Just Call Me Superhero

by Alina Bronsky

  I hadn’t missed anyone, and especially not these two. And yet here they were sitting at our kitchen table and Friedrich’s saucer eyes were practically popping out of his head. I could almost hear the rattling in his head. He was taking everything in, the gas oven, the pattern of the dish towel, Claudia’s deformed plants in the hydroponic pots, the shelf of spices and valuable antique tea caddies that looked like they’d been salvaged from the garbage. I would like to have had a curtain in front of all of it. Or better yet just to have thrown the two of them out.

  Just like Claudia, they began with lies; and just like her they couldn’t keep it up for long. I cannot fathom why so many people thought that was an effective strategy. They said something about a special project the guru had planned for us. And supposedly it wouldn’t work without me.

  I just pretended to listen. In reality I was trying to imagine what Friedrich looked like on the inside. A partially disintegrated thyroid gland. Worn out adrenal glands that had suspended service. Liver chronically swollen from a lifetime of medications. Juvenile arthritis. Shriveled kidneys. High blood sugar. I was tempted to go get my Pschyrembel and look up a few more things.

  They took my silence the wrong way—suddenly they changed their strategy.

  “And Janne asked about you,” said Marlon nonchalantly. He was sitting next to Friedrich and running his huge bare feet across the kitchen tiles. Back and forth, nonstop, again and again. I only let them in after they took off their shoes. That was always a good way to embarrass guests. They turned down slippers. I looked at Marlon’s feet and wondered whether he cut and filed his own toenails and if not, who had done it for him. Marlon ran his hand along the tabletop and his sleeve barely made a sound as it scraped the surface. It was driving me crazy.

  “Janne,” I said. They nodded. Friedrich was probably wondering just then whether the grimace on my face was meant to be a smile. I wondered whether they knew how she spent her time. Had she also hit on the idea of Googling their names?

  And then Marlon pulled something out of his pants pocket and put it on the table. It was green, flat, and rectangular. I squinted and then reached out my hand.

  It was a one hundred euro note.

  “What’s that for?”

  “Forget all that shit we said,” Marlon said. “You’re going to come because you’re getting paid. Consider it work. It’s important.”

  I took the note between my fingers and held it up to my ear. I liked the crinkling sound it made.

  “It’s not much,” I said. “What do I have to do for it? And who is paying?”

  There was a pause during which I crinkled the note a little more.

  “Well?”

  “The guru,” they said at the same time.

  What they finally explained sounded completely absurd.

  “The guru has something extraordinary planned,” said Friedrich. “He thinks we all have a huge problem and he wants to help us.”

  “As far as I’m concerned it would be enough if he helped you.”

  Friedrich didn’t respond.

  “What exactly has he got planned?” I asked.

  “He hasn’t explained it yet.”

  “Why am I not surprised?”

  “First we all have to warm up to each other before it can really start.”

  “Another disgusting comment like that and you’re out of here.”

  “We’re going soon anyway, but you have to come next Thursday. Please. You can’t be missing from the picture.”

  And that’s when it finally began to dawn on me.

  A dam seemed to have opened in Friedrich. “The guru wants to film us,” came pouring out of him. He rushed the words out one after another, choking on them as if he was scared Marlon or I might try to tell him off. But we didn’t say a word. I wasn’t entirely sure Marlon was even listening. “He might make a proper film about us. A documentary about a group of disabled people. Insights that could break down prejudice, understand? Just imagine, the movie might get reviewed in all the papers and shown at festivals. We could become famous. I even suggested a title. The Magnificent Seven. Great, huh?”

  “There are only six of us,” I said quietly. “Or do you count for two?”

  He smiled placidly. “I counted the guru. In any event, he promised that a big surprise awaited everyone at the end. If he managed to survive it in one piece.”

  “How nice,” I said.

  Marlon felt for the note that I had thrown back onto the table and stuck it back in his pocket.

  “You just don’t get the fact that for once this isn’t about you,” he said and stood up. “Come on, porky.” He turned, touching the wall with his fingertips, and started moving toward the door.

  I caught up to them in the entry hall and put a hand on Marlon’s shoulder to hold him back. We weren’t finished yet. I didn’t fight it when he disdainfully shrugged off my hand and in so doing jabbed his elbow into my side as if by accident. It could have hurt, but it wasn’t so easy to hurt me these days.

  I wanted to be sure that I had understood him correctly. “Janne?” I asked. “Is this about Janne?”

  He shrugged his left shoulder.

  “Well, as for me,” said Friedrich from behind me, “I’m doing it a little for myself, too.”

  My name is Friedrich and my body is disintegrating from within,” said Friedrich into the camera that the guru held in front of his face. We sat on the lawn behind the family services center and watched. Only Janne had turned away and was bracing her head in her hands. Marlon was sitting on the grass next to her wheelchair and running his fingers along the wheels.

