Superhero
We'd all had enough of superhero
movies, and the wannabe superheroes they'd spawned, and the satires of
superhero movies, and the anti-hero movies.
We'd had enough of heroes.
Casting Ben Affleck (who’d already
ruined one superhero movie) as Batman was really the final nail. The Batman-Superman movie was a disaster, and
it put people off the whole notion of capes & tights altogether. Not even Joss Whedon was spared – after
Batman-Superman, the Agents of Shield show fizzled, Avengers 2 was a box office
bomb, and Robert Downey Jr. went back to rehab.
Well, first he went back to hookers & coke. Then he went back to rehab.
The last “real” superhero, Phoenix
Jones, was also dead, and the utter stupidity with which he chose to meet his
end was just too juicy for the tabloids to pass up. What did he think would happen when he
waltzed into a brawl between the Crips and Bloods? He got shot.
A lot.
That was the trouble with
superheroes. They were unrealistic - even
the ones, like Batman, who didn't have any particular magical powers, just a
lot of money and more hours in the day than anyone else in the Universe, so he
could learn all the martial arts, ninja skills, design all the gear...it was
exhausting to contemplate. And then when
some asshole like Phoenix Jones tried to imitate Batman, he just ended up dead.
The real problem I had with
superheroes was the notion that one person could put away more bad guys than could
an entire police force. If Batman was
such a god damned hero, why didn't he just throw all his money at the Gotham PD
- outfit them with batarangs and body
armor and high tech surveillance equipment?
No, it had to be all about Bruce Wayne's ego, didn't it? I had a theory that superheroes came from a
Nietzschean-Objectivist expression of the idiot strain of American radical
individualism – the notion that I, and only I, can save you, and the
government-funded police forces actually hired to do that job are incompetent
buffoons.
Still, there I was, outside of a
"secret warehouse" in the middle of the city, Intrepid Reporter Jimmy
Smith, just out of journalism school, still wet behind the ears, and not just
because of the rain. I had my tablet and
stylus in hand, because Willamette Week had gotten a tip about a "new
superhero" who had a base of operations here.
I knocked at a small door set into a
larger rolling garage door. It opened,
and a small man's face peeked out.
"Yes?"
"Jimmy Smith with the
Willamette Week. Here to
interview," I checked my notes, "The Stumptown Savior." I winced at that.
"Just a sec." The small man's face retreated. The door
closed. I waited.
After a minute, the door opened
again. The small man ushered me
inside. "It'll just be a
minute," he said as he bade me follow him through a metal hallway bathed
in fluorescent light. We went through a
door into a dark space, obviously the main floor of the warehouse, where two
Ikea leather sofas sat across from each other under one hanging light. It was all very dramatic.
"Sit," said the small man,
pointing at one of the sofas. I
sat. The small man hurried out of the
room.
I drummed my fingers on my
knees. I fidgeted. I fiddled with my phone.
Several minutes later, the small man
returned, this time wearing a frankly ridiculous getup. Bright orange bike shorts, a black cycling
jersey, a furry pink fedora, and motorcycle boots. Seriously?
"Seriously?" I actually said that out loud.
"Meet the Stumptown
Savior," said the small man, and his voice reverberated around the room
through some kind of electronic trickery.
I kind of blinked at him for a few
minutes. The headline of my story was
clear: “Nothing,” because this wasn’t a story.
This was just another wacky dude trying to out-wacky the most
self-consciously wacky city in America.
The Stumptown Savior sat across from
me on the other couch. I decided that if
he wanted to waste my time, then he was going to have to start telling me
why. So I didn’t ask him any questions,
at first. After a few minutes of weird silence, he started.
“You’re obviously wondering about
this ridiculous getup.”
I nodded.
“But what you’re wondering more is
why I call myself a superhero.”
I nodded again.
“It’s because I can do this.”
Quite suddenly, he wasn’t sitting in
front of me anymore. He was across the
room, standing in the corner.
