Work Text:
The Proposal
In the beginning for all the known universes (not the actual beginning, but certainly closer to the beginning than now, except in that one universe where time runs backwards and Death will pull down the chairs and turn on the lights), there was a Conference of Stars.
At that Conference, Despair (the first one not the second) had an idea for an art project. It must be understood that it was the second Despair that dated Edgar Allen, and therefore first Despair’s ideas for art were still rather concrete.
In most universes, Despair discussed her idea with the red giant Rao. In most universes, the red giant Rao agreed to help Despair with her art project. For as Despair proposed it, for life to come about on an inherently unstable planet would only add to the beauty of that life. In her proposal, which was more of a prompt, when that life reached its height, the meaningful thing was to destroy the world. It was a perfect project, provided that we’re talking about the Despair who never dated Edgar Allen. The thing that made/makes/will make (depending on your universe) this art perfect is that one life form would escape. To mourn. To despair.
Many universes put in an entry for the project of Despair. Paintings. Tapestries. A few collages. Some multi-media. There was even a crocheted purple monkey with buttons for eyes, but that universe was unclear on the concept.
Here then, four American melodies as entries. Or four aspects on a common theme. At least they weren’t crocheted monkeys.
Despair (the second one) teased her crocheted purple monkey with a little hook, read “Annabelle Lee” while listening to Evanescence, which was a completely different entry altogether. Still, she smiled.
Entry 9 - Rhapsody in Blue: George Gershwin (Superman)*
Cars rumble rolled constant over the wide strung bridges. Waited at their gas station lines for odd day gas. Honked down one way streets. Breaked on black pavement through acid snow. Trains screamed down tunnels. Inside the train cars, people clung to swaying straps in the flickering dark. Out of disco clubs, the sweaty tumbled out laughing and shouting. Ran their steps to the all-nighter for runny eggs and raddled bacon. Ice skaters in Webster plaza skated circles all wrapped up in their Christmas-present-to-themselves scarves.
Pistons of a city that didn’t stop.
Alien invasions. Rogue nuclear bombs. Giant androids. Bio-engineered super clones. Through all of them, that hot dog guy was there on Fourth and Bessolo hawking his tubes of meat with extra onions and mustard. Relish.
Superman waved at him as he flew over and extended his right arm in flight. Superman was not a bird. No one mistook him for one as he flew down the canyon streets. Buildings in their holiday lights blinked at him. He smiled back to see them glitter.
He stopped an armed robbery at a convenience store with crossed arms and a slight shake of his head. One of thieves threw his gun at him. It bounced and fell with a clank that sounded like the cars going into the Midway tunnel.
He gift wrapped them and flew away.
Christmas lights blinked from the giant tree in front of Vanderworth Center. It was a new growth redwood. Cut short at height. Rootless and bright. He flew around the brilliant star at the top. A tourist took a picture and Superman smiled. It would come out blurry.
At the Planet, the presses churned. Bright white lights in a bright white room and people. Night crews as they put the finishing touches on tomorrow’s news today.
He could hear Perry yelling, because there were not four “t”s in atrocity, no matter how much Lois thought there should be. Tomorrow, she’d be at her sister’s house for Christmas. Miserable. Smoking with her brother-in-law on the back porch. Not talking about politics. Religion. Sports. Children. Family. Shoe size. She was hoping for an alien invasion.
For now, she was on the roof of the Planet. Cigarette at her lips. Red glow tip. He blew it out as he touched boots to roof.
She grinned. Her scarf looked like it was about to attack her chin. If it dared. “Don’t you just hate Christmas? All that fake good will.” She stubbed out her cold cigarette.
“I love this time of year. All the hope. Peace on earth. That kind of stuff.” He offered her his hand. She took it. Stepped lightly. Lifted as light as a feather. Flew over the city. Fingers tangled. Cloud brushed. Hidden and revealed from Metropolis below. Metropolis couldn’t be hidden from him by clouds.
She said, “Can you read my mind?” Her expression was wide open. She sometimes asked that question, her expression street level far away. Her hand cool in his. Her thumb sliding across the back of his hand.
