I was constantly choosing between suffering through the brain fog of being on an awful lot of painkillers and suffering through the pain itself. I hated feeling vague and clogged, all my perceptions and responses cottony and dampened, but not taking anything was terrible. I ended up weaning myself off the Oxycontin as soon as I could and chose being miserable, which was at least as uncomfortable for June as it was for me, because being in that much pain turned me into a cranky asshole.
Crankier asshole.
To her credit, June was as patient and nurturing as her personality allowed. She built me a kind of permanent nest on the pullout couch in her living room, a blanket fortress of pillows and snacks. She and Greg brought over more of my things from my apartment; she even enlisted the help of her barrel-chested not-boyfriend to be an extra pair of arms. She tried her best to make my presence in her house seem like an ongoing slumber party instead of a gross imposition. A few days after I moved in, she painted my toenails purple. It was her favorite color and looked a lot better on her than it did on me, flattering the deep, warm brown of her skin while accentuating the livid bruises around the pins in my ankle. We laughed at how swollen my toes were, like cocktail sausages poking out of the bottom of my brace. She wrapped up her hair and we put sheet masks on, as though skin care could cure anything.
IT COULDN’T LIFT my mood for long, though. June was quickly reemployed, this time helping a “research firm” develop sniff-proof packaging for “secure shipping” (smuggling). While her day job meant that she could continue to feed and shelter me, it also meant that I was alone for too many hours with nothing to do but think.
I couldn’t stop running the math in my head, over and over. Every day, the cost added up. Every day I couldn’t work, or move; every day that passed in a haze of pain and obsessive misery-making added to the total. As soon as I was alone with my asshole brain, the counter at the edge of my mind was whirring away, telling me exactly how much Supercollider cost me that day, that hour, that minute. Every time I felt my guts twist from the bone-deep anguish of moving wrong, or dropped the remote and couldn’t reach it for hours, that number jumped.
It could be worse, I told myself one day, endlessly circling through Netflix for something I hadn’t half watched that had at least one murder in it. I could be that redhead from R&D who was sliced clean in half. I thought about the glimpse of her rib cage I caught as she fell.
Of course, rationalizing ended up making it worse anyway. I was suffering; her suffering was ended, forever. Whatever her future might have been, whatever she might have discovered, whatever great love or disaster of her life—all of that possibility was gone. She might have lived sixty more years, making wonderful or terrible things, and it was gone . . .
My brain shuddered to a halt at that thought. It was so startling that I sat up straight, hurting myself. Digging out my laptop, I started looking for a way to calculate exactly how much he cost all of us. There had to be a way.
It didn’t take as long as I thought. After putting many variations of “disaster math” and “how to measure collateral damage” into a search engine, I eventually came across an academic paper called “A DALY Measure of the Direct Impact of Natural Disasters” by Ilan Noy. I’d been thinking about Supercollider the wrong way, I learned. I had been thinking about him as a person—an immensely destructive person, but a human being nonetheless. But he had more in common with a hurricane than a person, and once I adjusted my thinking, I realized there was a whole system devised to describe such forces, and what they cost. The currency was years of human life.
Lifeyears lost due to mortality are calculated as the difference between the age at death and life expectancy. The cost in lifeyears associated with the people who were injured (or otherwise affected by the disaster) is assumed to be defined as a function of the degree of disability associated with being affected, multiplied by the duration of this disability (until an affected person returns to normality), times the number of people affected. This disability coefficient is the “welfare-reduction weight” that is associated with being exposed to a disaster.
The last component of the index attempts to account for the number of human years lost as a result of the damage to capital assets and infrastructure—including residential and commercial buildings, public buildings, and other types of infrastructure, such as roads and water systems. We use the monetary amount of financial damages, and divide it by the monetary amount obtained in a full year of human effort. To proxy for this last quantity, we use income per capita as an indicator of the cost of human effort in each country-year, but discount this measure by 75%, as much of human activity is not spent in gainful employment.*
I flailed around the couch, clawing for anything that I could reach and write on. I came up with a few napkins and receipts, and a ballpoint pen lodged between the couch cushions. Hazy with painkillers, I tried to run the math.
I started with the Meat whom Supercollider had kicked across the room thoughtlessly, who landed with a sodden thump I still heard sometimes while I was trying to fall asleep. If he’d been twenty-five years old, and been the average civilian, that meant he’d have had fifty-two years of life expectancy left. I tried to account for the fact he was in what we’d call a “high-risk position,” so I cut that in half. It was still twenty-five years gone.
The woman from R&D was a different story. She was around thirty, I guessed, and had a safe desk job, which meant she was looking at another fifty-three years. Even if I decided to knock off another 25 percent because of her employer, that was still forty more years ahead of her, inventing new guns or new microsurgery techniques.
That was sixty-five years lost, just between the two of them, just that one day. That wasn’t even taking into account yet my own injuries, or the two more dead Meat, or the others who were hurt (probably at least one spinal injury, two with severe concussions, a host of broken ribs and fingers), or the property damage. Looking at it all written down, watching the numbers add up, it seemed like a high price to pay for a pinkie finger and some cryptocurrency.
