You remember the day he first swooped into our lives, the sky bathed bright orange with zeta-rays. You remember that stray satellite that was crashing toward our fair San Angelo, and what emergency shelter you were fighting the mob to get into.

I, myself, oblivious to personal safety, was snooping around the power plant's observation chamber, looking for the scoop on flawed disaster fail-safes. Suddenly the klaxon started to sound. Blast doors slammed. As the room I was standing in slid into a defensive domed shape, it wrenched me off my footing, leaving me to grasp and dangle from an inverted railing. On page 46 of Flight of Justice, his so-called memoir, he says he heard my screams from miles away.

Let me assure you, here and now, I did not scream, at least not till much later in our sordid little tale. I was too busy clutching onto steaming steel grillwork, a radioactive roar of heat below me, my hands slippery, wrists about to give. I never scream when these kinds of things happen to me.

Instead I muttered my last ritual rank-breath gutter curses at all villains, sports editors and ex-boyfriends. It was then that he barreled through the blast doors like a heat-seeking missile.

You want to know. You want to know what he said to me that first time he saved me, when he whipped up from below and hugged me against his chest. You want to know what he uttered into my ear, my arms looped around the thick sinews of his neck, the scruff on his cheek scratchy against my own.

Well here it is. His voice husky in a roar of wind: "Great legs."

Where did he take me, you ask? Where does one fly with a woman one has just saved when there's a satellite hurling its way toward a city of millions of other potential casualties?

To the top of a radio dish. You know the one, right off the 59 Freeway? There I was, plucked from danger only to be plopped hundreds of feet off the ground, my boots standing on bird droppings and graffiti.

"You saved my life," I said.

He shrugged. "That's what a hero does. Saves the girl."

He was wearing spandex. Another gal's head would be reeling, but I had assessed the situation. I didn't bother asking him who the hell he was, since the ridiculous costume gave him away. Some kind of vigilante, a superhero wannabe. Except that this one, admittedly, could fly.

"Lots of gals out there to save," I said. "A city full in fact."

"Not with legs like yours." He winked. Then he made to go.

"Wait," I said. "Why are you leaving me here?"

"So if you need me, I can hear you," he said. He cupped his hands, and waggled his middle finger, miming a satellite dish. "It magnifies the sound of a scream."

"Where are you going?" I asked.

"I've got someone else to save."

Don't believe him when he writes about this making me "jealous." After all, it was a time of disaster. Why should I begrudge the saving of some orphans? The Governor maybe, or even a video starlet? However, when he told me who, it's true I was horrified.

"Mr. T-bone," he said. At first I thought this was the name of some other superhero, maybe a washed-up mentor of sorts. Until he said, "I've got some money riding on himÑyou know in case the track survives."

"You're flying off to save a dog?" I asked. I imagined a news graphic of the satellite's trajectory. Computer generated estimations of the devastation. A grim-faced commentator in too much make-up standing in front of a graphic screen, mouthing the experts' dire predictions. An adrenaline junkie field reporter, voice hoarse, hair tousled, filming footage of people streaming toward underground safety. And emergency shelter locations scrolling across the screen.

Why wasn't this would-be superhero doing something to stop this?

"So you're the kind of guy who can fly," I said. "How about incredible speed and strength?"

"Sure, the big guy's quick. Strong. But there's some other talents too," he said. Wagged his eyebrows, I swear.

"Are we maybe aware that this city is in a state of crisis?" I said. "That thousands of people are about to become satellite stew?"

"The big guy knows that." He looked wounded, as if I had insulted his intelligence, but I could tell it wasn't the first thought to have crossed his mind.

"It has occurred to you to try and do something to save San Angelo, hasn't it?" I asked.

"As a matter of fact, the big guy was just thinking he would try and, you know, do something about that," he said.

I don't know what in my sharp-honed instincts made me put it this way, but somehow I knew to stand firm on the slope of the radio dish, fold my arms with conviction across my chest and announce: "A real hero would be flying off right now, to stop that satellite and save the world."

"How exactly would he do that?"

"Maybe he'd fly up to the satellite."

"Yeah?"

"Give it a good whack."

"Yeah?"

"Divert its trajectory, so it misses the city."

He nodded his head. Then suddenly he was gone, as were my panties, whisked away in a blur of red, white and blue.

This, I'll admit, was the first hook in my would-be hard-boiled heart. 

