Interviews

Lois had moved in with Richard a year into their relationship.

It had been a rainy day, just like the one that Lois was currently listening to through the storm windows, and it had been a Thursday if she figured the timing correctly. It was one of those memories both blaring and muted, like the first day of high school or the last day of college.

This memory was a door that swung very wide in her life, the door into a place that was supposed to be shared. Mutual. Cohabited. It was an Issue, the kind of thing Lois would refuse to talk about if her mother ever did manage to get her into therapy.

She had in fact recently developed a fixation about this door, this move, over the past few weeks. Thoughts came to her at home as she spotted old possessions hidden among those newer and not her own. She drove past her old building two days ago on a whim. Fate happened upon her old house line in her cell phone just this morning, as well as the thought that she still would not delete it.

And now, on this quiet Friday night Lois had a very prominent manifestation of a doorknob on her hands.

It was a box. A box she had packed so long ago that she could barely register it, yet it had her attention, four years later. A box labeled simply "Interviews" in awkward, slanted writing.

It had made its way away from her old bookshelf in her apartment to her first-floor office in Richard's inherited house ("I don't need this space, honestly! I'll move my treadmill into the basement. Take this room, you want the view"). Within it were almost two hundred hours worth of interviews with Superman: from the first micro tape of their first interview to the last CD burned from her digital recorder. It was the crux of every article she'd written on him (and some she hadn't) sitting in inert plastic holders.

Lois was listening to the rain while kneeling on her office floor, staring at the cardboard hidden behind two portable file boxes between her safe and the plant in the corner. It was a box of static, solid, and accessible records of some of the moments, conversations, and experiences had in better, less complicated times.

And it stared back at her. She sighed.

The lingering doubts about moving in with Richard were now very fresh in her mind, for not only was that the day she forfeited her independence for the Greater Good of Child Rearing, but it was the day she attempted to sate her loneliness with Richard's stable presence. She had not realized it until Superman returned, and now the hole in her was wider still.

Loneliness.

Her family and friends had remarked on what a good idea it was, how wonderful his home was and how lucky they were to have a good school district. Now she would get to pay for garbage pickup, but not a fire department. Now there was someone else to feed Jason at two in the morning. Now motherhood was going to seem a lot less shameful. It was the Suburbs, it was Domesticity, it was Child-Rearing, and it was the Nuclear Family Unit. It was great timing in her life, her career, and even her car payment. Everything was just perfect.

Despite this longing for the American Dream somehow surfacing in every cynical and socially dysfunctional person Lois had ever met, her own enthusiasm for the move had been less than wholly… extant. It was everything Lois could do to smile over the phone at her mother, to swoon over property values with her sister, and to keep Jimmy from grinning like an idiot when she told him she would finally 'get to start that herb garden I always wanted.' In reality, the idea made her want to scream.

Lois never moved in with men. It was like a law burned in stone by the very hand of god. It did not happen, it was not supposed to happen, it did not happen. She had explained this the day she told Richard she was pregnant, the day she had the baby, and the day after that. She maintained this mantra throughout the nights, holding onto it even as everything else in her life was taken away.

Yet even the oldest stone could crack. And Lois eventually did. Jason was born and she spent almost every night for six straight weeks just staring out her window, his cries constant in the early days of his existence, her never-ending worry and regret eating at her. She could feel her resolve melting away as she slowly lost her mind, as the child at her breast reshaped her entire universe, as she realized that she was alone.

They, she and the little creature now and forever a part of her, were alone.

Not in spirit, since they were not lacking in well-wishers, good friends, a supportive family (far removed, thank god), and even a responsible and eager father in Richard.

But, they were alone.

Because he was gone.

An equation someone in college once shared with her made Lois give pause:

"Divide however many months you were together by two. That's how long it takes to get over them."

At first Superman's disappearance had been simply odd. Then she listened, watched, and read every news report from around the world for the next six weeks. Eight weeks after that she scanned the skies almost constantly, whispering his name randomly at work, at home, worried and frantic. Her body had been swollen, her mind twisted with confusion at her new relationship status and the circumstances around it… yet the pain of wondering whether Superman was alive or dead ate at her.

