Superpowers (32 page)
Authors: David J. Schwartz
FRIDAY
Happy Birthday, baby."
Paris Palmeiro looked up at his mother with wide brown eyes, yawned, and made a cranky noise.
"Perfectly healthy, Dr. McAllister says." Gil sat on the bed beside Prudence and slipped his index finger into his newborn son's grasp. Paris took hold of the finger and squeezed, and Gil grimaced. "He's strong," he said. "Ow!"
"Three hours old and already tougher than his father," Prudence said.
"Bet I can take him in a footrace," Gil retorted.
"Smart-ass," Prudence said. "I love you, you know."
"You'd better." He kissed her on the forehead. "I have more people to call, and they still won't let me use my cell phone in here. Be back in fifteen minutes."
"Five."
"Say ten." He extricated his finger from Paris's tiny fist and blew kisses as he left.
Prudence touched fingertips with the baby, amazed at his smallness. She should be sleeping—in two hours she was supposed to do a live feed about the birth for the five o'clock news, and she felt like a train had passed through her—but all she could do was stare at Paris, counting his fingers and toes and watching him struggle to keep his eyes open.
He grasped at nothing a couple of times before he managed to latch onto her pinky. He yanked at it so hard that Prudence thought it was broken.
"Ow!" She reclaimed her finger while he was yawning and flexed it. "Baby doesn't know his own strength," she said, and tickled him under the chin.
_______
"Happy Birthday, baby."
"Mom! I'm not a baby." Grace folded her arms as Fern pulled her into a hug.
"You sure act like one sometimes," Fern said.
"Mom!"
"For pity's sake, honey, I'm kidding." Fern squeezed her youngest daughter until she squeezed back.
"I wish Daddy was here," Grace said.
"Me too, honey."
"I wish Jack wasn't sick."
"Me, too."
"I don't really feel like celebrating today, Mom."
Fern kissed Grace on the forehead, thinking that the hardest thing about being a parent was reassurance. Telling your kids that things would get easier, that everything would be OK, was some times a necessary lie, but harder to do when you couldn't bring yourself to believe it even a little bit.
So she told the truth. "I know, Gracie. But everyone's coming, and I think we all need this. We can't sit around being sorry all the time." She sighed. "Life has to go on."
"It's not fair," Gracie said in a tone that said she knew it never would be.
"No," said Fern. "It's not." And that was true, too.
EDITOR'S NOTE
Mortimer "Jack" Robinson died on October 20, 2001; he did not make his scheduled rendezvous with Caroline Bloom. He's buried in the same cemetery as his father, or at least that's what I've been told. I've also been told there was no autopsy, although the cause of death is listed as "brain hemorrhage." How do they know that's what caused his death, if no autopsy was performed? Call me cynical—everyone else has—but I doubt that Jack Robinson is buried in Jack Robinson's grave.
Jack's mother, Fern, sold the family farm to the Carlson twins in July of 2002 and moved to Appleton, Wisconsin. Her daughter Grace was headed to Eau Claire for college. They both refused to be interviewed for this book, so any episodes concerning them were reconstructed with the help of Charlie Frost.
I interviewed Charlye Frost extensively while he underwent treatment at the Mendota Mental Health Institute. What he hadn't personally witnessed he was able to describe for me based on the accounts of the other All-Stars and the images and thoughts he had gathered from his teammates and the others who played a role in these events.
It took Charlie nearly a year to feel well enough to leave Mendota. I visited him three or four times a week, usually at lunch. Charlie was medicated, and often when I first arrived he was sluggish and found it difficult to concentrate. Once he had some food in him, he became livelier. Our conversations often went far afield of the topic of the All-Stars, and I consider Charlie Frost a friend. He told me once that talking about what had happened was helping him with his therapy.
The day after Charlie left Mendota, he disappeared. I hope that he joined Caroline Bloom and Ray and Harriet Bishop in their self-imposed exile. There have been occasional reports of possible All-Star activity in places as far apart as Portugal and Singapore, but none of them have been substantiated. For the most part, people seem to have forgotten that the All-Stars ever existed.
Harriet, if you're reading this—I hope you're all right, and I'm sorry.
On the surface of it, Bert O'Brien's theory is too far out even for me—that someone is out there actively rewriting history, editing out facts and episodes that are inconvenient or damaging. But I've begun to wonder if he might not be right. I don't know who would profit from hiding the existence of superpowered individuals, but I wish I did, because then I might be able to find out who had Jack and Charlie's roommate Scott Silverstone killed. He died in a hit-and-run accident in March of 2002, shortly after agreeing to speak with me about these events.
Then there's the matter of Mary Beth Layton. I tried to interview her for this book, but Madison Correctional had no record of her. There was no record of her arrest or of where she was being held, and her case never went to trial. In fact, there are no records of her existence—no driver's license on file, no record of her enrollment at the university, nothing. Her family moved to California and won't return my calls.
I dug deeper and found there was no record of Solahuddin Sutadi either—no immigration records, no student transcripts, no tax or payroll records. All the articles on his death have disappeared, from print and Web sites both. All the journalists who covered it and the All-Stars have left Madison or retired from journalism altogether, and none of them would respond to my requests for interviews—not even Prudence Palmeiro, who works behind the scenes now, as a segment producer on a UPN affiliate in Florida.
I don't know if all these people have been threatened, or paid off, or what. But what it comes down to is that I'm the only one who will talk about what happened, and as far as anyone is concerned I'm a crackpot with an agenda. When I bring up the All-Stars most people laugh—they remember them as goofballs in silly outfits. Fools in tights.
That's why I wrote this book. At first I just wanted to get the story before anyone else, but when I realized that no one else was going after it, I wanted to prove that I wasn't crazy.
So that's the end, or at least it's as much of the story as I know. Maybe they'll show up again someday, with their five-pointed stars across their chests. It was nice having heroes for a while, even for a cynic like me. But in the end I guess we have to get by without heroes. Even the best of them is as human as the rest of us, and the only thing you can count on with humans is that they'll let you down eventually. You, for instance. You'll forget this story eventually, and it'll be like it didn't happen. Maybe you don't believe in superpowers or conspiracies or . . . hell, some days I don't know if I believe it.
No. I believe it. I just don't know if it matters, in the end.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks are due to many, but in particular to Jeanne Cavelos and the Odyssey Fantasy Writing Workshop, Keith Demanche, Troy Ehlers, Derek Hill, Lynda Rucker, Susan Winston, Marianne Westphal, Meghan McCarron, Haddayr Copley-Woods, Gavin Grant, Kelly Link, John Trey, Lois Tilton, the East Side Chicago group, the Semi-Omniscients, the Supersonics, the Sycamore Hill Workshop, Super-agent Shana Cohen, Jason Pinter, Will Francis, Beth Coates, Lindsey Moore, and Carrie Thornton.
I'd also like to acknowledge the Mifflin Street Animal Shelter, the Remedial House gang, the Rathskeller crew, the staff at Mancini's, and John, Elaine, Gretchen, Stephen, and Mary Schwartz.
Finally, this book wouldn't have happened without comic books, especially the works of Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, Chris Claremont, Peter David, Keith Giffen, J. M. DeMatteis, Kevin Maguire, Bill Sienkiewicz, Walt Simonson, Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, Frank Miller, Fabian Nicieza, Mark Bagley, and everyone who ever worked on an issue of
The Defenders.
Remember: they're all mailed flat!
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