By E.W.H. Thornton
The sun is dying.
It takes eight minutes and thirty-two seconds for the sun’s light to reach Earth, so for now, it appears to be its usual radiant self, but that will soon change for good if Novabolt doesn’t save the solar system again. Thanks to the miracle of quantum entanglement, it’s possible to watch events as they unfold in real-time via the Surya IV solar probe.
I was at the gym when the news broke in on all the televisions: a perspiring newscaster stutteringly announcing that several sources have now confirmed Professor Maelstrom is attempting to steal the sun’s magnetic field, and Novabolt is currently fighting her way through an army of mechanical golems in a desperate effort to stop her before it’s too late.
I sit hunched, frozen in an unnatural position on the rowing machine I was using when the story appeared, my gaze ricocheting between my phone and the television as I scrabble for the latest information and fail to notice my legs going numb.
The feed from the space probe is grainy and indistinct; viewing it is like looking through the wrong end of a digital telescope. The sun is a massive field of white: sunspots writhing like dividing amoebae, solar flares roiling ever more violently as the magnetic field depletes and the plasma destabilizes. Set against the glaring backdrop are a multitude of vaguely anthropomorphic shapes that would tower above most skyscrapers on Earth, but here are barely recognizable as Professor Maelstrom’s giant mechanical attack golems. Flitting between them is a speck scarcely the size of a fruit fly. If I strain my eyes, I think I can just manage to see hints of her blue and yellow costume, though I may be imagining it. There’s a scientist on the news struggling to outline the finer points of solar magnetohydrodynamics so we can all know the precise extent of doomed we’ll be if Novabolt fails.
A woman I kind of know the way you kind of know people at the gym lays a gentle hand on my shoulder.
“Don’t worry. The Earth will make it.”
I don’t care about the Earth.
I care about the speck.
Newscasters struggle to narrate the footage coming in from the Surya IV probe, a halting mix of random speculation and stating the obvious. One by one, the golems go limp or break off in scattered pieces as the speck makes its way to Professor Maelstrom’s ship, which looks like a crude, angular black starfish surrounded by shimmering distortion as it leeches off the Sun’s electromagnetic energy.
The speck reaches the ship and disappears. Nothing happens for what feels like a very long time. No one in the gym says a word. Even the talking heads on TV are speechless, the hand on my shoulder tightening into a claw.
The ship tumbles off its axis. Everything is swallowed by a hideous encroaching whiteness that suddenly turns black as the solar probe is destroyed. The TV scientist mumbles something about a massive solar flare as I stagger to my feet, pins and needles attacking everything below my knees as I race out of the gym and down the street.
The world falls in and out of darkness as the Sun’s guttering light reaches Earth as if we’re being bombarded with a series of rapid-fire eclipses. Traffic is stopped in the middle of the street. Strangers cling to each other and stare up at a sky fluctuating wildly between night and day.
I barely notice. I run past them, run through a city frozen in horrified suspense, run to our building, and up the stairs. My hands shake as I barely manage to get my key in the lock and throw the door open.
Jessica stands in the kitchen, smoothing back a plume of white-hot blonde hair, skin pink, as if she spent a little too much time outside without sunscreen. Her costume is starlight itself, gleaming sapphire blue surrounding a radiant golden-yellow chevron. Restored sunlight streams through the windows, illuminating her even more as a lingering trace of incandescent bioelectric energy arcs between her shoulder blades. She greets me with a wicked smile. I swallow.
“Are you all right?” She laughs.
“I’m better than all right, cowboy.”
I run to embrace her. My clothes burst into flame. She blows me out with a gust of frigid air that very nearly knocks me off my feet. She disperses her excess energy in a burst of infrared light, and lunges for me. I barely manage to shut the door. Her tongue is smooth and slippery. Her pussy tastes the way fireworks look.
* * *
Jessica’s had a lot of difficulty finding a normal career.
Growing up, she wanted to be a human rights lawyer. She ended up working as a paralegal at a law firm whose business model was based on a form of legal blackmail. They collaborated with a construction company that would trick elderly people into agreeing to massive, unnecessary renovations to their houses, overcharging them in the process. When they couldn’t pay, the law firm would step in and begin a campaign of legal harassment against their family, who would eventually pay a reduced but still exorbitant amount of the bill to make them go away. Jessica’s job consisted mainly of making threatening phone calls. When her supervisor chastised her for not being sufficiently menacing, she told him he was the scum of the Earth, quit, and went back to being Novabolt full-time.
Eventually, she tries substitute teaching. She’s sent to a high school in a profoundly underprivileged part of the city. When she gets to her assigned classroom, there’s a kid writing gang tags on the chalkboard. She erases them and tells him to sit down. He slaps her in the face. The rest of the class reacts like the audience of a daytime talk show that just heard the results of a paternity test, and the kid runs away. She chases him through the hall, halfway down a flight of stairs, then stops, gripped by the absurdity of what she’s doing, having no idea what she’d do if she caught him. After she finishes out the day, the school administrators confront her, wanting her to identify the kid who slapped her. She refuses, not wanting to ruin his life, leaves, and goes back to being Novabolt full-time.
She considers a career in law enforcement. There’s a preliminary series of lectures and tests to judge if one is a viable candidate for the police academy. She attends a long, impassioned speech delivered by a veteran police officer about how you can’t beat up suspects even if you really, really want to, which is obviously a thinly veiled means of conveying that if you do beat up a suspect, keep it as discrete as possible. She goes back to being Novabolt full-time.
“I envy you,” I tell her.
“Why?” She asks, clearly dumbfounded.
“For you, normal, everyday reality is like a bad dream you can choose to wake up from any time you want.”
Often, when Jessica gets upset, she gets quiet. I think sometimes a part of her is ashamed of what she feels, that she’s tormented by the sense that she should be above it, the conviction that the woman who bats nuclear missiles out of the sky like gnats shouldn’t be vulnerable to a boyfriend’s callous remark.
The more I think about what I said, the more I feel like an asshole. Being Novabolt is difficult enough. It’s natural that she would long for a degree of normalcy in her life, a ground level refuge from the endless profusion of existential threats endangering the cosmos. Should I try to explain to her that not mattering is a fundamental aspect of the human experience, that the overwhelming majority of us feel like minuscule cogs in a vast, unstoppable machine, going in circles while awaiting the inevitable day we’re worn out and replaced?
I want to be her comfort, her refuge, the person she’s never afraid to be herself around.
I don’t know if I can.
* * *
Jessica can traverse the galaxy on a single breath of air. She can alter the vibrational frequency of her atoms to phase through dimensions. She can see every form of electromagnetic energy, from radio waves to gamma rays. She can hear the sound atoms make when they collide in a particle accelerator.
Jessica can read my DNA with her naked eyes. Not only can she hear my heartbeat, but she can track every corpuscle traveling through my circulatory system. She can hear individual synapses firing in my brain and identify the exact neurotransmitter by smell.
All of which is to say that no, I’m not afraid she’ll sneeze and accidentally propel me through a wall, I’m not afraid she’ll move in her sleep and crush my skull, I’m not afraid she’ll twitch during sex, and emasculate me.
My confidence in her is absolute.
* * *
The marriage of Jessica’s parents was a loveless one. They stayed together to raise her after she was adopted, then divorced immediately after she moved out to attend college. Now her mother lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico, semi-retired, working part-time at a call center to support her true passion, studying the healing power of geophagy, A.K.A eating dirt. Her father is a functioning alcoholic who lives in Portland, Maine, and works as a mid-level sales manager for the second-largest plumbing supply company in New England. Neither of them like me.
“Your parents hate me.”
“They don’t hate you.”
“They think I’m not good enough for you.”
“Well, duh.”
I work at Home Depot. I do a little bit of everything, but mostly, I’m a cashier, which in practice means I spend my time helping people use the self-checkout machines that exist to replace me. I say as much when we visit Las Cruces, and Jessica’s mother asks what I do for a living. There’s so much earth in her house it smells like the Gardening Section. There’s a wall of shelves devoted to assiduously labeled jars containing every variety of soil imaginable. Her mother prepares orzo for dinner. I stare in mute horror as she stirs a tablespoon of clay, chalk, and sand into the pesto.
