“Don’t apologize,” said the guy across from me, Toby Wires—aka Wire-Lad. Used to be, he could control metal cables. Why just metal cables? We never found out. Of course, now all he controlled were lattes, as a barista. “We’re not an ‘example’ anymore, Shawna. You don’t have to worry about the code of morals—you can speak freely.”
“Right you are, fucker!” More laughter, and this time I saw some genuine smiles. “Damn, it feels good to curse. One good thing about the Rewrite, we finally get to act like people.”
“Represent!” said Gamma Gal, pumping a fist.
Toby put out a hand. “Okay, come on. Let the girl finish.”
“Anyway, I’m no different than you guys. I still miss my old life. After…” I swallowed. The cement floor seemed to spin underneath me, as I tried to reconcile reality with who I used to be. The thing I used to care about. “After the Rewrite, when we ended up here, I went to see Cellular Man. A lot of heroes, they couldn’t deal with the loss of their powers. The villains were fine—they ran off to run governments, work on Wall Street, they fit right in. But Cellular Man…” I swallowed. I could still see the blood.
Every day, tried to wash it away, but it wouldn’t go. Out, damned spot, out. It was everywhere, staining my clothes, my sheets. But taking that horror and putting it into words was beyond me. “He tried to shapeshift… without powers,” I said, my voice shaking. “He cut off… pieces of himself, stapled or stitched them onto other body parts. It was…” I couldn’t finish. My throat was closing up. Toby got up, brought me a glass of water, and I choked it down. I found his hand on my shoulder.
“It’s okay,” he said. “You don’t have to—”
“I want to,” I said, a little more fiercely than I’d intended. A couple ex-sidekicks winced. I must have looked a mess; eyes streaming, hair akimbo. But I needed to finish the story. All our lives had been cut short—I deserved that much. “I need this.”
“Okay.” He sat down.
“When the police came… the new police, not the kind we used to know, not the bumbling extras who would eat donuts and wait for us to show up… when the cops came, they threw me in a squad car. They were going to pin it on me. I was stupid enough to touch the knives, I tried to pull them out. They had fingerprints…” I focused on breathing, zoned in on a small hole in the concrete. A perforation. “They were convinced I did it. I was done for. And then he came.”
“The Storyteller,” said Toby.
I nodded. “Yes. With his cashmere sweater, and his pipe, and his stupid fucking…” They all blanched. “His… big glasses.” I wasn’t scared of him, not like they were. They all thought he was God, that he could kill any of us at any time, for speaking ill of him. I knew better.
If he’d wanted to kill us, he wouldn’t waste so much time torturing us.
“He walked into the police station. He wrote something on a piece of paper… Taped it to my cell. No one seemed to notice him. And the same officer who’d slammed my nose into the floor, broke it and wouldn’t give me a phone call, that officer opened the cell door. Smiled. Offered me… offered me coffee.” I fingered the crook in my nose where the splint had settled the bone. It still crunched, sometimes, when I poked it. “They said they were sorry, so sorry for the mix-up. That night they arrested some random guy, charged him with Cellular’s murder. Last I heard, he was doing fifty to life.”
Silence, around the ring of pale and frightened faces.
“I came back here. Back to the cul-de-sac, where all of us seem to end up—no matter what jobs we land, no matter who we once were. Villains, heroes, sidekicks, fucking henchmen… We all end up here.” I found I could breathe once more. Some great and awful weight was lifting from my joints, my spine, fleeing my guts like the sudden absence of a tumor. “Someone else moved into Cellular Man’s house, the week after. Like nothing happened.”
“What was on the piece of paper?” This was Remora Boy. He was sucking on a lollipop: slowly, compulsively. His way, I assumed, of dealing with the lack of his suction powers. I couldn’t judge. We all had our own ways of carrying the cross, the weight of a past world, one that had never existed.
