Less Than Hero (30 page)

In addition to the headlines and stories about us, I’m aware that while there haven’t been any more reports of Mr. Blank’s memory shenanigans, Illusion Man continues to terrorize New York City, branching out into Queens and the Bronx and Brooklyn, leaving no borough safe from his hallucinogenic reach.

The thirty-something guy holding up a copy of the
New York Post
catches me staring at him.

“Sorry,” I say. “I was just reading your paper.”

He checks the front page as if he can’t remember what the headline said, then opens the paper back up. “Politicians. Professional athletes. Superheroes. They’re all disappointing,” he says. “I guess you can’t count on anybody these days, right?”

Once my latte is ready, I head back outside and continue up Fifth Avenue, planning to cut through Bryant Park to reminisce about some of the good times we had fighting crime there, when
I notice emergency vehicles on the street in front of the New York Public Library. An ambulance and a fire engine and a single NYPD cruiser are on the scene as traffic backs up from what looks like an accident involving a couple of taxis.

A crowd has gathered on the sidewalk, so I stop and ask a few people on the outskirts what happened.

“Some homeless guy ran out into the middle of the street and got nailed by a cab,” a guy says. “Caused this whole fuckin’ mess.”

I’m not in the mood to rubberneck, so I leave the gawkers and the chaos of the accident behind and continue on my way, when I see Isaac sitting at the top of the library steps, holding a Starbucks container and watching everyone with that odd little smirk of his.

I stop and stare at him, not sure what I should do. It’s been three months since I last saw Isaac and I don’t know how to feel about seeing him now. On the one hand, he’s a friendly face and someone I’ve known for nearly five years of my life. Maybe not as well as Charlie or Randy or Frank, but still a friend. On the other hand . . .

Isaac sees me and holds up a single hand in a stillborn wave and says, “Hey Lloyd,” as if there’s nothing wrong. As if he didn’t abandon us on Thanksgiving in the hospital where Charlie was in a coma and never called to see what happened to everyone.

On the other hand . . . I obviously still have some unresolved issues about Isaac.

I can’t decide if I should ignore him and keep walking or return his greeting. Eventually I do neither and sit down on the steps next to him a few feet away—the two of us drinking our
coffee, not saying anything, the promising blue sky above us a contrast to the aftermath of the accident on Fifth Avenue.

“You’ve gone gray,” Isaac says, breaking the silence.

I shrug and hope he doesn’t say anything about how it makes me look distinguished.

“Charlie’s still in a coma,” I say. “In case you were wondering.”

Isaac just nods and drinks his coffee, the silence settling over us once more as the lifeless body is loaded into the ambulance.

“And Randy and Blaine are dead,” I say.

“I heard,” he says, like we’re at a cocktail party or a backyard barbecue, drinking beers and making idle talk. No
What happened?
or
Are Frank and Vic okay?
or
Sorry I wasn’t there
.

I want to lay into Isaac, but I just don’t have the energy. Instead I take a deep breath, let it out, and go with a more light-hearted approach.

“Give anyone a boner lately?” I say.

He shakes his head slowly back and forth.

“Decided to hang up your superhero cape?” I say.

Isaac gives a wry little smile. “I was never a superhero.”

“Sure you were,” I say. “You were Professor Priapism. Giver of erections. More powerful than an aphrodisiac. Able to—”

“I never gave anyone a boner.”

“What?” I say. “You didn’t?”

“No,” he says, like it’s the most ridiculous thing in the world.

“Then why did you say you could?”

“I wanted you guys to think I was like you.”

There’s something different about Isaac, something I can’t quite put my finger on, but at the moment I’m more focused on
his admission that he didn’t have any supernatural abilities.

“So all those times you went out with us, you were just
pretending
to be a superhero?” I ask.

“Not pretending,” he says. “
Performing
.”

It must be an actor thing.

“Is that why you didn’t want to come with us when we went after Blaine?” I say. “Because you didn’t have a superpower?”

“No, it just seemed like a really bad idea,” he says. “Plus it wouldn’t have been in character.”

“What does that mean?” I ask, ignoring for the moment that he called my plan a bad idea. Even if it’s true.

“Think about it.”

It strikes me again that there’s something different about Isaac. It’s not just his confident demeanor, but there’s something else. Something right in front of me that I should be able to see but that I just can’t figure out.

“Come on, Lloyd,” he says. “Cat got your tongue?”

Then it hits me.

“Hey,” I say. “What happened to your stutter?”

Isaac cocks his head as if thinking about his answer, but before he can respond, a hot-dog vendor on the corner across Fifth Avenue starts shouting at everyone to get away, threatening them with his wiener tongs. A moment later he discards his tongs and starts shoving wieners and buns into his mouth as fast as he can like he’s trying to unseat Joey Chestnut as the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Champion.

“Jesus.” I stand up and scan the crowds on Fifth Avenue, not sure who I’m looking for, but hoping I’ll know when I find him.

“What’s the matter?” Isaac asks, still sitting on the steps.

“I think Illusion Man is here.”

It’s been nearly a month since I’ve attempted to access my trigger, so I’m a bit out of practice. While in a way it’s like riding a bike, it’s also a bit like kick-starting a stubborn motorcycle.

“Illusion Man?” Isaac says.

A police cruiser sits parked diagonally on Fifth Avenue, with one of NYPD’s finest standing near the cruiser and the other directing traffic. The one standing by the cruiser starts walking toward the hot-dog stand, pulls out his gun and shoots the hot-dog vendor, then puts the gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger.

People start screaming and running off in multiple directions as a red VW Jetta runs through the intersection and hits a cab before it veers across Fifth Avenue, drives up onto the sidewalk, and crashes into the front window of Capelli.

