Superhero Novella

By Bartleby Willard

The eternal, superhuman lovebirds Hero & Heroine have awoken from a sixty year torpor after overstepping their limits and incurring an epically-disheartening divine chastisement.

Have they learned their lesson? Or will the heroes once again exceed the bounds and upset the metaphysical and natural order? Can these two unstoppably powerful charmers effectively battle what's bad without getting carried away and making things worse?

Canny Smith and her team of crackerjack intelligence agents hope for the best. Criminal mastermind Leviathan Cupcake Jones and wannabe-mastermind The Whiz don't even know the heroes are back. Readers like yourself just sit back and, their world not being noticeably in play, enjoy the ride!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Andrew Mackenzie Watson
• Release date: Jul 1, 2020
• ISBN: 9781393310280

Bartleby Willard

Skullvalley after Whistletown Bookmakers (SAWB) is headquartered both outside of timsepace and in the SAWB Building in Sometime Somewhere Wall Street, Isle of Manhattoes. Bartleby Willard is a self-created fictional character who one fine summer or perhaps spring day wanders into the SAWB Building, finds a quiet table, draws a "Bartleby Willard, Staff Writer" sign, a stack of blank writing papers, a feather pen and an inkwell from out his banged-up old leather satchel; and makes himself at home, or rather: at work. Amble Whistletown is the woefully mortal brother of one of the two gloriously immortal founding editors of SAWB who, after yet another wasted decade, is made editor for Bartleby Willard, non-real (literally) shapeshifting would-be author who showed up and was not sent away. Bartleby and Amble want to become real men of letters and hope you'll want to attend their writings and cheer them.

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Copyright © 2020 by Andrew Mackenzie Watson. All rights reserved worldwide. No part of this publication may be replicated, redistributed, or given away in any form without the prior written consent of the author/publisher or the terms relayed to you herein.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Disclaimer

Novella Preface

Novella Pt 1: Introducing the Players

Novella Pt 2: Furthering Old & Making New Acquaintances

Novella Pt 3: The Story Unfolds, Blossoms Even

Novella Pt 4: The Tale Unwinds and Slips Down the Rusty-Bar Sewer Drain

That's the End of the Book!

Optional Addendums to Pt 1

Optional Addendum to Pt 4

Novella Afterword

About the Cover

A Web Sampler

PureLoveShop.com

From-Bartleby.com

LanguagesAndLiterature.com

Bonus Track: Spiritual Surgery Notes

Disclaimer:

This is a work of pure daydream.

Any relationship to real people, places, or metaphysics is purely coincidental.

Preface

A lonesome, no longer invincibly-young narrator sketches a novella into existence.

A novella? Or more like a collection of doodles forming a basically-cohesive story? Well, in any case this book represents a step towards long-form fiction.

Themes include: what would actually be good enough to answer this vague longing blaring inside?; spiritual/moral vs physical/emotional satisfaction; romantic love; longing for infinite youth; the give-up and fall-apart and how it dogs you down; heroes and villains; how to actually help?; wisdom, enlightenment, and all that.

The book is a comic book — with Pow! Zing! Wap!, violence, heroes and villains, and hot bods. But it is also a meditation upon the question that at some point begins to nag at all lovers of super hero tales: What would it take to actually help? And what powers would allow one a spiritually, psychologically and physically sustainable help/live balance? And what about slipping off into a quiet life along the seashore with a bosom mate, your little family, a few friends, and the gentle rhythm of curling surf upon slipping sands? What do we need to be both sufficiently happy and sufficiently decent?

It is an OK work of fiction and, we dare to hope, kind of a fun read. Where does the irony begin and end? We don’t know. The narrator doesn’t know. That’s no small part of what makes it a work of fiction.

Bartleby Willard, Skullvalley After Whistletown Building, Isle of Manhattos, December 2019

[No! He’s not there! Where is he? Where are they??!?]

[Editor’s Note: A lot of the themes mused on in this work are dealt with in more detail in the collections First Essays and First Loves by the same author.]

Novella Pt 1: Introducing the Players

Hey

Hey!

I'm gonna tell you a fun superhero story.

