Less Than Hero

by S. G. Browne

  “I heard,” he says, like we’re at a cocktail party or a backyard barbecue, drinking beers and making idle talk. No What happened? or Are Frank and Vic okay? or Sorry I wasn’t there.

  I want to lay into Isaac, but I just don’t have the energy. Instead I take a deep breath, let it out, and go with a more light-hearted approach.

  “Give anyone a boner lately?” I say.

  He shakes his head slowly back and forth.

  “Decided to hang up your superhero cape?” I say.

  Isaac gives a wry little smile. “I was never a superhero.”

  “Sure you were,” I say. “You were Professor Priapism. Giver of erections. More powerful than an aphrodisiac. Able to—”

  “I never gave anyone a boner.”

  “What?” I say. “You didn’t?”

  “No,” he says, like it’s the most ridiculous thing in the world.

  “Then why did you say you could?”

  “I wanted you guys to think I was like you.”

  There’s something different about Isaac, something I can’t quite put my finger on, but at the moment I’m more focused on his admission that he didn’t have any supernatural abilities.

  “So all those times you went out with us, you were just pretending to be a superhero?” I ask.

  “Not pretending,” he says. “Performing.”

  It must be an actor thing.

  “Is that why you didn’t want to come with us when we went after Blaine?” I say. “Because you didn’t have a superpower?”

  “No, it just seemed like a really bad idea,” he says. “Plus it wouldn’t have been in character.”

  “What does that mean?” I ask, ignoring for the moment that he called my plan a bad idea. Even if it’s true.

  “Think about it.”

  It strikes me again that there’s something different about Isaac. It’s not just his confident demeanor, but there’s something else. Something right in front of me that I should be able to see but that I just can’t figure out.

  “Come on, Lloyd,” he says. “Cat got your tongue?”

  Then it hits me.

  “Hey,” I say. “What happened to your stutter?”

  Isaac cocks his head as if thinking about his answer, but before he can respond, a hot-dog vendor on the corner across Fifth Avenue starts shouting at everyone to get away, threatening them with his wiener tongs. A moment later he discards his tongs and starts shoving wieners and buns into his mouth as fast as he can like he’s trying to unseat Joey Chestnut as the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Champion.

  “Jesus.” I stand up and scan the crowds on Fifth Avenue, not sure who I’m looking for, but hoping I’ll know when I find him.

  “What’s the matter?” Isaac asks, still sitting on the steps.

  “I think Illusion Man is here.”

  It’s been nearly a month since I’ve attempted to access my trigger, so I’m a bit out of practice. While in a way it’s like riding a bike, it’s also a bit like kick-starting a stubborn motorcycle.

  “Illusion Man?” Isaac says.

  A police cruiser sits parked diagonally on Fifth Avenue, with one of NYPD’s finest standing near the cruiser and the other directing traffic. The one standing by the cruiser starts walking toward the hot-dog stand, pulls out his gun and shoots the hot-dog vendor, then puts the gun in his mouth and pulls the trigger.

  People start screaming and running off in multiple directions as a red VW Jetta runs through the intersection and hits a cab before it veers across Fifth Avenue, drives up onto the sidewalk, and crashes into the front window of Capelli.

  I give my trigger one final kick, imagining dentists and drills, and my lips start to tingle and my eyes grow heavy as a pressure builds in the back of my throat. I look around, trying to locate Illusion Man, figuring he has to be somewhere nearby, when I notice Isaac just sitting on the steps and drinking his coffee while the chaos unfolds, wearing a smile as if he’s watching his favorite movie.

  Then the proverbial penny drops and I realize Isaac wasn’t as bad an actor as I thought.

  My lips go numb and my throat tightens. Before I can open my mouth to release my yawn, Isaac looks at me and cocks his head and everything goes “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.”

  INTERLUDE #6

  Welcome to the Grand Illusion

  Isaac sits on the steps in front of the New York Public Library, drinking a grande black Pike Place Roast in the afternoon sun and watching the tourists and locals walk past, imagining that they’re actors in a play or a movie and he’s sitting in the audience, enjoying the show. He does this a lot. Just sits and imagines and pretends. It’s what he likes to do more than anything.