It was enough to make her lose her mind, and that all still tormented her even as she nursed her baby, her newest and greatest concern.

So it was that when Jason was three months old, Lois told Richard that they would move in with him, out to the great Suburb of Bayview and into the shackles of Perfection.

Lois held her miracle while Richard, Jimmy, and Richard's brother Michael moved her boxes in. She had packed with care, relishing the memories hidden in simple objects around her apartment, taking the time to file old paperwork and organize documents for storage. She walked slowly through the spaces, even when she was just crossing the room to get something, trying to seep in the essence of her place before she had to give it up.

Lois had four months left on her lease when she decided to move out, but opted to move to Bayview immediately because a significant day was approaching. She told Richard at dinner one night that she needed to be gone by the next Tuesday, and then requested that she be able to spend that last night at her apartment alone. He agreed, staring into her.

The next week Richard took Jason and two bottles of breast milk to let her make her peace with her former life. Lois had opened the door to face her empty apartment, a few spare things strewn here and there on the bare floors. She didn't turn on the lights, and just walked forward into the moonlight by memory, an infinite sadness rising in her throat.

Lois had difficulty saying goodbye to places, despite having lived in fifteen homes in her lifetime so far. More fodder for the couch.

That night the cool tiles of her balcony wore under her constant pacing. Lois had been agitated and upset, her first night away from Jason and ponderous about the meaning of this painful self-indulgence.

Richard didn't know it, but this night was a year to the day that Lois had last seen Superman. She had given him a year to come back, a year before she would begin to smolder in fury at his silent absence.

A year of hope.

So she waited. She told herself this was the last night, the last time she would do this to herself, and that she should just have hope this one last time.

But, the night waned, the cold seeped in too far, and Lois realized he really was not coming back. It was over as suddenly as it began.

The minute-by-minute agony of this night was too hard to remember, and to this day Lois shied away from the particulars. She could only remember the next morning, when she woke sore from crying and wearing her mind out in search of herself. As dawn came, Lois washed the salt from her face in the shower and closed, walled off, locked, and cauterized the wound left in her life by Superman. Whether he was alive or dead was all the same now. She was suddenly and unmistakably ready to start her new life.

At work she cleared her desk of notes on his disappearance, threw away headline clippings with her byline, ducked her head as she passed the framed portraits of him near the elevators, and even stopped wearing red for awhile until she noticed she was doing so. She reacted by defiantly purchasing five red sweaters for herself and one for infant Jason.

And then of course, there was the Move.

The new life with a new house, a new baby, and a new schedule had wholly consumed her. In the flurry of it all she had allowed herself to blur the details, forget the moments, and make Superman and their star-crossed non-affair a distant star fading in the sunrise of a new reality. It was as if the ocean had risen up to sweep the evidence of trespass out to sea.

Three years later, Lois wrote the article that won her a Pulitzer.

Richard had been intrigued to see her write about Superman, that's how silent she had been in the meantime: that the man closest to her had to wait with the rest of the world for her to say a word. And when the first word came out, hundreds followed.

Lois had been adamant about her silence on the topic; she murmured to Perry one afternoon that she knew no more than the next reporter about why Superman was gone and this was a statement that screamed in its significance. Luckily the Chief didn't push her. At the start it had been because her pregnancy and Richard's new position at the Planet had become a reality, and Perry dropped the topic of Superman's disappearance. Both of them silently acknowledged that to milk Lois' connection to Superman in light of the tabloid-type treatment it already received might be too much strain on such a delicate non-relationship as that between Lois and Richard. Now that there was a child involved, Perry let Superman rest in order not to scare Richard away. She was grateful for it.

But she eventually wrote The Article, and no one knew until she presented it to the Chief, who immediately sent it to Editing. It was published the next day.

And then… he came back.

It was incredible. It defined incredible. Words still would not come whenever she thought about it. She had tried to just keep breathing, just keep living and working and mothering and it worked... until Lois' bare feet touched down after their impromptu flight. That night her dormant feelings had flared back to brightness, both the hurt and the anger, the loneliness and the resentment.

