Alina Bronsky - Just Call Me Superhero

“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.