Twilight of the Superheroes Read online

  Both sailed as tiny, traumatized children with their separate families and on separate voyages right into the Statue of Liberty’s open arms. Rose was almost eleven when her little sister, Charlie, came into being, along with a stainless American birth certificate.

  Neither Rose and Charlie’s parents nor Isaac’s ever recovered from their journey to the New World, to say nothing of what had preceded it. The two sets of old folks spoke, between them, Yiddish, Polish, Russian, German, Croatian, Slovenian, Ukrainian, Ruthenian, Rumanian, Latvian, Czech, and Hungarian, Charlie had once told Lucien, but not one of the four ever managed to learn more English than was needed to procure a quarter pound of smoked sturgeon from the deli. They worked impossible hours, they drank a little schnapps, and then, in due course, they died.

  Isaac did fairly well manufacturing vacuum cleaners. He and Rose were solid members of their temple and the community, but, according to Charlie, no matter how uneventful their lives in the United States continued to be, filling out an unfamiliar form would cause Isaac’s hands to sweat and send jets of acid through his innards. When he or Rose encountered someone in uniform—a train conductor, a meter maid, a crossing guard—their hearts would leap into their throats and they would think: passport!

  Their three elder sons, Nathaniel’s brothers, fulfilled Rose and Isaac’s deepest hopes by turning out to be blindingly inconspicuous. The boys were so reliable and had so few characteristics it was hard to imagine what anyone could think up to kill them for. They were Jewish, of course, but even Rose and Isaac understood that this particular criterion was inoperative in the United States—at least for the time being.

  The Old World, danger, and poverty were far in the past. Nevertheless, the family lived in their tidy, midwestern house with its two-car garage as if secret police were permanently hiding under the matching plastic-covered sofas, as if Brownshirts and Cossacks were permanently rampaging through the suburban streets.

  Lucien knew precious little about vacuum cleaners and nothing at all about childhood infections or lawn fertilizers. And yet, as soon as Charlie introduced him, Isaac and Rose set about soliciting his views as if he were an authority on everything that existed on their shared continent.

  His demurrals, disclaimers, and protestations of ignorance were completely ineffective. Whatever guess he was finally strong-armed into hazarding was received as oracular. Oracular!

  Fervent gratitude was expressed: Thank God Charlie had brought Lucien into the family! How brilliant he was, how knowledgeable and subtle! And then Rose and Isaac would proceed to pick over his poor little opinion as if they were the most ruthless and highly trained lawyers, and on the opposing side.

  After Charlie was diagnosed, Lucien had just enough time to understand perfectly what that was to mean. When he was exhausted enough to sleep, he slept as though under heavy anesthetic during an amputation. The pain was not alleviated, but it had been made inscrutable. A frightful thing seemed to lie on top of him, heavy and cold. All night long he would struggle to throw it off, but when dawn delivered him to consciousness, he understood what it was, and that it would never go away.

  During his waking hours, the food on his plate would abruptly lose its taste, the painting he was studying would bleach off the canvas, the friend he was talking to would turn into a stranger. And then, one day, he was living in a world all made out of paper, where the sun was a wad of old newspapers and the only sounds were the sounds of tearing paper.

  He spoke with Rose and Isaac frequently during Charlie’s illness, and they came to New York for her memorial service, where they sat self-consciously and miserably among Lucien and Charlie’s attractive friends. He took them to the airport for their return to the Midwest, embraced them warmly, and as they shuffled toward the departure door with the other passengers, turning once to wave, he breathed a sigh of relief: all that, at least, was over, too.

  As his senses began to revive, he felt a brief pang—he would miss, in a minor way, the heartrending buffoonery of Charlie’s sister and brother-in-law After all, it had been part of his life with Charlie, even if it had been the only annoying part.

  But Charlie’s death, instead of setting him utterly, blessedly adrift in his grief, had left him anchored permanently offshore of her family like an island. After a long silence, the infuriating calls started up again. The feudal relationship was apparently inalterable.

