At eighteen, I left Mom's apartment with two suitcases, four boxes of books, and enough food to survive a natural disaster without relying on public assistance. She had spent the previous three days turning my departure for university into a military operation. Every time I thought I had finished packing, she reappeared with a new pile of clothes, a box of medicine, or some object whose absence would, according to her, cause my inevitable ruin. On the morning of my departure, I discovered a sewing kit carefully slipped between my criminal law and criminal sociology textbooks. I took it out of the box, holding it between two fingers, then crossed the living room where she was checking, for the third time, a bag full of towels. She wore loose cream-colored trousers, an orange blouse, and a scarf tied around her hair. Even at eight in the morning, surrounded by boxes and rolls of adhesive tape, she looked better dressed than most wedding guests.
"Mom, I'm going to study criminal justice in Manhattan. I'm not leaving to open an underground sewing workshop in a region without electricity."
She looked up with the offended expression of an artist whose social usefulness had just been questioned, took the kit back, checked that the needles were properly stored, and placed it back in the box.
"And what do you plan to do the day a button falls off just before an important interview? Call the police and wait for a specialized unit to come repair your shirt?"
"I'm planning to become a police officer, actually. I'll be able to close the case without further action."
"You joke now, but you'll thank me when you're the only man in your precinct capable of properly sewing a sleeve back on."
Dad was waiting near the door with several new binders in his arms. Where Mom anticipated clothing, culinary, and emotional disasters, he mainly viewed university as a war against administrative disorder. He placed his pile on a box already almost impossible to close, then explained to me for the second time that each subject needed its own binder, with dividers separating lectures, assignments, and additional readings.
"I already have binders. You gave them to me for Christmas."
"These are reinforced. The rings on the previous ones had started to warp."
"After three years of use."
"Exactly. You'll work more at university."
I looked at my parents, then at the boxes now occupying half the living room.
"I'm going twenty minutes away by subway. You understand I'll be able to come back for something?"
Nathan and Jamal arrived just as I said that sentence. Nathan wore an old T-shirt showing the skeleton of a tyrannosaur and contemplated the stack with cautious admiration. Jamal, who had agreed to come on the condition that no one ask him to get up before nine, appeared at nine forty-five with a coffee in hand and the fatigue of a man returning from a long expedition. He tried to lift one of my boxes of books, set it down almost immediately, and asked me whether I really intended to take my entire library.
"Only the useful books."
"There are at least thirty in that one. How many useless books do you own exactly?"
"I would prefer not to answer without my lawyer present."
Dad suppressed a smile. Jamal pushed the box toward the entrance with his foot, muttering that I had no reason to carry the Penal Code around as if the existence of American justice personally depended on my dorm room.
The university was in Manhattan, close enough that I could come home regularly, but far enough to make my departure look like real independence. I had chosen an accelerated criminal justice program, supplemented by a concentration in criminology and several law modules. The credits I had earned during high school, combined with the summer semesters I intended to take, were supposed to let me finish my studies in three years. The plan seemed almost too clean: degree around twenty-one, New York Police Academy, a few years of field experience, then an application to the FBI once my age and background allowed it. Quantico remained a distant objective, a line drawn in pencil in a life perfectly capable of taking another direction, but I needed a destination. Without one, I risked turning every day into abstract preparation for some future catastrophe.
The university residence occupied an old renovated building a few streets from campus. The lobby had kept its stone columns and far-too-high ceiling, but the floors had been repainted in an impersonal beige that gave every hallway the appearance of a waiting room. Students and their parents circulated while carrying boxes, lamps, and pieces of furniture whose dimensions no one had checked. The air smelled of cleaning products, new cardboard, and dust displaced by moving day. My room was on the fourth floor, at the end of a narrow passage where an entire family was trying to get a small refrigerator inside without scratching the walls.
My roommate was named Daniel Kim. He studied accounting, played guitar without knowing any song in its entirety, and evidently considered the floor an additional storage surface. When we entered, he was sitting in the middle of his clothes, busy connecting a stereo system whose cables seemed to have been tied by a personal enemy.
He looked up at my boxes, my family, and my two friends, then spent a long moment observing the pile of books.
"Are you moving in for four years, or are you preparing a bunker capable of surviving the end of the world?"
"Three years, normally. As for the end of the world, I prefer to keep several options open."
Daniel laughed, probably because he thought I was joking. Jamal set a box on my desk and explained to him that I was exactly the kind of person who would know exam dates before the professors did. Nathan added that I had certainly already prepared a study calendar stretching all the way to graduation.
They were barely exaggerating.
Mom spent the next hour judging the curtains, the quality of the sheets provided by the residence, and the almost complete absence of color in the room. Dad inspected the lock, tested the smoke detector, and made me repeat the route to the two emergency exits. Nathan found a specialized bookstore a few streets away thanks to a flyer abandoned on the desk, while Jamal lay down on my bed, claiming to be testing the mattress for safety reasons. Their presence filled the room so completely that I did not immediately realize how different it would seem once the door closed behind them.
When everything was set up, Mom hugged me in the middle of the hallway with an intensity that forced several students to walk around us. She then placed her hands on my cheeks and examined my face as if trying to memorize every detail before a journey of several years.
"You call me tonight. Not tomorrow morning, not when you have a problem, not after you forget to eat for two days. Tonight."
"I'll probably still be alive in a few hours."
"Malcolm, that was not a question."
"I'll call you."
Dad extended his hand by reflex, then seemed to remember that we were not at the end of a professional meeting. He briefly pulled me against him, awkwardly enough that his shoulder bumped into mine, but his hand remained on my back longer than expected.
"Work seriously, keep your documents in order, and don't let the first few weeks convince you that you can put everything off until later. I have seen intelligent students fail only because they thought they could catch up on a semester in three nights."
"I was planning to drop my classes after the first party."
"You joke, but I know someone who almost did exactly that."
He glanced toward Mom, who was waiting near the elevator, then continued in a lower voice:
"Still try to enjoy these years. You don't need to turn every day into an investment for the future."
I looked at him, genuinely surprised.
Dad cleared his throat.
"Reasonably, of course. I'm not encouraging you to develop an addiction or compromise your academic record."
