Just Call Me Superhero

by Alina Bronsky

  “That’s very nice of you.” Janne’s mother tightened her grip on the handles as if she was afraid I wanted to make off with her daughter.

  “Piss off,” said Janne without turning her head.

  I shrugged my shoulders and let them go ahead.

  The self-described psycho queen had brought an embroidered pillow that she was sitting on now. I remembered her name: Kevin. Her lipstick reminded me of Claudia’s though she had on more and had applied it much more deftly. Friedrich smiled when he saw me, which made me reflexively reach up and touch my own face. But it was still the same. Richard with the prosthetic had both legs, the real one and the artificial one, up on the chair next to him and was staring blankly out the window.

  I entered the room behind Janne. She was met by a flurry of greetings. For me, nothing. So I didn’t bother to say hello either.

  “Bye, Mama,” said Janne glumly to the woman, who looked around nervously, scanning from one face to the next and fidgeting with her handbag. Janne rolled her wheelchair to the edge of the circle the others had formed with their chairs. There was a space left free for her and an empty chair next to the space. I headed for the empty chair but was stopped in my tracks by a look from Janne. Not you, said the look, and I pivoted and headed in another direction as if I’d run into a glass wall. But nobody seemed to find it funny.

  Without looking at me Richard lifted his limbs off the chair next to him, freeing up another spot. He looked totally annoyed having to do it, as if I’d begged to sit next to him.

  The guru was late. We sat there silently. Janne stared at the wall and looked as if she had turned to stone. Richard read the newspaper. Kevin and Friedrich looked anxiously around the circle trying to make eye contact.

  The door flew open. Everyone except Richard looked up.

  But it was only Marlon, who I had already put out of my mind.

  Now it was easier for me to believe he was blind. He stood in the doorway and rocked on the balls of his feet. He was frowning and his nostrils quivered. I wondered what his eyes looked like behind his sunglasses. Whether maybe he had something to hide. Or maybe someone just told him he’d look cool with sunglasses on, like Agent K from Men in Black. Like, a girlfriend or something. He looked like somebody who had sex on a regular basis.

  “This chair is free,” said Janne quietly. He turned his head in her direction. He went toward with tentative steps, tripped on her wheelchair, and nearly lost his balance. She reached out her hand to brace him but then he managed to straighten up again. I’d bet anything he did it on purpose. Then he grabbed the free chair and let himself fall into it. He stretched out his hand toward Janne as he did but wasn’t able to reach her. This time she did not put out her hand.

  I wondered whether Marlon realized that everyone was looking at him. Blind people apparently sense that sort of thing. Janne definitely knew that she got stared at, stared at like we were some poor working-class family and she was our TV. But it didn’t seem to bother her. Maybe she even liked it.

  “Is everyone here?” Marlon asked Janne. She shrugged her shoulders and looked around the circle.

  “The guru’s not here,” said Richard. “He probably needs a new Chinese teacher’s handbook.”

  “Why Chinese?” asked Friedrich.

  “Because what I actually registered for was Intensive Chinese.” Richard looked wistfully out the window.

  “I don’t believe this is that sort of course,” said Friedrich, sounding unsure.

  “Do you think I really do?” Richard rolled up the newspaper and swung it at the wall. Kevin jumped. Something small and black fell to the floor. If I hadn’t have heard the crack of the shell I would have taken it for a housefly.

  “And you, Janne?” asked Friedrich. “Why are you here?”

  She ignored the question. She didn’t even look at him.

  We heard someone running down the hall. Then the guru was standing in the doorway gasping for air.

  “Couldn’t find a parking space?” asked Kevin quizzically.

  The guru held his chest, wheezing, and leaned against the doorframe. He didn’t look just tired but also surprised.

  “You’re all here.”

  “Where are the drums?” Kevin asked weakly.

