Three months after my death, I still had not decided whether I should consider myself dead for three months or born for three months.
The first formulation had the merit of honesty. Frank had died on the floor of a bank, two bullets in his body, while Claire leaned over him with her hands covered in blood. The second formulation gave the impression of a happy event. A clean restart. A blank page. A little light at the end of the tunnel, accompanied, if the universe had any real sense of spectacle, by soft music and a reassuring message.
For Laurie and Terrence Beaumont, the birth of their son had indeed been the best thing that had ever happened to them.
For me, it mostly resembled an extended detention in a body incapable of holding its own head upright.
I stared at the ceiling from my crib, my arms spread on either side of me, or at least I assumed so. My eyesight remained poor enough that my hands looked like imprecise blotches that sometimes entered my field of vision without permission. I had read somewhere that newborns could only clearly distinguish objects placed a few dozen centimeters from their faces, and that they spent most of their time sleeping.
The first part seemed accurate.
The second was an insult.
I slept a lot, yes. But never long enough to forget my situation. Every waking began with the same instant of confusion. I searched for my bedroom, my alarm clock, the damp stain above my old bed, the sound of the radiator hissing as if it had something to reproach me for. Then I tried to move.
My arm went in an unpredictable direction. My leg folded for no reason. My head fell heavily back against the mattress with the dignity of a sack of flour.
Then the memories returned.
The bank.
The gunshots.
Claire's face.
Then this white ceiling, this crib, and this body that now carried the name Malcolm Harrowing Beaumont.
During the first few days, I had believed it was a dream. Not a pleasant dream, obviously. More the kind of absurdly elaborate nightmare a dying brain could construct in the few seconds between the last heartbeat and nothingness. I had waited to wake up in a hospital room. I had waited for the light at the end of the tunnel. The Last Judgment. A voice authoritative enough to explain what had just happened to me.
Nothing.
No angel welcomed me. No mysterious being announced that I had been chosen to accomplish a great mission. No transparent screen appeared before my eyes to assign me extraordinary skills, a starting class, or even a basic tutorial.
There was only an exhausted woman who got up every time I cried and held me against her until my body stopped trembling.
Her name was Laurie.
At that time, I still could not think the word Mom without feeling as if I were lying.
My mother had another face, another voice, and a very particular way of saying "Frankie" when she worried about me. She had called me on the morning of my death. I could still hear her sigh when I had assured her that everything was fine, that my job was not dangerous, and that yes, of course, I would come to dinner the following Sunday.
I had died three days before.
Which gave fairly relative value to promises pronounced with too much confidence.
I also thought about my father. His overly expensive suits. His charts. His almost supernatural ability to turn every family conversation into a business meeting. We had argued often. I still resented him for things that suddenly seemed trivial, now that I would never be able to reproach him for them one last time.
I imagined a police officer appearing at their house. Or someone from the bank calling them with that careful voice people use when they are about to destroy your life while remaining polite. My mother would pick up. My father would remain near her, perfectly still, because moving would force him to recognize that the words were real. Then would come the morgue, the forms, the questions, and the funeral of a son who had promised to come home.
I had to not think about that.
Naturally, I thought about it all the time.
My new body was almost useless, but my imagination worked perfectly. It compensated, probably out of cruelty. I saw my old neighborhood again, Mr. Patel behind his counter, Paul, to whom I had never returned a borrowed tool, the teenagers I had caught smoking behind the building, and that apple crushed on the road a few hours before my death. Meaningless details clung to me more fiercely than the great memories, as if my mind refused to admit that an entire life could disappear while leaving behind an empty apartment, a few bills, and objects no one would really know whom to return to.
And then there was Claire.
Her face remained the last perfectly clear memory of my old life. Her hands pressed against my wounds. Her red eyes. Her trembling voice. That desperate smile when she understood what I was trying to ask her.
I had spent months looking for the courage to invite her for a drink, then waited until I was lying in my own blood to make up my mind.
As romantic strategies went, people had seen more effective ones.
"Yes, Frank."