“It’s harmless,” Jessica assures me.
“Says the woman who eats coal and shits diamonds.”
“I did that once to win a bet. You’re the one who keeps bringing it up.”
She’s right, though the food still manages to taste awful under its own power. As we eat, her mother asks me if I was raised with religion. I glance at the various crucifixes adorning her walls, the collective gaze of multiple Jesuses glowering down at me, their bodies contorted in agony, frozen mid-writhe.
* * *
Jessica belongs to me. Novabolt belongs to the world.
I belong to both.
There are long periods when I don’t see her. Weeks. A month. Sometimes, she manages to get in touch, but you can’t teleconference with someone when you’re in another dimension, a billion years in the past, on the other side of the universe, or exploring the dreams of a comatose god.
I knew this going in. In choosing to be Novabolt, Jessica pledged to subordinate her own needs to those of an endlessly imperiled Earth, Galaxy, et cetera. I never would’ve gotten involved with her if I wasn’t willing to respect that choice and all it entails.
Agreeing to it was easy. Living with it is another matter.
I imagine I must feel the same way wives of sailors felt before the advent of modern technology when every voyage was by its very nature an exercise in absolute uncertainty, your only knowledge being that the person you love is subjecting themselves to forces you can’t predict or understand, leaving you with no idea when or even if they’ll return. Instead of a widow’s walk, I have Google alerts set up to notify me if there’s any news of her return. They’re wrong at least half the time.
When it’s like this, the time I spent with her feels like it happened to someone else, the man who experienced it seeming like a remote entity that bears no relation to who I am now that I’m alone. All her possessions scattered throughout our apartment seem like props. Sometimes, I open the secret compartment in our bedroom and look at her Novabolt equipment, technology advanced beyond my comprehension, keepsakes from various adventures, and different costumes for every conceivable purpose and occasion. Other times, I’ll find myself staring at the second toothbrush in the medicine cabinet, thinking about how it’s essentially nothing more than a bacteria farm at this point, and the only sanitary thing to do is throw it away; then I leave it where it is.
Dostoevsky said that man is free, and the greatest expression of that freedom is to give it up for the sake of another.
Jessica gave me a lead container no bigger than a matchbox. It contains a sliver of the Trinitite glass resulting from the nuclear explosion that brought her into this world, her only weakness. She said to keep it on me at all times and to use it on her if she ever loses control. It’s around here somewhere. I could no doubt find it if I really did a thorough search.
* * *
I am endlessly fascinated by her body.
When I express amazement at how similar it is to a human body, Jessica tells me about parallel evolution and anatomical homology. Walking upright is essential for using tools and raising young with the long developmental cycle required for sentient intelligence. Highly social mammals are the best at cooperating to ensure collective prosperity, while human-like emotions are best for ensuring the survival of offspring. I don’t know if she’s right, but she certainly sounds like she knows what she’s talking about.
There are subtle differences. Her body is cooler than a human’s, though not in a way you’d notice unless you were touching it constantly, a subdued warmth that belies just how incredibly alive it feels. Her body is, of course, harder than an average human’s, though not entirely unyielding, more taut than rigid. Her hair varies slightly in color, always managing to be some form of blonde as it shifts between bronze and copper, brass and gold. Her teeth are slightly sharper, the crystalline patterns in her irises tend to wander, her ears are slightly more aerodynamic, and a hundred other little things no one notices because people see what they expect to see, and when they look at Jessica, they expect to see a fellow human.
She hates her body. No women’s shoes are large enough for her. Women’s clothes either fit poorly or not at all. She thinks her arms are too vascular. She’s embarrassed by how prominent her abdominal muscles are to the point where she won’t wear a two-piece bathing suit. She can’t go to a salon because scissors can’t cut her hair. She has to do it herself by reflecting her heat vision off a mirror. The same holds true for all other hair on her body, and she has to set up a network of two or three mirrors to reach everywhere.
I tell her she’s beautiful. She absorbs my compliments tepidly. Sometimes, I think she only really feels beautiful when she’s Novabolt. Occasionally, she’ll put the costume on prior to sex, and won’t want to take it off; I’ve learned to work around it and wonder if I’m cultivating a fetish.
Afterward, I place my hand against her chest, and lay my ear against her breastbone. Though I can’t feel or hear any hint of it, I know it’s there, a fist-sized neutron star burning where a heart would typically be in a human.
“What’s it like having a star inside your chest?”
“Is this the prelude to a heartburn joke?”
“Seriously.”
“I don’t know. It’s like being me. It’s always been there; it’s all I’ve ever known. What’s it like having a fluid pump constantly contracting and expanding inside your chest?”
“Very odd when you put it like that.”
I kiss her and know that she will live forever, or at least for such an unimaginably vast span of time that, for an ephemeral creature like me, the difference between an aeon and an eternity is meaningless. Neutron stars don’t burn out. The pressure of quarks and electrons in their core prevents them from collapsing. The sun inside her will endure for at least one hundred billion years, probably more. It will essentially last as long as there is a universe for it to inhabit, as will the life it sustains.
“Let me lick your ear.” She says.
“Why?”
“I’ve never done it before. I want to see what it’s like.”
“Go ahead.” She does. It feels okay. “Well?”
“It’s a revelation. I’m an ear girl now, no two ways about it. Gonna have to get me a strap-on otoscope.”
“What’s an otoscope?”
“The thing doctors look in your ear with.”
“Oh.”
* * *
We travel to Maine to visit Jessica’s father. It’s winter in Portland, the kind of cold that passes through you as if you aren’t there. He lives in the house Jessica grew up in, a two-story Late Victorian huddled uneasily beneath a shroud of snow. The driveway isn’t shoveled. We park on the street. Jessica rings the doorbell, waits, rings the doorbell multiple times, and pounds on the door.
“Maybe he’s not home.” I venture. She says nothing and scowls as she takes out her cell phone and calls him. I hear the phone ringing inside. I begin to shiver and am about to suggest returning to the car when the ringing abruptly stops.
“Dad? We’re here. Yes, now, we’re right outside, answer the door. No, I’m not. Because I’m not. Just-” She pauses, closes her eyes, and exhales a slow breath that produces no steam despite the cold. “Open the door, please.”
The door opens. Her father emerges, embraces her heartily, tells her to come the hell in, and doesn’t seem to notice me.
Inside is what can only be called a shrine. Everything that’s ever been printed about Novabolt, positive or negative, is framed on walls, lined on shelves, and heaped in overflowing scrapbooks. Seemingly every piece of Novabolt merchandise ever made is here: Novabolt figurines, Novabolt lunch boxes, Novabolt toothbrushes, a can of SpaghettiOs with Novabolt-shaped pasta, those knockoff action figures they sell at dollar stores that identify her as Lightning Female.
Jessica looks at the floor.
“Dad, it’s freezing in here.”
“It’s fine!” He declares, punctuating his statement by downing half a glass of Jack Daniel’s. Jessica turns to me.
“It’s cold, isn’t it?”
“Yeah.” I nod.
“You’ve just been away too long. Your blood’s gotten thin.” He refills the glass. “You have blood, right?”
Later, Jessica shows me her childhood bedroom. Her father hasn’t changed a thing since she moved out. She says she thinks he wants to turn it into a museum if she ever gets killed, and I can’t tell if she’s joking or not as I behold the vast assortment of posters covering her walls.
“You never told me you liked L7.”
“I liked them when I was sixteen. I think I liked what they stood for more than their actual music.” She sits down on her old bed and bounces experimentally. “Christ, this place is small.” I resist the impulse to tell her my room wasn’t half as big as this and I had to share it tell myself she doesn’t mean it that way.
I notice that not only is this the only room in the house without any Novabolt paraphernalia, it’s the only room in the house with nothing superhero-related at all. I wasn’t a superhero kid, but even I had the Madame Night poster. I don’t even remember buying it. It seemed to spontaneously manifest on kids’ walls. Avoiding it required a deliberate effort to swim against the tide of popular monoculture. As I sit down on the bed next to Jessica, I notice she’s relaxed for the first time since we came here.
