Third Class Superhero (4 page)

The concierge informs us:

An informed client should carefully consider all relevant factors, including, but not limited to: the general political and socioeconomic climate, both domestically and abroad, historically low/high unemployment levels, gross inequality in the criminal justice system, buoyant consumer confidence, lack of self-confidence, frenzied retail spending, sneaky retail borrowing,
questionable consumer credit, evil interest rates, cutesy consumer angst, generalized anxiety disorder, pseudoreligious financial services advertising mumbo jumbo, and market volatility.

I call down to the spa to book us husband-and-wife massages.

"You have great hands," I tell the masseuse.

The masseuse says:

I dream of the invisible hand. I want to outsource my manufacturing. I want to protect my family from unforeseen risks. I want to incorporate a transaction vehicle to effect a tax-free 368(a) reverse triangular merger. I want to define the boundaries of tomorrow. I want to live life one choice at a time. I want to map the possible. I want to test the untestable. I want to measure the profound. I want to fathom the unfathomable. I want what I want. A wholly owned subsidiary of Global Risk International. More than life insurance, less than a mutual fund.

We check out the pool.

The cabana boy asks me: Do I believe in an infinite power?

The poolside bartender says: Past performance is no guarantee of future results. We consider a Day Trip. The Menu of Options is truly dizzying. At the top is:

HOW TO SPEND YOUR TIME HERE

The fine print reads:

On a typical day, a man of your age, race, height, and moral fiber makes 4,817 distinct choices. When used in compliance with the instructions, the Basic Package guarantees a maximum of three Minor Errors and one Major Error per day. You also get three Take Backs and a midlife Do-Over.

"When does the Authenticity start?" my wife says. "I want to have some Experiences."

We make Excursions. We pay à la carte. We explore secret islands. We take detours off the Beaten Paths. We hide in caves. We cover ourselves with mud (extra charge). We eat more buffets.

After a couple of weeks, ennui sets in. We are bored with paradise.

"Let's go home," my wife says. "I want to go home."

Home. I can picture it. We'll go back to our lives. We'll pull up the imported gravel driveway. I'll kick open the fancy imported door we bought for ourselves. It'll be Sunday Afternoon. It's always Sunday Afternoon there. Everything is perfect. Everything is fine. Ninetieth percentile. Golf is always on TV. A swirl of yearnings: a mixture of what I want, what I know I'll never have, what I am told to want, what I am afraid of, what doesn't exist. Every thirty, sixty, ninety seconds, the world completely changes. I will watch the golf, I will feel very Visit-Your-Lexus-Dealer-Today. A deep-down, in-your-gut feeling.

Our vacation is ending, our vacation is over. We pack our bags. We wave good-bye to the resort.

The captain comes on the PA. We buckle ourselves in.

Just before takeoff, I lean over and whisper to my wife.

"There's got to be more," I say.

"What?" she says. The plane is roaring.

"I said there has got to be more." I am screaming.

Okay, buddy,
she mouths back at me,
lead the way.

HE WAS TURNING
into something unspeakable.

At the office, people avoided the issue.

David, they would say, how are you? You
, they said. To be polite.

Others noticed but pretended not to. As if they weren't always staring and whispering and wondering. Assuming it could never happen to them.

David, for his part, played along, glad to make small talk. He asked about their children, looked at pictures of dogs and cats and trips to Tahoe. David moved his mouth, made the right sounds, gave people what they expected. The men talked about sports, mostly, and the women, if they could help it, didn't talk to him at all.

***

IT HAD REALLY STARTED
a month earlier. Or not.

Whatever it was, if it was an it, it had started a month earlier.

If it was more of a lack of an it, then it had stopped about a month earlier.

Or started to stop. Or stopped starting. It had happened or not happened. Either way, something or nothing. Either way: about a month earlier.

It or not-it was not any single change. It or not-it was a lot of changes, not all at once and not connected by any pattern or nonpattern.

There was, for instance, the habit David had developed of referring to himself, daily and with increasing frequency, in the third person.

"Everyone wants to know what David's going to do," he liked to say. Which was true. Everyone did, in fact, want to know what David was going to do. It wasn't arrogance. David was, without a doubt, arrogant, but it wasn't
just
arrogance. Still, this happened often enough that even David started to notice David referring to David as David.

"I'm so sick of it," he said one night. This was near the end of the summer, during a late session at work. David was pacing in front of the whiteboard with a Magic Marker in his hand. "Everyone is always watching David." The members of his working group nodded in sympathy. He was their boss. Also, he had large quads and round, hard anterior delts. People were somewhat afraid of him.

"You know what?" he continued. "I'll be honest. I don't know what David's going to do." He stopped and leaned over the table for emphasis. Eric from marketing was nodding like an idiot. David lowered his voice now, to drive the point home. He said, "David doesn't rush things," and then paused for effect, drawing even more vigorous nodding. "That's just not
who David is.
"

There was also the matter of his detachment from the goings-on of the world. This was both local and global. He hardly watched the news anymore. Names, places, statistics—they no longer held his interest. Likewise with water rights, tree frog biodiversity, the suffering of strangers. Things that used to matter to him: populist uprisings, malnutrition, the distribution of wealth. Nothing stirred him anymore.

He had once cared.

Cared deeply and, if not deeply, then, at the very least, cared mildly. Cared in an abstract, willing-to-sign-a-petition, NPR-listener sense of caring.

Now the news just came and went, passed right through him. Now it all seemed so temporary, so specific, so far away.

