PART I

ICARUS 

The dream was always the same. . . 

I was flying. 

Not like I used to, with a harness and straps and all that crap around me.

I was really flying, like I dreamed of flying when I was a little boy, lying on a grassy hill and looking up at the clouds.

            That was the daydream. But the real dream . . . does that make sense? By definition, a dream can’t be . . .

            Oh, but this was! It was! It was so real.

            Wind in my hair and my face. Folds of my clothing slapping against my body. And the noise! So much noise that you wouldn’t expect when you’re in the middle of a dream. Not the gentle sound of wind through the trees on a warm summer day by the river, with the smell of cotton candy and the sounds of baseballs cracking against the bat while children scream.

            No, the wind, the wind roared like a mighty lion at the circus, or a grizzly bear on a rerun of Davy Crockett. It roared through my ears and my body, up around and through me. I soared, and the wind was my friend. Through cloud after cloud, wet and unpleasant but only for a moment and then out the other side, and below. Below I could see . . .

            The fair. It was beautiful. The ferris wheel was turning, the lemonade stands were running, horses, pigs, bulls and other animals everywhere, children screaming with joy as I coasted a hundred, then fifty, now twenty feet above them. Now, touching the ground with a few steps to steady myself.

            And now my street clothes were gone. Instead I was in my skin-tight costume, the green one I’d used to wear when I did my thing back in the day. Sweet kids rushed up to me, along with happy, smiling adults and pretty girls- oh, the girls. Bright red lipstick and swirly dresses, some up just past their knees. Sometimes it was the pretty blonde I saw by the guess-your-weight for only a few seconds back when I was sixteen. Sometimes it was the brunette with the short-n-curly look that Liz Taylor’d had when she was younger. Sometimes it was the redhead with the bouffant hairstyle and the half-dozen freckles on her perfect little pale nose I’d gotten a slow-dance with at my cousin’s wedding. I’d learned her name was Rosie, but could never find anyone afterwards who knew her last name, or how she was connected to my cousin, or how I could have found her.

            None of that mattered in the dream. In the dream, they all came to me. They all loved me. They all wanted to love the man who flew, the man who could do anything. The man who would, when he could, if he could, the man who’d change everyone’s lives forever. Selling a thousand comic books a day, and ten times that number watching the TV show about my exploits. The president asking me to dinner, and me saying: well, yes, sir, but could I please bring my folks, too? I’d love for my dad to meet you.

            All of them, rushing up over the green grass on a warm summer day at the fair. Reaching out to touch me, the one in the lead being the first to tap my shoulder and . . .

            #

            “Six A.M., Mr. Conlan!” said a voice full of sunshine I’d heard every morning for the last year. 

            I opened my eyes slowly. It was the same, happy, fresh-faced young lady who’d woken me up, changed my diapers (let’s not try to get around it by calling it incontinence, shall we? I piss and shit myself in my sleep. End of awkward word-dance), and helped me dress myself for nearly a year now. 

            She was a beautiful young thing. Or maybe she was just average and the only young thing I’d gotten this close to since the last presidential elections. Either way, I was quite certain that despite my persistent little fantasies she wouldn’t have fallen for me even back when I’d been in my prime, much less now when she had to wipe my wrinkled old ass as part of her morning routine. 

            “Good morning, Meagan,” I said, still trying to hold on to the remnants of the lovely dream. Thoughts of me, the redhead, the brunette and the blond all fading into the dusky sunset of my happier dream-life as the sun tickled the sky outside my window. “How many of us do you have to do today?”

            “Oh, too many, as usual,” she said, pulling out sheets and lifting my nightshirt. 

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            I closed my eyes. This was a cruelty on the level of a bargain with a leprechaun. When I was a teenager and thinking about sex every three seconds or so, I would have given worlds to have a gal like Meagan getting her hands close to my privates. Now? Now it happened every day. Every (literally) stinking day, but there was zero stimulation in the whole affair for either of us. 

            Six minutes. That’s how long we usually had. Then into the wheelchair, and into the hallway as she peeled off her gloves and smiled again at me. 

