Heck Superhero Read online

  The dentist considered him a moment. “Look,” he said, “we’re not exactly set up to help you here. But if you bring your mom in, maybe we can work something out.”

  “She’s—she’s pretty busy. Could you just give me something, maybe? For the pain?”

  “Bring your mom in, and we’ll see what we can do to help,” he said. His voice sounded like a teacher’s when the discussion was supposed to be over.

  Heck stood there a moment. “Okay. Thanks,” he said. As he walked out he thought he heard the dentist say, “Harmless enough.”

  Heck leaned against a wall.

  Bring your mom in. An easy enough task if you lived in a microverse without time loops. Impossible, though, if you had a mom who counted at a right angle to real numbers and lived in imaginary time.

  He felt in his pocket for the pill.

  He wasn’t going to swallow it. He just wanted to look at it. He felt for it, but it wasn’t there, and he was glad, but then it was. He pulled it out, all coated with blue pocket lint.

  Found.

  Round.

  It weighed a pound.

  That was a poem. It rolled around.

  Maybe he should take the pill. Maybe he wouldn’t get too high because the pain would hold him down like a stone on the string of a helium balloon. Besides, why shouldn’t he take the pill? He’d paid for it. Not willingly, maybe, but Spence’s money was gone.

  No.

  Bad for him. Bad, bad, bad.

  But … who cared?

  Yeah, and besides that, who cared?

  Furthermore, who cared?

  Who cared about a flat-broke bottomworld garbage-eater? His mom? She was probably just now noticing that she hadn’t seen him for a while. So, one might ask, who cared? Heck? Heck, no.

  Heck swallowed the pill.

  Right away he wished he hadn’t done it.

  Right away he knew what Spence would say to him. He’d say, Hello, billiard ball brain. He’d say, How are you, Hi-Ho Lord Emperor of Stupid? He’d say, Do you like your brains fried or scrambled?

  And what about his mom? How would he take care of his mom if he was starting a life of crime and addiction?

  He walked to his bench. He’d stay here and not move until it was all over. No matter what happened, he’d stay where he was.

  Half an hour later, everything was still the same except that he didn’t feel hungry anymore and his teeth weren’t as noisy. He was relieved. The round girl had probably just given him a birth control pill or something and at that very moment he was chemically mutating and all his future children would be born with golf-ball-sized heads.

  Everything was okay. He just needed to find a quarter so he could phone Dierdre. Come and get me, Dierdre, he’d say. I need to talk to my mom. He didn’t feel tired anymore. He felt … “Compassionate,” he said aloud.

  Yes, compassion was what he felt as he watched the mortal shoppers who shuffled by on feet that could not fly and saw through eyes that could not pierce brick.

  He would do a Good Deed for one of them. Yes. He would.

  Just thinking about the Good Deed made him feel better. It was the cookie at the bottom of the bag. It was the holiday coming up, the good dream the night before, the money in the pocket of a coat you hadn’t worn for a long time. It was the thing that made you feel good even though you couldn’t remember what it was that was making you feel good. It was a big stupid smile in his brain and he couldn’t help it. It came down to this: if you did a true Good Deed, you could change the microverse, maybe change it to a better one.

  It could cure crime. Take a wrongdoer, put him in a pink cell, and just do Good Deeds to him all day long until his evil dried up. All the out-of-work grandmothers could do it. They could knit him sweaters and feed him chicken and dumplings and apple pie and read him stories until he was brought to his knees. Evil could never thrive under intensive Good Deed Therapy.

  Not long ago, Heck had figured out a way that it could cure the common cold. Everyone thought about ways to fight germs, but what if they invented a sort of germ cookie, something that germs liked eating even more than they liked human cells? You could entice them to eat the germ cookies, and give them their own country in Antarctica. Same with cancer—feed the cancer something tasty so it didn’t have to dine on human nuclei.

  Yes, the Good Deed was the Theory of Everything, and he was just the superhero to get the job done.