That sounded more like him.
After they left, the room suddenly seemed much larger, though it had not gained a single centimeter. Daniel flopped down onto his bed, stared at the closed door, and declared that my parents seemed nice, even if my mother frightened him slightly.
"She only asked why you didn't have curtains."
"She asked it as if living without curtains revealed a profound moral failing."
I smiled and knelt in front of the pile of books.
That was when I saw the silhouette near the door.
It was tall, motionless, and vaguely human. I made out neither face nor clothing, only a dark shape in the corner of my vision, like someone who had stopped in the doorway to watch me. I turned my head sharply. The hallway remained visible behind the half-open door, but no one stood in front of our room. A student passed a few meters farther away with a fish-shaped lamp before disappearing behind another door.
"You okay?" Daniel asked.
I kept staring at the hallway for a few seconds.
"I thought I saw someone come in."
"Probably our neighbor with the lamp. I think it's better to avoid talking to him until we know why he owns that thing."
I accepted the explanation because it was reasonable.
The alternative was not yet.
∗ ∗ ∗
My first weeks at university were less spectacular than I had imagined, but infinitely more exhausting. The campus formed a cluster of modern buildings wedged between the noisy streets of Manhattan. The halls smelled of coffee, damp paper, and the food students ate while walking so they would not lose five minutes. The elevators were always full, the corridors constantly crowded, and the classrooms ranged from vast lecture halls lit by fluorescent lights to small rooms where thirty people tried to fit their notebooks on tablets designed for children.
I quickly discovered that having the memories of an adult and having prepared for my studies for several years did not make university easy. It gave me a head start in certain subjects, nothing more. The introductory criminology classes covered concepts I had already encountered, but placed them within a framework based on studies, statistics, and rigorous methodologies rather than intuition. Sociology forced me to consider crime as something other than the simple consequence of bad individual choices. Criminal law, meanwhile, continually reminded me that a truth impossible to establish legally was not enough to convict someone. Some students found that idea absurd. It frustrated me too, but I had grown up with Dad. Procedure was not merely an obstacle placed in front of justice. It was also one of the rare protections preventing authority from being satisfied with its own conviction.
I spent a large part of my time in the university library. Its huge windows overlooked streets that always seemed active, no matter the hour. Inside, the silence was never complete. Ventilation systems hummed, pages turned, keyboards clattered, and someone always ended up spilling coffee in a corner. The tables were covered with textbooks, revision cards, and students asleep on their own arms. I liked that place. It resembled neither Mom's colorful workshop nor Dad's perfectly ordered office, but it had its own functional disorder, that of hundreds of people simultaneously trying to understand something.
I continued training in parallel. The campus gym was small, overheated, and frequented by several men convinced that every mirror had been installed so they could admire their arms. I ran early in the morning, continued gymnastics in a nearby club, and found a dojo where I could practice two evenings a week. My schedule should have left little room for anything else, but Daniel quickly decided it was his moral duty to prevent me from becoming a hermit.
Before he even managed to drag me to a party, an apparently ordinary piece of information reminded me that the DC universe was moving forward while I prepared for exams.
I discovered Bruce Wayne's departure one morning in the campus cafeteria. It was a little after seven. The windows were fogged, employees were still filling the displays, and a line of half-awake students waited in front of the coffee machines. I had settled near a window with my notes, a bowl of overly soft cereal, and a newspaper abandoned on the previous table. Bruce's face appeared in a photograph placed at the bottom of the front page.
He had grown since the photos published after his parents' murder. His features had hardened, his hair was longer, and he watched the camera with that closed expression journalists interpreted according to their needs. Some saw the arrogance of an overly rich heir. Others saw the aftermath of a traumatized child who had grown up under constant media attention.
The headline remained relatively sober.
WAYNE HEIR LEAVES COUNTRY WITHOUT OFFICIAL ANNOUNCEMENT
The article explained that Bruce had interrupted his studies, left Gotham, and almost entirely stopped appearing in public. Wayne Enterprises refused to comment on his movements. Alfred Pennyworth had issued a statement as polite as it was useless, saying that Mr. Wayne wished to travel and continue his education abroad, away from media attention. In the absence of real information, journalists filled the space with hypotheses: personal crisis, disagreement with the board of directors, a journey of self-discovery, private treatment, or an affair with a European actress no other newspaper seemed to know existed.
I reread the passage about his education several times. For an ordinary reader, Bruce Wayne was using his fortune to disappear and see the world. For me, the meaning was different. Traveling, learning, moving away from Gotham and its resources, all of it looked like the beginning of his training.
The boy who had seen his parents die was probably preparing to become Batman.
I slowly set down the newspaper and looked around me. Two students were debating a basketball game. A girl was asleep, her forehead resting on her textbook. Behind the counter, an employee was replacing a tray of pastries without paying the slightest attention to the screen broadcasting the news.
To them, a young billionaire had gone traveling.
To me, a countdown had just begun.
Daniel arrived a few minutes later and set his tray in front of me. He followed my gaze, saw the photograph, and smiled.
"You're interested in billionaire heirs now? I would have thought you preferred ordinary criminals."
"I'm interested in people who disappear without explaining where they're going."
"You've been studying criminology for less than two months and you already sound like the voice-over in a documentary."
He bit into a piece of toast, then pointed at the newspaper.
"If I were him, I'd disappear too. He could buy an island, never see a professor again, and hire someone to attend meetings in his place."
"I don't think he left to rest."
Daniel shrugged.
"Do you know him?"
"No."
And I did not know whether I wanted that to change someday.
That evening, I opened my old notebook and noted the date of Bruce's departure. I added that he had probably begun his training and that his return to Gotham remained impossible to predict. In the stories I remembered, Batman appeared when his city became sick enough to demand a symbol.
That did not mean he healed it.
Daniel eventually succeeded in taking me to a party held in an apartment shared by four students. The place was on the sixth floor of a building without an elevator, and it was difficult to determine whether the smell in the stairwell came from humidity, trash, or some unknown life-form. Inside, the music made the windows vibrate. The air smelled of beer, sweat, and a scented candle desperately trying to cover the rest. People danced in the middle of the living room while others shouted to talk less than a meter from one another.