  He had something that I never had before and would also never have. Something none of us had, least of all the guru. It wasn’t coolness or what people identify as charisma. It was something that made you strain to hear his words because it seemed as if he knew a secret that he wasn’t otherwise going to reveal. He didn’t need Janne because plenty of healthy girls would chase after him on their two good legs. He didn’t even know that Janne was attractive.

  But I knew it. And 395 days ago I would have sat next to Janne and smiled at her. People always said I had a charming smile. I hated when they did; it sounded so dopey and innocuous. I had Lucy by my side and I was faithful to her, even if it was more out of laziness than true conviction. Except for the brief kissing episode with Johanna, the woman Frau Hermann sent to fill in for her once in a while when she herself occasionally needed to puke her guts out in a hospital bed—that’s how Frau Hermann put it.

  I heard my own teeth grinding.

  Richard had detached his prosthesis and was doing something to his stump. I couldn’t help but watch. The guru turned the camera away from Friedrich and pointed it at the detached leg laying on the grass.

  “No,” said Richard.

  The guru lowered the camera. He hadn’t expected it all to be so difficult.

  “How did you find us anyway,” I asked. “Did you use a specific strategy to get each of us here? Each one lured with something you thought would be interesting to us? Did you research our family and friends? Did we unknowingly pass some sort of casting process as particularly qualified cripples? Or is it all coincidence?”

  “Coincidence is just the pseudonym God uses when he wishes to remain incognito,” declared the guru with frustration as he covered the lens with a plastic lens cap.

  “I’ve always wanted to learn how to throat sing,” said Kevin. “I think it’s unbelievably mean of you to trick me into this with false promises.”

  The guru looked as if he could live with it.

  “What do you think of this,” Marlon asked suddenly and sang a song I didn’t know. I didn’t even know what language it was in. Bright vowels held together by barely audible consonants wafted over my head. I felt dizzy. I lay back on the grass and closed my eyes. For a moment I forgot everything that ha
d happened to me.

  “I’m getting more and more yellow because my liver barely functions anymore,” said Friedrich. “It’s because of all the medications that I have to take.”

  “Poor thing,” said the guru. “That’s really a shame.”

  We were sitting on plastic chairs at a little round table. The guru had invited us to an ice cream parlor to try to lighten the atmosphere. It was the same one where I’d tried to shed a few tears.

  The camera was rolling. It was pointed at the young woman in the black waiter’s uniform as she balanced our ice cream bowls on a tray and tried to squeeze her way to the table between the legs of chairs and Janne’s wheelchair. I leaned forward to hide my face. I was afraid she might drop the tray on my head otherwise. She kept her eyes trained on the ice cream and didn’t notice anything until she had safely set down the last bowl on the wobbly table and then looked up.

  I wondered whether the camera had captured everything. The interested glance at Marlon. The annoyed jealous look at Janne. The puzzled look at Richard. The disgusted look at Kevin and Friedrich, who was still talking nonstop about his innards.

  And then the look at me.

  She had no way of knowing I had been watching her the whole time. That behind my sunglasses I was looking directly into her suddenly wide eyes. She tripped over Janne’s wheelchair and back to the counter. The others reached out their hands for their ice cream bowls and avoided looking at me. Even Janne stared into her ice cream with embarrassment.

  “This could be a great film,” said Richard after a pause. And then to me: “You’ll be the star.”

  “I’ve already been the star once, thanks,” I said.

  Janne’s face turned to me. For minutes on end, longer than ever before. I stared at my hands so as not to frighten her.

  “What happened to the dog?” she asked.

  “Shot,” I said.

  “And the owner went to jail?”

  “No,” I said. “He got a suspended sentence.”

  “And what have you been doing since then?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “I haven’t been home for long.”

  “How long?” asked Marlon.

  “Maybe half a year. Or a bit more. After the operations I was in a rehab center for a while.”

  “That’s a long time,” said Janne, running her hand pensively over her knee. She had very thin fingers. I wanted to touch her hand. She was probably cold. A ring would look beautiful on one of those long fingers, I thought, a heavy ring with a big stone, the kind Claudia liked to wear. Except they didn’t suit her because she had short, fat fingers.

  I imagined putting one of Claudia’s rings onto Janne’s finger.

  “Do you play piano?” I asked.

  She ignored the question.

  “I play the flute,” said Friedrich.

  I have no idea why I rang my own doorbell. Maybe just to hear the shrill sound from outside. Nobody was there anyway. I had a key in my pocket; I’d been a latchkey kid since elementary school and it was something I was genuinely thankful to Claudia for.

  The door opened and standing there was Johanna.

  Life is full of coincidences, I thought ruefully. I had just been thinking about Johanna on the lawn earlier. And I hadn’t thought of her for years. Now here she was in front of me. I pulled my hat further down my face and straightened my sunglasses.

  “You’ve gotten so tall,” she exhaled.

  I let my gaze drop. “And you’ve gotten so pregnant.”

  She blushed. It looked as if she had swallowed a basketball. I looked farther down: her dress was short like back then, her kneesocks striped. She looked like an over-ripened Pippi Longstocking. She’d been studying something social-minded for years, if I remembered correctly.

