Missive

This is an outgrowth from a discussion I've been having on facebook about the prospect of the upcoming third Christopher Nolan Batman film, 'The Dark Knight Rises,' which, despite the shit title, benefits from the fact that Nolan is, by and large, batting a thousand at this point.

If you have nine minutes handy, here's a summation of the Bane storyline from the mid-90's Batman comics. Also, the guy makes a dashing caprese salad.

Batman has been tremendously well-served by Nolan in the past two films. I doubt you could find a moviegoer or a Batman fan that didn't find 'Begins' and 'Dark Knight' at least highly enjoyable, if not definitive in their interpretations of the character. By grounding him in reality--again--Nolan has cemented what works about Bruce Wayne and put it all up there on screen.

The rest of the DC Universe has not fared as well.

I'm a DC Comics fan, as much as I think brand identification is utter claptrap. My father would--and probably still does--make jokes at the expense of Chevy cars in favor of Ford, despite the companies being, at least to me, virtually interchangeable corporate giants, based out of the same city, delivering essentially the same product. Fanaticism toward corporate properties has bugged me for along time, but at least in the case of fictional people, I have a preference.

Let me pause for a moment. If by some quirk of fate you have stumbled on to a corner of the web that calls itself "Strontium Lullaby" and are *not* a comic-book fan, first I apologize. Second, by way of explanation, there are two comic-book publishing houses which own pretty much every superhero you might ever have heard of: DC and Marvel. Marvel is owned by Disney but has its own film department now (after that film department's maiden voyage, 2008's 'Iron Man', excelled so greatly) but has licensed other of its properties to other film companies, like Spider-Man to Sony. DC, despite being wholly owned by an entertainment conglomerate, has had less in the way of success this decade in putting out superhero films.

Briefly: Marvel=Spider-Man, X-Men, Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, the Fantastic Four.

DC=Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, Flash, Aquaman.

One of the questions I was asked was "what's the difference between the two houses?" and the answer is, at this point, not much. However, when Marvel Comics debuted in 1961 (taking some characters from an older company, Timely) their approach was quite a bit different. Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and others sought to infuse a bit of humanity to their creations. The DC heroes, outgrowths of their 1940's selves, were still iron-jawed icons, lacking in solid characterization. Marvel wanted to cater to a slightly older demographic than superhero comics had originally shot for. The result was Spider-Man struggling with keeping up the rent while Batman had to wear a different colored cowl every night.

This is a generalization, and by the late 1980's would be largely moot, as comics struggled to grow up after 'Watchmen' and 'The Dark Knight Returns' served as such industry game-changers that everybody was struggling to keep up with them, while learning all the wrong lessons in the process.

So as a DC fan, I'm a bit...well, saddened isn't the right word, exactly...irked? Vexed. I'm a bit vexed that Marvel has managed to pull out all the stops on getting its properties to the big screen. I'm not even talking the winners here, like 'Thor', 'Iron Man', or the first two 'Spider-Man' pictures. They've put out films for 'Ghost Rider', 'Daredevil' and 'Elektra', which were, really, just frigging awful, as well as TWO sucky 'Fantastic Four' movies an a pair of Hulk films which keep hitting just to one side of the mark. In contrast, DC, which is already owned by a tremendous media conglomerate and doesn't have to shop its properties out to all and sundry, has managed in the past decade of the superhero film to produce two tremendous Batman films, an anemic and misguided Superman picture, and a tone-deaf Green Lantern adaptation. Also Smallville. Which sucked, despite the fact that it was a primetime TV show that had Deathstroke: The Terminator waterboarding Aquaman and the Green Arrow. How you get that kind of thing wrong is beyond me.

That's my missive. There's not much point to it, really, just that I'd marginally prefer a good Flash film to a good Iron Man one, and far and away would prefer a decent adaptation of Superman to, really, just about anything.

One final thought on Bane. He's not exactly well known outside the comics. Guys like the Joker, Riddler, Catwoman, they've all been featured in numerous adaptations beforehand, so, when you get something like Heath Ledger's revelatory performance as the Joker, part of what makes it work so well is the contrast, to Jack Nicholson, Cesar Romero, and to (a sadly lesser extent) Mark Hamill. He appears in 'Batman and Robin' briefly, but as an unmemorable thug

Bane isn't like that. Neither, interestingly enough, were the Scarecrow and Ra's Al Ghul. Both made appearances in the animated Batman series, but neither of them with the prominence of the regular Batman heavies, and neither of them appeared in Batman '66. (Ray wasn't created until '71, and really wouldn't have fit 66's palette anyway).

I think part of the reason Bane was chosen for this film was that there must have been tremendous pressure on Nolan to create another dark, gritty version of a classic Batman foil. Let's make the Riddler a psychopathic nutjob, too! Asses in seats, guaranteed! To try and deconstruct one of these guys. To say nothing of the poor schmuck who has to play the deconstructed Riddler/Penguin/Mr Freeze. Think deranged ice-cream salesman. Asses. Seats.