At first, I remained near a wall with a cup in hand, observing the place as if it were a crime scene that had not yet produced a victim. I had located the exits, the fire escape, the kitchen window, and the boy discreetly removing several bottles from the refrigerator.
Daniel nudged me with his elbow.
"Stop watching the doors. No one is going to attack you."
"I'm not watching the doors."
"You identified the two exits, checked the state of the fire escape, and noticed the guy in the green shirt stealing beers."
I glanced toward the kitchen.
"He took four."
"That is not your problem. You are here to have fun, talk to people, and discover that an evening is not an evacuation drill."
"I'm trying."
"You're trying like someone filling out a form."
He abandoned me to join a group near the music. I took a sip of lukewarm beer and immediately understood that the drink had been chosen according to the sole criterion of price.
"You look like you regret every decision that led you here."
The voice came from my right. A young woman stood against the wall, arms crossed. She wore a denim jacket covered in small badges, and her curly hair was tied above her head. I had already seen her speak several times in my criminal sociology class.
Nia Brooks.
She had a particular way of smiling when she knew a professor had just said something questionable.
"Only the decisions made after accepting this beer," I replied.
She examined my cup.
"No one's forcing you to finish it."
"I paid three dollars to get in. I have to get a minimum return."
"So you're trying to make your presence at a university party profitable?"
"I'm a student. Every expense has to be justified."
She burst out laughing, a clear laugh that stood out despite the music.
"You're Malcolm, right? The guy who corrected the professor for fifteen minutes on the difference between correlation and causation."
"And you're Nia. The one who asked him whether his example about poverty came from a study or his imagination."
"You know my name."
"We have two classes together."
"Or you've already investigated me."
"I only start investigations after the second date."
Her smile widened.
"So, according to you, this is our first date?"
I felt heat rise into my face but refused to retreat.
"That depends. Do you plan to stay against this wall all evening?"
"That mostly depends on your ability to ask me to dance without first producing a report on the risks."
I looked at the dense crowd.
"I would probably prefer to take an oral exam."
"I didn't ask what you preferred."
She set down her cup and held out her hand.
I danced badly. Not in that slightly awkward way that could become charming, but like a man trying to transmit contradictory instructions to every part of his body. Years of gymnastics, karate, and physical control had absolutely not prepared me to move without a precise objective. Nia found it hilarious. Her laughter made any attempt to preserve my dignity impossible, and after a few minutes, I began laughing with her.
We spent a large part of the evening together. She wanted to become a lawyer specializing in civil rights. Her father taught history, her mother worked as a nurse, and her grandmother seemed to run the entire family from a house in the Bronx. When I asked for her number before leaving, she looked at me with exaggerated seriousness.
"Are you actually going to call, or wait three days because a magazine told you it would make you mysterious?"
"I can wait four days, if you want a more intense experience."
"Try it and I'll deliberately give you the number of a pizzeria."
I called her the next day.
Over the following months, we dated without immediately defining our relationship. We studied in cafés, went to the movies, and sometimes spent entire evenings walking through Manhattan without any precise destination. Nia liked debating almost as much as I did, but refused to let me turn every personal conversation into a logic exercise. One evening, after I had spent several minutes explaining why her criticism of a restaurant lacked objective elements, she set down her fork and looked at me with amused weariness.
"Malcolm, when I tell you I don't like this soup, I'm not inviting you to build a case proving that my judgment is legally insufficient."
"I'm just trying to understand what you didn't like."
"It tasted like soup."
"That isn't very precise."
She slowly pushed the bowl toward me.
"In that case, you can spend the rest of the evening with it. Your relationship seems more promising than ours."
I improved.
Slowly.
∗ ∗ ∗
Lex Luthor did not disappear quietly like Bruce Wayne. On the contrary, he seemed to decide that no one on the continent should be able to ignore his arrival.
The major announcement was broadcast on the screens in the university's main hall. I was leaving a criminal law class when the news channels interrupted their programming to show a conference held in Metropolis. An immense stage had been set up in front of a glass building still under construction. Flags bearing a purple and green symbol floated above a crowd made up of journalists, investors, and political officials.
Lex stood at the center.
He was younger than the image I had kept of him. Elegant, perfectly calm in front of the cameras, he wore a dark suit whose apparent simplicity must have cost several years of my university fees. Behind him, the name of his new company occupied an entire screen.
LEXCORP
He spoke of innovation, energy independence, advanced medicine, and technologies capable of transforming the lives of millions of people. His voice was precise, confident, and warm enough to give the impression he was addressing each viewer personally. He was not merely presenting a company.
He was presenting the future.
The media immediately adopted that narrative. Within weeks, Lex Luthor was described as the genius of his generation, the new face of American progress, and the man who would make Metropolis the technological capital of the country. Magazines put his portrait on their covers. Channels analyzed his childhood, his degrees, his patents, and his supposed ability to understand engineering, finance, and international politics equally well.
Nia found me one evening in the library, surrounded by business newspapers and articles about LexCorp. She placed her bag on the neighboring chair, took one of the magazines, and looked at Lex's smiling portrait.
"I didn't know IPOs fascinated you so much."
"He built all of this almost alone."
"According to press releases written by people he pays to explain that he built everything almost alone."
"He's still probably one of the smartest men on the planet."
"Which doesn't mean he's honest, generous, or capable of choosing a tie correctly."
She turned a few pages, then looked up.
"You don't like him."
It was not a question.
I contemplated the photograph. Lex looked perfectly human, ambitious without seeming threatening, confident without appearing arrogant. Nothing allowed anyone to guess the man he might become.
"I don't know him."
"You use that phrase every time you want to avoid answering. Why does he make you uncomfortable?"
I took time to think. Obviously, I could not explain to her that Lex Luthor generally became the obsessive enemy of an invulnerable alien.
"Because everyone already seems to believe what he says. He has hardly accomplished anything publicly yet, but journalists talk about him as if history has already rendered its judgment."
Nia looked at the magazine again, then nodded.
"That, I can understand. Rich men love presenting their ambition as a form of public service."
