Bolt, From Dubuque (Part 8)
By: Ann Nonymous
Kevin landed lightly on the roof of his apartment building, taking off his sunglasses and shiny silver helmet and making his way toward one of the air conditioning units. While it was true that the building was only four stories tall, it was the closest thing that his small Midwestern college town had to a skyscraper, and right now he wanted to be as close to the stars as possible while still having both feet planted solidly on terra firma. With a sigh, he reclined, placing his arms behind his head as his eyes turned skyward, soaking in the sight of the universe above him. It felt good to be back here where the world was relatively quiet, where he was just Kevin Jones, an average college kid with average problems and a stack of homework. Because being a celebrity sure got old very fast, and the big ceremony tonight drove that home.
For a while earlier in the evening, Kevin wasn’t entirely sure that he’d be able to make it to his own party. It was a big deal, receiving the key to the City of Metropolis, but he had bigger problems at the time, namely the fact that, with each passing day, he looked more and more like Grizzly Adams. He’d stopped going out on rescues a few days earlier because of that, afraid that the media might notice his new facial hair and start making a big deal about it. And even though Kevin didn’t have a ton of friends, certainly one of them would be able to see that and get the connection, so in he had stayed. It had almost driven him crazy, too. Now that he could finish assignments in seconds, it left for a lot of free time, and a lot of thumb twiddling and television watching. Fortunately, there hadn’t been any big disasters in that time, either, but he was seriously beginning to wonder if he’d ever be able to be clean-shaven again.
His salvation had come in the form of a temper tantrum. Frustrated, and only an hour before the gala in Metropolis was slated to begin, he had taken the battery out of the smoke alarm and started playing target practice with his heat vision. Old papers, candles, bits of scrap metal had all felt his pain, and after a while, tiring of the whole thing, he had gotten an idea. What would happen if he zapped himself? Could he theoretically give himself some sort of heat vision tattoo? Would any damage be permanent or temporary, or would there even be any damage at all, considering that he had yet to find anything that even could hurt him since the bolt of lightning struck? The curiosity overrode any worries about potential deformities, so with a firm sense of resolve and a bottle of hydrogen peroxide handy just in case, he gave himself a little zap on the wrist, under where he normally wore his watch. To his amazement, the hairs on his arm scorched off. The skin also turned red and began to hurt after a moment, but after turning off the heat and allowing the area to heal for a second, the skin was okay. And the hair was still gone.
Kevin almost burst through the ceiling, his joy was so great. Shooting off the couch, he was in the bathroom in a matter of seconds, bouncing a ray of heat vision off of the mirror and vaporizing his hairy problem. “There you are, you handsome thing, you,” he had said, slapping on some aftershave and greeting himself with a smile. He had then quickly donned the football jersey and helmet, being sure to bring the clip-on bow tie, and headed toward Metropolis.
It was strange, but before being instilled with the power of lightning, Kevin had never really traveled much. He was from the midwest, and for much of his pre-college life, his travels had been limited to states with little or no topography, but plenty of cows, pigs, and corn. The rescue a week or so earlier had actually been his first trip to the east coast, or to anyplace really that lacked the large expanses of green that he was used to seeing. Since then, he’d hung around the city a little bit, but not enough to really be familiar or comfortable with the place. He could pick out the landmarks well enough, but tonight he needed to find some club in the business district, and that could prove to be a problem. During the flight over, he wondered if maybe it wouldn’t be worthwhile to land someplace nondescript and catch a cab, but it turned out that he didn’t need to. The press coverage and giant marquee proclaiming that it was BOLT APPRECIATION NIGHT gave the location away.
Landing on the red carpet in front of the club, Bolt took out his clip-on tie and situated it at the bottom of the V in the jersey. Cameras snapped as he sauntered toward the door, the microphones shoved in his face, questions flying from all around him. With each snap of the camera, and each shouted question, he found himself cringing.
“Who’s your tailor?” someone shouted.