That night, back in the city, as I tried to write a ground-breaking exposŽ on how a caped mystery man had saved the city from certain destruction, I couldn't concentrate. Safe in the busy newsroom, it suddenly flooded over me with radioactive heat that his crushing embrace had saved my life. I opened up a new file on my computer that I named "Mystery Man" and started typing. I approached my new article from the human angle, what it felt like to have gravity's pull against my legs, my chest bound to his, breast to pectoral, by one thick, muscled arm in the small of my back. "Girl Reporter Saved by Caped Mystery Man" ran on the front page right below the news that the city had been spared when he flyballed the satellite into the drink.

Wracked with insomnia, I took the long way home from work that night, pacing the streets in my black boots and trench coat. Rancid steam bellowed up from underneath the sidewalk grillwork, as the rest of you slept dreamless, new-lease-on-life sleep. I scanned the sky but there was no one, nothing but the grisly skewered cityscape, and the tension of expectation. The bloated moon above me, the stars hidden by an orange night sky, offered nothing in my search for the scoop.

In retrospect, this night when I paced the city streets was the last night of my innocence, when I still believed I sought nothing more than the truth about things, with the cocky swagger of someone who's always been able to pick herself up after a fall. I was a gritty girl reporter after all, ready to investigate what was underneath his electric blue tights.

It turned out there was a lot.

You want to know, don't you. You've read his memoir, gawked at the photos of him in his spandex suit, and you think you suspect the truth. Well, I'm here to set everything straight, to clear the smog. All his talk about Justice and Honor is based on fictions, lies and fantasies, and we'll start with this simple fact. I was never the kind of gal to fall for a guy in spandex. At least until that night.

It was 4:30 a.m. when he came to my basement apartment, and don't think he knocked on my window. I was dreaming of falling, down a dark and empty elevator shaft, and in my sleep my hands slapped the mattress in reflex. It woke me up. My eyes flicked open and there he stood, illuminated by my screensaver. He was crouched across the darkened room from me, watching. I leaned over to my bedside table, whipped out my derringer and aimed.

Later I'd know what he'd been doing. Looking through my negligee.

But he couldn't see into my mind, and this is what I was thinking: Finally, a man. Simple and sweet, minus the neuroses of your average stockbroker by day, beatnik-by-night with commitment issues.

I decided to commence with the research. "Ditch the getup," I said.

He stood, and nonchalantly stripped. I could hear my computer humming. The screensaver changed scenes, from the black of one astronomical constellation to the black of another. The shadows on him shifted. Muscles clumped and crawled under his skin. I put my derringer aside.

You want to know what sights I saw, in the pewter early morning light, standing before me, what murky and mysterious feasts were bulging out of him. But I'm not here to titillate. This isn't superhero porn masquerading as confession. This was an act charged with desperate groping, a search for someone to hold on to in a world of sudden disaster and random salvation.

Suffice it to say, the earth moved. Literally.

Afterwards he drummed on my belly, and I finally asked him the question that I hadn't asked him before. "Who are you?"

"Just a big guy who knows how to fly," he said.

"And how exactly do you do that?" I asked.

"Like this..." he patted on my pelvis softly like a drum roll and then snapped his fingers. "It's all in the hips."

"How exactly do you navigate?" I asked, fishing for more technical information. "Airplanes have instruments. Radios. Ground Control."

"The big guy uses the stars to navigate by."

"Tell me where you come from," I said. "We all have stories. Skeletons. Skins of varying thickness. People and committees who've screwed us over. What brings you to the bedroom of an investigative reporter, on a cold night like this?"

"You think it's cold in here? The big guy can take care of that," he said. He then attempted to employ what I later would pinpoint as one of his typical distracting techniques, the use of x-ray vision for heat and stimulation.

"You want something," I said.

"No," he lied, his voice raising a pitch. "Heroes don't want things."

"A hero," I said. "Right."

"What, you don't think the big guy's a hero?" he asked.

"Too simple. I don't buy it and I don't think you do either. We're all more than an idea. Heroes are myths."

"But you're going to write about the big guy like he's a hero, right?"

"Ah, the truth emerges," I said.

He sat up in my bed. "Remember your exposŽ on the Wrestling World Confederation," he said, suddenly gushing. "You nailed it. You got it all figured out, all that stuff about good versus evil and what people want in a hero. You even got it down to the color schemes. That's how the big guy decided on the colors in his suit, from reading your article. Red, white and blue. You know. Patriotic."

