Third Class Superhero (3 page)

From the corner of our street I can see up into Henry's window on the second floor—the dark room, the toxic blue flicker of the television.

I decide to float up to his window and surprise him. I hover for a few seconds, testing out my balance. How does it feel? Like you would expect it to feel. Better than sex. And not all that different. I want to rise, but I don't know how. Look up? Point up, with my fist, like Superman? But before I know it, I'm rising. As my head comes into view, I figure Henry is going to scream. I worry about him having a heart attack. I'm levitating outside his window. The window is open. He sees me and says hi.

"Come take a look at this," he says, pointing to his television. "This guy accidentally swallowed his own hand." He doesn't seem to notice what I'm doing.

"Henry," I say. His eyes are fixed on the screen.

"Henry, look at me. I did it. I can fly." He looks over.

"No shit."

He gets up off the futon and walks to the window. I ask him if he wants to go for a spin.

"I thought you said you didn't make it this year?"

"It's complicated," I say. "But I made it. I'm Class Three. A genuine superhero." Henry knows I'm lying before I even finish.

"I don't know what you did, Nathan. But you can still fix it. You're not a kid anymore, but you can fix it. Don't end up like me." I tell him I don't know what he's talking about.

"You shouldn't have done it for me," he says.

Truth is, I didn't. I did it for myself. I hurt people, people who were kind to me, better people than I am. I hurt them to get something I wanted. I was the bad guy in this story. And I know it. But I wish I wasn't a bad guy. Do I get points for that? What does that make me? What kind of guy?

Henry gets on my back and we take off. Slowly, a little wobbly at first, but then smooth and fast. Flying up there with him, looking down on the alleys, the clothes drying on the clotheslines, the small concrete backyards of the city, past the city limits, to the foothills, up over the smog, I'm flying, look at me, a bad guy in a good-guy costume, no more rules.
Dear Applicant. Your help is not needed. The world is just fine without you.
That's fine with me. Fine with me that my saga isn't epic. I'm not a superhero. I'm background. I'm a good person wrapped in a mediocre soul. I want to be better. I really do. But even now in my greatest moment I know this is as good as it will ever get for me and it's not that good. I have a small heart, a dark heart, a heart filled with exactly equal amounts of good and evil, one that is weak and will take us only so far, but for now it propels us higher and higher and higher.

Things are basically all right. I'm basically a good person. Above average, for sure. It's not always easy to know what to do. I don't know if I have a system or at least some rules or even one single rule that I follow consistently. I guess I just sort of make it up as I go along. Which is working out so far. Not so bad. I mean, considering. When I come to a place where I am forced to make a difficult choice, I draw a decision tree. If the state of affairs can be described by P, then Q. If X, then Y. If Y, then Z. And so on. Our employee handbook sets forth the official Corporate Epistemology, sponsored by Hartford Life & Mutual: the Rule of 80/20. You can get 80 percent of the way to the answer with 20 percent of the work. Good enough is good enough.

"What now?" my wife says. She says this at least once a week.

"We could get a dog."

"We have a dog."

I've got twenty-five, thirty years left. Thirty-five— maybe—maybe—if I quit with the smoking. "I don't want to outlive you," my wife says. We both know she will. It's temporary, what we've got going, and we plan accordingly.

The Realtor is showing us our dreams.

"Private, affordable, midrange," he says. I never thought I'd have midrange dreams.

We're deep in Sunday Afternoon. This neighborhood is called Luxury Car Commercial. Absolute last place I ever thought we'd be.

When we met, my wife was Pretty Girl in Import Beer Commercial. The night was young, the bar was full but not crowded, the aesthetic was clean, sleek, spare. No words were spoken. The city streets were empty and safe and artfully lit. The demos worked: 24–29 for me; she was l8–24; and we were in the same disposable-income bracket. She left before I could get her number.

The next morning, I saw her in Café/Lifestyle. She was on her cell phone and I was using my personal connectivity device. I felt Nationwide, Hopeful, Technological.
Everyone is connected,
said the Movie Star Spokeswoman, walking behind the baristas, adding depth to the mise-en-scène.
Everyone.

I smiled at Pretty Girl over the top of my caffeinated beverage and she smiled back. The Spokeswoman regarded us with benevolent disdain. Young, thin people coming together under a common brand-self-image-identification. Love in the time of logos and franchises. A match made on Madison Avenue.

Pretty Girl and I moved in together, spent a couple of years in Mental Environment, Urban Utopia Variety.

We lived in coffee shops and wireless zones and worked flextime and walked around on the street a lot. We were part of a One Nation Calling Plan. More pedestrians per square mile than anywhere else on earth, all neatly dressed. Pressed khakis for the men. Vibrant sweater sets for the women, who were racially ambiguous and trim and nonthreateningly smooth-faced, uniformly high-cheekboned.

Before long, we longed for the suburbs, longed for Leather, Safety, and Comfort Starting at Under $32,000. The feeling, the frisson, what the philosophers call
Touring Sedan.
A primal feeling.

Which is how we got here.

"It's never too soon to start thinking about the unthinkable," the Realtor says. He pulls out a comb and runs it through his already-combed hair.

We don't need the Good Life. The Pretty Good Life would be just fine.

"Nice neighborhood," I try to convince my wife.

A quarter mile down, the street ends and turns into a winding solitary road leading into nothingness. The Realtor says that's normal for this part of Car Commercial.

"Life is about choices," the Realtor says.

"It's a little existential for us," my wife says, popping a Euphorozil.

I'm thirty-two. Or fifty-two. Or forty-two. I can't remember. Whichever one, I'm in it now. In for the duration. The long haul, the long slog. The big game. Middle age. Didn't realize until a couple of years in that it had started, and at first, I admit, it didn't seem so bad. Kind of exciting. Life-building. Dream-building. Nest-egg construction. The Grand Plan, the Master Timetable. A mortgage, thirty-year. The Big Calendar in the Sky, days like boxes, getting X-ed out one by one. Pushing the boulder up the incline. My Whole Life. The Whole Shebang. Things go fast. The decades, they get away from you. Things can get bad quicker than you think. Quicker than I thought. Mistakes count permanently. Buying things we don't want to feel closer to the things we know we can't get. The thirties and forties. The long run. The lifelong conversation. Somewhere in here we'll get incredibly lost, wander around in the desert, and get spit out on the other side of fifty-nine and a half, into the land of penalty-free-IRA-withdrawal, looking around like we just popped out of a quarter-century fun-park water slide tube, thinking,
Where am I, how did I get here, can I do it again?

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.