Alina Bronsky - Just Call Me Superhero

“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.”

My 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.

I heard my own teeth grinding.

Richard had detached his prosthesis and was doing something to his stump. I couldn’t help but watch. The guru turned the camera away from Friedrich and pointed it at the detached leg laying on the grass.

“No,” said Richard.

The guru lowered the camera. He hadn’t expected it all to be so difficult.

“How did you find us anyway,” I asked. “Did you use a specific strategy to get each of us here? Each one lured with something you thought would be interesting to us? Did you research our family and friends? Did we unknowingly pass some sort of casting process as particularly qualified cripples? Or is it all coincidence?”

“Coincidence is just the pseudonym God uses when he wishes to remain incognito,” declared the guru with frustration as he covered the lens with a plastic lens cap.

“I’ve always wanted to learn how to throat sing,” said Kevin. “I think it’s unbelievably mean of you to trick me into this with false promises.”

The guru looked as if he could live with it.

“What do you think of this,” Marlon asked suddenly and sang a song I didn’t know. I didn’t even know what language it was in. Bright vowels held together by barely audible consonants wafted over my head. I felt dizzy. I lay back on the grass and closed my eyes. For a moment I forgot everything that had happened to me.

“I’m getting more and more yellow because my liver barely functions anymore,” said Friedrich. “It’s because of all the medications that I have to take.”

“Poor thing,” said the guru. “That’s really a shame.”

We were sitting on plastic chairs at a little round table. The guru had invited us to an ice cream parlor to try to lighten the atmosphere. It was the same one where I’d tried to shed a few tears.

The camera was rolling. It was pointed at the young woman in the black waiter’s uniform as she balanced our ice cream bowls on a tray and tried to squeeze her way to the table between the legs of chairs and Janne’s wheelchair. I leaned forward to hide my face. I was afraid she might drop the tray on my head otherwise. She kept her eyes trained on the ice cream and didn’t notice anything until she had safely set down the last bowl on the wobbly table and then looked up.

I wondered whether the camera had captured everything. The interested glance at Marlon. The annoyed jealous look at Janne. The puzzled look at Richard. The disgusted look at Kevin and Friedrich, who was still talking nonstop about his innards.

And then the look at me.

She had no way of knowing I had been watching her the whole time. That behind my sunglasses I was looking directly into her suddenly wide eyes. She tripped over Janne’s wheelchair and back to the counter. The others reached out their hands for their ice cream bowls and avoided looking at me. Even Janne stared into her ice cream with embarrassment.

“This could be a great film,” said Richard after a pause. And then to me: “You’ll be the star.”

“I’ve already been the star once, thanks,” I said.

Janne’s face turned to me. For minutes on end, longer than ever before. I stared at my hands so as not to frighten her.

“What happened to the dog?” she asked.

“Shot,” I said.

“And the owner went to jail?”

“No,” I said. “He got a suspended sentence.”

“And what have you been doing since then?”

“Nothing,” I said. “I haven’t been home for long.”

“How long?” asked Marlon.

“Maybe half a year. Or a bit more. After the operations I was in a rehab center for a while.”

“That’s a long time,” said Janne, running her hand pensively over her knee. She had very thin fingers. I wanted to touch her hand. She was probably cold. A ring would look beautiful on one of those long fingers, I thought, a heavy ring with a big stone, the kind Claudia liked to wear. Except they didn’t suit her because she had short, fat fingers.

I imagined putting one of Claudia’s rings onto Janne’s finger.

“Do you play piano?” I asked.

She ignored the question.

“I play the flute,” said Friedrich.

I have no idea why I rang my own doorbell. Maybe just to hear the shrill sound from outside. Nobody was there anyway. I had a key in my pocket; I’d been a latchkey kid since elementary school and it was something I was genuinely thankful to Claudia for.

The door opened and standing there was Johanna.

Life is full of coincidences, I thought ruefully. I had just been thinking about Johanna on the lawn earlier. And I hadn’t thought of her for years. Now here she was in front of me. I pulled my hat further down my face and straightened my sunglasses.

“You’ve gotten so tall,” she exhaled.

I let my gaze drop. “And you’ve gotten so pregnant.”

She blushed. It looked as if she had swallowed a basketball. I looked farther down: her dress was short like back then, her kneesocks striped. She looked like an over-ripened Pippi Longstocking. She’d been studying something social-minded for years, if I remembered correctly.

“Can I come in?” I asked.

She stepped to the side. “It’s your home after all.”

“What are you doing here?”

“Frau Hermann’s not well.”

I managed for a moment to pry my gaze away from her belly.

“Is it serious?”

She didn’t answer.

It was strange that today of all days I had remembered our tongues entwining. What could bring a woman in her early twenties to kiss a fifteen-year-old? I mean, sure, I came across as older, she’d said so herself afterwards. I had not forgotten the way she looked at me that time.