Third Class Superhero

by Charles Yu

  19

  Wally writes:

  A lot of people spend too much time deciding between Player 1 versus Player 2. This is the first mistake, in my estimation. Everyone I talk to wants to know how I got my high score, but when I tell them, they refuse to believe. Most readers of your magazine will not believe it either, I'm afraid, but I'll say it again anyway, in case anyone out there is open-minded.

  20

  Wally also notes:

  Sorry is not what it seems to be. This is the main thing that makes me different from your average player.

  Your average weekend player thinks Sorry is used as a defensive measure, to block eye-looking vectors.

  The professional uses Sorry as a neutral move.

  21

  Wally concludes:

  When the amateur says Sorry, he means: I wish that had not happened, but the world is what the world is.

  When the player of strength says Sorry, he means: That happened.

  ***

  Neat Trick: Also, thanks to Wayne Garza of Grand Rapids, MI, for the Trick of the Month.

  Wayne writes:

  Common Knowledge works in the mirror, too. To use it, go into Player l's house. This is at the very beginning of the game. The program will place you in the town square. Walk two units south and one unit west. Find the white house with a blue roof. Go in. (The door will be locked. The key is under the mat.)

  Our staffers have verified that Wayne's tip works. To try it for yourself, follow these directions:

  A. From the entrance, go down the main hall to the second door on the right. This is the guest bathroom. Turn on the shower. Make sure the water is very hot. Close the door and let the bathroom fill with steam.

  B. When the mirror is cloudy and opaque with the condensation from water vapor, stand in front of the mirror, about a foot to eighteen inches away. This is the optimal length for all eye-looking vectors. At this length, an eye-looking vector has unique properties. Use your hand to wipe off a small area—maybe six inches by three inches—from the glass so that the mirror can reflect your eye-looking vector. Now look at yourself. Keep looking. Do not look away. Stand still. Do not look away. The game will ask you over and over again if you want to look away. Resist the temptation. Note what is happening. Your eye-looking vector will begin bouncing off the mirror and into your reflection's vector-accepting eye, and then back out again. The vector will keep bouncing, back and forth, into the mirror and then out, into your own head, and back.

  C. After a while, small windows will pop up and the game will ask you over and over again: Are you sure Are you sure Are you sure Are you sure? Click away all of these little boxes. New windows will spring forth, asking if you want to terminate the subroutine. The game will assume there has been some kind of error. Keep clicking these closed, too. Stand still and whatever you do, do not look away.

  D. If you wait long enough, the game will give up and override the defaults. It will recognize your reflection in the mirror as a different player, Player 2. Now you are Player 1 and your reflection is Player 2.

  Now, say you are sorry. Say a true thing. You will know it and you will know you know it and you will know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know it. You will know an infinite number of things about yourself, an infinite regress, telescoping up to a vanishing point, a hierarchy of statements, longer and longer, more and more abstract, receding into the distance, farther and farther from the world, none of them beautiful, all of them true.

  Realism

  MY MOTHER IS READING A BOOK called Realism.

  It is a collection of stories, arranged like a museum. She bought it for herself. For her birthday. She is hoping it will help her understand her life better.

  "Why do they call it realism?" she asks.

  "It's not really realism," I explain. "Realism is just another way of choosing facts about the world."

  "That's confusing," she says.

  I say to her: You take a person and list some of her physical attributes. Make them seem significant.

  I say: You accumulate details, where that person lives, what she likes to eat, what she sees from her kitchen window every morning.

  I say: You make time flow evenly, in a straight line, one instant to the next. Events occur in some logical order.

  Effects follow causes. What has already happened and what has not yet happened are divided by a thing called the present moment. There is a thing called memory. That's realism, I say.

  My mother will not admit it, but she bought the book because she felt she needed to read it before she couldn't read anymore. Before it was too late.

  My mother is going to die.

  My mother is going to die, my mother is dying, my mother has already died.

  All of this happens in one night. The night she dies. All of this happens in one frozen frame in the flight path of Xeno's Arrow. In the luminiferous aether between Point A and Point B. Between two arbitrarily close points on the infinitely dense real number line.

  Everything that will ever happen has already happened. Xeno's Arrow doesn't really ever move.

  What is a story in this kind of universe? What is character, what is plot?

  ***

  "Listen," my mother says. "I think you will like this."

