Flyover City! A Novel (with Superheroes)

12. Dr. Rex!

In the quest to become a built from scratch, prefab hero, there's a lot of important questions you have to ask yourself. Practical factors to be considered. Like, for instance, who are you gonna let know? Your significant other? Your best friend? Your family? (that last is a no-brainer for me: my dad would be the first to bemoan the lack of a good retirement plan and health insurance benefits. Until I got in with a good outfit like The Agency, of course.)

I've decided that - for the time being, anyway - I'm not gonna let Spiff in on my plan. After all, I can imagine what my reaction would be if the tables were turned - and I just really don't need to hear it right now. If I do decide to tell him, it won't be at least until after my daily trips to the gym start to take. If he eventually figures it out on his own, he can be - I don't know, not a sidekick - but maybe like my loyal assistant. He could drive me to fights, search for clues on the Internet or something.

Seeing as Spliff already isn't terribly supportive of my new healthy lifestyle - my workouts, or the fact that I've switched to light beer, and stick with a salad when we go out for pizza - I had to be all nonchalant when I asked him for his cousin Rex's phone number.

I can hardly believe it myself, to be perfectly honest. Rex is a chiropractor and nutritionist who specializes in sports medicine out in the suburbs. It's not just that I'm something of a skeptic (though, yeah, there's that), it's that Rex is one of those guys who looks like a Sears catalog model and talks like a Tony Robbins' seminar. We only ever call him by his first name when we're talking shit about him: face-to-face, it's "Dr. Hanson" all the way. I'm pretty sure Spiff even calls him that at reunions and holiday dinners.

(Seriously, anytime I get a call at work and I ask the customer for their name - if it's "Dr. Whoever"... chiropractor, without exception. There are mad scientists and Nobel Prize winning physicists in the world who don't take their title as seriously as chiropractors do. And, hey, it's not like I disrespect his profession or anything. It's just - "crack my fucking back, Rex", you know?)

The whole science and medicine thing used to be, if not "easy", at least reliable. You'd go to a doctor, someone who's devoted their life to studying the established, well-accepted mechanics of human biology, and if there was something wrong with you, they'd cut you open, yank out the bad stuff, and load you up with pills afterwards. Hooray for the age of enlightenment! But that was before scientist Hugh MacGuffin introduced the world to the field of Malphysics - those randomly occurring quantum snags in the fabric of reality that make hard science a little softer around the edges. And sure, it's nice to have an explanation as to why Alphamale's uniform doesn't burn off when he's flying around LA at mach 5, and it's a great way to talk your parents down from their frenzy over your D-minus in science class ("But, mom, if Ultraphenomenon followed the accepted laws of gravity, he'd never be able to fly!") but it makes the world just that much more unpredictable. Dangerous, even.

And it makes it that much harder for a patient to tell the snake-oil salesman from the person who can actually help them out. Reiki, faith-healing, Reverend L-Ron's e-meter - malphysics makes them all possible. Or at least a little less suspect.

But as this whole hero thing has been (or at least should be) nothing if not a huge, life-changing paradigm shift - this morning after an hour on the treadmill, I headed out for an appointment with his smiley-ness.

Rex' office is south of the city proper, on the 11th floor of a featureless, black cube, surrounded by a bunch of nearly identical buildings. In the downstairs lobby, the elevator bank was cold, sterile; mirrored surfaces reflecting endlessly off one another, with tiny, insignificant me swallowed up in the infinite corridor they created.

Public transportation being what it is, I was running late for my "initial consult". Luckily, no one in the office seemed to notice. The waiting area was busy, like a wartime triage for Mary Kay sales reps; a bunch of probably rich, most definitely middle-aged women, watching Dr. Rex strut back and forth between rooms, too smitten to question the sinister looking device that was swinging from his belt, bouncing loudly against his hip.