I would never know whether she had really meant yes or whether she had merely offered a little peace to a man whose lungs were filling with blood. Part of me preferred not to know the answer. The other replayed the scene several times a day, as if a different angle, a forgotten intonation, or a displaced detail could change the ending.
It never changed anything.
I could have acted differently.
That sentence quickly became the center of my existence. I could have used my radio sooner. Watched the man in the cap better. Waited for the other two robbers to come back. Understood that the young man on the floor had not yet been neutralized. I could have fired.
That possibility returned most often, because it gave my regrets a simple shape. I had had a weapon in my hands. I could have pulled the trigger, turned around, shot the other two as soon as they came through the door. In the most generous versions, I hit all three of them, saved the customers, and left the bank a hero. In the others, I missed my shot, wounded an innocent person, or died exactly the same way, but with more damage around me.
My mind knew all those possibilities.
It started over anyway.
If I had been faster. If I had been better trained. If my employer had given me a real bulletproof vest instead of that rigid piece of theater that mostly made me hot. If I had become a police officer instead of choosing a job I had considered temporary for several years.
If, if, if.
One tiny word could devour entire days, even when those days took place in a crib.
I cried often. Laurie usually thought I was hungry, cold, or had a stomachache. Sometimes she was right. The rest of the time, I cried because I was furious at the robbers, at myself, and at God, which was not exactly a thought a Catholic was supposed to be proud of.
I had never been particularly devout. I attended Mass on major occasions, prayed mostly when I needed something, and knew more swear words than Bible verses. Yet I had believed in God with the quiet certainty one grants to the existence of the sun. I did not think about it every day, but that belief supported part of the structure of the world.
I had imagined that after my death, I would find my grandparents again. That someone would explain why certain things had had to happen. Or at least tell me that my last decision had mattered. I had tried to protect Claire. That had to mean something.
The answer had apparently taken the form of a crib.
Maybe reincarnation was part of the plan. Maybe there was no plan. Maybe the universe operated according to rules no priest, scientist, or fiction writer had ever properly understood.
I knew stories about reincarnation. I had read several during my university years, often when I was supposed to be studying. A man died in a tragic or embarrassing way, woke up in another world with a new body, then accepted his situation with impressive speed. He regretted his old family for a few pages, discovered he could throw fireballs, and began an adventure eventful enough to prevent him from thinking.
In their defense, few readers would have enjoyed a protagonist spending several months having a breakdown in his crib.
As for me, I had found neither magic, nor mission, nor extraordinary advantage. Only Laurie and Terrence Beaumont, my new parents, who looked at me as if I were the best thing that had ever happened to them.
That complicated everything.
If they had been cruel, indifferent, or simply neglectful, I could have considered them strangers I temporarily depended on. A horrible situation, but at least a clear one. But they loved me. Laurie responded to the slightest sound coming from my room. Terrence sometimes checked my breathing when he thought she was not watching. They gently argued over which of my smiles was meant for them, as if a three-month-old baby already possessed an emotional calendar and a policy of fair distribution.
On my side, I felt as though I were deceiving them.
Their son was not an innocent newborn, at least that was how I perceived myself then. Behind Malcolm's eyes were the memories of a twenty-eight-year-old white man, a security guard, holder of a degree he had never truly used, and dead before finding the courage to ask a woman out.
Not exactly the standard contents of an infant.
I did not know if there had been an original Malcolm I had replaced. That idea terrified me more than death itself. Maybe this child should have had his own soul, his own desires, his own way of laughing. Maybe I had settled into his place at birth, like a metaphysical squatter with far too many memories and no explanation.
No one could answer me.
So I lay there, watching my blurry hands, and wondered whether I was their son, a parasite, or something strange enough to be both.
The following months were less philosophical, mainly because it is difficult to maintain an existential crisis when your gums are trying to murder you.
I had completely forgotten teething.
It was not a mild discomfort. It was a continuous burning that climbed through my jaw and created an almost irresistible need to bite anything that came within reach of my mouth: toys, blankets, fingers, and, once, Terrence's chin.