  She opens the book and begins to read:

  And then in one moment, I understood what he meant, I understood everything he had ever meant, and had not meant, and could have possibly meant in all possible and impossible worlds. I felt melancholy, I felt joy, I felt dread, I felt a sadness so deep it cannot be described in words. I felt emotions that have not been given names, I felt emotions that have been given the wrong names, I saw what it meant to feel and I saw that it was all the same feeling and I felt big feelings, the old feelings, the ones before language, before the mind had language, before the mind had learned to tell a fake story called consciousness and developed anxiety when it invented time, and danger, and risk, and probability, and the future. I felt what the caveman felt, staring up at the young sun, before division, before naming, before fear and awe and desire had been created. I felt that first unified feeling of what it is to be alive, to be human, to know and therefore not know. And I felt small feelings, too, the most trivial, the most subtle feelings others would not distinguish between, I felt all of them, a million kinds of sadness, a trillion, every variety, every infinitesimal gradation, I felt them all at once and one at a time, in a single moment. I stepped out from my front door and into the daylight and took a long sip of my foamy, frothy cappuccino. It was a new day.

  This is from her favorite story in the book.

  The title of the story is Once More, with Feeling.

  It is a story about a sudden moment, an invisibly thin sliver of the life of the mind of a young man trying to understand things he will never quite grasp.

  My mother wants me to make our lives into this kind of story. A realistic story. She thinks I can do it.

  "I want to feel like that young man in the story," she says. "I want to feel small feelings."

  This is why she bought the book. To teach herself the names for her nameless life. To learn that people have cataloged her anonymity. She has been mythologized.

  My mother has discovered her interior life. It has always been there, a roiling primordial ocean, a vast and deep and fluid planet inside her, a world of limbic forces and unformed, half-formed, preverbal objects floating in the surface waters of her consciousness, in the benthic depths of her unconscious—massive, silent, underwater objects bumping her occasionally from within. This ocean is something she never thought to talk about, as if it were an unspeakably private derangement, something others would never understand.

  And now she is like the cartoon coyote, suspended in midair, who is reading a book about gravity and after learning what gravity is, begins to fall to the earth. Now that my mother knows that all of these feelings have names, that there are empty containers for her to fill, to pour her amorphous, un
refined emotion into, she must do it. She must learn the names for the things that have always been there inside her.

  ***

  She reads. Thirty years go by, forward and backward and forward again. Time stops and starts and stops again.

  "This book, it kind of makes me seem pathetic," she says. "I never realized I was so ordinary."

  I tell her that's the point. I tell her I am ordinary, too.

  "Most people are," I say. "That's what it means to be ordinary."

  She tells me that when I was born, she thought I was going to be a great man.

  "That's what your name means. It means Marching Toward Greatness."

  My mother's life up to this point has been a record of small insults, neither tragic nor inconsequential. She lives alone. I am her only visitor. She has taken to watching the Lifespan Network, a twenty-four-hour continuous feed of made-for-TV movies, star vehicles driven by B-list actresses. B minus. The movies are XXX poignant, long stretches of aimlessness punctuated by brief interludes of emotional gratification. Pornography for the heart.

  "I want to go through an experience. I want to have an epiphany," she says.

  I tell her there is no such thing. I tell her those are made-up features of realism. Illusory. Like time, like meaning.

  We work, we sleep, I live my own life. She lives hers. We used to see each other once a week, then it was twice a month. Now it is once a month. But we are always talking. We can talk through walls. We can talk across the city. We can talk from different countries, different planets. The universe is one big living room, all of space and all of time from the big bang to right now has been one long conversation between the two of us.

  "I want to try out all of these new emotions I learned about," she says. "I want to feel weltschmerz. I want to feel malaise, six kinds of it. I want to feel ennui.

  "What is ennui?"

  I tell her ennui is an emotion for rich people. It is like boredom, but more refined, like high-thread-count bed-sheets.

  My mother is getting impatient.

  "So far, you aren't doing a very good job of writing our story," she says. "This is going nowhere."

  She becomes voracious. She needs more. More, more, more. Stories, stories, stories. Everything is a story to her now. Everything.

  ***

  "Why Realism?" I ask her. "Why does this matter to you?"

  "It doesn't. That's the point. You have to make it matter."

  I am trying to make a story out of the raw material of our lives. I can't connect the pieces. I have to try to stitch them together with fragile threads that break and fall apart. Sometimes just looking at them too hard, just thinking, makes everything fall apart. I need to do this before she dies. I need it to matter. How do I do that? How do I keep it from just trailing off?

  My mother tells me I have already covered all of this.

  She says I need a driving force. Instead, I am going in circles.

  "We have a beginning and an ending already. It's the middle that is difficult," she says. "We are missing a middle."

  I know we are. But if she wants it to be real, to be realist, to make sense, then there is only so much I can do.

  ***

  From Realism, chapter 30, page 2,l57:

  She reads: "Skilled practitioners often include details to increase the believability of the narrative. Note, however, that this use of particulars detracts from the universality of the story. "

  My mother asks me, What is universal? What does this mean?