I could not accuse Lex of crimes he had not yet committed. Maybe this version would be different. Maybe he would never become Superman's enemy. Still, a man capable of seducing the media, investors, and political officials so quickly could become more dangerous than an ordinary criminal. A criminal had to conceal his actions. Lex Luthor seemed capable of convincing the world that they were necessary.
In my notebook, I moved his name from the probable column to the confirmed column.
Then I added:
LexCorp founded in Metropolis. Luthor presented as a genius and benefactor. No known criminal activity. Do not confuse future knowledge with current proof.
The last sentence came from Dad.
It was frustrating.
It was also indispensable.
All the while, the silhouette continued appearing in my blind spot. I saw it in the reflection of a library window, at the end of a hallway after a classroom closed, or behind me in the bathroom mirror. Every time I turned my head, it was gone. At first, I attributed these appearances to fatigue. I slept too little, drank more coffee than I would have thought possible, and spent several hours a day reading texts printed in tiny characters.
Then the shape became clearer.
I made out a dark shirt, a tie, and the outline of an adult man. One night, I woke up abruptly in my room. Daniel was sleeping on the other bed, a blanket pulled over his head. The orange light from the streetlamps filtered between the curtains and cut the furniture into dark shapes.
Someone stood near my desk.
I stopped breathing.
The silhouette remained almost transparent, but I could make out its shoulders, its tilted head, and the very clear impression that it was watching me. I slowly reached for the bedside lamp. When the light came on, there was nothing there.
I remained sitting for several minutes, my heart beating too quickly, inspecting the desk, the window, and every corner of the room. Daniel eventually groaned under his blanket and asked me to turn off the light.
The next day, I made an appointment at the campus health center. The doctor questioned me about my sleep, my coffee consumption, my stress level, and my family's psychiatric history. I answered honestly to every question that concerned neither my death nor my reincarnation. He concluded that I was probably suffering from fatigue, stress, and visual migraines.
I reduced the coffee.
I slept more.
The silhouette remained.
I then began to consider a possibility I had always pushed away.
Maybe I was going mad.
My second year was more difficult. The courses became more specialized and the instructors less willing to accept approximate reasoning. I took modules in criminal procedure, criminal psychology, investigative methods, and constitutional law. Several professors were still working in the police, courts, or federal services, which allowed them to destroy in a few sentences theories we had spent hours building.
Professor Adler, in charge of criminal procedure, had spent twenty years as a prosecutor before discovering a late vocation for academic humiliation. During our first class, he entered the lecture hall with a file under his arm and wrote on the board:
EVIDENCE CAN BE TRUE AND UNUSABLE.
He turned around and observed the room with almost hostile calm.
"Those of you who find that idea unfair may leave the class now. The others might understand before the end of the semester that procedure does not exist to prevent you from arresting the guilty. It exists because you will not always know with certainty who is guilty."
I immediately liked his class.
The exams were demanding. We had to analyze complex situations, identify possible violations, and defend several opposing interpretations. I spent nights working with Nia in the library. She had eventually officially become my girlfriend after explaining to me that we already behaved like a couple and that my need to define every step was starting to become ridiculous.
"You can simply ask me if I want to date you seriously," she had said.
"Ask you exactly what?"
She had stared at me in silence for several seconds.
"You see? That's precisely the problem."
I had kissed her before she continued.
Our relationship was not perfect. I studied too much. Nia was involved in several associations and rarely agreed to leave an injustice alone, even when she had no immediate means of correcting it. We argued about our schedules, our priorities, and my tendency to cut myself off from the world when something preoccupied me.
The silhouette worsened that last flaw.
The names I knew continued, in parallel, to appear in the newspapers in the most ordinary way possible. Clark Kent entered my life in the form of an article barely two hundred words long about the probable closure of a small neighborhood library.
I would never have noticed it if his name had not been printed under the headline.
By Clark Kent, junior correspondent
The article was in the local pages of the Daily Planet, between an announcement about roadwork and a report on a municipal meeting. Clark told how a budget cut threatened an institution used by children and low-income families. He had interviewed a librarian, two parents, and a boy who went there to do his homework because his apartment was too noisy.
No alien.
No catastrophe.
No spectacular revelation.
Only the modest story of a place whose disappearance would probably never have made the front page.
Yet I reread the text several times. The style was simple, almost too sincere. Clark did not try to dramatize the subject or draw attention to his own work. He let the people concerned explain why that library mattered.
I began looking for his byline in the following editions. He wrote about injured workers, a farm threatened with closure, a fundraiser for a family whose building had burned down, and a teacher using his own salary to buy supplies. Always small stories. Always people the major media could easily ignore.
If I had not known his name, I would have seen only a conscientious young journalist at the beginning of his career.
But I knew.
Superman might not yet exist publicly. The man behind the symbol, however, had already begun telling the stories of ordinary people.
Lois Lane was much harder to miss. Her name appeared more and more often above articles devoted to municipal corruption, dubious public contracts, and companies refusing to answer certain questions. Her first front page came a few months later.
I discovered the newspaper at a kiosk near campus. A photograph of Metropolis City Hall occupied half the page. The headline announced that several officials had awarded public contracts to companies owned by their relatives. Under the headline, Lois's name appeared in characters large enough to be impossible to ignore.
She had obtained internal documents, questioned employees, and reconstructed a system of favoritism that had lasted for several years. Two officials resigned within the week and an official investigation was opened. Other media began talking about her as a tenacious young journalist, a new voice at the Daily Planet, and a reporter stubborn enough to ask the questions others avoided.
In a photograph published a few days later, Lois stood in front of the newspaper building, a notebook in one hand and a tired smile on her face. In the background, slightly blurred, Clark Kent held a stack of files against his chest.
I spent a long time looking at that image in a café.
Nia followed my gaze.
"You know her too?"
"Who?"
"Lois Lane. You're staring at her article as if she just revealed the existence of aliens."
"She's good."
"She made two men who thought they were untouchable resign. Personally, I already like her."
She took the newspaper and began to read. I kept looking at the photograph.
Lois was already becoming the journalist I knew.
Clark was still in the background.
Lex was building his empire.
Bruce had disappeared.
The pieces were falling into place.
For a long time, I had considered the DC universe a future storm that would eventually reach my life. I now understood that it had already begun. It was simply still far enough away that most people saw only a change in the light.