He let out a cry high enough to surprise everyone, himself included.
Laurie ran in from the hallway, her hair tied up in a hurry, a tape measure still hanging around her neck. She stopped in the doorway, observed Terrence holding his chin, then me, perfectly innocent by all reasonable jurisdictions.
"What happened?"
Terrence looked at me with the suspicion of a man who had just discovered that his few-month-old son could already organize an assault.
"He bit me."
Laurie looked down at me. Her lips trembled.
"He doesn't have teeth yet."
"He works with the means available."
She burst out laughing.
"He has quite a jaw."
"That is not a quality we should encourage."
I felt no remorse.
That pain had at least one quality: it was present, simple, impossible to turn into a metaphysical debate. I hurt, I could not explain it, and my only means of communication consisted of screaming until an adult intervened. Laurie almost always came. Terrence too, when he was not at the office or locked in the small room he used as a workspace. But she was the one who most often took me against her and walked around the room until I calmed down.
She sang off-key.
Not a little off-key. Not charmingly. Off-key as if the melody owed her money.
No one had probably ever had the courage to tell her. I depended on her for survival, food, and not remaining in a dirty diaper. I had regrets in this new life, but not that one.
She told me whatever crossed her mind. Her clients. The clothes she wanted to create. An associate who had used the word "bold" to describe a jacket that was objectively hideous. One night, as my cheek rested against her shoulder, she explained to me that a woman had declared that purple and orange could never be worn together.
"As if sunsets needed her permission," she concluded.
I stopped crying long enough to listen.
"Exactly," she resumed, interpreting my silence as approval. "At least you understand."
Apparently, I had become a fashion critic before I knew how to hold a spoon.
She also spoke about Terrence. His ties organized by color. His ability to forget a meal the moment a file was in front of him. The day he would probably try to prosecute sleep for obstruction of justice.
Then she spoke about me.
About what she hoped for my future. She did not dream of a precise profession, a fortune, or success capable of impressing her clients. She wanted me to be curious, kind, and brave enough not to let others decide the person I should be.
Above all, she wanted me to be happy.
My first mother had wanted the same thing.
The comparison imposed itself without warning. They did not look alike, did not speak the same way, had not led comparable lives. Yet Laurie held me with the same care. She pronounced my name with that same anxious tenderness, checked my forehead when I slept, and sometimes returned to my room simply to make sure I was still there.
I had spent weeks considering her my new mother, a replacement imposed by a phenomenon I did not understand. That night, the word new began to lose its importance.
She was Laurie.
She was also my mother.
That did not replace the woman I had lost. Love did not work like a chair in a waiting room, where one person had to get up so another could sit down. It could be added without erasing what already existed. This discovery did not make my grief disappear. It only created a little space around it.
For the first time, I considered that this second existence might not only be a punishment.
Laurie kissed my forehead, put me back in my crib, and stayed near me until I fell asleep.
That night, I decided to give them a chance.
Her.
Terrence.
And maybe even Malcolm.
Laurie Harrowing worked as a fashion designer in Manhattan. Even when she wore old jeans, a chalk-stained shirt, and a scarf tied in haste, she gave the impression that every element had been chosen to appear in a magazine. She often placed my bassinet near her sewing machine when she worked at home. The steady purr of the motor, the rustle of fabric, and the curses she murmured every time a thread broke became the soundtrack of my early years.
She presented colors to me as if she were displaying evidence before a jury.
"Red," she said, waving a piece of fabric in front of me. "Not burgundy, not garnet. Red."
I reached toward the blurry shape.
"Very good. Now, blue."
For several months, all colors remained for me more or less interesting variations of fog. That never discouraged her. She laughed easily, not with the small polite laugh adults use to appear pleasant, but with a laugh that took her whole body and made other people want to smile even when they had not heard the joke.
Terrence Beaumont laughed less often.
