Three months.
I had been dead for three months.
Or I had been alive for three months.
I had not yet decided which phrasing bothered me less.
The first had the advantage of being honest. Frank had died on the floor of a bank, with two bullets in his body and Claire leaning over him. The second implied that I was supposed to consider what followed a happy event.
For my new parents, it certainly was.
For me, it was mostly three months spent imprisoned inside a body incapable of holding up its own head.
I stared at the ceiling of my room from my crib, my arms stretched out on either side of me. At least, I assumed they were stretched out. My eyesight was still poor enough that my hands looked like two pink blurs that occasionally appeared in my field of vision without warning.
Babies had terrible eyesight.
I had read that somewhere, once. A useless piece of information stored in some corner of my brain that had suddenly become critically important.
Newborns had difficulty distinguishing colors, could only see clearly for a few dozen centimeters, and spent most of their time asleep.
That last part was a lie.
Either that, or I had ended up with a defective model.
I slept a lot, certainly, but never long enough to forget my situation. Every awakening came with the same moment of confusion. I searched for my bedroom, my alarm clock, the damp stain on the ceiling.
Then I tried to move.
My arm shot off in an unpredictable direction, my leg curled up for no reason, and my skull dropped heavily back onto the mattress.
And I remembered.
The bank.
The gunshots.
Claire's face.
Then this white ceiling, this crib, and this body that did not yet entirely belong to me.
During the first few days, I had been convinced I was dreaming.
Not a pleasant dream, obviously. More the kind of particularly elaborate nightmare my dying brain might have constructed in the few seconds before shutting down for good.
I waited to wake up.
Then I waited for the light at the end of the tunnel.
Then God.
Then anyone, really.
No one came.
There was no angel, no judgment, no mysterious voice explaining that I had been chosen to save another world. No transparent screen appeared before my eyes to welcome me to a new existence.
Only an exhausted woman who picked me up whenever I cried.
Her name was Laurie.
My mother.
It had taken a long time for that thought to stop sounding like a lie.
In my mind, my mother had another voice, another face, and that particular way of saying "Frankie" whenever she worried about me. She had called me on the morning of my death. I could still hear her sigh when I told her I was fine.
I had promised to come to dinner on Sunday.
I had gotten myself killed three days earlier.
Promises were worth much less than people claimed.
I thought about my father too. His overpriced suits, his charts, and the way he turned every conversation into a business meeting. We argued often. I still resented him for certain things, which suddenly seemed petty now that I would never be able to confront him about them again.
He would learn the news from a police officer.
Or from a call from the bank.
I imagined my mother answering the phone. I imagined my father standing beside her, perfectly still, because moving would mean acknowledging that the words were true.
I imagined them arranging my funeral.
I should not have done that.
My infant body might have been almost useless, but my imagination worked perfectly. It was probably compensating.
I thought about the neighborhood, Mr. Patel, Paul, and the teenagers I had caught smoking. I thought about my empty apartment and the apple crushed on the road a few hours before my death.
And I thought about Claire.
Always Claire.
Her face was the last clear memory of my old life. Her hands covered in my blood. Her red eyes. Her desperate smile when she understood what I had been trying to ask her.
"Yes, Frank."
I had spent months trying to find the courage to ask her out for a drink, then waited until I was dying to finally do it.
A remarkable strategy.
Now I would never know whether she had truly meant yes or whether she had simply offered a little comfort to a man whose lungs were filling with blood.
Part of me preferred not to know the answer.
The other part replayed the scene several times a day.
I could have done things differently.
That sentence quickly became the center of my existence.
I could have used my radio sooner. I could have watched the man in the cap more carefully. I could have waited for the other two robbers to return before trying anything.
I could have fired.
That was the one that came back most often.
I had held the gun in my hands. The young robber had been on the floor. I could have pulled the trigger, turned around, and aimed at the other two the moment they came through the door.
In the most generous versions of my memories, I shot all three of them and saved the bank.
In the others, I missed, hit an innocent person, or died in exactly the same way.
That did not stop me from starting over.
If I had been faster.
If I had been better trained.
If I had worn a real bulletproof vest.
If I had become a police officer.
If, if, if.
A tiny word capable of devouring entire days.
I cried often.
Laurie probably thought I was hungry, cold, or suffering from a stomachache. Sometimes she was right. Most of the time, I cried because I was furious.
