Times Child (2/10?)
“Welcome to Trans World Airlines flight 1978 to Metropolis, NY via Saint Louis,” chirped the redheaded flight attendant at the counter. “Please make your way to the ticket counter for boarding.”
Lois closed her dictionary and slipped her draft of the article on the earthquake and resulting aftermath into her carry-on and gathered her items before making her way to the plane entrance. She settled herself into the cushions of her chair and pulled a journal and pen out of her purse. ‘Never go anywhere without writing materials… you never know when a story will break,’ was one of Lois’ mantras of journalism. The medium-sized leather bound sheaf she pulled out was not the notebook she used for stories but rather private musings which are not meant for publication. Considering the thoughts running through her mind about her mild-mannered coworker and his consistent disappearing act she didn’t think it would be wise to write her thoughts in her normal journal. ‘Even if something this earth-shattering was newsworthy I wouldn’t want ANYONE to know this,’ Lois thought.
Opening her journal to the first empty page she drew a line down the middle of the Page. One side she title: “Clark Kent” and the other “Superman.” Lois closed her eyes and first thoughts were of what Superman looked like. The image she conjured up was none other than the impish face from their first interview. She remembered his black windswept hair with a loose curl over his brow just begging to be brushed out of the way. His smirk when he flirted with her about being the first to know about any girlfriends. She wrote down, “black hair” and “flirts with me,” in the “Superman” column and closed her eyes again to think back to the flight just in time for the plane to start speeding down the runway. As the plane rose off of the ground, shedding gravity as it leapt into the sky she remembered him catching her in his arms when she had briefly slipped from his fingers. ‘His eyes are quite an unusual shade of blue,’ Lois mused. She wrote down “Eyes: Blue and bright in intensity.” Finally she wrote down the height he gave her during her interview “6’4” and “broad shoulders.”
Switching her train of thought to Clark she tried to conjure up an image of him and found it a bit harder. In some ways she liked to think that she knew him pretty well but for some odd reason she couldn’t seem to get a handle on him. Finally she remembered that he did have black hair only he tended to have it smartly parted off to the side. “Black hair” Lois wrote down followed soon thereafter with “glasses.” She had to think a bit but she remembered watching him a little bit during their date the day of the interview. She had been so excited by the prospect of her interview with Superman that he hadn’t realized she had said she would go out with Clark. She let her mind wander back to the date with Clark Kent:
“Lois- for goodness sake didn’t you hear me knocking?”
“Uh huh?”
“Uh, Lois we di-did have a date for tonight, remember?”
“Oh.”
“Lois?”
“Huh?”
“You haven’t been…?” Clark mimed taking a drink of wine.
“Oh, no. No.”
“I certainly hope not. Well, let’s push off shall we?”
“I better go get a coat.”
“Ok.”
‘I went to get that coat and when I came back Clark had his glasses in his hand. There was something very familiar about that face. I don’t know why I didn’t see it before.’ Smirking Lois thought, ‘he probably thought it was cute that I got as frazzled as I did… assuming Clark is indeed Superman that is. Wait a minute, was I that out of it to not realize that he hadn’t actually set a date for that evening?’’ She added a title to the second page “odd things in Re: to Clark.” Beneath it she added a number “One” and wrote “Did I actually set a date to go out with Clark the day of interview? I don’t remember doing so.”
Lois sat back and contemplated her “Night with Superman” article a moment. In that article Lois briefly mentioned her memory of a train ride across Kansas. She closed her eyes and let the memory unfold:
Bored out of her mind with the Kansas landscape Lois was using her binoculars to try and find oil derricks on the horizon. Suddenly a boy crossed her vision. Quickly plopping the binoculars onto her lap she gawked before getting her mind together, tugged on her mom’s arm and pointed out the window, “Mom, lookit that!”
“Look at what, Lois?”
“I saw a boy run as fast as the train! Faster even!”
“Hu-ho… Lois Lane you have a writer’s gift of invention, I’ll say that for you.”
“But, But-“
He dad cut in tired of Lois’ supposed tall tale, “Uh Lois, read your book.”
“No one ever believes me,” Lois said sullenly and pulled her book up but her mind was whirling, ‘Who was he? How could he run so fast?’ and a sense that the boy was significant to her future all flashed through her mind.
The conductor came into the Pullman car, “Now stopping at Smallville, Kansas. Next stop Topeka.”
‘Clark once told me that his mother lived on a farm out in Kansas. Was he that boy?’ Lois wrote down next to number two, “boy in Kansas…Clark?” Beside number three Lois wrote, “Never around when Superman is… when Superman is gone Clark comes back with a lame excuse or occasionally something for me.”
Going back to the list where she was focusing on looks Lois closed her eyes and brought the image of Superman and then mentally added glasses and altered his red and blue to be a business suit and tie in her mind. Lois’ eye sprang open and she gasped in shock. ‘There’s no doubt in my mind that Clark Kent is Superman,’ Lois thought. ‘I wonder what that means though,’ Lois continued. ‘How much of Clark Kent is real? How much of Superman? Superman has always claimed never to lie, that means that if he’s telling the truth then there has to be an overlap in terms of how he acts.’
Lois turned a page in her journal and wrote ‘Commonalities between Clark and Superman” and underlined it. Next to number one she wrote, “Kind.” Remembering back to the mugging Lois realized that as soon as he saw the gun pointed as Lois he put himself between her and the mugger. Beneath “Kind” she wrote “protects me.” Lois leaned back and looked out the plane window and felt the gentle sway of the plane as it banked and corrected course. ‘Clark would shyly ask me out on a date while Superman would flirt shamelessly.’ Underneath that she wrote, “Flirts with me as Superman, takes me out on dates as Clark-both sides of the same coin?”
Finally at a loss to write anything else she allowed he mind to wander over the idea of Clark as Superman and what that might mean. As she contemplated the idea her hand moved across an empty page, doodling as it stroked the pencil against the ivory lined parchment. ‘The good thing about Clark being Superman is that I can actually be in a relationship with Superman,’ the romantic in her thought. Lois stopped doodling and placed the notebook and pencil in her purse and laid the seat back to relax. She barely noticed that the drawings were of Superman’s symbol.