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  Chase ran water. He needed a moment to get the right music in his head. The music had to give him strong lift right away and get him out of range in seconds.

  Chase took the towel, it was damp, spread it in front of him. His heart was pounding like a jackhammer. He couldn’t do it. He’d never pull it off. He wasn’t fast enough. He couldn’t do it. But he had to try.

  He opened the door. She was standing at the wall next to the door. She wasn’t watching the door. With the opening of the door, her attention turned toward the bathroom, her look turning toward him…seeing him…seeing the towel he held between his hands, his arms stretching it out between them…

  He hurled the towel up and over her head, bolted the other way. The hardwood floor was smooth and slippery. He ran the length of the shadowed hallway, burst into the daylight at the end of it, made it to the living room, bolted toward the den. She would’ve had the towel off her face by then, would now be coming after him, right behind him.

  Chase kept bolting, hit the den, veered toward the wet bar. He left the backpack, grabbed the iPod, grabbed a champagne bottle from an ice bucket, bounced off the wet bar hurtling toward the sliding doors where it was almost dark. He made it to the doors, plunged through the slot between them.

  He had the iPod on and playing. The Carpenters. The piano that opened “Close to You.” Then the vocal began. It took a moment. The strings came in. Chase’s feet left and he took off into the air, flew. The blue dragons took off after him. On the deck Her Blue Majesty held a Tec-9 automatic rifle, fired at him. The blue dragons puked blue fireballs at him.

  10

  His senses surrounded him. The smell of himself hit him in the face. The sores on his feet stung. Bushy hair beaded up to his earlobes, surrounded his mouth. He was too long unwashed for the dirt to reach any recent layers of dirt, any clothing in contact with his joints and the parts of his body that hinged long worn away. His fingernails looked like grimy plastic spoons. He wrapped his head around his head. Then unwrapped it. Then wrapped it again. It was like when he was balling in the Army. Back when he drove Army tanks in North Carolina before they discharged his ass on a medical. Years later he took a Greyhound to Brutalia to see God but he fell off the map. Sometimes you could hear God inside the sidewalks. The city was good because you could find shelters and have them to yourself almost. They all had a clear white neon cross in front. There was a lot of city too and lots of places to put down where you could have a city block to yourself, be the only bum. You could always find food anywhere, the dumpster diving was good and the food never got cold. But there were more bums coming to Brutalia trying to turn it into New York and shit.

  The city vibrated up his crumbling elephant feet. It flickered with a billion myths, cave drawings and magic. That was what God sounded like. He stopped to hear the voices. They weren’t the same voices. It wasn’t his brain doing it outside his brain, it was from way outside his brain. It was like the city was in his head.

  He looked around at the headless bodies. He had to be sure this was real and not a long-ass dream or he wasn’t tripping.

  The Motorchrists hated bums. They stomped bums. Bums stayed clear of them. He went over them now, cleaned the motherfuckers out. He picked three bikers of six hundred dollars in folding money, five stolen iPads, a pile of heroin, a pasture of weed.

  Around him more and more of the zombie bikers were working their way to their boots, their heads growing back in flesh-like sprouts. They staggered like toddlers away from the scene, into the dark streets.

  Patrol cars came, slowed down, didn’t even stop to fuck with him, kept going.

  A helicopter with OSD on it swept for minutes, a guy in it shooting the scene with a camcorder. It went away.

  He tossed a fourth biker, recounted the money. His brain wrapped around the numbers, held tight, squeezed them. The paper burned his fingers. It was more $$$ than a fucking game show. He could stay high for weeks and buy pussy without losing money for getting high.

  His skin crawled up and down with the smells creeping toward him. Bums were showing up. One then two then three then eleven motherfucking bums with more coming.

  He barked profanity at them to get the fuck away, this was his, but they kept coming. They went to their knees, started pawing the biker bodies with cash-seeking fingers, tossing the bodies, pulling paper money, knives, guns, weed, meth. They pulled boots off the bikers, put them on their own feet. They grabbed whole chickens from the grill, devoured them, grabbed bottles of whiskey. The more bums showed up and the more ways the $$$ was grabbed-up and thinned-out, the less long it would keep them off the bricks.

