I've written about a third of a novel of this re-visioning of the Superman Myth. Of course there are copyright infringements. I would have to be hired by Superman's owners, or simply sell the idea and be a consultant. Any time, Super People!
Superman was awakened by the
buzzing of his Iphone. It was still in
the utility pocket of his tights. Now it
vibrated against his butt cheek, bringing him out of a deep dreamless
sleep. The fact that his Iphone was in his tights and his tights still on
his body was due to his having fallen asleep after a hundred hour work-day. He had gotten back to the Fortress of Solitude only long enough to have a cup of Ramen noodles and collapse onto his bed,
eyelids falling of their own weight like leaded curtains.
“Awww,
shit!” He rolled to his left, and the badly fitted contour sheet snapped up in
the corner, so that all his bedding started to unravel. He slapped at the buzzing pest in his
pocket, hoping to kill it as easily as he would a mosquito. It vibrated insistently.
Superman
sat up, dragging blankets and sheets with him.
He rocked to one side and fished the smart phone from his pocket. There were only four people who had his phone number. He tapped the face of the device and
squinted blearily at the display.
“Where
R U?”
The Man
of Steel pushed the Clear button. It
would notify his Project Manager, Piers Bloch, that he was in the Fortress. That was all Piers needed to know.
“Where
the hell would I be?” His voice had the gravel of fatigue and irritation. “Moscow?
Alma-Ata? Minsk?” He sat up, kicking his sheets and blankets
into a pile on the floor. The place was
a wreck. Outside, he could see the
mountains of Greenland, rising in range
after range, deep in the interior. Wind
kicked disdainfully at the peaks, blowing off piles of ice and snow. It was almost possible, here, to make the
world stop. Almost.
For
Superman the world could never stop.
Sighing
deeply, summoning his will power, he got up.
He took three steps to the left and
was in his bathroom.
Outwardly, to the visible world, the Fortress of Solitude was a
wheel-less Winnebago. Superman didn’t
need much in the way of personal accommodation. There was more,
much more,
underground. Next to the trailer, a twelve foot satellite dish and several
other antennae rocked in the gusts.
Superman
looked at himself in the mirror. There
was a faint sizzling sound, and a blast
of heat from his eyes. His three-day stubble
disappeared, leaving behind the odor of burning hair.
His gut
hung over the red-speedo atop the blue
legs of his tights. He needed a
Rejuvenation, he realized suddenly. But
who has the time? Wait, he
thought…..that’s a joke. A Rejuvenation is about moving so fast that
time runs backwards. He could make the
time, if he wanted. It was the
wanting…..it was the motivation that was missing.
Superman
thought, with sudden and unexpected
longing, of the key to the Kryptonite Vault. It was hanging just out of his reach, in the towel shelf. He could see it, dangling from a Bugs Bunny
key chain. He could go down into the
underground world of the Fortress, unlock the vault, walk in….and never walk
out again.
He
rubbed his now-smooth chin, patted his belly, and reached inside his tights. A discreet little Jockey-style flap enabled
him to reach his...um...his Super Junk, as he called it (with a super amount of
self-mockery). He made a piss that
poured from him like Niagara, on and on.
After three minutes it gradually rattled to a halt….squirted one last
time…and was done. The super hero
replaced himself in his tights and went into the single room of the camper,
stepping over empty cans and papers.
The lights were on…he had fallen asleep with the lights on….but they
were beginning to dim, and his computers had already kicked over to auxiiary
power.
Impervious
to the cold, Superman went outside, brushed snow off a stationary bicycle,
and pedaled for two minutes with such speed that smoke rose from the bushings that
kept the bike’s cranks and pedals attached to the
frame. The lights came back up.
He
returned to the trailer’s interior. “I
should clean this up,” he mumbled to himself.
He was, after all, Superman. He could have asked one of his clones do the cleaning, but the
idea
of watching himself working for himself, that was a little
too much….and he could, or would, only clone himself, so there was no cloning
some sweet plump girl named Rosita to do his housework.
He
heard a sound like distant thunder.
This was followed by another sound, like a straw sucking on an empty
milkshake. FtooothweeeeeeEEEP!