  Isaac watched a lot of television when he was a kid, pretending the lives of the characters on sitcoms and dramas were his, imagining that he had the perfect life with the perfect family and that his parents hadn’t divorced when he was eight years old and his mother didn’t leave him home alone on a regular basis while she slept her way through a series of drunken one-night stands.

  As he grew older, Isaac’s attention shifted from television to the big screen and he spent as much time as possible in movie theaters, watching adventures and romantic comedies and fairy tales where everyone lived happily ever after. Eventually he decided that if he wanted his life to have a fairy-tale ending, he was going to have to become an actor.

  So he joined the drama club in middle school, where he played minor roles and bit parts before graduating to high school theater and landing the lead or supporting role in half a dozen plays, including The Laramie Project and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. People told him he was good, that he had talent, and he believed them. He had It, with a capital I. His destiny was written on the wall in twenty-four-karat gold, and the road ahead was paved with diamonds.

  After high school he moved to New York to become a star on Broadway, only to burn out and develop a stutter and discover that life isn’t like a movie. Life doesn’t wrap up with the hero or the main protagonist overcoming obstacles in order to succeed. Life is about loss and disappointment and all of the things that can go wrong.

  To paraphrase Jim Morrison, life is about heartache and the loss of God.

  In real life, there is no happily ever after.

  At least, that’s what Isaac used to think.

  For most of his adult life he’d been a serial failure, killing one opportunity after another, working temporary night jobs and volunteering for clinical trials so he could afford to pay the rent on his crappy studio apartment in Alphabet City while he auditioned for plays so far off Broadway that they might as well have been in New Jersey. Not that it would have mattered. His stutter always betrayed him and the role eventually went to someone else.

  Then, six months ago, everything changed.

  The first thing he noticed was that he stopped dreaming, which was weird because Isaac always dreamed, ever since he could remember. Sometimes the dreams were so vivid he would wake up thinking that his nocturnal visions had followed him into the real world. Occasionally, in the brief twilight between being asleep and awake, Isaac would have trouble differentiating between what was reality and what was fantasy.

  As night after night passed without a single snippet of a dream, he began to wonder if their disappearance was a reflection of his waking life, a metaphor for how his real-world dreams of being an actor had never materialized. But Isaac soon discovered that their absence was due to something more monumental and life-changing than he could have ever imagined.

  He had developed the supernatural ability to make other people hallucinate.

  Isaac had once seen a cicada molt and emerge from its nymph exoskeleton as a fully formed adult with wings. That’s how he felt when he discovered his new talent—as if he had finally cast off the detritus of his previous existence and was ready to fly.

  At some point Isaac’s stutter vanished. He’s not sure exactly when it happened but one day it just wasn’t there. Poof, like magic. But like a goo
d magician, Isaac didn’t reveal his secrets and kept up the pretense of his stutter so that no one would suspect anything had changed.

  When he found out that Vic and Lloyd and the other guinea pigs had all experienced their own metamorphoses, Isaac initially felt a sense of disappointment that he wasn’t a unique butterfly. But he soon learned that their new abilities, while amusing and effective, didn’t come close to his ability to manipulate the fabric of reality.

  So he decided to play along with them and use his acting skills to make the others believe he could give people erections. None of them would ever know the truth, because no one would ever want to check. And they believed him. He fooled them all. It was the performance of his life. He should have won a Tony. Or an Oscar.

  Maybe once he’s grown tired of Manhattan, he’ll head out to California and see if they appreciate his talents any more in Hollywood than they did on Broadway.

  Isaac takes another sip of coffee and continues to watch the giant movie screen on Fifth Avenue, hundreds of men and women playing out their roles in a never-ending script. But this particular scene is beginning to grow a bit boring, so Isaac decides to liven things up.