  Friedrich was the only one who had signed up to, as he put it, make contact with other handicapped people. The guru seesawed back and forth on the back legs of his chair and listened. As he spoke Friedrich let his little blue eyes rest on me of all people. I crossed my legs, took off my hat and put it on my knee, and smoothed out my hair. Not only had my hair not been cut for an eternity, it hadn’t been combed in nearly as long. My fingers kept getting snarled in the matted strands. As Friedrich began to explain that his organs were decomposing because of an autoimmune disease and that as a result he didn’t have long to live, I felt sick.

  Friedrich happily listed all the medications he took on a daily basis. They had complicated poetic names that he seemed to take visible delight in pronouncing.

  “Stop,” said Janne when he started to say the fourth one. “Nobody cares.”

  Friedrich gulped. He forgot to close his mouth and gummed the warm air for a while.

  “But we’re here to talk.”

  “Not with you,” said Marlon.

  Kevin started to tremble again.

  The guru cleared his throat and turned suddenly to me.

  “Tell me, Mark.”

  “Marek.”

  “Tell me, Marek. There was a story in the newspaper a year ago about a fighting dog that attacked a young man.”

  “Really?” I said. For the first time Janne looked at me for longer than a quarter of a second. For another quarter second I’d probably have to have allowed my entire ear to get bitten off.

  “Yes?” I said in her direction.

  “Well, I was just wondering . . . ” said the guru. Everyone seemed to be listening, his voice hung in the breathless silence, and my back began to tingle. I didn’t want them all to stare at me. Everyone always did anyway, but somehow here it didn’t seem right. Blind Marlon had even turned his left ear to me and seemed to be straining to listen.“ . . . if perhaps you would like to tell us about it,” said the guru.

  I hadn’t been expecting such brazenness.

  “I remember it, too,” said Richard. “It was big news in the paper and they ran a photo of him.”

  “What kind of photo—before or after?” asked Marlon.

  I needed to do something to distract myself from my urge to rip the chair out from under him. So I stood up and left the room and I didn’t even care whether Janne looked at me for more than a second as I walked out.

  I crossed the street, past all the lit-up shops and bars, and my eyes burned. It happened all the time and it was annoying. I wiped my eyes with a finger without removing my sunglasses but the burning didn’t stop. What I really needed was to take off the glasses and dry my face with a tissue, but there were people all around. A class of babbling and giggling elementary school kids passed me. Most of them only came up to my belly button.

  They didn’t look at me because I was outside their field of vision and thus outside their world, but I could still sense it.

  Whenever I went anywhere people altered their course to avoid me. The more crowded a place was the easier it was to recognize. Where once there had been chaos, suddenly organized lanes appeared, all seemingly regulated by the same cosmic diagram that had as its goal to get people past me unharmed and with as much clearance as possible. I felt like a clove of garlic in the middle of a stream of ants. People probably didn’t even realize they were doing it—their subconscious altered their course in a way that soothed their mind without their ever recognizing what had caused the agitation or what hazard they had sidestepped.

  I changed course as well. I went into the first ice cream shop I saw. I’d never particularl
y cared for ice cream but the bathroom was right at the front of the shop. I slipped in and locked the door. I turned off the light and took off my sunglasses. I felt around for the sink. I thought about Marlon and his question: Before or after?

  I braced myself on the sink and tears fell on my hands. Crying was ridiculous but when my eyes itched and burned like this there was no stopping the tears. I felt for the faucet, turned it on, and splashed cold water on my face. Somebody knocked on the door.

  “Just a second,” I shouted and let myself slump onto the toilet seat cover.

  One eye itched worse than the other. They probably screwed up and stitched one of the tear ducts closed. Claudia cried a lot at first, always when she thought I wouldn’t pick up on it. But of course I picked up on everything. She walked around with a splotchy, puffy face, her eyes squinting, irregular spots of cover cream smeared on, and thought nobody would notice.

  And then suddenly she was happy again. Just like that, though I didn’t notice exactly when it happened. Like a switch had been thrown. She got used to everything much faster than I expected. She could look me in the face without batting an eye. At first she touched the scars with her fingertips a lot and asked whether it hurt and assured me that I wasn’t ugly. She didn’t do that anymore.

