Who Writes This Stuff?

After the super battle I’m slightly shaken, but not stirred. I call Larry from a payphone and excitedly tell him there’s far more here than a three page magazine article. This is at least a book. For a moment I feel like Truman Capote when he first set foot in Holcomb, Kansas.

I walk down the street after hanging up on the perplexed and slightly annoyed Larry, who adamantly insists I cut this down to whatever Trigger wants. I’m in a fugue. I don’t know how to find Hammerspace now. He effectively lost me when he vanished into that puff of smoke a few chapters ago.

I’m a few blocks from the payphone when I spot the flashing lights of police cars and fire trucks. I keep walking toward the disturbance until my way is blocked by police officers and a line of crime scene tape. On the other side of the police perimeter is a furiously burning gasoline tanker which firefighters scramble to spray with extinguishers. A way off from the tanker I see two paramedics hoisting the invisible remains of Force Field Girl into an ambulance. Apparently she ran from the battle with Hammerspace and was hit by a car (because she was invisible), which then lost control and careened into the parked gasoline tanker, causing it to explode. I can’t help wondering about causality after this. If Foursight had never said anything, perhaps she wouldn’t have run. But then maybe Hammerspace’s grenade would have blown her apart. What exactly did Foursight see? Was it exactly this? Was this the only possibility? Was it like watching a television or was it much more complicated than seeing one scene at a time in the order that they go down? Maybe he sees all possible futures simultaneously, but somehow he can pick the one that will actually occur because of what he knows about the present. This awes me for a moment before I decide Foursight just isn’t that smart, and I shake the notion.

I return to my hotel room and flip the TV on just for the noise to keep me company. I lie down and stare at the ceiling as I dial Hammerspace’s cell phone number hopelessly. I’m shocked when he actually picks up. I stumble on my words at first, but it’s surprisingly easy to convince him to meet up again.

It’s three in the afternoon when Hammerspace picks me up from the sidewalk in front of the hotel in a green Honda Accord complete with rust holes. I assume this is a cover, because driving around in some sort of super car would draw too much attention. I immediately ask him about the disappearing act, and he assures me it isn’t any sort of super power, only a slight of hand trick that anyone can do. He won’t tell me exactly how it works, though.

We drive back to Hammerspace’s building. I’m pretty excited to see the inside of a supervillain’s lair, but what awaits on the other side of the door is shockingly normal. Hammerspace lives in a studio apartment on the third floor of a building that smells alarmingly of cat urine. He explains that this is because of the cat lady on the floor below him. I ask him how many of the animals she has and he says “none, but she keeps her litter box in the stairwell.”

The inside of the villain’s hive is cluttered with peculiar items. He has a chemistry set complete with boiling beakers atop bunsen burners and enormous lengths of twisty wires connecting them all to a large Tesla coil. There is a rifle-like device which is clearly labeled ‘brain scrambler’. A man-sized robot spider sits deactivated behind his couch. A baseball diamond is displayed prominently inside a glass case near the entryway. A discarded sock hangs over the edge of the display case. Hammerspace passes all of this to sit down in a dilapidated reclining chair in front of the television. He kicks off his boots and puts up the foot rest. He reaches down and plucks an open bag of pork grinds from the floor next to the chair. He offers me some, but I decline. They give me heartburn.

Hammerspace seems more and more annoyed as I inquire excitedly about his death rays and robospiders. “You act like you’ve never seen a brainwashing machine before,” he eventually interrupts. “It’s not that big a deal. They don’t even come in handy very often. Maybe when the death ray runs dry. You haven’t seen a death ray either? They’re all over the place.”

I get him to talk more about the global super weapons black market. “There are a couple of evil super scientists out there that build this stuff and pretty much sell to the highest bidder. Some of it comes from space aliens too, but don’t write that in your article. It pisses off the fundamentalist Christians. Super scientists? They’re like scientists but they do super science. Super science is like regular science, but way ahead. That’s where all the lasers and stuff come from. It’s all powered by radioactive waves. You can get radiation to do just about anything.”

Hammerspace sees something on the television that catches his eye and he reaches over to his coffee table for a tiny black spiral notepad. He jots something down and then explains. “This where I write down all of my evil schemes. I like to write things out and let them sit for a little while before I really put anything in motion. Sometimes you come back to it later and realize it’s just stupid. Like one time I came up with a plan to make kinoki pads that suck people’s souls out of their feet. I had been drinking, but still. I come up with so many ideas. The mind of an evil genius is always rattling away. The gears never stop turning. Like this here, I just saw that kid from The Sixth Sense on TV and that made me think of this thing where you would pay it backward.”

Pay it backward?

“Yeah. Basically, I’ll go out and perform three evil deeds on complete strangers and I’ll tell them to perform three evil deeds on three strangers. So it will spread like a chain letter until everybody on the planet is evil.”

And that accomplishes…?

“Well, that’s the part I haven’t ironed out yet, but that’s why I write these things down and come back to them. It’s good to look at things from a fresh perspective so you can really weed out the bad ones.”

Ever wonder what kinds of things an evil mastermind watches on TV? He lists his favorites for me as he surfs channels. “The Sopranos, American Idol, Family Matters reruns, COPS – I love COPS. I love watching degenerates get their asses beat.”

Degenerates?

“Oh yeah, you know. Crack hos, junkies, trailer trash, to some extent drug dealers, just scumbags in general.”

I should probably be a little afraid to ask the next question, but my reputation for having no tact and no fear must be upheld, so I do it. I ask him what divides him from those kinds of people.

His masked face twists into an appalled contortion I can’t replicate in any literary way. “Are you joking? I’m nothing like those people. I mean, I suppose I understand where the average Joe might lump us all together as criminals, but that’s like saying Hitler and Pam Anderson are the same because they’re vegetarians. It just doesn’t work. What I do I do with class. Those people are animals. They’re little more than chimps given an orgasm button in some sort of lab experiment. They just push it and push it until they waste away and die. They have no self control, no ability to plan ahead, no greater thought processes, and no idea what they’re doing. But I know exactly what I’m doing. I have plans and ambition. If I had to pick one special thing that separates us that would be it, the ambition. Real people have it. Dirt bags don’t.”

This ties into another interesting aspect of Hammerspace, which has become even more evident as he sits here watching TV – his total shift in diction when addressing superheroes as opposed to the way he speaks to me during everyday encounters. “Yeah. That’s a big part of it. If I’m robbing a bank and the Scarlet Avenger lands in front of me and I say ‘I ain’t do nothin’, bitch’ that’s how a common hood rat talks. I want the Scarlet Avenger to know that I’m a vastly superior threat. So I might say something like ‘Well, well, well, Scarlet Avenger, we meet again. Shall we dance the dance where you DIE!’ That sounds very chill. I’m letting her know I’m an educated and reasonable gentleman, but that I want to kill her.”

So if this were Dungeons and Dragons you would be lawful evil?

“I have no idea what that means. I’m not a nerd-” is all he manages to say before he sees something that makes him leap out of his seat. “Holy shit!”

Next Week: Boogeymen