Just Call Me Superhero

by Alina Bronsky

  To take my mind off it I tried to imagine what I must seem like to Marlon. Probably an amorphous sweating, panting, heat-radiating lump.

  “Why are you lying there like a corpse?” I asked.

  He didn’t answer. I didn’t expect him to. I had an idea of what was going on with him. He too had imagined everything differently. He had wrongly assessed both himself and the trip, and he felt humiliated about looking helplessness in front of Janne. So he had as much right as I did to hate everything here, myself included.

  I opened the well-oiled door to the room, went out, and closed it quietly behind me.

  The guru was unloading boxes of groceries that someone had obviously left for us in the kitchen. He looked a bit more relaxed. Across the polished counter rolled apples and lemons while the smell of marinated meats and olives wafted out of bags, and I would love to have just bitten right into the big loaf of dark bread sitting on the table.

  “Why don’t we have our own rooms?” I asked with the slightly annoyed tone of a package tourist. “There seems to be more than enough space.”

  “Because they are renovating,” said the guru without turning around.

  “So who’ll be doing the cooking?” I didn’t think there would be anything wrong with my taking a banana. After all, Claudia had paid for the groceries.

  “You.”

  I decided to take it as a joke, left him to sort out the groceries, and moved on.

  The villa had a wheelchair-accessible elevator between the ground floor and the second floor. I took the wide staircase with the wine-colored banister that had been polished by many hands. Upstairs, where our room also was, I found half a dozen doors. Some were locked. I heard Kevin giggling behind one of them. He was sharing a room with Friedrich. I wondered whether the guru was going to room with Richard or whether an exception to the plan would be made in this particular case. And I wondered why others always got luckier with such things than I did.

  Janne, of course, wasn’t upstairs. I went back down the steps, my hand again sliding on the now-warmed wood of the banister. I’d last seen her just after our arrival as she disappeared behind the door to her assigned room on the ground floor. The guru carried her suitcase in after her.

  I knocked on the door.

  She answered, sounding cheerful and welcoming. With a vague sense of gratification that she was feeling at ease, I turned the doorknob. Janne’s wheelchair was in front of the wardrobe and she was sorting her things. Girls, I thought. I never would have thought to unpack the week’s worth of clothes I had.

  “Can I help?” I asked.

  She nodded.

  I took a hanger off the rod and handed it to her. She put it into the neck of one of her dresses, smoothed it out, and gave it back to me. I hung it up. So it went, until, after the seventh dress, I couldn’t restrain myself any longer.

  “How long are planning to stay here? Or are you going to change before every meal?”

  “You have a problem with that?”

  Eventually we emptied the suitcase. I looked at the hanging dresses with their lace and flowers and puffy sleeves. It looked like the costume closet at my old theater group that Lucy had taken care of. She was handy at it. We sure were a committed group back then. Oddly enough, Lucy didn’t mind at all staying behind the scenes and taking the old clothes home to wash and iron, all of which she had found at secondhand shops and flea markets. Her name didn’t even make the program, and neither did the names of many others who, I now realized, worked a lot harder than I did to make our shows possible. And my face was on every ticket. Mustn’t they all have hated me?

  “You fit in pretty well in a place like this,” I said.

  Janne smiled, flattered.

  I sat down on the bed without asking. Without the webcams she must have felt like something was missing. The guru’s dilettantish handheld camera was surely no substitute. There was a dresser with a mirror next to the window, there was a brush and other girlie stuff on it. Suddenly I felt emotional. I reached out my hand and tried to catch Janne’s fingers as she rolled past me.

  “Do you like me?” she asked, looking me in the eyes.

  I turned away. Her gaze was as sharp as a knife. A frilly, flowery razor blade.

  “You are very pretty,” I said. I would’ve loved to have said something that would have surprised her a bit.

  I wanted to kiss her again. If I was honest, that was exactly the reason I was here. The only reason and at the same time the most pressing reason. I wanted to kiss Janne. I didn’t need to do anything else for the whole week. Maybe even for my whole life.

  I pulled her close.

  She lifted an eyebrow, her arm tensed. She gave me a look that was both skeptical and coquettish, as if she didn’t want to make it too easy for me. That was certainly not the way you looked at someone you were scared of. But then again there probably weren’t many people she was scared of.

  All this thinking was taxing my brain. I didn’t want to think anymore. In the hospital, with all the bandages that had made me into a mummy, I didn’t have much else to do but think. So I’d laid there and my thoughts had swirled until I got dizzy. Sometimes I tried to quiet them with music or an audiobook, but my thoughts were always louder than whatever I put on. Nothing had ever tested me like that before.

  I tilted my head and shook it, as if the memories might fall out of my ear, then I leaned over to Janne and kissed her. She turned away and I grazed the tip of her nose and a little of her cheek, delicate and covered with an invisible fluff. Her skin tasted more bitter than it had the first time. But she smelled of limes once again, fresh and fragile like a flower that was so delicate it was threatened if you so much as breathed on it. She pushed me away and hid her face.

  “Is that why you came?” she asked.

