A Once Crowded Sky (41 page)
He trains hard, and Ultimate finally lets him go out. They chase the villain to the edge of the building, and Pen trips, and he falls. He knows then, somersaulting through the air, reaching out for any handhold that
might save him from cracking into the concrete below—what was supposed to be simple and lovely is complicated and furious: the bars slinging by, springing into his head and tossing him toward the other side, fingernails scratching brick, falling still, waiting to be saved.
It wasn’t a story to be admired from a window. It was crusty and hard; it hurt, and it kept on hurting every time they’d leave to go out again to fight some other scumbag who’d kick and piss his way to jail.
And still Pen fought on. The Everything was constantly on the brink, and PenUltimate was there behind it, as he was taught to be, his fingers dug in, holding on, pulling hard. It was probably to impress Ultimate, or maybe it was to help people, to save them. Whatever it was, he did it for a long time until he met her. And she asked him to walk away, to do the one thing he’d always longed for. She never said it, but she asked.
At first he’d said no. Too many people were suffering; someone else was dying. But she wore him down after a while. Convinced him there’s courage in the leaving. Others will come up. Give them room. Let them come. And you come home, Pen. You rest now, Pen. You’re done. You did good, and you’re done. Everyone ends, Pen. Even you.
She was the first person he’d really loved besides Ultimate, and she didn’t like this game. She never cared for it. Not because it wasn’t necessary or noble, but because it risked his life and she was selfish about that one thing. Never asking, she pleaded for him to understand, to make that one sacrifice, grant her that one wish. Stay with me, Pen. Leave and stay with me.
So he left, and he stayed. When the call came, and he had to choose between his promise to her and his promise to them, the great caped community, it didn’t take that long to decide. Frankly, she was much prettier than they were.
And as PenUltimate starts to dodge Soldier’s bullet, starts to fight with another friend, he knows it had been the wrong thing to do. Though it made her happy for a while, in the long run it had all been for nothing.
He had to come back eventually. They all come back, and he was one of them. A threat from above, and there he was again jumping and jarring, fighting again alongside The Soldier of Freedom. And he ran again, and he came back again, and here he was fighting again, defeating Ultimate, discovering the villain.
Here he was reaching the predictable epiphany. All that running, and here he was reaching the inevitable conclusion.
It’s time. Time to rise. To fight. He’ll defeat Soldier, the last villain; he’ll prove his heroism, and then he’ll go to the graves, make the sacrifice, follow Ultimate into death and glory.
Every attempt to escape that fate is folly. Pen was meant to burn; it was how Ultimate built him: every wire, every tube, that had been strung through Pen is tied into that hole in the graveyard, and Ultimate is forever reaching out from The Blue and pulling at all that loose metal, dragging his boy into the fire.
Pen had fought it; Pen had done his best to fight it. For her. He had spent years fighting it for her. He fought it the way Ultimate had taught him to fight it, his fingers dug in, holding on, pulling hard.
He had left and refused to come back. He was strong, and he stayed away. For years. For her. But he was tired now. He had been fighting everything for so long now; cracks, heroes, soldiers, robots, and prophets, and today especially had been a long day. It had been a long fight, and he was tired.
And that was all right. It was all right to be tired, to be weak, to give in. That’s what she had taught him. As always, Ultimate’s voice comes to Pen, and Ultimate screams at him, the metal voice tears the world open with its roar, demanding that Pen hang on to the battle,
put the fight above the man
; but then he hears her. And Ultimate is finally gone, and he hears her. And she says that sometimes he is weak, and she loves him then too.
And Pen surrenders, escapes from the fight, gives in to the tug of the wires; and in that surrender Pen transforms, sees what he was meant to see, what Ultimate and Soldier and Prophetier and every hero he ever knew always saw, what he had missed for all those years. He had fought for all those years, and he had missed it somehow.
The Blue. A better world, a bluer sky settling above. He’d been so afraid; he had missed it somehow.
Of course it’s an adolescent fantasy. Pen understands that the game is merely a simplification of a reality burdened with layers of miscomprehension, the reduction of all colors to black and white and beyond that to just blue. But it is in the purity of the distillation that beauty flourished; it is in the tearing away of the cluttered bullshit that some amount of veracity was revealed, a truth put forth.
Religion, philosophy, aesthetics, morality, physics, poetry: what are they but attempts to organize through metaphor the utterly disappointing chaos that forces itself on you from that first waking moment. This. This out here. How entirely indescribable it is; how little of it submits to being summarized or repeated, re-created to others who might desire to know what you know, to learn some fraction of what you learned, though they have nothing to offer in return, for they stand just as befuddled as you, just as blinded by the plume of colors plummeting toward them, jumbled and puzzled, looping in on themselves and back again, knots into knots, twisting over decrepit walls, crumbling and forming and birthing and dying, forever dying so that—just when some understanding is achieved, some love realized—the peace of comprehension shatters, never to come back; how easily we are lost in it, loafing through a dry, hot plain with no way home, how we will worship the bubbled blue spouting in the distance, how we will dash to it, hoping for relief, for something cool and clean to soak ourselves in, to wash off the stench and refresh the senses, renew what was missing.