So you take a character who, in the comics, is an extremely relevant part of the Batman mythology, but otherwise relatively unknown. Bane works because he, like the Joker (and like the best foils in all superhero stories) is a mirror for the protagonist, an anti-Batman, but with the same drive and determination that drives our hero.

Now, if only someone will make that Green Arrow movie.

The Killing Jar

Davey keeps the jar under his bed, where it's dark. The killing jar. Grasshoppers are the best. He keeps the jar beneath where his head rests on the pillow so he can hear them struggle. Grasshoppers fight the longest. Sometimes they'll hold out for more than a day. In the mornings he'll lay on the wooden floor of his room, flat against his stomach, and pull up the bed skirt that blocks the light from outside. He'll check to see if the grasshopper--or whatever it is--is still alive. Early morning, when the whole world is quiet. When his father is not yet home.

It is surprising what can be endured.

The morning air is cool as he leaves the house, guiding the screen door with one hand to close with a gentle, unnoticed click. The jar is in his other hand, open end turned downward. It is a comforting, familiar shape. Behind the house there is a stream, dry now from the heat of August afternoons, the heat that's coming, that will wrap him up like a Mother's too-tight embrace. Like the day has had one too many and needs to pull you close, so close you almost drown. This is preferable, of course, to other things.

He carries the jar though he's not sure he will use it. Th last one had been a disappointment. Davey thinks he remembers the first grasshopper taking ages to die. This one had barely lasted the night. He wakes up now, sometimes, at the silence.

Davey follows the dry stream past the clearing where the older kids come to neck and to break bottles against the old felled tree. He treads carefully and quickly by, his eyes on the ground though he knows no one is there to watch him. He follows the streambed to the creek.

I dreamt of him last night. Dreamt I was him, down by that creek where we found him, almost a week before the school year began. This was 1992, I think. I awoke this morning to a dull pain in my right temple and the sound of a cat howling outside my window. I live on the third floor; the howl must have been something. I sat in the dark there, listening to the sound and trying to remember why I'd dreamt of Davey Caldwell.

You learn a lot of things in school. You learn whose parents are poor, you learn who can be dumped on. You learn just how far you can push a thing before the adults force themselves to intervene. I learned those lessons. So did Davey Caldwell.

I gotto feeling guilty about the cat, mainly about how, really, when I looked to inward, I felt nothing. No distress at the thing's state. Not sorrow, nor even guilt, really. The guilt I was feeling was second-hand, guilt at not feeling guilt. I decided to go down to check on the thing, bring it some cat food, if only to shut it up.

We found Davey by the creek. He'd captured a frog in that jar of his he carried everywhere. I think in the years between then and now, I'd convinced myself I told Roger to leave it, to let the poor kid alone. Waking up this morning, I knew that wasn't true. Just one of those things we tell ourselves.

So there we were and there he was. For a long time he didn't see us.

I got about half-way down the last flight of stairs and I saw him. Homeless guy. He was sleeping in the foyer of my building, against the radiator. Stopped me cold. For a second, I had the absurd thought it must be Davey, lying there. Of course, it couldn't be. Davey died, years ago.

"Hey, Davey," Roger said, and I knew this would end badly. "Whatcha doin'?"

"Collectin' frogs." His eyes down. The little frog struggling against the side of the jar.

"Oh yeah? Int'ris'ted in the flora?"

"Fauna" I remember correcting him, but I didn't. I never would have.

"Can I see it?" Roger asked. Smirking.

"No, it's mine."

That act of defiance, that denial...we probably would have gone after him anyway, but that "no" sealed his fate. We rushed him, Jim and I only a half-step behind Roger, who had Davey pinned with next to no effort. We knew our roles. I pinned his right arm. Jim got his feet. Roger sat on Davey's back and pushed his face into the mud. The jar tipped over; the frog got out.

If I went out, I'd probably wake him up. I don't know how long I'd been standing there. If I went outside to tend to the cat, I would have to talk to this guy. I didn't want to talk to him, I didn't want to tell him I'd only come down because of the cat, I didn't want him to ask me for something. So I just stood there, dumbly, for a little while longer, there on the steps at three in the morning, in my bathrobe.

Davey was twisting, writhing to get free. Roger was inching down his back. "Get his other arm!" he shouted at me, his hand on the belt of Davey's pants. "You like that, faggot?" He was saying. "This is what your Dad likes, isn't it?"

"What are you doing?" I finally asked. My attention wavered. I didn't see Davey's fingers find the upturned jar. he jerked his arm free, then brought it up. I was right where I definitely shouldn't have been. There was a terrible crash as the thing broke on my temple, all the lights went on at once, a blinding white-hot flash and I blacked out.