“Why didn’t you tell me he’s like this?”
“What was I supposed to say? ‘Hey, by the way, my own father is a crazed fan?’ ”
“That would’ve been a start, sure. How does he not know if you have blood?” She shrugs.
“It’s not public knowledge.”
Jessica’s father takes us out for dinner at what he declares to be the best Mexican restaurant in Maine. When she leaves to go to the bathroom, he seems to notice my presence for the first time.
“Just so you know, if you hurt my little girl, I will literally kill you.”
I don’t say anything, hope this will be his first and last bid for relevance.
When it’s time to leave I go first to warm up the car. Fifteen minutes pass, then half an hour. By the time Jessica comes out and tells me she wants to drive, night has fallen. I ask what happened. She says nothing at first, then has to pull the car over to cry.
“I really am just a fucking I.P. to him.”
“What happened?” I repeat, it is not a request now but a demand.
“He’s dying. It’s his liver. He told me he wants Novabolt to pull some strings and get him to the top of the organ donation queue.”
“What are you going to do?”
“You’re honestly asking me if I’m going to let my father die or not?”
“It’s your decision.”
“That doesn’t mean I have a choice.”
We switch places so I can drive. As city lights dissolve in the rearview mirror, I put on L7’s album Bricks Are Heavy. Jessica starts singing along when Shitlist comes on, and demands that I sing along with her, and that I honk the horn when appropriate.
* * *
Novabolt takes me to some of her favorite places on Earth.
An abandoned amusement park in Japan being reclaimed by the forest, a Ferris wheel drenched in ivy, the skeletal remains of a roller coaster buttressed by tree limbs, a merry-go-round overflowing with wildflowers.
The aftermath of a forest fire in Australia, a scoured moonscape populated by a multitude of denuded trees jutting upward like so many jet black spikes driven into the earth.
A Siberian caldera where a rainbow of heavy metals bleed out from a plateau of fissured ice, a burst of geothermal heat making it sublime into billowing steam with a sound like an avalanche that ranges over thawing permafrost riven by fissures spewing methane.
We stop at Lake Titicaca and watch the day end. The sunset paints white mountain peaks orange and stains the lake with various shades of blushing peach. The night sky is more stars than not, a fog of liquid effulgence.
“It looks better from space,” Jessica says, resting her head against my chest as we lie down on a hill atop an isolated island. “No atmosphere to obscure it. The moon looks better from here, though. The closer you get to it, the less it shines.”
“What’s it like on the moon?” I ask.
“Boring. It’s just gray dust. Saturn, now it has moons. Enceladus has cryovolcanoes that shoot crystal geysers into space. Ganymede has a whole ocean just below its surface. Titan has an opaque atmosphere, with weather patterns that shape the terrain. And that’s just this solar system. Luna sucks, there’s no comparison.”
“How does Earth compare with the rest of the galaxy?”
“It’s home.” I wait for elaboration that doesn’t come. My hand finds hers, and our fingers entwine. I stroke her hair. It seems to drift through my fingers as if responding to some natural current I can’t sense. I feel her body tense like she’s bracing herself for something.
“Do you ever worry that you’ll never be happy?” My hand goes still.
“I… I guess I don’t think about it that way. It’s fleeting by nature. Happiness isn’t a state of being; it’s moments. Instances. If it lasted, it would be something else.”
“No.” She replies firmly. “It’s more like a wave. If you catch it, you can ride it for as long as it exists. It ends, sure, but there’s always a fresh wave coming in.”
“I don’t think it’s that reliable.”
“What about sadness?”
“That, I’m sorry to say, is more consistent.”
“And now?” The words hang, a breeze skims across the lake over a flurry of ripples to buffet us with a sudden draft of thin, cool air that carries her question away over the Andes.
“I feel at ease. Content.”
“But not happy?” I want to answer the question she’s really asking.
“Being with you makes me happier. Happier than I’ve been in a very long time. I love you. I love being with you.”
A long silence.
“It’s a shitty moon. But there’d be no waves without it. No tidal waves, that is. Maybe that would be better. It’s not a direct analogy. What is this, an interrogation? I’m not on trial here.”
“You have my deepest apologies.”
“Want me to draw a dick on the face of the moon? I’ll do it if it’ll make you happy.”
“I’m okay.”
“I’ll save it for your birthday.”
“Well, now you’ve ruined the surprise.”
* * *
Jessica stopped seeing her fourth psychiatrist some time ago and is adamant in her refusal to seek out another. She says number five will do the same thing one through four did, using cognitive behavioral therapy that doesn’t work for anything beyond the most superficial problems and prescribing yet another SSRI that does nothing except make her gain weight and annihilate her sex drive. She self-medicates with THC gummies, taking one or two over the course of the day, then three or four to help her sleep. I ask if she wants to talk about it, and she responds with a flat no, says she doesn’t want to bring this shit home with her. Wants there to be at least one place where she doesn’t have to think about it.
She has to lie to every therapist she speaks to. Everyone lies to their therapist a little, but Jessica has to fictionalize the vast majority of her life. Even then, she has to be careful, knowing that if she omits too much, the psychiatrist might be able to intuit the truth, filling in the gaps with what’s public knowledge about Novabolt’s life.
She can’t talk about her childhood. She has no memory of what happened before she materialized in our world as a thirteen-year-old frozen in a block of solid Trinitite, where she remained in stasis for over eighty years, she doesn’t even know if she existed at all before the world’s first man-made nuclear explosion. She has to lie about what she does every day, about the sources of her trauma, about her intentions for the future. Not only is it frustrating and exhausting, but it’s rendered even more absurd by the possibility that, if a psychiatrist did determine that Jessica thinks she’s Novabolt, they’d diagnose her as delusional, wonder if she’s a danger to herself or others, if she’s going to jump off a building because she thinks she can fly.
* * *
I want Jessica to not be afraid to share anything, tell her there’s nothing she could possibly say that would make me love her any less. This is a lie on multiple levels, as well as hypocrisy of the first order. There are multiple things about myself I hide from her, paramount among them my cynicism.
I read the book The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells and mention offhandedly that humanity is, in a very literal sense, cancer infecting the planet. We are uncontrolled growth destroying the body that sustains us, a parasite whose appetite is so ravenous we’re killing our host organism. Jessica gets upset at what she calls my casual misanthropy and goes on to enumerate all of humanity’s noble and redeeming qualities. I want to tell her it’s easy to like humans when you don’t have to be one, hold my tongue, and let the subject drop.
I can see it from her perspective. I know that my contempt for the human condition is a luxury she can’t afford to indulge in. If Novabolt ever decided the world wasn’t worth saving, it would be the end of everything, including her.
I read the book Escape From Evil by Ernest Becker. Jessica walks by and asks me to tell her when I’m done, that she wants to check it out. I read the sentence, ‘It seems that the experiment of man may well prove to be an evolutionary dead end, an impossible animal—one who, individually, needs for healthy action the very conduct that, on a general level, is destructive to him.’ I tell her okay and begin thinking of creative ways to lose it.
* * *
We don’t have any friends in common. Jessica tells me this can spell doom for a relationship; we have to find other people we can hang out with together.
All of Jessica’s friends are SRs. Superheroes don’t like calling each other superheroes, so they refer to themselves as Special Responders. Since they like acronyms almost as much as the military does, they are always abbreviated to SR. I tell her when she talks that way, it sounds like she’s in a cult. She thinks about it for a second, then tells me I’m not that far off, really.
I schedule a double date with Sean and Gertrude, a married couple I know from college.
“It’s official.” I declare. “We’re going bowling.”
“Bowling.” She echoes with skepticism. Jessica doesn’t enjoy physical competition for obvious reasons.
“It’s just an excuse to drink alcohol and eat garbage.”
“Isn’t that every social function?”
“Yes, but with this, you get to rent shoes.”