  Heck fixed his eye on the clerk in the men’s wear store across from his bench. All the time he’d been sitting there, not one person had gone into her store. There she stood, nothing to do, no one to talk to. Poor mortal thing.

  He walked into the store.

  “May I help you?” the clerk asked brightly. Her name tag said Jennifer.

  “I am the one who helps,” Heck said. It sounded so true. She seemed not to understand him, and then she smiled as if it didn’t matter.

  “All our shirts are half price today,” she said, “and then there’s our Super Discount rack.”

  “Yes. Super. That’s what I need,” Heck said. He followed her, but suddenly he knew nothing in this store would fit him. He was rounding out big time.

  “This would look good on you,” Jennifer said, pulling out a black shirt.

  “Black’s taken. Batman already has black,” Heck said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The Lantern has green, Spiderman has red, Superman has blue …”

  She stared at him a moment and then quietly put the shirt back on the rack. She shuffled through the rack as if looking for a color that hadn’t been taken.

  “I’m not sure we have anything for you,” she said in a small voice.

  “Maybe I should go to Mr. Big and Tall,” Heck said.

  “Yes,” she said, concentrating on a price tag, “that’s a good idea.”

  Something in her voice made him think about what he was saying. Why had he even come in here? He should be looking for his mom. What about his plan to find a job? Here he was doing Good Deeds for store clerks when he should be looking for a job.

  “Uh, I don’t suppose there’s an opening for a job in this store,” he said.

  “No,” she said, shaking her head firmly. “No, there isn’t.”

  Heck felt like he should apologize, but he was having trouble remembering what he’d said.

  “You wouldn’t want to work here,” she said. “The pay is terrible.”

  “I only need enough money to make a phone call.” What was he talking about? What phone call?

  She pulled some change out of her pockets. “Here,” she said.

  “No, no, I didn’t mean …”

  “Take it. The phone’s over there.” She poured the change into his hand and turned away.

  “If you need me, Jennifer, just call,” Heck said, and he left the store. He glanced back once. She was watching him.

  Wow. That was super-nice of her. He hoped he’d made her day a little better, but he had to move on. There were no apartment-sized Good Deeds to be found in an orderly men’s clothing store. He shrugged his shoulders, shoulders that felt unusually strong today.

  He felt good, like the whole world was made for him, like nothing could be taken away. His flat life seemed like a dream, a place where nothing was solid, where he couldn’t grab on to anything, couldn’t change anything, couldn’t stop anything from dying. Now he was round enough to do whatever it was he had to do—save his mom, even. Now his teeth didn’t hurt at all.

  Heck noticed two boys counting their change at a popcorn vendor. One of them asked the girl at the counter, “Can you give us half a bag for this much?”

  The girl behind the counter had seven earrings in each ear, two in her eyebrow, one in her nose, and one in her lip. She didn’t answer them, didn’t look at them.

  “Girl? Girl, can we buy half a bag for half the money?” the other boy asked.

  She looked at them and shook her head slowly. “No half bags allowed,” she said. She had a ball bearing pierced
into her tongue. Behind her the popcorn popper came to life. Heck wondered if she could make electrical machines operate just by willing them to. She’d be able to do it because of the magnetic field created by all the metal in her face.

  He stepped up to the counter just as the boys turned away disappointed. “Wait,” he said to the boys. To the girl he said, “May I have two bags of popcorn, please?” He placed the change the clerk had given him on the counter.

  Without answering she snapped open a bag and began filling it languidly. The boys smiled at each other. “You don’t have to,” one boy said to Heck.

  “Yes. Yes, I do,” Heck said soberly.

  The girl put the bags on the counter and scooped the change off the counter. “That’ll be four dollars.”

  Heck handed the popcorn to the boys. “Run along now,” he said.

  “Thanks!” they said in unison.

  “They don’t look like they’re starving to death to me,” the girl said, counting the change. She counted again. “Four dollars. You’re missing a dollar.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Heck felt his superface blush. “I will pay you the rest another day,” he said. “Until then, if you need help, just call. The name’s Heck.”

  “Yeah, whatever. That’s funny. You’re still a dollar short.”