  “Can I come in?” I asked.

  She stepped to the side. “It’s your home after all.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Frau Hermann’s not well.”

  I managed for a moment to pry my gaze away from her belly.

  “Is it serious?”

  She didn’t answer.

  It was strange that today of all days I had remembered our tongues entwining. What could bring a woman in her early twenties to kiss a fifteen-year-old? I mean, sure, I came across as older, she’d said so herself afterwards. I had not forgotten the way she looked at me that time.

  I pushed past her.

  “How are you?” she asked my back.

  “You can see for yourself.”

  “There’s worse things,” she mumbled. “You shouldn’t get too worked up about it.”

  “Never. It’s just a face.”

  For the next meeting the guru had asked us to come back to the meditation room at the family services center. This time he was punctual. We all were. Janne and Marlon were sitting there silently. Friedrich was chatting with Kevin about nightmares. Richard was reading the paper again.

  The chair between him and Kevin was free.

  “Hi, Marek,” said Janne smiling. I nearly missed the chair and fell on the floor.

  “Hi, Janne.” My face tingled. Richard folded up his paper and looked at me for a long time.

  “People, this isn’t going to work,” said the guru suddenly.

  I had nearly forgotten he was there. He was sitting there on his chair, small and long-nosed and looking a little too distraught.

  “I’m sorry, people,” the guru said into the silence that had descended on the room.

  “What?” asked Marlon.

  “It was a stupid idea.” The guru looked away as if to avoid Marlon’s gaze, as if he had forgotten Marlon couldn’t see anyway. “I’ll give your parents the money back and we’ll disband the group. It’s just not going to work. I overestimated myself.”

  I thought of how I would go home with a hundred euros in my pocket. I didn’t have to tell Claudia anything. She wouldn’t know that I was no longer leaving the house every Thursday at three-thirty. I could go back to spending the entire day watching my fish and looking at images of deformed people in reference books without the annoying interruption. I would no longer be a participant in a self-help group for youths with physical and mental impairments. I could bid them all adieu with a light heart.

  Especially Janne, who thought it beneath her to answer me.

  Marlon sat there motionless. He probably loved to be filmed. I used to be photogenic once, too.

  Friedrich’s features were soft and his mouth trembled silently. Richard tugged at his earlobes, frowning. Kevin smiled pensively and looked at Marlon. And Janne . . .

  Janne said loudly: “No!”

  “What do you mean no?” The guru let his hat roll around on his knees the same way I sometimes did. “I say yes and I ask all of your pardon. You’ll get your money back.”

  “Will you look for other disabled people?” asked Friedrich.

  The guru waved his hand in the air. “You’re not replaceable. It was doomed to fail from the start.”

  “No,” repeated Janne.

  She was sitting next to Marlon, very upright, and her green eyes seemed to be giving off sparks. I just couldn’t get used to her face, it still surprised me every time. And even though there was as much space between her and Marlon as there was between Friedrich and me, I still saw them as together. And I thought to myself that there had never been a couple like that before, not in the movies or in real life. A couple that you had to congratulate on aesthetic grounds alone.

  I suddenly had a bitter taste in my mouth. I would like to have spit on the floor.

  “We’re going to keep going,” said Janne.

  We’re going to keep going, Janna had said.

  Nobody asked her who she meant by we. Marlon and her? All of us? Since when were we a we? We had barely exchanged more than a few sentences with each other,
we’d gone for ice cream together one single time, and we all made each other sick. I couldn’t even figure out why I came back here and why the others did. Did they not have anything better to do, either? Were catfish and reference books the only things waiting at home for them, too?

  And yet nobody disagreed with her. Not even me, even though I was suddenly very angry with Janne. I wanted her to look at me. I wanted her to smile at me. I wanted her to cry. Or do anything that showed she was a real person and not some alien trapped in the body of a cripple.

  The guru was a bit speechless.

  “I feel honored,” he finally said, though it sounded like “you can all go to hell.”

  “Are any of you already eighteen?” he asked, looking around quite despairingly and lighting on me, oddly enough, as if my age hadn’t been mentioned alongside my photo—the before photo—in every newspaper in the country.

  Kevin slowly raised his hand. Nobody else.

  The guru’s eyes narrowed. The gears in his head seemed to clatter, as if he was trying to calculate something. “Okay,” he said. “Minor mistake. Not even you, Marlon?”

  Marlon leaned back in his chair silently.

  “For now, it doesn’t matter. Let’s just get started,” said Janne.

  The guru said that if he was going to continue we would also have to make concessions. Meaning we had to show up on time, answer questions freely, and not bother our fellow participants. We had to be open, honest, and trusting. And in the end, together we would work out what united us despite all of our differences.

  Janne sighed loudly.

  “Have you ever done anything like this before?”

  “Are we going down that road again?” asked the guru.

  “Sorry.”

  “If you are referring to recording, then yes, I know how to hold a camera,” said the guru huffily. “In another life, I even spent some time at film school.”