Gertrude and Sean greet Jessica with the awkward, forced extroversion that’s an obligatory part of all introductions. Jessica listens rapt to the banal details of their lives, fixing Sean and Gertrude with such intense scrutiny it seems like she’s angling for the gold medal in Attention Paying. Gertrude asks Jessica what she does for a living. She says “Logistics.” and changes the subject. Sean asks her how we met. She says, “OkCupid.” and changes the subject. Gertrude mentions an amusing meme and offers to send it to Jessica’s cell phone. She says her phone is work issue and isn’t compatible with consumer models. She doggedly persists in asking Sean and Gertrude about their lives, striking a tone that’s almost interrogative as she pries details out of them even I wasn’t aware of. I can tell they feel torn, divided between the natural human inclination to talk about themselves and the natural human inclination to not part with so many personal details at once, especially to someone who isn’t reciprocating.
Jessica initially picks a six-pound pink bowling ball, finds her fingers don’t fit in the holes, and is eventually forced to use a sixteen-pound ball the color of a tombstone. She rolls it with conspicuous clumsiness and manages to hit the gutter more often than not.
Gertrude works at a narcotics abuse community outreach center, which piques Jessica’s interest. She presses her for details, and Gertrude grudgingly obliges, tells her how addicts lie to her and scream abuse at her every day, how they pretend to swallow their dose of liquid methadone then go outside and spit it out to sell it for something harder. She tells her how they shoot cocaine in their feet because it’s the only site on their body they can still find veins in, and they develop abscesses that are complicated by HIV and need to have their toes amputated, but many refuse medical treatment because they were viciously abused as children and their capacity to trust others, especially authority figures, has been utterly destroyed. I can tell Jessica is getting more and more upset; she’s bowling strike after strike because she’s too distracted to keep intentionally missing, but she can’t stop herself from pumping Gertrude for more grisly information, and I finally have to pull her aside under the pretense of obtaining nachos.
“Stop it,” I say, and it comes out like a reprimand like I’m telling a child to stop misbehaving in public. I was so fixated on her behavior that I didn’t realize how mad I was getting. “Stop torturing yourself. You’re off the clock; this is supposed to be fun.”
“Fun.” She says it as if the very concept were distasteful.
“I thought you wanted to make these people your friends. You don’t even want to talk to me about your work. Do you honestly believe Gertrude wants to talk about trading sex for meth right now?”
“Some things are more important than throwing a ball at pins.”
“Including the relationship this whole mutual-friend-thing is supposed to strengthen? You were the one who wanted this in the first place.”
“I’m sorry, but I believe profound human suffering is more important than finding bowling buddies.”
“And what do you intend to do about it? Incinerate the foster care to prison pipeline with an optic blast?” She regards me with an expression I’ve never seen before. It takes a second for me to recognize it as scorn. I try to change tactics even as I see the impending blow-up we’re barreling towards, the emotional equivalent of a hyperadrenalized brain seeing a car accident unfold in slow motion. “Jessica, caring about others isn’t a valid excuse for not caring about the person in front of you right now.”
“Really? You’re honestly accusing me of not caring about you? You think it’s easy for me, that I don’t work hard every day to make sure you’re an integral part of my life?”
And I lose it.
“This isn’t about me! This is about your need to blow everything up, to catastrophize every situation so it becomes an existential crisis because then you can manage it! You can’t handle normal because you’re not in total control of it at all times!” She gets even calmer, her voice descending into an overenunciated monotone.
“You. Can never. Understand.”
“OF COURSE I CAN’T! YOU WON’T FUCKING TALK TO ME ABOUT IT!”
Our nachos have been ready for some time, the glaring yellow pasteurized process cheese product cooling into a single rigid globular mass like a wad of old chewing gum riddled with shards of bone.
* * *
Of course, Jessica finds Escape From Evil. She reads it and directs my attention to the sentence, ‘There is nothing in human nature that dooms in advance the most thoroughgoing social changes and utopian ambitions.’
* * *
There’s a difference between saving the world and fixing it, a distinction even Novabolt’s most ardent fans often fail to appreciate. A massively popular petition circulates online appealing for Novabolt to use her freeze breath to restore the polar ice caps to avert catastrophic climate change. Novabolt doesn’t run her own social media accounts, no superhero does, but she composes a multi-page press release outlining the many reasons why such a measure is unfeasible, how displacing that much of the Earth’s atmosphere at once would trigger worldwide extinction-level disasters, and furthermore, a radical reduction of greenhouse gas emissions is already totally within humanity’s grasp, requiring societal restructuring and mass cooperation that is difficult but eminently possible, not to mention a fundamental responsibility of sentient beings sharing a society and planet. Some people are inspired by Novabolt’s words. Others call her a coward, a nihilist, and various slurs.
Jessica has been to every country in the world, every state and province, and administrative region. She knows society is broken. She has no illusions regarding the day-to-day, on-the-ground reality of globalized neocolonial hypercapitalism, the technocratic machine that keeps the world locked in a permanent state of apocalyptic depredation. She dreams of toppling oligarchs, of plucking yachts from the French Riviera and depositing them in the toxic cesspools generated by mine runoff, destroying servers recording debt that’s crippled generations, tearing down the multitude of prisons built to warehouse the dispossessed and uppity. I want the same things, but by virtue of my position as boyfriend, I am forced into the role of being the voice of pathetic moderation, repeating ad nauseum how the rich and powerful the world over are looking for any excuse to turn against her, how igniting such a conflict would destroy Novabolt’s capacity to do any good at all.
Backstage at a fundraiser to support female education in developing nations, someone records Novabolt casually remarking, “Of course, no one deserves to be poor. The only people I know who deserve to be poor are rich.” Scandal ensues. A rabid fury gushes forth from all media platforms, people demanding to be told why Novabolt should be empowered to act on our behalf when she doesn’t share the values that make us great, and so on. Her fellow superheroes tell her to make a calculated retreat from the media spotlight, but Novabolt becomes determined to rebound. “If they’re going to hate me anyway, I might as well take a firm stand on something.” I do my best to be supportive. She decides to advocate for a cause no one could possibly disagree with, the elimination of the practice of female genital mutilation.
The backlash is spectacular. She is labeled a super supremacist, a threat to human autonomy everywhere; people she could kill with the shockwave produced by a firm blink describe their intentions to colorfully maim her while charitable and philanthropic organizations publicly distance themselves from her.
One of the talking head commentariat on cable news unleashes a diatribe where he repeatedly calls her that woman. Jessica and I begin referring to Novabolt as that woman among one another, a running joke that is eventually incorporated into our everyday vocabulary.
* * *
“Goddamn you, Psyduck,” Jessica exclaims as the Pokémon in question escapes from the screen of her new mobile phone. “You’re lucky you’re a fictional character, otherwise, I’d wring that grotesquely oversized neck of yours.”
It’s early evening in Dude Chilling Park, and the cool air is just beginning to bite. We’d intended to come earlier in the day, but Novabolt had to fend off a school of kaiju that abruptly emerged from the Atlantic.
“I’ll trade you my Psyduck,” I say consolingly.
“It’s ‘gotta catch ’em all,’ not ‘gotta receive ’em all from your boyfriend who’s so obscenely lucky he falls ass-backward into Charmanders.’”
“Of course not. That would never fit on a t-shirt.”
It’s nice out despite the falling temperature. Nearby, a child’s birthday party is winding down, the bouncy castle deflating so the faces of characters from the movie Frozen melt like clocks in a Dali painting. Senior citizens practicing tai chi move with the profound deliberation of clocks ticking down to midnight. The homeless man who furiously masturbates while staring at trees is nowhere to be seen.
“This place is trash, nothing but Pidgeys and Caterpies as far as the eye can see.” She pockets her phone in disgust. “I don’t know how I’m expected to work under these conditions.”
“It’s a jungle out there.”
“It isn’t, that’s the problem.”
A troupe of children streaks past us, waving their own mobile devices in the air. Tinny canned lines issue from their phones, lo-fi declarations of heroic intent.
“They’re playing your game,” I say. Jessica shakes her head.
“It’s The Sisterhood’s game. I’m part of the team.”
“But you’re everyone’s favorite.”