Superman
looked out the window. One of his
clones had just landed and was heading towards the silo opening behind the
trailer. Briefly, the clone and its
maker exchanged a glance. Superman
nodded perfunctorily. It was best not
to engage them in conversation.
Hunger. He registered hunger as the quiet gurgling
at the center of his abdomen and a
slight dizziness due to lowered blood sugar levels. It was ridiculous, this need to eat,
defecate,
occasionally masturbate, blow his nose, fart. Ridiculous.
But that was where the central problem
was located, wasn’t it?
He was Superman. He wasn’t Super Super. He wasn’t Man Man. He was Superman. He was, in
fact, a goodly part human being, even if his Kryptonian origins lent him
unusual faculties. No one knew the truth: that his mother
was a human being transported from Earth by Jor-el. There was no getting away from it. It was a long and complex story, best left in the dust of the
past.
He
called himself by his real name, Kal-el.
That was his given name. This
Superman business was ridiculous. True,
he could leap tall buildings in a single bound…..
He
waved his hand in front of his face, as if to dispel a mirage. To get to the
half-sized refrigerator, he had to wade through the detritus
of his trailer: bedding, old
newspapers, empty CD jewel cases, cans of Calistoga
water. He couldn’t even get it open;
there was a box of Ramen jutting from the cabinet, obstructing
the door.
Frustrated,
he decided to clean the place, now, not later, NOW! He became a blur,
and twenty seconds later the Winnebago was spotless,
immaculate.
“Why
did I wait so long to do that?”. Kal-el
spoke aloud. He was beginning to
worry about himself.
The brooding, the mess, the overwork….all classic symptoms of
depression.
“That
won’t do,” he said bitterly. “We can’t
have Superman on Prozac.”
He was
going to take this day at a slower pace.
He was going to relax, meditate, read
some Dostoevsky and some Philip K. Dick, watch the Lakers
take on the Bulls. Almost…almost,
a day off.
“There’s
so much to be done,” he thought
desperately. “So much to be done.”
Then,
as always, aware of his mental processes, he stopped thinking and hurled his psyche a billion light years into space. From that distance, he looked down upon the infinitesimal speck
of this person, this unfortunate hero the Earthlings called
Superman, Kal-el, son of Jor-el.
This
thought, he realized, was his nemesis:
There’s so much to be done. In
those five
words huddled a universe of misplaced responsibility, guilt,
neurotic over-achievement.
He had that insight for a few seconds, then his distance
collapsed, his detachment gave way to
a sucking rubber-band sound, thwangggg! and he was pulled
back into his personality.
“Who am I kidding?” he asked himself. “I’m the only person who stands between
these earthlings and utter self destruction.
I can’t afford the luxury of neurosis.
I am doomed to be a workaholic because the alternative is to be
uncaring, unfeeling, and to let these people fight each other to extinction.”
He had
altered the political structure of the planet Earth until its stability
depended upon
his intervention. He
kept the peace by what he called “The Balance of Astonishment”. Or, sometimes, “Mutually Assured
Incompetence.”
Kal-el
found a can of chunky pineapples in his kitchen cabinet, and a container of
cottage
cheese out back in a tin box. The wind drove particles of stinging ice into his face, but he
didn’t
feel it. Pain was,
for him, a voluntary experience.
His
computer chair was a drummer’s stool, a collapsible Gibraltar Power Throne.
He sat in front of his monitor, moved his wireless mouse
with a nudge of his forefinger.
Eating with deliberate slowness, he watched the monitor come
to life. Between bites, he brought
up his email program.
It was server-automated, and software sifted the messages for code words
and phrases of things he thought might need his immediate
attention. At the bottom corner of
his Outlook Express in the left hand box, the program said,
“You have 17,596 unread messages.”
About
average. Down in the bunker complex, a
dozen of his clones answered email,
another hundred thousand messages a day. Automatically sifted out were the “Dear
Superman,
can you get my neighbor to drop dead” messages. Emails from civic leaders, volunteer
coordinators, educators, local politicians, national politicians, tribal
chieftains, individuals who fit the profile of true need, those were the emails he answered and
responded to with the appropriate action.