He was not unhappy. Only convinced that almost everything deserved to be taken seriously. A young, ambitious prosecutor, he lived with the certainty that some legal catastrophe would happen if he left his office five minutes too early. His suits were impeccable, and his diction even more so. When he held me, he held me like a precious object whose manual he had studied without being certain he had understood all the instructions.
"He isn't going to break," Mom told him.
"I know."
"You're holding him like evidence."
"Evidence does not drool on my shirts."
I did indeed drool a lot, which was one of the rare uncontested advantages of my age. No one could reasonably hold it against me, even if Terrence sometimes looked as though he were searching for the relevant precedent.
Dad expressed his affection less easily, but it was there in his habits. He sometimes came home late and still came into my room before taking off his jacket. He bought books years before I was supposed to know how to read them, then carefully arranged them on a shelf at my height. He seemed almost embarrassed by the pride he felt every time I did something earlier than expected.
That happened often.
Even though I was careful.
I had no desire to become the baby capable of reciting Shakespeare at eighteen months and attracting the attention of a government institution. Yet it was difficult to play ignorance perfectly. I understood words, recognized adult expectations, and learned to control my body with the patience of a man who had already spent twenty-eight years in another. I followed conversations with my gaze, responded too quickly to my name, and examined my toys instead of simply banging them together like a satisfied little primate.
Mom concluded I was a genius.
Dad adopted a more cautious position.
"He is attentive."
"He is brilliant."
"All parents think their child is brilliant."
"Yes, but we are right."
He had no satisfying answer to that.
My first word arrived without ceremony. Mom was leaning over my bed, her hair tied in haste and her eyes marked by a bad night. I could have chosen something simpler or kept pretending I was not ready, but the word came out before I had time to analyze it.
"Mom."
She stood still.
Then she brought a hand to her mouth and began to cry.
I cried too, but for a different reason. The word now belonged to two women. I had feared that saying it for Laurie would constitute a betrayal, proof that my old life was slowly fading. It was not the case. The memory of my first mother remained exactly in its place.
There was simply more room inside me than I had imagined.
"Dad" followed a few weeks later.
Terrence did not cry.
He merely left the room for several minutes before returning with red eyes, which was apparently completely different.
The years then began to pass faster. I learned to walk, then to run, even if my adult experience could do nothing against legs that were too short and a center of gravity designed by a drunk engineer. I fell often. I learned to eat by myself, thereby saving a significant number of Dad's shirts. I discovered cartoons of the era, children's books, and the particular frustration of knowing how to read while having to pretend to slowly decipher each word.
I deliberately left a few mistakes.
Not enough, according to Dad.
Far too many, according to Mom, who was already telling her friends I was destined for Harvard while I still did not know how to tie my shoes.
Above all, I began to become Malcolm.
Frank was not a separate voice in my head, not yet. There was no figure beside me, no invisible interlocutor to answer. Frank was the name I gave to the man whose memories, regrets, and certain habits I possessed. I folded my clothes with too much care, hated being late, and felt an almost instinctive respect for uniforms.
But Malcolm loved drawing with Mom.
Malcolm preferred hot chocolate to coffee.
Malcolm laughed when Dad tried to explain legal concepts to a three-year-old with the seriousness of a man being questioned by the Senate.
Those two lives did not replace each other. They slowly mixed, until it became impossible to determine where one stopped and the other began. That probably should have frightened me. In reality, I was simply relieved to feel something other than grief.
The first arguments between my parents began before my fourth birthday.
At first, they were about small things. Dad came home late. Mom reproached him for missing dinner. He replied that a trial did not stop because she had made chicken. She asked when he had last spent a real evening with me. He explained that he was working precisely to offer us a stable life.
Even at four, I thought the argument needed a better lawyer.
The same reproaches returned every week, slightly altered but never resolved. They tried not to argue in front of me, as if a closed door were enough to protect a child. It muffled the precise words, but not the silences, the changes in tone, or the way Mom put away the kitchen too loudly after certain conversations.