My God, I contributed to that ridiculous costume of his? "I'm glad someone reads what I write," I said.

"So the big guy admits it, okay? He wants you to help him out."

"Help you with what specifically?" I asked.

"Give him a good name to go by. A couple of one-liners. Maybe come up with some props."

"Props?"

"You know, gadgets."

He must have seen my look.

"Okay, forget the props. But you could give the big guy a whole background, maybe a tragedy or something that people will really go for. "

"My job is to write the truth."

"Oh yeah? What's little girl going to write about this?" he asked. Drum roll. He held the covers up to remind me.

I had to admit it. He had me there. He cackled a cartoon-villain evil laugh and then flip-pinned me flat to the bed.

"You. Are going to help. The big guy," he said, his full weight pressing me down into rumpled, sweaty sheets.

"No one tells me what to do."

"You'll help, because he's got something you want. The old rackaracka-diggadig."

In case I'd forgotten what that might be, we screwed. Again. And again. And then he rolled over and the biggest scoop of the decade fell asleep in my bed, my arm crooked under the thick tendons of his neck.

In the morning glare of light coming through the blinds he wasn't as pretty. He slept with his mouth open, air fluctuating through his trachea. I could see the pores and blackheads of his skin. He even had one of those bi-level haircuts, short on top, long in the back.

Can't you see how that got to me? You can imagine how real he was, this fantasy of a man, asleep in my bed. This perfect image he presents of himself, his Flight of Justice "superhero" act that the rest of you believe, was never what I fell for. Each of his idiosyncrasies, each belch and fart, the scratching of his balls, slouched and slack in his sleep, made him real to me. And thereby even more elusive and compelling.

Don't think he didn't have his annoying habits too, the kind you might not mention in a memoir. I'll overlook a toilet seat left up by most men, but when he stood at my refrigerator the next morning, door agape and drank my carrot juice out of the carton, he looked like a wharfside dockworker. He turned and flashed me a smile.

"The big guy needs to borrow your car," he said.

"My car? Why?"

"Errands to run." He screwed the cap on and put the carton back. Then he leaned on the open door for support.

"Why would you need my car when you can fly?" I asked.

"It's Sunday. The big guy doesn't fly on Sundays."

"Why?" I asked.

"It's part of the ol' code."

"Right," I said. "Heroes need codes."

"But I'm willing to change codes, when you help me come up with, you know, a better one."

"Real heroes close refrigerator doors," I said.

"The car?" he asked.

"What do I get in return?" I asked.

He gave me a look, like isn't it obvious?

"I mean I have questions," I said. "I'd like answers. You're the biggest scoop in the city this morning."

"It'll be back to you by sundown." He shut the refrigerator door and I heard its suck of relief.

He drove off in my Tempo, still wearing the ridiculous cape and the spandex.

My skills as an investigator are honed and varied and like many in my profession, I'm not above becoming intimate with a source to get to the scoop. And it's a good thing I did. Traditional means of tracking him down were worthless. One of my sources at the San Angelo Municipal Crime Lab peeled his fingerprint off my pelvis and scrolled it through their computer banks, all to no avail. So what's a gal to do, but go in for the swab test? His DNA had no match. I came up as empty as that bottle of carrot juice he left in my fridge.

Lending him the car proved to be the more strategic maneuver. Here was the tally of evidence: My radio dials were moved to A.M. talk radio. There was the smell of drugstore perfume in my car and evidence of a chili dog in crumpled microwave paper. One long strand of blonde hair. A couple of crunched beer cans. Used racetrack stubs. And the old Tempo ran better than it had in years.

This is what he was really like. Can't you see how in a moment of weakness any self-respecting investigative reporter with an Honorable Mention for the Pulitzer Prize could feel compelled to forsake her ethics and give him a makeover?

The fact is he needed guidance. Think about the little pranks of his early days, how he left the gangster in charge of an opium den on top of the media building, forty stories up, bound naked with a beeping car alarm taped to his backside. The Fire Department had to raise their ladders to rescue the thug.

Rank injustices flourished while he made the world safe for movie stars. The racetracks became the safest place in town. As for crimes against blondes? Unheard of, on his watch. His early good deeds were as tasteless as his clothes.

