Behind the Mask

A woman in the row ahead bounces a fussy baby. I can see him in the gap between the seats, struggling as if taken captive by a giant. He fastens his cloudy blue eyes on mine, and I make a wild face, blowing out my cheeks and raising my eyebrows. For a moment, he goes quiet. Then his face collapses, and his wail fills the train car with unfiltered anguish. He weeps huge, adult-size tears.

Grand Central has been rebuilt since I moved from the city. Only it wasn’t rebuilt; it was always here. The Unmaker never brought it down on top of thousands of morning commuters, reducing it to shrieking rubble, before Outsider subdued him. From its soaring ceiling to its urine-scented lower corners, it has remained unchanged, reliable. For everyone but me.

Two Hyde cops are leaning against the wall at the end of the platform, bullshitting and watching the disembarking commuters. I resist the urge to pull my hoodie tighter around my face. Try not to look like a criminal, Emma. There’s no way they’re looking for me.

As soon as my parents discover I’m missing, they’ll know where I’m headed. They might call the cops. And, of course, I’m carrying a gun in my messenger bag, which I basically stole.

They’re not Hyde cops anymore, I remind myself. They’re New York City cops. I’ll never get over that. Of all the insults I’ve endured in sixteen turbulent years, the worst—well, the second-worst—was waking up to find someone had renamed my city.

No one knew Outsider’s exact origin story, but you could always detect in him a restless sorrow, a weariness, even when he streaked through the skies over Hyde on his way toward danger, rattling the skyscrapers with sonic booms.

He broke a few windows in the early flyovers. He was frightening: a man stumbling around in blind grief. He once careened through a flock of Canada Geese, sending lifeless birds spiraling down onto rooftop decks. He was sloppy, but in his carelessness, we saw sadness.

Outsider came from a distant future, a dying Earth. He was the first to step through a painstakingly-constructed wormhole designed to carry the last surviving humans to the safety of the past. They hoped to live out their lives under cover of false identities, refugees scattered in the confusion of our age. Like all of his people, he was augmented at the molecular level, possessing abilities far beyond those of his human ancestors. They planned to conceal their natural advantages from the inhabitants of the time.

There were some amongst his kind who implored him not to go, arguing that humanity’s lifespan was simply at an end. The human story was over, they said. You only do us a disservice by prolonging it.

What I love about Hyde—or New York—is that in a hundred steps I can pass the apartments of dozens of interesting people. Where we live now, a hundred steps only take me as far as the home of a distracted broker and a “concierge travel specialist,” whatever that is. Together they drive a sleepy, flaccid child between play dates.

I miss Hyde. I can tell my parents do, too, although they think it was always called New York City.

“It was too crazy there,” my mom says. Meaning: you were too crazy there, Emma. You and your stories about Outsider, and the Unmaker, and battles that demolished places you loved. Your frightening insistence that they were real and not the stuff of comic books. “Hasn’t the city been through enough?” my mother would ask. “Do you have to pretend it was worse?”

Focus, the last surviving hero, lives in a tightly-guarded penthouse atop a metallic modern building. He seldom descends to street level, but my research tells me he’s going to attend a meeting of global financial bodies this afternoon. With no supervillains to fight, Focus campaigns against the evils of corruption.

He’s a shadow of the hero I remember, but he’s the only person who can help me.

I’m not prepared for the throngs of people outside Focus’s building. The street is cordoned off, with New York cops keeping people on the opposite sidewalk. A limo idles at the curb. Many of his admirers hold up signs, appealing for his help: Please find my daughter. Missing since June 1997 and What happened to Flight MH370? They fidget and peer over the heads of the others.

The doors open, and a sigh passes like a breeze through the crowd, but it’s only two hefty men in dark suits, who regard us through mirrored sunglasses. Then I feel the crowd urge forward, and he’s there, wrapped in a hooded black cloak like a monk’s robe, his face obscured. He’s being hustled forward by a female guard in a suit and identical sunglasses, and he seems frail, harried.

“Focus!” people call out. “Focus! Over here!” They hoist their signs, begging for recognition.

If I’m right, I won’t have to shout. If I’m wrong, and he won’t listen, the last superhero is probably a dead man, and I’m on my own.

