The Hero

This is a short story I wrote for my Creative Writing class last semester.  I got an A on it if that's worth anything.  The name of this story is The Hero.  It is not based on a true story.

            When I was six years old, my parents started going to church again, and I was enrolled in Sunday school.  On the first day, Miss Johnson told me about this guy named God.  He was an all-powerful being who had complete control over the world.  Everything God wanted was at his disposal.  But I could never really grasp the concept.  But then, one day, I realized why it was that I couldn’t fathom God. 

It was because I was God.

            I was nineteen years old and this quietish Chemistry major just kind of meandering through his sophomore year of college.  My hobbies were basically just video games, reading, and compulsively checking my Fantasy Football team.

            My discovery began on an early October Sunday.

            My roommate Brett was going against me in Fantasy Football.  And going into the night game, I needed David Garrard to get me sixty points.  Which meant something like six hundred passing yards and nine touchdowns, something along those lines.  I’m not sure if you’re a football fan, but those results are quite improbable.

            Brett was being quite irascible and I wanted nothing more than to defeat him.  But let’s just say that, along the course of the hour between the end of the late afternoon games and the beginning of the night game, I realized something.  I willed myself into manipulating the game.  That night, David Garrard threw for 607 yards and nine scores.  I needed the greatest game in the history of the National Football League from a painfully mediocre quarterback and it happened.

            Now, you’re probably wondering how I had this ability.  It’s really nothing too terribly fantastic.  But if I told you, then you’d know.  And maybe you would have to deal with what I had to deal with.  Sometimes, it’s best to be left in the dark—trust me.

            For the rest of the night, Brett pissed and moaned about what David Garrard had done.  He chalked it up to luck.  The next day before class, I confided in him.

            “Hey Brett,” I said.  “You know how David Garrard did that last night?”

            “Seriously, dude, you won.  It’s over.  Move on.”

            “No, no, but I want you to check something out.”  Then I sat at my desk while still looking back at Brett.  “What channel you wanna watch?”

            “I don’t wanna watch TV,” he responded.  “I wanna go to class.”

            “Just say a channel.”

            “ESPN.”

            “It’s probably on ESPN already.  Pick a different one.”

            “I don’t…Oxygen.”

            “Okay then, turn on the TV.”

            Brett then picked up the remote which was sitting on the top of the television and turned it on.  The Oxygen Network appeared.  To this, he replied, “Okay, so you thought there’s no way I’d say that and changed the channel when I was in the shower.  Cool.”

            Then I looked at the television and made the screen crash through and onto the floor.

            Brett abruptly exclaimed, “What the fuck was that?”

            I then willed the light off and then on again.  I nervously told Brett, “I have absolutely no idea how I’m doing that.”

            We then headed over to the Washington Building.

            “Do you know how to stop time?” Brett asked me.

            At first I wondered which specific hallucinogen Bret was using, but then I realized the question was not nearly as absurd as it seemed to be on the surface.  So I decided to give it my best shot.

            Instantly, the two girls walking in front of us stopped mid-stride.  The white noise of conversation ceased.  Yet Brett and I continued to walk.

            Brett was giddier than I had been during the previous night’s football game. 

“This is sick.  Completely fucking sick.”

Immediately, I interjected, “Okay, you cannot tell anyone about this.  If you tell anyone, I’ll make you forget about this.”

Brett grimaces.  “Okay, fine.”  Brett and I got to our class, the room remaining empty as we had arrived ten minutes early.

I saw the clock, the minute hand two whole numbers away from go-time.  Initially, I resigned myself to playing the waiting game.  But then I remembered that the waiting game sucks.  I glanced at the clock, meticulously moving the clock’s time.

Then, all of a sudden, Dr. Scott was getting ready to lecture.

“Okay, class,” he said.  “We’re going to read the article I assigned for you guys to read today.  I figured no one actually read it anyway so you guys are getting a break.”

Are you kidding me, I thought.  For once, I actually do the assigned work and now this happens?  I get to spend an hour talking about shit I already know?

No, wait, I can do whatever the Hell I want!  Fast forward an hour.  I thought I’d just keep that one to myself.

Brett and I walked back to our dorm after class dismissed.

“Why don’t you just speed through the walk back?” Brett asked.

I didn’t have a good answer.

“To Hell with walking!  If you can do whatever, why don’t you just get yourself a trillion dollars, a mansion, and Scarlett Johansson?”

I contemplated Brett’s question.  It was fair to ask—I didn’t know why, allowed whichever circumstances I would even remotely fathom, I was choosing this.

Then in the distance, I heard a high-pitched scream.  I couldn’t tell precisely what had happened, but the sound triggered an immediate reaction.  I dashed towards the noise and saw a slight blonde struggling on the asphalt against a muscular black-haired man.  The woman held tightly to a brownish purse.  The man had continuously smashed her frail frame.  Her injuries lacked any sort of grotesque visual appearance but she was clearly disoriented.