  11

  That night Chase flew drunk, landed on a beach somewhere on the Eastern Seaboard outside of Brutalia. He needed a superhero name for himself. He had two powers, he could fly and he could see himself from any angle. He had pale skin, sleek blonde hair in bangs, a skimpy stringless black eye mask over a delicately pretty face. He had the private school blazer over jeggings. For now that was his costume. And his one mission was to somehow locate Kieran. He closed his eyes and saw his Canadian Kieran, his heart twanging the sweet conspiracy that was a love affair, two against the world in a secret hiding place made of dreams. He had to get back there.

  His head was plugged into the iPod but it was turned off. He sat on the sand. He had drunk the entire bottle of Her Blue Majesty’s champagne, a a Bollinger Blanc de Noirs Vieilles Vignes Francaises 2001 at $600 a bottle. The night rolled over him like a lost highway. He lie back on the sand, let the sea breezes wash over him. He gazed at the star points way up there. His eyes closed. Time passed.

  The iPod was growing with the songs that gave him flight. It held an eclectic range of picks from Ravel to Rufus Wainwright. He didn’t pick the songs, they picked him. But he had to discover them first. Then he had to learn how to control them so he could recharge his flight power at will. But the day had been long and gross. He had too many enemies. Too much had gone down. There was no going back home, no going back to school. There was no warm bubble without Kieran. He was exhausted and he was drunk. Right now Beethoven at top volume wouldn’t get him off the sand.

  12

  Milo Spector was nude on the bed, his pulse only an assumption, the TV volume way down until the sound was subliminal. The screen ran 1973 Soul Train, a hundred Afros and plaid bellbottoms soundlessly doing the brick house atomic boogaloo popping locking kicking splits down and back up.

  He knew who he was. From faded Space Age color film his face had been identified as the face of Dr. Milo Spector. The Kinner & Membert ID photo framed the face of a still-boyish black nerd with glasses. It was the same face and everything else he saw in every mirror and when he looked down at his body. It was a man whose every public or private record pre-2000 had been erased.

  “It’s cold,” Mona Doll said.

  She went brrrr touched her stiff nipples, warmed up. KM technology had perfected holosynthesis in the 1970s. A fusion of virtual reality and holography, she seemed so real she had a pulse. Yet Milo had such control he could draw every curve of her to suit the sweatiest corner of his psyche. In Brutalia only those at the top of the superhero food chain had tech like this. She was black in his matching shade of brown, black bangs, her face somewhere between gamine and pixie.

  Mona Doll said, “You keeping count?”

  Spector said, “This one will make five.”

  Mona Doll said, “Not that I believe the average. I mean, I don’t actually buy that the average person has only eight orgasms a month. Maybe if the average person is ten years married, right? Settled into a boring pattern of sex on Tuesdays, or whatever. Maybe.”

  He said, “Mine is eight.”

  “So you need three more this month.”

  “Yes.”

  “I never asked this,” she said. “Why limit your monthly number of orgasms?”

  “I only do what’s necessary.”

  “Why?”

  “More than that is unnecessary.”
/>   “Are you serious?”

  “As far as I can tell.”

  “More than eight orgasms in one month is too many?”

  “I don’t get to be self-indulgent.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m a superhero.”

  “That’s a profound sacrifice you make for the good of Mankind.”

  “I live with it.”

  “You have an uneasy life.”

  “It’s a discipline.”

  “Does that make you an uptight superhero?”

  “You can’t be a weak one.”

  “Why not stop at fewer orgasms per month?”

  “Fewer orgasms than necessary.”

  “That quota is just enough to keep your equipment in working order.”

  “Just enough.”

  “You could masturbate to do that.”

  “Sex is better than masturbation.”

  “You’re a romantic,” she said.