Just before Labor Day, David and Patricia were having their usual breakfast. They drank a pot of black coffee with heaps of sugar added. They each ate two slices of buttered toast and then split an orange while reading their respective sections of the newspaper. David always took the business page; Patricia browsed obituaries, then cooking. They read in silence.

The phone rang. David did not look up from the stock quotes. Patricia answered.

"It's for you," she said, handing it over.

"Hello?" he said.

"David Howe?" said the woman on the other end.

And that was it.

***

That wasn't when it happened, of course. But the day of the call was the day he remembered that, at some time in the recent past, something had happened. That, on some level, for some indefinite period of time, he had known, he had been aware, that this something had happened, although he was not sure what it was exactly.

Two words.
That was all he had heard her say. After that, he had stopped listening. Two words: David Howe.

She had obtained David's name from a database of qualified individuals. She wanted to talk to him about an exciting new opportunity, about upside potential and risk-adjusted returns. She was good at her job and David could not get in a word for ten minutes. Finally, he hung up on her in midsentence.

He did not think about the call again until later that night, lying awake in the dark. Patricia was making small fluttering noises through her delicate nostrils. A bird outside their second-floor window was trying to mimic her nose calls. Between the chirping creature and his wife's snoring, he could not fall asleep.

David Howe.

That's all she had said. It was just his name. Two words. A question, nothing more.

But now he could not stop thinking about it, could not stop thinking about that moment, after she'd said it, when he'd held the phone, hands trembling, breath shallow and acidic, his vision suddenly blurry. Something in her voice, in her tone, the way she had said his name, had reached deep down and plucked something inside. That morning in the kitchen he had had a feeling, but could not quite put his finger on it and so he let it go. But now, lying in the gray middle of the night, it had come back to him. Now he could not think about anything but the call; now it was coming to him; now he remembered what had turned his fingers cold and his ears hot.

She was calling for David Howe, but she was not calling for
him.

He remembered thinking,
She has the wrong number,
and wondering,
Why is this woman calling my house, calling my number, why is she talking to me but asking for David?
He tossed in bed for hours, got up to smoke cigarettes in the bathroom, held his head under the shower, smoked some more, the whole night back and forth, wondering how it was possible, wondering why she had called. He wondered and wondered and then, in a flash of cold sweat, he remembered. He
was
David Howe.

In the days after, he was shy, afraid of startling Patricia. He wasn't sure if she knew. If she did not, he wasn't sure he could explain, and even if he could figure out how to explain, he was not sure she would understand.

At work, he observed the different ways in which people handled what they said, how people reacted to
him.
Some people called him David, and some, as noted, preferred the euphemism "you" to refer both to David and to
him.
Mostly, though, they ignored it. They talked about what had been on television the night before. People at the office hid their fear well, which he appreciated, considering what they were looking at, all of him just out there, in the open like that, for everyone to see.

At home, it was a different story. He thought it, whatever it was, might go away before Patricia found out. He took measures to avoid her, but she made it easy. In the mornings, she woke up an hour before him, showered, drank a cup of coffee, and went to work. She was usually in bed by the time David got home. They went days with no more than a dozen words exchanged. Three, four days. A week. They barely spoke. The bills got paid, the garbage taken out to the curb. After a while, he realized she did not know. She either had not paid enough attention or he was succeeding in his efforts to conceal it, to conceal himself, the awful truth.

He thought things could go on like that indefinitely, with him going to work and pretending it had not happened and then coming home and not talking about it with Patricia. And he was not entirely sure that such a state of affairs would be wholly undesirable. At the very least, it was better than scaring her.

Then one day she came home and found David sitting on the couch, devastated. He had the TV remote in one hand, but the television was turned to a test signal. In his other hand he held a glass half full of warm bourbon.

"I don't understand how this happened," he said.

"How what happened?"

He thought she was kidding. He said nothing.

"How what happened?" she repeated.

He realized she was not kidding. Why was he hiding it from her? Eventually, she would find out. He decided to show her. He pointed at David, at himself, at his
self.

"This," he said.

***

THE BASIC FACTS
of his identity were the same as ever. His name was still David Howe. People still called him by this name when they were talking to him. Or, rather, when they were talking to David. When talking to one another, if they wanted to make reference to the person in the world associated with
him,
they said the words "David Howe" and everyone knew what they meant.

As far as he could tell, David was still the same age: forty-seven, soon to be forty-eight.

David still made the same salary, that certain amount of money transferred every two weeks out of the firm's account and into the possession of the legal entity known as David Howe. This amount was more than David rightfully deserved, and he knew it. A lot of other people knew it, too.

David still liked dogs over cats, beer over liquor, and hockey over football. David still cared about people, but only to the extent it made sense to care about them, and no further. These were the basic facts about David Howe and they did not change.

The first thing he noticed about David was that he
noticed David.

For example, David's emotions. The basic range of David's emotions repeated itself in a fairly regular cycle: fear, desire, excitement, boredom, anger, envy. Not always in that order, but between those six feelings, most of David's waking hours were covered.

The difference was that now, when David felt something,
he
could observe it.
He
could watch the world through David's current emotional state like a slide in a projector, or as through a colored filter on a lens.

If David got angry, he could see the world through David's anger. It wasn't just the racing thoughts, the murderous impulses, or that he could feel David's face flushing bright red, David's pulse quickening. These things were not anger. It was that he knew a moment before David said something what David was going to say. He could see what anger itself looked like, how vaporous, unformed rage first cooled and condensed into fluid, volatile thought, how that liquid then crystallized around particles into individual words. He could see how David's anger was apparent to others long before David was actually angry, and long after David thought it had subsided.