Third Class Superhero (13 page)

All day at work, Janine thinks of the day to come, what can and will go wrong, deferring relaxation for anxiety and then deferring anxiety itself for a kind of pre-anxiety.

All day at work, Ivan thinks of Janine. Maybe. He types the word on his screen, doodles it on a notepad, says it quietly to himself in the elevator. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

In the evening, Ivan calls Janine. He dials slowly, waiting a full stop between each digit.

1.

3. 2. O.

5. 8. 6.

4. 9. 9. 1.

In the moment between the tone of the last digit being depressed and the first bell strike of the first ring, in that silent space when Ivan could hang up, Ivan tastes, for the first time since "maybe," that it might not work out for him, that he can still salvage the situation, delete the event of calling, keep the secret of his desire, in effect stop the coin in midair, freeze the dice in midbounce, keep the two Englishes as one, end the observation before it interferes with the measurement, preserve Schrödinger's half-cat, pull the string back, keep the numerator from falling into the denominator, keep the world from splitting into before and after, heads and tails, two possibilities and one actuality, before the universe knows there are desired outcomes and undesired outcomes and tells him what happens.

Which brings us to the actual reason Ivan has misunderstood Janine's highly technical use of the word "maybe." It is a problem beyond the reach of emotional statistics and more in the realm of another, yet to be discovered discipline.

Ivan thinks he wants Janine to say yes to a date with him. Ivan thinks he wants to call Janine, and to ask her on a date, and for Janine to weigh her choices and decide between Ivan and other men, Ivan and women, Ivan and no man or woman, Ivan and whatever's on television.

Ivan thinks he is awaiting the outcome of an event Z: what Janine will say to him after she picks up the phone.

What Ivan does not know, what Ivan could not possibly have known, is that Event Z depends on Event Y, which depends on Event X, and so on and so forth, until we get to Event A. And the outcome of Event A, which is what Ivan's really waiting for, is what Janine is waiting for, too.

Event A started ten years ago, when Janine was a junior at Lower Peninsula High School and she had braces and a crush on Brandon, sweeper on the boys' soccer team, who liked English class and so didn't really hang out with his teammates, instead choosing to read alone during lunch, which Janine noticed because she had just moved and started school at Lower Peninsula and also ate alone.

Event A goes like this: Around the time of the Halloween semiformal Sadie Hawkins dance, when Janine was working up the nerve to call Brandon, whose number she had cribbed from the bulletin board near the soccer coach's office, Janine's father, Mr. K., left for the weekend on business. This was routine: Mr. K. was in sales then and he often left for weeks on end without so much as a good-bye. Mrs. K. was madly in love with Mr. K. and called him every night on his cell phone at whatever roadside motel he was at, just to say good night. Janine liked to hear her father's voice and often dialed for her mother and said good night first before handing off the phone to Mrs. K.

Event A technically began when, on a clear, blue October night, just before Janine was going to call Brandon, she decided to call her father first. It was late on a Friday. The phone rang several times and then went to voice mail. And then Janine called again and again it was the same thing. Janine hung up and didn't say anything to her mother, who had been sitting in the next room and had figured out what had happened. Janine didn't call Brandon that night, or ever. Mother and daughter went to bed without a word to each other, too nervous, each not wanting to look the other in the eye.

That night Janine did not say her prayers and she did not drift off thinking about Brandon.
Janine and her mother lay awake in separate beds, in their own rooms, unaware that they were each waiting for Mr. K. to call. They didn't want to assume the worst. They didn't want to assume anything. There could have been any number of explanations for why Mr. K. did not answer the phone late on a Friday night: bathroom, outside for a smoke, taking a drive to relax, shower. There could have been any number of explanations except for the fact that Mr. K. had, in 2,143 previous calls, never not picked up the phone when Mrs. K or Janine called. In fact, he had never failed to pick up the phone on the first ring.