  I tell her something is universal if all people can understand it. Truths about the human heart are universal. At this, my mother laughs, as if I have told a good joke.

  "Realism has more nouns, more adjectives. Where are the thousands of varieties of flowers? Where are the descriptions and terms for architectural features? Describe my nose. Describe the smell of the tree in our backyard. Enough of your abstractions."

  She says I keep coming back to the same few words. Like I am stuck. Over and over again. She says I am obsessed with time, space, death, consciousness, memory, risk, the world, the universe. She asks me, Is that all you know? Is that all there is?

  I can't make this about us, I say. Your life is not what you did, what you said or wore or ate or drank or noticed out of the corner of your eye. I have to leave out the details, I have to find the essence, search for the missing middle. I have to keep this general. I have to find the secret at the center of our story. Then I will be able to tell it. Then I can fix the beginning, sharpen the ending. Then I can fill in the exposition.

  "We are running out of time," my mother says. "I'm going to die any minute now."

  ***

  She needs me to make it matter, to make some sense of things before she dies. I have said this all before. After she dies it will be no good to her. She can always come back to her life, we can always start this whole thing over again, but then we will be back at this point. This point right here. I have to make it make sense during her life, inside of her life, within it. I can't reach out, go above it, tell a larger story, a story-within-a-story. I can't cheat. Not if she wants realism.

  But what if that's the whole point? What if it is impossible to make it matter before she dies? What if that's what death is? The truncation. The explanation. The symbol key to the fumbling, inexact allegory of this condition.

  We are nearing the end, and still there is no urgency. No order to anything. I keep repeating myself. My mother knows it. We are drifting.

  "You don't have to make it up yourself," she says. "We are almost out of time. Just make it work."

  "All stories have already been told," I say.

  "Then tell me someone else's story."

  I tell her the story about a man who wakes up one morning to find himself transformed into an enormous insect. He thinks but he cannot express himself. He is isolated, alienated, a consciousness in a grotesque form.

  That's funny, she says. When I was a little girl, my uncle, your great-uncle, would tell me a similar story.

  This was the story:

  One morning, an insect wakes up to discover he has been transformed into a six-foot man.

  The man gets out of bed and stands on two legs for the first time in his life.

  He bathes himself free of slime, puts on a starched shirt and pressed suit, drinks a cup of coffee, kisses his human wife, and goes to work.

  At work, he sits in his cubicle all day. Then he goes home, goes to sleep, gets up, and does it all again the next day. His boss likes him so much he promotes him and then promotes him again.

  The man lives out the rest of his life like this, never a thought in his head, and no one ever knows that inside he is an insect, shrieking and shrieking in insect terror inside his huge, empty brain. No one ever knows that he is nothing but a big bug, a dumb, senseless cluster of impulse and sensation trapped in the strangest of all horrors: human consciousness.

  ***

  My mother tells me this story. And then she dies.

  Time stops. And then time starts up again. I am alone.

  ***

  Time loops back.

  My mother is alive. We are in the kitchen again. She is reading a book called Realism.

  "I'm going to die soon," she says. "So we have to work fast."

  ***

  She dies again. She keeps dying and coming back. I tell her I am trying my best.

  "What if you can't do it?" she says. "What will happen to us?"

  I tell her that not all stories have endings.

  Yes, they do. Yes, yes, yes, they do, she insists. They end where they end, where that place is, wherever they have taken you.

  "We can't fail," she says. "I want to feel everything. I want to feel every emotion ever felt. I want to learn something. I want to be trapped in a moment, forever, at the end of my life, in amber, in a frozen instant of genius."

  We will fail, though. We already know we have. She has lived this moment a thousand times. A hundred thousand. Our entire lives together
are nothing more than this moment. The two of us, a son and mother, trying to have a lifelong conversation, trying to make some sense of their anonymity, themselves.

  All stories are failed stories, I say. All real stories are stories that failed at being the ideal story.

  I try to make things happen. I try to drive us toward something, anything. I have no great secret to tell her, nothing that will tie it all together. I'm not smart enough to do it. Some stories have no beginning or end or middle. Some stories do not exist. There are some places you can't get to.

  I give up.

  "I can't do it," I say. "I can't make this into a story."

  Florence

  A message comes through from the boss.

  How is she?

  I look over at Florence's vital readings.

  The machine blips.

  I type: Normal The blips are blipping

  Four years go by

  A message comes through from the boss.

  How about radius? Stable? Or getting bigger?

  Florence swims in a circular path around the lake.

  I check the display.

  I type: Radius is stable. 41.08 kilometers.

  I hit Send. Four years go by.