  CONTEXT

  When they’d moved in, it probably was the best view on the planet. Then, one morning, out of a clear blue sky, it became, for a while, probably the worst.

  For a long time now they’ve been able to hang out here on the terrace without anyone running inside to be sick or bursting into tears or diving under something at a loud noise or even just making macabre jokes or wondering what sort of debris is settling into their drinks. These days they rarely see—as for a time they invariably did—the sky igniting, the stinking smoke bursting out of it like lava, the tiny figures raining down from the shattered tower as Lyle faints.

  But now it’s unclear what they are, in fact, looking at.

  INFORMATION

  What would Charlie say about the show that’s about to go up? It’s work by a youngish Belgian painter who arrived, splashily, on the scene sometime after Charlie’s departure.

  It’s good work, but these days Lucien can’t get terribly excited about any of the shows. The vibrancy of his brain arranging itself in response to something of someone else’s making, the heart’s little leap—his gift, reliable for so many years, is gone. Or mostly gone; it’s flattened out into something banal and tepid. It’s as if he’s got some part that’s simply worn out and needs replacing. Let’s hope it’s still available, he thinks.

  How did he get so old? The usual stupid question. One had snickered all one’s life as the plaintive old geezers doddered about baffled, as if looking for a misplaced sock, tugging one’s sleeve, asking sheepishly: How did I get so old?

  The mere sight of one’s patiently blank expression turned them vicious. It will happen to you, they’d raged.

  Well, all right, it would. But not in the ridiculous way it had happened to them. And yet, here he is, he and his friends, falling like so much landfill into the dump of old age. Or at least struggling desperately to balance on the brink. Yet one second ago, running so swiftly toward it, they hadn’t even seen it.

  And what had happened to his youth? Unlike a misplaced sock, it isn’t anywhere; it had dissolved in the making of him.

  Surprising that after Charlie’s death he did not take the irreversible step. He’d had no appetite to live. But the body has its own appetite, apparently—that pitiless need to continue with its living, which has so many disguises and so many rationales.

  A deep embarrassment has been stalking him. Every time he lets his guard down these days, there it is. Because it’s become clear: he and even the most dissolute among his friends have glided through their lives on the assumption that the sheer fact of their existence has in some way made the world a better place. As deranged as it sounds now, a better place. Not a leafy bower, maybe, but still, a somewhat better place—more tolerant, more amenable to the wonderful adventures of the human mind and the human body, more capable of outrage against injustice …

  For shame! One has been shocked, all one’s life, to learn of the blind eye turned to children covered with bruises and welts, the blind eye turned to the men who came at night for the neighbors. And yet … And yet one has clung to the belief that the sun shining inside one’s head is evidence of sunshine elsewhere.

  Not everywhere, of course. Obviously, at every moment something terrible is being done to someone somewhere—one can’t really know about each instance of it!

  Then again, how far away does something have to be before you have the right to not really know about it?

  Sometime after Charlie’s death, Lucien resumed throwing his parties. He and his friends continued to buy art and make art, to drink and reflect. They voted responsibly, they gav
e to charity, they read the paper assiduously. And while they were basking in their exclusive sunshine, what had happened to the planet? Lucien gazes at his glass of wine, his eyes stinging.

  HOMESICK

  Nathaniel was eight or nine when his aunt and uncle had come out to the Midwest to visit the family, lustrous and clever and comfortable and humorous and affectionate with one another, in their soft, stylish clothing. They’d brought books with them to read. When they talked to each other—and they habitually did—not only did they take turns, but also, what one said followed on what the other said. What world could they have come from? What was the world in which beings like his aunt and uncle could exist?

  A world utterly unlike his parents’, that was for sure—a world of freedom and lightness and beauty and the ardent exchange of ideas and … and … fun.

  A great longing rose up in Nathaniel like a flower with a lovely, haunting fragrance. When he was ready, he’d thought—when he was able, when he was worthy, he’d get to the world from which his magic aunt and uncle had once briefly appeared.

