Sunspots

Lois had moved in with Richard a year into their relationship. Lois never moved in with men, but having a child with one and facing a mental breakdown from lack of sleep, intense worry, and the equation a girl in college once introduced to her made Lois finally give in to the suggestion.

“Divide however many months you were together by two. That’s how long it takes to get over them.”

Lois had never been with, but probably loved, Superman for nigh on three years, and was very desperately hoping that six months from when she agreed to move in she’d be a free woman. She never spoke a word about what the rest of the world had just finally stopped wondering, and had never even written a word despite Perry’s constant bellowing. Lois worried for the first two weeks of his absence. She listened, watched, and read every news report from around the world for the next six weeks. Eight weeks after that she simply scanned the skies, whispering his name randomly at work, at home. Her body swollen, her confusion at her new relationship status and the circumstances around it, the pain of wondering whether Superman was alive or dead ate at her.

Lois nursed her young son while Richard, Jimmy, some guys from the office and Richard’s brother Michael moved her boxes in. She had packed with care, relishing the memories hidden in simple objects around her apartment, taking the time to file old paperwork and organize older documents for archival storage. She spent the last night in her apartment alone, requesting that Richard take Jason and two bottles of breast milk to let her make her peace with her former life. The cool tiles of her balcony wore under her constant pacing. Richard couldn’t know it, few would unless they paid very close attention, but the night before Lois let her lease lapse was a year to the day that Lois had last seen Superman. She gave him a year to come back, a year before she would begin to smolder in fury at his silent absence. A year of hope. When she woke the next morning, sore from crying and from wearing her mind out in search of herself, she was ready to start her new life. Catharsis. Not even the birth of her son was as significant to her as moving in with Richard. It all came down to this. And as dawn came and Lois washed the salt from her face in the shower, she closed, walled off, locked, and cauterized the wound left in her life by Superman. Whether he was alive or dead was all the same now.

She didn’t need to wait the additional six months, after all.

It was three years before Lois wrote the article that won her the Pulitzer. Richard had been intrigued to see her write about Superman, that’s how silent she had been, that the man closest to her (but really the person least likely to ever hear about Superman, little did he know) had to wait with the rest of the world for her to say a word, and when the first word came out, hundreds followed. Lois had been adamant about her silence, she murmured to Perry one afternoon that she knew no more than the next reporter about why Superman was gone and as soon as her pregnancy and Richard’s new position at the Daily Planet had become a reality, Perry stopped pushing the issue. Both of them silently acknowledged that to milk Lois’ connection to Superman in light of the tabloid-type treatment it already received might be too much strain on such a delicate relationship. Now that there was a child involved Perry let Superman rest in order not to scare Richard away. She was grateful for it. It also served to close the door a little further on that chapter of her life. Soon after, Lois began contemplating moving.

She had rarely thought about him in the weeks following. She cleared her desk of notes on his disappearance, threw away headline clippings with her byline from around her office at home as she packed it up, ducked her head as she passed the framed portraits of him near the elevators, and even stopped wearing red for awhile until she noticed she was doing so and promptly purchased five red sweaters for herself and one for infant Jason. Anger was the fire in which she purged the pain, but the remnants of that conflagration were not easily identified until the moment Lois’ bare feet touched down after their impromptu flight following his return: she missed him. It had laid dormant, a quiet ache in the face of the greater pain from before her late night catharsis in a nearly empty apartment, but with his return it flared once more. Oh, the anger, the questions, the resentment, and even the self-pity were also flaring around her, but in the quiet of night in the darkness throughout the weeks after his return Lois simply missed him.

It was difficult to miss a man, both his love (mainly in her mind) and his affectionate friendship (something once openly shared between them), while laying next to another man who knew little of her traitorous thoughts, which is why Lois spent a lot of time now remembering “the move.” The ideas, sensations, and experience of the weeks leading up to and following the day that she had moved in with Richard were now very fresh in her mind, for not only was that the day she forfeited her independence for the Greater Good of Child Rearing, but it was the day she attempted to sate that longing for company with Richard’s stable presence. She just had not realized it until Superman returned, and now the hole in herself was wider still. In contemplating all of this, Lois found a focus, something her mind kept returning to as she remembered the loneliness of the past and compared it to the awkward, sad confusion of the present. Something that she had ignored since the move.

It was a box. A box she had packed so long ago that had her attention now, four years later. A box labeled simply “Interviews” that had made its way to her first-floor office in Richard’s inherited house (“I don’t need this space, honestly! I’ll move my treadmill into the basement and let it be inspiration to build a rec room for Jason. Take this room, you want the view.”) Within that box were almost two hundred hours worth of interviews with Superman. From the first micro tape from their first interview to the last CD burned from her digital recorder, the crux of every article she’d written on him (and some she hadn’t) were sitting in inert plastic holders. She sat now in her office, staring at the box, which was hidden behind two portable file boxes and between her safe and the plant in the corner. It was a static, solid, and accessible record of at least some of the moments, conversations, and experiences had in better, less complicated times.

A new life with a new house, a new baby, and a new schedule had wholly consumed Lois as much as she would let it all those years ago, following his departure. In the flurry of life she had allowed herself to blur the details, forget the moments, and make Superman and their star-crossed affair (which she convinced herself was a one-sided, silly crush) a distant star fading in the sunrise of a new reality. Three months ago he had ripped the door off her cocoon of scar tissue and now she found herself desperate for memories. Desperate for anything that would rekindle their friendship, their sense of being able to share something beyond the basic formalities they had acquired. Something to get them through the fact that they shared a child. Something to soothe the ache of missing him that she still refused to acknowledge in the light of day.

