It's Superman! A Novel (44 page)

“And did you finish your list, sir? All hundred names?”

Carl can almost feel a drop in the air temperature. He shouldn’t have asked such a direct question; is he
crazy
? Know your place, Krusada, he tells himself. Know your place.

When Lex speaks again, nearly a minute later, he seems to have forgiven Carl’s impudence. “All hundred names, yes. And Number One goes to the president of the United States. Number Two I’ll give to his ugly wife. Every Lexbot will have its own serial number, of course.”

“Is that right?”

“La Guardia, I’ve decided, will have Number Nine.”

“Even if he loses the election on Tuesday?”

“He won’t, Carl. Number Nine goes to Fatty. Shirley Temple gets Number 48. Clark Gable, 32. Deanna Durbin, 46.”

“Deanna Durbin!” says Carl. “I have a little crush on her!”

As the limousine progresses downtown, Lex rattles off several more famous names from Hollywood and politics (Louie B. Mayer, Robert A. Taft, Earl Browder) as well as from the worlds of business and high finance, athletics, education, fashion, literature, the arts, publishing, broadcasting, and the sciences, both abstract and applied—among them Henry Ford and Carl Hubbell, John Dewey, Coco Chanel, Margaret Mitchell, Frank Lloyd Wright, Henry Luce, Westbrook Pegler, and George Washington Carver.

“George Washington Carver, sir? But he’s a Negro.”

“I don’t discriminate, Carl. All human beings are the same to me.”

“Yes, sir. May I ask a question?”

“You may.”

“If the president and the first lady get numbers one and two—who gets Number Three?”

“Adolf Hitler.”

Carl hadn’t expected
that.
He’d been thinking maybe Ernest Hemingway or Bing Crosby.

“The Lexbot will be an
international
phenomenon, Carl.”

“Yes, sir, of course.”

“And Number Four will go with my compliments to Signore Mussolini, Number Five to Comrade Stalin, Number Six to General Franco, and Number Seven to King George. Or maybe I’ll reverse that, Six to the Sixth, eh?”

“That’s a lot of free merchandise you’ll be handing out. Sir.”

“You have to spend money to make it, Carl.”

“I can just see it now, sir—ten, fifteen pages in
Life
magazine. Everybody showing off their brand-new Lexbots. At lawn parties and so on.”

While the limousine is stopped for a red light, Lex reaches into his topcoat and takes out a small black socketed cube. He bounces it lightly in the palm of his hand.

3

Clark’s impact with the granite bluff not only rendered him senseless and blank but also left him wedged in a crevice of his own making. New pebbles and pulverized rock steadily pepper his head and sieve down on his face and shoulders.

The south-facing windows of the Tudor City buildings are all lighted now, moon faces in nearly every one. Traffic on First Avenue has come to a complete stop, with drivers peering through windshields and riders jumping out to point at Clark. It’s like that terrible morning in third grade when Clark dozed off, a cheek pressed to his arithmetic workbook, then woke amid a babble of silvery laughter to find his classmates gleefully surrounding him. He burst into tears. Later, when he informed his mother that he could never, ever go back to school, she told him, “Clark, you just can’t be so sensitive.”

After disengaging himself, Clark slides down the face of the rock, lands flat-footed, finds his balance, and starts to walk. Is he limping? He’s limping! Although it doesn’t persist very long (ten steps and the favoring vanishes), it’s nonetheless unnerving.

People call to him. Shout. He ignores them and crosses First Avenue, squeezing between the front fenders and rear bumpers of two or three automobiles, his breathing labored, his head woozy.

On Thirty-ninth Street he steps around metal scraps, hunks of tire, and a car bonnet. He stumbles over a massive piece of a brick wall, crunches more glass with every step, tearing his athletic socks to ribbons.

He fixes his gaze on that whirling dervish twenty feet away and doesn’t know what to do.

But coming closer to it, at least the fog in his head grows fainter, his breathing becomes less shallow.

Clark can feel it all returning, his vitality, his talents.

Then his legs cave and he falls to his knees.

When he lifts his eyes the robot is right there.

Then he’s hurtling backward again, smashing through a bay window, tumbling through an interior space, a living room, passing upside down beyond an archway and into a foyer—smacking the wall hard enough to both explode plaster and splinter lathing.

