Superhero

You know that the average life expectancy of a superhero is twenty-eight? Twenty-eight, isn’t that something? That makes me luckier than most by almost an entire year. Lucky me.

I’m sorry to start this story so bleakly but I want to be factual where I can. I heard being factual helps.

I had this friend once. She had three fucking heads, all beautiful as anything. One of them could sing songs that‘d lure you towards her like she was a siren, like she had string wrapped around you. Another head could scream indefinitely and deafen you all the while. But the other head was nothing special, which to me, made that the only special one.

Me and this friend, I won’t give you her name but if you look her up you’ll find it, we were teenage superheroes and it’s how I got my start. As part of a duo. She’s dead now though. We can’t all make the average, right?

To be honest, most of the superheroes I knew from back then are gone. But her being gone, that still stings.

So anyway, she had this theory. She thought superpowers developed in response to our childhood situations. How we grew up, she said, is what decided our abilities. I’ll use her as an example — I don’t think she’d have minded.

This girl had no parents and was shipped around foster homes like a white elephant, like the gift no one wanted. She ended up spending six years in this one place in a cramped room where no one hardly spoke to her. No one asked her how she was. Sure, she got meals, she got a little educated, but she didn’t get to talk.

So one night she sprouted two friends right on her own shoulders. Suddenly she had three heads. One head would sing her to sleep, would hush out the gentlest lullabies you could imagine. The other screamed and screamed to release her pain.

She had a lot of pain.

When I try to apply that theory to my own life, to my own childhood, I can see it clicking. See, I had a father — which is more than my friend had. My father was a hoarder. We had three cats and a dog and these stacks of trash, of magazines and letters and papers and cereal boxes, we had these stacks on every corner and they looked like Egyptian columns. Everywhere was matted with fur. The house reeked of animal shit and it reeked of stale food, too.

I wanted it clean. I wanted to live in houses like other kids my age. Maybe the cats wanted it clean even more than I did, but I wanted it clean too. Anyway, every time I‘d move something Dad would go hysteric. He’d scream. He’d say “that’s the way your mother left it before she left us,” and I’d feel so bad I‘d creep around the stacks of trash for the next month careful not even to brush up against something.

So one day, when I tripped over a sneaking ginger cat, I sent his precious worthless piles flying — and he lost it. He yelled and sobbed and I just stood there, something in me boiling up, as he screamed.

Then, I don’t know. I kinda phased out. A flash of black and then white, like a photo being taken right in front of me.

The room was tidy. You could see the linoleum — I didn’t even know we had linoleum! And it looked mopped. The trash was gone. The stained sofa looked new. And me and Dad stood in this hollowed out room just staring at each other.

Dad couldn’t handle it. He said I’d stolen the memories of his dead wife. I said sorry, I didn’t even know what I’d done.

He had a breakdown a week later and was never the same after.

I didn’t mean to talk about my father so much. Despite what I’ve said, I loved him very much. But you got to wonder, is that where my powers were shaped? By childhood?

Who knows.

But that’s how I found out I could clean shit up. I’d blank out for a little, then I’d come back and everything would have changed. Except for me, I guess.

After Dad’s breakdown, I took a job cleaning rooms in a motel. I could wash the sheets without them leaving the room. I saved that motel a lot of water and soap, I can tell you that. In exchange, I lived in a single room there. And for about three weeks I was pretty happy. Job was easy, I was earning money, and at the time, Dad was getting the care he’d probably needed for years.

Then the motel manager fired all the other cleaning staff because, why keep them on? Damned if I didn’t feel bad for that, as I looked out from behind the curtain as these dour faces headed to their cheap cars, back to tell their families that hard times were coming.

But I kept on cleaning. Moved onto a bigger hotel eventually, got better pay. Paid for Dad’s care and donated the rest to a mental health charity. What did I need with it?

Okay, I said I’d be factual. Truthful.

Working the hotel is where I met the girl with three heads. She worked in the back. Couldn’t have her on reception, said the boss. Can you imagine what the guests would say? At nights she sung, walking down the darkened corridors, lulling the guests into the sleep of their lives. I think it was the only part of the job she liked.

We started hanging out on breaks. Talked about our lives, our powers, our futures.

“I’m depressed,” she said one day. Said it just out of the blue — we’d been talking about cakes. That middle head, her real face, always had a smile on it like she didn’t have a care in the world.

I said I was too. I said we would be depressed together.

“Do you think we’d make better villains than heroes?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never thought about it.”

“I could put people to sleep and you’d go into the rooms and steal wallets. What do you think? Then you’d clean up after so there was no evidence whatsoever. Doesn’t that sound exciting?”

“I guess it does,” I admitted.

So that’s what we did for a while.

We doubled our wages for six months, before people stopped staying in the hotel where money seemingly vanished. It wasn’t worth the great sleep they got.

Eventually our boss put two and two together and we lost our jobs.

We didn’t care so much by then because we were in love. We had superpowers, we had money, and we were in love.

We decided we’d keep doing what we’d been doing in the hotel, only we’d do good with the money. We’d invest it in equipment, in research, in all kinds of things that would eventually improve the world.

So that’s what we did, too. And in two years, our powers boosted a little by new equipment, we were putting supervillains to sleep instead of hotel patrons.

There was this one villain I’ll never forget. It was near to the end of it all. He had these bushy brows, like cat tails. Thin lips, pale face, little eyes. But its the brows I remember.

Usually my friend would stand outside and make the supervillain sleep, then I went in and handcuffed them.

But that time, when she saw him, she just started screaming. She screamed until the windows broke. I covered my ears and stepped away.

She walked closer and closer to this supervillain. He’s covering his ears but blood is gushing out between his fingers.

She’s screaming louder as she gets up to him. Screams into his ears.

Then his eyes pop. His head rocks, trembles, and it’s not long until he’d dead.

That’s the kind of mess I can’t clean up.

I came and took her hand, dragged her away.

All three faces were crying. Tears really streaming down.

“Why’d you do that?” I said.

”I didn’t mean to,” she replied. “But he looked like someone. He really looked like him.”

That’s all I ever got from her. That he looked like someone. I didn’t push but I think maybe it’s to do with her childhood. I never knew for sure.

She died a few months later. I don’t want to go into that but suffice to say she didn’t see twenty-eight.

So why am I telling you this? That’s the big question, right?

I don’t know.

But sometimes I have this dream. I see my friend screaming all her hatred into that supervaillain. Only he’s got my head, my face, not his. And he’s doing everything he can to keep it together, to not let all the anger destroy him. And I’m looking at myself from above, yelling at him, telling him he needs to scream too, just like she is. That if he keeps it all inside him it’ll be too much, that he’ll burst. That he’ll die. That he has to let it flow through him, let it back out into the world.

Twenty-eight on average.

I’m hoping to reach thirty.

I think maybe that’s why I’m telling it.