  “It’s not why you came?”

  I thought she was going to be mean now but she just laughed.

  “Where is Marlon anyway?” she asked.

  No, anything but that! It was the one sentence that could not have been said at this moment. I gasped for air.

  “What do you want with him? He can’t even see you.”

  She glared at me contemptuously. It was the kind of look that should have frightened me. The fear I saw in other people’s eyes was nothing compared to this.

  “Tell him that I want to see him. If it’s no bother. And now piss off.”

  “Good evening to you as well.” I slammed the door behind me.

  Obviously I didn’t say anything to Marlon. I wasn’t Mother Teresa. I let him continue to relax in our shared room in the pensive pose of a corpse at a public viewing. Our shared room—just thinking of that made my stomach churn. I probably couldn’t have stood to share a room even with Janne.

  “Spoiled only child,” stated the guru with the knowing and overly-kind smile that I had learned to hate. He was looking at his camera, checking out the footage he’d already shot, but he hid the display from me. I had sought him out to complain again. What I would have really liked to do was to take the camera away and make everything better. I’d long since realized what a dilettante he must have been. If the others didn’t get it, that was their problem.

  He pointed the camera at me.

  “Yes, I’m a spoiled only child,” I said into the lens but hadn’t even finished saying it before it occurred to me that it was factually inaccurate. Technically I wasn’t an only child. I had a little brother.

  I’d never seen him except in photos that Claudia showed me years ago. A naked baby stumbled around in the pictures. I had refused to tolerate any of it. I wanted nothing to do with the baby because I didn’t want anything to do with my father, either, who’d had a heart full of love for our au pair and balls full of speedy sperm that destroyed my peaceful only-child existence forever.

  My father came to Berlin a few times, supposedly to meet up with me.
I figured he must have just had business meetings there. For Claudia’s sake I went with him once to the zoo and once to the natural history museum. We’d sat on a park bench and eaten ice cream, which even then didn’t taste very good to me, and he wanted to show me a picture of this other boy whose father he had become. I had asked him why he was sitting there with me if he had another son. Having more than one son at the same time seemed absurd to me. He coughed oddly and then took a big bite of his ice cream cone. It must have hurt his teeth given the way he had grimaced.

  Later on he wrote me a letter and for my birthday and Christmas sent me first Legos and later money. I didn’t answer the letter because I was too polite to write the things I really thought. I accepted the gifts.

  Then came the Rottweiler. Claudia told me that my father had come to the hospital immediately. Once. It had been hard for him, Claudia said.

  “I’m a spoiled only child,” I repeated. But the guru was already walking down the stairs with the camera.

  The guru had been bluffing. On the first night, he cooked. Veal cutlets wrapped in bacon, green beans, baked potatoes, and for dessert homemade panna cotta with raspberry sauce. I was so hungry that I nearly choked as I greedily wolfed down the delicacies. My stomach was cramping up.

  “You should be a chef,” I said to the guru. “This is your true calling.”

  He looked across the table at me with sad dachshund eyes.

  I had seated myself between Friedrich and Richard. Janne was across from me. Although she seemed to be eating the whole time, the amount of food on her plate never actually diminished. We’d waited forever for this dinner and had basically not had anything else all day. When Friedrich had tried to complain about it the guru had answered that he should walk to the nearest grocery store and get himself something. Friedrich looked out at the woods with his eyes squinting skeptically. When nobody was willing to go with him, he stayed in the villa and bugged everyone with his grumbling stomach.

  “Do you always eat so much?” Richard asked Friedrich over my head.

  Friedrich shook his head. “Usually more.”

  I took a second helping and thought with a full mouth that the guru wasn’t such a bad guy. Something was off about him, something major, but you could say that about almost everyone these days. With a full belly it was tough to concentrate on what a pain the coming week would be. I almost began to look forward to it.

  Until my gaze fell on Marlon. He was sitting next to Janne. She had asked him to take the spot next to her as soon as he’d shown up. Me on the other hand she had not asked. He had only just then finally—and heroically—rousted himself from bed. Now he was sitting next to her and guiding small bites into his mouth with his fork while I waited for him to spill something on himself.

  I tried to look at them in a relaxed, benevolent way, and was successful until Janne stroked Marlon’s arm and whispered something in his ear.

  I’d had enough at that point. I threw my fork onto the table. It fell clattering to the floor.

  “What’s the plan for the week?” asked Kevin.

  “Do we have one?” asked Marlon, and I could see how Janne’s warm breath tousled his hair.

  While the guru, still wearing his chef’s apron, explained the various outings to the churches and cow stalls of the area, I stood up and picked the camera up from the counter. I turned it on and walked around the table. I wanted to do it for Janne, so she could continue to think that she’d come out of this a star, or at least come out of her YouTube ghetto. If it made her so happy to have people look at her.

  The truth is, I found it fun to shoot video. I zoomed in on the plates. On Friedrich’s greasy glistening lips. On Janne’s hand, which had wandered into the crook of Marlon’s arm. Looking through the display I no longer saw it as something that drove me crazy but rather as a thrilling visual motif. I zoomed in on Janne’s full plate. She’d eaten only the beans and cut off a tiny piece of her veal cutlet. It was the only plate that wasn’t eaten completely clean.

