Third Class Superhero

by Charles Yu

  32.05864991%

  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 da
y 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.

  All day at work, Janine thinks of the day to come, what can and will go wrong, deferring relaxation for anxiety and then deferring anxiety itself for a kind of pre-anxiety.

  All day at work, Ivan thinks of Janine. Maybe. He types the word on his screen, doodles it on a notepad, says it quietly to himself in the elevator. Maybe, maybe, maybe.

  In the evening, Ivan calls Janine. He dials slowly, waiting a full stop between each digit.

  1.

  3. 2. O.

  5. 8. 6.

  4. 9. 9. 1.

  In the moment between the tone of the last digit being depressed and the first bell strike of the first ring, in that silent space when Ivan could hang up, Ivan tastes, for the first time since "maybe," that it might not work out for him, that he can still salvage the situation, delete the event of calling, keep the secret of his desire, in effect stop the coin in midair, freeze the dice in midbounce, keep the two Englishes as one, end the observation before it interferes with the measurement, preserve Schrödinger's half-cat, pull the string back, keep the numerator from falling into the denominator, keep the world from splitting into before and after, heads and tails, two possibilities and one actuality, before the universe knows there are desired outcomes and undesired outcomes and tells him what happens.

  Which brings us to the actual reason Ivan has misunderstood Janine's highly technical use of the word "maybe." It is a problem beyond the reach of emotional statistics and more in the realm of another, yet to be discovered discipline.

  Ivan thinks he wants Janine to say yes to a date with him. Ivan thinks he wants to call Janine, and to ask her on a date, and for Janine to weigh her choices and decide between Ivan and other men, Ivan and women, Ivan and no man or woman, Ivan and whatever's on television.

  Ivan thinks he is awaiting the outcome of an event Z: what Janine will say to him after she picks up the phone.

  What Ivan does not know, what Ivan could not possibly have known, is that Event Z depends on Event Y, which depends on Event X, and so on and so forth, until we get to Event A. And the outcome of Event A, which is what Ivan's really waiting for, is what Janine is waiting for, too.

  Event A started ten years ago, when Janine was a junior at Lower Peninsula High School and she had braces and a crush on Brandon, sweeper on the boys' soccer team, who liked English class and so didn't really hang out with his teammates, instead choosing to read alone during lunch, which Janine noticed because she had just moved and started school at Lower Peninsula and also ate alone.

  Event A goes like this: Around the time of the Halloween semiformal Sadie Hawkins dance, when Janine was working up the nerve to call Brandon, whose number she had cribbed from the bulletin board near the soccer coach's office, Janine's father, Mr. K., left for the weekend on business. This was routine: Mr. K. was in sales then and he often left for weeks on end without so much as a good-bye. Mrs. K. was madly in love with Mr. K. and called him every night on his cell phone at whatever roadside motel he was at, just to say good night. Janine liked to hear her father's voice and often dialed for her mother and said good night first before handing off the phone to Mrs. K.

  Event A technically began when, on a clear, blue October night, just before Janine was going to call Brandon, she decided to call her father first. It was late on a Friday. The phone rang several times and then went to voice mail. And then Janine called again and again it was the same thing. Janine hung up and didn't say anything to her mother, who had been sitting in the next room and had figured out what had happened. Janine didn't call Brandon that night, or ever. Mother and daughter went to bed without a word to each other, too nervous, each not wanting to look the other in the eye.

  That night Janine did not say her prayers and she did not drift off thinking about Brandon. Janine and her mother lay awake in separate beds, in their own rooms, unaware that they were each waiting for Mr. K. to call. They didn't want to assume the worst. They didn't want to assume anything. There could have been any number of explanations for why Mr. K. did not answer the phone late on a Friday night: bathroom, outside for a smoke, taking a drive to relax, shower. There could have been any number of explanations except for the fact that Mr. K. had, in 2,143 previous calls, never not picked up the phone when Mrs. K or Janine called. In fact, he had never failed to pick up the phone on the first ring.