  The evidence, though, kept piling up that he was not worthy. Because even when he finished school, he simply didn’t budge. How unfair it was—his friends had flown off so easily, as if going to New York were nothing at all.

  Immediately after graduation, Madison found himself a job at a fancy New York PR firm. And it seemed that there was a place out there on the trading floor of the Stock Exchange for Amity. And Lyle had suddenly exhibited an astonishing talent for sound design and engineering, so where else would he sensibly live, either?

  Yes, the fact was that only Nathaniel seemed slated to remain behind in their college town. Well, he told himself, his parents were getting on; he would worry, so far away. And he was actually employed as a part-time assistant with an actual architectural firm, whereas in New York the competition, for even the lowliest of such jobs, would be ferocious. And also, he had plenty of time, living where he did, to work on Passivityman.

  And that’s what he told Amity, too, when she’d called one night, four years ago, urging him to take the plunge.

  “It’s time for you to try, Nathaniel,” she said. “It’s time to commit. This oddball, slacker stance is getting kind of old, don’t you think, kind of stale. You cannot let your life be ruled by fear any longer.”

  “Fear?” He flinched. “By what fear, exactly, do you happen to believe my life is ruled?”

  “Well, I mean, fear of failure, obviously. Fear of mediocrity.”

  For an instant he thought he might be sick.

  “Right,” he said. “And why should I fear failure and mediocrity? Failure and mediocrity have such august traditions! Anyhow, what’s up with you, Amity?”

  She’d been easily distracted, and they chatted on for a while, but when they hung up, he felt very, very strange, as if his apartment had slightly changed shape. Amity was right, he’d thought; it was fear that stood between him and the life he’d meant to be leading.

  That was probably the coldest night of the whole, difficult millennium. The timid midwestern sun had basically gone down at the beginning of September; it wouldn’t be around much again till May. Black ice glared on the street outside like the cloak of an extra-cruel witch. The sink faucet was dripping into a cracked and stained teacup: Tick tock tick tock …

  What was he doing? Once he’d dreamed of designing tranquil and ennobling dwellings, buildings that urged benign relationships, rich inner harmonies; he’d dreamed of meeting fascinating strangers. True, he’d managed to avoid certain pitfalls of middle-class adulthood—he wasn’t a white-collar criminal, for example; he wasn’t (at least as far as he knew) a total blowhard. But what was he actually doing? His most exciting social contact was the radio. He spent his salaried hours in a cinder-block office building, poring over catalogues of plumbing fixtures. The rest of the day—and the whole evening, too—he sat at the little desk his parents had bought for him when he was in junior high, slaving over Passivityman, a comic strip that ran in free papers all over parts of the Midwest, a comic strip that was doted on by whole dozens, the fact was, of stoned undergrads.

  He was twenty-four years old! Soon he’d be twenty-eight. In a few more minutes he’d be thirty-five, then fifty. Five zero. How had that happened? He was eighty! He could feel his vascular system and brain clogging with paste, he was drooling …

  And if history had anything to teach, it was that he’d be broke when he was eighty, too, and that his personal life would still be a disaster.

  But wait. Long ago, panic had sent his grandparents and parents scurrying from murderous Europe, with its death camps and pogroms, to the safe harbor of New York. Panic had kept them going as far as the Midwest, where grueling labor enabled them and eventually their children to lead blessedly ordinary lives. And sooner or later, Nathaniel’s pounding heart was telling him, that same sure-footed guide, panic, would help him retrace his family’s steps all the way back to Manhattan.

  OPPORTUNISM

  Blip! Charlie scatters again as Lucien’s attention wavers from her and the empty space belonging to her is seized by Miss Mueller.

  Huh, but what do you know—death suits Miss Mueller! In life she was drab, but now she absolutely throbs with ghoulishness. You there, Lucien—the shriek echoes around the gallery—What are the world’s three great religions?

  Zen Buddhism, Jainism, and Sufism, he responds sulkily.

  Naughty boy! She cackles flirtatiously. Bang bang, you’re dead!

