Every good comic book needs a bang-up splash page opening scene. Two spandex wonderballs slugging it out in a fortuitously abandoned warehouse isn’t a bad way to begin. Maybe a long shot of the hero standing in the rain, praying that his velour cape doesn’t shrink. Or possibly even a shot of the master-villain – pensive and angst-ridden - swearing vengeance over the grave of his beloved pet iguana Pete.
I don’t know about that. I’ve never lived such a scene. My days are painted in the humbler hues of rust, shadow and regret.
Who am I?
I’m Captain Nothing – champion of the terminally depressed. More powerful than a Clydesdale’s best Sunday hay-fart. I’m able to leap tall curbs and cross dead-end streets without leaving a single footprint to track.
Trademark pending.
Some of us are born with a sense of identity. Some of us take years to uncover the truth.
The truth is, I have tried on so many masks I’m no longer sure just who I really am.
I was always good at hitting people but never good enough to make it as a professional fighter. So I tried my hand at being a policeman, only that didn’t work out. I kept getting my left hook mixed up with my victim’s rights.
So I settled for becoming a superhero which is just another way of saying “a cheap thug in a cheaper mask”.
It makes for an interesting tax return.
Do you want me to draw you a picture? It’s not my job but I’ll do the best I can. Here I am - just a big guy, a little thick in the belly and even thicker in the head. A pair of army boots with the toes turned up from too many roads turned under. A mask that was made to never come off.
I look like some kind of a freak of unnature.
A wannabe backyard wrestler who never made it beyond the tool shed.
A trick or treat freak show gone sadly to seed.
Now where was I?
Oh yeah.
That splash page.
My splash page starts out in the shadows of a hotel room, handy to the rail yard. There’s a fly jittering hopelessly against the window pane. You look out through that window pane and you can see the yard hogs hauling empty boxcars back and forth.
We’re not talking four star living.
“You were the best, Magma,” I told him. “The freaking best.”
“Was I? What’d I do?”
“You took them all on. The Flaming Underpants League. The Cosmic Wedgie. You even went toe-to-toe with Dr. Destiny.”
“I was a fighter, wasn’t I?”
“Nah. You were better than that. You were the thinker. The smartest man in the universe. Magma-Brain, the guy with a computer cerebellum. Stephen Hawkins called you up whenever he needed to brainstorm?”
I opened the scrapbook.
There wasn’t much to see here.
A few random drive-by paparazzi photographs.
A bubblegum trading card, still reeking vaguely of that hard pink slab of sugarfied chicle.
Three issues of the Magma-Brain comic book, signed by the artist.
It never made it to issue #4.
Lastly came a Crayola sketch scribbled by a kid who Magma-Brain had caught falling out of a burning high school window. The kid grew up to sell designer drugs out of a neon briefcase.
I threw him out of another window, briefcase and all, two years ago.
Too bad there was no one around to catch him this time.
Magma-Brain still stared at me blindly, looking a little like a man who has lost sight of the path in the middle of a deep dark woods. That’s how it is sometimes. Life is nothing more than a ball of twine. You unwind it until you get the end and then you just start to fray.
So I hit him with the shoebox.
I had been gathering up every clipping I could cull from the public archives and tucked it all in a Dr. Scholl’s orthotic shoebox. Every newspaper article I could find. Every police record and anecdote. Even a thesis that some wannabe psych major had written on the possible motivations of the smartest evil genius in the entire mega-universe.
I had all my bases covered.
I was organized.
I had researched out every step in Magma-Brain’s long and checkered criminal trail.
It was the best detective work I’d done in a decade of bad decisions.
I had a copy of the story of how he hacked into the interweb and transferred an entire Swiss bank into his Credit Union account. The Giza Pyramid Scheme. Or the time he seized the identity of the entire nation of Nigeria and Ponzied Bill Gates out of his controlling interest in Microsoft.
One by one I laid out the newspaper clippings upon a tired bedside tray.
“You were the master scammer,” I told him. “You would steal entire histories without leaving a single trace.”
He still didn’t get it.
He looked up at me through eyes the color of whiskeyed-out piss, the cobwebs of senility clouding his once-sharp vision.
“Who are you?” he asked.
Who am I?
We’d fought so often, he and I.
“Who are you?” he repeated.
I looked in the mirror of his greasy bedroom window, staring at the reflection of a man in a mask.
“Who are you?” he asked for third time.
Good question.
We never see the tracks we leave behind.
Just the woods, and the darkness and then nothing at all.
I stood there in the quiet and lonely dusk of the room, holding the pillow out before me in both of my hands, as if I could somehow muffle the approach of what came next.