Batmen

Yejin Suh

COUNTERCLOCK Emerging Writer’s Awards – 2nd Place, Prose

While I was sticking bandaids over my nipples, I realized I’d forgotten to lock the door. If my mom walked in, she’d ask, “What the hell are you doing,” in that mild way of hers, and I’d have to explain that I always wear bandaids under thin shirts because it wasn’t socially acceptable for women’s nipples to be visible through thin shirts after centuries of patriarchal rule, except bras are physically detrimental to our bodies, and it was ninety degrees and climbing out, so I had to stick to the bandaids, like covering up an injury—two blasted wounds on my chest that weren’t supposed to be there.

Luckily, she never walked in on me. Half an hour later we sat sprawled along my favorite spot along the Hudson—this rundown park bench on a cliff off the Palisades Interstate Highway—with my band-aids affixed. Across the wide mouth of water stretched dappled trees like small Brussels sprouts, country eventually fading into fogged city skyline.

We were talking about my dad. Actually, she was talking about my dad, and I was groping a dandelion between my thumb and index finger.

“He’s good,” she was saying.

I shrugged.

“He is,” she insisted. “Just… misguided. He doesn’t know how to show it. But he’s trying his best.”

I have this recurring daydream where the Founding Fathers come back to life. Through cryogenics, or something—the logistics don’t really matter—and I’m singularly tasked with the job of acclimating them to the modern, 21st-century world. I was trying to head back to this daydream now. First I’d take them to this very spot. “Look,” I’d nudge George Washington with an elbow—because we were friendly and companionable like that, “That bridge is named after you.” Him in his 18th-century garb, white linen knickers and knee socks, me in my Nikes and respectably thin shirt, no bra. He’d gaze on with muted, pleased surprise. He’d be so pleased, in fact, that I wouldn’t mention that his bridge was a motorist’s true nightmare, the source of endless, irrefutable misery and frustration for hundreds of thousands of commuters on the daily: the slow stretch of corporate cogs in clean-pressed suits, tapping wary fingers against the sides of their Lincolns; the college kickbacks with their feet up their convertible dashboards; my own mother hurling an evocative Konglish cocktail curse mix at her own steering wheel; every one of them strapped bumper to bumper in baking summer heat or that mind-numbing East Coast winter.

If I had all the Founding Fathers lined up side-by-side on my park bench, I could pick any one of them to be my new dad. Or all of them—a paternal horde. Every family dinner would be a roiling political debate—and don’t even get me started on movie nights. Watching old sitcoms while Hamilton and Jefferson argue over whether to take the punchlines literally or not.

“Are you listening to me?” she snapped.

I nodded. The flower was smithereens between my fingers.

She pressed, “So what do you think.” It wasn’t really a question so much as a warning that if I wasn’t listening closely, she’d continue to talk, or if I was listening too closely, she’d also continue to talk—landmines in every direction.

“I agree.”

“With what?”

“...With what you said.”

She pinched the bridge of her nose.

My mom has this unyielding philosophy that people never change. Parts of us might, sure, but at our innermost, deepest core, we don’t budge, not really. I think the opposite is true—which is why it was painful, really, for me to be insisting that my dad was more or less genetically programmed to be an asshole, while she waxed poetic about his spectacular growth. She looked at me, said earnestly, “He didn’t mean it, you know. He loves you.” I nodded.

There’s that running joke where you can say literally anything you want under the sun in America except for one exception: the nuclear trigger that is the dreaded c-word. In season 1, episode 3 of the Harley Quinn show—this new ‘dark humor’ animated R-rated spin on Gotham villains—no one bats an eye when a villain smashes cars together and slams Wonder Woman into the side of a building, but after he calls her the c-word during a fight, the Earth literally stops turning. He’s disowned by his supervillain clique, cancelled by the public, and desperate tries to salvage his rep on national talk shows.

Now, trying to learn the cuss hierarchy of a language I’ve been forgetting in increments since kindergarten? Kind of like playing with fire. I mean, it’s like groping for something in the dark, like catching a ball in a game where you don’t know the rules. I wanted the definition, the nuance, the subtle shades of this delectable word that made it this perfect verbal suckerpunch. I wanted the whole toolbox, see. Like, which word should I pull out today? The one that’ll sting, one that’s abrasive, the one that’s honest to God funny, and should I pair it with this delectable word sandwich, between Jesus and Christ, or what? I’d stay up all night trying to translate a word and guess at its day-in-the-life context in its origin country three thousand miles away across the Yellow Sea.