But I can't complain too much, because each time he did something remarkable, spectacular, headline-spinning, he came to my basement apartment. If I had better connections, I'd have been tempted to rig disasters.

Each time I reported it straight. Just the facts. "Caped Mystery Man leaves Crime Boss Dangling, City Hanging." Skipping the part that came after of course. "Girl Reporter Gets Good Banging" would not have been good for my reputation, not when a gal wants to be more than just runner-up for the Pulitzer. I wasn't going to help him. A couple nights of thrills aren't enough to take a dynamo career like mine and risk meltdown. I mean, I was a hard-hitter. My exposŽs made a fucking difference.

It's true he got me out of a few "scrapes." Though a glamorous profession, mine is also a dangerous one. There was the time I ducked into an oil mogul's private jet in order to research his shady dealings with freeway expansion lobbyists, and was thrown out of it. While the plane was in mid-air, that is. But I reiterate, though I may have plummeted through the air, spitting curses at several recalcitrant landlords and wayward stepfathers on my way to what I thought would be a certain smashing death, I never "erupted into shrieks and screams for help." Contrary to what he claims only once did I scream for him. That would come much later, though.

So yes, he would save me. And then he'd round up the "bad guys" who "did his little girl wrong." And yes, as my own search for the scoop started to affect the news, I became fond of the power that gave me to change the world, every reporter's secret dream.

It was under my influence that he started to tackle more noble endeavors. Remember how he wiped out the child prostitution rings around the military bases? How he was there to protect ethnic minorities from municipal crackdowns? The drought, alleviated with iceberg transports. (Whose idea, you might ask?) I even pointed out to him that brunettes and redheads deserved equal protection as blondes. Can't you see how easy it was to compromise myself? I no longer merely reported the news. I helped make it.

But don't think my attraction to him was some power trip. It wasn't just about influencing world events and making the world a better place. Let's face it. When you're doing it with a guy who can fly, your options for sexcapades aren't limited to the bed, and maybe, just a little bit, I was falling for him.

There's nothing like the smell of iron and decades of stale male sweat to make a gal wet for a pounding. So he took me to Silverado's gym after hours, in one of the warehouses down by the docks. We broke into the weight room. I stripped and lay myself out on the blue mat. I could see my reflection in the mirrored wall, a silvery figure in a darkened, cavernous room, amidst rows of barbells and weight machines, pliant and powerful.

"All right, stud. Ditch the suit."

He started to tug at his patent-leather boots.

"First the cape," I said.

He stripped it off and flung it away. It wrapped itself around a weight bench.

"Now the shirt," I said. Grinning, he ducked his neck and yanked off his shirt and tossed it aside. In the dim light his tights looked battle gray instead of bright blue. The bulge, you ask? Off the goddamn charts.

"Now the boots." He kicked them off, and one flew up into the warehouse rafters, a bright white patent leather blur. The other landed with a thud on the metal water fountain.

"Now the tights."

And there he was.

When we were done and we were lying on sweaty vinyl, and he had said his customary, "You sent the big guy into the upper ionosphere," the discussion shifted back to what he really wanted from me.

"You hate the suit don't you," he asked.

"Didn't they have it in black?" I stared at the exposed metal pipes of the warehouse gym ceiling, my arm limp under his neck. "Something more urban?"

"But black's so evil. People associate black with bad guys," he said.

I casually mentioned the name of another well-known hero whose trademark cape is black.

"Shit. Outclassed." He fell silent.

I turned my head to look at him, his profile thick-jawed and heavy-browed. He was thinking, eyelids fluttering. He was so thugishly adorable when he was thinking. Suddenly the feeling of his crushing embrace flooded over me, the rush of when he would catch me from falling. The sensation was tactile and real, as if he was somehow saving me yet again, just by lying loose-balled and slack in my arms, the mat cooling underneath us. I gazed at his face and wondered if love was a sudden disaster, or a random salvation, if it was a stray satellite about to explode or a safety net, arms that clasp you before you hit bottom. I couldn't help myself, I pulled closer to him, and kissed him gently on the scruff of his cheek.

He looked at me and said, "That black cape business? That guy must have a P.R. team. No one could think up all those props on his own."

"Shhh," I said. Can you imagine my frustration, what was already starting to tug at my ethics? When you have knowledge, taste, talent, insight, how can you withhold it from someone you're starting to fall for?

