All My Friends Are Superheroes (7 page)

‘It’s been so long,’ the Perfectionist says.

All the Broken-Hearted Man’s plans evaporate. His eyes go wide. He can’t stop it. He can’t spin it or control it. It simply floods out of him.

‘Why did you do that?’ he wails. ‘Why would you do that to me? Why did you return my heart?’

The Perfectionist stares at the Broken-Hearted Man. Her teeth grind together.

‘I loved you so much,’ the Perfectionist says. Her eyes have gone glossy. ‘Without it, what would you have loved me with?’

The Broken-Hearted Man says nothing. He looks at his shoes and nods. He moves to the back of the airplane, finds an empty seat.

Tom returns from the washroom. He sees the Perfectionist crying. He strokes her hair with his hand. He almost feels her lean into him. She doesn’t hiccup.

FOURTEEN
THE BUTTON FACTORY GALLERY

Tom watches the Perfectionist sniff. In the washroom he’d realized that smell, like sound, was invisible. He scrubbed the deodorant from his underarms. He ran on the spot as fast as he could for six minutes. He’s still out of breath. Sweat drips from his forehead. There are moisture stains under his arms.

The Perfectionist leans towards him. She sniffs. He unbuttons the top three buttons of his shirt and holds it open at the collar. The Perfectionist leans closer. Tom flaps his arms like a chicken. She closes her eyes. She breathes in until her lungs are full.

‘Who are you fighting?’ Tom asks. A good question, but Tom’s referring to a specific experience they had at the Projectionist’s art show at the Button Factory Gallery.

Tom and the Perfectionist both received an invitation. He’d assumed she wouldn’t want to go but he was wrong. She wanted to see what the Projectionist called art. The Projectionist is the only superhero ever to receive a Canada Council grant.

The reception started at seven and Tom and the Perfectionist stepped from their cab at nine. They entered the gallery. It was shoulder to shoulder with superheroes. Everybody was there: the Cartographer, 360, Fifteen-minutesago, the Barometer, even the Scenester.

Tom and the Perfectionist circulated through the hot room. The Perfectionist was sweating (perfectly). The white walls of the gallery were bare – they couldn’t find any art. The room held nothing but superheroes. At 9:15 they were ready to leave. The Amphibian caught them on their way out the door.

‘Fantastic, isn’t it?’ asked the Amphibian. He held a large glass of wine in his hand. Stains on the rim showed it’d been filled several times.

Tom rolled his eyes. The Perfectionist crossed her arms.

‘About as expected,’ she said.

‘You didn’t go into the back room, did you?’ the Amphibian asked.

‘There’s a back room?’ asked Tom.

‘Follow me,’ the Amphibian said. He pushed through the superheroes. Tom and the Perfectionist followed.

At the far end of the room was a tiny door. The Amphibian got on his hands and knees. He crawled through the door.

‘I don’t want to get my pants dirty,’ said Tom.

‘I’ve got to see this,’ said the Perfectionist. She crawled through the tiny door. Tom followed her (and looked up her skirt).

The room on the other side was bigger than the one they’d just left. A mirror covered the far wall completely. It looked like a regular mirror. Tom, the Perfectionist and the Amphibian stood in front of it. Their reflections weren’t distorted in any way.

Tom rolled his eyes. The Perfectionist crossed her arms. They were both disappointed, a sentiment Tom was about to express when his reflection leapt out of the mirror and started running towards him. The Perfectionist’s reflection jumped out of the mirror and started running towards her. So did the Amphibian’s.

With his reflection running towards him, Tom didn’t know what to do. He raised his fists. His reflection raised its fists. They sized each other up. They circled around each other.

Tom found an opening. He jabbed with a right, which his reflection blocked with a left. His reflection threw a
right hook, which Tom blocked with his left arm. In his peripheral vision Tom saw the Perfectionist fighting the same fight.

Tom’s arms began to ache. His knuckles were bleeding. Bruises were forming on his forearms. He couldn’t keep this up much longer, and his reflection showed no signs of tiring.

‘What are you guys doing?’ yelled the Amphibian.

The Amphibian’s voice surprised Tom. Tom hadn’t been this surprised by the Amphibian since the day he’d taken him to see the Salzburg Chamber Orchestra perform Mozart’s Serenades Nos. 3 and 4.

Tom had wanted the Amphibian to see everything. The Amphibian had never been to a classical music concert before. They were the third and fourth in their seats. A halfhour later the orchestra came out. Some of the musicians played scales. Others simply tuned their instruments. Some played the same three or four bars over and over again. The musicians finished tuning and the house lights dimmed. The conductor walked into view.

The Amphibian stood up. His clapping was frantic.

‘That was fantastic!’ he screamed. The rest of the evening just disappointed him.

Just like his friends were disappointing him now.

‘What are you doing?’ the Amphibian repeated. His voice was filled with disbelief. It made Tom and the Perfectionist stop. When they stopped, their reflections stopped. All four turned and looked at the Amphibian, who
was sitting on the floor across from his reflection. The two Amphibians were sharing the same glass of wine. They both looked annoyed.

‘These are friends of yours?’ asked the Amphibian on the right.