I made a noise. I think it was something along the lines of: “Wha….huh?”
“Quantum teleportation.” His voice echoed around the space. A second later, he was back on the
couch. I tried to gather my thoughts. I’d seen enough David Blaine street magic to
know where this was going.
“Big fan of David Blaine, are
you?” I asked.
He laughed, a weird tittering giggle
that sounded like a small dog gargling a mouse he’d just caught.
“This isn’t stage magic, my friend. This is real teleportation.” He disappeared off the couch and came through
the door through which I’d entered earlier.
“Ok, sit still for a minute.” He came back and sat on the couch, blinking
at me.
“Would you at least get rid of the
hat? It’s very distracting.” He took off his hat.
I still wasn’t prepared to believe
the guy could teleport. And anyway, even
if he could, if that was his only superpower, it wasn’t a very good one.
“Look, even if you could teleport,
which you can’t, because that’s not possible, it’s still not a very good
superpower, is it? I mean, what are you
going to do to bad guys, say ‘Stop! Or I’ll…be somewhere else at you?’”
“You’d be surprised at how handy it
is. For instance.” He grabbed my hand, and suddenly we were both
standing across the room.
“Oh,” I said, and fainted.
I came to lying on the couch. The Stumptown Savior was mopping my brow with
a wet cloth, and proffered a glass of ice water. I accepted it. I sat up and took a sip. It was exactly the scene you’re picturing
from all the movies.
The quick nap had cleared my mind
pretty successfully.
“So you can teleport, and not only
that, you can take people with you.” The
words as they came out of my mouth felt like they were scrawled into wet cheese,
which is to say they didn’t make any sense at all.
“Yes,” said the Stumptown
Savior.
At this point I had the presence of
mind to turn on the video recording function of my tablet. I pointed it at him. “Do it again.” He nodded, vanished, and reappeared across
the room. I jerked the tablet’s camera
toward where he now was.
“Ok, now come back.” He did.
“Ok, now do it again, except this
time, take the tablet with you while it’s recording.” He obliged.
When he returned, I reviewed the footage. There wasn’t a period of blackness or
anything – the background just changed suddenly.
“Huh.” That was the most intelligent thing I could
think to say at that moment.
“So when did you-”
He grabbed my hand and we were suddenly standing on top of
the Space Needle.
“Oh,” I said, and fainted
again. Thankfully, he caught me, or that
would have been a pretty permanent nap.
I came to in the observation lounge
of the Space Needle. A paramedic was
standing over me and I had an oxygen mask on my face.
“Heights,” the Stumptown Savior
explained to the paramedic. “He should
be fine now.”
“Ok, but maybe don’t go up the Space
Needle if you’re that afraid of heights,” admonished the paramedic.
“I didn’t really have much of a
choice,” I said, voice muffled by the mask.
The paramedic took away the mask and cleared away his equipment. He really wanted to take me in for
observation, but the Stumptown Savior persuaded him that I didn’t need it.
After a minute, I said, “So you can
teleport, take people with you, and go really far.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Alright then.” I stood, with his help, and found a water
fountain. I drank deep.
“You know I’ve never been up the
Space Needle,” I said. “This is my first
time.”
“Mine too,” he said. “This was just
a whim. Needed to show you what I could
do, you know?”
“So you can teleport, take people
with you, go really far, and go places you’ve never been before.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Alright, so is this magic, or is
this an incredible scientific breakthrough?”
“A little from column A, a little
from column B.”
I walked over to the windows,
overlooking the dreary Seattle skyline.
The Stumptown Savior joined me at the windows.
“Tell me more about it,” I said.
“I will.” He grabbed my hand and I found myself back on
the couch in his warehouse. I managed to
remain conscious.
“That must’ve caused a stir,” I
said. “Disappearing from the Space
Needle like that.”
“Not as much as you’d think. People are focused on other things.”