He drops to the floor, whacking his rib cage on a radiator valve.

Propping a hand on its warm coils, Clark uses the radiator to give him leverage and get him back on his feet.

He totters through the archway into the well-appointed living room. It glitters with broken glass. Going lightheaded again, he puts out a hand and clamps his fingers over the back of a Morris chair.

Slumped in the chair is a dead woman with a small hole in one temple. A wide ribbon of blood runs from it down past her ear and underneath her jaw, where it breaks into two separate thinner ribbons that disappear finally behind the sopping collar of her white-and-rose housedress.

Another dead woman is splayed out bloody on the floor.

In the street something else blows up. Across the street rooftops are in flames. A fire truck clangs. There’s gunfire. Another explosion.

Clark looks from one corpse to the other.

Taking his time, he walks carefully across the living room and sits in an upholstered chair. Leans forward and looks at his hands.

They’re shaking.

He clasps them, pins them between his knees.

He thinks about Donny Poore and that Negro prisoner cooked to death inside a vault.

He remembers the
General Slocum
and feels sure he would’ve dropped the water tank before he’d flown it to the excursion boat.

They’d all have drowned anyway.

For two years he’s been trying to grow up, pay attention, make himself ready . . . and do you know what?

It was a joke.

He wonders if there is a back door he can use.

Getting up, he looks around (but not at the dead women), then walks through a doorway into the kitchen.

A parrot is squawking in its cage.

He smells burnt coffee.

There are dishes drying in a rack and a plate of Toll House cookies on the table.

No back door.

Clark pulls out a chair, sits at the table, and glances mechanically at the glow-in-the-dark clock in the back panel of the electric range. It reads nine-twenty-three.

“Herman says hello, Herman says hello!”

Picking up a Toll House cookie, Clark regards it closely as though inspecting it for imperfections. His mom used to make these: butter, sifted flour, baking soda, salt, chocolate morsels—anything else?

“Herman says hello, Herman says hello!”

He puts the cookie back on the pile.

Folding his hands in his lap, he stares at the new-looking white Kelvinator with the basket-shaped motor on top.

Diana Dewey had a new refrigerator, too. He doesn’t think hers was a Kelvinator though. But maybe.

He remembers Diana’s raspy voice, her crooked smile, the silky texture of her skin.

“Your mother says hello, your mother says hello.”

“Hello, Mom.”

“What are you doing just sitting there, Clark?”

“I’m not sure, Mom.”

“Don’t you think it’s pretty selfish?”

“No, I guess I don’t.”

“Clark Kent!”

“I’m sorry, Mom. But I don’t know what to do.”

“Herman says hello, Herman says hello.”

Clark turns and looks at the parrot, then he turns back and looks at the Kelvinator.

The clock on the electric range reads nine-twenty-three.

“Son, do you plan on sitting here all night?”

“Probably not. Just till everything goes away outside.”

“Clark . . .”

“I don’t know what to do!”

“Give yourself a little credit, son. Your vanity will do you in if you don’t.”

“My
vanity
?” Clark laughs. “Me, vain?”

“Herman says hello, Herman says hello.”

“Mom?”

“Herman says hello . . .”

“Mom, come on, quit it,” he says, pulling on his tattered sleeve, poking a finger through a burn hole in an elasticized cuff, slack now and droopy. “Mom?”

“Clark, are you scared?”

He considers the question for a moment.

“Yes, ma’am, I suppose I am.”

“That’s good.”

“That’s
good?
”

“I wouldn’t want to think your father and I raised a fool.”

“No, ma’am.”

“Now get off that silly chair and go do something. Doesn’t matter what. Just do something, Clark.”

When he leaves the kitchen the glow-in-the-dark clock on the electric range reads nine-twenty-three.

Passing through the living room without glancing at either of the dead women, Clark goes and stands in the bay window. A hook-and-ladder screeches to a stop, firemen dropping from it, unwinding canvas hoses and dragging them toward hydrants. Several cars, skeletons now, still burn. Another just
whumped
into flames. As far as Clark can see, all of the house fronts, brick and brownstone, are scorched black, and every other window looks blown out.