"This costume's ridiculous, isn't it?" he asked.

"Maybe a little," I said.

"Is it the cape?" he asked. "Whenever we do the old foofoo-doofoo, you always make the big guy take the cape off first."

"Capes are corny," I said.

"See? This is why the big guy needs you," he said. "Left to his own devices he comes up with a stupid costume." His brow puckered and his face contorted. He looked at his carefully constructed identity lying disheveled around him, red, white and blue spandex strewn across barbells.

"I've already told you. I'm not prepared to compromise my journalistic integrity for any man," I said, as gently as I could.

"Hypothetically speaking..." he said.

"Hypothetically speaking," I said.

"If you had certain abilities, like you could fly for instance, and you wanted people to think you were a hero..." He looked plaintive.

I talked, a kind of soft hypnotic rhythm, rubbing his shoulder with my hand. He closed his eyes, relaxing. "I'd change the world," I said.

"Like what?" he asked.

"I'd help the weak."

"Mmm. That's good," he said, his voice a murmur.

"I'd save the oppressed."

"Save the oppressed...."

"My mantra would be justice. It appeals to some inherent desire we have since childhood that things should be fair, no matter how much our experience tells us that's not how the food chain works."

"Justice." His eyes flipped open and he snapped his fingers. "Yeah. That's it. Everyone falls for that." (See chapters 2, 3, 5, 17, 19, and 20 of Flight of Justice for references to the dogma he came to form on Justice.)

"I'd be noble."

"Like, what do you mean?"

"No practical jokes or tasteless humor."

"Oh no?"

"I'd be above mere human cravings. I wouldn't screw around with every gal who had nice gams. I'd especially stay away from blondes."

He turned his head to look at me. "You're kidding me. These other hero guys aren't wholesome. They always get the girl."

"Oh sure, I'd have a certain someone I'd reveal myself to."

"Okay," he said. He propped himself up on one elbow to look at me in the dim light.

"Also, a hero can't have weaknesses. No addictions. No cheap beer."

"Right, no cheap beer."

"Gambling."

"Right no gambling," he said. "Not even the dogs?"

"What kind of hero owes money to a bookie?"

"Oh."

"I wouldn't belong to any specific religious denomination, but I would represent the morality of religion without ever mentioning a favorite God or prophet," I said. "I'd be classically handsome. But not threateningly so. Which means I would not have a bi-level hair-cut. This is the kind of hero people will believe in. This is the kind of hero who can change the world."

"Wow. That's the kind of hero the big guy is."

"But," I said. "What if people want an explanation about why I can do the things I do?"

"How would you explain the things you do?"

"How would I explain the things you do?" I asked, eyeing him.

He smiled, innocent, a wide-eyed ÔHow should I know' look on his face. "Power of prayer?"

I said, "Maybe I'm a scientific experiment gone awry." I looked for a flicker, a sign, that said I'd stumbled on the truth.

Suddenly, as if on cue, he gassed the gym, the rubbery flatulence adding to the general manly smell of the room. "The big guy apologizes for that."

I chose to ignore this obvious stalling technique no matter how endearing it was. "Genetic tinkering, maybe? Biomechanics? Maybe it's all in the suit," I said. "Magnets. Microchips."

His brow was knit.

"Maybe you're an alien," I said.

He looked at me with respect. "Wow. Yeah, maybe."

"One of us somehow. Raised among us, perhaps?"

He cocked his head, his eyes darting around the room, thinking. "Okay, I'm liking it," he said.

Suddenly I was pissed. All of this was an elaborate endeavor to get me to be his P.R. spindoctor. "I'm getting nowhere," I said.

"What do you mean?" he asked.

"You come here and give me nothing, then expect me to put my career on the line."

"Maybe the big guy's an alien, raised among you and he doesn't want to reveal the truth, okay? Because he doesn't know if the little girl could take it," he said.

"You just made that up. I'm not after a fiction. I'm not after a lie," I said. "I want to know the truth."

"You're acting like you don't need the big guy, and you do," he said.

"Do you know what two people who are intimate together do with each other? They reveal themselves. They share their pains and disappointments and personal histories. But it looks like a good fucking is all I'm going to get," I said.