When I came to, Davey was sitting a little ways away from me. he had a frog in his hands. I don't know if it was the same frog. The world swam in and out, I remember that much. And there was blood. A lot of it. Mine.

"Where'd they go?" I managed after a while.

"To get help, I guess," Davey mumbled. "I think they're scared."

"Why are you so fucked up, Davey?"

And he told me. Bits of it, anyway. The rest I think we all worked out years later. He must have been gratified, I suppose, to have me as a captive audience. After a while I sat up. He told me the story of his life; maybe he thought I'd tell someone, maybe he thought I'd never believe him, I don't know. We never talked to each other again. After a while, there were sounds, adults coming, calling after Davey and me.

Davey stood up. He let the little frog go, almost as an afterthought, I think, and he disappeared in to the woods. Roger and the others happened on me a minute or two later.

"Little faggot ran off," I told them. Things got worse in Davey's life after that.

I stared at the middle distance around the homeless guy for a little bit after I made my decision. I wish I could say Roger got what was coming to him. I wish I could say it was him in that foyer. He's a broker. Fortune 500. I didn't do too badly, either, all things considered.

After a little while longer, I went up.

You Provide The Pictures, I'll Provide The War (On Crime)

The curious problem with any review of a theatrical-release film is that film's immediacy. I get in, my box of Hot Tamales snuck in under my coat, I sit down, and two hours later I gotta leave. It's not like I can get the projectionist to rewind so I can watch the whole first and second acts again. This is a roundabout way of apologizing for whatever diffusiveness afflicts this writeup, but there's something going on in The Green Hornet that I have to get off my chest.

First of all, I enjoyed the movie, much more than many of the reviews told me I would. I wasn't expecting to (I wasn't even expecting to go, but I was bored yesterday and it was this or The King's Speech and I was pretty sure George 6 doesn't blow anything up in that one). However, the movie delivers cheerily-executed violence (who knew Michel Gondry would turn out a fine action director?), Seth Rogen being Seth Rogen and an unexpected--albeit small--role for Space Badass Edward James Olmos.

However, there's something going on in this film, a subplot, an itch, an undercurrent of yellow journalism that disturbs me. Spoilers to follow:

Rogen takes the reins of his father's newspaper and in a prank attempt to get back at his Dad, steals the head off a recently-dedicated statue to the man. He's caught on film right after this and right before he and Kato bust up a bunch of ne'er-do-wells about do so something quite untoward. That night, before he knows he's a hidden-camera film star, Rogen decides he wants to do this full time.

He takes the meager amount of footage and information about his escapade and uses his Dad's paper to explode the thing into a front page story, much to the chagrin of (Edward! James!) Olmos. He gets Cameron Diaz's character (a rarity in an action picture in being an actually interesting lady, the film compensates by giving her no discernible motivation for the setup that made her interesting. So: square one) to do all this criminology research so he can turn it around and use it to plot his strategy, all the while using the Daily Sentinel to blow up his antics to Ed Dillinger proportions.

By the climax of the film, Rogen decides to do something of actual journalistic integrity, Michael Clayton-style, but in the explosive(ly awesome, I don't care that an elevator can't take that kind of weight) climax, it's telling that he aims to put the info on the Net, rather than running it through his paper. Of course it's a guy's voice, which obviously works better on the Net or on TV, but when you combine it with the lack of regard Rogen's character displays for journalism in general, it makes a distasteful cocktail. I can't see Clark Kent or Lois Lane, or, really, Van Williams' Britt Reid doing something akin to what Rogen's Reid does.

Part of this, I acknowledge, is the mechanics of the story. Gondry needs Rogen and Chou to get down to the business of administering beat-downs, and the vigilante-pretending-to-be-a-criminal is a pretty integral part of the GH mythos, and I'm glad they kept it. It just bothers me. By the end of the film, his reputation as a city-wide bad guy secured, Rogen steps down as the Sentinel's chief, but doesn't really ever learn his lesson or anything.

Still. A fun time was had by all, and by "all" I mean "me". I just hope that should a sequel happen, they try and make the newspaper something credible rather than just a prop.

He said on the Internet.

Imprint

We carry forever the imprint of those we have loved. At least, that's what the poet says. And science, as ever, is keen to catch up to poetry. That's what they call them, then. Imprints. That's what brought me to Mars. My name is Hawker Ellis. I work in Recovery.

An imprint is a digital clone of your beloved's personality. Everything they are, reduced to ones and zeroes. And it is dispiriting how easy all that turned out to be. For 60,000 credits, you can download a version of your consciousness into someone's brain. A pooka. A Guardian Angel that only you can see and hear and talk to. Soldiers would get them of their sweethearts, and vice versa, before shipping out to the Proxima front. The dying loved them. Funerals became very, very weird.

We needed to get to her, and the only way to do that was through him. Madhuri Choudry, Captain of the Hieronymus Bosch.

