Third Class Superhero (12 page)

The Mostly Empty World
Man of Quiet Desperation is in the stark, barren landscape. A tree with no leaves shoots up from the otherwise featureless foreground. There is a low-hanging sun but no shadows. All of the objects around him he can count on his ten fingers. No one has bothered to fill in the details of this world. It is empty now, but before long the real world will leak in and he will have to move on.

The Motel Room
Man of Quiet Desperation starts to realize something.
The City

He does not realize something so much as he starts to almost realize something. It is a familiar feeling. He is always doing this. This is his job.

The Movies
He is always getting into these situations where he is about to realize something and it isn't a nice feeling or a painful but good feeling, like tension inside accumulating and then suddenly being released from a hole on the top of his head.

The Motel Room
It isn't a moment when his field and depth of vision suddenly expand or a goose-pimple-inducing thought of simplicity and certitude or a rule about the world or a breaking of a rule about the world suddenly occurs to him. It is a sick feeling. It makes him nauseated. It makes him want to vomit everything he has inside him and then continue to vomit, until only blood and bile and then even the tissues of his organs start to come up. The liquid in his stomach sloshes around and splashes up against the inside of him. That's how he knows he is on the verge of realizing something.

The Bookstore
What is he starting to realize? And where does it come from? From up above? Down below? Certainly not from inside, because what, if anything, ever happens like that? Maybe for other people. Maybe for geniuses. But he isn't a genius. Anyone who would buy a book entitled
Organize Your Days,
who would read a book called
Get a Life,
anyone who needs this kind of advice is not a genius. These are not books for geniuses. These are not books written by geniuses. These are books for people who have trouble with things you aren't even supposed to have trouble with. These are books for ordinary people, for the mass of men.

The Dinner Party
The thought occurred to Man of Quiet Desperation, a thought of unknown origin, from somewhere above or outside, as if it were being narrated to him, planted inside his consciousness. Man of Quiet Desperation, with a sickening feeling in his gut, started to realize where he was.

The West
And it occurs to him that things don't just occur to people, like in stories. People always know everything there is to know about themselves, never any less. Everything is a secret that everyone knows. A secret that no one knows they know. To smile is the greatest mystery possible, to smile is to tell a secret, is to tell a lie from your head and a truth from your heart together, in one word—the conjugation of the terrifying present, the perfect past, the conditional future all in a single wordless word in the eternal, tenseless grammar.

You Can Never Go Home Again Because There Never Was a Home to Begin With

Man, 46, at some point in his life, tries to go back to the house, back to where it all started, back to where it always starts. To see his wife. Maybe get to know her, maybe settle down.

When he walks through the door, he sees her, still sitting on the couch where he left her, ten minutes, ten days, ten thousand lifetimes ago.

"You waited," he says.

"You came back," she says.

"I can't stay long."

"I know."

"I have to get back to work," he says. She is crying. "Can you ever take a break?" she asks. "Maybe we could go somewhere for a long weekend, somewhere less stark. Sci-fi? How about a Messy Realism?" Anywhere, she says, I'll go anywhere with you.

But Man of Quiet Desperation is already at the door, putting on his coat, tying an old scarf twice around his neck.

The Bookstore
Man, 46, is going from story to story to story, from middle to middle, hoping for a break, some white space,
an empty page, looking around, saying to himself,
At this point in my life, at this point in my life,
on the verge of a secret, of telling himself the secret he already knows:
At this point in his life is every point in his life.

Man of Quiet Desperation keeps moving.

