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Good Samaritan (02/08)The rest of the evening was a slow-moving nightmare, and I was stuck in it. Stuck wishing the moments would start slipping away, but time had slowed to point that a second felt like an era. And a minute was borderline eternity.
As I sprayed Superman with jets of water, I saw the green glowing sheen of that Kryptonite stuff washing away and dribbling down my driveway in what looked to be a minor toxic waste spill. Okay, well, maybe that was my imagination. *Rabid* imagination. Rabid was a much more appropriate word. It wasn't *that* green. I stared at the runoff as it snaked down my driveway and into the dark, leaf-filled gutter twenty or so feet beyond. It barely had a tint to it. In fact, it probably was only shining at all because of the street lamps reflecting off it. But still...
"This isn't toxic, is it?" I asked, thinking suddenly of Claire and Annie. I glanced up and noted my door was still hanging wide open just as I had instructed. Two pairs of eyes were staring out from the living room window. Two pairs of tiny hands were smudged up against the glass.
And then I remembered I had gotten it on my hands. I stopped to inspect my skin. Though I didn't see a glow, I paused to squirt the water at myself. I shivered as the chill shocked me.
"Not to you," he replied. Weakly.
I resumed spraying him. By "you", I got the distinct impression he meant humans. Not me, specifically. I blinked.
I glanced around at the surrounding box-shaped houses. The lights in the windows were all dim, save for the occasional glow from behind closed curtains. I didn't think anyone was watching.
Very few would be home anyway. The neighborhood housed primarily younger couples and I doubted there would be very many at home on a Friday evening like this, not in the last dregs of warmer weather. A few years ago, the surrounding community had been almost all retirees. But when I had moved in with... When I had moved in, it had been the start of a new wave. Nature had oscillated.
Regardless, the tension was still there. The tingling in the back of my neck. All it took was one observant person at a window... I prayed that no one would notice the commotion and come out to discover what was going on. Because how I was going to explain why I was giving a collapsed Superman a shower in my driveway in the dark was not something I could even begin to fathom. I'm not very good at improvisation. I think.
The hose snorted and sputtered. I had been twisting it a bit too hard.
I looked down at him again as I loosened my grip.
In the relative darkness, it was difficult to see if he was doing any better, although now he was moving to help the spray do its job. He did this mostly in silence, though every once in a while he coughed, dry and heaving, which was followed by a rather violent shudder.
"Can you tell if it's gone?" I asked.
His head nodded minutely. "I think so," he replied. His voice was quiet, sheer misery dripping from it.
Superman fell back into silence as I cast the hose aside and ran back to turn it off. He hadn't moved when I returned. He lay there, panting. Twitching. Well, shivering, I imagined. It wasn't cold, but it wasn't warm either. And he was wet and it was dark.
"Can you stand?" I asked.
What was I supposed to do now? What was the proper etiquette for this sort of thing? I was suddenly struck hard with the thought that the world's most well-known celebrity was lying half-dead in my driveway. Now that the immediate crisis was gone, the close proximity with him was quite stupefying. This...
This was *Superman*.
As I watched, he flopped impotently from his back to his side. He groaned -- it was a muted, strangled sound. "No," he responded after some amount of deliberation. But he didn't ask for help.
Damn it.
Now what? Maybe get a blanket?
He straightened his huge body out and sighed. His eyes slid shut and he held a hand to his forehead like somebody with a hangover. Aches, maybe?
"Where am I?" he asked.
I blinked. "In my driveway."
"And where is your driveway?" His question was accented with one of those horrific dry coughs I had heard earlier in the car. His whole body curled up off the ground like a wave before it went flat again into a restive state. I got a little nervous that maybe the Kryptonite stuff wasn't as gone as I'd thought. But he would tell me if it wasn't, I rationalized.
Surely he wasn't that concerned with his image that he'd be dying in silence?
Then again, the whole reason he was lying there like a wet rag had to do with precisely that.
"1570 North Oakford Street. I took you home in that Explorer." I pointed, sort-of, in the direction of the parked rental vehicle further down the drive. The navy-blue paint made it hard to see in the darkness.
"What state?"