One evening, in an almost empty restaurant, I lost the thread of our conversation because I thought I saw someone standing behind Nia. The place was small, lit by lamps hanging above the tables. Rain struck the windows and the music barely covered the other customers' conversations.
Nia placed her hand on mine and waited until I stopped staring at the reflection in the window.
"You're looking behind me again."
I brought my eyes back to her.
"Sorry. I'm tired."
"You use that answer a lot lately. Is someone following you? Have you received threats? Did you discover something you refuse to tell me?"
"No."
The answer came out too quickly.
Her expression closed slightly.
"You just lied to me."
"I'm not lying to you."
"Then tell me what you're looking at."
I felt my heart accelerate. In the window behind her, the silhouette still stood near the counter. Its face was turned toward me. I could almost make out its features.
I lowered my eyes to our hands.
"I sometimes think I see someone."
Nia waited.
"Someone you know?"
"I don't know."
"Since when?"
"A while."
"How long, Malcolm?"
"Since I arrived at university."
She slowly withdrew her hand.
"And you never told me."
"I saw a doctor. He thinks it's fatigue."
"And you?"
I looked up. The silhouette had disappeared from the reflection.
"I don't know."
"Are you afraid?"
"Yes."
The word was difficult to say, but it was true.
Nia's anger gave way, for a moment, to worry.
"Then let me help you."
I wanted to accept. Part of me wanted to tell her everything: the bank, the reincarnation, the notebook, Bruce Wayne, and the possibility that the man in my blind spot was connected to Frank. But that would have meant asking her to believe in a truth I did not understand myself. If she believed me, she would enter a world of secrets and dangers to which she had never consented. If she did not believe me, she would see me as a sick man who had built his whole life around a delusion.
"I can't," I replied.
Her gaze changed.
"You can't what? Talk to me?"
"I can't explain right now."
"You're telling me you've been seeing someone for more than a year and you can't explain. Do you understand what that means for me?"
"I'm not asking you to solve the problem."
"That isn't the issue."
She leaned slightly toward me.
"You spend your time saying facts matter, that trust is built, and that no one should make a decision without enough information. But as soon as it concerns you, you close the door and ask me to wait outside."
"I'm not asking you to wait."
"No. You're not asking anything. You decide alone what I can handle."
I had no answer that would not sound like a justification.
Nia breathed in slowly.
"I care about you, Malcolm. But I can't keep being close to someone who disappears in front of me every time something becomes real."
"I'm not disappearing."
"You're sitting right in front of me, and sometimes I feel like I'm talking to a closed door."
We did not break up that night. We tried again for several weeks. I promised to see another doctor and actually did. The tests revealed nothing. I tried to talk more about my fear without explaining its cause. Nia tried not to turn every silence into proof that I did not trust her.
It was not enough.
Our relationship ended in the same café where she had once reproached me for analyzing a soup. There were no shouts and no spectacular accusations. She simply set down her cup, looked at me for a long time, and said she could not continue like this anymore.
"I don't think you're a bad person," she clarified. "I don't even think you want to hurt me. But you want to control everything, even the amount of truth other people have the right to know about you."
"I'm sorry."
"I know."
Her smile was sad.
"And I think you mean it. But being sorry doesn't turn a relationship into a place where I can live."
I let her leave.
I could have called her back, told her the entire truth, and taken the risk that she would believe me. I did not. Maybe out of caution. Maybe out of fear. Probably both.
That evening, Nathan and Jamal met me in a small restaurant near Mom's place. I did not tell them about the silhouette. I only told them that Nia and I had broken up because I had not trusted her enough.
Nathan stirred his drink with his straw for a long time before answering.
"Did you trust her?"
"Yes."
"Then why didn't you talk to her?"
I looked at the table.
"Because some things don't concern only me."
Jamal crossed his arms.
"That sounds like a sentence used by people who want to decide for everyone."
I looked up at him.
"You think I should have told her everything?"
"I don't know what you were hiding. I only know you don't get to call it protection without admitting it suited you too."
His bluntness hurt.
It was necessary.
Nathan placed his hand on my forearm.
"You don't have to tell us what you can't tell. But you can say if you're not okay."
I took a breath.
"I'm not okay."
Neither of them tried to solve the problem. Jamal ordered another portion of fries, and Nathan began telling us how a researcher at the museum had spent twenty minutes looking for glasses he was wearing on his head.
I listened to them.
It was little.
That evening, it was enough.
∗ ∗ ∗
The man in my blind spot spoke for the first time a few months after my twentieth birthday.
I was alone in the room. Daniel was spending the night at his girlfriend's, and I was trying to finish a paper on eyewitness testimony errors. It was almost two in the morning. Several sheets covered my desk, a cup of coffee was cooling near my elbow, and the rain drew long streaks across the window.
I felt a presence behind me.
It was no longer a vague impression or a shadow glimpsed too quickly. Someone was standing less than two meters from my chair.
I did not turn around immediately.
My heart accelerated, but my hands remained flat on the desk. I tried to identify what I saw in the dark reflection of the window. A male silhouette, a shirt, a tie, slightly hunched shoulders.
Then a voice said:
"You should stop drinking coffee. You never liked it."
The cup almost slipped from my hands.
I turned around.
The man stood between my bed and the door.
He had a face I knew better than my own.
A white face, a little too pale, short brown hair, and the features of a man approaching thirty. He wore the bank security guard uniform. Two dark holes tore his shirt at chest level. The blood around the impacts looked almost black.
Frank.
I backed away so brutally that my chair struck the desk.
The man raised his hands.
"I think neither of us should panic."
"You don't exist."
"I planned to start with good evening, but we can move straight to the existential crisis."
His voice was exactly as I remembered it. Not the one I imagined when I thought of Frank, but the real voice, with its slightly dry way of ending sentences and that irony he used whenever he was afraid.
I stood up.
"You're a hallucination."
"Possible."
"A projection of my memories."
"Also possible."
"Or I'm asleep."
"I don't think so. You spilled coffee on your hand and haven't reacted yet."
The burn reached me one second late. I wiped my skin on my trousers without taking my eyes off the apparition.
Frank looked around.
"Daniel isn't here?"