“It had this elaborate, cursive handwriting. Very small, very precise. It said… ‘After the gruesome murder at Olympus Circuit Drive, young Shawna was falsely accused, another victim of our flawed criminal justice system. Luckily, a stop-and-frisk caught the real culprit with the victim’s blood and several murder weapons, that very night! Vindication never tasted so sweet.’”
“Our state doesn’t have stop-and-frisk,” said Toby.
“Exactly.” That tiny hole in the concrete seemed to swallow my world, as I delved into the memory, explored its nooks and crannies. Searching for any missing pieces. “There was more.”
They waited.
“‘The good people of Olympus Circuit welcomed her back with open arms.’” I’d kept the paper, pinned it to my fridge, to prove I wasn’t crazy. Memorized it. “‘Soon enough, the terrible act was forgotten, and life returned to normal. Shawna Mason continued her life as a landscaping designer… an ordinary, everyday hero, making the community more beautiful each day.’ And that’s why I came. Because… because no one remembered him. And that wasn’t right.” I broke up a little, and Remora Boy handed me a tissue box. I took it reluctantly, snorted into a Kleenex.
“Anybody got a trash can?”
“Over there,” said Gamma. I threw a mess of mucus and shame into the bin. Stared at the floor again.
“You say this was months ago,” Toby prompted me, softly. “Why now? If he made us forget, why did you need to share this with us now?”
My hands balled into fists. “Because… because I don’t think that’s the only thing he’s made us forget.”
Toby frowned. “What do you mean?”
There was a knock on the door. We all jumped. I knew who it was; I knew what was about to happen. For all we knew, it might have happened a hundred times—because none of us would remember. Not with our lives rewritten out from under our feet every morning.
“I think he’s Rewritten more than just our pasts,” I said, speaking over the sound. “I think he’s messing with us on purpose. Torturing us, building a Purgatory, for something the heroes did. Or something he thinks they did.”
“Shawna,” said Toby, rising, “maybe we shouldn’t—”
“No! Fuck this!” I rose. Pushed my chair in front of the door. The knocking grew louder; I tried to shut it out, tried to think of anything but that sound, my nails digging blood out of my fists. “We can’t let him do this! We were the good guys, damn it! We don’t deserve this!” Remora Boy was crying. The others had pulled away from me; their faces were sheep’s faces, panicked and wild-eyed.
“We have to fight back,” I said, and the knocking grew louder, and I could feel his influence slithering into the room like a fat slash of red ink through our lives. “He’s going to stop us meeting like this. He’s going to make us forget. But we need to hold on. He can’t rewrite everything! There has to be some hole—some way through his powers!”
Toby stepped forward. First I thought he was going to hit me, stop me from bringing the anger of our new God into this room, into our minds. But he just put a hand on my cheek.
“This has happened before,” he said. He was smiling, the genial expression of peace you might see on a saint. Or a martyr. “You gave us a phrase to repeat. A mantra. This time I remembered it.”
“I…” The hammering was thicker and now I recognized it for what it was: not a fist on wood, but the sound of a typewriter’s keys, old-fashioned and big as the stars, slamming down into us, changing the script. “What was it?”
“No one can break through the ceiling,” he said and then the Sidekicks decided to disband their quaint little meeting, for the good of all. There would be no more awkward confessions tonight. Because the old world was gone, and it was easier to forget it, let it pass. The comrades hugged, they cried, they ate crackers and cheese and slurped stale water from Toby’s kitchen tap. And then they went home, and fell into a deep, nourishing sleep, forgetting all dreams of returning to the old way. After all, their lives were better now: more meaningful, more human. No more silly costumes, no more playing dice with the fate of the earth. Their toys were broken, but they now had a chance to do real good. Lasting good.
In the quiet of Olympus Drive, there remained only the stillness of night, and the ripe possibilities of a slowly approaching dawn.
I woke up screaming. The scary part was, I didn’t know why.
My throat was raw. My hands were scabbed over with fingernail marks.
I got out of bed, tried to wash the blood off my hands.
No one can break through the ceiling.
There was a note on the fridge.
