Miracle Monday (25 page)

Now, with Superman preoccupied with the current world crisis and evidently uninterested in his former life, Lois had a court order appointing her Clark Kent's executor. She also convinced her old friend Inspector Henderson to pull some strings and cut some tape to get police guards around Clark's apartment. There was nothing anyone could see besides the papers all over the floors—financial records, bill stubs, discarded first drafts of news scripts, answers to Superman's fan mail—but she might find something else if she looked hard enough.

"Quite a mess, isn't it?" said the voice from the direction of the window.

She looked up from the bare floor against which she was straightening something that looked to be a manuscript and saw him standing on the ledge outside the window that had been shattered and whose shards had been carried off for souvenirs.

"What do you care?" Lois muttered and looked back down at the floor.

"My executor, I presume?"

"That's what the court says." Lois continued to work as he climbed in through the window.

"The reports of my death are highly exaggerated."

"Listen, hero, as long as you're here you might at least do something about those windows. It's cold as a—"

"Excuse me miss, but do I know you?"

"Oh, don't play the lost little lamb with me, Superman, okay? Be a hero or a Romeo or a heel or some kind of sick, hormone-infested macho freak or anything you feel like being, but don't make believe you don't know what's going on in my head."

"You're upset that I never told you that Clark and I were the same person."

"Upset? No, amazed. You're a stranger. Do you realize that? In all the years I've known you, you've been a stranger. How do you think that makes me feel?"

"Alone?"

"That's a good word for it. Another good word for it is shitty."

"Lois, I'm sorry. I'm sorry you had to find out about it on television. If I'd known it was going to happen I would have told you first."

"Told me first? How about second? How about in the week or two since the news broke? Where on God's Earth have you been all this time?"

"Maybe I've been busy making sure this remains God's Earth and not somebody else's."

"Oh, I get it. Now you're being the hero. The wide-eyed and innocent tactic didn't work. Well, I read the papers. I even write the papers. It's all very impressive the way you've been saving the world two, maybe three times a day. What would we do without you? And when you have the biggest personal crisis since you lost your parents, you have nothing to do about it but brood on the far side of the moon, for all I know. You certainly don't come and talk to your friends about it. You don't even drop a note to the person who's allegedly in love with you and tell her you're alive and well and you'll get back to her."

"I couldn't do anything else."

"Was I part of the disguise?"

"Excuse me?"

"The disguise. Clark Kent was the part of you that walked around looking and acting normal. A parody of normal. Was I just somebody to have tagging along on your arm in
Time
magazine so we puny mortals could think of you as a living, breathing Earthman who just happened to be an immigrant?"
 

"Lois, that's ridiculous. I don't think that's the real issue."

"Issue? I used to have a boyfriend before I met you named Barry Elkin, a psychologist. He was always talking about issues. He broke up with me because he said I still had too many issues to resolve. He said that out loud. I still don't know what he meant by that, other than the fact that he wanted to break up with me."

"It meant that he couldn't deal with a woman as strong-willed as you are."

"How do you know he wasn't even more strong-willed than I am? How do you know he wasn't the Lyndon Johnson of psychologists?"

"Because I once read a paper he wrote for a psychological journal on raising children. It was obvious from the paper that he was very strong-willed, although not as strong-willed as you are."

"Ah, the all-knowing, all-seeing Man of Steel strikes again. Is there anything you don't know?"

"I didn't know he was a friend of yours. Now I'll want to know more about him."

"Read some more psychological journals. I've got a mess to clean up."

"I'll clean up the mess. It was my apartment."

"I didn't mean the apartment. I meant my life."

Then she cried, which gave him an excuse to hold her in his arms, which made her stop crying and then made her angrier.

"Superman!" She pushed his arms away. "What is it you do to me? You know ants attract each other with smells?"

"Yes, they're called pheromones. They're a form of communication, like an insect language."

"Heartwarming. And did you know that now doctors are saying that attraction between humans is probably at least in part based on a smell we give off?"