Luckily, there are plenty of Internet discussions to peruse about learning the Korean language, between k-pop obsessed weeaboo fetishists, slow first-generation immigrant children like me, and jobless white saviors with dreams of teaching English to rural South Asian villagers in run-down jungle huts. In one Duolingo chatroom, AnimeTittyLover3960 enlightened us:

No, this one’s a real curse word. It’s usually only used in situations of serious anger, not casually. It doesn’t really have a direct English translation, but it’s like a combination of b*tch, wh*re, c*nt, and idiot.

And [heart]Jimin[heart] countered: really? my friend’s mom calls her kids that affectionately all the time tho.

And yet someone else said:

“He didn’t mean it, you know.”

I sighed, nodded again. I imagined John Adams staring me in the face and screaming, C*nt! Parchment flying everywhere.

The most surprising part of it all is that it was never surprising to begin with. My dad’s girlfriend at the time bust into a bar and threw her drink in his face because he was flirting with my future mom. When my mom tells that story now, I’m like, “Don’t you think that’s kind of a red flag?” and she shrugs and says, “I was impressed. Felt good to have a man like that.” Then I think something like: how in the ever living (cuss) could anyone fall for such a cocky, brash, emotionally constipated, borderline evil, self-loathing, brooding, narcissistic, apathetic, high-horse, womanizer male? Then I remember I crushed on characters like Batman for most of my childhood. Accusing my mom of giving into her misogynistic-inclined tendencies is sort of like blaming her for breathing oxygen. Kind of inevitable. It’s the sort of thing that that makes me clamp down on my feelings, stick band-aids over my nipples, made me idolize this freak superhero/vigilante to the ends of the Earth because he was precisely everything I ever wanted to be, which was really, when it boiled down to it—-not a woman.

So I’m thinking of my mom, maybe ten or eleven, wrapped up in her bed in this dingy little apartment somewhere south of Seoul trying to fall asleep, and her dad busting into her room at three in the morning, drunk off his ass, shaking her awake and slurring nonsense words in her ear. It’s like how the crime rate in Gotham City has never gone down, even after all those nights of Batman’s head-bashing and teeth-gritting. Villains just pop up over and over again like some kind of disease. And if I were a better person, a better girl, maybe I wouldn’t say things to her like, “I guess you like it when men treat you like dirt.” And then I think about Bruce Wayne beating the ever-living shit out of me. Sometimes letting people hurt you is the only way you can get them to put their hands on you. Even I understand that.

I finally understand, vaguely, what makes a home a home. It’s not really always the people, or the physical feel of it—it’s really how much that cuss stings on a scale from one to ten, and how much that great, ugly thing burgeoning in your throat rears its head. It’s how much you want to escape and how many times you’re told to head upstairs and lock your doors. Because when someone is screaming in your face, “This is my home/my rules/my ground/etcetera,” it doesn’t really feel you belong, surprisingly. And staring at the world map, I couldn’t really do anything except head to some other world, where I was showing James Madison our roomba. “It’s kind of like a pet, but it’s not alive,” I’d say, watching it bump around my desk legs. “It’s a little robot that cleans the floors.” He’d hum thoughtfully.

Every time she’d say, “He didn’t mean it, you know,” and I wanted to wring her out and scream, That’s the entire problem! The problem is, that he didn’t mean it! The problem is, that he says and does a number of things with terrifying callousness. But I didn’t say a thing. Like how none of us ever said a thing sitting down at our dinner table, day after day, ignoring the elephant—or scratch that, not an elephant, an overgrown Tyrannosaurus Rex with freakish proportions—sitting dumbly in the kitchen. I never really did decode the cuss hierarchy, even though I looked it up over and over again grasping at straws, trying to cross this bridge I’d lost a decade ago through my ancestors, because I wanted to know this word just for that semblance of dignity. That little morsel of self-worth you try to salvage after someone’s backhanded you across space—-someone twice your size, someone larger and louder who takes up all the air in a room, someone who shows it on their face, worst of all, someone who knows all this, and does it anyway.

In the famous four-issue storyline Batman: A Death in the Family #428, Joker beats Robin to death. Then Robin comes back to life, and he’s out for revenge against Batman. He trains for years to kill Batman.