“Of course, that goes without saying.” As if in confirmation, the words ‘For Nova Omega!’ rise above the chatter, Novabolt’s signature catchphrase—as portrayed by a voice actress doing an artful interpretation of Jessica—ringing out in a moment of clarity that reverts back to indistinct chatter as the kids scamper away.
“You know, I don’t think I’ve ever actually heard you say that in real life.”
“And you never will, cowboy.”
Novabolt’s catch phrase was invented by a public relations firm called Influence Dynamics, as is its fictional origin. The true story of Jessica manifesting spontaneously during a nuclear test was deemed to have too many menacing overtones for the public psyche, so the narrative of her being the last surviving refugee of a destroyed planet called Nova Omega was pedaled to the masses. Besides engendering sympathy, the invented origin had the added benefit of giving Novabolt motivation to protect Earth that went beyond her own innate nobility, which was deemed too tenuous to maintain the confidence of a skittish public.
We park ourselves on a nearby bench. Jessica leans into me, and I sling an arm over her broad shoulders. Our bodies don’t fit together neatly, it’s not a case of big spoon and little spoon so much as skeleton key and another, different kind of skeleton key, but it’s not uncomfortable, simply a matter of adjustment.
“Children are so strange.” She says as the gaggle of boys and girls reach a cluster of adults and fragment, breaking apart to return to their respective caretakers and report the results of their excursion into the realm of fictional superheroics. “Like little aliens. And I’m aware of the irony of me being the one to say that, so don’t point it out.” Jessica was physically and mentally about thirteen years old when she was freed from the block of Trinitite that had held her in stasis for so long, and she finally awakened to herself. She will live forever, provided she survives the endless perils of superheroism, but no matter how many billions of years she exists, she will never know what being a child is like or at least a prepubescent one.
“Do you feel like you missed out?” I ask.
“I don’t know.” She responds, a diplomatic answer. I’ve been open with Jessica about the profound shittiness of my own childhood, how I recall it as an overwhelming expanse of helplessness and fear that infected me with abiding feelings of anger and despair, I will always struggle to cope with. I know there are many happy childhoods in the world, but I’ll never be qualified to comment on them. “I’ll never have nostalgia, that desire to recapture something ineffable. Sometimes, I envy the fictional version of that woman. She seems a lot more grounded. I guess I just wish I knew what I was missing.”
“Everyone feels that way,” I say, tightening my hold on her. “Some fundamental incompleteness. Vague but persistent. A desire for fulfillment that never goes away. If it did, we would all be Buddhas, beings of perfect serenity, accepting everything, devoid of any need to inflict our will on reality.”
“Sounds boring.”
“Yeah, but if we were perfect, we wouldn’t care. We wouldn’t need amusement.”
“Or each other.” She nuzzles in closer. I breathe in her scent, nuclear fusion, and lavender shampoo. “I think I’d rather be broken. Besides, aren’t bodhisattvas motivated by compassion for human suffering?”
“But if there wasn’t any suffering to alleviate, compassion would be useless.”
“Vestigial empathy. A messiah needs suffering to justify its own existence.”
“I guess a true messiah would welcome their own obsolescence. You’d know better than me.”
“It’s ‘I’, not ‘me’.”
“Me apologize.”
“I’m no savior.”
“False modesty doesn’t suit you.”
“I didn’t say I wasn’t awesome. But the more powerful you get, the more aware of your true limitations you become, of just how little of your will you can really inflict on the world. Acquiring power just inflames the lust for more power, and it’s never enough. The whole process is a vicious cycle. I’ve seen it, had to fight people addicted to it. At some point, you just have to draw a line and tell yourself it’s enough if you want to retain your sanity.” Jessica usually isn’t this candid about her work. I don’t know what to say. “You were right, you know. Back at the bowling alley. I can’t handle normal.”
“I was just being an asshole.”
“Indeed you were, but even assholes get it right once in a while. I’m good in a crisis and bad in everything else. When I’m holding tectonic plates together to stop an earthquake, I’m in my element. Confident. Serene. It’s now, when everything is fine, that the anxiety starts bubbling up.” She squeezes me gently. “Because I know, no matter how tightly I hold on…” She doesn’t finish the sentence. She doesn’t have to.
I change the subject.
“You should go to a comic book convention as that woman one of these days. Everyone would just think you’re an exceptional cosplayer and treat you normally. You wouldn’t have to do anything special, be strong. You could be that woman without having to be that woman.”
“Not in a million years.”
“You don’t need a childhood to feel nostalgic,” I say, circling back around.
“Nostalgia. A portmanteau of the Greek for homecoming and pain. First diagnosed in European soldiers experiencing a debilitating form of homesickness.”
“You don’t have to have a past to feel it. You just have to know that nothing lasts.”
“That’s what I’m supposed to tell myself when I have an anxiety attack. ‘This isn’t forever.’ ”
“And it’s a good thing, in that case.”
“What’s worse? Nothing lasting forever? Or nothing ever changing?”
“We don’t get to choose. There is only permanent flux.”
“An endless series of nows, all existing in a constant state of slipping away.”
“Speaking of, it’ll be night soon, we should go.”
“Yeah.” She says, making no move to stand up or loosen her embrace. The moon assumes greater clarity as the specific point on Earth we occupy spins away from the nearest star, appearing low and yellow and heavy, like a piece of overripe fruit bending its bough.
“Pretty moon,” Jessica says.
“Yes.”
“Would look even better with a dick drawn on it. Just say the word.”
“The word is no.” She issues a forlorn sigh.
“Tragic. I can only hope that one day I’ll find a boyfriend who likes cool stuff.”
* * *
Our toilet is backed up, overflowing. After many fruitless efforts on our part to clear whatever’s obstructing the flow, Jessica says she may have, in the most fleeting instant of absentmindedness, flushed a tampon.
Not wanting to share this information with a plumber, Jessica says she can find the offending feminine hygiene product herself with the help of her X-ray vision. Together, we trace the plumbing through our apartment building. As we progress, Jessica grows increasingly quiet. We follow the plumbing into the basement. Jessica looks apprehensive. I ask her what she sees. She says she can’t see anything.
And this is how we learn the pipes in our building are made of lead.
* * *
One day I come home and find Jessica weeping quietly. I ask her what’s wrong. She tells me she can hear the cosmic microwave background radiation that is the enduring byproduct of the Big Bang. She tells me it changes over time. Sometimes, it’s nondescript white noise, sometimes it’s like music, and there are rare instances, like now, when it is both sublime and unbearably sad. I tell her I think I know what she means. She’s skeptical. I go to our stereo and put on Tchaikovsky’s 6th and final symphony, the pathétique, which he composed in the shadow of his own impending death. Jessica’s skepticism hardens into certainty. She tells me Tchaikovsky must have somehow heard the echo too; the similarity is too uncanny to explain any other way. I speculate that perhaps everyone who’s dying hears it somehow: an existential tinnitus. She doesn’t hear me, she is listening too intently to the morendo.
* * *
We have a fight. We have another fight. Soon, it seems like all we do is fight.
“If you love me you’ll honestly consider shedding your mortality, not just dismiss the possibility out of hand.” Jessica has hinted at this for some time but has only recently begun stating it openly, as the prospect of us sharing the entirety of our lives has slowly become easier to imagine.
“I’m a human.” I say as if this detail might have escaped her attention somehow. “Humans die.”
“You don’t have to. There are options.”
“I don’t want to live forever.”
“You know how it makes me feel when you say that? You’re essentially saying you’d rather die than stay with me.”
“It’s not about that. You’ve dealt with dozens of supervillains seeking immortality, has it ever worked out well for them? Has it ever been worth the price?”
“I’m not talking about using mass murder to win the favor of an evil god. If you started treatments now, you’d only have to keep pace with life extension technology as it develops. Worst case scenario, you go full synthetic and end up with a body that’s infinitely better than the one you have now.”
“Which is to say the body I have now is infinitely worse than a synthetic one.”
“Don’t twist my words. I thought you hated humanity. Why are you so hell-bent on clinging to yours?”
“And I thought you were humanity’s number one fan. Isn’t mortality an inextricable part of that?”