I recognized the fatigue in her voice and the defensive anger in Dad's. Above all, I understood they were no longer talking about the same problem. Mom was not asking him to give up his ambition. She wanted him to be present. Dad was not clinging to his work because he did not love us. He was afraid of not being able to provide enough for us, then used that fear to justify every absence.
They still loved each other.
That was not always enough.
One evening, the door to my room remained ajar. Voices rose from the living room. I went down the hallway and sat on the stairs, from where I could see Mom near the couch and Dad still wearing his coat. His briefcase rested at his feet.
In other people's homes, a briefcase probably would not have looked accusatory.
In ours, it almost had its own personality.
"You promised you would be there," she said.
"I called."
"At nine thirty."
"I couldn't leave the office."
"You can always leave the office. You choose not to."
Dad passed a hand over his face.
"It isn't that simple."
"It never is with you."
"Laurie..."
"He asked where you were."
I lowered my eyes to my feet.
It was true. I had asked the question several times, first with impatience, then with that caution children develop when they understand a subject hurts the adults.
"I have an important case," Dad replied.
"You always have an important case."
"People are counting on me."
"So are we."
The silence that followed was worse than shouting.
Dad turned his head toward the hallway. I moved back too late, and our eyes met.
"Malcolm."
Mom turned immediately.
"Oh, sweetheart."
She came toward me, but I went down the last steps by myself. At four, I was old enough to walk toward my own catastrophes.
"Are you going to get divorced?"
The question was probably too direct for my age.
Their stillness gave me the answer before they spoke.
Mom knelt in front of me. Her eyes were bright, but she did not look away.
"We don't know yet."
Adults often used that sentence when they knew the truth but were not ready to pronounce it.
Dad approached in turn.
"No matter what happens between your mother and me, we will always remain your parents."
"Are you going to leave?"
His jaw tightened.
"I'm going to live somewhere else for a while."
I had already lost an entire family. One might have thought that would make me more resilient. It did not. The pain was not as violent as the pain of my death, but it did not need to be. An old wound did not protect against new ones. Sometimes it gave them more places to settle.
Dad left that night with a suitcase.
Before opening the door, he stopped near me. I expected a speech about responsibility, stability, or the complexity of adult relationships. Terrence Beaumont was very good at transforming an emotion into a statement with an apparent plan.
Instead, he bent down and took me in his arms.
He held me so tightly my face pressed against his jacket.
"I am not abandoning you," he murmured.
I nodded against his shoulder, without being certain I could believe him.
When the door closed, Mom remained standing in the entryway for a long time. Then she slid down against the wall and cried.
I sat beside her.
She pulled me against her without speaking, and this time, I was the one who stayed until she calmed down.
The separation became permanent.
I lived mostly with Mom and spent certain weekends at Dad's. She filled our apartment with fabric, music, and projects sometimes begun before she had found the money needed to finish them. He organized our days to the quarter-hour. Breakfast at eight. Reading at nine. Museum or park at ten thirty. He even planned the moments when we were supposed to have fun, which removed part of their spontaneity without making them truly unpleasant.
Dad had not become a bad father after the divorce.
He had become a father terrified of wasting the slightest minute with his son.
Mom taught me to draw, to recognize fabrics, and not to fear colors. Dad taught me to argue, to check facts, and never to sign a document without reading it entirely. Even a school trip permission slip. Especially a school trip permission slip, according to him, because "vague formulations are the natural refuge of poorly defined responsibilities."
They contradicted each other on almost everything.
Their influence nevertheless formed a surprisingly balanced whole.
At six, I had almost accepted my new life.
Then Thomas and Martha Wayne were murdered.
The news came over the radio one morning in 1995. I was sitting on the living room carpet with a box of crayons open in front of me. Mom was preparing lunch in the kitchen, humming a song of which she knew only half the lyrics. I was drawing a man in uniform.
Not a police officer, I had been repeating to myself for several minutes.
Only a man wearing a blue shirt, a black tie, and a patch on his shoulder.
An artistic coincidence.
The music stopped to make way for the news bulletin. The journalist spoke about a budget negotiation, an accident in Queens, and a municipal corruption case. I continued drawing without really listening, until his voice adopted that graver tone presenters reserve for catastrophes and important deaths.
