After the Golden Age

With growing anticipation, Celia neared the beginning of the file, the pages that would, she hoped, tell her why Sito had ended up here in the first place, who had admitted him, and how the bills got paid. An insurance ID number, that was all she wanted.

A knock sounded on the frame of the door, which Celia had left open. Startled, she looked up and avoided heaving a frustrated sigh.

A young man in a white lab coat leaned on the door frame. He wore a vaguely predatory expression, staring at her like he might leap at her. She contemplated retreating into a corner.

“Are you Celia West?” he said. His eyes gleamed.

“Yes. And you are—”

He took that as his invitation to rush in, hand extended for her to shake. She did so, confusedly. “I’m Gerald Ivers. Doctor Gerald Ivers. Miller told me you were here.”

Great, she thought. The question was, Why had Miller told anyone she was here? “Can I help you with something?”

He pulled a spare chair from a corner over to her desk and sat on it, right at the edge, leaning forward eagerly. He could strangle her if he wanted. Or she could strangle him.

“I just—well, this is going to sound crazy. But you’re the Celia West? The daughter of Captain Olympus and Spark?”

Just shoot me now … She managed a thin smile. “I’m Warren and Suzanne West’s daughter, yes.”

“Can I ask you a few questions? Let me back up a little. I’m very interested in the psychology of superhuman crime fighters. I’ve written several articles on the subject—I could get copies for you, if you’re interested. You might have a particular insight into this area of study. Purely anecdotal, of course.”

He regarded her, brow raised like he expected her to launch into a personal chat about her parents then and there.

“I’m probably not the best person to ask,” she said. “I’m a little too close to the joke, as it were.”

“You think what your parents do is a joke?”

The last thing she wanted was to have herself psychoanalyzed. “No, of course not. But you should know that I left home on not very good terms when I was seventeen. It wasn’t the best environment to grow up in.”

If he’d whipped out a notepad and started writing, as he looked like he wanted to do, she’d have snatched it out of his hands and beat him with it. But he just stared attentively.

“No, I suppose not. But your perspective on the topic is unique, you have to admit. Why do you think your parents do what they do? Why do any of the city’s crime fighters don costumes and risk their lives?”

He probably wouldn’t go away if she just told him to. If she did that, he’d probably get all kinds of warped ideas about her bitter attitude being a defense mechanism that stemmed from the trauma of growing up in the uncertainty of a household of superhuman vigilantes.

Not that she’d ever thought about this before or anything.

She said, “I think most of them believe their powers are a gift. That because of it they have some kind of destiny, a responsibility to protect those weaker than themselves. It’s a calling.”

“I can’t help but wonder if there’s more to it than that. Look at the Hawk—I’ve studied his case extensively, and he wasn’t superhuman. He had no powers. What drove him to fight crime? Especially under the guise of a costumed persona?”

The Hawk. The original vigilante. He appeared on the scene in Commerce City forty years ago, disappeared twenty years later—after secretly placing a note on the then mayor’s desk that read, “I retire.” Every five years or so a new book came out discussing his case, speculating on his psychology, and guessing who he might have been, really. Worse than the debate about who wrote Shakespeare’s plays. The evidence was just as sketchy. What intrigued people most about him: he’d had no powers. Perfectly normal, mortal. Everyman.

“Maybe some of them get a rush out of it.”

“But if that were the case, why did the Hawk just retire? In studies of people who participate in extreme sports, their activities come to resemble an addiction. They rarely stop until they’re incapacitated or killed. I have an idea that it’s the same with the vigilante crime fighters.”

She might worry about her father getting killed, except he was the indestructible Captain Olympus and the point seemed moot. He looked after her mother and the others. They’d all had scrapes, sure. But they’d come through, every time.

He continued. “Do your parents ever talk about retiring? Do they show any sign of it?”

None at all. But she didn’t think that was Ivers’s business.

“Doctor, have you ever talked to any of the city’s superhumans?”

His lips pressed into a line. “I’m treating Barry Quinn currently.”