He stood. Nude and exquisite, chiseled flesh in dim light. "You know, it's Thursday night. The big guy has people to save on Thursday nights. He thinks he hears a blonde screaming right now, as a matter of fact." He walked to where his cape was wound around a weight set bench, pulled it off and wrapped it around himself, with wounded dignity.

"Don't you dare leave me down here at the docks in the middle of the night," I said, standing up in the cavernous warehouse gym.

"Don't fall down the stairs," he said. "Since the big guy gives you Ônothing,' he won't be around to catch you."

"I do not fall down stairs," I said, but I was calling out to an empty room.

And there went your Mister Noble, your defender of Justice and women, a gust of cold air in a drafty gym whipping by my naked flesh. I stood there alone, looking at the prospect of trying to find a fire-escape stairwell to the lower level and a streetside exit, with nothing but my trench coat and black boots to walk home in.

So here's the truth, about him as well as myself: I'm not proud to say it, but I am partially responsible for the biggest media-image scam in American history. I helped to create the lie. It wasn't long after that he started to give statements, the cheesy lines about Justice you're all so familiar with, and make references to his alien birth. It was the beginning of his glory days, his catapult to mythic status. Sure enough, everyone bought into his hero story and loved him for it. He even got rid of the white patent leather boots, for that subtle, two-toned look.

I should add here, that I had nothing to do with the name you all now know him by. He came up with that one himself, as you can tell by the sheer arrogance and cheesiness of the moniker.

It was a couple of weeks later, in the parking garage at work when I next saw him. He was wearing his costume, cape and all, hiding behind a huge concrete piling when I came out of the elevator, along with a couple other commuters. He followed me to my car. There was something ludicrous about him walking through a dim concrete parking garage in that getup. I ignored him, though the other people walking to their cars in the parking garage couldn't help but stare.

He followed me, ducking his head, under the low cement ceiling. I opened my car door and got in. He was only a step behind, sliding into the passenger seat. There, parked in my Tempo, as drivers in cars trolling by us strained to watch, he announced to me, "We are now willing to give you that interview."

"What, all that stuff about being an alien?"

"It's true, we came from another planet. It's true we were raised among you, only to grow up and fight Justice, wait, fight for Justice."

"Who do you think you're fooling?" I asked. "You think I don't recognize this stuff? I'm not after fictions I made up myself. I'm after the real scoop on you. I'm after the truth. And if you can't offer me that, then at least I deserve a good banging."

"We can't do that," he said.

"On a battleship," I said. "In the tropics. I want to look up at the stars like they're something to navigate by. I want to screw while a hundred sailors in sweaty socks are grunting and sleeping through their hangovers."

"You don't get it," he said, as if offended to his core. He pointed at me. "We don't do that. Okay? That's not what we're about. We're about Justice."

Suddenly I realized the enormity of what I'd done. I snapped on the interior light in my car and stared at him in the yellow light and shadows.

"Where's the big guy?" I asked, warily.

"We're here, we're here. But, you know. No dog races. No girls."

I stared at him, suddenly realizing the bi-level haircut was gone, as was his easy charm. He sat awkwardly in the car, unable to look at me. He didn't seem to know what to do with his eyes, which normally would be looking through my clothes, or his hands, which normally would be creeping under my trench coat, into my lingerie. He sat hunched over, his arms crossed, fists tucked into his armpits. He gave me a quick sideways glance, the light dim in his eyes.

"We decided to give you the interview first, if you want it."

Suddenly, I had one of those flashes of insight, where everything seems interconnected, like when you're staring at the stars over the city, and you suddenly realize you actually can see the outline of a bear, or a huntress. I felt I had created him, and instinctively knew the torment that would follow for him, the need to shake your fist at the sky and all villains, to prove you are the person you've created. I wanted to run my hand along his smooth-shaven cheek.

"You can't live a lie." It was only after I spoke, that I realized it came out as a whisper.

"Fine. There's others who want to interview us. We'll let them have the scoop." And then he was gone. Suddenly I was alone in the car, the engine beeping at me in the stillness, the passenger door hanging slightly ajar.

My one consolation is that I refused to interview him. People with far less talent and credentials than I, had the dubious honor of cashing in on this headline spinning scoop. The Pulitzer that year would go to someone else.

He no longer came to my bed, and he no longer consulted me on which fascist coups he needed to interfere with, or which smuggling blockade to dismantle. He had "Justice" to guide him.