It finally occurred to me that, with a man who could cross the globe in a matter of minutes, that was actually a very relevant question. "Oh, I'm sorry." I stuttered a weak apology, though breath was slowly leaving me.
God, what must this man think of me? On the other hand, he looked rather like he wasn't thinking much about me at all. "This is Arlington, Virginia. It's about a forty minute drive from Dulles Airport, which is where I found you. I work there."
"And you are?"
"Jake. Jake Lancer."
"I'm sorry we couldn't have met under better circumstances, Mr. Lancer. Thank you, though."
"It's what anyone would do."
"You would be surprised, Mr. Lancer."
"Jake."
"Jake," he corrected himself. I barely heard it.
The conversation ceased.
Well, great. What was I supposed to say now?
I tried not to stare at him in the following silence, but when you have a garishly-colored world icon in your driveway, believe me, it's quite hard to look away. He just lay there, eyes closed, breathing shallowly, coughing every once in a while. In the dim light, his pallor looked very bad, like a proverbial vampire.
I couldn't very well just go inside and leave him there to fend for himself. Could I? Again, I found myself grasping for any smidge of experience that might get me through this, but came up dry. Maybe he was collecting himself to depart and just needed a few moments to catch his breath. He had already recovered leaps from when I had first dumped him on the pavement, although he still looked rather wretched.
Well, I could give him a few minutes.
Distractions. I could do that. I turned away from him to give him a little privacy. I hated it when people saw me sick, and I was hardly a macho type let alone a world savior. So I multiplied that by ten and figured that might be how he felt right now. Then, given the fact that he was lying prone like a discarded toy on the pavement, while I was standing around practically on top of him, kind of like a mother hen but, well, more manly, I doubled the figurative value of embarrassment and came away with a large total.
And then, as I thought more about it, it became painfully obvious why people could peg me as an engineering type about five seconds after meeting me.
Anyway, I shook my head and focused on other things.
The shaggy carpet of Zoysia on my lawn had already started to mottle into a golden, straw-colored brown, though the dark made the distinctions muted and hard to pick out. But as I glanced at the tufts draping over onto my front walk and the side of the driveway, even I could see that it was far too long. I stepped from the driveway into the grass. There was a dry-sounding rustle, and my foot sank down way too far for my liking.
Mow the lawn one more time before all the grass dies, I added to my list of things to do tomorrow.
And speaking of the lawn, my gaze trailed to the gargantuan blob in front of the dining room window. The Camelia bush had grown several feet this year, and it occurred to me that the old tarp I had been using to cover it from the early frosts the past few years would probably be far too small now.
Item two: buy new tarp.
Buy. Buying. Why did that spark a memory? Oh, yes.
Retrieve credit card bill from the dining room table before Claire starts that school project she had mentioned last week. Or had that been the week before and she had already done it?
No matter. The credit card bill needed to be collected regardless, for she would surely have a new assignment soon enough.
Why did every school project consist of popsicle sticks and glue? It seemed a dangerous combination when the catalyst was a six-year-old. And rarely did the assigned subject of sculpture ever look the same when rendered with thumb-sized slabs of wood. But I wasn't a teacher. What did I know? I just put down plastic tablecloths and dealt with it.
I looked back at Superman, realizing he hadn't made a sound in some time. He was still and prostrate, but I could hear his soft, sometimes hitched breathing. Maybe he had fallen asleep? Then I began to wonder what the heck I would do if that was really the case. I'd already demonstrated with embarrassing success that I could no longer lift things in Superman-sized amounts.
"Superman?" I asked hesitantly.
He twitched. "I was hoping my powers would come back in a few minutes."
They obviously hadn't. "How long does it usually take?"
"Depends," he replied noncommittally, though there was an underlying dread in his tone. As if he had had enough exposure to this Kryptonite junk that he knew full and well he wasn't going to be getting up on his own anytime soon.
Honestly, I was beginning to sense a pattern with him as far as injuries went.
The fingers of my right hand found their way to my mouth and I cupped my chin. "Can I? Do anything, I mean?"
"I'm sure I will be fine. I just need a few minutes."
There was a lack of conviction in his tone that scared me deeply, but I remembered the embarrassment quotient I'd arrived at, and turned back around to give him a few more minutes. What could a few more minutes hurt?