  At the bottom of the library steps, a homeless man dressed in a red coat, dirty tan pants, and a pair of white tennis shoes roots through a garbage can like a raccoon. Next to him is a shopping cart filled with an assortment of clothing and artifacts that probably constitute the homeless man’s life savings. It’s obviously been a while since he’s been the leading man, so Isaac decides to make him a star.

  The world around Isaac dims and goes out of focus for a moment, the sounds of the city a murmur of background noise and conversation. Then Isaac cocks his head and the murmur turns into a hum. Tires on asphalt. A high-powered fan. The incessant drone of ten thousand bees.

  The homeless man whips his head around, startled and confused, then looks up into the sky and his eyes go wide.

  “Go away!” he shouts and starts waving his arms around his head.

  A moment later, he screams in pain and starts running back and forth on the sidewalk in front of the library, continuing to wave his hands in the air as if batting at some unseen attacker. Then he lets out another scream of pain and terror before he runs away up the sidewalk and dashes out into Fifth Avenue, where he gets hit by a taxi speeding to make it through the stoplight.

  The man flies across the hood of the taxi and slams headfirst into the windshield, then launches over the roof as the cab driver slams on the brakes. Rubber screams on asphalt, the body somersaults through the air, someone shouts out in horror and surprise just before another taxi slams into the rear of the first, glass exploding and metal crunching, the sound jarring and insistent and final. The homeless man continues to tumble through the air, once then twice, before he finally falls to the asphalt in a sprawl of broken bones and flesh and blood in the middle of Fifth Avenue.

  The crowds converge on the accident, men and women reacting with shock and grief and horror, a wide range of human emotions playing out on the screen in front of him.

  Much better, Isaac thinks, then he takes a sip of his coffee and settles in to enjoy the show.

  I’ve never dropped acid or eaten psilocybin mushrooms. I’ve never even smoked pot. And after five years of testing pharmaceutical drugs, you’d think I would have had at least one hallucinatory episode to add to my life experience, but until now I’ve managed to avoid seeing any Plasticine porters with looking-glass ties. Hell, I don’t even know what Plasticine is.

  So while there aren’t any newspaper taxis waiting to take me away, my reality has definitely taken a turn for the psychedelic and surreal.

  Faces and people melt and blur together. Buildings laugh and street signs wave. A giant balloon floats by that looks like Frank. For all I know it is Frank. I haven’t seen him in over a month, so maybe he’s turned into a blimp. In my present reality, anything is possible.

  The rational part of my mind knows none of this is real, but that doesn’t make it any easier to cross the street when the asphalt is bubbling like hot lava while Viking ships populated by all of the characters Eddie Murphy has ever portrayed float past and fire cantaloupes at me out of licorice cannons.

  This is not how I thought my day would turn out.

  Clouds become disembodied faces. Streetlamps turn into the stilt-like legs of giant aliens. Everything melts or expands or otherwise breaks the rules of physics. It’s as if I’m living inside a Salvador Dalí painting.

  I look around and try to figure out where I am, but there aren’t any recognizable landmarks to help guide me. The last thing I remember I was standing next to Isaac on the steps of the New York Public Library. I don’t recall walking away, so for all I know I’m still standing there and this is all in my mind. Except I feel my arms and legs in motion and the ground moving past beneath my feet, which means I must be mobile. But in my current state of mind, I can’t be sure of anything.

  At some point I realize the sun is gone and I’m wandering in the dark through a haunted forest, with barren, skeletal limbs reaching out and voices whispering in the darkness, so apparently I’ve transitioned from Dalí paintings to Disney cartoons.

  For some reason, my hallucinations are predominated by pop culture references.

  Sophie appears, laughing and running, hiding behind tree after tree, but as soon as I catch her she turns to vapor and vanishes like a breath in the winter air. Someone taps me on the shoulder and I turn around to find Randy floating six feet off the ground wearing a Led Zeppelin T-shirt, his flesh melting, so naturally I scream and run away. Charlie and Vic and Frank and Blaine show up here and there, more demons and ghosts to haunt the landscape of my newly warped reality.

