Hmmmm. I just thought of something.
“I lied. You know all about lying, don't you? For instance, you told me you hadn't discussed this with Clark. That was a lie, wasn't it, Superman?”
“No.” He closed his eyes again. Because it was happening. The moment he'd been dreading for two years was happening, and there was nothing he could do to stop it, nothing he could do to change it. Somehow it had all gone out of his control. “It wasn't.”
Okay, let's focus on just a part of this quote:
“No.” He closed his eyes again. Because it was happening. The moment he'd been dreading for two years was happening, and there was nothing he could do to stop it, nothing he could do to change it.
What was happening? Well, obviously, Lois was ripping off his cover, exposing him as a liar. Why had he been dreading this moment so much? The easy, pat answer is that he was afraid of Lois's anger. A better answer is that he was afraid that Lois would be angry enough to reject him. He was afraid of losing her.
I think, however, that the best answer is that Clark was afraid of losing
himself. Or should I say that he was afraid of losing
himselves? Both of him? Both non-superpowered Clark and superpowered Superman?
Almost for as long as Clark had known Lois, he had been carefully splitting himself in two before her eyes. He had been telling himself that Clark was his real self and that Superman didn't really exist. But he had been
acting as if he wanted to show
her that Superman was as real as Clark Kent, and Clark Kent was a mere earthling, no different from other men. Lois's different responses to the two personas he presented to her helped him keep himself divided. He loved her for loving him separately and in parts. That's why he envisioned a future for them where he offered her only a part of himself. A future, indeed, where he turned himself into half a man, amputating the Superman part of himself and living his life as if Clark Kent
really was just an ordinary man. For Lois's sake. But really, mostly for his own.
But now Lois had seen through his disguise. And now the walls separating Clark and Superman were crumbling. And now
Clark Kent - the man that he had packed up in boxes when Lois didn't want him, the man that he had had to pretend to be killed by a bullet - that man, Clark Kent, was now slipping through his fingers. Or rather, Clark Kent was merging inseparably with Superman, until both were neither and neither was known. And both were lost. And the man who didn't know himself could never again look at Lois and see
himselves reflected in her eyes, to find confirmation that there were two of him, and never the twain shall meet.
When I re-read your story, I noticed that during the whole Lois/Clark confrontation and during the ensuing discussion between Constance Hunter and, well, Clark, you didn't once call him
Clark. You never said that
Clark did or said something. You consistently used the pronoun
he: he did,
he said,
he thought. Because during that time Clark wasn't Clark. He was nobody. When Lois no longer believed that Clark and Superman were two separate people, he didn't believe it himself. He didn't believe in Clark anymore, the farmboy reporter with no superpowers. He was slipping through his own fingers, crumbling like a castle made of sand. He was losing himself. He didn't have a name any more. He was nobody. He was just "he".
But when Clark flew to the hospital to see the "baby version" of himself once more, he was Clark again. Because the baby had been wrapped in his byline, and how could he deny, to the baby, that he was Clark Kent? And he had saved it, like his mother had saved him. And the nurse, Katie, who took care of the baby, reminded him of his mother. And he had given the baby his father's name.
I remember that in the last part, you said that the baby felt so light and insubstantial in Clark's arms, when he lifted it out of the trashcan. It felt as if it might fly away on its own. Could this have been your way of saying that the baby's seeming unnatural lightness reflected Clark's precarious hold on himself? Maybe his sense of self was so tenuous that he might scatter and disperse in the wind, disappearing in the sky? Clark had to wrap the baby in his cape and hold on to him tightly to prevent the infant from just floating away. What about his own "solidity"?
The baby is definitely becoming more solid and real:
Maybe it was the tight swaddling, but Jonathan felt more substantial to him now, his weight and warmth in Clark's arms a solid, comforting thing.
And because I think of the baby as a metaphor for Clark Superman Kent El, I think that Clark, too, is becoming more solid. He is picking up the pieces of himself, but he is not building two shadow-characters of himself this time. He has finally found a way to fit the pieces together so that Clark kent and Superman can be one man:
"My name is Clark Kent, and I'm Superman."
Wow. This is even more significant than I realized when I read it the first time, Caroline.
Ann