‘Two of the best I have,’ answered the Amphibian on the left. They rolled their eyes and continued their conversation.

The airhostess comes around and collects Tom’s headphones. Tom hands them over. He turns towards the Perfectionist, leans in close.

‘I know you’re fighting yourself,’ Tom says. ‘I know you want to see me.’ But the Perfectionist keeps staring out the window of the airplane.

FIFTEEN
TENSE

The Perfectionist continues smelling Tom. It’s his post-exercise smell. She looks at her watch. She has thirteen minutes before the plane lands. She needs to talk to the Clock. Putting her tray in the upright position, she settles back in her chair, closes her eyes and falls asleep.

The Perfectionist’s eyeballs flicker behind her eyelids. Even though she and the Clock both live in Toronto, and it’s not even a ten-dollar cab ride between their houses, they never manage to find the time to get together. So, at least twice a month, the Clock visits the Perfectionist in her dreams.

They sit in matching yellow mesh lawn chairs. The strapping pinches the Perfectionist’s left thigh. She shifts in
her chair, looks over her shoulder and sees the cottage her family rented every summer until she was eighteen. She wiggles dry sand between her toes. It’s 3:30 in the afternoon. She hopes she’s wearing sunscreen and sniffs the air.

‘Can you smell that?’ the Perfectionist asks the Clock.

‘Smell what?’

‘Tom.’

‘Only if Tom smells like dead fish,’ answers the Clock.

‘I swear I can smell Tom,’ she says, folding her hands in her lap. She looks at her fingers. Her nails are never bitten here.

‘What’s it like?’ she asks the Clock.

‘What’s what like?’

‘Travelling. Being able to travel to the future.’

‘It’s nothing like you think,’ the Clock tells her.

‘Will you take me?’

‘You wouldn’t like it.’

‘I just want to see it.’

‘It’s not like you’re imagining.’

‘Take me there,’ the Perfectionist pleads. She puts her hand on the Clock’s arm. ‘I really need to see it.’

Part of the reason the Perfectionist is so desperate to see the future is that she once got stuck in the present. She had a fling with Terry Cloth, whose superpower is the ability to make every day feel like Sunday. They met on February 11th and spent the next five months in bed. They didn’t have a lot of sex; they moved the
TV
into the bedroom. They ordered
in and had supplies delivered. They started screening their calls and then stopped answering the phone altogether. June went by and neither of them had left the apartment.

Then one morning, the Perfectionist woke up early. She let Terry Cloth sleep. Puttering around in the bathroom, she stepped on the scale and waited for the needle to stop swinging back and forth. When it did she was so shocked she jumped off the scale, spilling red wine on her white housecoat.

She’d gained fifteen pounds. All her clothes were too tight and her housecoat was the only article of clothing she felt comfortable in. The washing machine was broken. She pulled on a pair of Terry’s track pants and a white T-shirt that stretched over her belly. She carried her housecoat down two flights of stairs to the street.

Outside she sniffed in the fresh air. The sound of traffic was overwhelming. There were so many people. She walked to the laundromat watching the sidewalk.

The wash cycle was twenty-seven minutes long. The Perfectionist read a newspaper, had a coffee and eaves-dropped on people talking about their jobs. She looked at her watch; it didn’t feel like Sunday any more. It felt like Wednesday. It was Wednesday.

The Perfectionist knew Wednesdays weren’t as good as Sundays. But it still felt good to have one. She never went back to Terry Cloth.

Terry Cloth was heartbroken. His superpower so often went unrecognized and he thought he’d found someone
who really appreciated him. His life became an endless series of Sunday afternoons, instead of Sunday mornings, until he hooked up with Mr. Breakfast.

The Clock pushes her sunglasses on top of her head. ‘You want to go because of Tom?’ she asks.

‘Yes.’

‘Then what I’m about to show you will only disappoint you,’ the Clock says.

‘I think I know that.’

‘Okay.’

The Clock picks up her lawn chair. She sets it down so her back is to the water. The meshing sags as the Clock sits face-to-face with the Perfectionist. Their knees touch. She holds the Perfectionist’s chin. She tips the Perfectionist’s head down until their foreheads meet.

‘Close your eyes,’ the Clock whispers.

‘They are closed.’

‘Close them.’

The Perfectionist closes her eyes. The Clock begins to hum. The hum is high-pitched and steady. It drowns out the seagulls and the surf. The Perfectionist can feel it in her chest. It keeps getting louder. It fills her ears. She can’t think about anything else. Then it’s gone. All sound is gone.

‘We’re here,’ the Clock says.

The Perfectionist opens her eyes. She sees nothing. It’s white. All white. There’s no up. There’s no down. No horizon. Nothing. It’s just white.

‘Clock, what is this?’ asks the Perfectionist. Her voice is shaky.

‘This is the future.’

‘This is the future?’ the Perfectionist asks. Her mouth is dry. She forces herself to swallow.

‘Why is the future like this?’

‘Because it hasn’t happened yet,’ says the Clock.

The Perfectionist wakes up. She’s on the airplane. She feels the plane’s descent. She flares her nostrils. She breathes, deeply. She can still smell Tom.