Furious at the robbers.
Furious at myself.
Furious at God, which was not exactly the kind of thought a Catholic was supposed to be proud of.
I had always believed there was something after death.
I had never been particularly devout. I attended Mass on important occasions, mostly prayed when I needed something, and knew more curse words than passages from the Bible.
But I believed.
Not with the loud certainty of certain believers. More in the way you believed the sun would rise the next morning. I did not think about it every day, but it was part of the structure of the world.
I had believed that after my death, I would see my grandparents again. That someone would explain why certain things had needed to happen. That perhaps my final decision would have meant something.
I had tried to protect Claire.
That had to count for something, didn't it?
Apparently, the answer was 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 manga author had ever understood.
I knew reincarnation stories. I had read several of them, mostly during my college years, when I was supposed to be studying market economics. A man died, usually in an embarrassing manner, then woke up in another world with an extraordinary ability, a new body, and enough modern knowledge to revolutionize a medieval society.
The protagonists accepted their situations with impressive ease.
They spent five minutes mourning their former families, discovered they could throw fireballs, then went off to seduce elves.
In their defense, no chapter would have become popular if the protagonist had spent six months suffering from depression in his crib.
As for me, I had yet to see either an elf or a fireball.
Only Laurie and Terrence Beaumont, my new parents, who looked at me as though I were the best thing that had ever happened to them.
That made everything more complicated.
If they had been cruel or indifferent, I could have treated them like strangers. Jailers, perhaps. People I temporarily depended on until I could take control of my new existence.
But they loved me.
It showed in every gesture.
Laurie responded to the slightest sound from my crib. Terrence checked whether I was breathing whenever he thought she was not looking. They playfully argued over which one of them my smiles were meant for.
And I felt as though I were lying to them.
Their son was not really a child.
Behind Malcolm Harrowing Beaumont's eyes was Frank, twenty-eight years old, security guard, uselessly educated, and dead before he had found the courage to ask a woman out.
I did not know whether there had been an original Malcolm whom I had replaced.
That idea frightened me more than almost anything else.
What if this child had been meant to have his own soul? His own personality? What if I had taken his place at the moment of his birth?
No one could answer me.
So I lay there, stared at my blurry hands, and wondered whether I was a son, a parasite, or both.
The months that followed were less dramatic, mainly because maintaining an existential crisis was difficult when your gums were trying to murder you.
My first teeth began to come in.
I had completely forgotten that part of childhood.
It was not a mild discomfort. My gums burned for hours, my jaw throbbed, and I felt the constant need to bite something.
Anything.
A toy. A blanket. My own fingers.
On one occasion, Terrence's chin.
He let out a cry high-pitched enough to surprise everyone, including himself.
"He has quite a jaw," Laurie declared proudly.
Terrence rubbed his chin.
"Perhaps he could wait until he actually has teeth before using them."
I felt no remorse.
Human beings possessed a remarkable ability to forget pain. It was probably necessary for the survival of the species. If adults clearly remembered every tooth, every fall, and every childhood fever, no one would ever agree to do it again.
The tears returned.
This time, there was nothing philosophical about them.
I was in pain, I could not explain it, and my only means of communication consisted of screaming loudly enough to wake the building.
Laurie always came.
Sometimes Terrence did too, when he was not at the office or shut inside the small room he used as a workspace. But Laurie was the one who most often held me against her.
She walked slowly around the room, rocking me even in the middle of the night. She sang off-key, though she was probably unaware of it, and told me whatever came into her head.
Her clients.
The dresses she wanted to design.
An associate who had used the word "bold" to describe a jacket that was objectively hideous.
She spoke to me as though I could understand.
Which I could.
"Do you know what she told me today?" she asked one night, while my cheek rested against her shoulder. "She told me purple and orange don't go together. As though sunsets needed her permission."
I stopped crying long enough to listen.
"Exactly," she continued, interpreting my silence as support. "At least you understand."
She talked about Terrence too.
She made fun of the way he organized his ties by color, which was unfair. Any reasonable organizational system involved colors.
She said he worked too much, that he would forget to eat if she did not prepare something for him, and that one day he would probably try to prosecute sleep for obstruction of justice.
Then she talked about me.
About what she hoped for my future.
