Alina Bronsky - Just Call Me Superhero

I pushed past her.

“How are you?” she asked my back.

“You can see for yourself.”

“There’s worse things,” she mumbled. “You shouldn’t get too worked up about it.”

“Never. It’s just a face.”

For the next meeting the guru had asked us to come back to the meditation room at the family services center. This time he was punctual. We all were. Janne and Marlon were sitting there silently. Friedrich was chatting with Kevin about nightmares. Richard was reading the paper again.

The chair between him and Kevin was free.

“Hi, Marek,” said Janne smiling. I nearly missed the chair and fell on the floor.

“Hi, Janne.” My face tingled. Richard folded up his paper and looked at me for a long time.

“People, this isn’t going to work,” said the guru suddenly.

I had nearly forgotten he was there. He was sitting there on his chair, small and long-nosed and looking a little too distraught.

“I’m sorry, people,” the guru said into the silence that had descended on the room.

“What?” asked Marlon.

“It was a stupid idea.” The guru looked away as if to avoid Marlon’s gaze, as if he had forgotten Marlon couldn’t see anyway. “I’ll give your parents the money back and we’ll disband the group. It’s just not going to work. I overestimated myself.”

I thought of how I would go home with a hundred euros in my pocket. I didn’t have to tell Claudia anything. She wouldn’t know that I was no longer leaving the house every Thursday at three-thirty. I could go back to spending the entire day watching my fish and looking at images of deformed people in reference books without the annoying interruption. I would no longer be a participant in a self-help group for youths with physical and mental impairments. I could bid them all adieu with a light heart.

Especially Janne, who thought it beneath her to answer me.

Marlon sat there motionless. He probably loved to be filmed. I used to be photogenic once, too.

Friedrich’s features were soft and his mouth trembled silently. Richard tugged at his earlobes, frowning. Kevin smiled pensively and looked at Marlon. And Janne…

Janne said loudly: “No!”

“What do you mean no?” The guru let his hat roll around on his knees the same way I sometimes did. “I say yes and I ask all of your pardon. You’ll get your money back.”

“Will you look for other disabled people?” asked Friedrich.

The guru waved his hand in the air. “You’re not replaceable. It was doomed to fail from the start.”

“No,” repeated Janne.

She was sitting next to Marlon, very upright, and her green eyes seemed to be giving off sparks. I just couldn’t get used to her face, it still surprised me every time. And even though there was as much space between her and Marlon as there was between Friedrich and me, I still saw them as together. And I thought to myself that there had never been a couple like that before, not in the movies or in real life. A couple that you had to congratulate on aesthetic grounds alone.

I suddenly had a bitter taste in my mouth. I would like to have spit on the floor.

“We’re going to keep going,” said Janne.

We’re going to keep going , Janna had said.

Nobody asked her who she meant by we . Marlon and her? All of us? Since when were we a we ? We had barely exchanged more than a few sentences with each other, we’d gone for ice cream together one single time, and we all made each other sick. I couldn’t even figure out why I came back here and why the others did. Did they not have anything better to do, either? Were catfish and reference books the only things waiting at home for them, too?

And yet nobody disagreed with her. Not even me, even though I was suddenly very angry with Janne. I wanted her to look at me. I wanted her to smile at me. I wanted her to cry. Or do anything that showed she was a real person and not some alien trapped in the body of a cripple.

The guru was a bit speechless.

“I feel honored,” he finally said, though it sounded like “you can all go to hell.”

“Are any of you already eighteen?” he asked, looking around quite despairingly and lighting on me, oddly enough, as if my age hadn’t been mentioned alongside my photo — the before photo — in every newspaper in the country.

Kevin slowly raised his hand. Nobody else.

The guru’s eyes narrowed. The gears in his head seemed to clatter, as if he was trying to calculate something. “Okay,” he said. “Minor mistake. Not even you, Marlon?”

Marlon leaned back in his chair silently.

“For now, it doesn’t matter. Let’s just get started,” said Janne.

The guru said that if he was going to continue we would also have to make concessions. Meaning we had to show up on time, answer questions freely, and not bother our fellow participants. We had to be open, honest, and trusting. And in the end, together we would work out what united us despite all of our differences.

Janne sighed loudly.

“Have you ever done anything like this before?”

“Are we going down that road again?” asked the guru.

“Sorry.”

“If you are referring to recording, then yes, I know how to hold a camera,” said the guru huffily. “In another life, I even spent some time at film school.”

“Probably as a janitor,” I mumbled.

I have no idea whether Janne was listening to him or to me or to anything. Marlon’s hand had just started to run along the wheel of her wheelchair again and we all looked away as if the two of them might start going at it right in front of us.

Dirk’s eyes practically jumped out of his head when I appeared at dinner in the kitchen on Wednesday. He was probably under the impression by then that Claudia locked me in my room all day and only let me out late at night, when everyone had sought shelter. I was wearing jeans and had ironed a white shirt. Just because.

“Shall I set the table?” I asked.

“That would be great,” said Claudia standing at the stove with her back to me.

It smelled of garlic and some Indian spice. Claudia was turning lamb chops in a pan and the fat sizzled. Dirk sat there silent and pale.

For a moment I tried to put myself in Claudia’s position. And I tried to imagine that Janne was there in Dirk’s place. I broke out in a sweat. I wasn’t sure whether to admire or pity Claudia now. Maybe it was a mistake to start mixing with people again tonight of all nights.

“Am I in the way?” I put large flat plates on the table.

“Don’t be silly, we’re happy to have you,” Claudia answered mechanically. Dirk nodded in agreement several times.

Claudia carried the pan to the table, set it down, and kissed Dirk quickly on the cheek. I looked away.

They looked a bit ridiculous together. Given the chance, I realized I hadn’t really looked carefully at Claudia in a long time. A few years before she had seemed noticeably more cheerful. Now, with her heavy eyelids and square chin, she reminded me of an ostrich. The lines in her face were really pronounced since she’d lost weight. Though she did have a super physique as a result. Her skirts seemed to keep getting shorter, and construction workers and taxi drivers regularly whistled at her well-toned legs.

“What happened there?” Claudia asked.

“Hm?”

She waved the spatula at my head.

“Johanna cut my hair,” I said.

“Did you lose a bet?”

I felt the sides of my mouth tighten. But laughing still kind of hurt, especially when you tried not to. “I asked her to. So people wouldn’t be so scared of me anymore.”

“Nice,” said Claudia flatly.

“Yeah, well,” I said. “I actually think I would have been better off doing it myself.”