Take away the hard radiation, the month-long trip, the blue sunsets & the domed wonders, and Mars is just another place, like Dayton, Ohio. It's amazing how quickly we become desensitized to wonderment. Airplanes then flying cars then rockets; radio then television then holograms; adding machines then computers then imprints. You really can get used to anything.

The thing about space travel is its fabulous anonymity. The distances are so vast, so baffling, they hide the truth. No instant wireless reports. Radio signals take years to travel from star to star, and they may fall apart entirely, If you're the point man, say, of humanity's only contact with an alien race, well, we have to take your word on what happened. Especially when you refuse the mind scan. And everybody on the Bosch, they all backed her claims about what happened. But Choudry and Barquist were they only ones to actually see them, and now Barquist is dead--died alone in some daredevil shit above the Great Red Spot a month ago--and Choudry is halfway to Proxima and there's an alien spaceship making its leisurely way in to the Inner Solar System.

So they sent me. Choudry didn't take a scan and that's her right, sure, Bosch wasn't a military ship. She didn't have to and neither did Barquist. But she did make an Imprint, for her husband, before her ship left for Proxima.

Liang Hao wasn't hard to find. He runs one of those restaurants that gets popular every five to six years. Marvin's. Full of old-school Martian kitsch, mostly American. Cigar-store Thark. Red decor everywhere. Little koi ponds that link through a series of--no kidding--canals. And to think that I found him on Bradbury Street. Unassuming guy, short, starting to gray. Sometimes, just for a moment, I could swear he was talking to her. Out of the corner of his eye. Meant she was Active, which meant Recovery would be that much easier.

Just behind the earlobe--usually the left--of an Imprinted and you'll find the tagport, the point at which the original chip was implanted and through which a competent service technician (or Recoverer) can access your chip and fix any problems you may be experiencing, such as signal lag, aphasia, synesthesia, general customer dissatisfaction, aneurysm, stroke, channeling the dead or deciding the fate of the human race. Okay, I made one up. You can't channel the dead.

My equipment includes a tagjack, neural harness, general assortment of quite-lovely drug cocktails, restraints, and a VR relay/recording device. And, yes, you could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff. Most of the downloads I recover heave the ephemeral quality of dreams, vanishing a few moments after the harness is released. It's important to have the recording equipment.

On his way out after locking up the restaurant, I accosted Liang. Quietly. Gun in his side to show I meant business. It's the part of the job I love. Reminds me of old movies. I even bought a slouch hat. We stepped back inside Marvin's.

"Siddown," I said.

"What's this about?" Liang asked me and it was preliminary interview time.

"Did your wife ever mention the Zonzomma Incident?"

"Yeah. Yes, I mean, of course," Liang said. Is she in some kind of trouble? She left for Proxima a year ago. Nobody said anything about the Zonzomma."

"Do you know what this is?" I asked him, pulling out the harness. At this point he figured out what was in store, and well, they do try to run...

I hit him with the sedative and it was down to business.

The whole thing was a terrible long shot. What I was relying on was that Choudry's impressions of the Incident would be so vivid, so close to the core of who she thought herself to be, that they would be transferred along with whatever packet she prepared for Liang. It's never 1:1. You never get the whole of that person's mind, yapping away at you, 24/7. The brain can't handle it and who would want it in any case? The Imprint is usually a best-face impression of how we'd like to be thought of by our lover. However, this being the brain and the brain being essentially very undisciplined and associative and James-Joyce-on-his-worst-of-all-ever-days, the personality construct tends to get a little bit of bleedback. Side-effect memories. Of course my hope, and that of my employers, is that Choudry's include the Zonzomma.

In order to convey any meaningful sense of the upside-down blushing immediacy of poking about in someone else's brain, I'm going to have to strap on my stream-of-consciousness prose hat. You'll have to trust me, come what may, flowery ostentatiousness and all. We started in the Green Room.

The Green Room is an electropsychic construct, a basic dream space where your average technician (or less-than-trustworthy sort such as myself) can uplink to interact with the Imprint and the host mind. It's a shared fiction we inhabit. Makes it easier to contextualize the more intimate, less quotidian aspects of the whole enterprise.

Choudry was there. Liang was there. I was there. Choudry demanded to know what was going on. I explained. And because she was just ones and zeroes (and so was I and so was he and so was the Green Room, as long as we were all in it) I dove headfirst in to her.

Like I said. Ones and zeroes. The three of us are there, riding the binary infrastructure of her thoughts, leftover memories kept in the fridge, with a heart on them to remind you I love you. They are meeting at a party for the first time. He is trying an especially groan worthy line. They are married. It's their first time together, it's their first fight, it's a jumble, she's leaving that's what the fight's about, she's leaving for the first time, she's alone it's the ship it's THEM.

The Zonzomma are giant diamond jellyfish the size of cities. She and Barquist are afraid the little shuttle they're in will be torn to pieces. The clouds around them shake as the Zonzomma speaks. She is coming home. She sees him, on the platform. Their first date. Sunset in Bangalore. The fields beyond her father's house. University. The first time she felt weightless. The first time they kissed.

