Third Class Superhero

by Charles Yu

  We're going to get through this, is what I tell my wife.

  "Of course we are," she says. "Or, we won't." The Excluded Middle. It's times like this that I know she hates me.

  We go downtown. To Antidepressants. For dinner. The sidewalks here are interrupted by lush green meadows. Butterflies are everywhere. It's bright bright green and yellow, Sad and Happy like colors, with a gritty gray undertone, as if you could wipe away the world like condensation on a windshield and see the real thing underneath. A verdigris of biochemical equilibrium.

  "I make good money," I say, or ask. I'm not sure. "At least there's that."

  After we got married, I got my MBA, got a job in Assurance. Reassurance, really. It's all about strategy and decisions and foresight and Regret Minimization. Planning, really. The allocation of scarce resources. Like time with grandkids. Working it out, years and dollars, so they run out at the same time.

  It's hard to explain all this—at cocktail parties I just say consulting. But of course it would be a great injustice, a massive understatement, to say that the Firm does consulting.

  We do consulting. We do so much more.

  We envision bold new e-solutions. We help you to create a vision of the future.

  We are a forward-thinking global consultancy utilizing a unique, proven value-added approach that delivers a rapid and measurable return on your IT investment. With a one-of-a-kind, ROI-focused methodology.

  We do vertical integration, storage solutions, industrial automation. Supply chain logistics. Outsourcing. Insourcing. Organizational change. Knowledge flow optimization. eCRM. Supply chain management.

  We do:

  Marketing

  PR

  Proxy solicitation

  Securities underwriting

  M&A advisory

  Reinsurance

  Brand management

  Risk management

  Asset management

  Management management

  We also do copies, toilet paper rolls, toilet seat sanitary covers, urinal cakes, staplers, digital scanners, shredding, and dicing. Want to beat the'S&P? Crush the'S&P? We can help beat. We can help crush.

  "Today is a new day," says the Corporate Gestalt on my morning commute.

  The perpetually rising sun is still rising as I drive from the City Where I Actually Live, over the bridge, into the City Where I Want To Be. The dry, cool, still air smells of rich, full-bodied Ethiopian coffee beans and money. The buildings in this city are timeless, impervious. Upper Midlevel Executives stride purposefully to the beat of their own soundtracks, their eyes fixed into the near future.

  Corporate headquarters is a twenty-building campus, bounded by Hope and Opportunity to the north, Change to the west and east, and Billboard County to the south. The temperature at HQ is kept at 64.3 degrees Fahrenheit.

  My wife wants me to quit. She says it's killing me.

  She's wrong. It's already killed me.

  I look at her and I don't feel a thing.

  How can I tell her that? I look at her and I know she's perfect, I know it, and I don't feel a thing. I love her, really, for real, and I don't feel a thing. The temperature inside me is kept at 64.3 degrees Fahrenheit. I work in the Mostly Empty World. It's morning and the sun is making its way over my personal horizon. I'm global. My clients are global. The nation is asleep and the city is hitting snooze but I'm at my desk, twenty-four ounces of piping hot buzzing pure fuel in front of me.

  "The possibilities are infinite," says the Corporate Weltanschauung.

  I shower, get dressed for work. My wife is sitting at the kitchen table. I fumble around the pantry.

  "I'll make you something," she says. "Toast."

  "Did I have toast yesterday?"

  "What was yesterday?" she asks.

  We go weeks, years, putting off whatever it was we had started doing when we first started out doing whatever we had intended to do. When we first started out together. Young and stupid. Somewhere, our lifetime to-do list is sitting in a drawer. What is it we were going to do? We had plans, I think.

  We work. We sleep.

  I wake up in the middle of the night.

  My wife is staring at me.

  "What now?" she says.

  We plan a vacation.

  We want to see the Other. The travel agent sends us literature, glossies, video brochures.

  We choose a package deal with Authentic Experiences™.

  According to the brochure, there are five kinds of Experience: Urban, Rural, Semirural, Ethnic, and Ethnic with Danger. Standard Endangerment is Mild or Implied, but those in the know understand they may inquire discreetly about Actual Hazard—e.g., I've heard there might be something more? whispered into the ear of a client services representative (along with a slip of paper, folded and pressed into the palm, on which has been written a four- or even low five-figure sum)—for which damage waiver/general release forms will have to be signed and notarized and the seriousness of the individual assessed and validated using his or her response to the questionnaire essay What Is Wrong In The World Today? in fifty words or less. From the brochure, we have Eric, 27, investment banker:

  What Is Wrong In The World Today

  is that people are dying. Poor people. In other countries. People are dying every day, dying of death, and also disease and starvation and malnutrition. People are dying and my generation just does not care. Including me. But I want to care. I really want to. I want to care so bad.

  We book a Deluxe Package. We get our shots, passports, sunscreen.

  The puddle jumper lands deep in the jungle. We discover an electronic ticker flowing down the middle of the Amazon. A river of ferocious velocity. Billions of shares traded globally every second.