  The bathroom door shook as a fist banged on it.

  I stood up, put my sunglasses on, and threw open the door. I saw a young waiter wearing a vest, bow tie, and pants all in black. His mouth opened in a silent scream but something about the shape of his mouth was off. Lip and tongue impairment, I thought to myself. Must have had to go to a speech therapist as a kid. Probably still slurs his speech.

  “Boo!” I said and went past him and back out of the shop.

  The next morning I discovered that somebody had taken my Pschyrembel Clinical Dictionary.

  It was my only copy; I’d bought it a half-year earlier at a shop that specialized in medical books. It sat on my bookshelf alongside an atlas of human anatomy, an early-twentieth century book on gynecology and obstetrics passed down to me by my grandfather, and another historical but utterly useless tome with the romantic title The Art of Healing, that I’d spared from the recycling bin only because of its beautiful jacket. Claudia had given it to me for my birthday two months before in the hope that my interest in medical reference books might lead to something good and improve our chances of successfully living together.

  “See,” she’d said approvingly as I unwrapped the book. “It’s totally normal for people to discover new horizons after a serious injury. Happy birthday, my beautiful boy.”

  “Amen,” I’d said folding the wrapping paper up nicely. A quick leaf through the tome confirmed my suspicion that Claudia was completely off the mark with this gift. I wasn’t interested in the history of medicine. And I didn’t want to help anyone. “Thanks for the beautiful book,” I said. “Please feel free to borrow it anytime you’d like, for instance if you need a paperweight.” She didn’t bat an eye.

  The history of the art of healing was still there, as was the book on gynecology and obstetrics; Plastic Surgery: Vol. 1 Basics Procedures Techniques, an out-of-pocket expense of 229 euros; everything right where it belonged.

  But Pschyrembel was gone.

  I ran down to the kitchen and pulled the plug of the vacuum cleaner, the business end of which our cleaning lady was holding. Frau Hermann was severely nearsighted and also very sickly. She must have been healthier at some point, but I couldn’t remember it. The day before yesterday a cobweb fell from the kitchen lamp into my minestrone.

  Frau Hermann turned to me. She was very shaky, and her few grayish-white tufts of hair were pulled up on top of her head with the kind of hair clip you expected to see on a Chihuahua.

  “Would you like a coffee?” I asked. Her gaze wandered indifferently over my face. She had problems of her own and as a result I felt relaxed in her presence.

  “Yes, maybe so,” she said.

  “On the way.” I drew a rectangle in the air. “Have you seen my thick green book?”

  “The one with all that nastiness in it?”

  “No, the other one. Though it wasn’t on the most palatable of topics either.”

  “Green?”

  I nodded.

  “It’s on your mother’s nightstand,” she said and turned her back to me. As she turned she made a gesture with two raised fingers. I understood and plugged the vacuum back in.

  I hadn’t been in Claudia’s bedroom since Dirk wormed his way in. Lately I hadn’t been talking to anyone; during the day I lowered the shades and napped or flipped through my Pschyrembel, and at night I took walks, sometimes even without my sunglasses, and felt the velvety cool air on my skin.

  It didn’t seem to bother Claudia. She was always in a rush in the morning and Dirk was there in the evening. In between she worked like an animal. Dirk was at least ten years younger than her and he looked slightly stupid though Claudia claimed he was intellectually gifted. I wondered what an adult was supposed to do with his intellectual gifts. Whether perhaps other qualities might slowly become more important, qualities like a spacious apartment with wood floors and a fireplace, for instance. Claudia said I didn’t need to worry about Dirk.

  That was our last conversation about the topic for the time being.

  “My son is in a bad mood,” Claudia had said to Dirk just a little too loudly the evening the three of us spent together. In response Dirk asked what I was doing about my depression. I slammed my door shut. I figured he me might as well think I was not only depressed but also violent.