“Focus,” I say, making no effort to raise my voice. “I believe you’re in danger from Martin Tucker, the comic book writer.”

All at once, the people around me slow and blur, their voices dialing down to mere whispers. The entire world fades—everything except me and the stooped man in black across the street.

“Why do you say that?” he asks. His voice is as clear as if he were standing directly in front of me.

I begin to perceive a web of filaments, a forest of glowing fibers stretching in all directions, connecting everything in a complex lattice. A woman, brandishing a sign with glacial, agonizing slowness, ate at the same table in a diner as the man who is yelling in extreme slow-motion at a taciturn cop. The cop’s neighbor once bummed a cigarette off the man who sold the magic marker that the woman used to make her sign.

This is the power Focus wields: to perceive and make plain the patterning behind the skin of the world.

The people between us move incrementally forward, their details blurred. Here goes nothing.

“He’s somehow related to the disappearance of several dozen superheroes—and villains—over the last ten years,” I say.

The skein of filaments reaches out beyond the city. I see a woman in Malaysia making my shirt, a stooped man strolling the beach somewhere along the Indian Ocean.

“There are no other superheroes,” he says. “I’m the only one.” His face is hidden behind wraps of dark cloth, the eyes barely visible.

Outsider’s passage through the wormhole produced an electromagnetic pulse that fried networks within sixty miles of Hyde. He awoke under dark streetlamps and darker buildings, breathing the unfamiliar stink of burning fossil fuels. People began filtering out of doorways, congregating in the streets and talking to strangers in the way you only see during a disaster.

The wormhole inverted and closed with a thunderclap. His children never appeared. Outsider’s passage had led to the total collapse of the timeline he knew as his history. He had erased everyone he loved from existence.

He was alone, angry, and powerful in ways unimaginable to the people around him.

The quantum-level alterations in his mind and body were powered from extra-dimensional realms created in his timeline. When his universe collapsed, this energy source began to fade.

That was Outsider’s great secret. With his powers faltering, he was constantly forced to improvise, to push harder, to discover new capacities within himself. He became more than he ever might have been, had he remained in his own time. But he sometimes wished he had stayed behind with the people he loved to watch the world die.

Everyone knows that story now. They read it in the comic books, now that Outsider is just a fictional character. But I remember when he rattled the windows of Hyde, and no one knew exactly why. Back then, that little quantum of knowledge in the hands of the Unmaker might have leveled a city.

Everything speeds up again. The female guard, following whispered instructions, crosses the street and points me out to a cop, who waves me through the cordon tape.

Resentment shimmers through the crowd. “What’s so special about her?” I hear one woman say. A man shouts to the dark, hooded figure, “You only help little girls?”

The filaments reach out from me and weave into those growing out of the seats and unraveling like vines from the ceiling. Only Focus remains untouched by the pattern. The fibers bend around him, moving slightly as if to avoid his touch.

“You’ve been found to be . . . delusional,” he says. “I see two— three?—protective orders that forbid you to contact individuals in the comic book industry.”

“There were more,” I admit, “but those people don’t exist anymore. I was trying to get in touch with the Glass Samurai and Fidget. Their people got a little jumpy.”

He sits back. The filaments fade a bit, retreating into the world. I wonder if he’s about to kick me out of the car. I can’t let it happen. “I remember,” I tell him. “I remember when Outsider was a real man, when New York was called Hyde, and there were villains who nearly leveled the city. One by one, they vanished, and no one else knows they were ever real. Right about the time a superhero disappeared, they showed up for the first time in a comic book.”

He’s not going to kick me out. Inside my chest, I feel a spring uncoil, the loosening of a tightness I’d forgotten was there, and all at once I’m afraid I’m going to cry. No one has ever believed me. For years, I’ve been sitting across from nodding therapists, who listened intently without rolling their eyes, and just when I began to think they understood, they’d say “I believe you believe it’s true,” and smile as if that was the same thing as “I believe you.”

Focus looks out the window. I wonder if he can perceive the city the way I do, unmade and remade, its near destruction flattened into inked pages in a comic book.