The first time my dad left for Korea for a long while, we didn’t know when we’d see him again. My mom wept in the airport. I hated her for it. I wanted to shake her by the shoulders and yell in her face: Can’t you see we are feeling the same thing inside? When you let it out, you make it worse. You confirm the existence of a hole that isn’t supposed to be there. You coalesce a feeling into reality, when you show it on your face. If I let go of anything, I’ll catch myself. I have to watch myself. Sometimes I almost feel like I’m hunting myself—-waiting for my face to slip up and confess, dissolve into prayer, right between my crosshairs: Gotcha. Where’s your control now?

I watched him board the plane. Trained my face into something I hoped was cold and hard. He’d call me once he landed on the other side, but I knew I’d just let my phone ring itself into oblivion.

Because I hated him. Because the truth of it was, I’d spent years loitering outside his office at home on the off-chance he might invite me in to ask about my day. A single curt dismissal from him was enough to make my eyes water, though I’d never dare cry in front of him. My childhood with him in public is one long string of memory of him cussing out waiters in restaurants, slamming the front door on campaigners, and storming out of car dealerships with salesmen chasing after him. He could suck the air out of a room and bring grown adults to tears in public. I idolized it. I wanted nothing else in the entire world than for that office door to creak open, for him to gesture me inside. Give me that nod of approval. I was seventeen now, far past that childish idolatry, yet the part of me that strained for that nod, that murmur of love, was enough for me to turn against myself. I hated him. Because I’d slotted myself between my dresser and wall upstairs a week before, because I wanted to be surrounded on three sides, dreading that heavy thud of footsteps climbing up, the drunken breath slurring through the door. In the end, it all boiled down to control. The Bat lurking between walls, preying on whoever he deems the next suspect, taking down in the dark. He had power, absolutely all the power he could ever drain and suck out of the house, and I had none. I was terrified. I was hopeless. But most importantly, I was jealous, and I wanted it too.

Boarding that plane, he was choosing to give me absolutely nothing, not even rejection. And he knew it.

In the Tower of Babel Issues #43-36, Bats gets kicked out of the Justice League because it turns out he’s got plans to wipe all of them out in case any of them go bad or get mind-controlled. That’s his whole thing, I guess: stacking contingency plan under contingency plan under plan until every single variable has been more or less accounted for, and anyone who the plan’s been written against has every exit blocked off. It’s blatant paranoia and a desperate grab for dominance, but since a guy’s doing it, he’s just a mastermind planner.

My dad went halfway around the world, and I was sure that eventually, he’d recognize the people he depended on with crippling need, realizing that with no one to impress and no one to flatter, his purpose would extinguish. I was wrong. He detached. He found others. He was flexible. It was sort of like a game: I knew he didn’t give a shit about me, and he knew I didn’t give a shit about him, yet we were still bound by an inextricable, fine thread. I updated him regularly on the monumental progressions of my coming-of-age narrative: driver’s license, December SAT, 17th birthday in the city. It’s because he knew, in the end, there would always be a nest for him here, in the States, once he’d destroyed everything there, we’d still be forced to open our doors for him, our doors that are lined by his pockets. That’s when I truly discovered what a contingency was. His money’s everywhere, really, it’s bound to this house, and the walls reek of it, the foundation creaks with it.

In English class once we read this story about a woman in the 19th-century who finds out her husband’s dead. Then when she finds out he’s actually alive, she has a heart attack and dies. My class was apathetic about it, as things are with most English classes. I said, “That sucks.” It did suck. It only occurred to me later that we were trained not to see these things, even if it was right in front of our faces. It’s re-reading a book for the tenth time and noticing the details you missed before, except this time, it’s in real life, and those details are the waggling remnants of a bygone era. I use the term bygone loosely.

It’s in such simple terms as man versus woman. I’m those extra two letters, that pathetic tail hanging off the front, a burden. I’m the Miss and Mrs and Ms versus Mr; I’m too specific about my titles, I’m a lot to handle, I’m a lot of work. I’m the wax strips across my legs every weekend, the nickel earrings I’m allergic to, the short cut of my pants. The catch-22 is that society dictates the extra ways in which we’re required to make ourselves respectable for everyday life, and then berates us for the time it takes and the energy we use up. The catch-22 is the men who loiter outside to complain, They take so long in the bathroom, and what do they think we’re doing in the bathroom? Adjusting our clothing, freshening up makeup, spritzing on perfume. Because you’ll see our bra strap peeking out or our lipstick smudged and think This is not what you should be. Unlike you, there is no default for us. Every choice we make with our appearance or our demeanor constitutes something. I’m that wish I think many women have: to be that default—inconspicuous and unnoticeable unless I choose to be.