  A man with a briefcase drops down from a tree. We've taken a vacation to get away from Car Commercial and ended up in Life Insurance/Asset Management. It's ten times worse. The big time, big budget—it's Super Bowl Worthy.

  "My clients want an asset allocation strategy that takes the emotion out of their investment decisions," says the asset manager.

  My wife picks up a fallen tree branch, as if to crush his skull.

  "Your hopes and dreams," he says, raising an arm in defense. "A unique product tailored to fit the needs of each individual customer."

  "A lot of things remain unsaid between us," I say.

  "You need a management consultant," he says. "There are the obvious financial/metaphysical issues to think about, of course. And you want the whole thing to be dignified and tax-efficient."

  "What whole thing?" asks my wife. She turns to me.

  "What does he mean by 'whole thing'?"

  We check into the hotel.

  We do buffets. Midnight and breakfast. Lunch is sandwiches and iced teas on the Veranda of Opportunity. The hotel bar is open twenty-four hours a day.

  The concierge informs us:

  An informed client should carefully consider all relevant factors, including, but not limited to: the general political and socioeconomic climate, both domestically and abroad, historically low/high unemployment levels, gross inequality in the criminal justice system, buoyant consumer confidence, lack of self-confidence, frenzied retail spending, sneaky retail borrowing, questionable consumer credit, evil interest rates, cutesy consumer angst, generalized anxiety disorder, pseudoreligious financial services advertising mumbo jumbo, and market volatility.

  I call down to the spa to book us husband-and-wife massages.

  "You have great hands," I tell the masseuse.

  The masseuse says:

  I dream of the invisible hand. I want to outsource my manufacturing. I want to protect my family from unforeseen risks. I want to incorporate a transaction vehicle to effect a tax-free 368(a) reverse triangular merger. I want to define the boundaries of tomorrow. I want to live life one choice at a time. I want to map the possible. I want to test the untestable. I want to measure the profound. I want to fathom the unfathomable. I want what I want. A wholly owned subsidiary of Glo
bal Risk International. More than life insurance, less than a mutual fund.

  We check out the pool.

  The cabana boy asks me: Do I believe in an infinite power?

  The poolside bartender says: Past performance is no guarantee of future results. We consider a Day Trip. The Menu of Options is truly dizzying. At the top is:

  HOW TO SPEND YOUR TIME HERE

  The fine print reads:

  On a typical day, a man of your age, race, height, and moral fiber makes 4,817 distinct choices. When used in compliance with the instructions, the Basic Package guarantees a maximum of three Minor Errors and one Major Error per day. You also get three Take Backs and a midlife Do-Over.

  "When does the Authenticity start?" my wife says. "I want to have some Experiences."

  We make Excursions. We pay à la carte. We explore secret islands. We take detours off the Beaten Paths. We hide in caves. We cover ourselves with mud (extra charge). We eat more buffets.

  After a couple of weeks, ennui sets in. We are bored with paradise.

  "Let's go home," my wife says. "I want to go home."

  Home. I can picture it. We'll go back to our lives. We'll pull up the imported gravel driveway. I'll kick open the fancy imported door we bought for ourselves. It'll be Sunday Afternoon. It's always Sunday Afternoon there. Everything is perfect. Everything is fine. Ninetieth percentile. Golf is always on TV. A swirl of yearnings: a mixture of what I want, what I know I'll never have, what I am told to want, what I am afraid of, what doesn't exist. Every thirty, sixty, ninety seconds, the world completely changes. I will watch the golf, I will feel very Visit-Your-Lexus-Dealer-Today. A deep-down, in-your-gut feeling.

  Our vacation is ending, our vacation is over. We pack our bags. We wave good-bye to the resort.

  The captain comes on the PA. We buckle ourselves in.

  Just before takeoff, I lean over and whisper to my wife.

  "There's got to be more," I say.

  "What?" she says. The plane is roaring.

  "I said there has got to be more." I am screaming.

  Okay, buddy, she mouths back at me, lead the way.

  The Man Who Became Himself

  HE WAS TURNING into something unspeakable.

  At the office, people avoided the issue.

  David, they would say, how are you? You, they said. To be polite.

  Others noticed but pretended not to. As if they weren't always staring and whispering and wondering. Assuming it could never happen to them.

  David, for his part, played along, glad to make small talk. He asked about their children, looked at pictures of dogs and cats and trips to Tahoe. David moved his mouth, made the right sounds, gave people what they expected. The men talked about sports, mostly, and the women, if they could help it, didn't talk to him at all.

  ***

  IT HAD REALLY STARTED a month earlier. Or not.

  Whatever it was, if it was an it, it had started a month earlier.

  If it was more of a lack of an it, then it had stopped about a month earlier.

  Or started to stop. Or stopped starting. It had happened or not happened. Either way, something or nothing. Either way: about a month earlier.

  It or not-it was not any single change. It or not-it was a lot of changes, not all at once and not connected by any pattern or nonpattern.