About twenty, twenty-five feet away from where he stands (but raising one foot now to the window seat, bracing it there, jiggling it nervously), the robot continues its monotonous spin. Pencil-thin streaky light shoots from its head and the ends of its fingers. Clark lifts his other foot onto the windowsill and crouches, arms winged back like a competitive swimmer.

The instant he springs, the air is raked with submachine-gun fire. Volleys of bullets strike him and recoil, further shredding his tights, his trunks, and his cape, and snipping off the final stitch fastening the wedge-shaped emblem to his chest.

The big
S
goes skimming away just as Clark plows fists-first into the robot, digging knuckles into its plated chest, lifting it off the street, and carrying it with him over the roofs of the police cars (everyone ducks) and down toward First Avenue.

But that’s not where Clark wants to go—he can see a crowd gathered there—so he bears down with his weight, and both he and the robot (Clark on top) crash into the street. Tumbling half a dozen times, Clark collides with a lamp post, his lower vertebrae taking most of the impact. The lamp post snaps near its base and slams across the pavement.

Angling as it goes, the robot skates on its back down the street, then strikes the curb and sideslips across the pavement, toppling over a low metal railing and down a flight of steps to the basement entrance of a brownstone. It clatters and clatters and finally bashes against a door.

Clark picks himself up and shakes his head.

Despite all the sirens and the roars of hose water and flames, the staticky grumble of squad-car radios, it seems all of a sudden very quiet and still.

Then: “You in the leotard!” Edges crackling, the voice comes amplified through a bullhorn. “Down on the ground with both your hands in back of your neck—now!”

From the bottom of the areaway comes a low scritching sound followed by a soft whir and then silence.

From behind Clark come the racking of shotguns.

He slightly turns his head, looks over a shoulder.

A dozen policemen, at least a dozen, are pointing their weapons at him across the bonnets and boots of radio cars.

“This is your last warning, circus boy! Get down on the ground!”

With a vague hand gesture, much the same one a good host would use during a party if a guest offered to get up and fix his own drink, Clark continues on across the pavement.

The cops don’t shoot him.

But a bluish-white light flashes.

Clark closes the short distance to the top of the areaway and then peers down the steps.

Popping a molten pimpled bulb from his camera’s flash attachment, Willi Berg smiles up at him.

Looking jailed, Lois Lane stands just inside the basement behind a decorative wrought-iron security gate.

A couple in bathrobes and pajamas flanks her, peeking cautiously out. The man is armed with a pewter candlestick, the woman with a coal shovel.

Willi takes another flash picture of a badly dented, partly crumpled steel cylinder, maybe eighteen inches long, that lists in a corner, half buried in a clump of dead leaves.

The cylinder sporadically emits crackling blue sparkles.

Willi calls up, “Check out the mechanical monster.”

“What happened to it?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. Oh. Um,
Superman,
I want to introduce you to my good friend Lois Lane. Lois, this is Superman I was telling you about. And that’s Mr. and Mrs. Pierce. Dave and Sally were kind enough to let us in during the fireworks.”

Clark goes down a few steps, nodding hello to all but never taking his eyes off Lois Lane. She’s going to recognize him. Of course she will. He’ll never pull this off.

But then she says, “Superman, huh? What’s your
real
name?” and Clark feels the giddy joyful pleasure of a practical joke successfully perpetrated. Remembering to lower his voice, he says, “Let’s talk about that some other time, shall we, Miss Lane?”

Clark feels cocky enough to swagger but then, catching his own reflection in a lit-from-behind basement window, he is mortified: his hair sticks out and his face is streaked with grime, his clothes are in complete tatters, and where his emblem used to be, minuscule knots and twists of black thread shabbily outline its tricornered shape.

His boots are gone and he has white socks on.

No wonder Lois Lane doesn’t recognize him! Who would?

Like a futuristic whoopie canister, the cylinder suddenly springs open and reassembles. A shaft of ruby-red light cuts a neat furrow, a dandy’s central part, through Willi’s thick hair, singeing it down to his scalp. It also passes between two bars of the iron gate and strikes the blade of the coal shovel, which then smacks Mrs. Pierce in the face, knocking her flat on her back.