“Damn it, every moment I’m with you, I have to watch plaque accumulate in your arteries to become heart disease, proteins accumulating in your neurons to become dementia, flaws in the DNA of your cells that will eventually blossom into cancer, your immune system fighting an endless battle against an army of infinite invaders it can never hope to defeat. I love you, and you’re dying every second. Can you imagine what that’s like?”
“You’re not being fair. Have you thought of what it’s like for me to love you? You’re just as subject to existential threats as I am, only on a higher level. Every day I live with the fear that some homicidal maniac will uncover a hidden cache of Trinitite, trap you in some pocket dimension, or discover a vulnerability you’ve never accounted for. What’ll happen if someone at the terminal point of a big rip universe forges a bullet of near absolute zero matter infused with phantom energy and fires it through space and time at you faster than the speed of light?”
“I’ll dodge it just like last time!”
No matter how heated our exchanges get I can’t bring myself to tell her the real reason why I can’t entertain the possibility of sharing eternity with her, my real apprehensions.
What if I’m rendered immortal, and we break up? What if I need her to access the treatment that’ll allow me to cheat death for one more year? What if I come to resent my dependence on her? How every breath I take will be contingent on her capacity to suffer my continued presence? What if it goes the other way, if she stops loving me but feels obliged to stay because she engineered my immortality, if loving me becomes a matter of grim duty for her? I couldn’t live with that.
But I would have to.
* * *
“Damn, that is one heavy burtation.”
“An extremely heavy burtation.”
“Truly, that burtation ranks among the very weightiest of burtations.”
“In the annals of burtation, that particular burtation would be classified among the heaviest.”
“I pride myself as being something of an expert in the field of burtations, and as such can honestly state with no small amount of certainty that that is one heavy-ass burtation.”
“If I was looking for that burtation in a store, I would go straight to the heavy section.”
“If I had to move that burtation, I would lift it with my legs, not my back, so as not to injure myself while heaving my massive burden of burtation.”
“A true burdentation, if there ever was one.”
“We all have our own burtation to bear.”
“Gotta bear that burtation.”
“That beartation.”
I have no idea what the hell ‘burtation’ means, no memory of where we first heard it, zero notion of how its supposed heaviness became a running gag between us where we lob it back and forth, endless volleys of iterated gibberish where the goal is to heap absurdity upon absurdity until the idea collapses in on itself. It stopped being funny a long time ago, and then it became funny again, then it stopped being funny again—still, we keep doing it. The point isn’t the joke itself but rather the sharing of the joke, and it is the bread in our communion, and it doesn’t matter if it’s funny or not. Jessica likes it, and I like that she likes it. It makes her happy, and that makes me happy.
* * *
It is so fucking stupid.
It’s the kind of thing an adolescent trying to be edgy would doodle in their notebook instead of paying attention in geometry class.
It’s just a slab of gristly off-white muscle heaped into a vaguely anthropomorphic shape about the size of a semi-truck. It barely has a face. It doesn’t walk so much as shamble; its whole ungainly form listing from side to side like a sumo wrestler with an inner ear infection. Its teeth are uneven rows of stalactites and stalagmites, the digits of its hands are sclerotic meat hooks, wisps of long pale hair dangle from its head in pathetic skullet begging to be combed over, its eyes are dull chips of matte black devoid of any intelligence whatsoever.
It is crude, uninspired, just plain boring.
And it is fucking killing her.
She’s stronger than it is. I’m certain of that. If she could stop holding back and unleash the complete sum of her power, she would be able to end it in under a minute.
She can’t because she’s fighting it in the city. If she punched the creature with the full totality of her strength, the resulting atmospheric shockwave alone would kill people for miles in every direction. She’s done everything she can to lure it out of the city, but no matter how stupid the creature is, some brute homicidal instinct keeps it returning to where the population is densest. Every moment it isn’t fighting Novabolt; it’s attacking people, ripping apart cars, tearing down buildings, behaving like a natural disaster with deliberate homicidal intent.
Novabolt doesn’t let it happen, somehow managing to insert herself between the creature and every life it intends to destroy. Not only does she have to reign in her strength, she has to constantly balance attacking it and protecting others, which leaves her vulnerable. She will die before she lets it hurt anyone.
Literally.
Despite all her disadvantages she continues to hold her own, the fight dragging on as each combatant persists in the face of devastating blows. If it was a matter of skill, the battle would have been over long ago. Novabolt lands forty, fifty attacks in a row, her body a blur of fluid motion as she delivers a withering barrage of calculated strikes probing for some hint of weakness, some minuscule part of it that is anything less than absolutely invincible.
Then the creature punches her once, and windows shatter for a square block as she’s driven down through the street, through the concrete foundation, through the granite bedrock, deep into the Earth’s crust. With Novabolt gone, it immediately turns and launches itself at an overturned school bus. Before its attack can land, she erupts from the street and knocks it away.
Battered and bloody, drained and disoriented, she hurls herself at it once more.
I’m watching it transpire on my phone, bellowing at the screen like a lunatic as I stumble into the pawn shop. The man behind the bulletproof glass is nonplussed as I command him to sell me the most powerful gun he has right now, damn the price. He obliges, apparently people purchasing firearms while weeping in hysterical rage is an everyday occurrence for him. I leave my credit card behind as I sprint out with some kind of handgun, I don’t know, a revolver of some sort.
I am fully aware of how stupid I’m being. Even as I tell myself I’ll just get in her way, just be one more thing she has to worry about aside from preserving her own life, I’m also telling myself it’s possible I might hit some weak point she’s missed, maybe I can get it in the eye or mouth or something, anything. Reason and mania intermingle in my mind while my body practically moves on its own; what I do right now is less important than that I do something, anything besides passively watching as she’s beaten to death in the street.
I’m sprinting down the block when the tenor of the commentary issuing from my phone changes, a newscaster who prides herself on remaining stoic and objective has begun wailing, a guttural howl of animal despair. The gun clatters to the sidewalk as I grip my phone in both hands and gawk. In the distance, I hear a sound like dozens of wrecking balls striking the sheer face of a mountain in rapid succession.
Novabolt isn’t moving. She’s hanging limply from the creature, her body absorbing blow after blow as she leaves herself completely open, making no attempt to defend herself. I fall to my knees, the crack of a snapping rib issuing from the phone’s speaker with awful clarity, each strike contorting her whole body like a mangled paperclip.
Yet she isn’t being knocked away. She remains attached to it somehow, her face buried in the crook of its neck.
The creature abruptly stops punching. A moment passes, and there’s an instant where, for the very first time, it seems like it doesn’t know what to do, its absolute focus on death and destruction interrupted.
It jerks to life, changing tactics as it stops hitting Novabolt and attempts to grab her shoulders to pull her away. She reacts in a flash, ensnaring it in a bear hug that pins its arms to its sides.
Strange sounds emanate from where Novabolt’s face is buried in its neck, a burning hiss and icy crackling rapidly alternating between one other, and I realize what she’s doing.
The creature has no weak spot, so she’s creating one. She intentionally opened herself up to its blows, buying herself a chance to latch onto its neck with her teeth. This whole time she’s been superheating its flesh with her heat vision, supercooling it with her ice breath, then repeating the process again and again, making it expand and contract, vacillating wildly between massive extremes of temperature to render its flesh ever more brittle, subjecting it to millennia worth of decay in seconds.
Suddenly she lets go of the creature. It immediately tries to pull her off of it, which is exactly what she wants. As every tendon in its arms strains to pull her away, she plants her feet on its chest, pushing as it pulls. It abruptly stops, too late, realizing what’s happening.
With a roar of triumph that resonates across the planet, Novabolt rips out its throat. Blood geysers erupt from it; great spurting arterial jets that paint the cityscape in vast swaths of green.
If the creature had any higher intelligence whatsoever, it would stop fighting, felled by the knowledge that it will be dead in a matter of seconds.
It doesn’t. Oblivious to its own defeat, it keeps throwing punches, fists like titanium battering rams slamming into Novabolt, who, beyond exhausted, can do nothing but absorb each hit as the strength behind them depletes mercilessly slowly.