  There was, for instance, the habit David had developed of referring to himself, daily and with increasing frequency, in the third person.

  "Everyone wants to know what David's going to do," he liked to say. Which was true. Everyone did, in fact, want to know what David was going to do. It wasn't arrogance. David was, without a doubt, arrogant, but it wasn't just arrogance. Still, this happened often enough that even David started to notice David referring to David as David.

  "I'm so sick of it," he said one night. This was near the end of the summer, during a late session at work. David was pacing in front of the whiteboard with a Magic Marker in his hand. "Everyone is always watching David." The members of his working group nodded in sympathy. He was their boss. Also, he had large quads and round, hard anterior delts. People were somewhat afraid of him.

  "You know what?" he continued. "I'll be honest. I don't know what David's going to do." He stopped and leaned over the table for emphasis. Eric from marketing was nodding like an idiot. David lowered his voice now, to drive the point home. He said, "David doesn't rush things," and then paused for effect, drawing even more vigorous nodding. "That's just not who David is."

  There was also the matter of his detachment from the goings-on of the world. This was both local and global. He hardly watched the news anymore. Names, places, statistics—they no longer held his interest. Likewise with water rights, tree frog biodiversity, the suffering of strangers. Things that used to matter to him: populist uprisings, malnutrition, the distribution of wealth. Nothing stirred him anymore.

  He had once cared.

  Cared deeply and, if not deeply, then, at the very least, cared mildly. Cared in an abstract, willing-to-sign-a-petition, NPR-listener sense of caring.

  Now the news just came and went, passed right through him. Now it all seemed so temporary, so specific, so far away.

  Just before Labor Day, David and Patricia were having their usual breakfast. They drank a pot of black coffee with heaps of sugar added. They each ate two slices of buttered toast and then split an orange while reading their respective sections of the newspaper. David always took the business page; Patricia browsed obituaries, then cooking. They read in silence.

  The phone rang. David did not look up from the stock quotes. Patricia answered.

  "It's for you," she said, handing it over.

  "Hello?" he said.

  "David Howe?" said the woman on the other end.

  And that was it.

  ***

  That wasn't when it happened, of course. But the day of the call was the day he remembered that, at some time in the recent past, something had happened. That, on some level, for some indefinite period of time, he had known, he had been aware, that this something had happened, although he was not sure what it was exactly.

  Two words. That was all he had heard her say. After that, he had stopped listening. Two words: David Howe.

  She had obtained David's name from a database of qualified individuals. She wanted to talk to him about an exciting new opportunity, about upside potential and risk-adjusted returns. She was good at her job and David could not get in a word for ten minutes. Finally, he hung up on her in midsentence.

  He did not think about the call again until later that night, lying awake in the dark. Patricia was making small fluttering noises through her delicate nostrils. A bird outside their second-floor window was trying to mimic her nose calls. Between the chirping creature and his wife's snoring, he could not fall asleep.

  David Howe.

  That's all she had said. It was just his name. Two words. A question, nothing more.

  But now he could not stop thinking about it, could not stop thinking about that moment, after she'd said it, when he'd held the phone, hands trembling, breath shallow and acidic, his vision suddenly blurry. Something in her voice, in her tone, the way she had said his name, had reached deep down and plucked something inside. That morning in the kitchen he had had a feeling, but could not quite put his finger on it and so he let it go. But now, lying in the gray middle of the night, it had come back to him. Now he could not think about anything but the call; now it was coming to him; now he remembered what had turned his fingers cold and his ears hot.

  She was calling for David Howe, but she was not calling for him.

  He remembered thinking, She has the wrong number, and wondering, Why is this woman calling my house, calling my number, why is she talking to me but asking for David? He tossed in bed for hours, got up to smoke cigarettes in the bathroom, held his head under the shower, smoked some more, the whole night back and forth, wondering how it was possible, wondering why she had called. He wondered and wondered and then,
in a flash of cold sweat, he remembered. He was David Howe.

  In the days after, he was shy, afraid of startling Patricia. He wasn't sure if she knew. If she did not, he wasn't sure he could explain, and even if he could figure out how to explain, he was not sure she would understand.

  At work, he observed the different ways in which people handled what they said, how people reacted to him. Some people called him David, and some, as noted, preferred the euphemism "you" to refer both to David and to him. Mostly, though, they ignored it. They talked about what had been on television the night before. People at the office hid their fear well, which he appreciated, considering what they were looking at, all of him just out there, in the open like that, for everyone to see.

  At home, it was a different story. He thought it, whatever it was, might go away before Patricia found out. He took measures to avoid her, but she made it easy. In the mornings, she woke up an hour before him, showered, drank a cup of coffee, and went to work. She was usually in bed by the time David got home. They went days with no more than a dozen words exchanged. Three, four days. A week. They barely spoke. The bills got paid, the garbage taken out to the curb. After a while, he realized she did not know. She either had not paid enough attention or he was succeeding in his efforts to conceal it, to conceal himself, the awful truth.