Not a particular career, prestige, or income. She wanted me to be curious, kind, and brave enough not to let other people make my decisions for me.
She wanted me to be happy.
That was all.
My first mother had wanted the same thing.
The comparison arrived without warning.
Their voices had nothing in common. They looked nothing alike. Their lives, habits, and styles of dress were completely different.
But Laurie held me with the same care. She said my name with the same worried tenderness. She checked my forehead while I slept and sometimes returned to the room simply to make sure I was still there.
I had spent weeks thinking of her as my "new mother," a kind of replacement imposed upon me by incomprehensible circumstances.
That night, the word "new" began to lose its importance.
She was Laurie.
And she was my mother.
That did not replace the one I had lost.
Love did not work like a chair in a waiting room. One person could be added without necessarily forcing the previous one out.
That realization did not make my grief disappear, but it created a little space around it.
Perhaps my second life was not only a punishment.
The thought seemed almost obscene at first.
Then Laurie kissed my forehead, placed me back in my crib, and remained beside me until I fell asleep.
I decided to give her a chance.
Her.
Terrence.
Perhaps even Malcolm.
Laurie Harrowing worked as a fashion designer in Manhattan.
Even at home, she always looked as though she had stepped out of a magazine. She could wear old jeans, a hastily tied scarf, and a shirt stained with tailor's chalk, yet somehow make it all look like the result of a carefully planned artistic choice.
She often placed my bassinet beside her sewing machine while she worked.
The noise should have kept me awake.
Instead, it quickly became reassuring. The steady purr of the machine, the rustle of fabric, and the curses muttered whenever a thread snapped became the soundtrack of my earliest years.
Laurie showed me colors as though she were presenting evidence in court.
"Red," she would say, waving a piece of fabric in front of me. "Not burgundy. Not crimson. Red."
I reached out toward it.
"Very good. Now blue."
For several months, all colors remained more or less interesting variations of blur to me.
That did not discourage her.
She laughed easily. Not the small, polite laugh adults used when they wanted to appear pleasant, but a real laugh that took over her whole body and made everyone else want to smile even if they had not heard the joke.
Terrence Beaumont, on the other hand, rarely laughed.
It was not because he was unhappy. He simply took almost everything seriously.
He was a young prosecutor, ambitious and constantly convinced that a legal disaster would occur if he left his office five minutes early. His suits were immaculate. His diction was even more precise.
Whenever he held me, he carried me like a valuable object whose instruction manual he had studied without being entirely certain he had understood it.
"He isn't going to break," Laurie told him.
"I know."
"You're holding him like evidence."
"Evidence does not drool on my shirts."
I did, in fact, drool quite a lot.
It was one of the few advantages of my age. No one could hold it against me.
Terrence did not express affection as easily as Laurie, but it was there. In the way he came into my room after a long day. In the books he bought long before I could read them. In the almost embarrassed pride he felt whenever I did something slightly earlier than expected.
And I did many things earlier than expected.
Nothing spectacular.
I had no desire to become the baby who recited Shakespeare at eighteen months and ended up locked inside a government laboratory.
But it was difficult to perfectly imitate ignorance.
I understood words. I knew what adults expected from me. My body remained clumsy, but I learned to control it with the concentration of a man who had already spent twenty-eight years inside another one.
I followed conversations with my eyes.
I responded to my name too quickly.
I spent more time examining my toys than randomly shaking them.
Laurie concluded that I was a genius.
Terrence adopted a more cautious position.
"He is observant," he said.
"He is brilliant."
"All parents think their child is brilliant."
"Yes, but we're right."
He had no answer to that.
My first words arrived without much ceremony.
"Mom."
Laurie cried.
I cried too, but for a different reason.
The word now belonged to two women.
I had feared that saying it to Laurie would represent a betrayal. Proof that my former life was fading away.
It did not.
The memory of my first mother remained exactly where it had always been.
There was simply more space in my life than I had believed.
"Dad" followed several weeks later.
Terrence did not cry.
He left the room for several minutes and returned with red eyes, which was obviously entirely different.
The years began to pass more quickly.
I learned to walk, then to run. I fell often. My adult experience was useless against legs that were too short and a center of gravity designed by a drunken engineer.
I learned to eat by myself, which saved a considerable number of Terrence's shirts.