Janine didn't think about this. She just waited. At some point, she must have fallen asleep because she woke up to the smell of French toast and her mother calling to her to come down. Her father had not called. So the two women each pretended they had a busy day ahead of them, and Janine ate her breakfast quickly and practically ran out of the house, and Janine and her mother each went to a different park and waited, though neither of them said anything to the other about it. They waited the next day, too. And just like that, a weekend slipped by without Janine noticing that her life had been put on hold. She had not called Brandon, she had not done any homework, she had not talked to or even looked at her mother. Those things could wait until she found out where her father had been on Friday and Saturday nights.

And on Sunday evening, when Janine heard her father's car pulling into the driveway, sounding no different, no less devoted, no more adulterous than when it had left two days ago, Janine felt a huge tide of relief wash over her. She felt silly for having assumed the worst, embarrassed even. Ashamed.

But when Mr. K. gave Mrs. K. a hug but not a kiss, it all started again. Janine had never seen her father do that. Mrs. K. had never seen it either, and she waited for her husband to come back into the room and start laughing, and kiss her and explain that it was a joke, and also explain where he had been. But he didn't. Upstairs they could hear the shower and hear him singing.

Just like that, Event A on Friday got linked to Event B, and now Janine was waiting for two answers. One moment Janine was perfectly happy, anchored to the linear sequence of successes and failures, days beginning and ending. The next moment she was adrift, waiting for answers, waiting for outcomes. There was no big event. No deaths, no parent running away, no explosive argument. A non-event, actually. Just a missed phone call. Just however it happens that people stop living days and events start overlapping, start getting tied into each other. The decision of whether Janine was going to allow herself to feel okay with things was dependent on some event a few hours away. And day by day it got pushed back moment by moment until it was firmly rooted in the next day. A few events in a day, a few days in a row, a few months go by, and then it's seventeen years later. Event A, Event B, Events C, D, E, and so on until we get to Event Z, which is where Ivan comes in, wondering what "maybe" means, not knowing he's waiting on the outcome of a chain of events that started almost two decades ago. Ivan, having pushed the last digit in Janine's number, has no idea what he is tying himself into, as he waits by the phone for an answer.

The phone rings.

The first ring is an eruption, a breach of the silence that seems interminable. Janine wants to pull the cord from the wall so it will stop. Then the ring is over. Janine breathes heavily, hand on the receiver, hoping there are no more, hoping it will just go away.

The second ring. It seems louder than the first. Now Janine's reaction is the opposite—to pick it up, to answer it, to let Ivan know, to let the other side know, to let the world know that someone is waiting.

But why should she have to pick it up? Why should she be the outcome, the right half of the equation, the answer at the back of the statistics book, the coin uncovered on the back of someone's hand?

The third ring. Why does it have to be Janine who decides? Why can't she just pitch her lot in with his? Why not wait to see if the phone stops ringing? Why not wait to see what she will be forced to do if the phone just won't stop ringing?

The fourth, fifth, and sixth rings. Events EE, FF and GG.

Rings 7, 8, 9, 10. HH, II, JJ, KK.

Rings 11 through 100. All tied together, hanging in a web. This is what Ivan is waiting for when he calls, all of it, going back to that Friday night when Janine sat, nervous about calling Brandon, waiting to hear her father's words of advice. Ivan could not have known this. Ivan could not have known the cutting edge of emotional statistical theory: the theory that there are ten billion universes out there, similar to ours, each containing an Ivan G. and a Janine K. Ten billion Janines wait by ten billion phones, ten billion Ivans hold ten billion receivers, with ten billion suns setting on ten billion Earths. In each universe, the phone rings. It rings and it rings and it rings. It rings.

Ivan could not have known the theory that explains what "maybe" means, that explains where the number 32.0586499!% comes from. The theory that of these ten billion universes, there are 3,205,864,99! in which Janine picks up the phone and says yes. Yes, yes, yes: 3,000,000,000 in which she has already picked up, 205,000,000 in which they are happily flirting, 860,000 in which they are making plans for a date, 4,900 in which they are having dinner, 90 in which they are looking deep into each other's eyes, and one universe—one in ten billion, one alternate universe—in which they have fallen immediately and irreversibly in love. Of these ten billion universes, there are some kinds in which she says yes, allows herself to be loved, and some kinds in which she doesn't, and some kinds in which it is Ivan who does the loving, and some in which it isn't. She wonders if the phone might just ring forever. She waits to see which kind of universe they are in.