“No.” He didn’t have that power. His cape brushed her legs.
She stretched out her other hand, pulled in Metropolis below. “Good.”
In that below, trucks made early morning deliveries. Early morning travelers in coffee clutches. Surged at the pre-dawn street corners.
Somewhere below, someone aimed their telescope. Their long lens camera. Everyone hoped for their view. A photo on Perry’s desk by sunrise.
Cars screeched. Trains rumbled. Snow ploughs whirred. The city that never slept woke up.
Dawn on the roof of the Planet. Touched feet to rooftop and he said, “Merry Christmas, Lois.”
She smiled, “What?” Stared at him. Blinked. Slipped free of his hand. She ran for the door to the stairwell. She couldn’t hear Perry’s voice as he yelled her name. He must already have his photo.
The Planet would headline Lois’ Christmas Eve with Superman for the afternoon edition. She glanced back. Yule bright in her smile. “Thank you,” and was gone.
He left, alien invasion achieved, and flew into the morning sun.
Entry 12 - Take Five: Dave Brubeck (Mild-Mannered Reporter)**
It was raining egg rolls. Clark fumbled his. Tossed from hand to hand in an elaborate juggle of off the knee and back of the hand and into the trash can under his desk. “Opps.” He fished it out with a practiced smile. “Five second rule.”
Richard laughed where he was redlining Christmas Gala copy. He said, “You’d think after ten years Cat would know that space for five inches doesn’t mean ten would be better.”
Clark pushed his thick plastic glasses up his nose and didn’t say the words that Lois would have said. She was in Shanghai. Chasing a story. Hurricane Lois. Clark’s eyes met Richard’s. The words were there anyway. News room buzzed the world around them. They held the unspoken words in their ears.
Clark smiled ruefully into his own copy. Nineteen inches of expose on toxic sewage bubbled under canal side suburbs with space for a four by five photo. Not the front page, but page four wasn’t bad. He hoped this would help at least one of the people in those cheek-to-cheek row houses trying to live their American dream.
He looked around the News Room. The Christmas Eve party had wound down hours ago. The toxic nog nothing but film on a punch bowl and everyone hurried to their American slice homes.
Lois in Shanghai. Jason at his aunt and cousins in the suburbs. Nothing left for the ones who remained but words.
At the Planet, they dealt in words. Loudly wrote them. Silently edited them away.
Another egg roll rained his way. Clark forgot and caught it. Caught another laugh from Richard. A surprised puff. Clark dipped the egg roll in honey sauce and paged up. His lead paragraph needed a better hook. He wasn’t watching Richard. Wasn’t watching the empty space across from him. Clark typed.
Richard deleted. Hummed. Whispered words under his breath as he deleted, deleted, deleted, “You've got possibilities, Takes a fella to tell, You've got possibilities, Let me pry you from your shell.”
Clark’s computer beeped at him. “What’s that from?” It sounded familiar. Most things did. He heard everything at least once.
Richard grinned all over, mitochondria level grinning glee. “The Superman musical.”
All Clark could do was say, “What!” and hear the crunch as the Page Down key died.
“I got Lois the soundtrack for an early Christmas present.” Richard clicked a few more keys. Grinned some cell level happy more. “There were death threats.”
Clark could hear the echo of those threats. “Oh.” Metropolis around them. The News Room. Monitors blazing.
“You done?” Richard pushed away from his desk.
Clark nodded. He clicked and typed and sent. There was enough hook. He followed Richard to the elevator. There were no sirens. No need to make for the roof. Richard held the elevator for him when Clark tripped over his shoe laces. The elevator buzzed angrily at them. Richard knelt and tied Clark’s shoe. A brush of fingers on thick leather. A double knot. Richard looked up through his dark lashes. Blushed. Flushed. Heart in a double thump beat. “Force of habit.”
Clark said, “Gosh,” because really what else could he say. Golly would have been just too much.
Richard sighed and stood up. The deco gold elevator doors opened on the bottom floor with its deco lobby walls, which in turn led out onto Metropolis where there was a reasonable degree of deco buildings gleaming on a clear winter’s night. Richard shivered and buttoned up his coat. Wrapped his long blue scarf several times around his neck.