I discovered the cartoons of the era, children's books, and the particular frustration of knowing how to read while having to pretend to slowly sound out every word.
I deliberately made a few mistakes.
Not enough, according to Terrence.
Far too many, according to Laurie, who announced to all her friends that I was destined for Harvard even though I had not yet learned to tie my shoes.
I was growing.
And, almost despite myself, I was beginning to become Malcolm.
Frank remained. His memories, regrets, and habits still accompanied me. I folded my clothes with excessive care. I hated being late. I possessed a probably unreasonable respect for uniforms.
But Malcolm liked drawing with Laurie.
Malcolm preferred hot chocolate to coffee, which Frank would have considered a moral failing.
Malcolm laughed whenever Terrence tried to explain legal concepts to a three-year-old.
The two identities did not replace one another.
They blended together.
Perhaps that should have frightened me more.
The truth was that I was simply happy to begin feeling something other than grief.
My parents began arguing before my fourth birthday.
At first, it was only about small things.
Terrence came home late.
Laurie blamed him for missing dinner.
He replied that a trial did not stop because his wife had cooked chicken.
She asked when he had last spoken to me.
He answered that he was working precisely so he could provide us with a stable life.
The same arguments returned, slightly modified, week after week.
They tried not to argue in front of me.
Adults often believed that a closed door prevented children from understanding what was happening. It only muffled the exact words. Tone carried through walls perfectly well.
I recognized the exhaustion in Laurie's voice.
I recognized Terrence's defensive anger.
Most of all, I understood that they were no longer talking about the same problem.
Laurie did not ask him to work less because she despised his ambition. She wanted him to be present.
Terrence did not insist on discipline because he did not love me. He feared that a lack of structure would leave me vulnerable in a world that had probably rarely forgiven his own mistakes.
They loved each other.
That was not always enough.
I already knew that.
One evening, my bedroom door remained slightly open.
I got out of bed, walked down the hallway, and sat on the stairs. From there, I could see part of the living room.
Laurie stood near the couch with her arms crossed. Terrence was still wearing his coat. He had clearly just come home.
"You promised you would be here," she said.
"I called."
"At nine-thirty."
"I couldn't leave the office."
"You can always leave the office. You choose not to."
Terrence set his briefcase down beside the door.
"It isn't that simple."
"It never is with you."
"Laurie…"
"He asked where you were."
I lowered my eyes toward my feet.
It was true.
I had asked several times.
Terrence ran a hand over his face.
"I have an important case."
"You always have an important case."
"People are relying on me."
"So are we."
The silence that followed was worse than the shouting.
Terrence looked toward the hallway.
I moved back too late.
Our eyes met.
His expression changed immediately.
"Malcolm."
Laurie turned around.
"Oh, sweetheart."
She came toward me, but I walked down the remaining steps before she could carry me.
At four years old, I was old enough to walk toward my own disasters.
"Are you getting divorced?" I asked.
It might have been too direct for a child.
Both of them remained motionless.
That reaction was answer enough.
Laurie knelt in front of me.
"We don't know yet."
Adults often used that phrase when they already knew the answer but were not ready to say it aloud.
Terrence approached as well.
"No matter what happens between your mother and me, we will always be your parents."
I looked at him.
"Are you leaving?"
His jaw tightened.
"I'm going to stay somewhere else for a while."
Laurie looked away.
I had already lost an entire family.
You might have thought that would make me more resilient.
It did not.
The pain was not as violent as my death or the loss of my former life, but it did not need to be. An old wound did not prevent new ones from hurting.
Sometimes it merely gave them more places to settle.
Terrence left that night with a suitcase.
He stopped beside me before opening the door.
I expected a speech about responsibility, stability, or complicated circumstances.
Instead, he picked me up.
He held me so tightly that my face was crushed against his jacket.
"I'm not abandoning you," he whispered.
I nodded against his shoulder.
I wanted to believe him.
The door closed behind him.
Laurie remained standing in the entrance for a long time. Then she slid down the wall and cried.
I sat beside her.
She pulled me against her without saying anything.
This time, I was the one who stayed until she calmed down.
The separation became permanent.
I lived mainly with Laurie and spent certain weekends at Terrence's home.
She filled the apartment with fabric, music, and projects she sometimes began before finding the money necessary to finish them.