“Bolt, do you have a girlfriend?” another one yelled, and he found himself wondering how these people came up with these questions.
Posing for the press and dropping a few juicy quotes during his big coming out press conference had been bearable, but he had been in charge of the situation. And the questions had been relevant. He had also obviously been peddling to a completely different bunch of reporters and photographers. It was certainly more comfortable pandering to the news media, and not just because their questions were more predictable. He had known from the very second he had flown into Metropolis that he would, in fact, be news. It was practically a given, and he should know, because he had read all the comic book coming out issues. Hero does something heroic, shocks the world, becomes news and ends up with some sort of oddly incestuous relationship with a newspaper. So being a major headline was practically predestined, and the questions that the media would ask him to get those headlines and the subsequent copy had all been asked before, floating in text bubbles over the heads of fictional reporters of comic books past. But tonight had nothing to do with the real news. Tonight was either political or social, and either way it was filler for the society pages and entertainment magazines, things that he was decidedly less familiar with. These photographers and anchors were the same ones that gathered at the end of every special occasion and assessed who was the best and worst dressed, who had the best hairdos and whatever other superficial things they could think of to judge a person on. It just felt downright creepy having people who made their livings on style and gossip fawning over Kevin Jones, a scruffy everyman who was even now standing in front of them, on a red carpet, in jeans and a t-shirt. A shiny helmet might make for a nice disguise, but somehow he got the feeling that it wouldn’t be looked upon as a great moment in fashion.
Quickly, Bolt made for the doors, figuring that it would be calmer on the inside. It didn’t take long to find out that he had been wrong on that account. Almost immediately upon entering the club, someone latched onto him, offering him a smile while shoving a drink into his hand. This person - his handler, apparently - brought him on the rounds, introducing him to politicians and celebrities, all of whom were dressed in identical tuxedoes, their dates all perfectly lovely and perfectly transparent in every way. Almost without exception, he found that the questions launched at him in these one-on-one meetings were almost as devoid of intelligence or common sense as those hurtled at him outside, and he found himself giving dumb answers in response, just for the entertainment value.
“So, Bolt, the sun’s gone down and it’s dark in here. Why wear the sunglasses?” one man asked before taking a sip from a martini glass.
“I wear my sunglasses at night, so I can so I can see,” he answered, offering a smile. The other man looked at him with confusion, one of his eyebrows arched as if waiting for a punch line, apparently not realizing that he had just missed it. As he moved on to another conversation with another fancy-dressed dignitary, Bolt concluded yet again that lowbrow comedy probably wasn’t his calling.
“Been a Chargers fan long? And could we maybe persuade you to wear a Metropolis Lions jersey from here on out?” another man asked. Bolt thought he looked somewhat familiar, concluding that he was probably in the football business.
“As soon as I get powers of a lion, I might think about it,” he answered, making a swiping motion with his left hand as he did. The football guy just shrugged and turned his attention back to his date. The types of people who attend functions like this just didn’t have a sense of humor.
The next person he talked to was introduced as Perry White, a staff writer for Daily Planet, the famous, well-respected Metropolis newspaper. Bolt caught himself smiling as he talked to White, glad to be answering his questions about rescues and other matters of actual importance. After all, Bolt liked to think that those were the things that had led to the award he was receiving tonight, although he kept expecting someone to pop out from behind one of the large potted trees situated around the club and tell him that he was on Candid Camera. The feeling only grew as certain answers to White were followed by Elvis parables, most of which didn’t really have much of a point and tended to ramble on. Bolt had to bite his tongue as moments in the life of Elvis seemed to beg for a humorous quip, one that would surely make the Candid Camera faithful laugh. If there wasn’t a television audience, though, such quips would just end up being rude, or would fall flat, and would certainly make the morning edition of the Planet, right below a headline that read, “Bolt: Weirdo.” Given such incentive, it was easy to play it straight with White. Besides, talking about Elvis was better in his mind than talking about Bolt.