Clark had pulled Richard in this year’s office gift exchange. He’d bought the scarf while writing a piece on disabled veteran street vendors.
Richard glanced back at Clark. “I’m still hungry.” He brushed Clark a mild glance, and mild-mannered, Clark followed him into Chinatown for a boiling oil pot of peppers and very crispy duck. As he ate, sweat pearled on Richard’s upper lip. He licked it away. He smiled happily. Above them were dusty yellow streamers and paper red dragons. In front of them, there was a pot of bubbling hot oil full of searing spices.
Clark leaned forward to breathe in. His glasses fogged. Smiled through them. Felt Richard’s mild kiss and blinked into it. Breathed in heat. Tasted peppers and thought, “Oh.” As Richard pulled away, all Clark could think to say was, “What do you think will be in our fortune cookies?”
“Golly,” said Richard and bit into another pepper, sweat beaded again on his upper lip. Clark leaned forward to taste. It was hot. Then, eventually, there were cookies. There was an armed robbery attempt. Clark fainted somewhat uncoincidentally under the table. Superman saved the day. Richard said, “Lois is going to be so pissed that she missed this,” and Clark ate a cookie, which crumbled in exactly the right way.
The mild mannered reporter reported. The editor edited. Words. White rivers of them in the formatting. There were even red peppers reviewed in the pink sheets. Mild yellow cookies. Sweat. Cool milk. Christmas day.
Entry 26 - Journey of the Sorcerer: Eagles (Last Son of Krypton)
His parents had sent him to earth in a space ship that looked like an expensive Christmas tree ornament. Lois said that the moment she saw the hologram.
Some when, the crystals had told him how to grow his own space ship that would be all spiky tips and velocity. Father had told him and taught him. Mother had talked, her eyes full of concern for how he would look like them but wouldn’t be one of them. For all his father spoke of power, that was the image that stayed. Images that he could see and not touch.
Lois smirked warm and bright. She was touchable. Spun around. Looked up. “This is amazing.” No matter how many times he brought her here, she always said something like that.
He held up a glass of water melted from an ice core thousands of these Earth years old. From before Krypton ripped herself apart. Some when of scattered Krypton, it was Krypton’s winter solstice. Great-red-Rao. Dead-Krypton.
All around them in this far North of Earth, Sol’s yellow light refracted and reflected crystals all around him. Them.
“What are we doing again?” asked Lois. She held her flute awkwardly. Always ready to move.
“We’re celebrating the return of great Rao.” He turned the stem of the flute between his fingers. Right hand. Then left hand. Last year, he’d celebrated with holograms. Worshiped-remembered-sip to the distant-red-giant-Rao. Known only from what he’d been told. Felt-filled-power, bright-Sol. He saw-felt light bring life to a blue-bright world. The one beneath his feet. Except what was beneath his feet was grown of Krypton. He, a Kryptonian. The last of a dead race. He was not dead. Nor was Lois.
“And Rao is your home planet’s sun?” She grimaced. Glared at her glass. “This might be easier if this were vodka.” Her eyes narrowed. “I could put a thousand milligrams of orange juice in with vodka and I’d enjoy never getting sick.” Her look flickered on him. “Of course, you never drink when you fly.” Her pad and pen were on a table in Metropolis. She’d left them behind. Now, here, she held her flute like a knife.
He said, “Did I tell you someone tried to stab me with a fillet knife in Little Bohemia last night?”
She laughed and seemed to understand his apparent non sequitur. Lois always either understood or walked onto misunderstanding’s back and jabbed it with her shoes. Then asked for an interview. For truth, justice, the American way that she didn’t believe in. Right up to where she grilled a Senator over his expense reports.
She tossed back her water and put down her glass with a thud on the Kryptonian table. Her steps toward him clicked on the crystal of the Fortress of Solitude. He heard it sing a hymn to Rao. To the beat of her feet. She couldn’t hear it, but she triggered the melody.
He stepped closer to her in his red boots. Listened-felt his counterpoint that she only heard the iceberg of. Spiky tips and velocity.
