Caped Crusader in Heels

The zipper sticks halfway up my thigh, right where the fishnet catches, and I'm standing in the alley behind the Monarch Theater with my heart going like a jackhammer and my hands shaking so bad I can't get the damn thing to move.

"Come on," I whisper. "Come on, come on, come on."

The alley smells like wet cardboard and old piss. Somewhere above me, a window unit drips onto a fire escape. I can hear the El rumbling three blocks over and the city doing what it always does at midnight, which is to say, breathing. In and out. In and out. Like it's got lungs. Like it's alive.

I finally get the zipper past the snag and the dress settles against me. Black. Sleeveless. A little bit of sequin work along the collar. I found it at the Goodwill on Fourth Street two weeks ago, tried it on in the dressing room with the fluorescent lights buzzing overhead, and I swear I felt something click into place. Like a bone resetting. Like a door opening in a house I didn't know I had.

My mother's voice is in my head right now. *What are you doing, Marcus? What are you doing to yourself?*

I pull the cowl down over my face.

The cowl is the part I made myself. Everything else I bought or stole or found, but the cowl I built in my apartment with a glue gun and a roll of black vinyl from the fabric store on Delancey. It's not perfect. The ears are a little crooked. The stitching along the jawline puckers if you look close. But when I pull it down over my eyes, when the world goes dark around the edges and I'm looking out through those two narrow slits, I stop being Marcus. I stop being the guy who stocks shelves at the pharmacy on Grand Street. I stop being the son who calls his mother every Sunday even though she cries every time.

I become something else.

Something that doesn't have a name yet.

The first time I wore the whole thing, I just stood in front of my bathroom mirror for an hour. Didn't move. Didn't speak. Just looked at myself. The dress. The fishnets. The cape I'd cut from an old bedsheet and dyed black in the bathtub. And the cowl. The cowl made it real. The cowl made it something I couldn't take back.

My neighbor, Mrs. Kowalski, knocked on my door that night. Asked if everything was okay. Said she heard me moving around, said it sounded like I was crying.

I told her I was watching a sad movie.

She said, "At two in the morning?"

I said, "It was a really sad movie."

She hasn't knocked since.

Now I'm in the alley behind the Monarch, and the Monarch's been closed for fifteen years, ever since the roof caved in and the city couldn't afford to fix it. The marquee's still up there, all rusted out, the letters gone except for an M and an O and half an R. Somebody spray-painted a dick on it last summer. Nobody's cleaned it off.

I'm here because of what I heard at the pharmacy. Three guys came in yesterday, bought Sudafed and energy drinks and talked loud enough for the whole store to hear. They were talking about a girl. A girl named Elena Vasquez. Said she owed them money. Said they were going to collect tonight, behind the Monarch, and if she didn't have it, they were going to take something else instead.

I know Elena. She works at the bodega on my block. She's nineteen. She gave me a free Gatorade once when I came in with a fever and couldn't stop shaking.

I don't have a plan. I want to be honest about that. I don't have a plan and I don't have a weapon and I don't have any idea what I'm doing. I have a dress and a cowl and a cape and a pair of boots I spray-painted black because the brown ones looked wrong. I have my father's old leather gloves, the ones he wore when he worked construction, the ones my mother gave me after he died because she said she couldn't stand to look at them anymore.

I have this thing inside me that I can't explain. This thing that says, *Get up. Go out. Do something.* This thing that's been growing in me since I was twelve years old and watched the news and saw a man in a cape and a cowl and thought, *Oh. That's what I want to be. That's what I want to be when I grow up.*

Except I'm thirty-four now. And I'm not a man in a cape. I'm a man in a dress. And I don't know if that makes me brave or crazy or both.

The alley door opens.

I press myself against the wall, into the shadow of a dumpster. My heart is going so fast I can hear it in my ears. The fishnets itch. The dress is too tight around my chest. I didn't think about the fact that I'd need to breathe.

Three guys come out. I recognize two of them from the pharmacy. The third one's new, bigger, with a shaved head and a tattoo on his neck that looks like a spider. They're dragging someone between them. A girl. Elena.

She's not fighting. That's the thing that scares me most. She's not fighting at all. Her head is down, her hair covering her face, and she's just letting them pull her along like she's already given up.

"Where's the money, huh?" The big one shakes her. "Where's the fucking money?"

"I told you," she says. Her voice is small. "I told you I'd get it. I just need more time."

"Time's up, sweetheart."

I step out of the shadow.

I don't know why. I don't know what I think I'm going to do. But I step out, and the three of them turn, and I'm standing there in my dress and my cape and my crooked ears, and they just stare at me.

The big one laughs.

"What the fuck is this?"

"I'm..." My voice cracks. I swallow. "I'm Batman."

Silence. The El rumbles overhead. Elena looks up. Her eyes go wide.

The big one lets go of her arm and takes a step toward me. "You're what?"

And I realize, standing there in the dark with my heart pounding and my hands shaking and the whole city breathing around me, that I don't have an answer. I don't have a plan. I don't have anything except this moment, this stupid, impossible moment, and whatever happens next.

But I'm here. I'm finally, actually here.