I was doing calculations on how henching compared to Alaskan crab fishing when it came to high-risk professions and life expectancy, when June came home. I explained what I had been working on, but she seemed less enthusiastic than I had been about the importance of my calculations.
“So today was the day you finally went full conspiracy theorist.” She curled her lip. “Honestly, you took longer than I thought.”
I was too feverishly amped to succumb to her sick burn. “I’m onto something.” It was hard to keep my eyes off of what was emerging on the screen: a picture of the actual human toll of just a few minutes of Supercollider’s presence. It was appalling.
June was saying something. “What?” I asked, trying to pay attention this time.
“I said you’ve gone stir-crazy.”
“These numbers mean something.”
She dropped her bag and coat onto a chair, and took off her nose plugs with an audible sigh of relief. “If I come home and there’s a bunch of string and post-its about how Supercollider’s an inside job, I’m kicking your ass out.”
“Would only post-its be okay, though?”
She disappeared into the kitchen.
Late into that night, and over the next week, I worked to describe and quantify the disaster of Supercollider. There was a lot to account for, and a lot of numbers I had to guess or invent. I nearly tore my hair out trying to work out figures for hospitalization times and lost income for people I barely knew. I pored over endless crowdfunding pages, slowly becoming numb to the ordinary horror of house fires and tornadoes, to properly calibrate how much disasters were costing people. Within a few days of slow, foggy calculations, I had a number that seemed solid.
Those few minutes in a hotel conference cost all of us 152 years of our lives combined. Supercollider had decided that a kid’s little finger and the Eel’s ransom demand held more value than 152 years in hench lives. Maybe a lot of those yea
rs wouldn’t have been terribly good, and would have involved a lot of busting heads and driving recklessly and working for villains. But they were our shitty years, and they’d been taken from us by an asshole in a cape playing judge and executioner.
For all her teasing, at first June seemed relieved I had something to do. I think she hoped that once I landed on a number that made sense, I’d lose interest and become a reasonable person again. To her dismay, I immediately began to examine Supercollider’s greater toll on the world. If that one morning cost us so much, how much damage was he doing every day?
The next project took much more complex thinking and more time; I was slow, and sometimes had to stop and close my eyes for hours until a headache passed. I was forever waiting until the drugs were fading just enough that I could think a bit, but not so much that the pain made working impossible. The fact that I could focus at all in the state I was in convinced me I was doing something important. And in those little windows of time, I started to build something.
To start, I only went back six weeks, and found four incidents (including the press conference) that I could run some numbers on. Only a few days before my leg was shattered, Supercollider was chasing Nerve Gas and backhanded one of the getaway vehicles into a parked car. One of the henches was thrown free from the wreck, through the windshield, and was shredded on the pavement. Supercollider dragged the other two henches out of the car and restrained them by tying them up with the car bumper and front axle. While it was not mentioned directly in the news reports, there was no way they weren’t injured in this process, because human flesh is squishy and he tied them up with huge chunks of steel. I counted one dead, two injured, and two totaled cars.
A couple of weeks earlier, Alkaline managed to mind control the psionic hero Dendrite, and things went haywire in a penthouse downtown. Supercollider had a run-in with the gas stove, and in the resulting explosion, the condo was seriously damaged and both Alkaline and her hench were badly injured (Dendrite was fine). More than two hundred residents were evacuated from the building that night. The villain was sent to the hospital in serious condition with burns to her face and 40 percent of her body; the hench was luckier, and got away with burns to 20 percent of her body. Alkaline never stabilized, and ten days later she died of complications. I counted one dead, one injured, and two hundred displaced, with $400,000 in damage.
A month and a half back, Supercollider and Accelerator had busted up The Gash’s warehouse operation, and the building caught fire. Three Meat died on-scene, and three firefighters were nearly killed when a wall fell on them. According to a follow-up news story last week, they were “still dealing with the effects of their injuries.” That fiasco racked up three dead, three injured, $1.2 million in damages.
Then there was the press conference. The body count was on the high side at four, with a lot of injuries, but a mere $70,000 in property damage.
I ran the numbers. In six weeks alone, Supercollider was responsible for 468 lifeyears lost. Those years bought a pinkie finger, Dendrite getting her faculties back, Nerve Gas and a handful of Meat being arrested after a botched robbery, and The Gash losing an awful lot of coke. That was what 468 years of our lives were worth to him. That was how little I mattered. A black pit opened in my stomach, and I wasn’t sure if fury or despair waited at the bottom.
June tried, to her credit. She treated what I was doing as though I had a weird new hobby, like I’d suddenly become obsessed with knitting or model trains. She’d even listen to me give a quick summary of the day, about the complex spinal or traumatic brain injuries I’d tracked, about the buildings demolished and cars totaled. I learned how long to talk before her eyes glazed over or she got annoyed, and let her lead me away from the spreadsheets and toward a new horror movie or stories of her nightmarish coworkers. But all the while, in my head, I was adding up the cost.