See what I mean? I try to nudge Choudry's construct back to the Zonzomma. Liang, protesting, still along for the ride.

Strange readings for years. Clouds over Rossellius. Taking the shuttle down. A flash, a brief flitting image of Barquist's face as he--

Gossip, well. Liang is outraged, somewhere distant and close, but the general framework of the Green Room holds. He doesn't know it, but he holds all the cards. His brain, after all. Back in. The clouds, she and Barquist, the thing breathing. A week spent in the company of that thing, it quickly learning their language as they barely grasp its. Zonzomma is their word for themselves. Between-the-Tall-Clouds is the jellyfish's personal name, it turns out.

There is a memory, hazy, guarded, Choudry protests, but, again, ones and zeroes. You'd think a thing like weekly skinny-dipping sessions in other people's minds would decrease the brain's natural proclivity toward solipsism. This it does not.

The image snaps into view. I am she and she is he and we are all together watching the Earth on their return trip. The foredeck. She and Barquist. Something has happened between them, the night before. "I can't talk to anyone about this," she says he says I say. This, what we saw...nobody will ever be...the world has changed. There are aliens out there. But I love him. And I won't leave him."

"I know," Barquist says. They hold hands in the Earthlight.

Rubbish. Back to the Green Room. Not one usable piece of intelligence in the whole construct. Just your typical human messiness. Liang has gone. Choudry is alone. She is crying, softly.

I close the door on the Green Room and I'm back in the real world, Liang slumped over, dreaming an I-hope-dreamless sleep. Equipment stowed in orderly fashion and I'm out the door. The whole operation took less than ten minutes. Still time to catch a bus out of here, maybe linger. Maybe catch a movie. Give me time to collate my thoughts before the inevitable dressing-down my superiors are sure to give. Big honkin' alien spacecraft. No idea what it would want with us. No idea at all. Still. These things have a way of finding a happy resolution, right?

That's what I tell myself.

BEHOLD!

Long-time logophiles know that curious words crop up to describe groupings of animals. An unkindness of ravens, a parliament of owls, so forth. And on the same day that a friend of mine was bemoaning the sheer number of metaphors she had to wade through, I came across this delightful Wondermark comic.

So I thinks to myself, what's the word for a whole bunch of metaphors crammed together? A commonwealth? A congress? A translucence? Then I had it. And after spending more than a little time that should have been spent sleeping and precisely NO time researching whether or not this had been done before, I had it. Collective nouns. For English.

You're welcome.

• A mix of metaphors.
• A likeness of similes.
• A pause of commas (suggested by Andrew).
• A stoppage of periods (also suggested by Andrew)
• A tensor of parentheses.
  
• A squadron of semicolons.
• An ass-load of regular colons
  
• An impertinence of innuendo.
• A Constitution of articles.
  
• An obviousness of foreshadowings.
• A head of metonyms.
• A confession of references.
• A forest of symbols.
• Anastrophe of vector a.
  
• A ray of hyphens.
  
• An aside of dramatic ironies.
• A misinterpretation of regular ironies.
• A happening of gerunds.
• A perigrination of participles.
• of in medias res.
  
• A constellation of authors.
• A recurrence of flashbacks.
• A missive of quotations.
• A spl-fucking-it of tmeses.
• A skyscraper of isocolons.
  
• A frustration of anticlimaxes.
• A good relationship of climaxes.
• A stormcloud of pathetic fallacies.
  
• An implausibility of allegories.
• An association of analogies.
• A sponnybrook of doonerisms.
• A tautology of tautologies.
• A siege of ontologies.
• An antibiotic of non sequiturs.
• An inzameling of polyglots.
• A reunion of cognates.
• An ENTIRE FUCKING UNIVERSE of hyperbole.
  
• A stream of consciousness.
  
• An asylum of grammarians.
• An irrelevance of bloggers.

Secret Identity

When you're going to step out on your wife, you'd better have a plan, and Mark Maitland had a doozy. It wasn't that he didn't love Stephanie, he was the first to point that out, even (and usually) to whichever girl he was explaining the intricacies of his marital woes to. No, he loved Stephanie. Which is why he bought the spandex, ultimately. He didn't want to hurt her.

Annual company shareholder dinner. He was there with Stephanie, the both of them suffering through disjointed insufferable conversations and the kind of chicken curry liable to get whoever crafted it called before The Hague. She looked beautiful, standing there across the room making small talk with Artie Preston about whatever goddamn thing Artie Preston was in to these days.

It was sheer elegance in its simplicity, the plan. After all, Mister Upstanding had to be somebody, and Mark was of the right build and you never saw under the guy's Mecha-Halo, right? Mark kept a police scanner in his study, not obvious but something you could find if you were looking for it, and if there was a bank robbery in progress or if Mesmeron or the Preying Mantis threatened to blow up the Triboro bridge, he had his permission, tacit, no questions asked, to step out for the evening.