"Yes, that's true. What are you getting at, Lois?"

"Well, how do I know that when you hold me like that you don't spray some weird pheromone up my nose at super-speed and make me fall madly in love with you?"

"Lois, that's completely incredible. You know I wouldn't do anything like that."

"That's just the point. I don't know anything of the sort. I can't trust you anymore. For years you slouched and talked in a high voice and hid behind your glasses and for all I know you laughed at me that whole time."

This was a highly inauspicious moment for the two of them, Superman and Lois Lane. There are a lot of inauspicious moments in the course of such discussions between people who are momentarily insecure and in love. The purpose of such discussions is to slide headlong at these moments, bump around a bit, deal with them, and eventually resolve whatever it is at issue. There are always lots of issues coming up with the bumps.

What Superman wanted to tell Lois next was that he was unsure about his ability to have her without having Clark as well. He wanted to say that Clark was his means to be on a roughly equal footing with her, and with those among whom he had to live.

What Lois would then have said was that a woman arrogant enough to love a superman is uninterested in having a man who is on an equal footing with her. She would have said that she loved Superman, that she was born and raised to love Superman or someone like him just as surely as Prince Charles was born and raised to be the King of England. She would have said that she firmly believed that if Superman had died as an infant with his parents on the planet Krypton, then there never would have been a Lois Lane, because there would have been no place in the world for her to fit in. She believed that everything fit into the Order of the world, and she would have impressed Superman by telling him this.

Before Lois met Superman, she would have said, she was both an overachiever and a lost soul, and without him she would have been a casualty of her own brute competence. She would still have been the first girl to edit the Hightstown High School newspaper, the first female valedictorian of her college class, and one of the first women to win a Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship from Columbia University. And with nothing better to do with her time, she would certainly have been a millionaire by the age of twenty-five, and a burned-out husk who had conquered all the worlds she had ever known by the age of thirty.

She would have said, in her characteristic colorful overstatement, that she used to go out with men who would have made Gloria Steinem and Lillian Hellman blush, and that, without exception, she was so unmoved by them she was in the habit of crying herself to sleep.

Lois would have said that before she met Superman she was a spoiled little girl who had never been said no to, who had never had her heart broken, and who would have died of loneliness by now if it were not for Superman. She would have asked him if he had any idea of what it was like to be totally alone, and he would have said that he did.

He would have confessed that now, without Clark behind whom to hide, he was afraid that he would soon die of loneliness himself. She would have cried again, he would have joined her, and they would have decided that they desperately needed each other.

Unfortunately, none of this was ever said. Unfortunately, at the inauspicious moment when Lois blithely accused Superman of using some sort of exotic hormone spray to get her to fall in love with him, the sky lit up with a new dire emergency.

This particular emergency was the result of C.W. Saturn, in the guise of Kristin Wells, whipping up all the pollution—all the nongaseous matter—in the sky between Metropolis and the edge of space, and weaving all that garbage together into a kind of flying carpet the size of the city itself. At the inauspicious moment when Superman streaked out the window, Kristin was riding the carpet from high in the sky down toward the surface of the city with the apparent intention of shrouding the city with it. Because it was so high, it reflected the rays of the sun off its surface like the moon, but as it came closer it would blot out the sun completely.

Superman would certainly be able to deal with this issue, just as he had been playing Kristin Wells to a stalemate ever since the devil took her soul. The conversation with Lois, however, would go unfinished.

"There was the elfin character who claimed to be from the Fifth Dimension, whatever that was," the old man said. "I can never remember his name, but whenever we run a story on him I look it up and spell it out in big block letters and tack it up on the bulletin board in the city room. People have been comparing him to this girl, but I don't think the comparison goes very far."

"You're talking about Mr. Mxyzptlk?" Dan Reed the moderator asked.

"Probably, but I couldn't vouch for your pronunciation of it."

"The pronunciation's right, Mr. White," Jimmy said.