She put her hand over his. Took his glass. Drank his water. Such a small and fragile hand. Human. Man of Steel. Woman of Kleenex. He’s read his Niven. Studied with Jor-El.
She said, “What next?”
This was not an interview. Just for them. Him. Her.
The Sol sun was high in the sky over them, neither a solstice nor an equinox, and her hand was on his. Her breath on his face. Warm and alive. Touchable. He was invulnerable. That was not the same as unfeeling. He could hear a sparrow fall a mile away. He could hear two pennies fall. A heartbeat.
He looked like them, but he was not of them. Different. He wondered what he felt like to her. What the color red looked like to her eyes. Blue reflected-refracted. Yellow. Light. He could only know the color of her eyes through his eyes. What she felt like.
She leaned into him on extended toes, cool-human hands on his shoulders, and said, “Wow.” She felt like wow. She looked like Lois. Smiling. Lips soft-close-curved and he could do that. Kiss. There was no going back to the radiation of the red sun. Not even in the chamber that once did that sort of thing. This was a yellow-bright blue-marble world. Ice at the poles. But they could kiss. Touch. Breath in each other’s breaths.
The holograms spun around them, a kaleidoscope of lights. A planetarium of the universe. Of his journey in reverse. His father’s voice. She snuggled into him and said, “Is that your father?”
“Yes.” His arm wrapped itself around her. “I wish you could have met him.” What he meant was that he wished he could have met him. What he meant was he wished that she could have met him. He was dualistic like that. What he meant was her arms around his neck. Soft curves and bounced with energy. They floated into the air. Into the lights. Images around them of Krypton as it was. Dawn and dawn again. The images were Krypton, but the light from outside was all Sol. Bright-yellow-life, and not giant. Warm in his arms and smiled. They kissed, and it felt like he’d kissed the sun. Like he had turned on the lights and put out the chairs for guests. Like Lois and nothing like solitude.
Entry 52 - An Outdoor Overture: Aaron Copeland (Smallville)
Sunlight escaped through the clouds and illuminated the wide snow covered plains dotted with frail lines of wire fence. The black train rattled down the thin track and through the escaped sunlight that shone down and reflected on the snow before the clouds hid the sun away again.
Clark rode the train home. He could have flown. He could have driven, but he didn’t own a car. He liked the train. The long slow chug-a-chug away from the sea. Across the hills and valleys and out into the wide open sky. The people stamped the snow off their feet in the vestibule and shook ice off their coats. Fewer people every year. Mr. Alastair Jones in the next seat had heard a rumor that they were going to discontinue this line next year.
Clark smiled. “All the more reason to enjoy the trip this year.”
Clark gave away his seat when Mrs. Ruby Greene, on her way to visit her niece in Pierre (pronounced peer), swayed with the chug-a-chug of the train on the wide way and almost fell. He steadied her with his right hand, pushed his large black plastic glasses up his nose with his left hand. (He was not right or left handed, and he did not need glasses to see.) He stood up. “Would you like my seat?” He didn’t fumble. There was no need. He lifted her luggage onto the overhead rack with both hands (not that he needed both).
She gave him a tired smile. Worn and a little down turned. She had a bunion on her right big toe and a bad case of bursitis. Outside the wind flew flurries of brilliant white snow under a pearled sky, and he listed to the sound of her voice for miles.
Later, he stood in the vestibule and leaned into the wind that blew over the vast flat space. Mr. Jack McPherson joined him, cigarette glued to his lower lip. Neither of them said much of anything. Just watched the winter fallow fields full of wide round bales of hay. White grain silos like castles in the drifts. Full of grain.
Clark got off at Concordia in Cloud County. He walked down Highway 9 in his blue jeans and red flannel shirt and blue coat. He didn’t need the coat. He didn’t need to walk. He walked. Hands in his pockets. One foot in front of the other. When he was a boy, he’d have run. Raced the train and grinned at Lana Lang’s curls.
He wasn’t a boy anymore.
A mile out, a truck passed him. A man leaned out and tipped up the brim of his John Deere hat. His face was red, his forehead pale. The man yelled, “Well shit, you’re Jonathan and Martha Kent’s boy, ain’t ya?”