            “I think you’re going to have a better day than usual, Mr. Conlan,” she said as she reached for her clipboard to check my name off. If I died, my guess is they’d need a record that they’d wiped my butt carefully each day as evidence of my not being abused. 

            “Really, honey? And why’s that?”

            “You’ve got a visitor already waiting for you downstairs.”

            “What? Is this a joke?” Some of us got visitors- Mostly JWs looking to make a convert among those of us who could see the finish line coming up and might want to get a little insurance for the trip ahead. Julie on the ladies’ floor above had a daughter and three grandchildren who came to visit (she proudly told us again and again) every Sunday after Mass. Ed down the hall had a wife of forty-three years who’d come and just hold his hand while they watched football on the TV, his stroke-twisted face now and again trying to say words while his wife pretended to understand him. Or maybe she did- I wouldn’t know. By the time I was ready to settle down and get married, there was no one left for me. They’d all gotten snapped up by Jewish guys who could check something besides the ‘flies around in a silly costume stealing things’ box on the work-history section of a job application. 

            “Who?” I asked. 

            “Dunno,” she said as she scrubbed her hands with that disinfectant goop they use today instead of soap-and-water, “but to get in the door this early? Must’ve slipped Rick a c-note or two. See ya!” She smiled and waved her fingers at me as her flats tapped on the cheap linoleum on the hallway floor. 

            I made a mental note of her smile, for later when I fantasized about her accidentally falling into a time machine and sharing an egg-cream with me when I was in my teens, and the American Airman had yet to start his routine of pummeling me and destroying my latest project. 

            The one I’d spent a year on . . .

            Nope. Not gonna get mad. The Airman had been beaten up enough in the end to where he was in my position- needing help for his basic functions. And I could gloat because he’d been put in his place by a villain about two decades before Father Time did his little romper-stomper on me. Ole’ Double-A may have torn up my flight suits again and again, but at least I could still shit in a toilet when I wanted to, instead of in a bag connected to my gut with a hose. 

            Rick showed up at the door a few minutes later. He was a good kid, overall. Maybe in his mid-twenties. Some days he could be full of life, singing Spanish songs with enough vigor and panache that the little curly goatee on his chin bobbed and weaved like a boxer dodging punches. Other days he’d be like a postman stuck doing door-to-door deliveries in the rain, or a mechanic working on a make of car he really doesn’t know how to work with- unsure and grouchy, wanting to get through the day’s work quick as possible so he could get on to other things. 

            Today, he seemed to be the latter. 

            “ ‘Morning, Mr. Conlan,” he said briskly, walking up to my chair and grabbing the handles behind it. 

            “Good morning, Rick,” I said, pleasantly as I could. Sometimes, pretended happiness makes for a good weapon. 

            “You’ve got a visitor, Icarus Conlan” Rick said, “nice person. Wanted to see you really bad.”

            “He got a name?” I asked.

            “She does, I’m pretty sure. But I missed it when she shook my hand and told me how much she wanted to talk to you.”

            Well, two things. Meagan was right- Rick had been given a bribe. Normally, he wouldn’t budge on the no-visitors-before-noon-on-a-weekday rule. Meant she’d put something in his hand when she got here, if he was going to put his regular rounds on hold while he wheeled me over to see her. 

            “She cute?” I asked.

            “Cute as chicks her age go. She’s a bit younger than you, maybe in her forties.”

            “Still a spring chicken for an eighty-something like me.”

            “You got a daughter, maybe? Niece?”

            “Nope. Never married, no siblings. Not too many women wanted to hitch their star to a comic-book bad guy.”

            “You still on about that? How long’s it been, Russ? Sheeeeit. I bet the last time you wore a costume and tried to rip someone off, they were still using rotary-dial phones.”

            I didn’t have much to say to that. Then I did. “You’re right, you know. But by the time everyone forgot about Mothman, my chances in the girl department had pretty much expired like an old library card. What looks I had were pretty much gone, and my only skills really were flying in a fancy glider suit and breaking into banks. Not much good on a resume.”

            I waited for Ricardo to answer, but he didn’t. He didn’t have to, because as he turned the corner…

            Wow.