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