Interviews

Lois had moved in with Richard a year into their relationship.

It had been a rainy day, just like the one that Lois was currently listening to through the storm windows, and it had been a Thursday if she figured the timing correctly. It was one of those days both blaring and muted in memory, like the first day of high school or the last day of college.

This was a door that swung very wide in her life, the door into a place that was supposed to be shared. Mutual. Cohabited. It was an Issue, the kind of thing Lois would refuse to talk about if her mother ever did manage to get her into therapy.

She had in fact recently developed a fixation about this door, this move, over the past few weeks. Thoughts came to her as she spotted old possessions hidden among those newer and not her own. She drove past her old building two days ago on a whim. Fate happened upon her old house line in her cell phone just this morning.

And now, on this quiet Friday night Lois had a very prominent manifestation of a doorknob on her hands.

It was a box. A box she had packed so long ago that she could barely register it, yet it had her attention, four years later. A box labeled simply “Interviews” in awkward, slanted writing.

It had made its way away from her old bookshelf in her apartment and into 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 it 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, it was the crux of every article she’d written on him (and some she hadn’t) sitting in inert plastic holders.

She was in that office at the moment, staring at the folded cardboard hidden behind two portable file boxes and between her safe and the plant in the corner, listening to the rain. It was a static, solid, and accessible record of at least some of the moments, conversations, and experiences had in better, less complicated times.

And it stared back at her. Somehow, it represented Loneliness to Lois, and she sighed.

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 a longing for company with Richard’s stable presence. She just had not realized it until Superman returned, and now the hole in her was wider still. Loneliness.

Her family and friends had remarked on what a good idea it was, how wonderful his home was and how lucky they were to have a school right down the street. Now she would get to pay for garbage pickup, but not a fire department. Now there was someone else to feed Jason at two in the morning. Now motherhood was going to seem a lot less shameful. It was the Suburbs, it was Domesticity, it was Child-Rearing, and it was the Nuclear Family Unit. It was great timing in her life, her career, and even her car payment. Everything was just perfect.

Despite this ironic and universal longing for the American Dream somehow surfacing in every cynical, sarcastic, and socially dysfunctional person Lois had ever met, her enthusiasm at the move had been less than wholly… extant. It was everything Lois could do to smile over the phone at her mother, to swoon over property values with her sister, and to keep Jimmy from grinning like an idiot when she told him she would finally get to start 'that herb garden I always wanted.’ In reality, the idea made her want to scream.

Lois never moved in with men. It was like a law burned in stone by the very hand of god. It did not happen, it was not supposed to happen, it did not happen. She had explained this the day she told Richard she was pregnant, the day she had the baby, and the day after that. She maintained this mantra throughout the nights, holding onto it even as everything else in her life was taken away.

Yet even the oldest stone, even the hardened essence of the very planet forged in its molten birth could crack. And Lois eventually did. Jason was born and she spent almost every night for three straight weeks just staring out her window, his cries constant in the early days of his existence, her never-ending worry and regret eating at her. She could feel her resolve melting away as she slowly lost her mind, as the child at her breast reshaped her entire universe, as she realized that she was alone.

They, she and the little creature now and forever a part of her, were alone.

Not in spirit; they were not lacking in well-wishers, good friends, a supportive family (far removed, thank god), and even a responsible and eager father in Richard.

But, they were alone.

Because he was gone.

An equation someone in college once introduced to her made Lois give pause:

“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. Richard did not know it (no one really ever really did) because Lois never spoke a word about what the rest of the world had just finally stopped wondering (but where, oh where, was Superman?), and had never even written a word despite Perry’s constant bellowing.

Superman's disappearance had been at first simply bizarre for Lois. She had 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 had been swollen, her mind twisted with confusion at her new relationship status and the circumstances around it… yet the pain of wondering whether Superman was alive or dead ate at her.

It was enough to make her lose her mind, and that all still tormented her even as she nursed her baby, her newest and greatest concern.

So it was that when Jason was a month old, Lois told Richard that they would move in with him, out to the great Suburb of Bayview and into the shackles of Perfection.

Lois held her miracle 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 walked slowly through the spaces, even when she was just crossing the room to get something, trying to seep in the essence of this place before she had to give it up. She was at peace with her decision, but still haunted.

Lois had four months left on her lease, but opted to move in immediately, as a significant day was approaching. She told Richard at dinner one night that she needed to be gone by the next Tuesday, and then requested that she be able to spend that last night at her apartment, alone. He agreed, staring into her.