"The business world is in mourning this morning after the murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne, shot last night in Gotham City. The couple were leaving a theater with their son when they were reportedly attacked in an alley in the Park Row neighborhood. Their child, nine-year-old Bruce Wayne, was not injured. Gotham police are continuing their search."
My crayon stopped.
Thomas Wayne.
Martha Wayne.
An alley.
Bruce, nine years old.
Ah.
Very bad ah.
I knew that story. In my old life, almost everyone knew it, even people who had never opened a comic. The parents murdered in front of their son. The young heir raised by his butler. The years of travel. The training. The return to Gotham.
Batman.
The name echoed in my mind with an almost comical absurdity. Batman was real. Or, more precisely, he would become real.
For now, he was a nine-year-old child who had just watched his parents die.
"How awful," Mom murmured from the kitchen.
She appeared in the doorway, a spoon in her hand.
"That poor child."
She was hearing the story of a boy who had just lost his parents. So was I. But I heard something else behind the journalist's words.
Gotham.
The Joker.
Ra's al Ghul.
Bane.
Alien invasions, gods, demons, and catastrophes capable of rewriting reality as if the universe were a poorly filed document.
I knew the DC universe, but not enough for that knowledge to be truly useful. I had read comics during my adolescence, watched the movies, the animated shows, and some series. I knew the major characters, the most famous events, and an impressive quantity of useless details.
The problem was that DC was not a single world.
There were hundreds of versions, contradictory timelines, characters dead in one story but alive in another. Cities could be destroyed, rebuilt, replaced, then destroyed again, sometimes with more smoke and fewer lasting consequences. Knowing that Bruce Wayne existed did not tell me which continuity I had been born into. It only confirmed that my family lived in a much more dangerous world than I had imagined.
I looked down at my drawing. The ordinary man in uniform suddenly seemed ridiculous. In this universe, a uniform was not always enough. Sometimes, even alien armor was not enough.
"Malcolm?"
Mom had approached.
"Are you all right?"
I raised my eyes to her.
In some stories I had read, millions of people died during invasions. Entire cities disappeared, and ordinary families became numbers written in the margins of a heroic event. She could die. Dad could die. I could lose them as easily as I had lost my first life.
"Yes," I answered.
My voice trembled.
Mom knelt in front of me.
"Are you sure?"
"The boy... he saw his parents die?"
Her expression softened. She placed a hand on my hair.
"Yes, sweetheart."
She spoke gently, as if my question merely proved I was a sensitive child.
"But he surely has people to take care of him."
I already knew the name of the man who would.
Alfred Pennyworth.
That did not make the situation any less terrible.
Mom took me in her arms. I let her, still shaken by the news. I had died trying to protect someone, then spent six years rebuilding a family. It was the story of another family's destruction that had finally taught me where I had landed.
The DC universe was not only a second chance.
It was also a threat.
I spent the following days searching for confirmations with the limited means of a six-year-old living in 1995.
In other words: not much.
The computer network existed, of course, but not in the simple and almost universal form I had known. Mom did not have a connection at home, and I could not ask her to sign me up for an online service so I could research companies and vigilantes who, in my old world, belonged to comic books. Even for a precocious child, there was a limit to the number of worrying questions one could ask before an adult started using the word specialist.
I began with television, newspapers, and magazines Dad kept in his office.
Gotham existed.
So did Metropolis.
Wayne Enterprises was an old company, involved in industry, medicine, and several technological fields. Queen Industries regularly appeared in the business pages, linked to Star City and the Queen family. Oliver had to still be a child or teenager, but the public existence of his name already confirmed another part of the map.
S.T.A.R. Labs existed as well.
The newspapers presented it as a network of advanced research laboratories working on medicine, energy, and experimental technologies. This discovery did not reassure me. In the stories I remembered, S.T.A.R. Labs was often near a revolutionary invention, a catastrophic accident, or a person suddenly developing the ability to walk through walls.