“So tell me how this happened. How’d you get this…ability?”
“I was struck by lightning while I
was standing way too close to a space-time rift.”
“Seriously?”
“No, but wouldn’t that be
cool?” He smiled at me, a disquieting
sight.
“The truth is much more mundane, I’m
afraid. I was working on the particle
accelerator at CERN, and I don’t really know how, but somehow I was blasted
with a particle beam, and, Bob’s your uncle, I can teleport. Like, quantum entanglement, something. I still haven’t really figured it out.”
“Still a pretty decent superhero
origin story,” I said. “How do you use it?”
“Mostly I patrol the streets, find
people in trouble, and get them out of there.
About all I can do, really. I’ve
experimented with teleporting criminals directly into prison while they’re
committing their crimes, but the police have no idea what to do with that,
because the criminals haven’t gone through the proper procedures, had their
Miranda rights read, you know, that sort of thing. Also, I’ve almost gotten knifed or shot a few
times, and I’m not bulletproof.”
“Can’t you just teleport away from
the path of the bullet?”
“I can’t do it that fast – by the
time I could register the shot, it would already have shot me. I’m not Neo.”
“No, of course.”
“So you want to go out on patrol
with me?”
“Yeah, but first – why the crazy
getup?”
“Oh the hat was just for shits. You know.
But the cycling gear is comfortable and easy to move in, and the
motorcycle boots just look cool. I mean,
don’t they?”
I nodded. “Sure.
Maybe not with the cycling
gear though…”
He chuckled. “Yeah maybe you’re right, but hey, we’re all
a little eccentric, aren’t we?”
“Yeah, we are.”
“Come on then. My Spidey sense is tingling.”
“Careful where you use that –
Marvel’s got a lot of copyright lawyers.”
“Are you one of them?”
“No.”
He grabbed my hand. “Alright then. Off we go.”
***
It turned out his “Spidey sense” consisted of a police
scanner app on his phone. We teleported outside
and I managed to remain conscious again.
He pulled his phone out of a pocket on his cycling jersey along with a
pair of earbuds. He put one in his ear
and handed one to me. I wasn’t super
happy about sharing earbuds with someone – ew – but I gamely obliged. All was crackling and static, with the occasional
burst of incoherent police code. After a
minute, the Stumptown Savior said, “Let’s go.”
Out of another pocket of his jersey, he produced two ski masks. He put one on and handed the other to me.
“Secret identity, you know,” he explained. I nodded and put the ski mask on.
“You can be my Robin,” he chuckled.
He grabbed my hand. I
found myself looking out the window of a darkened office building looking down
at an alley. I couldn’t really see
anything happening in the alley.
“What’s the crime?”
“911 call was dead air,” he said, “but it was geolocated
here. Something’s going down, probably a
mugging victim throwing his phone in some bushes as the trouble started. Need to find it. Stay here.”
He vanished.
I realized the real crime here might be me breaking into an
office building, but I had to hope that wasn’t going to end up being a
problem. I watched the alley. He appeared at one end of it and started to
walk along, looking into shadows.
He must’ve seen something, because he sprinted out of
view. Suddenly he was beside me. “Come,” he said, grabbed me, and we
went. I blinked and was standing in the
shadows at the end of another alley. In
front of me, some poor guy was being menaced by a thug with a switchblade. Stumptown walked toward the thug.
“Hey,” said Stumptown.
The thug turned. “What
do you want, freak?” Stumptown dived and
grabbed the thug around the knees in a low tackle. The two of them disappeared. The victim gaped. Then he ran.
A few minutes later, Stumptown
reappeared beside me. He was bleeding
from a nasty slice across one shoulder.
“Job hazard,” he said.
“Where’d you put the bad guy?”
“Dropped him off in front of the
police station. Whether they do anything
with him…I doubt it. But it got that
victim off the hook.”
“I thought you normally teleported
the victims.”