"How do you know Daniel?"
He looked at me as if the answer were obvious.
"I was there."
"No."
"I wasn't exactly standing in the room, but I was there. I saw what you saw. I heard what you heard. I spent twenty years inside you without being able to speak, act, or even decide whether I was still a person."
His joke had vanished.
I remained still.
"You remember my whole life?"
"I remember your life as something I observed from too close. I know Mom, Dad, Nathan, Jamal, Nia, and that time you pretended you hadn't broken the vase when we both know you had."
"I was five."
"And you were already a bad liar."
"Don't call her Mom."
The response came out sharper than expected.
Frank fell silent.
I immediately regretted the tone, but not the distinction.
"She's my mother," I continued. "You can care about her. You can have my memories. But she is my mother."
He slowly lowered his hands.
"You're right."
That answer unsettled me more than an argument would have.
"Then who are you?"
He looked at the holes in his shirt.
"I was hoping you'd know."
"You're Frank."
"Yes."
"I'm Frank too."
He shook his head.
"You were Frank. That isn't the same thing."
The sentence hung between us.
For years, I had described Frank as my old life, the person I had been before Malcolm. Yet the man in front of me did not resemble a simple memory. He looked at me with his own reactions, his own posture, and a worry that was not entirely mine.
"Can you come closer?" I asked.
"Probably."
He took one step.
His foot passed through a textbook left on the floor.
We lowered our eyes at the same time.
Frank raised his leg, then deliberately sank it into the book.
"That's new."
I carefully walked around the desk.
"You pass through objects."
"Remarkable observation. Your studies are paying off."
I held out a hand, then stopped a few centimeters from his shoulder.
"Try."
My fingers passed through his body without encountering resistance. A cold sensation climbed along my hand, not strong enough to hurt, but too precise to be imaginary.
Frank grimaced.
"I barely feel anything. It's mostly unpleasant on a personal level."
I withdrew my hand.
"Daniel has never seen you."
"I don't think so. I couldn't stay long enough before tonight."
I took my phone and pointed it at him.
The screen showed only my empty room.
Frank stood in front of the mirror fixed to the wardrobe door.
No reflection.
"I'm offended," he declared. "I was sure death would improve my profile."
We spent the rest of the night running tests.
Daniel did not come home, which spared me a difficult explanation if he had found me talking to an empty room.
Frank could pass through walls, furniture, and doors. He could not take an object with him. When he tried to grab a pen, his fingers passed through it. He could, however, choose to become more solid for a few seconds. His hand then took on a clearer appearance, and he managed to move the pen, open a drawer, or exert pressure against my palm.
Every interaction seemed to cost him something. After moving several objects, his arm became transparent up to the elbow and the outlines of his body began to tremble.
"Stop," I said.
"I can still try."
"Your arm is disappearing."
"I've already lost more."
"Frank."
He looked up at me.
"Stop."
This time, he obeyed.
His form slowly recovered when we stopped the experiments, but not entirely. He could also move away from me, up to a certain limit. We tested the distance in the hallway once the floor became quiet. At eight meters, he slowed. At ten, his body distorted like an image crossed by interference.
"I can keep going," he said.
"No."
"We need to know the limit."
"We know it enough."
"Malcolm."
He took another step forward.
His silhouette vanished.
The sensation that followed almost cut my legs out from under me. Something tore inside my chest without producing physical pain, as if part of my mind had just been abruptly ripped away. I leaned against the wall.
Frank reappeared beside me, paler still.
"All right," he murmured. "Ten meters."
"You are completely reckless."
"We obtained a measurement."
"You almost disappeared."
"I'm already dead. My standards are different."
"Mine aren't."
He looked at me for a few seconds before turning his eyes away.
"I'll have to get used to that."
We discovered his other ability by accident.
Frank needed to recover. I asked him to try to return to the place he said he had emerged from, inside me. The wording made us both uncomfortable, but no better description presented itself.
He came closer and placed an still-transparent hand against my chest.
"Are you ready?"
"No."
"Me neither."
He stepped forward.
His body passed through mine.
For one second, I saw the bank again. The cold floor, the gunshots, the weight of the insufficient vest, and the fear of dying before having done anything useful. Then the sensations mixed with mine. I was still in the hallway, but I perceived my own body with unusual clarity: every muscle, every point of support, and every breath.
Frank spoke in my mind.
"Can you hear me?"
I started.
His voice no longer came from the room. It existed directly behind my thoughts, distinct from my inner monologue.
"Yes."
I raised my hand.
The movement seemed stronger than it should have been. Not faster, but supported by a second intention perfectly aligned with my own.
"Try something," Frank suggested.
I returned to the room and got into push-up position. Normally, accumulated fatigue would have quickly slowed my movements. This time, an additional strength accompanied each push. It was not as if Frank controlled my body. We were producing the same movement together.
After several repetitions, a sharp pain shot through my wrist.
I stopped immediately.
Frank emerged from my body and appeared kneeling near the bed, more transparent than before.
"Our muscles can provide more strength," I said, massaging my joint. "But my bones and tendons remain the same."
"So hitting much harder could break our hand."
"Or dislocate a shoulder."
"This power is less fun than expected."
"It's dangerous."
"Which is generally the adult version of the same sentence."
I wrote everything down in the dinosaur notebook, even though its cover now held together more thanks to adhesive tape than to its original cardboard.
Frank could move about ten meters away from me. He passed through matter when he remained intangible. He could materialize to act physically, but each contact consumed what we called his cohesion, for lack of a better term. When he entered my body, he could fuse his strength with my movements, but my organism remained the physical limit of that power.
We still did not know how his cohesion returned.
The answer came the next day.
Frank had almost entirely disappeared after our tests. He returned inside me before Daniel came back. I fell asleep shortly afterward and did not wake up until fourteen hours later, with hunger violent enough to make me dizzy. I emptied a large part of Mom's provisions while Daniel watched me eat with concern.
"You okay?"
"I think so."
"You just ate four eggs, two sandwiches, and an entire box of cereal."
"I was hungry."
"That's not hunger anymore. Your body is trying to replace a roommate."
Frank reappeared later that afternoon, fully visible and far too satisfied with his condition.
"I feel better."