And maybe, just maybe, I was wrong, and he would get up at any moment.
"Okay," I said. Maybe we *would* get lucky. Right. Lucky. A horrible, dark part of myself wanted nothing to do with this.
Back to the distractions. I thought back to earlier in the day. I had been up in the flight tower when a plane had called in a mayday. National Met Air Flight 1993. There had been a pin drop of a moment when everyone froze with dread and the silence was a living, breathing animal, and then motion resumed, and everything was business. We had all frantically tried to reroute planes to get the runway clear for the rapidly descending aircraft. And then, for the first time since I had joined the air traffic control staff at Dulles, the call from the pilot turned into an eruption of cheers, muffled and screeching as the small speaker in the cockpit was presumably overwhelmed. There had been a telltale streak of movement moments before on the radar screens, but the tension had been so thick it took me a bit to process fully.
Superman had arrived to save the day.
Thank God.
I had been so excited to finally see the Man of Steel in action. So relieved that he had chosen to venture away from Metropolis skies this day.
But it had all been so distant and clinical. Yay, the hero had arrived. Yay, the day was saved. Cheers ensued. But we have to get planes down every minute, and more than two of those minutes had already passed with no direction to the planes circling. The delays would be atrocious. Back to work! Hurry, now.
Hours later, I had gone to Francine at the Budget desk to borrow a car for myself and my accompanying headache. My carpool buddy had had to leave early with a cold, and I needed a vehicle to pick up my kids from school. And why pay for a taxi when you have connections in car rentals?
I took the shuttle blithely to parking lot twelve, way out into the boonies where they kept all the high-mileage, possibly-ready-to-break-down, only-rent-in-emergency-overload vehicles. Walked up a long row of SUVs. And there he was, slumped against the door of my would-be transportation.
That was when my day had become starkly real.
I blinked and shook myself from the memory.
"Anything?" I asked.
"No."
I glanced at my watch. It was like Russian roulette. The longer we stayed out here the more likely it was that somebody would spin the lucky bullet into the chamber and look out the window onto my driveway.
His dignity be damned, or perhaps saved. "Okay, put your arm around my shoulder," I commanded in my best Dad-means-it voice.
I knelt down on the pavement next to him, vaguely shocked at the gelid cold that seeped through my pant leg. And I had let him lie there for nearly twenty minutes. I reprimanded myself in silence.
"What?" He sounded dumbfounded.
"You're coming inside." I tried not to let the creeping doubt take hold of my words. Maybe I'd breached some Kryptonian personal space barrier. I pressed on. "This cold isn't doing you any good and you certainly can't just lie in my driveway all night. Sooner or later somebody will see you here, and you've made it plainly clear you don't want that to happen else you would be in the ER right now, and I would be slowly recovering from the shock somewhere in a bar. Because, believe me, I'm quite shocked, and what the Hell am I saying?"
"Mr. Lancer, I couldn't--"
I didn't bother to correct him on my name this time. "Put your arm around my shoulder," I commanded again, and before I lost the courage, I grabbed his arm and slung it over me. "You can fly back to your Arctic fortress or whatever when you can fly."
He actually sputtered. "My... Arctic fortress?"
"It's one of the popular theories."
"Oh." Despite the paleness in his face, he looked positively bemused, as if he couldn't figure out why the scientists hadn't decided he should have a fortress in the Bahamas. How about that?
"Okay, now we'll push up on three," I said. "One... Two... Three..."
He moaned pitifully. And it took several tries. But we finally got off the ground. For a moment as we both stood there panting, I thought it would be an easy time from there, but then I guess Superman realized just how wretched he felt. His weight on my arm felt like it doubled, and I nearly toppled over with him in tow, which would have made twice in one night that I'd dropped the Man of Steel for lack of strength. The whole ordeal made me wish I had gone to the gym a bit more lately. Or at least done some sort of activity. At all.
Self-recrimination saved us both. I made myself bear his near-full weight, despite the developing spots in my vision, and we began to shuffle forward. Foot by very slow foot.
I believe I mentioned before that the moments seemed to be progressing with glacial speed. Well, now, they seemed utterly frozen.
Never had the walk from my driveway to my living room seemed so long.
*****
TBC...
(End Part 02/08)