The next week Richard took Jason and two bottles of breast milk to let her make her peace with her former life. Lois had turned around from the door to face her empty apartment, a few spare things here and there and drawing her eyes away from the bare floors. She didn’t turn on the lights, and had instead just walked forward into the moonlight by memory, an infinite sadness rising in her throat.

Lois had difficulty saying goodbye to places, despite having lived in over twenty homes in her lifetime so far. More fodder for the couch.

Soon after, the cool tiles of her balcony wore under her constant pacing. Lois had been agitated and upset, her first night away from Jason and ponderous on the meaning of this painful self-indulgence.

Richard couldn’t know it (few would unless they paid very close attention), but this night was a year to the day that Lois had last seen Superman. She had given him a year to come back, a year before she would begin to smolder in fury at his silent absence.

A year of hope. And that year was up this very night.

So she waited. She told herself this was the last night, the last time she would do this to herself, and that she should just have hope this one last time.

But, the night waned, the cold seeped in too far, and Lois realized he really was not coming back. It was over as suddenly as it began.

The minute-by-minute agony of this momentary Big Bang was too much on her soul, and to this day Lois could not remember the particulars of that one, lonely night. She could only remember the next morning, when she woke sore from crying and from wearing her mind out in search of herself. As dawn came, Lois washed the salt from her face in the shower and had 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 was suddenly and unmistakably ready to start her new life.

She had experienced Catharsis, and was able to step forward (and hadn't needed to wait the additional six months, after all).

Lois 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 unpacked it, 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. She had promptly purchased five red sweaters for herself and one for infant Jason.

And then of course, there was the Move.

Not even the birth of her son was as significant to her as moving in with Richard. It all came down to that. It was done. She was still here, life was still ticking by.

The new life with a new house, a new baby, and a new schedule had wholly consumed Lois as much as she would let it. In the flurry of it all 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. It was as if the ocean had risen up to sweep the evidence of trespass out to sea.

Three years later, Lois wrote the article that won her a Pulitzer.

Richard had been intrigued to see her write about Superman, that’s how silent she had been in the meantime: that the man closest to her 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 this was a statement that screamed in its significance. At the start however, her pregnancy and Richard’s new position at the Planet had become a reality, and Perry dropped the topic anyway. 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 non-relationship as that between Lois and Richard. Now there was a child involved and Perry let Superman rest in order not to scare Richard away. She was grateful for it.

And then… he came back.

It was incredible. It defined incredible. Words still would not come whenever she thought about it.

'Insane' often came to mind though, and Lois tried not to follow suit. She tried to just keep breathing, just keep living and working and mothering and just do it all perfectly and ignore everything.

And it worked... until Lois’ bare feet touched down after their impromptu flight following his return and she realized… she had missed him. It had lain dormant, a quiet ache from before her late night catharsis in a nearly empty apartment, but with his return it flared once more. It had been there the whole time.

Oh but yes: the anger, the questions, the resentment, and even the self-pity were also burning around her, and Lois was furious. But just as it always was for her in the quiet of night, Lois simply missed him.

So she found them talking.

In their brief discussions since he had returned (full of furtive glances and this undistinguishable 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 strange fact that he was so eager to confess, not much else was said. He only came when called for. 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 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 on the other hand now 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, escaping Luthor, worrying about the possible long-term effects 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 she was in quite such a life-threatening situation... 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.

Somehow, years of resentment 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 hopes of getting him back.

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, yet this meeting was very different than their first. Despite now knowing that they were closer than they had imagined, the distance between them was further than it had been in all the time they'd known each other. 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 that I am probably more an unwanted complication in your life than ever before. Know that until we both understand where we stand I will abide by all your wishes. 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 had paused to see if she had any last words, polite to a fault.

“Come when I call for you?” She wanted to let him know further communication is desired. They needed 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, and the question burned in her. She didn't know how to ask, not so much because of the question but because she didn't remember him. Lois realized that she 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 hope to understand more?

It has been three months since Superman had ripped the door off her cocoon of scar tissue and she found herself desperate for memories. In fact, 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.

So it was this rainy 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; she would return to the beginning, try to find something there in the relative simplicity of their relationship that would help her see a solution to their painful silence.

Resolved, Lois took in her situation: Jason was in bed, Richard was out of town at the SPJ conference, and 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, hello. 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, at the way she perceived the ignorance of a creature who knew more about humanity than she did, “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.

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