  She’s anorexic on top of it all, I thought. Then I zoomed in on her fingers playing with Marlon’s arm, and my compassion had reached its limit.

  I was so engrossed that I totally missed the guru’s lecture on what our collective purpose was here. I watched Janne’s face in the display. And it was clear as day that she didn’t like the sound of the plans. She wanted to stay at the villa. The guru said, no problem, then the others would be the only ones on camera.

  Bull’s-eye.

  I pointed the camera at the guru’s face. I zoomed in to get the little wrinkles around his eyes. He was older than I had first thought, and no longer as frantic as at the start. But he still didn’t look exactly relaxed, more like a nervous, tattered teddy bear. His lips were closed tightly and the corners of his mouth drooped. It wouldn’t have surprised me if he was just gone one morning and we found out that the rent for the villa had not been paid and all our valuables were gone.

  I turned off the camera and sat down again at my place at the table. The platter of potatoes was empty. So was the pan with the veal. Friedrich, I thought angrily, and looked across the table at Janne’s plate.

  “Are you finished with that? Can I have it?”

  She pushed it across to me without looking at me. I ate it with her fork, which was still on her plate, and looked at her the whole time, until she shook her head contemptuously.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Nothing. You’re so young and yet already such an asshole.”

  That summed things up perfectly.

  There was a wood fireplace in the house but no dishwasher. So it fell to Friedrich to build a fire and to me to wash the dishes. We both protested, but the guru acted like a dictator and wouldn’t discuss it. He untied his apron and handed it to me. I took it and threw it on the table. Then I set up in front of the sink.

  “It’s been ten years since I washed a dish by hand.”

  “Then it’s about time.” He watched as Friedrich put a big, round log into the fireplace and pulled a long match out of the pack. It hissed, then broke off, and Friedrich dropped the box of matches and the long matchsticks went all over the floor.

  I wasn’t sure if I would have done any better, which is why I didn’t laugh.

  I let hot water run into the sink and dribbled in dish soap. Marlon was still sitting at the table. It was almost as if he wanted to watch me. The guru clicked his tongue in commiseration as Friedrich screwed up his fifth attempt to light a match and shoved a dish towel into Marlon’s hand.

  “Help Marek dry the dishes.”

  To my surprise, Marlon didn’t object. He came over and stood next to me, too near in fact, and I moved over a little. I put dripping wet dishes into his hand. He dried them and stacked them on the counter. The guru documented the cooperation between Blind and Deformed.

  I dunked my hand into the warm foamy water and watched as Richard went over to the fireplace with a few sticks and a piece of paper. He pushed aside the nearly-sobbing Friedrich, kneeled down, and stacked the twigs into a sort of tent. Soon enough flames were dancing behind the glass doors, which Richard wiped clean with a damp cloth.

  “Nicely done, Richard,” called the guru, and you could clearly hear the former kindergarten teacher in him. “Don’t worry about it, Friedrich.”

  Richard gave him an annoyed look and the guru fell silent, embarrassed. Then suddenly a smile spread across Richard’s face. Behind me I heard the sound of Janne’s wheels on the wood floor.

  “Are you cold?” asked Richard standing up to let Janne get close to the fire. She shook her head but did pull closer to the fire and stared at the flames. If she had stared at a lake the same way I would have grabbed her to keep her from jumping in. The guru turned the camera around. She straightened her shoulders and pushed a lock of black hair from her forehead.

  Marlon had heard her, too. His whole body had tense
d. I had the feeling he was vibrating.

  “Will it take you much longer?” Janne asked him as if he were all alone.

  He can’t see how much is left, I nearly said. Though he had probably been counting the plates. What did I know about how he perceived the world. What did any of us know about each other.

  “We’re done,” we said simultaneously.

  “Have you seen my room yet?” Janne asked Marlon. “Would you like to?”

  “Yes,” answered Marlon, and then it got so quiet that we could hear the fire crackling.

  I didn’t get a wink of sleep that night. I thrashed around in bed, threw off the covers, picked them up off the floor, opened the window, closed it again. I barely managed to sit still for ten minutes. My heart felt as if it were beating in my throat and threatened to stay there. I turned to the wall so I wouldn’t have to look at Marlon’s empty bed. The bedspread with the lemons and parrots was still on it, the pillow was still indented in the shape of the back of Marlon’s head.

  Marlon was with Janne. The whole night. I forbid myself to leave the room and creep around the villa. To put my ear to Janne’s door. To storm in there and smash everything to bits. A few times I couldn’t hold back the tears and I cried for a couple minutes like a wounded animal—until I stuffed a corner of the blanket in my mouth. Outside it was quiet and I felt like the last human being on earth.

  Marlon’s bag sat there still unpacked next to his bed. On his nightstand was an iPod with headphones. I couldn’t think of anything better than to throw it out the window. It smacked with a dull sound into the flowerbed.