A Once Crowded Sky (44 page)

“Don’t go,” she says, through small whimpers. “Listen to me. For once, okay? Don’t go. Okay? Okay?”

During the wars, during all those wars, she’d always cried after he left. She cried because she knew they’d see each other again, or they wouldn’t ever see each other again.

“I liked Pen,” Soldier says. “He was all right, good kid.”

“Yeah. Yeah, me too.”

“I’m sorry for him, what I’ve done.”

“I know.”

Soldier pauses, leans into his cane. “I’ve got some things, things I want sent on to Anna. Would you do that for me?”

“Of course. Always.”

“Thank you. I appreciate that.”

“Always.”

Soldier reaches into his pocket and takes out a leather case. He opens it and unfolds a pair of glasses. “That thing you said. About endings and all. That’s pretty good.” He puts the glasses on and places the case back into his pocket. “That was a good story.”

“Sure.”

“It had to end. It had to.”

“Like a destiny, kind of.”

“Yeah, suppose it’s like that.”

“Except not, right?”

Soldier steps back. “Good-bye.”

“Until next time,” she says.

Soldier’s eyes dip down and then soar back to her, and he smiles, and he tips a hat he’s not wearing, an old-style hat maybe. The chiseled jaw, the dark pulled skin, the thin black hair stretched back: he’s grown up so handsome, so sweet. Before he can turn, she bends forward and kisses him on the cheek, and he turns, and he’s gone.

Later, she starts to clean the apartment: Runt’s coming over for dinner. Under Soldier’s chair she finds one of his guns, Carolina she thinks,
propped up against a leg. For a while she searches everywhere, hoping to find the other one. But she can’t, and eventually she gives up and sits back at her table, the weapon placed in a drawer in her room. After lighting a cigarette, she waves circles through the smoke, trying to make it go away, knowing Runt doesn’t like it.

3

Ultimate, The Man With A Metal Face #584

Of course, a few days after he died, Anna knew she was pregnant. A silly tryst back at the hospital while she was recovering, and now—it was all so predictable; she didn’t even need the tests, but she got them anyway, eventually. They can’t say yet if it’s a boy or a girl (but Anna has decided it’s a girl). The doctors say that, regardless, it seems healthy—healthy and strong.

It’s a nice day outside, but Anna feels like staying in, so she sits alone in the corner chair in their apartment, running her finger up and down the scar in the middle of her chest. It’s fun to play with somehow: its purple hills and steep edges have such an alien texture, so different from her own, rather plain, skin. She tries to stick her nail under it, to see if it’ll just slip off.

She shuts her eyes and lays her head back into the giving cushion. What a nice day it is outside, sunny and pristine and nice. After a while, she allows her finger to dip lower again, to follow the direction of the line down her abdomen, down to her belly button. Her nail drags outward
toward her hips, then draws a circle around her stomach, tickling her in a few spots.

Here, where the girl will grow: how big Anna’ll get as the baby expands and becomes someone real. If she wanted, she could name her Penny or Penelope or something like that. Penelope was Felix’s daughter and she owed him so much for the surgery, so that might be nice. But it’s all much too corny; it’ll have to be something normal—like Claire or Elizabeth. She’ll think of something, she’s sure.

God, her parents’ll be so, so excited when she tells them: it’s going to be a whole scene full of jumping and screaming and all the rest of it. And her brother, who was never that big a fan of this particular union, even he’ll be caught up in it. They’ll be sad too, the way everyone is around her these days; but they’ll be happy too just the same.

She’s going to need clothes and cribs and all that crap. And the paper. At some point she’ll have to tell her boss. She can already picture it: she’ll be one of those absurdly bloated women reporters, waddling after some deputy mayor, shouting for him to slow down so she can get the quote without her water breaking.

She circles her stomach, and she laughs, keeping her eyes closed. Her bare toes tuck into the fluffed rug beneath her, seeking warmth before arching away and then settling down once again among the soft strands of fabric.

She sleeps and dreams of heroes. When she wakes, she’s scared, and she cries out.

To calm herself, she takes a book off a nearby shelf and flips through the pages. Since the funeral, DG’d taken to sending her gifts; a lot of those heroes had, but DG even more than most. She especially likes to send books that seemed as if they’d make nice reading for the baby someday; not really children’s books, but classics, the kind you end up reading when you’re a child, though you always mean to return to them:
The Red Badge of Courage
,
Huckleberry Finn
,
Little Women
, that kind of thing.

It’s almost as if she knew, but that doesn’t surprise Anna. These people always know all sorts of things, patterns in their little game that seem so relevant they study them eternally, as if the world itself were constantly at stake. She can’t help but to roll her eyes for what must be the millionth time.

The tome she’s apparently chosen is the
Aeneid
, and she thumbs
through the pages without purpose or intention, finally settling on a place near the middle but closer to the end. Anna can vaguely recall she was supposed to have finished this thing in college, but she can’t remember ever even starting. A long, nice day ahead of her, she reads a little of the text out loud to her little girl.

The poetry is lovely and flowing, and she eventually grows distracted and places the book down in her lap. She should call someone and get out and enjoy the day. She finds again that her hand is drawing circles around her center, outlining their daughter.