  Janine didn't think about this. She just waited. At some point, she must have fallen asleep because she woke up to the smell of French toast and her mother calling to her to come down. Her father had not called. So the two women each pretended they had a busy day ahead of them, and Janine ate her breakfast quickly and practically ran out of the house, and Janine and her mother each went to a different park and waited, though neither of them said anything to the other about it. They waited the next day, too. And just like that, a weekend slipped by without Janine noticing that her life had been put on hold. She had not called Brandon, she had not done any homework, she had not talked to or even looked at her mother. Those things could wait until she found out where her father had been on Friday and Saturday nights.

  And on Sunday evening, when Janine heard her father's car pulling into the driveway, sounding no different, no less devoted, no more adulterous than when it had left two days ago, Janine felt a huge tide of relief wash over her. She felt silly for having assumed the worst, embarrassed even. Ashamed.

  But when Mr. K. gave Mrs. K. a hug but not a kiss, it all started again. Janine had never seen her father do that. Mrs. K. had never seen it either, and she waited for her husband to come back into the room and start laughing, and kiss her and explain that it was a joke, and also explain where he had been. But he didn't. Upstairs they could hear the shower and hear him singing.

  Just like that, Event A on Friday got linked to Event B, and now Janine was waiting for two answers. One moment Janine was perfectly happy, anchored to the linear sequence of successes and failures, days beginning and ending. The next moment she was adrift, waiting for answers, waiting for outcomes. There was no big event. No deaths, no parent running away, no explosive argument. A non-event, actually. Just a missed phone call. Just however it happens that people stop living days and events start overlapping, start getting tied into each other. The decision of whether Janine was going to allow herself to feel okay with things was dependent on some event a few hours away. And day by day it got pushed back moment by moment until it was firmly rooted in the next day. A few events in a day, a few days in a row, a few months go by, and then it's seventeen years later. Event A, Event B, Events C, D, E, and so on until we get to Event Z, which is where Ivan comes in, wondering what "maybe" means, not knowing he's waiting on the outcome of a chain of events that started almost two decades ago. Ivan, having pushed the last digit in Janine's number, has no idea what he is tying himself into, as he waits by the phone for an answer.

  The phone rings.

  The first ring is an eruption, a breach of the silence that seems interminable. Janine wants to pull the cord from the wall so it will stop. Then the ring is over. Janine breathes heavily, hand on the rec
eiver, hoping there are no more, hoping it will just go away.

  The second ring. It seems louder than the first. Now Janine's reaction is the opposite—to pick it up, to answer it, to let Ivan know, to let the other side know, to let the world know that someone is waiting.

  But why should she have to pick it up? Why should she be the outcome, the right half of the equation, the answer at the back of the statistics book, the coin uncovered on the back of someone's hand?

  The third ring. Why does it have to be Janine who decides? Why can't she just pitch her lot in with his? Why not wait to see if the phone stops ringing? Why not wait to see what she will be forced to do if the phone just won't stop ringing?

  The fourth, fifth, and sixth rings. Events EE, FF and GG.

  Rings 7, 8, 9, 10. HH, II, JJ, KK.

  Rings 11 through 100. All tied together, hanging in a web. This is what Ivan is waiting for when he calls, all of it, going back to that Friday night when Janine sat, nervous about calling Brandon, waiting to hear her father's words of advice. Ivan could not have known this. Ivan could not have known the cutting edge of emotional statistical theory: the theory that there are ten billion universes out there, similar to ours, each containing an Ivan G. and a Janine K. Ten billion Janines wait by ten billion phones, ten billion Ivans hold ten billion receivers, with ten billion suns setting on ten billion Earths. In each universe, the phone rings. It rings and it rings and it rings. It rings.

  Ivan could not have known the theory that explains what "maybe" means, that explains where the number 32.0586499!% comes from. The theory that of these ten billion universes, there are 3,205,864,99! in which Janine picks up the phone and says yes. Yes, yes, yes: 3,000,000,000 in which she has already picked up, 205,000,000 in which they are happily flirting, 860,000 in which they are making plans for a date, 4,900 in which they are having dinner, 90 in which they are looking deep into each other's eyes, and one universe—one in ten billion, one alternate universe—in which they have fallen immediately and irreversibly in love. Of these ten billion universes, there are some kinds in which she says yes, allows herself to be loved, and some kinds in which she doesn't, and some kinds in which it is Ivan who does the loving, and some in which it isn't. She wonders if the phone might just ring forever. She waits to see which kind of universe they are in.