“FALL!” I cry at my phone. “FALL YOU SON OF A BITCH!”
Its last feeble attempt at throwing a punch ends with it succumbing to its own momentum, and it slouches against Novabolt—finally, finally dead. She steps back, and it collapses to the pavement in a crumpled mass of inert meat. Novabolt teeters, appearing ready to lie down next to it, then vanishes.
I sprint to our apartment, somehow remembering to close the door behind me this time.
Jessica lies on the floor; her eyes rolled back in her head, her breathing quick and shallow, her mouth and teeth stained green, hints of chalky sinew still stuck in her teeth.
I knew it was going to be bad, but this is beyond bad. This is the nightmare. She doesn’t respond as I call her name. The answer to her father’s question is yes, Jessica has blood, though she has less and less of it by the second, tendrils of violet trickling from her nose, her mouth, and her left ear. Her right arm is practically soaked, a jagged bone thrusting up from a compound fracture. I rip off my belt, and make a tourniquet; maybe it slows the hemorrhaging, I can’t tell.
The worst part is the heat. Her body was always cool, but now it’s hot, almost too hot to touch—is this it, what we’ve always feared? Can the containment field in her chest be failing? Like a moron, I look at my phone, dial nine and one, then toss it aside. I rifle through the pockets in Jessica’s costume and find the special communicator she uses to reach the rest of the Sisterhood, a piece of alien technology shaped like a hunk of coral and made of something that looks like plastic but feels like metal. There’s a multitude of blinking lights on the thing, practically none of which seem to serve any discernible purpose. I press what must be the call button. Green lights turn red, access denied. I remember Jessica mentioning something about how Sisterhood technology is tied to each individual team member’s personal biometrics. I consider trying to destroy it to alert the Sisterhood that something’s wrong, realize that if it’s still intact after that fight, there’s no possible way I can damage it. Instead, I keep poking at it, getting the same message until I’ve made too many failed attempts, all the lights assume one uniform pattern, and the device locks itself down, which I can only hope triggers some message to the Sisterhood or whoever their I.T. guy is.
I return my attention to Jessica, stroke her scaldingly hot forehead, and plead with her to say something, to hang on, to please not die.
Muffled voices.
“Why did she come here?”
“You really have to ask?”
The door bursts open. A woman with skin like black diamond flecked with silver enters, followed by a woman wreathed in a cloak of metallic blue flame and a woman dressed like she’s the commander of an occult SWAT team.
The Sisterhood, or at least half of it.
“Stand aside.”
“WHERE THE FUCK WERE YOU? YOU’RE SUPPOSED TO BE A TEAM! SHE WAS FIGHTING THAT THING ALONE!”
Lux-al’nyx makes a small, delicate gesture with one hand and a grand, sweeping gesture with another, lifting Jessica up on a gurney of shimmering white light while opening a portal to their headquarters. Strikeforge sweeps the room for any threats. Harrow moves toward me intently, depositing a hand on my shoulder and staring into my eyes.
“I’m afraid we were otherwise occupied. It seems Professor Maelstrom has been orchestrating today’s events ever since her last defeat, a coordinated assault on multiple fronts designed for the express purpose of-”
“Get out of my way.” I move to follow Jessica through the portal. Harrow plants her other hand on my chest, stopping me. She interposes herself between me and the departing heroines, so I find myself staring into her eyes once again.
“We’ll take care of her, I promise.”
“Great. Move.”
“I’m sorry. That’s not possible. We’re on high alert and must maintain a state of maximum security, especially now, when we don’t yet know if the threat is contained.”
“You think I’m a risk. Me. To the Sisterhood.”
“You haven’t been given proper security clearance.”
“So clear me.”
“I can’t. The decision to deny you clearance has already been made.”
“By who?”
“By Novabolt.” I stop pushing against her. All the strength goes out of me. I don’t know how I’m still standing. “I’m sorry.” It might sound like she means it. I don’t know. Everything seems so very, very far away. “We’ll heal her. I promise. Goodbye.”
Harrow turns and follows her fellow team members into the portal, which vanishes, revealing the empty stairway beyond the door. I look down. The blood on the floor is gone, every trace is gone, it’s like she was never here.
Days pass. I’m fired from Home Depot for calling an elderly customer ‘shit-for-brains’. I finally manage to fall asleep for a few hours, and when I wake up, Jessica is in the kitchen eating breakfast and looking at her phone.
“Hey. Check it out.” She holds the screen up to me. “Boom. Psyduck. I found the little bastard in the cafeteria at headquarters. Technically it’s a massive security breach, but you won’t hear me comp-”
She’s cut off as I dash to embrace her, nearly knocking her out of her chair in the process. I run my hands over her body, searching for the mortal wounds that are seared into my memory, finding no trace.
“Are you all right? Are you still hurt?”
“I’m fine. The Sisterhood fixed me up; it’s not a big deal.”
“Not a big…” I wrap my arms around her, and can feel her body has returned to its old, reassuringly cool self. “What about your heart? After the fight, your skin was so hot I could barely touch it. Is it stable again?” Her body stiffens. She makes no move to pull away, but I can tell she’s fortified herself, and is waiting for me to let go.
“It’s not a heart. And I was never in any real danger; it looked worse than it was.”
My arms go limp.
“I saw what that thing did to you. I was there, right there.” I gesture at the spot where I found her on the floor. “You were unconscious, bleeding. You were dying, Jessica.” She sighs.
“Fine, I was dying. It no doubt all looked very dramatic, a regular pietà.” I straighten. She remains seated, looking up at me while looking down at me.
“What was it like?”
“What was what like?”
“Everything.”
“It hurt.”
“I mean, what did it make you feel.”
“It made me feel like I was being punched many, many times.”
“You’re honestly going to bottle this up?”
“I don’t know what you want me to say. It wasn’t good. It wasn’t fun. I’m not going to pretend I want to revisit it. Besides, pain is boring. I don’t care how it made me feel, I’m here now, I want to be at home with you, not wallowing in past misery.”
“You’re going to ignore it. And you’re going to pretend it won’t manifest in other ways.”
She stands, rising like a glaring sun.
“I didn’t come here to be psychoanalyzed. Or saved, or fixed.”
“Why did you come here?”
“Because I love you.”
“When it’s convenient. When it doesn’t entail you having to actually trust me. As long as it doesn’t oblige you to let me inside your special superhero tree fort.”
Jessica turns away, and leans on the counter. Her shoulders slump, and she bows her head as if this is the most wearisome thing to ever happen to her.
“Knowing more about Novabolt and the Sisterhood would just put you in danger.”
“That’s not what this is about.”
“You know what? Fine. For the sake of argument, let’s say that’s not what this is about.” She turns and regards me with a withering look. “This is about me giving the best of everything I am to you, and it not being enough.”
“You hold things back so you can hold me back, so you can keep me at a distance.”
“Don’t talk to me about trust. You don’t even trust me enough to stay with me, you’re so afraid you’re unlovable that you’d rather die than risk staying.”
“Trust is earned! You don’t earn trust by selectively shutting me out of your life!”
“Yeah? If you’re the authority, then tell me. How much of my own life am I allowed to keep? Exactly what emotional pound of flesh are you entitled to for deigning to be with me? Quote me a number.”
“Let’s- Just- Let’s stop. All we’re doing is hurting each other now.”
“Good. I never wanted to start.”
“Of course. You always know exactly what you want.”
“And that’s a bad thing because…”
“Because I can’t ration my affection for you, doling it out in convenient, easily digestible nuggets. BECAUSE YOU HAVE TO WANT ME TO BE HERE! Because I can’t just stay because you haven’t explicitly told me to leave!”
“…”
“…”
“So leave.”
“What?” I say. She hesitates. Only a little.
“You heard me.”
I did.
And I act accordingly.
* * *
Jacob Mosley is a cocaine and heroin addict whose body has been ravaged by infections. He likes to say he has more eyes than toes. He really likes to say it. He’ll say it three times within the space of a five-minute conversation if you let him. If you don’t let him, he’ll get angry and punch a window, which is what happened earlier today.