He organized our days down to the quarter-hour.
Breakfast at eight.
Reading at nine.
Museum, park, or educational activity at ten-thirty.
He even scheduled the times when we were supposed to have fun, which removed some of the spontaneity but not necessarily the enjoyment.
Terrence had not become a bad father after the divorce.
He had become a father afraid of wasting a single minute with his son.
I grew up between them.
Laurie taught me to draw, recognize fabrics, and not fear colors.
Terrence taught me how to argue, verify facts, and never sign a document without reading it.
They disagreed about almost everything.
In a strange way, that created a fairly balanced whole.
By the age of six, I had almost accepted my new life.
Almost.
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 an open box of crayons in front of me. Laurie was preparing lunch in the kitchen while humming along to a song whose lyrics she only half knew.
I was drawing a man in uniform.
Not a police officer.
I had been repeating that to myself for several minutes.
He was simply a man wearing a blue shirt, a black tie, and a patch on his shoulder.
An artistic coincidence.
The music was interrupted by the news bulletin.
I continued drawing without really listening. The reporter talked about budget negotiations, an accident in Queens, and a municipal corruption case.
Then his voice changed.
"The business world is in mourning this morning following the murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne, who were shot last night in Gotham City."
My crayon stopped.
"The couple had been leaving a theater with their son when they were reportedly attacked in an alley in the Park Row district. Their nine-year-old child, Bruce Wayne, was unharmed. Gotham police are continuing their search…"
The crayon slipped from my fingers.
It fell onto the carpet.
For several seconds, I stopped hearing the rest.
Thomas Wayne.
Martha Wayne.
An alley.
Bruce.
Nine years old.
I knew that story.
Everyone had known it in my old world.
The parents murdered in front of their son. The young heir raised by his butler. The journey around the world, the training, and the return to Gotham.
Batman.
The name echoed through my mind with an almost comical absurdity.
Batman was real.
Or he would be.
"How horrible," Laurie murmured from the kitchen.
She appeared in the doorway, holding a spoon.
"That poor child."
I looked up at her.
She heard the story of a boy who had just lost his parents.
So did I.
But I heard something else behind it.
Gotham.
The Joker.
Ra's al Ghul.
Bane.
Alien invasions, gods, demons, crises capable of rewriting reality, and enough apocalypses to fill several calendars.
I knew the comics, but not enough.
That was the worst part.
I had read them during my teenage years. I had watched the films and cartoons and followed several television series. I knew the major events, the most famous characters, and a useless number of details.
But DC was not a single universe.
There were hundreds of versions.
Different timelines.
Characters dead in one story and alive in another. Cities destroyed, rebuilt, replaced, then destroyed again.
Knowing that Bruce Wayne existed did not tell me which continuity I had landed in.
It only told me that my situation was much more dangerous than I had imagined.
I looked down at my drawing.
An ordinary man in a uniform.
Suddenly, he seemed almost ridiculous.
In this world, a uniform was not enough.
Sometimes, even alien armor was not enough.
"Malcolm?"
Laurie had come closer.
"Are you all right?"
I looked at her face.
In some versions of the stories I had read, millions of people died during invasions. Entire cities vanished. Ordinary families were nothing but numbers in the margins of a heroic event.
She could die.
Terrence could die.
I could lose them as easily as I had lost my first life.
"Yes," I answered.
My voice trembled.
Laurie knelt in front of me.
"Are you sure?"
"The boy…"
I pointed toward the radio.
"He watched his parents die?"
Her expression softened.
"Yes, sweetheart."
She placed a hand on my hair.
"But he surely has people who will take care of him."
I knew the name of the man who would.
Alfred Pennyworth.
That detail did not make the situation any less terrible.
Laurie pulled me into her arms. I let her, still shaken by the news.
It was strange.
I had died trying to protect someone, then spent six years rebuilding a family. And it was the story of another family's destruction that had finally revealed where I was.
The DC Universe.
This was not a second chance.
Not only that.
It was also a threat.
I spent the following days searching for confirmation.
It would have been easier with the internet.
In 1995, the network existed, of course, but not in the convenient form I had known. Laurie had no connection at home, and I could not exactly ask a six-year-old girl to open an online account for me so I could research comic-book companies.
I began with television and newspapers.
Metropolis existed.