I give my trigger one final kick, imagining dentists and drills, and my lips start to tingle and my eyes grow heavy as a pressure builds in the back of my throat. I look around, trying to locate Illusion Man, figuring he has to be somewhere nearby, when I notice Isaac just sitting on the steps and drinking his coffee while the chaos unfolds, wearing a smile as if he’s watching his favorite movie.

Then the proverbial penny drops and I realize Isaac wasn’t as bad an actor as I thought.

My lips go numb and my throat tightens. Before I can open my mouth to release my yawn, Isaac looks at me and cocks his head and everything goes “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

Isaac sits on the steps in front of the New York Public Library, drinking a grande black Pike Place Roast in the afternoon sun and watching the tourists and locals walk past, imagining that they’re actors in a play or a movie and he’s sitting in the audience, enjoying the show. He does this a lot. Just sits and imagines and pretends. It’s what he likes to do more than anything.

Isaac watched a lot of television when he was a kid, pretending the lives of the characters on sitcoms and dramas were his, imagining that he had the perfect life with the perfect family and that his parents hadn’t divorced when he was eight years old and his mother didn’t leave him home alone on a regular basis while she slept her way through a series of drunken one-night stands.

As he grew older, Isaac’s attention shifted from television to the big screen and he spent as much time as possible in movie theaters, watching adventures and romantic comedies and fairy tales where everyone lived happily ever after. Eventually he decided
that if he wanted his life to have a fairy-tale ending, he was going to have to become an actor.

So he joined the drama club in middle school, where he played minor roles and bit parts before graduating to high school theater and landing the lead or supporting role in half a dozen plays, including
The Laramie Project
and
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead
. People told him he was good, that he had talent, and he believed them. He had It, with a capital
I
. His destiny was written on the wall in twenty-four-karat gold, and the road ahead was paved with diamonds.

After high school he moved to New York to become a star on Broadway, only to burn out and develop a stutter and discover that life isn’t like a movie. Life doesn’t wrap up with the hero or the main protagonist overcoming obstacles in order to succeed. Life is about loss and disappointment and all of the things that can go wrong.

To paraphrase Jim Morrison, life is about heartache and the loss of God.

In real life, there is no happily ever after.

At least, that’s what Isaac used to think.

For most of his adult life he’d been a serial failure, killing one opportunity after another, working temporary night jobs and volunteering for clinical trials so he could afford to pay the rent on his crappy studio apartment in Alphabet City while he auditioned for plays so far off Broadway that they might as well have been in New Jersey. Not that it would have mattered. His stutter always betrayed him and the role eventually went to someone else.

Then, six months ago, everything changed.

The first thing he noticed was that he stopped dreaming, which was weird because Isaac always dreamed, ever since he could remember. Sometimes the dreams were so vivid he would wake up thinking that his nocturnal visions had followed him into the real world. Occasionally, in the brief twilight between being asleep and awake, Isaac would have trouble differentiating between what was reality and what was fantasy.

As night after night passed without a single snippet of a dream, he began to wonder if their disappearance was a reflection of his waking life, a metaphor for how his real-world dreams of being an actor had never materialized. But Isaac soon discovered that their absence was due to something more monumental and life-changing than he could have ever imagined.

He had developed the supernatural ability to make other people hallucinate.

Isaac had once seen a cicada molt and emerge from its nymph exoskeleton as a fully formed adult with wings. That’s how he felt when he discovered his new talent—as if he had finally cast off the detritus of his previous existence and was ready to fly.

At some point Isaac’s stutter vanished. He’s not sure exactly when it happened but one day it just wasn’t there.
Poof
, like magic. But like a good magician, Isaac didn’t reveal his secrets and kept up the pretense of his stutter so that no one would suspect anything had changed.

When he found out that Vic and Lloyd and the other guinea pigs had all experienced their own metamorphoses, Isaac initially felt a sense of disappointment that he wasn’t a unique butterfly.
But he soon learned that their new abilities, while amusing and effective, didn’t come close to his ability to manipulate the fabric of reality.

So he decided to play along with them and use his acting skills to make the others believe he could give people erections. None of them would ever know the truth, because no one would ever want to check. And they believed him. He fooled them all. It was the performance of his life. He should have won a Tony. Or an Oscar.

Maybe once he’s grown tired of Manhattan, he’ll head out to California and see if they appreciate his talents any more in Hollywood than they did on Broadway.

Isaac takes another sip of coffee and continues to watch the giant movie screen on Fifth Avenue, hundreds of men and women playing out their roles in a never-ending script. But this particular scene is beginning to grow a bit boring, so Isaac decides to liven things up.

At the bottom of the library steps, a homeless man dressed in a red coat, dirty tan pants, and a pair of white tennis shoes roots through a garbage can like a raccoon. Next to him is a shopping cart filled with an assortment of clothing and artifacts that probably constitute the homeless man’s life savings. It’s obviously been a while since he’s been the leading man, so Isaac decides to make him a star.

The world around Isaac dims and goes out of focus for a moment, the sounds of the city a murmur of background noise and conversation. Then Isaac cocks his head and the murmur turns into a hum. Tires on asphalt. A high-powered fan. The incessant drone of ten thousand bees.

The homeless man whips his head around, startled and confused, then looks up into the sky and his eyes go wide.

“Go away!” he shouts and starts waving his arms around his head.

A moment later, he screams in pain and starts running back and forth on the sidewalk in front of the library, continuing to wave his hands in the air as if batting at some unseen attacker. Then he lets out another scream of pain and terror before he runs away up the sidewalk and dashes out into Fifth Avenue, where he gets hit by a taxi speeding to make it through the stoplight.