  The Pschyrembel dictionary was sitting on Claudia’s nightstand next to another thick book with a woman with big hair and a beautiful neck on the cover. Beneath the Pschyrembel was another book, a thin one that I picked up. It was about post-traumatic stress disorder in adolescents. I put it back down. Then I checked to make sure my bookmarks were still in the right spots in the Pschyrembel. It wasn’t Claudia’s style to rummage around in my things without asking. I was willing to be open-minded: maybe she just wanted to check whether one of her moles looked like melanoma.

  I put the Pschyrembel back on my shelf and Googled the guru. I would like to have forgotten his name, but unfortunately it was burned into my brain, so I Googled him. I wanted to see whether he happened to be a child murderer on the run for years. But I didn’t find any evidence of it. He’d played Puss in Boots at an independent theater and written a book about self-enlightenment through hiking. In the short biography in his book it said he’d been a kindergarten teacher and had survived a life-threatening illness. His Facebook profile wasn’t visible to the public. His teaching career didn’t show up much, and I couldn’t even find our self-help group on the schedule of the family services center.

  I typed JANNE into the search box. Clicked on videos. And stayed glued to my screen until evening.

  When the doorbell rang the following Friday afternoon, I didn’t move from my bed. I watched the fish in the aquarium and imagined I was one of them, like maybe the fat ugly catfish whose entire life consisted of sucking on a round stone. It was so busy sucking that it wouldn’t have noticed the end of the world. I envied the fish that.

  Claudia was at the office. I hadn’t figured out whether Dirk had a job. At least for once he wasn’t slinking around our house. I never opened the door for the mailmen. Claudia’s mail mostly went to the office and nobody had written to me in a long time. It didn’t take much to ensure that nobody wrote me. All I had to do was refuse to accept the huge stack of get-well cards and letters of condolence that the mailman pulled out of his bag a year ago.

  The doorbell kept ringing and ringing.

  I put my feet into my slippers and went downstairs to disconnect the bell. Through the frosted glass of the front door I could see several shadows.

  Jehovah’s Witnesses, I thought, lined up for a gangbang.

  Now they start
ed banging on the door as well.

  “I’m going to call the police,” I shouted. “Can’t you tell nobody’s home?”

  Someone pressed his nose to the glass. It looked like a pig’s snout, grotesquely distorted and magnified. The banging of the fists echoed hollowly through the entire place.

  Okay, I thought. You wanted it.

  I averted my eyes from the mirror in the front hall and put my hand on the door handle. I unlocked the door with my other hand. I threw open the door and stepped into the sunlight.

  As expected, one of them jumped back and stumbled over his own feet. The other didn’t move. I got the feeling that he was examining me from behind his sunglasses. It took a moment for me to recognize him.

  It was Marlon, and he was smiling. Behind him Friedrich was getting himself together. He had his hand in front of his eyes. My sunglasses were inside. I wasn’t used to so much daylight.

  I took pity on my eyes and turned my back to Friedrich.

  “Can we come in?” asked Marlon.

  “Did I invite you?” I still had my back to them. “How did you get my address?”

  “The attendance list,” Friedrich peeped.

  One of my pairs of sunglasses was on the bureau in the front hall. I put them on and turned toward the two of them.

  “What do you want?”

  “You didn’t come to the meeting yesterday,” said Marlon.

  “Of course not.”

  “You were missed.”

  I thought I must have misheard him. There was no way Marlon had actually said that. So I waited for him to say something more. But he was silent, and it was clear that he didn’t plan to give in first. I was the first to get impatient.

  “By who? You? Or was it Friedrich?”

  Marlon made his chin gesture, the strange nod that said more than a thousand words. I need to remember that, I thought.

  “The group. Cut the drama and let us in.”

  I could hardly believe that they were really here. Nobody had been here in ages. The last 389 days didn’t feel like one year and one month or even like ten years. Those 389 days were an amount of time somewhere between a blink of an eye and an eternity.