So did Gotham.
Wayne Enterprises existed and had divisions in technology, medicine, and industry.
Queen Industries did too.
The company appeared regularly in the business pages, often associated with Star City and the Queen family. To my knowledge, Oliver Queen was still a child or teenager, but his family name alone confirmed another part of the world in which I had landed.
S.T.A.R. Labs also existed. The newspapers described it as a network of advanced research laboratories involved in fields ranging from medicine to experimental energy.
That name did not exactly reassure me.
In the comics, S.T.A.R. Labs had a tendency to be located near groundbreaking discoveries, catastrophic accidents, or people who suddenly developed the ability to walk through walls.
Sometimes all three at once.
Then I searched for LexCorp.
Nothing.
No company by that name, no technological empire, and no public trace of a bald billionaire with an irrational hatred for an alien who had probably not appeared yet.
That did not mean Lex Luthor did not exist. He could still be young, unknown, or busy laying the foundations for what would one day become his company.
I also searched for Ted Kord.
No useful results.
No famous inventor, no head of Kord Industries, and no hero named Blue Beetle. If he already existed, he was still only a child unknown to the public.
Then I searched for the heroes.
The Justice Society.
Wonder Woman.
Green Lantern.
The Flash.
Nothing.
No reports of men flying through the sky. No old photographs showing masked vigilantes during the war. No rumors famous enough to reach mainstream newspapers.
I needed better sources.
During a weekend at Terrence's, I decided to try a more direct approach.
He was sitting in his study with an open file in front of him and a cup of coffee within reach. He had removed his jacket but was still wearing his tie, which was his personal definition of relaxation.
I sat in the chair across from his desk.
"Dad?"
He looked up.
"Yes?"
"Do you know LexCorp?"
He frowned slightly.
"LexCorp?"
"Yes."
"No. What is it?"
"A technology company. I think."
"Where did you hear about it?"
I had prepared an answer.
That did not make it a good one.
"A boy at school."
"Which boy?"
Terrence was a prosecutor.
I should have anticipated the next question.
"I don't remember."
"You don't remember the name of the boy who told you about a company whose line of business you know?"
I shrugged with all the innocence available to my six-year-old body.
"Maybe I dreamed it."
Terrence 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 thing."
"I was beginning to suspect as much."
I swung my legs slightly beneath the chair.
"What about Wonder Woman?"
He slowly set down his pen.
"Is she one of the characters from your cartoons?"
"Maybe."
"Malcolm."
"I'm checking."
"Checking what, exactly?"
The truth would have been difficult to sell.
I am checking whether we live in a comic-book universe where murderous clowns, aliens, and gods might destroy our city.
Even for a precocious child, that would have raised concerns.
"I want to know whether these stories are true."
Terrence leaned back in his chair.
I expected him to tell me to stop asking absurd questions.
Instead, he thought about it.
"I have never heard of those names," he said. "But my ignorance does not prove they do not exist."
I blinked.
That was a very Terrence answer.
"How can we check?"
"We look."
"In your files?"
"In a library."
I suppressed a smile.
"Tomorrow?"
He looked at the work spread out before him, then at his watch.
"Tomorrow."
He closed the file.
"And afterward, you will explain why this matters so much to you."
I nodded.
I had no intention of honoring the second half of that agreement.
The municipal library occupied an old brick building a few streets away from Terrence's apartment.
I was already familiar with libraries. I loved books in both of my lives, although my tastes had changed. In the first, I read to escape work and my family's expectations.
In the second, I read to determine whether an invincible alien would soon be moving to Kansas.
The encyclopedias quickly confirmed the existence of Wayne Enterprises, Queen Industries, and S.T.A.R. Labs.
Queen Industries was an old family company connected to Star City. S.T.A.R. Labs already operated several research centers across the country.
LexCorp remained impossible to find.
No company, no business article, and no mention of a certain Lex Luthor who might one day become one of the most powerful men on the planet.
Ted Kord produced nothing either.
That was not surprising. At the time, he had to still be a child or, at most, a completely anonymous teenager.
The archives concerning heroes were less conclusive.
Justice Society.
No results.
Wonder Woman.
Nothing.
Green Lantern.
Several advertisements for green lamps and an article about a particularly popular model from 1978.
The Flash produced so many unrelated results that we had to give up.