The Party
He is at the party—

The West
—and then in the mythical west—

The City
—and on the bus—

The Movies
—in the theater—

The Motel Room
—in the loneliest room—

The Constant World
—never stopping—the bar, the crowded restaurant, the church, the web of romantic intrigue, the awkward situation. He knows someone has to do it, but why does it have to be him? He is the Man of Quiet Desperation and this is what he does and he is okay just to keep doing it, for what they pay him, it's a living, it's an okay life, but sometimes he wonders if there might be something better somewhere, but he will not stop, is afraid to stop, wants so bad to just stop running from place to place to place, never any beginnings, never any endings, but sometimes he wonders what if he could only find a space to breathe, some breathing room, what might happen if he could rest for a moment in a place in between, an unnamed moment, a second to catch up, to just think things through, if he should just stop moving, if he should just keep moving, if he could just, if he would just, if he could only

In the field of study best known as emotional statistics, the word "maybe" is a term of art, meaning, when uttered by a woman to a man in the context of risk analysis and assessment in an environment of asymmetric imperfect information flow, i.e., pairing strategies of isolated individuals located in major metropolitan areas in early twenty-first-century northeastern America, i.e., dating, somewhere between 31 and 34%.

More specifically, when uttered by a woman to a man, when such man is capable of love but somewhat unclear in his idea of what love actually is and when such woman is perfectly aware of what love is, what it requires, and what it promises, and what it does not promise or fix or heal or even mean but despite or maybe because of such perfect awareness is incapable of allowing herself to be loved, "maybe" does not mean "probably" or "probably not" or anything vague or indeterminate. When "maybe" is used in this context, it means exactly 32.05864991%.

For instance, when Janine K. utters the word "maybe" to Ivan G. in response to his query regarding it's nice to see you here again and perhaps sometime maybe we could, perhaps Friday, how about Italian or maybe Chinese, and you don't have to say just how about maybe just think about it and perhaps I can call you?—such query taking place in the pasta and sauces aisle on an average Thursday after work, Janine K. wondering if Ivan G. is scheduling his grocery shopping to coincide with hers, and if so, if that is a good thing, and if not, if that is a good thing—she means "maybe" and is perfectly aware that "maybe" means nothing more and nothing less than 32.05864991%.

Unfortunately, for at least two different reasons, Ivan could have misunderstood Janine's use of the emotionally statistically precise word "maybe."

First, of course, is the fact that despite Janine saying "maybe" and Ivan hearing "maybe" and both words appearing to be that five-letter English word uniquely identified by the ordered sequence of letters "m," "a," "y," "b," and "e," Ivan could have been under the common misconception that what people refer to as English is one language when, of course, emotional statisticians have known for some time that "English" is actually two completely different languages, one spoken by women and the other by men, or one by men and the other by men, or one by women and the other by women—the point not being the genders of the speakers but rather the relative levels of desire in any two-person pairing of isolated individuals.

In other words, there is the language of the wanted and the language of the one doing the wanting, and the confusing thing is that they are exactly the same in terms of lexicographical content, grammatical structure, rules of punctuation, and even pronunciation. The difference is solely in meaning. Some words mean approximately the same thing (e.g., baseball, accordion, yes), while others mean quite opposite things (no, never), and still others have meaning in one English but not the other, and some words mean nothing in either language.

Thus "maybe" was spoken and "maybe" was heard, but "maybe" is one of the words that means quite different things in the two Englishes.

To Ivan, at this moment the relative desir-or, "maybe" is most likely a synonym of "probably" and also a synonym of "hopefully" and also "you are special" and also "yes." And also "be reassured, the world is just as you have always suspected it to be, principally concerned with you." To Janine, as established, it means just over 32%.

So as Ivan watches Janine handle the rotini, the penne, the farfalle, stalling for time, looking down at her shoes and then looking up, when she finally says "maybe," the word sounds to Ivan like a musical note sung right into the center of his heart. Weeks or even months later, when his desire has subsided, the two Englishes will collapse back into one and Ivan will hear the actual word Janine said. But for an instant, "maybe" is the most clear and unambiguous sound Ivan G. has ever heard.

The whole way home he says "maybe" "maybe" "maybe" to himself, like a piano tuner at work, depressing the same key over and over again until it seems to vary slightly with each iteration, until the note starts to sound subtly different, either because the string inside changes slightly or perhaps the world around it changes slightly at the moment the hammer strikes. Each time different connotations of the word emerge like secret frequencies revealed from a deep, rich vibrato. He takes a shower, smokes a cigarette, puts a pot of water on for farfalle, and the whole time he is making a song out of the one note.