"I feel like I ran a marathon in my sleep."
"So my recovery uses your energy."
"And probably my body's resources."
He looked at the empty cereal package.
"We should buy more food."
"We should especially avoid unnecessary experiments."
"Unnecessary experiments are how you discover what is useful."
I stared at the two impacts on his chest.
"You might not come back."
His expression changed slightly.
"I know."
That was the first time we truly spoke about that possibility.
Frank could be injured when he was material. A week later, during a controlled test in an empty gym, I threw a light ball at him, which he chose to block. It struck his forearm, and the area hit immediately blurred. He did not feel ordinary pain, but a localized loss of cohesion, as if the impact had taken part of him away.
We discovered damage transfer during a less voluntary accident.
I was training alone on a bar when my hand slipped. The fall was not high enough to kill me, but my shoulder was going to hit the floor at a dangerous angle.
Frank entered my body before I could ask him.
The impact came.
The pain was real, but much less violent than expected. I rolled to the side and remained there for a few seconds, breathing. When Frank emerged, his left arm hung against his body. A large part of his shoulder had lost its clarity.
"What did you do?"
"I don't know. I tried to take the impact."
"You transferred part of the injury."
"I always wanted to discover a power by falling off apparatus."
I slowly got up. My shoulder still hurt, but it was neither dislocated nor broken.
Frank, however, was struggling to maintain his form.
"Go back inside."
"You'll be exhausted again."
"And you might disappear."
"You say that as if we've established which of the two would be worse."
"Frank."
He stopped smiling and entered me.
I slept almost the entire following day.
After that accident, we established rules.
Frank was not to materialize for trivial reasons. He was not to explore homes, offices, or private belongings simply because he could. He was not to intervene physically except in cases of real necessity. We had to test every ability gradually and stop as soon as his cohesion diminished significantly.
Frank contested almost every wording.
"Define real necessity."
"Immediate danger."
"To whom?"
"A person."
"So if I can prevent Daniel from burning his shirt with an iron, does that count?"
"No."
"You underestimate sartorial gravity. Mom would be on my side."
"My mother."
"Your mother," he corrected without arguing.
The distinction remained important. Frank knew my loved ones. He shared my memories and had observed a large part of my life, but his emotions were not identical to mine. He felt affection for Mom, respect mixed with annoyance for Dad, and instinctive loyalty toward Nathan and Jamal. Yet those bonds passed through me. He was not their son or their friend in the same way.
We were linked.
We were not interchangeable.
I told no one about him.
That decision probably confirmed everything Nia had reproached me for, but the danger was no longer imaginary. If I explained that a spiritual double could pass through walls, materialize, and absorb injuries, I would not only risk a psychiatric consultation. In a world where S.T.A.R. Labs, LexCorp, Cadmus, and several agencies whose activities I knew only partly existed, attracting attention could turn us into an experiment.
Frank accepted secrecy more easily than I would have believed.
"I worked in security. The first rule when faced with an incomprehensible situation is not to immediately fill out a government form."
"I don't think that's a real rule."
"It should be."
He had a harder time accepting that I refused to use his abilities in my studies or professional plans. He could have passed through a professor's door to glimpse an exam topic, read a closed file, or listen to a private conversation.
I systematically refused.
"You know I could check whether Adler has already prepared the exam."
"That would be cheating."
"It would be preventive information gathering."
"Cheating."
"You lack imagination."
"And you lack limits."
He smiled.
"That's probably why we work together."
∗ ∗ ∗
I completed my degree in three years, as planned. The ceremony took place at the beginning of summer, in a large hall where several hundred students wore robes that were too hot under the gazes of families armed with cameras.
Mom cried before my name was even called. Dad claimed the building's dust was irritating his eyes, an explanation weakened by the fact that we had been inside for less than ten minutes. Nathan had just finished his first year of geology and had obtained a more regular job at the American Museum of Natural History. Jamal had entered his union apprenticeship program and spent part of the ceremony explaining that he was already making money while we accumulated degrees.
Daniel sat with them after swearing he would not play guitar during the reception.
When I crossed the stage, Frank walked a few steps behind me.
No one saw him.
He still wore his bloodstained uniform, but his expression no longer contained the confusion of his first appearance. He looked up at the diploma being handed to me and smiled.
"You did it."
"We did it," I thought.
He shook his head.
"No. That was you."
The distinction touched me more than I would have liked.
After the ceremony, Mom took me in her arms, Dad shook my hand before pulling me against him, and Jamal asked how long he had to wait before calling me Detective. Nathan spoke for several minutes about the possibility of comparing certain methods of criminal reconstruction with the reconstruction of incomplete skeletons.
Nia was not there.
She had sent me a message that same morning.
Congratulations. You worked hard for this. I'm sincerely happy for you.
I simply replied:
Thank you. I hope you're doing well.
She did not answer, and I did not hold it against her.
My degree did not make me a police officer yet. It only allowed me to move on to the next step.
The NYPD recruitment process was less theatrical than I had imagined and much more intrusive. Written exams, physical tests, background checks, interviews, medical examination, and psychological evaluation. I answered the questions as honestly as possible without mentioning the invisible man who sometimes accompanied me in the room.
Frank attended the psychological interview while standing behind the doctor's chair.
"Do you ever hear voices other people do not perceive?" the doctor asked.
Frank leaned toward me.
"Interesting question."
"No," I answered.
Guilt followed me for the rest of the interview.
I did not consider Frank a hallucination, but that distinction would probably have done little to impress the evaluator.
I passed the physical tests without his help. He protested, claiming that we needed to test fusion in a controlled environment. I replied that passing an exam with supernatural strength constituted fraud and that I wanted to know my real abilities.
"Our abilities are your real abilities," he argued.
"Not the ones I can use publicly without explanation."
"You're far too attached to details."
"That detail is called integrity."
"Your father would be unbearably proud of that sentence."
The academy began a few months later.
The first day quickly eliminated any impression of achievement. We had become recruits again, lined up in a room, observed by instructors capable of spotting an improperly fastened button from twenty meters away. The schedules were strict, the demands constant, and the quantity of regulations enough to satisfy Dad for several lifetimes.