Her eyes dash back and forth across the room, and her body quivers violently: another villain creeps inside their place and steals everything. Taking a deep breath and then exhaling as loudly as she possibly can, Anna tries to sigh it out of her, let all that pernicious air escape so that their child can only breathe in what is pure, a world untouched by the creeping villains that’ll always be there, kept barely at bay by the heroes who never give up, who always come back.

Her hand reaches back to her scar—to the skin over the metal, to the secret she’d promised to keep—but it doesn’t rest there, and it soon returns to circle her center.

Next to the scattering of Soldier’s books lie a pile of comics; they’d been left there by Sicko when he used to come over almost every other day, before Ultimate killed him on the other side of this room. She reaches out and trades the Virgil for a few comics, starts going through the pages without any real purpose.

Lord how Sicko’d tried to suck her husband into these stupid things, like getting him to join a cult or something. And Pen, of course, had gone right along with it, as a child would, taking it all much too seriously. How he’d burrow his nose into one of these funny books, shouting out nonsensical observations from time to time, to which she always responded with a nod, a smile, and yet another roll of her eyes.

Pencils and inks. Boxes and pictures. Circles and words. Silly men in silly tights saving a silly world. Boys imagining themselves to be myths because they can’t get a real job and do something useful with their lives.

As she flips, the pages begin to blur, the colors begin to run together, until only the backgrounds seem to stand out, all those heroes silhouetted in flight against all those clear, well-lit skies: it all becomes blue, all blue, until she reaches the end and groups them together on her lap.

It’s quiet, and it’s such a nice day outside, and after a while she picks out one of the comics, an odd book where some super-masked-men travel back in time to join some ancient-toga men and sail the world on a quest for a fleece, and she reads it aloud to her daughter, taking time to present each of the pictures in turn to the circle at her center.

About halfway through she pauses and brings her hand to her stomach. “He saved us,” she says. “That silly boy saved us all. What are we going to do without him?”

There’s no answer, so she finishes reading the comic and places it back on the shelf. It must’ve been neat, to be there all those years ago, with a mission and a sense of right: one person determined to declare himself against chaotic given, to say that he can help the helpless, change the changeless; it’s ridiculous, but it’s nice, like the day outside that she should finally see before it runs away.

She picks up her phone to call her brother so they can go for a walk and she can tell him about the girl. Again, as she dials, she circles the outline of their child against her skin.

What must it be like for her, hearing all this? She’s nothing; she is the story untold, and here Anna is, stupidly regaling her with stupid words and stupid pictures. Jesus, it must be so bizarre, deep in there, trying to understand this useless blabber. Like in the comic: bearded Neptune posed on the ocean’s floor, squinting curiously upward through leagues of opaque water as the bow of the
Argo
breaches his liquid-metal sky, scattering sunlight through the once endless blue, marking the coming of man into the world of gods.

Acknowledgments

A note on translation. The quotations of Dante’s
Paradiso
found in the epigraph, art, and text of the novel were derived from combining several translations of the
Paradiso
with my own translation of the original Italian. I relied especially on the brilliant translations and commentaries of Mark Musa and Allen Mendelbaum.

On the astounding art of Tom Fowler featured throughout the book, let me just say that on
page 5
, panel 5 of this book, my note to Tom was, “he should look like God watching His son die on the cross, except, y’know, he’s a melting super robot.” Tom’s response to this absurdity, “Yeah, sure, give me a day.” Look at the panel. Perfect.

The gifted Steve Bryant provided the lettering for the illustrations, subtly and expertly capturing the tone of the novel through the art fonts and word balloons.

Any success this book achieves belongs also to the tireless work of my agent, John Silbersack, and my editor, Matthew Benjamin. These insanely talented men took an odd manuscript and transformed it into a bold tragicomic-book novel. They were aided in this effort by the insightful assistant editors, Hannah Dwan and Kiele Raymond.

I’d like to thank my first readers for their willingness to endure
and then to comment upon a lot of weird ideas about superheroes and literature. This illustrious and patient group includes, Daniel McGinn-Shapiro, Molly McGinn-Shapiro, John Oates, Marvin Hinton, Alex Spellman, Bernie Shapiro, Eric Yellin, and Cliff Chiang.

To my former colleagues who continue to save the world in all sorts of odd and sad places, thank you for your service and your friendship.

As to my family. Without the kind work and support of my father, Llon King, and my stepmother, Virginia King, this book would simply have remained a bunch of bits trapped in my computer. My genius of a mother, Marsha King, read and edited four drafts of this novel while simultaneously taking care of my kids and discussing my future marketing and legal strategies; I am left in awe. Finally, my children, Charlie and Claire, are not only my inspiration, they are simply the best people I’ve ever met.

And to my wife, Colleen: “Honey, I’m not going to law school because I want to go overseas and fight terrorists.” “Okay, I’ll pack you some socks.” “Honey, I’m quitting that whole terrorist thing to write a book about superheroes.” “Okay, why don’t you use the desk downstairs.” Blessed with the grace of Beatrice, Dante walked from hell to heaven. Blessed with the grace of Colleen, I walk this life.