  “The world depends on it.”

  “This is for you and this is for America” Mona Doll said. “You save the world. AXIS is good. Therefore sex with you saves the world. Sex is good.”

  Now they both were dolls acting out like collected smooth porcelain collected and saved from childhood taken out for play in bedroom wonderland, equally dead and long lost except to a still throbbing instinctual association with the ever-known. It persisted ever more with time, instincts associated with being human. They positioned each other like doll figures. In her curves he sought a lost self. He was still allowed to wonder in his thoughts whether he was more real a person than the doll his nerves circuited. He would act out the act of love with no one else. A doll shaped from vague memory retention from forty years past and across the divide of the Twentieth Century. She released the alien colored mystiques fluttering the birdcage of his psyche. She was as mythic as his first ticket from home. She was all he had to connect with his existence as though he had before now. Today he was old enough to be his own parent. She was a doll he could poison at will with his touch.

  There was music between the temple-white walls of the Oval Office. It was late and beyond the white walls was the blackness of midnight. He was delivering a report to President Richard M. Nixon who sat with both ears cocked. The music was the infinite opening to the Isaac Hayes cover of “Walk On By.” He was part of the contingent sent by Kinner & Membert Industries. Catherine Birkin sat to one side, Simon Stranko to the other. Nixon wanted to see them. Nixon had been to China and Brutalia was next. But the memory was unconfirmed and unreliable.

  Thirty minutes later his pulse slowed back to an assumption. Mona Doll faded into the air like dream vapor then was gone. He switched off the TV. On one level he had to admire the Puritanism of it. Once reality took you there you had no actual reason not to spend your life fighting evil.

  Spector went to the bathroom to take a leak. Again he studied the face in the mirror. Every time at first look it was the face of someone he did not know. But that happens anyway whenever a person steps outside the continuous assumption of his or her identity; for something that absolute its border is surprisingly close.

  He drank three more martinis. Then he slept. Sleep was different now. Crossing that border was now like switching off a machine. When he was switched off the city was a throb underneath the blankness. Here it flickered with a billion myths, cave drawings and magic. Then the city faded to darkness like the vacuum tubes inside a space age TV set.

  His subconscious had no chance to shape his dreams, was given no time for surrealism. Sleep was now an abstract version of waking. His brain restlessly tracked the shadowy self of decades past for missed information. His subconscious had been reduced to the decorator’s role of dream-coloring that obsession with the absurd, appearances by the long dead. Once in a while it had the boldness to cast Mona Spector in roles that had them meeting for the first time. She would be so close to him to touch. He would be a few trembling breaths from asking her out for a first date. The dream would never last those breaths before it took her away.

  Crossing the border to waking was now a machine switching on itself. He awoke with unspeakable freedom. He had the freedom to lie there until the scale of what he had become stretched out around his body then settled upon him. Then the scale shrank to what he was that day like there had never been anything larger or beyond its borders. Every day began that way. It took time to become what he was.

  Then he went to the nerve center where 10 screens ran the media pickups…

  The President said for the time being information on Brutalia was on a “need-to-know basis.”

  Jay Leno: “NBC announced the new anchor of the nightly news is Stan Lee.”

  “Inconclusive,” said the NIH of the connection between coldwave energy and the amnesia in long-term residents of Brutalia.

  Disagreement over whether Brutalia was located in New York or Pennsylvania.

  The Army had secretly sent drones over Brutalia.

  Brutalia was a break for the politicians. It had taken over all conversation. No one had time to think about them and their bullshit. It relieved so much national crap it came off as refreshing. Both sides were unified in fear. Mass media was more than ready to serve it non-stop.

  Dr. Playground: America’s Dictator?

  OSD-sponsored street gangs in Brooklyn NY, Portland OR, London, Tokyo, and Berlin.

  Brutalia mayor Andrew Thorne in a mask and cape, a Bible in either hand. He was doing 60 Minutes.

  Man Mafia appearing in a cable TV ad for 2100 vodka.