Clark said, “Yes, sir. On my way home for Christmas.”
He got a “Merry Christmas” and an offer to drive him as far as Smallville. He shared a seat with a border collie named Cooper, who licked his hands. The man, Mr. John Jacob Jenkins (and as he said, “Ain’t that a mouthful?”), told him, “You shouldn’t be walking. It’s colder than a dead beaver's dick out there.”
Clark smiled and rubbed Cooper under his belly. Cooper whined, which meant keep going.
Mr. Jenkins let Clark out in downtown Smallville. Clark stood at the end of Main street and grinned like a fool. Hands in his pockets. Went into Sumner’s pool hall/store/ice-cream parlor/bakery.
Half the town was there to roll dice for coffee. Clark made his roll and lost. He paid for everyone that round. Ten cents a cup. Cost him a dollar and thirty cents. He also bought a tray of Sumner’s Danish.
Mrs. Alfreida Collins offered him a ride out to County Road 779 and told him the story again about how when she was young and went to dance halls, she and her beau came out to his truck and found a baby on the front seat. After Clark said, “Golly,” as he always did, she’d grinned and explained that the baby’s mother had run inside for directions, but hadn’t wanted to take a baby into a den of sin. When Clark got out, he thanked Mrs. Alfreida Collins with a Danish. When she’d driven off, he ran the rest of the way because there was such a thing as enough was enough.
A blink of an eye and he was home. Ma laughed that he shouldn’t have bought the Danish, what with her cooking up more food than an army could put to rest, but Pa had always gotten Danish from Sumner’s every Christmas.
That night he flew to the Cascades and back for an evergreen tree, because trees were hard come by in this part of Kansas. Even now. Especially now. They dressed the tree right up Christmas Eve. It was Clark’s job to put on the star.
It wasn’t beautiful. Ugly plastic. Not even electric. Cracked on one tip. He could have tried to melt the crack down with a look. But it just as easily could have exploded. That star was older than he was. He put it on top of the tree and held Ma’s hand. They had a Danish, and he didn’t try to figure out his presents. They were all wrapped in lead paper. Ma had met him. He wrapped hers in lead, too. She looked at them and smiled.
Come morning, Ma cooked up farm fresh eggs with their yokes dark orange and flavor bursting, government ham from the porch freezer, and some slices of government cheese. They each ate a Danish, and he checked Ma’s arteries for build up. Quietly, didn’t say anything. She smiled at him and wiped up every last trace of her egg with her ham.
They unwrapped presents, and he put on the soft white sweater that Ma had crocheted for him.
When he was little, he’d thought Santa brought the gifts. Then there’d been the year that he realized that he could be Santa, too. That was the first year Santa left extra gifts for Ma and Pa by the chimney come Christmas morning. Once in the chimney, but that had not been one of Clark’s better ideas.
Christmas wrapped, folded up for use again next year, they got ready for town. He drove the diesel truck back into Smallville for church. There was a preacher who did the circuit and Smallville got him in the afternoon. They ate more Danish and drank weak coffee. Talked to old friends while they stood in the heated building. He pushed his big black plastic glasses up his nose with his left hand. Shook hands with his right. Grinned. There were a lot of people dresed in Ma’s crocheted sweaters and scarves. She made them every year for the church fundraiser before Thanksgiving. They always sold well.
After friends had driven away, Clark took Ma to the cemetery at the end of town. They brought Pa a Danish. Field mice too as it came to it. Went back to the house with its tree and its star. Talked about nothing much at all.
Nothing much for the week. They stayed up on New Years and watched the ball drop in Planet Square in Metropolis, and it was a new year. Everything new. He kissed Ma’s cheek.
In the morning, Ma made eggs and ham and cheese. Come time to make his way home.
Ma drove him to the train station. Hugged him and it was all aboard. He sat next to the window and waved at her. Talked with Miss Jesipa Tooks across from him. She was going on thirteen and on the train with her mother on their way home from winter break.
He felt the train beneath him on its slow chug-a-chug and leaned back in his seat. No reason to go too fast. He might miss something if he did.