Terrence helped me use the microfilm reader, probably because my arms were too short to operate the machine properly and not because he had suddenly decided to believe in Wonder Woman.
We continued searching for nearly two hours.
"You see?" he finally said. "Those names probably come from stories invented by your classmate."
"Maybe."
I watched the microfilm images scroll past.
The absence of evidence did not reassure me.
In some versions, the heroes of the Justice Society had been erased from public memory, forced into retirement, or had never existed at all.
Wonder Woman could still be living on Themyscira.
Superman could be a teenager somewhere in Kansas, unaware of what he would become.
Lex Luthor could be nothing more than an ambitious student or a young man whose name no one knew yet.
Perhaps the world was not incomplete.
Perhaps it was simply waiting for the story to begin.
We left the library in the early afternoon.
Terrence carried a stack of books he had decided to borrow for me despite the partial failure of my research. American history, Greek mythology, and an encyclopedia about major corporations.
His way of encouraging my imagination was to provide it with properly documented references.
"Are you disappointed?" he asked.
"A little."
"Failing to find something is not always a failure."
I looked up at him.
"That sounds like something you say to juries."
"Juries are rarely as stubborn as you."
"I thought that was a good quality."
"Only when you are right."
We reached the crosswalk.
The light was still red.
Terrence looked left, then right. I did the same.
A second later, a group of people stepped into the street despite the signal.
I was distracted.
By Bruce Wayne.
By the timeline.
By the possibility that my family lived in a world where Gotham was only the beginning.
I followed the crowd without thinking.
My foot left the sidewalk.
Terrence shouted my name.
A car shot through the intersection.
Everything happened far too quickly.
The engine.
A horn.
The driver's face behind the windshield.
For a fraction of a second, I no longer saw the street.
I saw the ceiling of the bank.
I heard the gunshots.
I felt blood filling my mouth.
Not again.
The thought was so powerful that it erased everything else.
Not like this.
The brakes screamed.
The car stopped a few inches away from me.
Close enough for me to feel the heat of the engine.
I remained frozen in the middle of the road.
The driver rolled down his window and began shouting. I did not understand his words. My heart was beating too loudly.
Terrence grabbed me beneath the arms and pulled me back onto the sidewalk.
The books fell around us.
"Malcolm!"
He knelt and placed his hands on my shoulders.
"Look at me."
I looked at him.
All the color had drained from his face.
"Did it hit you?"
I shook my head.
"Are you hurt anywhere?"
"No."
"Are you certain?"
"Yes."
He pulled me against him.
Not with his usual care. Not as though I were fragile or valuable.
He held me like a man who had watched his son die for one second.
I remained still against him, unable to speak.
I was alive.
Again.
It had come down to a few inches.
To a driver who had braked quickly enough.
To Terrence shouting.
Nothing mystical.
No obvious miracle.
Only another occasion on which my life could have ended before I had been able to do anything with it.
"You could have died," Terrence whispered.
His voice trembled.
I closed my eyes.
He did not know how deeply that sentence frightened me.
Dying once had destroyed an entire life.
Dying a second time at six years old, after finding a new family, would have rendered all of it absurd.
My former parents.
Claire.
Laurie.
Terrence.
The years of grief, the teeth, the first steps, the words I had been forced to learn again.
All of it would have vanished in the middle of a crosswalk because I had been too busy thinking about Batman to watch the road.
It would have been almost funny if it had not been so pathetic.
Terrence pulled back just enough to look at me.
"Promise me you will be careful."
I had made a similar promise to my mother on the morning of my death.
"Always," I had answered.
I had believed I could keep it.
This time, I did not answer immediately.
I watched the car disappear at the end of the street, then looked at the books scattered across the sidewalk.
I could not guarantee that nothing would happen to me.
Not in this world.
Perhaps not in any world.
But I could 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 die without trying.
"I'll be careful," I said.
Terrence nodded and pulled me against him again.
I looked over his shoulder.
Gotham lay somewhere beyond the horizon. Bruce Wayne had just lost his parents, and the world continued to turn, unaware of what he would become.
One day, Batman would appear.
Then the others would probably follow.
The heroes.
The criminals.
The monsters.
I was not ready.
At six years old, I could barely cross a street without getting myself killed.
But I had time.
And this time, I was not going to waste it.