He speaks with little moments of hesitation, as if holding up and discarding all the words that don’t quite fit his meaning. “I’ve seen . . . flaws in the patterns around him. Every time a new comic series comes out, there’s a strangeness to the world, like pieces of a blanket were cut out and . . . patched back together.”

His voice is strained and surprisingly young. “For months now, I’ve been aware of him . . . studying me. Trying to trace my connections, discover my identity, my story.”

That’s how all the comic books start: with the secret identity. No one knows Focus’s origin story.

He continues. “My privacy is my only defense. I believe if he can . . . discern my personal history, he can do me harm.”

He leans in, so close I can hear him breathing through the dark wraps that encircle his face. “Tucker is surprisingly . . . disconnected. If he’s rewritten history, then he’s written himself out of it. I know his location, nothing more. And he has . . . influential friends.”

“No. People who are very . . . connected. People I need as partners . . . in my work.”

What’s he talking about? The excitement I felt at being believed is already draining. “I need your help,” I plead.

He shakes his cowl. “No, you don’t. Go home. You should—” He angles his head, sensing something in my pattern. “You brought a gun.”

Filaments shoot from the seats, passing through me. Something is wrong. They reach out for Focus, lightly at first, like a mother touching her newborn, then wrapping his arms and legs in glowing shackles.

A shimmering fiber bursts through the wall of the limo and enters the back of his head. His body jerks as if electrocuted. More filaments encircle and bind him. With visible effort, he pulls the fabric wraps from his face. He’s handsome. I could see talking to him longer, on a train or somewhere normal, in a normal world.

“He found me,” he gasps. As the threads cocoon him, he blurts out an address and apartment number.

“Where you going?” the driver asks. I’m not in the limo anymore. I’m in a New York taxi.

I swallow, trying to dispel the violence of what I’ve just seen. “Have you ever heard of a superhero called Focus?” I ask.

The man hesitates. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. You mean a DJ or something?”

I think about looking for a bookstore, so I could see if Martin Tucker’s latest creation has hit the stands yet.

I have a gun, I remind myself. I don’t have super strength, and I can’t fly or perceive underlying patterns, but I have a gun, and that passes for a superpower among normal people like me. I can kill Martin Tucker if I want to.

They say that every time you remember something, you open up the memory and repack it again, like viewing a painting and making a perfect copy of it, over and over. With time, the details smear and change, until the picture is something entirely different, not a transcription of the way the world was, but your own creation.

Dust blew around me. Not like a sandstorm, but an unspeakable darkness, the pulverized remains of people, buildings, and dreams. Blocks of debris impacted nearby, like the footsteps of an approaching giant.

He never bothered with an extravagant costume, never indulged in theatrical capes or high collars. He wore the same simple shirt and pants he had on when he came back to our time. When his feet settled on the cracked sidewalk beside me, I felt the solid, reassuring thump through the bottoms of my shoes.

“And what are you doing here?” he asked. There was a faint accent, an endearing lilt he never quite shed when he learned our language.

I knew him by sight. Everyone did. I’d watched him in videos, on the news, and listened to my parents debate whether he was a hero or something else.

A man ran out of the swirling dust, his face contorted in panic, and vanished back into the storm.

Outsider smiled. Caked dust cracked at the corners of his eyes. “Emma the Brave,” he said.

It’s one of those buildings where you need a key or someone to buzz you in. I wait a few minutes, hoping to slip in behind another resident, but no one comes along, so I pick an apartment and ring the intercom.

“It’s Sara from down the hall,” I say to the buzzy voice in the grill. “I forgot my key.”

It will be pretty pathetic if my quest to meet Martin Tucker ends on the front stoop of his building.

Chin up, I tell myself. There are lots of apartments up there, full of different kinds of people. Smart people, suspicious people, gullible people. I just need one of the latter.

On the long, clacking elevator ride to the top floor, I slip my hand into my bag and touch the gun. I have no idea how one confronts a supervillain. Should I put the muzzle in his face as he opens his door? As a villain, he probably won’t show any emotion, but he’ll be looking to outwit me as soon as he can. I have to act fast.

I’ve never fired a gun in my life. I’m not cut out to kill someone, supervillain or not.