“Yeah, well, it depends – here I
didn’t have clear access to the victim without going through the perp. I just do whatever’s easiest.”
I nodded. He grabbed me, and we teleported back to the
warehouse. I was getting very good at
remaining conscious.
“How many of those do you do a
night?”
“As many as I can, you know? I’m just one guy. This is a big city.”
“You going to do any more tonight?”
“Probably not,” he said. He prodded his injured shoulder and
winced. “This’ll need stitches, so I’m
going to spend the rest of the night in the hospital. Thank god for good health insurance, right?”
“What’s your day job?”
“I’m a physics professor at Portland
State. And shit, that reminds me, I’ve
got a bunch of exams to grade. Looks
like they’ll be late again. I’m
developing a reputation, you know. Good
thing I’m tenured.”
***
“I don’t know what to do with this
footage, Smith.” It was my editor. I’d given him the tablet to review the teleportation
footage, not at all sure how he’d react to it.
He’d reacted with bafflement.
That seemed about right.
“Put it on the website, maybe with a
poll asking people if they think this guy’s for real,” I suggested.
My editor was an old Jewish guy from
New York, balding, with a strong accent.
When he spoke, his tongue darted around his mouth as if seeking escape,
snaking to and fro, making a loud saliva noise.
It unnerved me to no end.
“But it’s not real, right?”
I shook my head. “No boss – it’s all real. You may not believe me. And that’s completely fine. But last night I was on top of the damned
Space Needle, and that wasn’t an illusion.”
“The Space Needle?” He rewound the footage again, his brow
furrowed, hyperactive tongue inspecting all the nooks and crannies of his mouth
and tasting the air.
“Yeah.”
After a minute, he said, “Take this
down to our digital editing guys – see if they can figure out what’s going on
with it. The story you’re spinning is a
wild one, Smith. If you’re telling me
this guy is more than just another dumbass Phoenix Jones, that this is really
something out of a damned comic book, then…I don’t know. That’s a lot to wrap your head around.”
“I want to go out with him a few
more nights before I write the article.”
“Sure. Also, go to the PSU website, see who this guy
actually is. If he’s a professor there,
we should be able to match up his picture.”
I nodded. “Yeah, but I’m pretty sure this guy wants his
secret identity kept secret, right?”
“Then he shouldn’t have shown you
his face, should he?” My editor handed
me back the tablet and walked off.
It was a fair point. Why had the Stumptown Savior met me with his
mask off? Was this all a kind of
publicity stunt, a way to reveal himself to the world? Then why put on the ski mask when he was
doing his superhero stuff? A lot of
questions for tonight, I thought.
I sat down at my desk, straightened
a pile of article drafts, threw them to the side. Those would wait. I opened my laptop and clicked open the web
browser. I scanned the Portland State
University website, looking at pictures of professors. There he was.
Unmistakably. The guy’s name was
Zack Anderson. Not exactly “Peter
Parker” or “Clark Kent.”
I decided to crash one of his
classes.
***
“So why did you want me to find
you?” Professor Anderson’s lecture had
been impenetrable to me, something about bosons or whatever, but I’d caught up
with him afterwards and he’d agreed to go for a beer with me. He hadn’t been at all surprised to see me;
in fact, he seemed to have been expecting me. For some reason, we’d ended up at
Pizza Schmizza, which, yes, had a bar, but was mostly a pizza joint. Neither of us was eating pizza.
Professor Anderson sipped a locally
brewed porter and thought for a second. “What
I’m about to tell you is off the record.”
I nodded. It was funny how people
still thought that meant something.
He continued. “I want some of the credit, I suppose. Maybe I want to get paid. I mean, I’ve got a skill. It’s got to be worth
something, right? If you reveal my
identity, maybe the cops will hire me on as a special consultant. Maybe I’ll get some private security gigs. I don’t know.
I want to monetize this. Call me
selfish.”