After a while, everyone was summoned to their seats, and Bolt was ushered up to the front of the room and situated at the head table, right next to a podium. The mayor stood up, gave a rousing, heartfelt, politically phony speech, then started to recount all that Bolt had done since showing up on the scene. The patrons applauded appropriately in all the right places, and after a few minutes, the official presentation was made. Bolt stood, and an oversized golden key dangling from a thick red ribbon was hung around his neck. He waved and smiled, then approached the podium, pulling a white note card out of the back pocket of his jeans as he did. The crowd went deathly quiet.
“I just flew into Metropolis, and boy are my arms tired,” he said, drawing a chorus of chuckles from the crowd. Hundreds of sets of eyes sparkled as they looked up at him, awaiting the next zinger, but as he looked toward White and the rest of the media members assembled at a table toward the back of the room, the headline flashed through his mind again, followed by the imagined response from media pundits and murmurs of the average guy on the street. He could be known as witty and funny, but if even one joke went bad or offended the wrong person, he could be thought of as Bolt the Dolt. Looking back toward the note card covered with scribbled one-liners, he wondered if maybe it wouldn’t be better the preserve some dignity, even if it meant wasting perfectly good jokes. While he pondered that issue, the silence drug on, and Kevin could feel his smile fading somewhat and his heart rate speeding up. He remembered an old saying that stated that, when nervous under the spotlight, imagining the audience naked would invariably relax you. He found himself instantly become more at ease as he tried that, but after a moment, he began to furrow his brow, wondering why the images all seemed so real. With a start, he remembered that it was, if fact, possible for him to see through the clothing of those in front of him, and he realized that he wasn’t just imagining. Horror passed over him even as his eyes finally came to rest on a man toward the middle of the room, wearing frilly things over his slightly flabby midsection underneath the tuxedo. He couldn’t stop the cringe from coming, and a shudder worked its way down his spine as the exterior clothing popped back into place. Sufficiently scandalized and in no mood to joke any more, he decided to just forge on ahead sans witty banter.
“I must say, receiving this key is an unexpected honor, but one I’ll gladly accept,” he continued. “It’s unfortunate that it takes crime and tragedy for someone like me to make a difference for this city, and believe me when I say that I’ll continue to do my best to make sure that Metropolis stays as safe as possible.” There was some clapping after that remark, and Bolt waited for it to pass before finishing up his speech. “I’d like to thank you all, and especially the esteemed mayor and city council, for this honor. With this key, I won’t have to worry about being locked out,” he concluded, holding the key up in the air and bowing ever so slightly. The applause was thunderous, and few random people even stood. As he worked his way back to his seat, he shook the hands of all those at the head table, inwardly congratulating himself for keeping it short and sweet.
The formal ceremony quickly finished and night progressed on, the social aspect of the party back in full swing again. Bolt found himself growing tired of answering the same questions and listening to the same hollow comments over and over again. He also grew tired of the superhero façade, of the phony smile and the outgoing personality that he had to slip into while in costume that was so completely opposite who he really was. Kevin Jones didn’t especially care for parties; he wasn’t much for conversation, usually content to hang in the background and observe. It wasn’t all that surprising, then, that Kevin Jones never, ever, got any unsolicited dates. Girls generally ignored him, and on the rare occasion when he was able to ask one out on a date, he struck out more often than not. Bolt, on the other hand, had been propositioned several times that night by extremely attractive women. It was so very tempting to take them up on it, too, but every time he allowed himself to ponder doing so, reality crashed in on him. None of these women were really interested in him. They were interested in the idea of him, in the hero, in an image. If he did get together with one of them, it would surely be for one night of mutual satisfaction, and then they would both be off. It was the type of hollow relationship that every man dreamt about, and that his conservative side ultimately found extremely distasteful. So he had said no, mentally kicking himself, but knowing that it was the right thing to do.