The whole way home Janine thinks about heuristic bias, the tendency humans have to systematically under- or overestimate probabilities. Janine thinks that generally speaking, as Bayesian calculation devices go, humans are fairly clunky machines.

Of course, Janine doesn't think of these things in so many words. She just thinks about what Ivan must think his chances are (good, pretty good, pretty damn good) and what they really are (32.05864991%) and she wonders why men are such terrible emotional statisticians.

She wonders why bees can sense magnetic fields, why dogs can smell on your breath what you had for breakfast yesterday, why bats can navigate through sonar, why humans can't do any of this. She wonders why we can see only seven colors, can't hear very well, and, by animal standards, have noses that are the functional equivalents of decorative spangles. Why, instead of actual useful abilities, what humans get is an intuition about probabilities—risk, chances, outcomes. How we get by on our crippled senses and slow maximum running speed because, most of the time, we can make good guesses about which berries are good to eat and which are poison, which thin ice will crack under our weight, which predators are not to be disturbed.

And how the mental rules of thumb that normally serve us well in filtering vast amounts of information, allowing us to choose rationally between courses of action and take justified risks, often undermine us in subtle and crucial ways. Hence emotional statistics: the study of the probability of success in matching isolated individuals into pairs, defined as

the number of desirable outcomes

÷

all possible outcomes

The key concept here being
desirable, desired, desire.

As Janine merges onto the freeway and assesses her chances of survival, she overestimates her likelihood of being mangled in a horrific accident. She overestimates her likelihood of hitting an infant placed, inexplicably, in the middle of the road. She overestimates her likelihood of having all four tires blow out at the same time. As she gets home and throws her keys in the basket by the phone and checks and deletes yet another message from her mother, she underestimates her likelihood of letting one more day slip by without returning that call. She underestimates the cumulative probability that this will cause her mother to die of heartbreak.

Ivan, on the other hand, is cooking and smoking and drinking a beer, all the while unwittingly succumbing to that insidious heuristic known by professionals in the field as
availability bias
and known to lay persons as
lying to yourself to get through the day.

In other words:
Ivan:
If I can imagine it, it could happen.
Janine:
If I've hoped for it, it won't happen.

In the shower, Ivan is soaping up and looking down at his ample midsection, also known to lay persons as his big fat gut, which he is sucking in without even knowing it. He washes his right leg, and then his left, and then soaps up his arms, which he assesses to be no less than 90% as strong as they were twenty years ago, when he was the best varsity pole-vaulter at a small liberal arts college with a surprisingly good track-and-field program and no women half as interesting as Janine.

In the kitchen making dinner that evening, Janine does not think about Ivan. She thinks about her father and whether he will call tomorrow. She is not happy as she looks into the refrigerator at a plate of sliced salami, seven pink discs of marbled meat perfectly spaced in a crescent, as she arranged them herself the day before. She is not happy but she takes the plate and a box of wine anyway and heads for the couch. She polishes off the wine without managing to eat any of the salami. When she wakes up a few hours later, the first thing she does is think of all the ways in which the day will go wrong. She calculates the probability of catastrophic failure and gets out of bed anyway.

In the morning, Ivan wakes up and the first thing he thinks of is "maybe." Today, he thinks, I will find out what that means. He has two shirts left in the current dry-cleaning cycle and a pile of shirts on the floor and a pair of brand-new slacks with the tag still on that he doesn't want to touch for fear that any deviations from his normal routine will affect something that happens during the day and turn "maybe" into "no." In order to avoid disturbing whatever tension lines of cause and effect may be between him and Janine, he has to minimize perturbations in the system and allow chance to take him where it will. Ivan flips a quarter to decide whether he will wear the blue shirt with faint checks or the slate shirt with a button on the breast pocket. Heads is blue, tails is slate. He flips tails and doesn't like it, flips tails and doesn't like it, flips tails and doesn't like it. He wears the blue shirt anyway.