Once I had worked through those first six weeks, I sat on the thing I had made for a little bit. I needed to take a break from the work, but it was never far from my mind. I spent a few days eating and sleeping more and doodling terrible equations a lot less, but I couldn’t stay away for long—Supercollider had been active since he was a teenager, and I had so much catching up to do. I intended to work backward, going through this back catalog of horrors, but before I did that, I looked forward.
If the six weeks I examined turned out to be an accurate core sample of the average cost of Supercollider being a superhero in the world, that meant some terrible things. For every day he was alive, he cost over ten lifeyears; he ate up an average of seventy-eight years of life a week. If he continued at this rate for the next forty years, that was a staggering 162,240 years of human life he’d cost the world.
The only events that I could compare him to were catastrophic. Years ago, a 6.2-magnitude earthquake hit New Zealand; 182 people died, thousands were injured, and there were billions of dollars in damage. The entire downtown core of Christchurch was leveled. There was no question in anyone’s mind that it was a disaster. It cost, according to the researchers who wrote the paper, 180,821 lifeyears.
Supercollider was as bad for the world as an earthquake.
I was overwhelmed with the feeling I had to do something with all of the terrible numbers that I’d been torturing myself with for weeks. I needed someone to know, or at least someone to have a chance to know, aside from me and June (and sometimes Greg, though he didn’t have the attention span to listen to me for very long). I decided to go the traditional crackpot-with-a-theory route and started a blog.
I called it the Injury Report.
I assumed I would scream into that echo chamber for the rest of my days, or until I got bored and defeated by it. I updated the lonely site regularly with Supercollider’s activity, present or past, and sometimes did profiles when other heroes happened to cause an egregious degree of harm. I created a few anonymous social media accounts and dutifully sent out the links every time I finished a new one, little digital messages in a bottle that I never expected anyone to read. Just sending them out there made me feel less lonely, less isolated. But one day one of those bottles bobbed up on the shore of a journalist who was trolling superhero hashtags for a story, and dug deep enough to find me.
The piece he wrote was not flattering. He positioned me as some kind of obsessive maniac, scribbling away in a basement, when actually I was obsessively scribbling in a third-floor walk-up, thank you very much. “Superhero sour grapes” was the best quip he came up with, dismissively assuming (correctly) I was a castaway hench bent on revenge. His audience mostly agreed with him.
But someone decided to check my math, possibly to make fun of me more effectively. And when they did, they discovered that it worked. They looked at the research I linked to online and it was legitimate, and a counterpoint emerged that I might be onto something here.
And just like that, the Injury Report took shape. While my primary focus was always Supercollider, I started to run the numbers for other heroes, and nearly every one of them came out in the red. I started to get requests, and I’d oblige, looking into a particular incident and coming back with a damning number. They all told the same story: superheroes, for all their good PR, were terrible for the world. They were islands of plastic choking the oceans, a global disaster in slow motion. They weren’t worth the cost of their capes; whatever good they did was wiped out many times over by the harm.
Soon, my messages weren’t lonely at all. Every piece I put up was boosted and recirculated and syndicated. I got tips every day about devastation and death and loss, accounts of family businesses now crippled by debt, and previously cheerful young people suddenly changed into shells of themselves by head injuries or PTSD. A morgue worker complained that my numbers were low, far too low; for every hench casualty the media reported, there were three more Meat on a slab.
I thanked every single person and added their numbers, and their credit (if they wished it), to the report. The stories about it were still sometimes insulting and dismissiv
e, but more and more readers cautiously allowed that I had a point. At any rate, people were reading it and fascinated by the horror show of it. I could count on tips and rubberneckers at the very least, and every day the total rose.
June’s support evaporated the moment I had an audience. Working on my theories alone seemed harmless, but once people started to pay attention, she panicked.
“Why the fuck do you do this,” she snarled one evening, while I was trying to respond to a backlog of DMs.
“I—what?”
“Why the fuck do you make this awful thing every day? It’s your whole life now.”
I slammed my laptop shut, startling her. “Because it is my whole life now.” I gestured toward my body, trying to encompass the abjection of it.
“But why wallow in it? You could be doing anything. Write live recaps of shows you’re watching, fucking learn to knit, I don’t know. You could do anything else.”
I shook my head. “I can’t do anything else.” And I lifted my laptop lid and tried to slide back to work, to the grim disaster math consuming my brain.
A hand waved in front of my face. I looked up, surprised, and June was standing directly in front of me.
“I don’t like it,” she said.
“Okay? You don’t have to, and I can stop talking about it.”
“No, I don’t like that it’s happening here. In this apartment. It’s not safe.”
I made a you’re-being-ridiculous face. “No one knows I’m here. I worked with Greg and have a VPN set up. It’s fine.”
“No, Anna—it’s not fine. You’re calling them out while in my fucking house.”
“Nothing is going to happen!”
“She says, as she tallies the human life and property these people destroy every day.”
Hench Page 7