In their brief discussions since he had returned, full of furtive glances and this indistinguishable longing that poured off him, soulful regret tainting every word, he had mentioned the fact that the five years the world had spent without him only felt like a few weeks. Lois was never cruel, and did not relish what it must feel like for him. To leave this planet to find another, all in the hope of family or ties, and to return realizing the ties that had not only been lost to him, but created and lost in time spent selfishly. His one, selfish moment that just happened to last five years. Did he regret it halfway through, trapped in space, isolated, so truly alone and alien beating his fists against a spaceship door?

Besides this, not much else was said. He only came when called for, after initially promising to respect whatever role Lois decided for him in Jason’s life. He no longer stayed for sound bites after a daring rescue, which came as a sour disappointment to Internet videographers the world over desperate to dub his voice over some cartoon ferret somewhere and become an e-mail phenomena. He did not chat as much with the local, smaller victims of life like the little old ladies with the random, stranded cats or the construction workers he used to startle at the top of buildings for a mutual chuckle. Lois had a busy life: there were fewer late nights at the Planet that could afford an off-the-cuff interview on the roof, almost no moments to replace the nights that Lois would call softly off her balcony at the sky when she lived alone and unattached, and what with their state of high awkwardness, no possibility after local crimes or disasters to excuse themselves for a friendly fly around the city.

Lois didn’t notice it at first, the complete lack of conversation. She was too busy having a nervous breakdown, trying not to be obvious about it in order not to arouse Richard’s ire, escaping Luthor, worrying about the possible long-term affects of all of this on Jason, and racking herself sick trying to remember having sex with the man she fantasized about for years. And ignoring all of it, too.

Lois was still surprised that she was not angry. She wanted to be, she expected to be, and she probably would have been had the shit not hit the fan so soon. It had been awhile since Lois was in quite such a life-threatening situation. A knife held to the throat here and an anonymous death-threat there. But to have Lex Luthor go nuts the very same week Superman returned, to have her son be so suddenly sucked into the vortex of megalomania, and to watch Superman nearly die so soon after she got him back got her through her anger very quickly. She didn’t get to yell at him for leaving over tea. It was BAM I just nearly kissed him, we all just nearly died, and I discover that he’s the father of my child, and he nearly dies again all within a week. Whatever private longing she had for memories of better times, of old friendship, and even needing some level of communication for the sake of her son, there was definitely some resentment. But, it was nothing in the face of all that. That is why she kissed him, lifeless at the hospital, why she whispered to him about Jason in hope to see his eyes open to her.

She thought of this one day, a week or so after telling him he was a father, and made her way out onto the roof, waiting without realizing it. He had come. This meeting was very different than their first. Despite now knowing that they were closer than either of them had previously known, the distance between them was further than it had been in all the time they had been acquainted. She could barely look at him; the new knowledge that they were lovers was a bitter and confusing pill. Fortunately and unfortunately, the topic of Jason was immediate, leaving her and her confusion to the side. She said she had no idea what to do. She had so much to think about. He nodded.

“I do not wish to trouble your life any further. I understand we are now irrevocably tied, and yet I am probably more an unwanted complication in your life than ever before. Know that until we both understand where we stand in regards to our lives, our son, and us I will abide by all your wishes and continue to watch for your safety as I always have. I..,” he paused and looked down. Lois realized with a start that she was used to waiting for him to finish a sentence, as sometimes his head would tilt and he would listen half a world away. This time however he just could not go on, assumed a miserable air, and turned to leave. He paused to see if she had any last words, polite to a fault.

“Come when I call for you?” Let him know further communication is desired. We need some hope.

“Always.”

And he was gone. From that time on she called for him rarely, finding it far too painful and awkward, more for him than her. A thousand times she wondered how to ask him about Jason’s conception, the question burned in her. Lois had spent so much time forgetting that she couldn’t remember anything. She even found it strange to remember to wait for his pauses, how could she dive into that memory?

So it was a quiet night weeks later that Lois used her favorite letter opener to slice the tape on the “Interviews” box. If she was to discover what to do about her future, she should remember her past. She was sick of such large questions regarding the time lost, the love spent and forgotten, her attachments all around fighting to hold her back as she tried to flee and understand herself in peace. She would return to the beginning, try to find something there in the relative simplicity of their relationship before that would help her see the end to this pain now. Jason was in bed, Richard was out of town at the SPJ conference, it was Friday. She ran her finger across the neatly organized rows of tapes and CDs and let her hand reach out for the earliest date:

“Mayor Frederick, Chief of Police re: arson threat, Super-Man.” Every tape after that one said only “Superman” and she smiled at herself. Being a journalist made it very easy to interview your crush, and having a crush made it very easy to be a journalist. Lois picked up her mug of chamomile tea while she sat down in her office chair and dug through a drawer searching for her old tape recorder. AC adapter in the wall, headphones on, finger on the volume poised in case it was terribly loud, and then the hiss of tape fast forwarding. She stopped and heard her voice finish a question. Too soon. Fast forward. Silence. This must be…

“Well, um, good evening. My name is Lois Lane, as you know I’m a reporter for the Daily Planet… a, uh, newspaper,” Lois of the present smiled at herself, Superman must have already mentioned that he was an alien, “and I am here interviewing the person all the world is wondering about, Superman.” The name sounded awkward on her younger tongue.

Lois of now braced herself.

“Hello, Ms. Lane, and thank you very much for asking me here.”