We studied law, procedure, intervention techniques, first aid, radio communications, driving, firearms, and report writing. The physical training reinforced what gymnastics and karate had already taught me: technique eliminated neither fatigue nor fear, but it reduced the number of decisions to make when both appeared.
Sergeant Morales led several of our scenarios. She was short, calm, and far more intimidating than the instructors who shouted. Her specialty consisted of waiting for a recruit to finish a complicated explanation before asking a question simple enough to reveal everything that had not been understood.
During one exercise, we had to intervene in a simulated apartment after a domestic violence complaint. An actor played the role of an agitated man. A woman stood behind him, silent, a bruise made up on her cheek. I correctly identified the risk, separated the individuals, and requested an additional unit.
After the exercise, Morales had me stay behind.
"Why did you place your hand on your weapon when you entered?"
"The suspect was hiding his right hand."
"Did you see him hiding his hand, or could you not see it?"
I remained silent.
"That is not the same thing, Beaumont. You anticipated a possible danger. That is your job. But if you turn every absence of information into proof of a threat, you will end up creating the danger you claim to prevent."
The sentence reminded me of Dad, Harris, and Adler.
An intuition could save a life.
It could also destroy an innocent person's if treated as certainty.
Frank watched all the exercises. He sometimes passed through the sets to check what the instructors had placed behind a door, then described the mistakes I might have made. I refused to use his information during evaluations, which caused regular arguments.
"There's a second actor in the bathroom," he warned me during a scenario.
I continued as if I had not heard him.
"Malcolm."
I followed procedure, checked the angles, and discovered the actor when a normal recruit could have seen him.
After the exercise, Frank waited for me in the hallway.
"You could have reacted earlier."
"And explained how?"
"You don't need to explain every good decision."
"If it depends on information I shouldn't have had, yes, I do."
"One day, your need to have a visible justification is going to cost you time."
"And your need to act as soon as you know something is going to make us cross a line."
"Do you really think criminals will wait for your evidence to be elegant?"
"No. But innocent people deserve that I not treat your observations as absolute permission."
He crossed his arms.
"You are frustrating."
"I come from you."
"You are proof that education can turn a reasonable man into a jurist."
Despite his complaints, Frank helped me. He observed my posture during exercises, spotted movements I could not see, and commented on my reactions. He understood the stress of a uniform, the responsibility of a weapon, and the particular fear of having to choose before possessing all the information. He had wanted to become a police officer in his old life.
He was discovering the job through me.
That closeness also revealed the dangers of fusion. During a defense exercise, another student threw me to the ground more violently than expected. Frank instinctively absorbed part of the impact. I got back up almost immediately, while he appeared a few meters away with part of his back blurred.
"You didn't need to do that."
"I reacted."
"You have to warn me."
"The floor didn't leave us much time for a meeting."
"It wasn't dangerous."
"You couldn't know that before the impact."
"Neither could you."
We added a new rule: Frank was not to transfer a minor injury simply to spare me pain. His cohesion was not a free resource. Every time he recovered inside me, my body paid part of the cost through fatigue and hunger.
Firearms training was the most difficult part.
I knew how to handle a weapon. Frank had done it before me, and his memories made some gestures familiar. Yet the first detonation in the shooting range brutally brought back the bank. For one second, I saw the young robber again, the weapon between my hands, and the moment when I had not fired.
My first round landed far from the center.
The instructor asked whether I had a problem.
"No."
Frank stood behind the firing line, perfectly motionless.
"You're lying."
I took another breath, lowered the weapon, and asked for a moment.
The instructor accepted without comment. I closed my eyes, felt my feet against the floor, and let the memory exist without trying to drive it away.
"I'm afraid," I thought.
Frank answered after a few seconds.
"Me too."
That was enough.
I resumed position and finished the session with a correct result, not an exceptional one. I did not want to become a man who saw a weapon as the solution to his old failure. I only wanted to be able to use one if no other possibility remained.
Over the months, the uniform stopped looking like a borrowed costume. I no longer viewed it with Frank's almost religious respect. I knew the possible mistakes, prejudices, and abuses too well for that. But I understood what it represented for the people who would look at us. For some, protection. For others, a threat. Often both at once.
Wearing the uniform would not make me a good person.
It would simply make my decisions heavier.
On the day we received our badges, Mom adjusted my collar before even congratulating me. Dad checked that my name was spelled correctly on the documents. Nathan wore a jacket too large for him that he had probably borrowed, and Jamal declared that the uniform made me look like a man who would ticket his own friends for illegal parking.
"Only if you refuse to cooperate," I replied.
"You see?" he said to Nathan. "Power has already corrupted him."
Mom was smiling, but her eyes remained wet. She placed a hand on my cheek.
"Are you sure?"
She was not talking about the ceremony. She was asking the same question as when I had told her I wanted to become a detective.
"Yes."
"Then I'm proud of you."
Dad waited for her to step back before extending his hand to me. I took it, but he eventually pulled me against him.
"Do your job properly," he murmured. "Not just legally. Properly."
"I'll try."
"No. You will do it, and when you fail, you will recognize it quickly enough to correct what can be corrected."
That was probably his way of giving a blessing.
Frank stood a little apart, invisible among the families and the new police officers. His old bloodstained uniform contrasted with mine, clean and new. For one second, we looked at each other without speaking.
In his old life, he had wanted to wear a real uniform.
In mine, he had made it this far.
"You should be proud," I thought.
"I am."
"Of us?"
He smiled slightly.
"Of you. I reserve the right to claim part of the credit when you become famous."
I looked at my parents, Nathan, and Jamal. Daniel had promised to join us later for a drink. Nia was now taking courses in preparation for law school and continuing her own life. Bruce Wayne was traveling somewhere in the world. Lex Luthor was building his empire in Metropolis. Clark Kent and Lois Lane were already filling the pages of the Daily Planet with the stories that would come before Superman.
The world was slowly moving closer to the one I remembered.
I too had moved closer to the man I wanted to become.
At twenty-one, I had a degree, a badge, a place in the NYPD, and a partner no one else could see.
For twenty years, I had believed Frank was only the life left behind me.
He now stood in my blind spot.
And, for the first time since my death, I was no longer moving forward alone.