I took a gulp of my own beer, a
hoppy IPA with a bitter grapefruit bite.
I pondered what this guy was saying.
Actually, he was making more sense than any other superhero in
history. Why did all of these guys with
superhuman abilities do their thing for free?
That was another thing that made no sense about comic books – the Nietzschean
ideal of the Superman, sprinkled with the “only I can do this” radicalism of
Ayn Rand, but working for the common good of humanity? No, this guy was clearly the most real
superhero of them all – taking the idea to its logical extreme. Well, him and Deadpool, I supposed. It was at that moment that I realized that my
cynical sociological analysis of superheroes was seriously compromised by the
fact that I’d never actually read a comic book, and all of my knowledge came
from movies, TV shows, and video games. Still, I thought I had a point, and that was enough for the moment.
“So essentially, instead of an
article, you want me to write you an ad.”
He shook his head. “Not so crass as all that. I want you to write me an origin story, paint
me as the lonely hero, get people interested in me. I’ll be all reluctant about it, and then
we’ll see what happens.”
I drained my beer. It being early afternoon, I decided not to
have another. Outside, the rain pattered
against the restaurant window, reminding all of us that it was any of the
months between September and June.
“Come to the warehouse tonight and
patrol with me again. Get some good
video, and then tomorrow write your article.”
“If I do that, it’ll come out in
next week’s paper edition, but I can load the video footage onto the website
today, give people a tease.”
“That’s fine.”
***
The night’s patrol started slowly –
even the criminals tend to cocoon a little bit at the start of the rainy
season. The Stumptown Savior did manage
to rescue an old lady from the path of an oncoming truck, although the shock of
teleportation nearly killed her.
Stumptown dropped her off at the local hospital and blinked back to
where I was waiting for him.
“That’ll be a great bit of footage
for the website,” I said, my voice muffled by the ski mask he still insisted we
both wear. Honestly, I thought – ski
masks?
“Don’t you worry the ski mask sends
the wrong message?”
“What do you want me to do, get a
Mexican wrestling mask and paint it fun colors?
Come on now.”
“I’m just saying – I see a guy with
a ski mask coming at me, I’m running the other way.”
“Yeah well…” He motioned me to follow him. We ducked into an alley and he checked his
police scanner. He grabbed my hand and
we blinked across the city. In front of
us, a four story apartment building was engulfed in flames.
“Turn on the video,” he said. I pointed the tablet at him and then at the
burning building. He teleported. I zoomed in on the building. He was gone for quite a while. I began to worry about him.
Then he was next to me, kneeling,
coughing, carrying nothing at all. He
was black with soot from head to toe, and his cycling jersey looked to have
melted off of one of his arms, burning him quite badly.
“Dammit,” he spat. “Nobody in there.”
“You’d prefer there to have been
someone in there?” I asked.
“Can’t be a rescue if you don’t
rescue anyone,” he coughed.
“True,” I said. Wow.
“Ok, that’s it for tonight. Need a hot bath and some steam in my
lungs.” He grabbed me and we shot back
to the warehouse.
***
I had to decide how to approach the
article. Did I respect the guy’s “off
the record” comments from the pizza place, and do as he asked – paint him as a
reluctant hero, just trying to do some good?
Or expose him as the cynical self-promoting bastard he actually
was?
Part of me wanted to wait and see
how this played out, see if it was possible for the guy to parlay a superpower
into a paying job without seeming like a total asshole in the process. I was convinced that people would find the
notion of a paid superhero off-putting, because of the cultural associations of
heroes with, well, heroism.
Then again, this guy was using me
and my newspaper to craft a narrative for himself that, frankly, was a load of
bollocks. Nothing new in the media
world, true, but I didn’t like the taste of it.
After all, why bend over backwards
for this guy when all he wanted to do was make a buck, to the point that he
actually wanted for there to be
people burning alive that he could rescue?