Sometimes all three at once.
I then searched for LexCorp.
Nothing.
No company by that name. No technological empire. No bald billionaire presented as America's new genius. That did not mean Lex Luthor did not exist. He might still be young, unknown, or busy building the foundations of what would one day become his company.
The absence of LexCorp only taught me that some stories had not begun yet.
Ted Kord produced nothing either. No famous inventor, no leader of Kord Industries, no hero publicly associated with the name Blue Beetle. If he existed, he was probably still only a child unknown to the public.
The searches for heroes were even less conclusive. I found no credible reference to the Justice Society, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, or the Flash. That could mean they did not exist. It could also mean they had not appeared yet, that their activities had been concealed, or that I had landed in a timeline where their history differed completely from my memories.
In summary: I knew enough to be afraid, not enough to be useful.
A very comfortable intellectual position.
During a weekend at Dad's, I decided to test a more direct approach. He was sitting in his office, a file open in front of him and a cup of coffee within reach. He had removed his jacket but kept his tie, which constituted his personal definition of relaxation.
I settled into the chair opposite him.
"Dad?"
He raised his eyes.
"Yes?"
"Do you know LexCorp?"
His eyebrows drew slightly together.
"LexCorp?"
"A technology company."
"No. Where did you hear that name?"
I had prepared an answer.
That did not make it convincing.
"A boy at school."
"Which boy?"
Dad was a prosecutor.
I should have anticipated the next question.
"I don't remember."
"You don't remember the boy who told you about a company, but you remember its name and its field of activity?"
I shrugged with all the innocence a six-year-old could possess.
"Maybe I dreamed it."
He stared at me for several seconds.
"You ask very strange questions."
"Do you know the Justice Society?"
"The Justice what?"
"Society."
"I know the Department of Justice."
"That isn't the same."
"I was beginning to suspect that."
I swung my legs under the chair.
"And Wonder Woman?"
He slowly put down his pen.
"Is that a cartoon character?"
"Maybe."
"Malcolm."
"I'm checking something."
"What exactly?"
The truth would have been difficult to sell.
I'm checking whether we live in a universe where aliens, gods, and murderous clowns might one day destroy our city.
Even for a precocious child, that would have justified a conversation with a specialist.
"I want to know if those stories are true."
Dad leaned back in his chair. I expected him to tell me to stop asking absurd questions. Instead, he genuinely thought about it.
"I have never heard of those names," he finally said. "But the fact that I do not know them does not prove they do not exist."
I blinked.
That was a profoundly Terrence Beaumont answer.
"How can we check?"
"We search."
"In your files?"
"In a library."
I held back a smile.
"Tomorrow?"
He looked at the work spread in front of him, then at his watch.
"Tomorrow."
He closed the file.
"After which you will explain to me why this search is so important."
I nodded, without the slightest intention of respecting that part of the agreement.
The public library occupied an old brick building a few streets from Dad's apartment. Wide steps led to glass doors that creaked slightly, and the inside smelled of paper, dust warmed by radiators, and lemon cleaning product. I had liked libraries in both my lives, even if my motivations had changed. Frank read to escape his work and his family's expectations. Malcolm now read to know whether an almost invincible alien would soon grow up on a farm in Kansas.
The encyclopedias and business archives quickly confirmed the existence of Wayne Enterprises, Queen Industries, and S.T.A.R. Labs. LexCorp remained unfindable, as did Lex Luthor. Ted Kord produced no useful result, which made sense if he was still a child. The searches devoted to heroes were less convincing. Wonder Woman yielded nothing. Green Lantern mostly led to advertisements for lamps. The word Flash appeared in so many different contexts that it was almost unusable.
Dad helped me operate the microfilm reader, probably because my arms were too short to properly reach the controls, not because he was beginning to believe in the existence of an Amazon princess. We searched for nearly two hours before he straightened and rubbed his eyes.
"Those names probably come from stories invented by your classmate."
"Maybe."