  Even the monochromatic redhead who gave me twenty bucks makes an appearance, standing in the path ahead of me wearing a red lace teddy and beckoning me toward her with an alluring wave of an index finger. Then her index finger morphs into a serpent and I turn and run in the other direction.

  Like I said, I’m pretty sure none of this is real, but I’m not taking any chances.

  I reach a clearing in the forest and look up and see the moon glowing like a giant eyeball in the black sky. I’m waiting for it to turn into a face and wink at me, or start bouncing across the sky like a cartoon sing-along ball.

  Look out! Look out! Pink elephants on parade!

  Instead, the moon starts to look less like a lifeless satellite reflecting the sun and more like the opening at the end of a circular tunnel. The longer I stare at it, the bigger the moon grows, until I feel myself hurtling through the tunnel and into a universe of white, blinding light.

  Then something pops and everything goes black.

  I wake up shivering on the ground, curled up in the fetal position, wearing rumpled khakis and a pullover hoodie, covered in dirt and leaves. I get to my feet and brush myself off and look around, trying to figure out where I am. There’s not much light but it’s enough for me to decide that I’m in the Ramble in Central Park. Or at least I think I am. At the moment I’m still not sure of anything. Scratch that. I’m sure of one thing: I’m staying as far the fuck away from Isaac as possible.

  How he managed to fool all of us for so long is beside the point and not something I’m going to beat myself up about, because I already have enough guilt on my plate to feed an entire congregation of Catholics. But it’s obvious that when it comes to superpowers, I still have my training wheels, while Isaac is in the pole position at the Indianapolis 500.

  I start walking, rubbing my hands together and trying to warm myself up, waiting for the trees to uproot and follow me or for Randy to come jogging past wearing a Dark Side of the Moon T-shirt and spitting balls of fire. Instead I see a man in a jacket walking a black standard poodle. At first I think my hallucinatory experience from yesterday has run its course and that my reality has returned to normal, but then the man waves back at me with three hands and his poodle starts barking in German.

  Hallo, Ich sah nur ein Voge
l. Ein Vogel! Ich bin so aufgeregt! Vogel!

  Eventually I make my way out of the Ramble, past the Shakespeare Garden, and end up by the Delacorte Theater, where Romeo and Juliet embrace in an eternal prelude to a kiss. While the statue captures an innocent moment of the star-crossed lovers frozen in time, I notice that one of Romeo’s hands has shifted to Juliet’s ass while his other hand cups her breast. He squeezes Juliet’s breast as she lets out a moan of pleasure. Then I blink and the statue returns to normal.

  The last remnants of night are holding on in the shadows as the first hint of blue sky appears above Queens. I’m hoping the daylight will bring some relief from my hallucinations, though I wouldn’t be surprised if the sun rose wearing Ray-Bans and singing “I Heard It Through the Grapevine.”

  I walk past the Great Lawn on my way toward Fifth Avenue, blowing into my hands and rubbing my arms, trying to ignore the miniature Loch Ness Monster that keeps surfacing in the Turtle Pond. A couple approaches, a young man and woman walking hand in hand, either getting an early start to their day or putting the finishing touches on a late night. When they kiss, their faces melt together and drip onto the sidewalk like hot wax.

  Apparently Isaac’s superpowers are longer lasting than Extra gum.

  I walk through the Greywacke Arch and sit down on a bench out behind the Met. Other than joggers running past on their way to a healthy lifestyle, and a homeless person digging through a garbage can, there’s no one else around. So I sit there in the early-morning cold, trying to warm myself up and pull myself together, wondering what I’m going to do if my new state of mind turns out to be permanent.

  A few minutes after I sit down, a man in a long black coat and freshly pressed slacks sits down on a bench across from me. He’s holding a bouquet of daisies in one hand and looking around expectantly, an expression of anticipation on his face, as if he’s waiting for someone. He looks familiar, though I don’t know from where or when. If you live in Manhattan long enough you’re bound to run into someone you recognize. In my current state of mind I wonder if he’s real or a figment of my imagination; an odd coincidence or my subconscious coming out to play on the jungle gym of my hallucinating mind. There’s a good chance it could be either.