That was what really clinched it for me.
The way he sounded so disappointed
that he hadn’t found a cowering child or mewling pet about to burn to death
in that apartment building.
My editor came in to my office,
noticed me with my “pondering” face on.
“What are you pondering?” he asked,
tongue squirming around his gullet like a snake on fire.
I gave him a hard look. This was the moment I had to decide, because
I knew that once I told my boss the truth about this guy, the jig would be
up. My boss would insist that I write
the truth, the whole truth, and make it as juicy as possible. Print media wasn’t dead, but it wasn’t terribly
healthy either, and our free weekly had been more ads than articles for a while
now just to keep the lights on.
Sensationalism was guaranteed to get papers in people’s hands, and that
would translate to increased ad revenue, especially if we put all the video on
the website.
Including the video I’d taken of
Stumptown at the burning apartment building.
I had him saying, “Damn, nobody in there.” I had the whole exchange.
“Stumptown’s a fraud, boss. Sure, his power’s real, but all he really
wants is to make money off of it.” I
loaded up the video from the apartment building and handed the tablet
over. My boss watched it.
“Ok, so…wow. That’s pretty damning. Actually annoyed that…” He handed the tablet back to me.
“Yeah. So he wants to use us to get publicity for
himself, see if he can parlay his skills into a paying gig.”
“Oh he does, does he?”
I nodded. “That’s his whole thing. He told me he wants to ‘monetize’ this. His words.”
“Monetize being a superhero?”
“Yeah.”
My boss paced around my office for a
few minutes. I think neither of us was
sure where to go with this.
I checked the footage I’d taken from
the first night’s patrol and put on the website. The poll was at 65% for “this is fake,” 22%
for “this is real,” and 13% for “I don’t know, I just like to click on polls.” The comments below the video were the usual
morass of “FIRST!!!!!!1!!!,” “This is shopped because of the pixels,”
“[something offensive and irrelevant],” and “Hey that’s interesting, now look
how you can make a zillion dollars and work at home!” Not helpful to deciding
what to do with this, except that it showed that people were watching the
video. Maybe it hadn’t gone viral, but
it was at least the internet equivalent of a light cough.
“I’m writing the truth, boss.” I’d opened my mouth not sure of what was
going to come out of it, but I knew I was right about what did.
“Go for it. Take this guy down.” He left my office.
***
My article laid it all out. The guy’s name, his superpower, even the
supposedly “off the record” conversation we’d had at the pizza place. I pointed readers to the website, where I’d
posted the video of Stumptown being pissed off he didn’t find any victims in
the apartment building.
The uproar was immediate and
confusing. A debate ensued – some of our
city’s libertarian anarchists, the same ones I blamed every time I got a damned
cavity after they’d defeated putting fluoride in the water because they were
afraid of the government tainting their precious bodily fluids, applauded
Stumptown’s entrepreneurial spirit, while being careful to denounce him for
wishing harm on innocents. The leftist
anarchists, the ones I blamed for the city’s parks being shut down constantly
because they kept putting tents and homeless people in them, denounced him as a
sellout and said other incoherent things.
The sensible middle of the city wasn’t sure what to make of him. I think even the vegans had an opinion about
his leather motorcycle boots. On point
as usual.
Everyone, however, agreed he was an
asshole.
But in the end, he got what he
wanted. A private security firm hired
him on as protection for a local hip hop artist. It paid so well that he quit his professor
job. He eventually became a Bodyguard to
the Stars, able to whisk celebrities out of the hassling arms of the paparazzi,
or in some cases, whisk the paparazzi themselves out of there.
Obviously he lost the ski mask, the
cycling outfit, and the motorcycle boots.
Celebs don’t like their bodyguards dressed like that.
I never saw him again – I couldn’t
tell if he was pissed about my article or pleased with it. After all, it had gotten him exactly what he
wanted.
I don’t know why I ever expected anything else to
happen.