If there were a reverse button on the elevator, I would press it, go back to ground level, and start the long walk back to Grand Central right now. Maybe I could stop by a few places I remember being destroyed, a tourist from another world.

The clattering of the elevator rises to a crescendo, then falls silent. The doors open.

I never had a master plan. I thought if I could enlist the help of Focus, we might have a chance at stopping Martin Tucker before he erased everything amazing from the world. This is utterly, stupidly hopeless.

Speaking of hopeless, I’m going to be in more trouble back home than I’ve ever imagined. I swiped my parents’ credit card and stole a gun from their safe. I’m not compliant with my useless medications and not cooperating with my psychologists. I’ve been told that if I continue with my obsessive behavior toward certain figures in the comic book industry, I’ll be confined to a rehabilitation facility against my will. Being in Martin Tucker’s building with a stolen firearm probably qualifies as my last strike.

The elevator doors start to close. I put up my hand to stop them. Emma the Brave steps out.

I leave the gun in my bag and knock on the apartment door. From within, there’s a mousy scurrying, then silence. The peephole darkens.

A pause. “I’m sorry,” he says. “I don’t know how you got in here, but I suggest you leave.”

“I’m not talking about the comic book,” I say, leaning in. “I mean the real Outsider.”

He doesn’t answer, and I begin to wonder if he walked away from the door. “And I want to know why you changed Hyde to New York!”

There’s no sound. Maybe I should have led with the gun. At last, he speaks. “Step back and let me see you.”

I comply, looking directly into the peephole until I lose my nerve and stare at the carpet.

“Are you the one who’s been hassling my agent?” he asks. There’s no anger in his voice. He actually sounds curious.

The door clicks and rattles as he draws back the locks. “Well,” he says. “I’d hate to disappoint a fan.”

I was expecting someone more . . . villainous. He’s wearing a ratty gray T-shirt with a cartoon manatee on it and cargo shorts that reach below his knees. He’s mostly bald, with a scruffy goatee. He might be my dad’s age.

His apartment is lit by huge windows full of sky, and it’s a dump. The red couch and three mismatched chairs look like furniture rescued from a sidewalk. They’re stacked with books, papers, and magazines, and there are more piles on the floor. The walls are bare. The sink overflows with grimy dishes. The only clear spot is a wooden stool and a space on the kitchen counter for his laptop.

I have the disconcerting feeling that I’m supposed to say something nice about the apartment. My parents used to say that was what everyone in Hyde did when they went over to each other’s places. “Nice windows,” I say.

“I’ll stand,” I reply, because I’m pretty sure that’s what you’re supposed to say to the villain. Then I feel foolish and sit. “Fine.”

“They vanish, and some time later, they show up in a comic book. Everyone thinks they’re fictional.”

Martin Tucker shrugs. “It’s just a matter of unearthing their secrets.” He meets my eyes for just a moment before again letting his gaze wander the room. “I discover their secret identity. I get the origin story. I write it up, hit ‘send’ to my publisher, and—poof! They’re long gone before the edition ever hits the stores. Thirty-two total, so far. Today will be the last, number thirty-three.”

Tucker laughs. Not a villain’s laugh—certainly not the laugh of an evil genius with a plan to rule the world from a gross apartment. It’s more like the tired way you laugh when someone else steals your cab. “And how did he weasel out of it?”

“He’s corrupt,” he says. His hands ball up and relax. “Like all of them. Someone got to him. A criminal group, or a government, or a company with deep pockets. They found something he cared about, and they applied pressure. No one is immune.”

“No, he was fighting to stop some corruption, so that other people could sweep in and take a bigger piece of the pie. Those same people have been trying to find me, too, for several years.”

“Well, technically, he’s just a fictional character now. You can’t murder someone who never existed.” He waves a hand in front of his face, as if swatting at flies. “But that’s arguable—I get it. What I want to know is this: do you miss the time before I started cleaning things up? When this city was almost destroyed?”

“That’s not—” I begin, and don’t know how to answer. Because, yes, I miss it a little, and I don’t know what that says about me. I was terrified at the time. I had to sleep in my parents’ bed because I had nightmares in which buildings fell on them and they cried out to me from under the rubble. I hated it, and now I miss it. I feel wrong even admitting that.