"Thank you, Olsen. I'll have to take your word for it. Mr. What's-his-name has certain powers of—oh, what shall we call it?"

"Magic?" Reed suggested.

"All right, for lack of a more precise description, magic it is. He comes to town whenever he breaks out of whatever zoo they keep him in back home, and he simply follows Superman around trying to get his goat. He has, as a matter of fact, done many things similar to what this girl Kristin Wells has done. He once made the statue in the Lincoln Memorial come alive, for example, and walk across the ellipse to the Capitol Building where poor Senator Stevenson found himself plucked up and sitting in a six-foot-diameter marble palm, holding a conversation with his fellow Illinoisian. He did all sorts of things like that."

The man doing most of the talking was Perry White, the editor-in-chief of the
Daily Planet
, who once finished ahead of Walter Cronkite in an opinion poll to determine the man whose word the citizens of Metropolis trust most. White was a great gray mastodon of a man, three times a winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the person who had given Clark Kent his first job as a reporter. Barrel-chested and robust, White looked like the sort of man Bruce Jenner would be when he grew up. He was sitting between Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen, talking on a special live interview with the new WGBS anchorman, Dan Reed, about Superman and Clark Kent, the man Reed had replaced. The biggest news of the day—still, and getting bigger by the hour—was the running war
between Superman and Kristin Wells who, as everybody knew by now, was supposedly
possessed by some sort of malicious demon. Perry White had some trouble swallowing that idea, but he had seen some strange things in the past sixty-six years, he admitted.
 

Jimmy Olsen, on the other hand, positively choked on the notion. Jimmy stayed as silent as he did only because the man sitting next to him was the person who had first taught him that personal feelings have no place in responsible journalism. White was, next to Superman, the person Jimmy respected most in the world. In fact, Jimmy was usually afraid of White and had never been afraid of Superman. Sitting next to the editor, Jimmy felt like a beer can, discarded by some witless tourist, lying on the ground beside the last of the redwoods. Jimmy's first impulse, when Reed asked him to be on the show, was to refuse. He had refused at first, but so had Lois, and Jimmy changed his mind only when he realized that if Lois did not have something to do today—something that had the illusion of usefulness around it—she might do something foolish to herself. She was so morbidly depressed that she might do something foolish to herself anyhow, but he convinced her to go on the show with him.

Meanwhile, Jimmy thought, if Perry White kept talking with such clinical detachment about Kris as though she were some kind of primeval monster, Jimmy might do something even more foolish. He might disagree with Perry White in public. Maybe it didn't matter, Jimmy thought, because it was possible that nobody was watching. Most of the power was out in town and nobody wanted to hear the news these days anyhow.

"Whatever it is this little twerp's got," Perry continued on the subject of the mischievous otherworldly pixie, "Superman can't really handle it. Maybe it is magic. That was what we used to call it in the old days when Clark was with the
Daily Planet
and most newspapermen, except for Clark and a few others, hadn't yet discovered their responsibility to be precise in their writing. Whatever it is, Superman's vulnerable to it. And whatever it is, Miss Wells seems to have it or something like it in at least as great a measure as...umm—"
 

"Mxyzptlk," Jimmy said.

"Right."

"So what are you saying, Mr. White?"

"I'm saying, Dan, that whatever power this girl has is something from which
Superman is really unable to protect us. I'm also saying that unlike—Olsen?—"
 

"Mxyzptlk."

"Unlike Mix-el-plix, whatever, this girl's intentions don't involve having fun. She has willfully waged a psychological battle against our friend Superman, taking away his clearest tie with the world around him. She has kept him occupied with trivia ranging in seriousness from zany inconveniences like upside-down buildings and vanishing walls to genuine crises like locust plagues and epidemics of maddening eczema. Superman knows as well as we do that she must be stopped. I assume he hasn't yet stopped her, but simply defused what she has done so far, because of two reasons. Firstly, he doesn't know what her intentions are and he would like to know. Secondly, he may not have devised a way of stopping her short of killing her."