By far the worst indignity is that he continued to save me.

Case in point: the incident at the border where I posed as a patrol officer, trying to infiltrate a casino-girl smuggling ring and was tossed off a cliff. I remember standing on the edge of an ancient rockface, still wearing a beige border patrol uniform, my ankles and wrists bound with duct tape, my captors smoking cigarettes behind me, my derringer tucked helplessly inside my pants. The nighttime sky was smoky with the Milky Way. I struggled against the duct tape, trying not to reel from the immensity of the drop before me, of the sky above me, littered with falling stars.

My captors pushed me off.

As I fell down that sheer cliff, I'll tell you who I cursed. My last ritual rank-breath gutter curses were at him. For being able to change the world, for being able to fly, and for eluding me, despite all my efforts to get to the truth about him.

You think I wanted him to save me? You think I wanted to feel the breath-pounding security of his thick embrace? When you're defying the forces of the universe, shaking your fist, daring the ground to meet you head on, you think you want someone to hold your hand? Proving in a gust of wind, the clutching forearm in your back, that you're as feeble and helpless as you've always suspected you were? If I wanted proof of my powerlessness, I would have stuck it out with a string of stepfathers back home. It was a truth I had long since defied and forgotten, and here was my reminder, wearing spandex and a cape, saving my life, yet again.

He flew me to my basement apartment and dropped me off on the outside step. "There we go," he said. He set me down on the cement and immediately triggered the apartment building's motion detector lights. There in the glare I realized, he was getting the act down better. He was more sure of himself, and now with his forearms folded across his chest he no longer looked like someone who was trying to keep his hands from wandering into a gal's lingerie. He looked strong, and sure, confident about his identity.

I bent down, angrily unwinding duct tape from my boots. "I didn't ask you to save me," I said.

"If we didn't save you, you'd be dead," he said.

"You think I don't know that?" I said. I stood up, losing my balance.

He looked at me, shrugged, took a step backward, then flew away into the dark, leaving me alone, standing in a yellow circle of motion detector light. Still trailing duct tape on the bottom of my boot, I stepped down into the empty city street, so that I could watch him go, until he merged with the black night sky, and all I could see was the stars. I knew these constellations well, from my screensaver, and as he disappeared I suddenly saw them for what they really were. Nothing more than a random conglomeration of chemical gases spaced throughout a black vacuum. Humans, a paltry species on a planet revolving around one of these smaller yellow stars, connected the dots and decided, this grouping is a bear, that one is a huntress, those three together are a damsel in distress.

That night, while lying alone in washed-white sheets in my basement apartment, to the sound of my screensaver clicking from one astronomical chart to another, I saw the truth like a vision. Despite that one near-miss at the Pulitzer, my own powers were merely mundane, a gut-churning stew of talent, conviction, insight and ego that couldn't change a made-up mind, let alone the world. Alone in my bed, I lamented. What I could have done with his strength! I knew exactly which crimes I'd solve, which social movements I'd back, which death squads I'd dismantle, which dictators I'd have a little ionospheric chat with, which bedrooms I'd haunt. I wrenched the sheets in my fists, hot angry tears in my eyes, as I declared to the dark, that if I was the one who could fly I would never ever wear blue spandex.

Which brings me to the day I climbed the radio tower, high above the 59 Freeway shortly after I first read Flight of Justice. Oh, I'm no different than the rest of you. I too have his memoir sitting on my bedside table, next to my derringer and vibrator. I admit, the day I read his book is the day I screamed for him.

I parked my car at the tower's asphalt base, and looked up its mighty height. Gripping the steel bars in my hand, I climbed the radio tower, one foot over the other, one thin wrist reaching for steel and then another, weighed down only by his book in my shoulder bag, and the lies he'd told in it. Below me was concrete city sprawl. When I reached the top I flung a leg into the welcome steel surface of the dish, and hurled myself into it. I wore my black boots. My trench coat. Lip liner, I'll admit.

There I stood, a tiny feeble figure in a glaringly white two-story rounded structure, with its huge metal transmitter pointed at the sky. My heart pounding, breathing in beige air, I screamed, yes, screamed, on waves of sound, for him to come to me.

At first he didn't come, and I screamed some more, screams of the ground swirling and buckling under me, the screams from my nightmares, of falling, the screams of helplessness.