In a worse universe, the woman in the story survives, and has to live like every other modest woman in that time, forced to scramble under her husband’s feet for the rest of her life, invisibly shackled by a man, and overlooked by society, a society today which still encourages young men of really a certain temperament and nature to amass fortunes in business and technology and science and bind them to a house and wife and by default, children, to construct what is really a failsafe contingency plan to trap generation after generation. We’re surrounded by Batmen, really. In most issues, he’s brooding on a Gotham City rooftop.

Robin never really succeeds in killing Batman. They’re characters eternally doomed to live out their mangled interpersonal relationship. I think about that first time my dad left for Korea, a lot. Something unfurled in me, like a newborn deer, fur wet and crinkled, legs unsteady—it was tentative, but unletting. I wasn’t sure what it was, but it was new. It took unsteady breaths. When I came home from the airport, I breathed in the house. The walls still reeked of him, but before, when the stench was impalpable, now it was fading—no tension lined the walls, no floors unsteady like tectonic plates. No more tip-toeing on ice, beating around the bush. It was freedom I tasted. But above freedom, it was relief—this tangible, palpable relief that flooded my senses and flowered in the recesses of my head. I never asked my mom who she really wept for, but I could guess.

Robin never really succeeds in killing Batman, but I always wondered what he felt like when he came back to life. I wonder what it’s like to be in that space between life and death. Sometimes more than anything else, I wish my dad was there. Not alive to face me, not tragically dead. Just… disappeared, into thin, thin air. I wish I could be unburdened of something I never asked for. I don’t want him to suffer alone; I don’t want to know him, either. That space between stranger and loved one; between mere discomfort and abuse. In issue #238, Superman discovers the Phantom Zone—a mysterious pocket universe to throw criminals into, a place beyond space-time. I like to think there aren’t just criminals there. Sometimes people who are just fed-up go there to blow off some steam and sit in space. Sometimes people are trapped there, lingering between two uncertain worlds, waiting not for a rescuer but for their own bodies to come back. You never know who’s in the Phantom Zone. It makes me eye people in a different way. You see a perfectly happy stranger and think, Is she in the Phantom Zone, and how often does she visit? Does she dread going home at night? Does she tip-toe around her own house? I told my mom, too. Sometimes in the night she quietly agrees.

Sometimes I forget.

Last Christmas Day, the floors were chilly and the house glazed over in silence. We spent the day at the movies, just so for a brief two hours, we were surrounded by that artificial technicolor warmth, and the passionate air of the moviegoers around us. Back home, we lapsed again into black and white.

Then I texted my cousin, who is like a sister to me: Wyd?

She texted back: With my mom’s side.

And I remembered she wasn’t actually my sister.

In one of my favorite comics, the Injustice storyline features the Joker killing Lois Lane, and then Superman subsequently going batshit crazy trying to establish a totalitarian regime to ensure a crime like that never happens again. Batman, of course, leads the insurgency against him. I guess some realities are still worse than others. I thought of that last Christmas with him—that Christmas had color, all right, this mismatched, haphazard craze like someone had ground every shade of pastel onto one another, loud and wrong, clunky. And I looked again to my home, saw nothing wrong with the muted colors and the dark.

Writer’s Notebook

I think the reason that superheroes and comic books remain such a large part of our society's entertainment and a hallmark of American pop culture is because they provide us a chance to look down at our world from a 'bigger' perspective, one where we have more power than the world around us (when it's usually the other way around). Heroes can be fun and dynamic to us, but they can also potentially bring unbalanced, twisted relationships into play. Writing this really personal story to me, I tried to bring together the two elements I find most fascinating in the superhero world (the humor of it; and the ever-changing bad interpersonal skills) in telling, and trying to ultimately make sense of, a story about my own life. I think it is sometimes startling to find that the most fantastical, far-removed-from-reality stories we love often hold the most truth to them in exploring reality.

Judge’s Notes

“Oh, my! I adored the mind of the narrator here, how the piece uses comic books and wild asides that depict a daughter trying to understand her father, her family, and ultimately herself.” – Nick White, 2021 Prose Judge

about the writer

Yejin Suh is an aspiring writer from New Jersey whose work appears or is forthcoming in Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Half Mystic, and Blue Marble Review. She has been recognized by YoungArts, The New York Times, and UK Poetry Society, among others. She loves speculative fiction and hopes to foster emerging writers' love for it through her publication Wintermute Lit. She is an incoming freshman at Princeton University.