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It’s a rugged green canvas backpack, intended for use by hikers and outdoors enthusiasts. It has a spacious main compartment and three smaller outer compartments, all with zip closures, as well as a mesh outer pocket designed to hold a water bottle. Inside, it has five additional zippered compartments, each one flush against its lining, and each one water-tight. This backpack was made for adventure. Lex Luthor buys it in 1995, when he is fifteen.
It’s an odd choice for Lex; most of his belongings fit an aesthetic best described as upscale heroin-chic. He never ventures outdoors, or at least, not an outdoors the backpack would recognize as such. He does not climb mountains or hike wooded trails. Nonetheless, he carries the backpack everywhere for a couple months, almost as if in training for a different life.
In the main compartment, he carries two changes of clothes which sit there untouched for weeks at a time, a heavy book which gets exchanged for a different heavy book every couple days, and a pile of well-worn “Warrior Angel” comic books. The outer pockets hold an array of condoms, a rail map of Europe, and driver’s licenses from Kansas and Illinois that identify him, respectively, as Julian Alexander and Alex Lillian, both aged 21. He occasionally sticks a bottle of something which is not water in the mesh bottle holder.
At least once each day, Lex stuffs a few hundred dollars in folded bills inside one of the inner compartments. In noisy rooms, with other people dressed in black, he says that his dad has been choking off his funds, so somebody else will have to buy the drinks for a change. But he keeps on adding to the cash in his backpack, until, within a month, he’s carrying over ten thousand dollars in nonconsecutive bills.
As the money accumulates, so do the ID documents, Soon the backpack contains passports from the United States and France, the first issued to Alexander Luthor, the second to Julien Alexandre. Alexander Luthor was born in Metropolis in 1980 and has no hair. Julien Alexandre was born in Paris in 1977, and has orange curls, and wears glasses.
The orange curls spend a few weeks smooshed into one of the outer pockets, along with a red-bound book of detailed Paris maps. The stash in the inner pockets tops out at $13,600, mostly in hundred dollar bills.
Then, one day, Lex drops the backpack in a corner of his closet and leaves it there.
***
In 1997, Lex takes the bag out again and goes through its contents. He leaves the cash where it is but removes everything else. He packs it anew with fresh clothes, fresh condoms, many heavy books, and a large plastic bag of marijuana. The backpack travels with Lex to Princeton.
Through half of Lex’s college career, the bag sits on the floor of his dorm room. He carries it out occasionally. Over the next two years he stores some new items in it: a set of handcuffs, The Anarchist’s Cookbook, a leather dog collar, a tube of glitter body-paint, a stack of folded pages containing complex equations in nearly indecipherable script, a black feather boa, and some pornographic comic books from Japan. In the spring of 1999, he adds a new U.S. passport in his own name and twenty thousand dollars in traveler’s checks, but a week later he takes these out again and places them in a leather satchel bearing his initials. Not long after that, the backpack gets shipped to the mansion in Smallville along with clothes, books, and other items Lex no longer wants, where it will spend the next two years in a storage room in the basement.
***
In October, 2001, Lex comes into the storage room at last and retrieves the backpack, bringing it up to his new bedroom. He digs through its pockets, removing items one by one. There is still a crumpled baggie of pot, which he sniffs hopefully but then discards. He discards just about everything else, too: the boa, the musty Princeton sweatshirt, the switchblade, the dog-eared copy of Sartre’s Nausea, the lace thong, the tube of black lipstick. He takes out all the cash and counts it, then shrugs and replaces it in the hidden pockets. This done, he slings the bag into a closet again.
***
December, 2001. Lex tucks a large plaid flannel button-down shirt inside the backpack. It doesn’t look like anything he’d ever wear.
***
In February, 2002, Lex takes out the backpack again. Underneath the flannel shirt, he places an encrypted computer disk, a small handgun, and an envelope containing thirty crisp cashier’s checks for a thousand dollars each. Instead of putting it back in the closet, he pulls aside a rug by his bed, opens a safe in the floor, and sets the bag inside.
That May, he removes the gun and adds fifty thousand dollars in bearer bonds.
***
In early 2003, Lex puts an additional two hundred fifty thousand dollars in bearer bonds into the backpack, and sews a small GPS tracer into the lining.
A month later he removes the tracer.
Before the end of the year, he adds twenty thousand dollars in travelers’ checks, another twenty thousand in cashier’s checks, and a Montana driver’s license bearing the name Todd Miller. Todd Miller was a character from “Warrior Angel,” all those years ago, but the picture on the license is not the familiar drawing of Todd Miller; it’s a photograph of a young man with dark hair and ruddy cheeks and wide green eyes, wearing a flannel shirt very much like the one inside the bag.
Lex also replaces the tracer.
***
In spring of 2004, Lex takes the tracer out again. He removes the disk and puts in an entire laptop computer. He takes the crumpled cash out of the inner pockets, straightens out the bills, counts them, and shuffles them in with many, many more bills, amounting to exactly twenty-five thousand dollars.
He takes out Todd Miller’s Montana driver’s license and puts in one from Indiana, as well as an American passport and Social Security card, in the name of John Carter. John Carter’s photos look exactly like Todd Miller’s, only slightly older, and instead of a flannel shirt he wears a bright blue t-shirt and red jacket.
***
Over the next several months, Lex takes the backpack out of the safe every four or five weeks. He takes the computer out, does things with it, and puts it back. He puts in a high school transcript for John Carter. He takes out all the documents and replaces them with a new set bearing the same pictures, only this time the name is Jeffrey Steen and he’s from Omaha, Nebraska. He adds more cashier’s checks, and more bearer bonds.
He removes the tracer and replaces it with three smaller ones: one hidden in the lining, one sewn into the padded shoulder strap, and one tucked inside the toggle hanging from an outside zipper. At various points Lex takes out all of these, puts back two of them, takes those out, puts back one. Takes the one out.
***
The last time Lex adjusts the backpack’s contents is in July, 2005. He counts all the money again, then solemnly puts it back. He discards the documentation on Jeffrey Steen and inserts a new set for Troy Rhyne of East Plano, Texas – this one augmented with a birth certificate, health and vaccination records, and a lifeguard certification card. He takes the computer out and spends a long time with it before putting it back in the bag, along with a silver CD inside a plastic case. He leaves one miniscule tracer inside the padding of the shoulder strap.
***
Less than a month later, Lex hauls the backpack out of its safe and dumps it out in front of an evidently startled Troy/Jeffrey/John/Todd. Troy/Jeffrey/John/Todd wears only boxer shorts, and Lex calls him Clark. They go through the pack’s contents together before Lex puts everything away again. Then they argue, and when Lex opens a different container and takes out the item inside, Clark falls to the ground moaning. He didn’t react that way to anything the backpack holds.
But then Lex puts the thing back in its other container, and shuts it, and Clark evidently recovers. They argue more – in softer tones, but it’s still very definitely an argument – until, abruptly, they stop arguing and start doing something much more physical, something which closely resembles certain pages from a specific issue of Japanese manga. They do it on the bed, with the backpack right there next to them. Lex makes noises the backpack has never heard before.
Afterwards, Clark tells Lex that his name is Kal-El.
A moment later he is fully dressed, and Kal-El/Clark/Troy/Jeffrey/John/Todd picks up the backpack and carries it away very rapidly. In a split-second he is rushing with it over bare earth, past grass and trees and growing fields, under the open sky. Wind whistles past the canvas as they run.
It’s taken ten years, but the backpack is finally outside.
***