Finally, after the crowd started filtering out, he took it as his cue to leave. Some of the press had lingered outside the door, and as he exited, he slowly took off into the air from right in the middle of the red carpet, giving them ample opportunity to take photos. Then, faster than the human eyes could see, he had made a bee line for home, wanting nothing more than to just be by himself for a little while. Now, staring up at the sky, Kevin sighed, compiling a list of excuses to be used to avoid ever having to attend anything like that again.
An airplane flew overhead, and Kevin followed it, his ears picking up the dull roar of the jet engines. Somehow, watching the stars from up in the air, above the flight paths of the airlines, just wasn’t the same. He sighed and smiled, sitting up. It was time to go inside and get back to his dull and boring life. With a grunt, he pulled the key over his head and took off the football jersey, shoving both into the helmet and making his way discretely back to his apartment.
Once inside, Kevin turned on his television en route to his couch and the stack of reading material that awaited him there. The local news provided the background noise as he cracked open his comics, a genuine smile forming on his face as he slipped into his favorite fictional worlds. It was easy to ignore the television in favor of his reading, but after a few minutes, the urgency of the voice coming from the speaker was so great, he had to turn his attention back toward the real world. What he saw shocked him.
In full color, on the screen in front of him, was a scene of devastation. In some small Oklahoma town, a reporter stood, panning the camera across what used to be frame houses and majestic oaks. Now it looked like a war zone, with piles of rubble and lumber strewn everywhere, the trees stripped of their leaves and reaching up toward the sky with gangly, naked, scarred branches. But something was odd about the picture.
“To repeat, an F5 tornado struck tonight outside of Oklahoma City,” the man on the screen said. Behind him, a group of people stood, not helping, not mugging to the camera, just staring off into the distance. “Hundreds of people here were initially reported lost or missing, but one by one, they are being found again.”
Even the rescue crews in the background were just standing there, agape. Kevin dropped the comic and stood up, moving closer to the television. As he did, the camera panned toward what used to be a brick house. The spotlight on the camera strained through the darkness, but it was clear that a large section of roof appeared to be suspended in mid air, with no cranes anywhere nearby. There was just the form of a man underneath. “Rescue efforts have been led by this man, who has thus far has been too preoccupied to grant any interviews.” The camera cut away, and footage taken earlier, in the waning daylight hours, began to roll. The images clearly showed a man flying from spot to spot, lifting boulders and cars, clearing away piles of rumble faster than the eye could see. Every now and then he could be seen cradling a body, lifting gently into the air before shooting across the sky. The image froze and the screen split, with a picture of Bolt, taken at his first press conference, appearing alongside that of the flying man, suspended in midair. “It was initially believed that these heroic efforts were the work of Bolt, but clearly this is another person, a new superhero.”
“Can that be?” Kevin muttered, dropping to his knees in front of the television. The picture cut back to the live feed, and the roof that had previously been in the air was now being tossed aside. The man bent over, and a moment later stood, a furry form in his arms. He walked forward, clearing the rubble, then rubbed the animal in his arms and set it down. The animal, a dog, then bounded toward the gathered mob, the man following behind. The crown began to roar as the man approached. The reporter made a motion to the camera, and the picture became shaky as the two made their way toward the man.
“Sir!” the reported called, the jerkiness becoming more pronounced as the pair appeared to be running now. After a moment, the movement stopped, and the man materialized on screen, his form clearly in focus now. The new hero had black hair, slicked back onto his head, and a handsome face. He wore a royal blue shirt, a strange five-sided symbol containing an “S” printed prominently on the chest. Kevin felt goose bumps form on his arms as he realized that he knew that man, whoever he was.
“Who are you? Do you know Bolt?” the reporter asked breathlessly, shoving the microphone in the man’s face. The hero folded his arms across his chest, his eyes shifting back and forth between the reporter and the camera. The light on the man had grown brighter as more reporters had gathered around.
“My name is Superman,” the hero finally said. “And, if you’ll excuse me, I have more work to do.” With that, he was gone. And so was Kevin.