The hard part was finding the right color of spandex to match the guy's traditional bluish purple and leaving a swatch of the stuff in just the right place. Again, not too obvious, but he didn't want to go to the whole trouble of telling the girl at the fabric store that his wife was really, really in to Mister Upstanding and hence the bolt of the damn stuff he was buying, of which he'd only use a scrap, and enduring that knowing look as she scanned through and why couldn't it have been one of those frumpy women you so often find in stores like this?

There had been the predictable craze of 24-hour news speculation on who the flying wonder who averted the terrorist strike and locked up The Human Pyramid could be, but as with any news story that doesn't gain immediate traction, after a while it was forgotten and the question of just who Mister Upstanding was faded into the dull obscurity of B-list celebrity deaths and environmental catastrophes. But he had to be somebody, and why not Mark Maitland, mild-mannered accountant for a great metropolitan banking concern?

Shareholder meetings are their own brand of depressing, and that was before Holestyn & Tamura lost twenty percent of its net value in a single year. Mark had been on the task force assigned to massage the message to HT's annual dinner for its bigger stakeholders, to finesse the truth, to insert phrases like "emerging markets," "new direction," and "history of excellence" and just let them lie there in Don Holestyn's speech, for anybody to find. After dinner there was supposed to be dancing, an affair that in years past had been jubilant to the point of getting him nearly caught with Norma from Accounts Payable giving her the ol' Accounts Receivable. This year? Not so much. Dour as a Junior High dance, this was, with Investors and Employees on opposite sides of the dance floor milling around uncertain and vaguely resentful of being here int he first place. Stephanie was a real champ at these things. he was always glad to have her in his corner.

He didn't notice the rumbling at first. He was talking to one brave investor who'd managed to breach the enfilade of low-ranking employees to ask him point blank what HT was going to do in this positively ghastly market when Mark finally noticed the rumbling.

Then the ceiling tore apart. And giant robot spiders flooded in.

What is it about supervillains and the maniacal laughter entrance? The Tarantulist, astride a fifteen-foot mechanical spider, descended upon the party with an army of soulless killer arachnids aiming to be the second-worst thing to happen to Holestyn-Tamura since the Recession started.

"Bring me Don Holestyn!" the villain demanded. "I have six-hundred shares in this fucking company!"

Somehow, in the panic, Stephanie had made her way to his side. Mark was too busy trying not to wet himself to possibly anticipate what she was about to say.

"I'll hold them off."

"What?" he asked. Fucking spiders! Fucking ROBOT fucking SPIDERS! They were the size of dogs! Prowling around, herding them to the center of the room.

"I'll hold them off. You know. Create a distraction. A disturbance. Get their attention. So you can...you know."

"So I can WHAT?!"

"It's okay, Mark. I know. I know. It's okay."

Oh, fuck.

He gulped. He hoped not too outwardly obviously. Then he said the most perplexing thing he'd ever said in his life. He said "Okay."

Stephanie smiled the smile of a woman married to a superhero. She moved to the center of the crowd. Don Holestyn was crouching under the hors dourves table. Several people looked like they were positively rooting for the Tarantulist.

"Hey!" Stephanie shouted. "We're in an economic recession, you jerk! Holestyn & Tamura isn't any better off than any other company!"

He had a window. And he had a duty, a moral imperative to his wife, to get past the robot spiders and escape to safety. He would call the police, that's what he would do. The police would warn Mister Upstanding and the whole thing would be taken care of. Yeah. Yeah! He could do this.

Slowly, he insinuated himself backward, not looking for the spiders, not yet. People were actually listening to his wife. Go figure! And she was making sense! He ducked past a chunk of fallen masonry and by the barest breath of good fortune slipped past a spider that was attenuating its laser-guided unpleasantness toward Stephanie's back to reach the double-doors and slip out of the ballroom.

He eased the doors shut and began to run. The hallway was perversely quiet. He bolted down the deserted corridors of Holestyn & Tamura, forgoing the elevator, skipping down steps three at a time.

Gotta get out.

Gotta get out.

Gotta get out.

All at once he was in the night again, the city awash in familiar sounds, ignorant, apparently, of the ordeal inside. Only then did he try his phone. And...nothing. Jammed? If he got farther away...Mark had already started to run again when the light and the whoosh like a low-flying jet signaled that, right on time, Mister Upstanding had arrived.

Mark couldn't see the man's face, not clearly, not enough to make it out. The halo was like a lens-flare on God's movie camera, just obscuring the hero's features. He was taller than Mark, broader-shouldered, and in that moment of first contact Mark was seized by the reality that, really, he didn't look a thing like this guy.

"Tarantulist," Mark huffed at the--still floating, the bastard--superhero. "Inside."