There. There in The Blue. Beautiful circles and simple ironies. Mapped structures leading from planet to planet, star to star. The appeal of the uncomplicated. It draws you. Its very contrast to the disorder marks it as an organic whole. Good guys win. Bad guys lose. To be continued.
You need the stories. You demand their powers bristle in the air around you, rumble through the sizzled asphalt of Arcadia City. You need them to live, to breathe, to somehow exist and in that existence to always fight, to always triumph. Or else what was all this? What was all this tragedy continuously beating at you? Without your stories, without your heroes and their awesome powers, how could you explain this, this here, this incomprehensible real that ever refuses to embrace any rule, any cliché besides the intransigent, pathetic truth that we all end, that no one comes back.
To go on—and Pen goes on, dodging to his right as the bullet bears down—you need that. To take this next leap through the hurt you need to understand there’s a man above you, a metal man with a metal face framed inside a well-colored sun. If you looked up you might see his encouraging smile, and you might see your own face too reflected in that confident bluster, those melted-steel features, and you might smile too—as Pen used to smile when those hard hands cupped him and lifted him
into the sky. To go on you need that above you. That comic book story. The Man With The Metal Face, forever prepared to stand once more at the precipice.
He understands. After all this wondrous time and all these marvelous adventures, Pen stops fighting, and he surrenders, and Pen understands. There is no moral in it. No meaning. No sense at all. Except that it is the moral. It is the meaning. It is all that makes sense. Pen hears her, and Pen surrenders, and now he’ll go back, and he’ll allow himself finally to burn away.
He’ll stand straight in the spout and let the stories surge around him, and they’ll throw any number of significant moments and heartfelt endings at him, and he will close his eyes and think of her and let his flesh boil until his body dissipates to smoke and merges with The Blue, becomes the fog settling into the stories, blotting out the lights of Arcadia City. And some boy in the stream will look out from a mansion and think how dirty the city is, how much it needs him to go back down the ever-impressive staircase and work out a little harder so that when Ultimate tests him, he can stand up, stare his father in the face, and follow him into the night, dissolve into its dotted black surface and never come back.
He’ll leave her behind this time, sever his promise with finality and let her occupy this world without him. Anna will gaze out her window as the heroes drag through the mist, and she’ll know that we’re safe again: those who are needed are on the watch, and those who are not are finally resting, pulled up and strung loosely from the shivering stars.
And Pen decides to bring them all back, and the bullet bears down, and Pen moves, comfortable with the knowledge of what he’ll have to do to get around this last challenge, of what it will take to save the day. And had Soldier aimed well and the barrel been placed at the sturdy center, Pen’s quick pivot would’ve easily avoided the oncoming rush of lead; and had Pen been powerless, unable to dodge faster than the speeding bullet that dives toward him, Soldier’s lead would have flown well to Pen’s right, and he would have remained safe.
But instead, Pen’s deft move puts him into the path of the wayward shot, and the bullet spins into his chest, scratching off a rib and plunging to his core. And had it been the steel heart there, still jumping and bumbling with Ultimate’s life, metal would have simply bounded off metal and everyone would’ve been fine; had Pen not gone back after seeing the
solution in The Blue and exchanged hers for his so that she might live and hers might be repaired, everyone would’ve been fine.
His wife’s heart slowing inside him, Soldier’s bullet lost in its corridors, Pen gasps for breath a few times until his eyes pull back, his tongue cleaves to the roof of his mouth, and he dies looking out toward the towers of Arcadia City, their outline creating a teethed horizon that seems to bite into the clouds.
The Soldier of Freedom #534
Soldier checks the boy, confirms the kill. There’s no breath or beat, but wires threaded through Pen’s body keep humming for some time, gleaming through skin, creating a shadow etched thinly on the floor of the diner, an outline of an old lump of a man slouched over a young hero’s body. The light’s not strong. There’s not much detail to the figures. It’s hard to tell where one ends and the other starts up again.
Prophetier’s dead. Pen’s dead. The powers are gone. The threat is gone. The game is gone. Soldier gets up off the ground and looks around the diner to see if there’s something he can do that might help.
The Soldier of Freedom #529
At the end, three circles are in the center of a man. Each one is embedded inside the other so that none of them cross or touch. An old man with old eyes who looks upon the circles can’t tell which lies on top of which; to him, two appear to be reflected in each other like overlapping rainbows, while the other fires back and forth between these. Each is of a different color, and inside one appears the constrained image of a face, which wavers in and out of focus so that it can barely be grasped by the man’s determined squint. Soldier tries to understand it all, but he fails, and his hands go to his hip, and he draws, and he fires.
Later, when he takes the target down, he’s disappointed to find it still clean, uninterrupted by the flying metal. He ain’t surprised, but he’s disappointed.