*~*~*
Lois Lane sat cross-legged on her living room floor, stacks of newspapers surrounding her on all sides. In front of her, the television blared, locked onto the local network affiliate and playing a rerun of some bad drama or another, but Lois wasn’t really paying attention. For the past several hours, all her concentration had been locked onto the task at hand, sorting through copies of college newspapers from around the country printed within the last school year. The articles weren’t important, and neither were the ads or the pictures or the editorial pages or anything else except the names of the authors of the stories. Clark Kent, her mysterious and gifted new friend, had said that he occasionally wrote for newspapers, and that he hoped to be making a living on that very soon. Either that meant he was soon to be graduating from college, or that he was trying to break into the profession some other way. He looked to be about the same age as her, and his apparel, while not exactly screaming “college student,” didn’t exactly mark him as a professional of any kind, either. So she had started with the college papers, which the Metropolis University Daily got on subscription just in case they wanted to lift articles or editorials and republish them. So far, Lois hadn’t found so much as a mention of Clark Kent. All that she knew for sure was that he didn’t write for any of the large universities on the west coast or in the Rocky Mountain states. It wasn’t looking like he resided in the plains states, either, but she still had a long way to go before should reach that conclusion definitively.
It occurred to Lois that there was an easier way to go about finding the school of residence for her hero. The woman he had been with obviously went to Metropolis University, and Lois even had a name in case she wanted to contact her. She’d gone so far as to pull out the campus directory, flipping it open to the L’s, before convincing herself that the last thing that she wanted to do was talk to this Lana person. She was rude, she was trashy, and she certainly had no love lost for Lois. Besides, as bad as the woman was, there was no guaranteeing that she would be willing to surrender any information about her former boyfriend. Of course, there was always the breaking and entering option, and the thought of sifting through this woman’s belongings, maybe finding a few pictures of Clark to bring home, brought a smile to her face. But breaking the law probably wasn’t the best course of action, especially since it was darn hard to get any research done in jail, so now it was on to plan C. Getting up close and personal with her living room carpet wasn’t her idea of a fun-filled Saturday night, but she supposed that she didn’t really have anything better to do. The cause was most certainly noble, and if she accomplished her mission, the chances of another dull Saturday night at home were slim to none. Still, there was only so much newsprint a person could take, and thoughts of escaping the apartment were beginning to creep into her subconscious.
She sighed as she pulled another newspaper off the pile, taking a look at the heading. The most recent bunch had been from the Kansas schools – Kansas University, Kansas State, Wichita State, Emporia State. This one was Midwestern State, another podunk university in the middle of a wheat field. Somehow, she thought as she scanned the front page, she couldn’t really see Clark as coming from some place like that. He just seemed too...exotic to be from someplace as completely white bread as Kansas. Flipping through the paper, she came up dry, then chucked it into another pile and grabbed the next edition. Maybe she could go out to the ceremony for Bolt, she thought as she scanned the front page above the fold, then turned it over. Or maybe she could find her roommate and see what she was up to. Or...maybe.... Her eyes went wide and all planning for the night ceased as she gaped at the paper in front of her. “New Dean Chosen for the College of Agriculture,” the headline read, and the author was listed as one Clark Kent.
Okay, maybe she could see him coming from the Midwest, she thought, her head spinning. The innocence and wholesomeness and moral virtue, yeah, that could definitely be a by-product of a fine Kansas upbringing. And Midwestern boys had a reputation for being very...hearty. Curious, she scanned the article, trying to get a handle on his style, and found herself nodding appreciatively, even if the article was on a subject that she had no interest in whatsoever. Whoever he was while in her presence, his writing style was that of a professional, better than most that she saw in the campus newspapers of America. He was good, she realized, grabbing for the next edition. “Campus Security Holes Exposed” the top headline said, again written by Clark Kent. This article wasn’t just good, it was downright impressive. It had been well-researched, was hard-hitting, and had served to affect some actual change on his campus. So he wasn’t just her hero, Lois thought with a smile, wondering how many muggings this one article alone had prevented. They did have muggings in Kansas, didn’t they?
