by Steve Himmer
That afternoon when Frank left his office, a dark green sedan was parked outside the building, two of its wheels on the sidewalk and practically touching both the NO PARKING sign and the hydrant the sign had been put there to guard. Two men sat in the car and Frank later recalled the driver had a goatee and was smoking a pipe and the other man looked younger than the gray at his temples suggested. They weren’t familiar to Frank; they didn’t look like the sort of people he knew.
In passing he gave the men a slight scowl, the mildest look of reproach, to make them aware he had noticed their illegal parking and, he hoped, to discourage them from returning to that ill-chosen space. Enough to let them know they’d done wrong and hadn’t gotten away with it entirely. He wanted to knock on the car’s window and ask how they’d like to be the victims of some emergency, kept waiting for help by a car parked in front of a hydrant. He wanted to ask, but he didn’t; he satisfied himself with a scowl. Then he looked both ways across the busy intersection before him and stepped down from the height of the curb.
Halfway across the street — exactly halfway, because the image of his foot bridging both yellow lines became synthetically bonded with those awful sounds — Frank heard a crackle, a rumble, and some kind of whoosh like strong wind. He turned to see a tangle of scaffolding topped with a crane tumble down from a building half-built and sharing a wall with his own office tower. The steel didn’t fall so much as it slid like an avalanche slides down a mountain, and it swallowed the sidewalk and the men in their car and several people who had the misfortune to be passing by.
Bile bubbled up and foamed into his mouth and he rushed for the far sidewalk to vomit over the railing along the edge of the park. He retched until nothing more came, then he coughed and he wheezed with dry heaves and collapsed on the ground, knees pulled to his chest and eyes watering from all the particles stirred into the air. And as the dust cleared — a cliché come quite true in the face of something so hard to imagine — flashes of green shone through the dark mesh of steel and concrete and what remained of the crane’s yellow cabin.
I did that, Frank thought, I killed those men, and his heaves returned so he turned away from the scene of his crime and retched over the railing again. He’d wished them ill, he’d wanted them punished, and a few seconds later they were both crushed to death and who knew how many others were trapped in that tangle, too. And for what, for parking in the wrong place? For taking advantage of a spot in front of a building even though something so small as a hydrant was already there? They’d been live parking, they could have moved if the hydrant was needed. He knelt with his back to the chaos, to the screams and the panic behind him, his face and his hands cold and clammy as he went on heaving when nothing was left.
He answered questions from the police but didn’t confess to the disaster being his fault. He expected the police to arrest him, to see through his story and know him for the killer he was, but none of the officers did or at least they didn’t let on — maybe they would spring a trap on him later. Reporters tried to question him, too, since he’d been so close to the scene, since he’d so narrowly avoided being trapped in the wreckage himself, but Frank said, “No comment,” like he’d seen people do on TV and like other people watching TV would now see him do, too. He pictured himself on the news saying nothing and hoped he would look like an innocent man.
He rushed away toward the subway as soon as the police said he could go. But they took down his number, his name and address, so on the ride home he resigned himself to being found out — to being arrested, imprisoned, or worse — and sooner rather than later. He’d glared at those men, he’d crushed them to death, because they were waiting for a friend to come out of the building, maybe one of Frank’s colleagues getting a ride home from work, maybe Helen who had (he now realized) been on crutches for the past several days.
The dam of his teeth held another sour wave of vomit back as the train pulled into his station, and he just reached a garbage can on the platform before retching and spewing again. He was so spent, so heaved-dry, that he hung from the side of the barrel for several long minutes, moaning and pale, until a subway guard approached with a radio crackling in his hand. They’ve found me, Frank thought, and the idea of arrest didn’t scare him so much as in nightmares of being arrested, but he’d never dreamed of deserving the punishment coming his way. A crackling loudspeaker somewhere high in the station urged passengers to report any suspicious activity seen on the train.
“Are you alright, sir?” asked the guard, laying a hand on Frank’s shoulder instead of the sharp truncheon blow he’d braced for. “Let me call an ambulance for you.”
Hoisted to his feet by the other man’s hands, Frank answered, “No, thank you. I’m fine. Something didn’t agree with me.” He added, “That’s all, officer,” though the man was a security guard.
“Get yourself home, then. Have some chicken soup — nothing like it when you aren’t feeling so hot.”
