He couldn’t remember the drive home. He peered into the living room, at the stillness and neatness, and a strange sensation of nausea crept up on him. The light was harsh and the house cold. He went through to the kitchen and leaned on the counter. Taking a glass from the cupboard, he poured himself some water and gulped it down.
‘I miss you,’ he said to the vision of his parents in his mind, fully aware of how crazy and stupid this was.
The out-of-control feeling was back. He regulated his breath and closed his eyes and counted to ten. Then he threw the glass as hard as he could against the wall. At the breakfast bar he untucked one of the tall stools and took it into the living room. He calmly turned it on its side, legs facing the wall, and smashed it through the screen of the TV with such force the glass spat back into his face.
He remembered seeing a documentary about people living close to Chernobyl and how, on the night it happened, they sensed what felt like tiny bits of sand being fired against their skin when, in fact, it was gamma radiation.
Sam stepped back into the middle of the living room and examined the stool, two-thirds suspended in mid-air, the other third through the screen and out the back. He didn’t feel any better. Making his way back to the kitchen, he unlocked the side door into the garage and took from one of the metal racks a stack of folded-up cardboard boxes and the tape gun.
Ascending the ladder to the attic, he switched on the lights. He had grown to hate this place. He filled box after box without stopping, without hesitating, for three hours straight. Inside himself there was a staccato cascading. Before taping up the final box he noticed an eight-page preview comic of Y: The Last Man. In the hallway he took it out and flicked through it. In the same box he found a reprint of The Death of Superman. There were all the Akira books. There were lots of Suicide Squad comics, Hellboy, Neonomicon, We3, From Hell, 100 Bullets. He loved these comics so much. They had done so much for him.
He taped up the final box and when he loaded it into his car he looked at all the boxes, filling the inside to the brim, but even so it didn’t seem like much. His eyes and throat stung with hidden dust, and he opened the car window on his way.
When considering his chosen superpower he used to think if things were getting too hard he could blink and everyone in his field of vision would disappear. He would love that so much – to be alone, to go back to, if not a happy life, a life he could bear.
He felt perfectly calm as he arrived at the tip. He pulled up at the paper recycling area and started unloading the boxes, untaping them, tossing the contents over, quick as he could, throwing them jerkily, as if they were covered in disease.
He suddenly remembered exactly how good the first volume of Y: The Last Man was. What an awesome premise for a story: the death of every creature with a Y chromosome, apart from one man and his pet monkey. He’d read it in springtime, season-change weather, the sun higher in the sky. Now his breathing faltered again and the rain, falling in sheets, was freezing. His T-shirt provided little protection from it. He started opening the remaining boxes but couldn’t remember which one it was in. It was dark and he was in the shadow of one of the huge metal containers. Pulling the tape back, he felt a certain degree of panic. He’d just keep that one. But he couldn’t find it. He upended a box, then another, then another, the comics spilling all over the concrete. He kicked them aside but to no avail. What if he’d already thrown it over the top and into the container? He looked up. The container was red and blistered with rust.
‘Just forget it,’ he said aloud.
He tried to stay calm but his lip was shaking and he put his hands to his head and grabbed two clumps of hair and started pulling as hard as he could. His eyes were pinched so tight they hurt. He threw away the few strands that had come out of his scalp and from the corner of his eye caught them drifting up and away towards the orange light. He went down on his knees to find the comic, but it wasn’t there, and then started punching the sides of his head, fighting back the tears, determined not to be pathetic and cry. He could feel the last vestiges of sanity slipping into the distance as he ran at the container, brought his fist up and smashed his knuckles into the side as hard as he could. He felt the bones crunch and the pain shoot up his arm. He lay down in the soaking mud for a second. It was dark and late and nobody was around so he stayed there.
At last he sat up, and threw what was left of his beloved comics over the lip of the container. In the last box he came to the first book of Sandman, the book that had pulled him back into the world that day in his neighbour’s deserted garden. He tilted it towards the light and turned to the last story, about Death. How many nights had he gone to sleep with this book lying next to him? He watched it flutter upwards, a broken butterfly, and time seemed to slow with the image of the book coming open, the leaves flapping, the backlight of orange halogen. Then it was gone and the rain picked up.
Shivering in the car, he sat for a moment, soaked through. His chest was tight and it felt as if fingers were at his throat. The unnatural, prickly sweating and light-headedness. And then the feeling of impending death. His mind fell back, years crumbling as his memory accessed the coping mechanisms for panic attacks. He imagined a forest glade, bright sunlight, the cool shade under the eaves of the trees at the fringe.
But the Andromeda Galaxy was on a collision course with our own Milky Way, comets from the time the universe started hurtled across space in never-ending streams, the sun was going to burn out. Eventually the whole universe will tear itself apart.
He thought of the magical pond on the mountainside. And his mum and dad. What were people going to do when they recognised him on the street as the weirdo who dressed up as a superhero? What was he going to do now that he was a freak in the only place he felt safe – his hometown? What was he going to do without Sarah?
In the night he read every road sign under his breath twice, and blinked with a little nod as he passed every lamp post.
He pulled up outside the community centre, where his friends were camping out for a Call of Duty video game night, and ran to the front door, pushing through it with his shoulder. In the hallway blue light glowed through the square of reinforced glass set into the double doors. Inside, banks of screens stood on a fold-out table, computerised images of war, with steel frames draped with black netting and plastic vines like camouflage around the centre of the room. There was a table of supplies: chocolate bars and kettles and milk and bottles of Coke. In the centre of it all men in sleeping bags lay on their fronts on top of camping mats, ratcheted up on their elbows, their gaming controls held up before them. Sam sidled round, found Blotchy and stood in front of him.
‘Hey!’
Botchy tried to crane his neck to see around Sam’s form.
‘Congratulations, you got what you wanted,’ said Sam, leaning over him.
‘You’re not covering us,’ someone shouted.
Blotchy’s glasses caught the reflection of the screens and the rest of his face was in near darkness, but Sam felt his eyes behind the lenses.
‘Don’t ever speak to me again. You hated it that I was going to be happy, and now I’m not and I just came here to say I don’t need you. I never needed you, and never speak to me again.’
Sam gave a final nod from his head down to the centre of his chest, and then he made for the door.
The night outside was even colder now. He started shaking uncontrollably. He couldn’t remember ever being this angry. Something had snapped.
‘Sam,’ a voice called from behind.
Tango. Sam reached the car and got in, slamming the door.
‘What’s happened?’
Tango’s voice was muffled through the glass. The anger growing and growing, Sam screeched back up the ramp that led to the road. There was a flash of light and the sounding of a deep horn, the screeching of brakes and tyres squealing as a lorry swerved across to the other side of the road. Sam put his foot down, his back end fish-tailing, his heart beating so hard it shook his bones, and tore off.
He imagined the scene, Blotchy laughing to himself, emailing the newspaper, telling them about Sam and his superhero alter ego. He accelerated up the streets, blowing dead leaves into vortices as he cut through the night.
He picked up the photo on the passenger seat, of his family, and glimpsed at it whenever he passed under a street light. They’d want you to be happy, people had said to him when it happened, but he couldn’t be happy. That path was not open to Sam. He wished it would come to him, the memory of the day, like a hidden door sliding open, but he knew it never would. The day the picture was taken was lost in the synapses, data corrupted. The past was gone for ever.