The Hardyman | Page 5

back at the other man, turned on his heel, and went
inside.
7

After that day, Jack spent little time at his office focused on this work.
Now, his job was a place where he went for 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.
8
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