She is beautiful in her spandex uniform that creaks and groans under the weight of overflowing — almost but not quite superabundant — curves. The cold Pacific sparkles calmly back and forth beneath a northern sun early in May. She's underneath, in the secret undersea fortress — in chains anchored to the sea floor. But her high-tech jailers misunderstand themselves; they're wrong to think they're keeping her there. What's holding her there in a clammy silty-visioned stupor is that she can't find the direction of her partner. She reaches out for him with a wide, conically-expanding infinitely-bright Soullight. She feels out for him in all possible directions, but she does not find him.

You don't understand! They're two love birds! Disconnected from one another, their thoughts muddle and exhaust themselves — never forming a whole. I guess it's romantic, but it is also causing a lot of trouble right now. How easy it would be for her to disappear from these drab gray confines! How effortlessly she'd pass through twenty feet of steel and a thousand feet of high-pressure, pitch-black, near-freezing waters! But she's a sad old character befuddled in her slippers and dementia, unable to shape the jumbles of vague notions and sharp longings up into coherent thoughts like healthy people do. She's been sitting there in woolly chalky scribbly half-thoughts while nervous scientists read medical charts they can't fathom and pompous security chiefs clackety clack up and down the metal walkways, imagining their procedures and technologies exceeding excellent.

Then one day she gets a sliver of him. So faint that the first thought she has is pill bug; rolly polly; armoured ball-beetle; little silver bug tank; what?? But then recognition like electricity zaps all through her and she's awake again. She opens her eyes. Her captors don't notice. She looks around her small square cell and feels the cold steel links and concrete floor. She's very beautiful. They're both like that: eternally youthful, trim, athletic — she with full bosom, thigh and seat; he with the classic umbrella-back, narrow hips, sprinter's thighs. All this with no effort on their parts, I might add. Anyway, there she is luscious gorgeous in unbreakable adamantine cell, heaps of inescapable chains shackled to her ankles, wrists, waist, neck, and so on; there she is waking up to 40F naked and alone (the spandex part comes in a minute). She bounces her mind throughout the oceanfloor fortress; sees the stern-faced military thinkers in full uniform leaning over wide-spread hands, hunched forceful-shoulders-forward over their war tables; inspects the scientists and their miles of cages, trapped rats, clipboards, computer models, and cross-eyeglass glances (of all sorts); watches the hearty beefcake  soldiers at their push-ups, mess halls, card tables, frogman drills, bathroom breaks. Hmmph.

Now she's vanished from her adamantine chains and emerges, clothed in her signature blue and white Olympic-style form-fitting suit. If her hair is long and naturally curling, or short straight and pert, or a spherical afro-flame: that's up to your imagination. My point is the suppleness of her form and the fullness of her womanhood. And how easily she passes through metal, concrete and water; how she walks now upon the water and now, with an easy flick of spandex-stockinged toes (it isn't really spandex! it's some indestructible-ish fabric they invented years ago), flings herself into the sky.

One of their super tricks is modulating mass at will. They can make anything (including themselves) as heavy and/or large as a sun or as light and/or small as an electron. This ability alone allows them pretty much any physical feat. For example, she didn't have to jump off a little cowlicked wave into the pale blue sky of the North Pacific at round about 65 degrees north. She could've just slid basically instantly to anywhere on the planet. But it is fun to leap about in the physical world, especially when you're infinitely good at it and never experience fatigue, soreness, or other standard human complaints.

Too Cool For School

This guy!

I mean!

Oh my god!

Such a duder!

Caught in that addle-minded, lonely torpor beneath miles of gritty dirt and cold sharp stone for so many years, his body broke-back bent over a granite boulder like a rag doll; and what's his first order of business? Flung back into the merry, white-haloing sunlight via a heavenly jolt of truest love; and what’s his first move? Does he salute the sun and thank God and friend for his delivery? Does he dance and sing, skip upon the calm bay waters? Does he exultantly toss his able body from one skyscraper to another? Does he go seeking for his mate who’s recalled him to life with the world-bounding pulse of her love?

No

He's all like, Oh, good, she's coming here. Let me grab an iced tea and cigarettes and gaze out at the sprawling climbing glinting city, full-lost in vague, vapory, half-conscious contemplations.