  “I could give you some advice,” Heck offered. “With all the metal in you, it’s possible it is reacting with radiation leaking from that machine. If you start developing a strange growth out of the side of your neck that appears to be a second head—”

  She flipped open a cell phone. “I’m calling security,” she said.

  Mutant–human relations had never been good.

  He left the mall to walk the streets of Metropolis among the beautiful skyscrapers, built for people who could fly. Now that he’d given his money away, he remembered what he’d needed it for: to call Dierdre.

  That was okay. Everything was okay. He’d walk there. He was feeling like he could walk all night.

  Heck Superhero in the world of mortals, abandoned somehow in this dimension of weaklings without his supersuit, without the tokens of his strength—could feel himself fleshing out, feel his cricket quads, his butterfly lats layered over his adamantine skeleton. The streets were getting dark now, and filling with the shadows of the night people, but Heck could see as if it were day, past their shell faces and into the soft, moist being beneath. He could smell someone cooking chili miles away. Maybe it was Dierdre cooking for his mom, saying, Eat, eat, you’re too thin. He could hear the cars draining out of the downtown, like water swirling out of a tub, and then a sucking sound, and then silence.

  The in-between people had gone.

  Now there were the million-dollar penthouse people and the people who slept under trees and on park benches. Now there were the BMWs and the shopping carts; the ones who had memberships to fitness clubs and the ones who walked all day; the ones who dined out and the ones who dined outside. Now there was the topworld and there was the bottomworld.

  Heck loved them all, and why shouldn’t he, muscled up as he was, powered up, coming off the page, shoulders above his chin, layered chest, narrow four-paneled abdomen. Why shouldn’t he love them, his poor mortal mother among them, when he could see that they must live here under the shadowed towers of Metropolis, in one time and one dimension, and all the evil on the streets hiding in cracks and holes.

  Heck moved in frames now, one frame to another, like in a comic strip, and under his feet were words leading him to his destiny as a force for good in the world. He remembered he was supposed to be going to Dierdre’s, but he’d forgotten where that was.

  Heck Superhero, sensing an opportunity to do a Good Deed, slipped into a laundromat.

  No one was in the laundromat, but someone had left her laundry tumbling in the dryer. Could they be his mom’s clothes? Was she here doing her laundry? No. He’d see jeans and T-shirts and waitress uniforms if the clothes were his mom’s.

  The dryer stopped a moment later.

  If they had been his mom’s, it would have made her happy if he folded them for her. He pulled the clothes out. Some person would return after a long day and find her work done.

  He was just trying to figure out how you folded a bra when a lady walked in. The way she stopped short, surprised, told him that the clothes’ owner had returned. Heck put the bra on top of the folded clothes like a cherry on a sundae. “No thanks necessary, ma’am,” he said.

  “Pervert,” she said. She spun around and walked out.

  Heck left the laundromat. She’d gotten into her car and locked the doors. She was talking on a cell phone. Likely she’d spend the night with a police artist, making a composite drawing of his face.

  Heck walked away lightly so his feet wouldn’t crack the sidewalk. How could he expect people to understand? They were only bottomworld feeders, trapped in one space and one time and so soft and vulnerable.

  The whole city had gone anime. Buildings leaned over like wilting flowers and some disappeared at the edges, as if only the suggestion of a city were necessary. The roads shrugged and stretched as if they were just waking up.

  He hoped his mom wasn’t walking around the streets at night, alone, among the bottomworld dwellers. She was so small, so breakable. No, she would be at Dierdre’s. That was it: Dierdre’s.

  But what if Dierdre had a no-weekday-sleepovers policy like at Spence’s? He had to keep moving, had to keep the streets safe for breakable mothers everywhere.

  Heck could hear whispers in the dark, then the sound of running feet. He’d come to a high plywood fence surrounding the crater of a construction site. He saw that he’d frightened off a couple of kids, and they’d left behind a spray can of black paint.