  THE HALF-LIFE OF PASSIVITY

  Passivityman is taking a snooze, his standard response to stress, when the alarm rings. “I’ll check it out later, boss,” he murmurs.

  “You’ll check it out now, please,” his girlfriend and superior, the beautiful Princess Prudence, tells him. “Just put on those grubby corduroys and get out there.”

  “Aw, is it really urgent?” he asks.

  “Don’t you get it?” she says. “I’ve been warning you, episode after episode! And now, from his appliance-rich house on the Moon, Captain Corporation has tightened his Net of Evil around the planet Earth, and he’s dragging it out of orbit! The U.S. Congress is selected by pharmaceutical companies, the state of Israel is run by Christian fundamentalists, the folks that haul toxic sludge manufacture cattle feed and process burgers, your sources of news and information are edited by a giant mouse, New York City and Christian fundamentalism are holdings of a family in Kuwait—and all of it’s owned by Captain Corporation!”

  Passivityman rubs his eyes and yawns. “Well gosh, Pru, sure—but, like, what am I supposed to do about it?”

  “I don’t know,” Princess Prudence says. “It’s hardly my job to figure that out, is it? I mean, you’re the superhero. Just—Just—just go out and do something conspicuously lacking in monetary value! Invent some stinky, profit-proof gloop to pour on stuff. Or, I don’t know, whatever. But you’d better do something, before it’s too late.”

  “Sounds like it’s totally too late already,” says Passivityman, reaching for a cigarette.

  It was quite a while ago now that Passivityman seemed to throw in the towel. Nathaniel’s friends looked at the strip with him and scratched their heads.

  “Hm, I don’t know, Nathaniel,” Amity said. “This episode is awfully complicated. I mean, Passivityman’s seeming kind of passive-aggressive, actually.”

  “Can Passivityman not be bothered any longer to protect the abject with his greed-repelling Shield of Sloth?” Lyle asked.

  “It’s not going to be revealed that Passivityman is a double agent, is it?” Madison said. “I mean, what about his undying struggle against corporate-model efficiency?”

  “The truth is, I don’t really know what’s going on with him,” Nathaniel said. “I was thinking that maybe, unbeknownst to himself, he’s come under the thrall of his morally neutral, transgendering twin, Ambiguityperson.”

  “Yeah,” Madison said. “But I mean, the problem here is that he’s just not dealing with the paradox of
his own being—he seems kind of intellectually passive …”

  Oh, dear. Poor Passivityman. He was a tired old crime fighter. Nathaniel sighed; it was hard to live the way his superhero lived—constantly vigilant against the premature conclusion, scrupulously rejecting the vulgar ambition, rigorously deferring judgment and action … and all for the greater good.

  “Huh, well, I guess he’s sort of losing his superpowers,” Nathaniel said.

  The others looked away uncomfortably.

  “Oh, it’s probably just one of those slumps,” Amity said. “I’m sure he’ll be back to normal, soon.”

  But by now, Nathaniel realizes, he’s all but stopped trying to work on Passivityman.

  ALL THIS

  Thanks for pointing that out, Miss Mueller. Yes, humanity seems to have reverted by a millennium or so. Goon squads, purporting to represent each of the world’s three great religions—as they used to be called to fifth-graders, and perhaps still so misleadingly are—have deployed themselves all over the map, apparently in hopes of annihilating not only each other, but absolutely everyone, themselves excepted.

  Just a few weeks earlier, Lucien was on a plane heading home from Los Angeles, and over the loudspeaker, the pilot requested that all Christians on board raise their hands. The next sickening instants provided more than enough time for conjecture as to who, exactly, was about to be killed—Christians or non-Christians. And then the pilot went on to ask those who had raised their hands to talk about their “faith” with the others.

  Well, better him than Rose and Isaac; that would have been two sure heart attacks, right there. And anyhow, why should he be so snooty about religious fanaticism? Stalin managed to kill off over thirty million people in the name of no god at all, and not so very long ago.