The Hardyman | Page 5

eight hours to fantasize about his home project as his disembodied hands directing meaningless reams of paper from his desk to someone else's. He could sit for hours with a single-page memo before him, his eyes gliding back and forth across the page as his mind rode around inside the Hardyman at home. Once, Jack's supervisor, Brad MeCoy, had come upon Jack practicing walking like a robot between two rows of empty cubicles. Jack's arms were sticking straight out, his legs as stiff as boards. Brad had looked quizzically at Jack. After that, Brad had not come back.
On a morning several weeks later, Jack awoke before sunrise. He had outgrown the confines of the garage, he had decided. He wanted to take a few exploratory steps into the driveway before the rest of the neighborhood woke up. Outside, he opened the garage door, and he began his now skilled donning of the Hardyman. With relative ease and a growing sense of automaton-like coordination, Jack stepped his way across the garage in the suit towards the already brightening square of the garage door. Finally, he was free.
Jack stood vibrating in the dawn. He could hear the birds chirping in the trees of his neighbor's backyard. Other than that, no one appeared to have noticed what he was doing. He took a few shuffling steps down the driveway. He paused, savoring his new world-view from this position. Everything else seemed so much smaller from this place.
That was when he heard a distant grumbling. At the end of the driveway, Jack's garbage can stood waiting. He tried stepping backwards and got stuck mid-stride, rocking back and forth from robot leg to robot leg. The sound came closer. Jack was frozen. In horror, he watched as the garbage truck pulled into view before him. Then, from the side of the truck, a remote-controlled arm extended outward, grabbed the garbage can roughly at the waist, hauled it upwards, and dumped the entire contents of the pail unceremoniously into the hull. For a moment, its robot arm hung in the air as if waving back at Jack's own suspended robot arm.
In the cab, the driver's head turned towards him.
In the driveway, Jack looked out from inside the Hardyman suit into the eyes of the person, who, it appeared, was the garbage truck driver. It was a woman.
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If only, Jack considered, as the garbage truck zoomed away, he had used the blueprint for L.A. Rygg's Mechanical Horse from 1893. He could have built a metal Trojan horse and ridden out astride it as if he was some sort of mechanically inclined prince from the future. Surely then, she would have leapt out from the truck and jumped up on its back so they could go pedaling its quadrupedal mechanism off into the sunset together. Or he could have cloned G.E.'s Walking Truck circa 1968 and, marching down the driveway atop those staggering steel legs, he could have blocked her way with it in the street. She wouldn't have been able to resist cruising into the horizon sitting side-by-side with him inside it.
Making his way back up the driveway, Jack considered if it was the Hardyman from which she had fled--or if it had been him. From the comic books that he had read as a child, he knew that other men--say, for example, Doctor Victor Von Doom--would have handled the situation very differently. Doctor Doom would have been wearing a suit of Incredible Material Strength to protect himself from anything she might have done to him. Doctor Doom's groin-area would have had Incredible Resistance to Energy Attacks he may have experienced due to her mere existence. Doctor Doom's Maximum Radius of Self-Protection would have been eight feet, keeping her at a safe distance from him at all times. When she disappeared, Doctor Doom would have gone shooting straight into the air with Excellent Airspeed, care of the Twin Atomic Jets at his waistband, leaving the situation, returning to Castle Doom in Doomstadt, where he would spend the rest of his life running his robot factory and forgetting all about her. Other people would call him Dr. Evil behind his back, but all of this would be over, and the real Jack Junior would be long gone.
That afternoon, sitting at his desk, his head in his hands, his body situated between two listing towers of paperwork, Jack vowed that tomorrow he would wear the Hardyman suit to work. This time, when he boarded the morning train, his fellow passengers would scatter. This time, when he got to the office, the revolving door at the entrance would break free as he bulldozed through it. This time, when he arrived on the twenty-seventh floor in an elevator fairly bursting at its seams to contain him, he would careen down the