I watched the images scroll across the screen. The absence of proof did not reassure me. In some timelines, the old heroes had disappeared, been forgotten, or had never existed. Wonder Woman might still live on Themyscira. Superman could be a child or teenager somewhere in Kansas, unaware himself of what he would become. Lex Luthor might only be an ambitious young man no one knew by name yet.
The world might not be incomplete.
It was simply waiting for its story to begin.
We left the library in the early afternoon. Dad carried a stack of books he had decided to borrow despite the partial failure of my research: American history, Greek mythology, and an encyclopedia devoted to major companies. His way of encouraging my imagination consisted of providing it with properly documented references.
"Are you disappointed?" he asked.
"A little."
"Not finding something is not always a failure."
I raised my eyes to him.
"That sounds like a sentence you use in front of jurors."
"Jurors are rarely as stubborn as you."
"I thought that was a quality."
"Only when you are right."
We arrived in front of a crosswalk. The light was still red. Dad looked left, then right. I did the same, but my attention was elsewhere, occupied by Bruce Wayne, possible timelines, and the question of whether our world already contained beings capable of destroying a city by accident.
A group of pedestrians stepped onto the road despite the signal.
I followed them without thinking.
My foot left the sidewalk.
Dad shouted my name.
A car barreled into the intersection.
Everything happened far too quickly: the engine, the horn, the driver's face behind the windshield. For a fraction of a second, the street disappeared. I saw the bank ceiling again, heard the detonations, tasted blood in my mouth.
Not again.
The thought was so strong it erased everything else.
Not like this.
The brakes screamed. The car stopped a few centimeters from me, close enough that I felt the heat of the engine. I remained frozen on the road while the driver rolled down his window and began shouting. I understood none of his words. My heart was beating too hard.
Dad grabbed me under the arms and pulled me back onto the sidewalk. The books fell around us in a disorder of rigid covers and wrinkled pages.
"Malcolm!"
He knelt and placed his hands on my shoulders.
"Look at me."
I raised my eyes.
His face had lost all color.
"Did it touch you?"
I shook my head.
"Do you hurt anywhere?"
"No."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes."
He held me against him.
Not with his usual caution. Not as if he were handling something fragile. He held me like a man who had just seen his son die for one second.
I stayed still against him, unable to speak.
I was alive.
Again.
It had come down to a few centimeters, to a driver who had braked fast enough, and to Dad shouting at the right moment. Nothing mystical. No obvious miracle. Only another occasion where my life could have ended before I did anything with it.
"You could have died," Dad murmured.
His voice trembled.
He did not know how much that sentence terrified me. Dying the first time had destroyed an entire life. Dying again at six, after finding another family, would have made all of it hideously absurd. My first parents, Claire, Mom, Dad, the years of grief, the teeth, the first steps, and all the words I had had to relearn would have disappeared in the middle of a crosswalk because I was too busy thinking about Batman to look at the road.
Dad pulled back just enough to look at me.
"Promise me you will be careful."
I had made a similar promise on the morning of my death.
I had told my first mother that everything would be fine, with the quiet confidence of a man convinced willpower was enough to protect a life. I could not promise him that no misfortune would happen to me. Not in this world. Maybe in none.
I watched the car disappear at the end of the street, then the books scattered on the sidewalk.
I could, however, stop waiting for my life to begin.
I could learn. Prepare. Become stronger, smarter, and more useful than Frank had been. I had no idea how an ordinary man could survive in the DC universe. I did not even know whether I would remain ordinary. But I refused to go through this second life as I had gone through the first, postponing every important decision until tomorrow and assuming I would always have more time.
"I will be careful," I answered.
Dad nodded and held me against him again.
Over his shoulder, I looked at the city. Gotham was somewhere beyond the horizon. Bruce Wayne had just lost his parents and the world kept turning, unaware of what he would become. One day, Batman would appear. The others would probably follow: heroes, criminals, monsters, and all the catastrophes of which my memories only provided contradictory versions.
I was not ready.
At six, I could still die crossing a street without looking properly.
But I had time.
This time, I intended to use it.