"I know." Oh, and the voice. Deep, rich, crackwhorefucking baritone. Stephanie was going to know. She was going to know for sure. He wanted to retch.

"How many hostages?" Upstanding asked. The deal on Mister Upstanding was this: Far in the future, we will evolve past greed and cruelty and stepping out on your wife and tax evasion and over-watering your lawn and then we'll have technology--something called post-singularity by all those commentators who sprouted up back in September of '01 after Upstanding averted those plane hijackers--which will basically allow us to do anything. And, as the hero explained to David Letterman's highest ratings ever, they sent that technology back in time to be used by a person of perfect moral goodness. Not quite his direct words, but seeing him now, Mark wanted to punch the smug asshole straight in the face.

"Seventy," he managed. "Maybe more...my wife is in there. Sir. My wife is in there." He had no idea where that last part came from. At the mention of hostages, Mark could swear he caught a grin through the man's fucking lens-flare halo. No moral ambiguity here. Just a bunch of innocents and one pissed off guy with a robot spider army. Simple.

"Stand aside," the hero said. "Leave it to me."

Underneath

"People are always talking--psychiatrists--about how it's your Mother's going to screw you up. Well, not my Mom. My Mom was a peach. She put up with the whole thing all her life, never said anything to him or to me."

"?"

"No, it wasn't anything like that. It wasn't. My Father was just what you'd want. He never hit me, he never touched me, he just...he wasn't my father. I mean, sure, he was my actual, literal father, that's not what I mean. What I mean is...we have doctor/patient confidentiality in here, right?"

"?"

"Right. Sorry. Figured, just thought I'd check. I've never been in therapy, actual therapy. Seen it on TV, of course. I'm forty now. You'd think I'd have managed it earlier on, with everything."

"."

"Yes, with my Father. I thought my father was a professor of astronomy. I never talked about it with Mom. I especially never talked about it with him. She knew, she must have known. I found the basement when I was eighteen.

"I think she knew I knew, too, then. In hindsight it's impossible to think after that Thanksgiving dinner she didn't know something was up, but still, we never talked about it. And now he's dead. Last week. I gave the eulogy. They actually put me up there, on a stage, in front of people, they actually put me up there to talk about my father as if I knew him. As if I had any damn idea at all who he was, in the end."

"?"

"...My father...Doctor/patient, right? My father...my father, Ward West, was The Comet."

"Yes. THAT Comet. The superhero. Our house was in Grosse Pointe, well away from the city. I wasn't really aware of it, of him, growing up. Like I said, I thought he was a professor of astronomy, at the University. I just never imagined. Not some maniac in purple spandex and a white satin cowl. That cowl, that's what everybody remembers, how his cape came out from the back of the cowl."

"?"

"No, there weren't--no, I mean, looking back, there were times when he wasn't at home, but I thought he was out stargazing, or something. I don't remember if Mom told me that at first and I just internalized it. 'Oh, Dad is out stargazing.' It's night. It's plausible, right? I don't know. That's just the thing, though! You go through the whole back-catalog of your life, looking for signs he was ducking out. Was that time he missed my tenth birthday really a freak once-in-a-lifetime meteor shower or...wow. That sounds stupid just saying it out loud. All of this stuff, all of it I'm just saying out loud now, for the first time.

"'THE COMET! MOST WANTED MAN IN THE CITY!' Some news headline, I remember, from '82. It turned out to be agents of H.A.V.O.C. or something, responsible. After I found the basement, after I went back to MIT, I started collecting things. Old newspaper clippings--the political cartoons always got the cowl right, streaming behind like the tail of, well, you know. Hasbro put out a toy. I wonder who got the money on that? Who gets the rights? He'd have had to come forward. He was technically breaking the law, of course. I bought one of them on ebay, a Comet figure. Swear to God I carried the thing in my pocket for like a week."

"."

"By now you can figure what's in the basement. I took the house for granted, my whole life, growing up. Sure, it seemed weird that I was the only one of my friends without a basement but when you ask your father that question at the tender age of four or something, sitting on his knee as he smokes his pipe in that old cardigan of his, smelling of tobacco and pomade, and he says, 'Craig, my boy, they just didn't build it with one,' you take it at face value because he is your father. And I didn't think about it. I thought those low narrow wooden rectangles, set in from the rest of the wall by a half inch and framed for all the world like they were, or had been at some time, windows, I thought those were artistic touches, until Thanksgiving, that first year at college.

"It was like seeing the place for the first time, coming home. Like the scales were lifted from my eyes. You ever have that? I had taken the place for granted and then there I was, on the day before the Day, standing outside, by myself, staring at the front of the place. I began to become obsessed with the question of Does My House Have A Basement? The day before the Day. Dad was at his office at the University, presumably, and Mom was out shopping. We were supposed to have Uncle Neil over, only he wasn't Dad's brother, just a collaborator at the University.