He picks up a pile of leather volumes from another kitchen stool and steps gingerly around the apartment, looking for a place to put them down. “I see. After all I’ve done to make it safe. Well, the least you can do is make a better argument than ‘it’s wrong to kill people,’ because that ship has sailed.”

He drops the stack atop another pile on the couch, a little more noisily than he needed to, and returns to sit.

“When I unmade the Unmaker? Spare me. Were you in the city when he fought Outsider?”

I’m surprised how nonthreatening Martin Tucker appears. You’d think he would be sort of stiff, like a Bond nemesis, showing off his plans to irradiate the earth or drop the Hoover Dam on Washington. It occurs to me that he’s probably never had anyone he could talk to about his power. “I was outside Grand Central,” I admit.

He opens and closes his mouth and seems to forget what he meant to say for a moment. “It’s just . . . guys like that embodied something I’ve always hated. He thought his anger and specialness entitled him to run the world. I really hate people like that.”

He shrugs. “Yeah, that was a tough one. Hard to write about a villain without including a superhero, too. And once I found out that Outsider’s power was fading, I knew he would eventually be corrupted, too. He was already showing signs of caring too much. It was only a matter of time before someone used it against him. To borrow a phrase: he was too big to fail.”

I think about the dust caking the Outsider’s clothes, the way it broke around his eyes and in the corners of his mouth. He could have just picked me up, flown me to safety, and gone back into battle. But he paused.

He squatted down and offered me his back. I wrapped my arms around his neck, hiked my legs over his hips. His back felt warm—solid but yielding, like my dad’s.

“Are you ready?” he asked, standing and supporting my legs with his hands. I nodded into his hair, and we went up.

“Why do you care, anyway?” Martin Tucker asks. “The world is getting along just fine without him.”

I clung to Outsider’s back as we rose through the swirling gray storm. Without warning, we shot into bright sunlight, and I saw the embattled city below. Dust ran in furious rivers between the buildings, darkness shot through with bright electrical flares. A bridge swayed, flinging its cables skyward like an enraged squid.

It was terrifying and awful. And it was something else—something I barely understood and could not then admit. It was important. It mattered.

“You’re not quite old enough to grasp this,” he says, “but the only thing we love more than revering our heroes is destroying them. We wait for them to sell out for money or fame, or say something that conflicts with our values, or fail to agree with us on who the real enemy is. Then we trash them and move on.”

I think about the angry people outside Focus’s building. “That’s what you think you saved me from? The disappointment of growing up?”

“No—that of living. Most people would rather live in one of my story lines than the real world. You obviously wish you were still there. Despite the fact that many people died before I intervened.”

“No, that’s what I gave you. That’s the importance of fiction. People will always love Outsider now. We tolerate imperfection in our fictional creations. We root for flawed and damaged characters, people utterly unlike ourselves. Fiction is the new secret identity. It’s a refuge from which damaged heroes can continue to do good.”

“Yeah, it was,” he barks a laugh, as if amazed by my stupidity. “Because I have the power. Like you. We run the show, until the last one of us is gone.”

He nods, reading my thoughts. “Only we remember the alternate timelines. That’s a superpower.”

“Please,” he holds up a hand, “spare me the story.” He gets up and opens the fridge. It’s full of soda bottles. He pulls one out, offers it to me. I shake my head, wondering if he intends to erase me, too. What will it feel like to vanish? One moment, walking or riding the train—the next, nothing. A girl in a book. Emma the Nonexistent.

“I’m not special,” I go on, the words coming fast. “I really can’t do anything. I just remember things. When I was a kid—”

He twists the cap off his soda, and I jump at the hiss of escaping gas. I’m overwhelmed by the urge to run, as if I can flee my own undoing, outdistance the transformation of my life into paper and ink.

“I have to go,” I mumble. I slide off the stool, and my messenger bag upends. The gun clatters out, skitters across the wooden floor, and comes to a stop between us.

“Well,” Martin Tucker’s soda bottle freezes halfway to his mouth, “that’s a thing.”