It’s incredible to see how quickly rage can transform into helplessness. If Gertrude wasn’t here to provide first aid, he might have stared blankly at his lacerated hand until he bled to death. With Jacob’s immediate well-being taken care of, it falls to me to clean up.
We can’t just call a repairman to come and fix the window. Our yearly discretionary budget was wiped out when an influx of tainted heroin hit the streets, and people on the verge of death were being sent here every day, human runoff from emergency rooms too overcrowded to manage the crisis. Now even something as routine as fixing a window has to be budgeted for, the funds allocated only after being approved by the board of directors. My stopgap solution is to break the window more. I fetch a claw hammer from the janitor’s closet and knock out all remaining shards of glass lodged in the frame until nothing remains that could hurt anybody, fixing a hole by replacing it with a bigger hole.
A heavily bandaged and chastened Jacob returns the next day and goes from room to room apologizing to all the staff. I ask him what happened yesterday, and after enduring a bit about how he now has more eyes than hands, he tells me how he didn’t score in days and how when he isn’t high all he feels is angry and sad, and anything can set him off. I ask him if punching the window was a way of inflicting pain on himself that he at least had control over. He tells me no, that’s stupid, I was just angry and needed to score.
I forget sometimes how part of the appeal of being an addict is how simple it makes life, reducing it to the binary conditions of high and not high, pain and no pain, hustle, and respite. It barely even matters that the high never lasts more than ten minutes; thinking about nothing besides getting high is itself a coping mechanism, a refuge from an existence that was unbearable long before the prospect of chemical relief entered the picture. Punching the window wasn’t an isolated event; the force that delivered Jacob’s fist to the glass was the culmination of a lifetime of unspeakably dire circumstances.
He asks me about fixing the window and how much blood there was, and he mentions they asked him his blood type at the hospital, which is dumb because no one knows their blood type. I tell him it’s a popular belief in Japan that your blood type can determine your personality. He asks me if that’s really true. I tell him it’s probably like Astrology; people believe in it a little in order to amuse themselves. Jacob tells me he had an uncle who was in South Korea during his stint in the army, and there’s an urban legend there that leaving a fan on when you’re asleep can kill you. I say people believe ridiculous stuff everywhere, you know that whole MSG being bad for you thing is a myth, it’s actually a lot healthier than salt. He mentions that this is the first time in years that he’s talked to anyone this long without mentioning drugs. I glance at my watch. It’s been three minutes.
I don’t know how our conversation lands on the topic of superheroes, but it does. Jacob likes them, both the real ones in the world and the fake ones in comic books and movies, says the people who hate on them are jealous bundles of sticks, but that isn’t the term he uses.
“Please don’t say that.”
“What, you hate superheroes too?”
“No, I mean-”
“People say we should just have cops, but I never got my ass beat by a superhero. Blue fun, they call it.”
“I’ve heard of that, yeah.”
“So you like superheroes?”
“They’re okay.”
“More than okay, they’re super. Right there in the name.”
“Point taken.”
“Hell yeah, point taken.”
“Yeah.”
“Hell yeah.”
“Hell, yeah.” I concede.
Later, when my shift at the outreach center is ending, Gertrude takes me aside and asks me if I’m okay, saying coworkers who shall remain nameless have expressed concern. At first, I feel upset, even betrayed. I always thought there was a tacit agreement in our society that crying doesn’t count if you do it in a bathroom stall. I tell Gertrude I’m fine. She tells me that isn’t reassuring given what my definition of ‘fine’ tends to be.
“You’ve been sleeping here, haven’t you?” She asks.
“So have you.”
“Not when I don’t have to. Not for days at a time. When was the last time you went home?” I hesitate for too long, which is answer enough. “Remember that fight you had with that girl you were dating at the bowling alley?”
“Vaguely.”
“Remember what you said then?”
“Not really.”
“Well, it applies here as well. Caring about other people isn’t an excuse for not caring about yourself.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You know,” Gertrude says, her voice downshifting from supervisor to friend. “whenever you agree to something, you act like you’re conceding, surrendering somehow, as if you’re helpless to resist. But agreeing is a choice.”
“I suppose you’re right.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake. I’m putting you on mandatory leave, don’t come back until Monday. I’m not going to throw clichés at you-”
“So don’t.”
Gertrude’s mouth stiffens. She exhales slowly through grit teeth, and frustration melts away into an expression of profound sympathy that reminds me why she’s the boss around here.
“She really was that special, huh?” I hear myself cough out a single, bittersweet laugh.
There are no words, but that’s always the case until you start talking about it.
* * *
“ ‘Cosplay is not consent.’ ” Jacob Mosley reads aloud, gazing up at a large sign posted outside the building hosting the comic book convention. “What’s that mean?”
“No ogling the ladies in enticing costumes.”
“They need a sign for that?”
“Apparently.” As we go inside, it does seem a little moot, if only because the overwhelming majority of time spent here consists of waiting in lines, during which time everyone is invariably looking at their phone or Switch. Jacob may be the only one here without a mobile device of any kind, but he does have a colossal stack of comic books rescued from a bargain bin for ten cents apiece that he can flip through to kill time. He intends to get every single one of them signed, irrespective of whether the individual at the signing booth had anything to do with their creation or not. When I asked him why he was so indiscriminate with his collectibles he said it was about the journey. I asked him if he meant it was about community and shared passion, while the specific thing that drew people together was largely irrelevant. He said no, that isn’t it at all, and told me to stop being stupid, which is always good advice.
Jacob strikes up a conversation with another man who shares his affinity for Bronze Age crossovers, giving me leave to wander off. It’s been a long time since I’ve been anywhere with this many people congregated in one spot, and the crush of humanity soon feels suffocating. I make my way outside, past an extravaganza of cosplayers in technicolor costumes striking heroic poses and being recorded for posterity by everyone with a lens. I meander down a side street, the direction not mattering as long as it’s away, just for a few minutes, just until I experience the relief that comes from being alone with oneself instead of alone in a crowd.
I turn a corner and see a lone woman sitting on the ground near a pair of derelict train tracks garlanded by weeds, leaning back on arms planted behind her, fully at ease. I approach her.
“Wow,” I say. “Great Novabolt costume.”
“Thanks. I worked really hard on it.”
“It shows. There are no seams at all, just like the real thing.”
“Have you seen her in person?”
“A long time ago, yeah.”
“What was it like?” She asks eagerly. “What was she like?”
“Humbling. In answer to both your questions.”
“I’m so jealous. I wish I could see her like you.”
“It was a profound experience, that’s for sure. It changes the way you see things.”
“How?”
“I guess it has a way of redefining what seems possible.”
“In a good way or a bad way?”
“Both, if I’m honest.”
“Why-” She’s cut off as a group of fans approach, fawn over her costume, and ask to take some pictures with her. She obliges, striking a series of dramatic, photogenic poses that manage to capture Novabolt’s style in a certain, broad sense, though there’s a hesitancy in her portrayal, a distinct shyness that the subject of her impersonation would never allow herself to show. The fans thank her and leave. By now, I’ve assumed a seat on the asphalt. She sits back down next to me.
“They love you,” I say. She shrugs.
“They love Novabolt.”
“She’s an easy person to love.”
“Hmm. I’ve never found that to be the case.”
“But you’re a fan.” I gesture at her apparel. “You have to admit she’s incredible.”
“I like what she stands for. And, of course, she has the coolest costume, that’s indisputable.”
“What else could you ask for?”
“There’s something to be said for normalcy.” My gaze lands on the weeds flanking the metal rails inlaid in cracked asphalt.
“There’s no such thing.” I say. “Just different kinds of abnormal.”
“Temporary patterns we mistake for permanence.”
“Everything existing only insofar as it’s transforming into the past.”
“Happiness always a kind of forgetting.”
“There’s no improving on perfection.” I say. “All you can do is stand in awe and hope it-”
A flicker in the corner of my eye. I turn my head.
She’s gone.
“Lasts.”
I remain seated for some time, then get up and begin walking back to the convention.
I never see her again.
However, that evening, a dick appears on the face of the moon.
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