Blinking, Lois shook her head and stood up, making a bee-line for the phone. The next step was to get the phone number for Midwestern State campus information, and then Clark Kent was hers. It had only been a day since they had seen each other, but she had plenty that she wanted to say. She was still grinning as she dialed the phone, the television in the background switching to the late local news.
“Breaking news out of Oklahoma tonight,” the reporter said. Lois turned toward the television with mild interest. “A deadly tornado struck a suburb of Oklahoma City, bringing destruction and devastation, but also bringing hope in the form of a new hero.”
Her curiosity now piqued, Lois’s fingers hovered in midair above the phone, the number now forgotten. The pictures on the television were the standard pictures of death and destruction that always seemed to accompany killer tornado stories, but as the tape rolled, there was something else. In the distance, a man was doing things that no man could do, no man except Bolt. But it wasn’t Bolt.
The scene switched to the face of a haggard looking woman, wrapped in a blanket. “My sister was at home when the tornado hit,” the woman said. “We came here as soon as we could, and the house was a total loss. We started yelling her name, and we thought that maybe we could hear a weak scream, but it was coming from deep within the rubble. That’s when he came.” The woman smiled, her face turning skyward. “He just dropped right out of the sky and hovered above the rubble, pulling things away so quickly that it all just looked like a blur. But then, when the movement stopped, he was cradling my sister in his arms. The ambulances were overwhelmed, but he floated over to us, let us know where he was going with her, and just took off into the sky again.”
“Was it Bolt?” a man’s voice asked, drawing the woman’s eyes back toward the ground, to someone standing beside the camera.
“I don’t think so, no,” the woman said. “He wasn’t wearing the outfit, and he just looked...different. But whoever he is, I want to thank him for everything.”
“Clark,” Lois whispered, transfixed. The picture switched again, this time to a live feed in the darkened town. The mystery man now came into focus some distance away from the camera, surrounded by a mob of microphone-wielding reporters.
“Our Rod Lambert is live at the scene with this breaking news,” the reporters in the studio said. The image on screen became sharper as the camera zoomed into the new hero. The phone started to beep rapidly in Lois’s ear, and she absently dropped it into its cradle, never taking her eyes off the screen. There, larger than life, was Clark, unmistakably Clark. His hair looked like it was greased up and plastered to his head. His face, now devoid of glasses, was more devastatingly handsome than it had been before, if that was possible. His wardrobe consisted of a tight blue shirt, possibly made of some sort of spandex material, stretched across his broad expanse of chest, highlighting every ripple and better defining his muscles. On the shirt was printed a strange symbol, an S possibly. He didn’t appear to be flustered, like he had been in the alley. Neither was he cocky or distressed or smug or any other emotion that she had seen from him. He almost seemed solemn, authoritative. The image that he projected was one that was quintessentially that of a hero, and all at once she could believe that everything she had ever thought about him was true. In fact, it was hard to believe that he would ever have any doubts, that he would ever be timid or shy.
“Who are you? Do you know Bolt?” a reporter asked, and Clark stood there, looking between the reporter and him camera.
“My name...” he started, and Lois started to smile.
“Say it,” she muttered, her heart pounding heavily.
“...is Superman,” he finished. Lois threw her hands up in the air and danced an awkward dance, before running up to the television and bending down, every bone in her body willing her to kiss the screen. But she didn’t.
“He loves me,” she whispered at the pixilated face of the reporter in front of her, giggling at the thought. Standing up, she looked back toward the phone, a large grin spreading across her face. So she couldn’t call him tonight, she thought, but there was always tomorrow. And boy, tomorrow couldn’t come fast enough. Until then, she would bask in the warmness that she was feeling right now, and have dreams about the next time they met.