Chapter 1: Miscellaneous Intervals Involving My Mother

The structure of a proper good-bye works like this: There is a designated moment of leaving and there is a fixed quantity of wistfulness and usually the latter runs out just as the former comes to pass, resulting in neatly packaged episodes that build up to moments of emotional resonance to be dissected upon later reflection, when the details have been forgotten and stories can be made up.

***

Some Notes on the Premature Good-bye

Sometimes, however, before the moment of leaving but after the decision to leave, there is a brief span of time, ranging from a few seconds to several minutes, when I am no longer present in, yet not quite absent from, my mother's house.

What happens is that we run out of things to say to each other, run out of ways to say I miss you and you mean everything to me and so on, and we end up just staring off into the backyard at the ivy plants and our rusting lawn chairs. What starts out as the longing for home weakens into longing for the idea of home, which erodes into longing for the sake of longing, which eventually exhausts itself.

We drift into different rooms. We wander around the house. We pretend to look for things. We pretend to forget things and sit around pretending to try to remember what we're pretending to look for. We even pretend to look for things and then realize we've actually lost them. This is how we waste our time together: minute by minute.

***

Some Titles of Stories I Would Like to Write Someday

The Story of My Mother

My Mother: The Uncollected Stories

The Definitive Story of the Particular Sadness of My

Mother

***

2m 06s

Another source of waste: time spent thinking about lost time. It goes like this:

Every Sunday night at eight, when it is almost time for me to leave, I start to regret all the time I have wasted. Instead of talking to my mother, getting to know her, I have done nothing. Sat in front of the television. Looked through old baseball cards.

I start to think about lost time and this leads me to think about the fact that I am thinking about lost time, which leads me to realize that I will want it all back someday, all of which makes me start to regret the lost time spent thinking about lost time. Which leads me right back to where I started. And so on and so forth, until it's time for me to go.

***

Some Notes from the Seventeenth Draft of a Story Entitled "Tying My Shoelaces While My Mother Looks On
"

It takes, on average, eleven seconds for me to: (i) notice the untied shoelace, (ii) bend down, (iii) tie it, and (iv) check the knot on my other shoe for soundness. These eleven seconds are spent in silence.

Assuming one of my shoes comes untied approximately one out of every ten times I visit, in a typical year I spend an extra fifty-five seconds with my mother due to untied shoelaces.

***

(0m 11s)

(I once had a dream in which I saw my whole life, past and future, spread out before me like a deck of playing cards fanned across a table. It was wondrous. There must have been millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of cards—my whole life—subdivided into slices of exactly eleven seconds. But the feeling of wonder quickly gave way to a sickening panic as I looked closer and realized each and every piece was incomplete, cut by some devious method, some demon algorithm, some perfectly evil genius, in such a way that no one card was a self-contained moment. Someone had managed it so that any single piece was completely worthless, a stretch of perfect insignificance that made no sense, gave no solace, offered no closure.)

***

Some Notes on the Equivalence of Time

I woke from the dream, my shirt heavy with sweat, and I knew this: Someday all those thin and delicate cards, lined up in their unique and pristine order, will be scattered, once and for all. Every last bit of fine structure, every intricate local pattern, violently and permanently erased. Any apparent design revealed as illusory. The entirety of the sixty or seventy odd years I had been given to spend with my mother, to make her feel less alone, will have been wasted, spent cataloging, anatomizing, epiphanizing.

At that moment, nothing in the world seemed half as absurd as trying to turn a sliver of life into, of all things, a
short story.
Where there had been tantalizing promises, near-connections, ephemeral and minute narrative arcs, one day there will be just a massive pile of my life, my mother's life, our lives together, severed into countless eleven-second pieces.