  He picked up the can and drew a cityscape rising from the ground like building blocks. He spotted his blacks and began on the foreground detail. He peeked in the windows he drew, looking for an empty apartment that would be good for him and his mom. They didn’t need much—a bedroom for her, he could sleep on the couch. He looked for his mom, too, in the cityscape. Dierdre’s—she’d be at Dierdre’s.

  “Hey, that’s good,” someone said behind him.

  There were some kids standing there looking at him when he turned around.

  “You want to hang with us?” the tallest one said.

  “Come on, Beemer,” one of them said. “Leave him alone.”

  “Come on, kid. Wanna have some fun?” Beemer said.

  “No,” Heck said. He had work to do, good to uphold, evil to destroy. He put the paint can down.

  Beemer grabbed him by the back of the jacket. Beemer must have downloaded his soul into a cyborg shell or he wouldn’t have been so inhumanly strong, wouldn’t have been able to shake him.

  “Leave me alone, Cyborg,” Heck said.

  Beemer looked at the others and then at Heck again. “Are you some kind of freak or something?”

  “No,” Heck said.

  Beemer turned to the others. “He says he’s not a freak.” He gave Heck another good-natured shake, and Heck’s head flipped back as if his neck were boneless.

  “I’m not a freak, I’m a superhero.”

  No one moved or said a word. Their eyes slid between Heck and Beemer. Finally Beemer laughed and said, “I’d like to see Mr. Hero here leap off a tall building or something, wouldn’t you, brothers?”

  Heck’s thoughts raced at superspeed. What Good Deed could get him out of the death grip of a cyborg?

  Then he knew: Donate his jacket!

  Quick as a flash Heck’s arms were out of his jacket sleeves.

  Speedlines!

  The cyborgs called after him as he ran away, but no one chased him. They must have known they’d never be able to catch him.

  Maybe Dierdre’s was too far away after all. He’d call. Except when he put his hand in his pocket, he realized he didn’t have that change anymore.

  His tooth was hurting again. His ma
gnificent, powered-up body was shrinking. Every superhero had his Achilles’ heel, his weakness. Heck had his teeth. He headed for his old apartment building.

  The moon was setting by the time he arrived and it was cold outside. When he arrived, just to be sure, he crept into the building and tried his key in the lock of his ex-apartment, just as he’d done the night before.

  It still didn’t work.

  He went out back to the parking lot, to Mr. Hill’s 1958 Thunderbird. Heck thanked the forces for good in the universe that he’d remembered the old man never drove it and never locked it. He could hear people laughing across the street, and someone said the name Beemer. Heck heard a strange whistling sound. He listened closely, but then all was silent.

  From a trash can he took some paper, and on it he wrote with his trusty pencil, “Will fight evil for food.” In smaller print he wrote, “Discount on Good Deeds.”

  “Stop it,” he said to himself.

  But he couldn’t stop. Not yet.

  Maybe in a minute.

  He propped the sign on the windshield and climbed into the car.

  When it began to rain, Heck imagined that the car was moving. Someone in the front seat was driving him somewhere, to a picnic maybe. Someone was going to lean over the front seat and say, It’s okay, go back to sleep. He dreamed that in the trunk of the car there was fried chicken and potato salad and chocolate cake, all for him, Heck Superhero.

  TUESDAY, MAY 3

  Heck woke up cold.

  He lay there, following the filament of electric pain from the nerve in his tooth, into his jaw, down his neck and spinal cord, and back up to his brain. Where was his jacket? Bad dreams swirled like galaxies in the space in his head.

  He opened his eyes. A bad dream had opened the car door and was looming over him—a big kid, older than him and wearing a navy pea jacket. “Five,” the bad dream said.

  “What … ?”

  The dream had a big, round, smooth head and a soft tuft of blondish hair. “Five, five!” he insisted. Heck rubbed his eyes, but the kid didn’t go away. “That means ‘Help,’” the kid whispered, somewhat exasperated. He stuffed something into Heck’s pocket. “I didn’t kill the squirrel. The cyborgs did. I just wanted to give it a decent burial.” He glanced behind him, then ducked away.