Just Call Me Superhero (3 page)

“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.

W
hen 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 started 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.

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.”

M
y 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.