And then he came, that familiar blue blur, suddenly standing across from me. I stopped screaming for him, and attempted to gather my dignity back around myself, like a cape.

"What are you doing up here?" he asked, arms crossed at his broad chest, his eyes exposing nothing.

"Why did you write these lies?" I asked. I pulled out his book, knocked on its cover.

"We wrote the Truth."

"I never said I loved you. I never screamed for you to save me."

"Maybe we can hear things on a different frequency that other people can't hear. Like dolphins can. And bats."

"I've got a by-line, bucko, a reputation as a hard-hitter. You make it look like I had a schoolgirl crush on you."

"Wouldn't it compromise a journalist's integrity to have more than a crush on a hero?"

"You didn't tell the truth about us." I tried to calm myself. "Think back," I said, trying to sound rational. "Remember our sweaty nights? Remember your raw, shattering need and the slouched aftermath?"

He stood across from me, arms folded. "We don't do that kind of thing. We don't even sweat."

"Remember how it was?" I said. "You were my satellite ride, my explosion at dawn. You were elusive and mysterious, riddled with ambition."

The sun came out from behind a cloud, and in the afternoon light his face was sharp angles and shadows, and the bright spandex of his suit seemed to shimmer, like it was made of brushed metal instead of polyester.

"All this?" he said. "It isn't about ambition. It's about Justice."

"Don't you want to reveal yourself to me? Share your secret? Right now, right here is your chance. Spare me the lies. Don't you want to tell me the truth?" I admit, my voice had risen again to an agitated pitch. My gut was flooded with the tactile truth of his deep pores, his fingers drumming me, and suddenly my head was spinning. I teetered, there on the edge of the radio dish, grasping onto his arms, the same desperate groping as before, but this time the world of sudden disaster and random salvation left me with nothing to hold on to.

"Maybe someone's got her own lies she needs to look at," he said, slowly raising his eyebrows.

Far below us freeway traffic hummed by and suddenly I knew my ending as well as any TV Evangelist. One day, I will fall from the sky and no one will catch me. I will fall and curse every event in my life that I could not control, every eviction and betrayal, every secret kept and prize awarded to someone else. Legs kicking, arms swinging, I will fall to my death, knowing that my yearning to fly is feeble and doomed. When all is laid to waste, my claim to want the Truth is exposed for what it really is, a kind of denial that what I really want is to defy gravity, fate, the universe, and my own unremarkable, helpless place in it.

I steadied myself and looked out at the city, the freeways and power lines below me and I knew better than to let myself fall. I looked at him. "I admit it, okay?" I said softly. "I remember when the big guy pried open the blast doors to the nuclear core of my heart. Does the big guy remember that?"

His eyes cast about, lids fluttering, darting over the cityscape horizon, looking for something to fixate on. He was thinking. God, that got to me. I loved him when he was thinking.

Finally he shrugged and said, "That's the thing about Truth and Justice."

I stood across from him in the radio dish, folded my arms at my own chest, and said to him, "You can put me down now."

He picked me up, gently, and flew me down to my car on the side of the freeway. He kissed me on the cheek, smoothed my hair, then flew away. I watched him go. And then I stood amidst the fumes, cars whipping past me, and stared down at the asphalt gravel I was standing on. My legs felt strong, my ankles sturdy, anchored on the ground. I knew, right then, where I belonged.

He showed me the truth about myself, as he flew off to fight for Justice and change the world. In return, I'm telling you the truth about him, revealing what I understand.

You will never know him. He will always elude you.

As for me, you'll want to know my diagnosis. Superhero-envy, textbook case. Every gal knows, never fall for someone who can leave the earth, who can fly, who is not bound to the laws of physics you're bound to. All of my investigative abilities have led to this little revelation. I didn't just fall for him, I wanted to be him, and under those moon blue nights he was the one who could fly, streak away, leaving me on the cracked cement sidewalk with my trench coat and scoop.

Sure, I still stare up at the nighttime sky above San Angelo, but I no longer look for him. Sometimes when I see a conglomeration of stars that seem to have no shape of their own, I borrow a couple, imagine them as my own constellation, one I call "Girl Reporter." If you connect the dots you'll see the outline of an unflinching heroine, the kind of gal who can accept the truth, the fact that she can fall. It stretches across the black velvet cityscape sky and can be used to navigate, by those whose boots are stuck to planet Earth.