  Update on the Long Island man suing KM Industries and the city of Brutalia for one billion. The man had been a KM employee killed in a coldwave power plant accident. The official cause of death was overload of superpower-based energy. When his family sent the body to Long Island the man was restored to life. Once beyond the Brutalia Limit where superpowers or superpower-based science didn’t exist, his life was restored. If he ever returned to Brutalia he would revert to dead. That was worth one billion for “loss of life.”

  A slow news day.

  He followed the latest satellite reports on the teen with flight power. He had been spotted between Manhattan and Brutalia. Now he was tracking as far north as Canadian air space. The boy had been identified as Chase Juniper, the only child of parents killed in a commercial space travel accident. The boy had inherited an estate of 3 million. He had stopped attending a private school in Brutalia, was seldom seen. One maternal aunt, no contact. One account of Chase Juniper rescuing a suicidal gay teen in Massachusetts. The teen was about to go off a bridge when Chase spotted him, intervened for the rescue. Chase then spent the night talking the teen through it. Media hero for one day. And potentially the most dangerous person in the world.

  Spector owned the block of downtown real estate on which the KM Building stood. At his own Starbuck franchise, Milo Spector anonymously had his ten a.m. cup of coffee and a window table. Being a creature of habit was the least of his issues, it was a luxury. He watched the people passing in the rain. He sat there with the anonymity of a regular person. In Brutalia you could smoke anywhere. He smoked his pipe. The pipe made him feel like a scientist.

  He read the ever-shrinking Brutalia Post for local superhero coverage. There was one about a team of two transgendered amateur superheroes named JKM and the Halo. According to the story they were being sued by a drunk driver they had stopped by tearing the door from the driver’s 4x4.

  The two amateurs had posed for a photo. JKM stood for Jack Kirby Man. Apparently JKM broke the gender name barrier as JKM was a muscle-bound female in a mask and cape and emblem. Posing beside her was the Halo, a reasonably feminine she-male in white with big boob implants, thigh-high boots, a tiara that lit up like a halo. This had nothing to do with superpowers; Brutalia’s utter weirdness had to be in the water supply.

  The guy at the next table, a Kevin Nealon type with a laptop, said, “Not impressed.”

  Spector: “With these two?”

  “With supe
rheroes in general.”

  “I get that.”

  “Superheroes fit into the known spectrum. They change nothing. They may even make things worse. But they sure don’t make anything any fucking different. I guess they never did. You never saw in the comic books where they changed the world or anything. It was never a given that they would. No. The only difference they’ve made is drawing more of that to this city.” He pointed to the shot of JKM and the Halo.

  “They bring tourism too,” Spector said.

  “Oh right. Now Brutalia has an attraction. Lucky us. The amateurs get the most benefit. Some of them are even criminals.”

  “Are you saying criminal superheroes or super criminals?”

  “Criminal superheroes. Some of them are pedophile stalkers. They make things worse by creating a vacuum for super criminals.”

  “What does that mean, a vacuum?”

  “So far it’s been crazies posing as superheroes, right? Less so with the other side. That creates a vacuum. Nature does not allow a vacuum. When you have superheroes you create super villains. One leads to the other.”

  Tour buses now clogged the traffic and sidewalks. They went to locations of superhero sightings. They shot video of the amateur superheroes, who were easier to find than the real thing.

  “Notice you don’t see other cities doing this.”

  “This is the only city to have the occurrence of actual superheroes.”

  “Why here?”

  “Nobody knows. There are theories.”

  “It’s the government. Secret testing.”

  “Not aliens?”

  “No. Superheroes fit into the known spectrum. They’ve always existed but we didn’t know them as such.”

  Their lines blurred until it didn’t matter who said what; in any conversation about superheroes Milo publicly took no sides. Sides were irrelevant to him. Talking was a way to remain inconspicuous.

  Twenty minutes later he left Starbuck’s, strolled through the rain back towards the KM Building at the corner.