"I circled the house. I didn't have measuring tape so I counted steps. I searched around inside for some kind of discrepancy in the internal geography of the place, something that didn't match up with the outside. I went back out again, tried to push or bash my way past the painted-over-to-match boards I knew had to have once been windows."

"?"

"Very narrow, like the ones where if they were still there they'd be almost too small to squeeze through. I must have looked like I was trying to rob the place, only I'd left the front door wide open, and, really, it wasn't that kind of neighborhood.

"Eventually I figured it out. In my father's study, there was a door underneath the rug, like one of those that you pull down from the attic and it becomes steps. Very low-tech, really, which left me utterly unprepared for what was below, in the Comet's lair."

"?"

"I don't know. Cave? Fortress of Solitude? Oort cloud? I don't know what I was going to find, down there. I could hear my heart in my ears. Whatever I was about to do was Not Supposed to be Done. Secret things I was fucking with.

"There was light coming from below. I went down.

"It was low, the ceiling, I remember now. It was a proper basement, all low and cement-floored, missing the water heater and the furnace because at some point of course they'd been dragged upstairs to maintain the ruse. And there was a door at the end of the basement, like a garage door. The whole place had the feeling of a garage, the smell, of oil and stale exhaust. I could peer through the tiny window on the garage door--who knows how he got it down there or how he dug a tunnel from Grosse Pointe to Detroit proper without anybody noticing, but it was all darkness.

"There was a desk, with a row of computer screens. On the chair, tossed casually as if he were coming right back--and for all the world he probably was, the fucking Shooting Star was missing--that's his car, the Shooting Star--on his chair was a disembodied Comet costume.

"There were more of them in a rack in the closet. Not just your regular superhero costumes, but also some Comet scuba gear, a desert outfit, snow gear. There was a rack for various esoteric weapons. Two racks, really. One for his ice guns and one which was all stuff he'd collected from his enemies. Heliovore's Thermoscepter. Professor Zodiac's Wheel of Misfortune. The Human Pyramid's Turntable of Crime. All of this stuff crammed in to the basement with just enough room for that car of his.

"It's probably all still down there. He retired, what, a couple years after that? He was fifty-five. And my father was fit all his life, don't get me wrong. Scary fit, compared to the other dads. But even at fifty five, you gotta figure you're pushing your luck tussling with some tweeker at three in the morning with only your satin cowl and an ice gun you built in 1965."

"So I'm standing there, my heart about to just explode out of my chest, when I hear the sound of my mother getting home. Saying something about the lines at Meijer. Complaining about some woman in front of her buying more cranberry sauce than truly stalwart mortals should be able to process. Funny what you remember.

"I booked it upstairs. I kicked the rug over the ladder/door thing and rushed out, tried to look casual as I came in to the kitchen and offered to help Mom with the groceries.

"I didn't sleep at all that night."

"?"

"Of course I didn't say anything! What was I supposed to say? Hey, Mom, was snooping around in Dad's study and found out he's got a rocket pack and six changes of spandex tights hidden under the floorboards? I'm from the Midwest, Doc. Confrontation's not something we do. And who knows if she even knew anything. I thought she did. I think she did. She must have, right? Anyway, the morning came and Uncle Neil and Aunt Claire came over. I remember staring at them all through dinner. Like I said, my father was an only child, he didn't have any brothers, we just called him Uncle Neil.

"But so then Uncle Neil comes over and I'm...I'm just staring at him. At him and Dad and Aunt Claire. Were they in on it. I couldn't stop, who were they? Mister Midnight? Radium Girl? The Stoplight? The Hourglass? I tried to imagine Aunt Claire in that old green-and-black Hourglass costume. You remember the one? From the Seventies? Form fitting. Well, I guess they were all form-fitting. But with her there was just so much....form. Where was I?"

"."

"Oh yeah. Yeah, right, yeah. Under her clothes! Who was she under her clothes? And Uncle Neil as well? Under his sweater-vest and his half-windsor, has Uncle Neil got on the old garish yellow-and-red-and-green number? With the cowl stashed maybe in the pocket of his tweed overcoat, kept just out of sight. All through dinner I'm thinking this, like maybe they're talking in code, like maybe they've been talking in code all my life."

"..."

"The funeral was last week. I flew out, I saw my Mother again for the first time in a couple years. He was there, in his casket, like some wax doll of himself. All his secrets, gone for good. I kept thinking there'd be some letter or some video message, maybe, explaining things. Nothing. And then so I'm there, and I spent the whole flight over practicing in my head the eulogy, the speech I'm supposed to give in front of a room of Uncle Neils and Aunt Claires and people who all knew him better than I did, I'm sure.

"I stood there, I'm standing there, looking out at them, with my tie and my manicured words about my father. It hits me again. Who are these people? How much did any of them know him, really? How many of them--how many of us--all of us, really, I think now, carry our tawdry, lurid selves around with us, just underneath."