But they didn't exactly get to talk about it.

Lois had a busier life now than ever; there were fewer late nights at the Planet that could afford an off-the-cuff interview on the roof, almost no moments to replace the nights that Lois would call for him on her balcony when she lived alone, and with their state of awkwardness, no possibility after local disasters to excuse themselves for a friendly fly around the city.

It also seemed that Superman didn't interact with anyone at all. He no longer stayed for sound bites after daring rescues or even chat as much with the local, smaller victims of life like the little old ladies with the stranded cats or the construction workers he used to startle at the top of buildings for a mutual chuckle.

Lois didn't notice it at first, the complete lack of conversation. She was too busy having a nervous breakdown, trying not to be obvious about it, escaping Luthor, worrying about the long-term effects of all of this on Jason, and wracking herself sick trying to remember having sex with the man she fantasized about for years.

She thought of this one day, a week or so after telling him he was a father, and made her way out onto the roof, waiting without realizing it. He had come, but this meeting was very different than their first. Despite now knowing that they were closer than they ever imagined, the distance between them was further than it had ever been. She could barely look at him; the new knowledge that they were lovers was a bitter and confusing pill.

He took this opportunity to explain that the five years the world had spent without him only felt like a few weeks to him, to explain that he would never had left for so long if he'd realized. Despite her anger she pitied him for this; his one, selfish moment that just happened to last five years. To have left this planet to find another, all in the hope of finding family, and to return only to realize he'd left a son behind was truly terrible. It made it impossible to stay angry, which was probably why the bastard had told her to begin with.

Besides this sad context to his absence, not much else was said. Fortunately and unfortunately, the topic of Jason was an immediate change of subject that was easier to talk about than her own feelings. He nodded when she'd asked if he'd heard her that day in the hospital.

"I understand that this is an unwanted complication in your life. I.. will abide by your wishes, whatever they are," he paused and looked down. Lois realized that she was used to waiting for him to finish a sentence, usually because his head would tilt and he would listen half a world away. This time the pause was hesitance.

"Okay," was all she was able to say.

The silence stretched on, every second of it making Superman seem more and more miserable. Finally, he turned to leave, pausing to see if she had any last words, polite to a fault.

"Come when I call for you?"

"Always."

And he was gone. She did not call him again, finding it far too painful and awkward, more for him than her. A thousand times she wondered about Jason's conception, and the question burned in her. But two things stopped her: she didn't want to know, and she didn't know how to ask. She didn't remember him. Lois realized that she had spent so much time forgetting that she couldn't remember anything. She even found it strange to remember to wait for his pauses, how could she hope to understand more?

So it was that on this rainy night Lois used her favorite letter opener to slice the tape on the "Interviews" box. If she was to discover what to do about her future, she should remember her past. She was sick of such large questions regarding the time lost, the love spent and forgotten; she would return to the beginning, try to find something there in the relative simplicity of their relationship that would help her see a solution to their painful silence.

Resolved, Lois took in her situation: Jason was in bed, Richard was out of town at the SPJ conference, and it was Friday. She ran her finger across the neatly organized rows of tapes and CDs and let her hand reach out for the earliest date:

'Mayor Frederick / Chief of Police re: arson threat / Super-Man'

Every tape after that said only "Superman" and she smiled at herself. Being a journalist made it very easy to interview your crush, and having a crush made it very easy to be a journalist. Lois picked up her mug of chamomile tea while she sat down in her office chair and dug through a drawer searching for her old tape recorder. AC adapter in the wall, headphones on, finger on the volume poised in case it was terribly loud, and then the hiss of tape fast forwarding. She stopped and heard her voice finish a question. Too soon. Fast forward. Silence.

"Well, um, hello. My name is Lois Lane, as you know I'm a reporter for the Daily Planet… which is a newspaper," Lois of the present smiled at herself, at the way she perceived the ignorance of a creature who knew more about humanity than she did, "and I am here interviewing the person all the world is wondering about, Super-man." The name sounded awkward on her younger tongue.

Lois of now braced herself.

"Good evening, Ms. Lane, and thank you very much for asking me here."