“Yes, sir,” Frank said, and since his head had stopped swimming and his stomach stopped climbing, he wove his way to the turnstile and out of the station, into the cool evening air. He walked home without incident but kept his eyes on the ground. He avoided noticing the people he passed in case he might accidentally pull scaffolding down on their heads — who knew how his new power worked? Who knew its limits or how it was even set off? It was better to stare at the sidewalk than risk more blood on his hands.
In his apartment Frank let out his breath for what seemed the first time since the fall. He poured himself a glass of water, gulped it down, and poured a second and third. In time his heart slowed, his blood pressure relaxed, and he came back to himself. Most nights he would have turned on the news but tonight he was afraid of what the reporters would tell him, the city’s top story, maybe national news, and he didn’t want to know any more details than those he already did: it had happened, and it was his fault. Buildings don’t fall from the sky by themselves.
So instead of the news he watched the History Channel, a show about Winchester Cathedral and a diver named William Walker who swam beneath it in one of those heavy old diving suits, shoring up footings and repairing the cathedral’s foundation even though it was dangerous and no one had dived in the marsh beneath a building before.
But the cathedral was taller than regular buildings, taller than houses and everyday churches and the tallest of trees. It towered at the center of the old city and the lives of everyone in it: there it was every morning and night, silhouetted against both sunrise and sunset. Standing as tall as the moon and the sun, so tall that men like William Walker were willing to risk their own lives to shore up the past for the sake of the future. To keep the world as it always had been.
After the program Frank felt more relaxed, soothed by a narrator’s baritone voice telling him what was important about events already long over, events seen through a screen instead of right up in his face with all their vomit and dust. He walked onto the apartment’s balcony to look out over the city. His city. He wondered if he might be like Superman and this city really his to watch over. Maybe he could use his new powers to help instead of to hurt, the way Superman flew around the planet to turn back time and save all those lives. Frank couldn’t fly, but maybe he could do something else. Like William, Walker used his antique diving suit, though it wasn’t antique at the time.
He looked down on the busy street in front of his building, traffic thick and moving fast, and there on one corner an old woman struggled to cross with a cart full of groceries.
Frank concentrated.
He stared at those cars and he screwed up his eyes and he willed them to stop, to freeze where they were for the woman — if he could pull scaffolding and concrete down onto the sidewalk, surely he could stop a few cars — but no, nothing happened, nothing stopped moving in the city below even though he had willed it to happen so hard that he felt like his head might explode.
Now he wanted, he needed to know if his powers could only do damage but was afraid of the only way he saw to find out. He’d killed people, for God’s sake, crushed them to pulp and now he should do it again just to prove that he could? It was too cruel, yet there was a voice in the back of his mind: wasn’t it worth causing a little more harm to know what he was capable of? Couldn’t some small suffering now help him prevent greater loss later by teaching him how his abilities worked? He could find a positive use for his powers if he knew what those powers were. Even Superman must have made mistakes when he was just learning to use his powers — he must have hurt people, too.
Frank had to do what he could. He had to protect people without the power — the powers! — to keep themselves safe. He had to keep his city safe from other cities that would do it harm.
So he screwed up his eyes and he picked out a car and bored into its front left tire with all of his concentration and will. He pictured his eyes beaming drills and his mind a raygun, the air between himself and his target gleaming and tapering into a point far below where black rubber met road. And he actually saw the red beam of his vision and saw the tire glow, too, heating up, preparing to burst, he could swear it was swelling, and the whole world slowed down to a crawl — the whole world except him — but although it moved slowly the car passed from sight and away down the road and all the other cars drove off, too, no explosions, no crashes, no screaming or panic below.
And Frank collapsed on his balcony, his back pressed to the wrought iron rail there to keep him from falling, and his head — screaming now, pounding from the pressure of exerting his fruitless will on the world — sunk into his hands and his eyes closed and his apartment grew dark and then darker and he was afraid to stand up, afraid to move, afraid to do anything because he had all these powers he couldn’t control. Powers he couldn’t do anything with; he couldn’t even convince himself to get up off the floor or to turn on the lights. He could cause so much damage without meaning to, and in a world so unstable scaffolding might as well fall by itself because there was nothing he could do about it and it would probably happen again.