“I came to kill you.” It comes out more like a question that I would have liked.

He looks down the neck of his bottle. “I don’t think I can, either. Not to someone in my kitchen.”

He regards the floor. “Your appearance today is an opportunity for me. All the other superheroes are gone. I’m out of material. If I know your story, I can write another comic.”

He smiles, and his eyes wrinkle the way I remember Outsider’s did. A sad smile. “Don’t worry, I’ve already written my last work.”

“No. That’s already done. I’m talking about one more tale, just waiting for me to hit ‘send.’”

“I think the fans will really love this one. It’s about an unlikeable man who discovers how to spin reality into fiction. He’s revered by fans, called a genius by people much smarter than he is. He soaks it up, and all the while he despises himself for it, knowing himself to be the worst fraud imaginable. Corrupted by his desire to be loved, of all things. Eventually, he tells the truth, and vanishes.”

He slumps, wrinkling the cartoon manatee’s face in a way I might find funny under different circumstances. The room seems darker, although the sky outside the windows is as bright as ever.

“There is,” he nods. “But I’m not the one to write it. Outsider’s people were right about one thing. All stories end.” He looks at his watch. “Speaking of which, don’t you have somewhere to go?”

He arches an eyebrow. And, without planning it, I decide to tell him how I’m probably going to get arrested, sent to an institution, and disowned by my exhausted parents. He holds up a hand as if to stop me, but I go on with the story. I might be giving him enough information to fictionalize me, but I tell him anyway.

“Why did you share that?” he asks when I’m done. “You know what I could do with it.”

I wait until he meets my eyes. “I think you want one person to remember you.”

He nods, retrieves the gun, and hands it back to me. “It was nice to meet you. I have to put some finishing touches on my story before I send it off.”

“You never answered my question,” I remind him, “about renaming the city.”

“Oh, that. Reality and the story sometimes switch places,” he says, leaning against the doorframe. “While the main character’s life becomes fiction, little details from the story become true in the real world. I’ve used it to alter my identity a few times.”

“I was on a tight deadline. The publisher suggested setting the story in a fictional city. I forwarded some ideas for names to my assistant. She misunderstood, put New York into the draft, and the rest is, literally, history.”

“Wait,” I hold up a hand. “Are you telling me you changed the city’s name by mistake?”

He points at me, suddenly serious. “It’s not a vote. You don’t get a say. That’s the way it will always be while people like us are around.”

I have a strange thought. “So if you become fiction, who will be the author of the comic book in the real world?”

He nods and smiles, as if he approves of the question. “I don’t know. Do you want it to be you?”

“Come back by the building when I’m gone,” he says. “It would be nice to be remembered.”

“Oh, I was going to have the character’s apartment remain empty after he disappears. The fans like the suggestion of a sequel.”

He rolls his eyes. “No, a superhero name. Something befitting your powers. You alone remember how the other heroes fell to human weaknesses and were destroyed by a lesser man. You could be the Storyteller.”

The doors open, and I leave him standing, like Outsider on the verge of his wormhole. I descend into the streets of a changed city, walking halfway in memory.

I’m back on the train when I notice that my bag feels lighter, almost weightless. The gun is gone.

Of course it’s gone, because I never took it. It’s back in the safe where it belongs, and only I remember any differently.

Martin Tucker has changed the story. When the comic comes out, I suspect his character will be visited by a mysterious stranger. No name, no backstory—and no gun.

Something jingles in the bottom of the bag: two keys on a plain metal ring. The apartment will be waiting for my return, its wide windows regarding a mundane and beautiful sky.

For now, I watch the people sway to the long, slow song of the train, letting myself move with them, enjoying, for now, my secret identity.

Adam R. Shannon is a career firefighter/paramedic, as well as a fiction writer, hiker, and cook. His work has been shortlisted for an Aeon award and appeared in Morpheus Tales and the SFFWorld anthology You Are Here: Tales of Cryptographic Wonders. He and his wife live in Virginia, where they care for an affable German Shepherd, occasional foster dogs, a free-range toad, and a colony of snails who live in an old apothecary jar. His website and blog are at AdamRShannon.com.

Over an Embattled City