He casts his mind about; he teleports a freshly made iced tea from some hapless coffee shop (simultaneously — this is what passes for morality with this guy — transferring $4.00 to the company's account and $2.00 to that of the dumbfounded kid who is so sure she had already made that large iced tea with extra ice and lemon), undertakes a similar maneuver with a pack of full-flavors and a lighter, and tosses himself onto the wide concrete parapet of a nondescript Midtown Manhattan building top — where perspiring drink and eager smokes await him.

Hey!

She yells to him, her hands upon fine hips in an elegantly simple crime fighting one-piece. Hey!, what are you doing!?

He swivels around on his blue jean butt — my how good the clear morning light feels! His bare feet dangle now a few feet above the graying-white concrete rooftop instead of a thousand feet over the morning clatter of Midtown Manhattan on a sunshiny springtime Tuesday.

Hey!

He yells to her, cigarette and plastic tea flung wide as his open arms.

What are you doing!?

She demands again, having stopped ten feet short of their reunion, her eyes large with annoyance beneath a swirled-mad brow.

I'm, you know — I'm hanging out, waiting for you!

We haven't seen each other in sixty years!

I know! Right!?

What is wrong with you!?

Nothing. Why? I'm just, you know — relaxing a quick sec, admiring the city as she heats up, embroiled already in the interwoven struggles.

I've missed you with my whole being!

I you too!

I you too?! That's the story? I you too?! And a cigarette?! A cigarette before flying to meet me?! You should never smoke, but to stop for a cigarette in this moment!? Do you understand?! What am I to do?! I can't find another man as super as you. I'm stuck with you. Anyone else would be inappropriate! Don't you want love and relationship?!

Of course! Totally! I totally do!

Then put out the cigarette, magic-brush your teeth, and make me feel welcome!

So I dunno; it's their own private affair and not really our business telling them how to run their show; but it's pretty hard not to think he basically sucks and she's in a hard spot — having to choose between men who can't fling themselves at will throughout timespace, going alone, and this jerk.

Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

In Lower Manhattan, at the time of our telling, Number ___ Broad Street had been owned by The John Smith Trading Company for the past three hundred and four years. The company's never faced official scrutiny; a strange hazy indifference falls over any bureaucrat attempting to take notice of the organization; its books slumber on. Who was John Smith? What exactly does the company trade? How does it afford the taxes and upkeep of this beautiful old cut-granite building in a global financial center? Who works there? What would it take to get hired and fat-paw waived past the heavyweight (broad shoulders and massive chest sloping to a post-career paunch) front doorman in dark designer suit at the elegant marble desk, reading classic literature in various original languages (and the occasional incredibly-outdated newspaper)?

In Lower Manhattan, in the time of the Creatures, on the second floor of Number ___ Broad Street, an elite team meets round a rectangular wooden table overlooking a narrow winding cobblestone street of crooked curbs; folded-over threadbare mendicantation; fine-tailored suits flowing like smoothsliding rivers along with every step and jostle of their energetic, forward-facing, business-minded owners; and hardy bare arms clutching bright orange construction hats to stalwart paunches.

The head of the group, Ms. Canny Marie Smith, heir to the secret empire, stands with one shoulder at a large blank blackboard easel. She's a petite woman — I don’t tell her age — with an open-eyed, full- and forward-cheeked, upturned-button-nose chipmunk charm; pretty in a tidy, hair-bunned-back way. She stands 5’3" straight and shoulders-back at the easel, angled towards the round table, chalk and eraser held limply beside rich round butt/hips in grey plaid skirt, lip a little fidget-shifted to one side; eyes roaming large and questioning behind swoop-cornered black-plastic 1950s-secretary glasses.

It's a big day, and the half dozen members of this top-secret, extra-governmental agency — ages range from spunky 27 to considered 82 — are unsure what to think, what to say, how to proceed.

All indications suggest the heroes are back. On the one hand, great: maybe they can save us from the game-over that we — with nukes overflowing, ice and good government crackling, and superbugs and foolish prides looming — feel ourselves sinking beneath (up to our nostrils in wet loamy quicksands). On the other hand, hmmm: no organization, not even one with the conscious and resources of the ancient John Smith Trading Company, can control these magic dynamos, can stop them, veto or even moderate their choices. In the past, they seemed basically OK: they wanted to help — hearts in the right places — , and they were pretty effective