Twenty-four hours before, my best solution would have been to dial 9-1-1.  My more likely solution would have involved some combination of running and crying.  But all of a sudden, I felt inclined to help.  I felt inclined to intervene.  I felt inclined to be a hero.

I stepped forward and grabbed the attacking man, first with my right arm and then with both arms.  With the attacker fully in my grasp, I effortlessly tossed the man high into the air.  He flew far into the heavens before I lost track of him.  The blonde emerged from the ground, exerted a high-pitched scream of discernible joy and not the anguish of minutes before, and excitedly hugged me.

“Oh my God, I don’t know how to thank…how did you do that?” she excitedly asked while grasping for breath.

            I was flattered but also confused.  Nothing I had done seemed exceptional.  Sure, it seemed to defy gravity, but it also seemed to be so natural to me.

            Then I worried about the consequences of my actions.  If some guy you saw threw another guy high into thin air, would you tell anyone?  Hell, who wouldn’t you tell?

            “It’s not a problem, ma’am,” I replied.  “Just promise me that you won’t tell anybody.”  I didn’t wait for a response; I just walked away and ushered Brett to follow.

            “Why you so worried?” he asked.  “Can’t you just wipe away their memories?  You seem to have control over every other aspect of every other person’s life.”

            “Well, yeah, but I’m not really wanting to micromanage everything.  Who has time to deal with every little issue faced by everyone?”

            “Dude, fuck time!” Brett yelled, breaking off from the general calm of our conversation.  “Just stop time.  Choose to live forever, who cares?”

            “I don’t know; I just want to take this gift, whatever it is, and not abuse it.”

            After we got back, Brett took his textbooks and notebooks and went to the library.  Much to his chagrin, I refused to do his homework for him.  In the meantime, I turned on the television to get my mind back to my old reality.  Here I was—this nineteen year-old kid who could make his life interesting for the first time yet I sat on my ass watching crappy daytime TV.

            A couple hours later, I started to fade away mentally.  And then, just as I began to dose off into sleep, Brett ran into the room and eagerly turned on the local news.  I looked up and saw the text headline: Superhuman fights off attacker, says Witness.

            “Holy crap!” I exclaimed.  “They’re gonna find out.”

            “I wouldn’t worry,” Brett said.  “The anchorman seems to think the witness is drunk or high or something.”

            “The next story they ran was about a high-threat hostage situation in Detroit.  Some guy had taken his kids and girlfriend to a hotel in the boondocks and held them at gunpoint.

            “How do you deal with this in the world?” Brett asks me.

            “I don’t know, man.  It’s messed up.  I mean, threatening women and children for some kind of Napoleonic complex bullshit…”

            “No, I mean, you’re some kind of effing perfect superhero or something and yet this shit happens and you don’t do anything.”

            Brett was right.  So I headed over to Detroit.  One second later, I was in the outskirts of Detroit and in the crossfire.  The kidnapper had a pistol in his hand and he panicked once he saw my arrival.  He pointed the gun immediately at my head and fired twice.  Now all logic would suggest that my brain would be obliterated and I would immediately be dead.  But I was fine.  The bullets ricocheted off of my head and fell peacefully to the ground.  I then approached the man, swinging my arm violently and pushing him away.  He then hit the ground, allowing the family to escape.  Immediately, I made myself disappear.

            From that point forward, I began to acknowledge that perhaps my destiny was in vigilantism.  With all of the injustice in the world, it felt absurd for me to take this talent for granted.

            A couple days later, I resolved a bank robbery in Denver.  Then I freed an innocent man off of death row in West Texas.  Then I took down a cocaine kingpin in Bogota.  But whatever happened, I made sure that I left the scene of the crime, took no credit, and kept my crime-fighting out of my private life.  I still went to classes, I still did my homework, and I still was an utterly awkward failure with Anna.

            Anna was a girl my age that lived six doors down the hall from me in my dorm.  She had long, light brown hair, stood five feet eight inches, and possessed an endearing charm which continuously made me shake when I was near her.

            “I don’t get the big fascination with Anna,” Brett observed one day.

            “Oh, come on,” I responded.  “You know Anna’s pretty.”

            “Well, sure.  She’s pretty pretty.  You know, for you.”  Brett then took a sizable swig from his bottle of water before continuing.  “Well, when I say ‘you’, I mean ‘you you’, not latter-day Jesus you.  Anna’s a cute girl but you can snap your fingers and have Marilyn Monroe in her prime all over you, if that’s what you want.  Why the Hell would you not at least make Anna want you?”

            “Don’t you see the conflict there?” I retorted.  “Sort of an unethical thing to make someone love you.”

            “Hell, just tell her that you’ve been solving these conflicts.  Even you being the nerdy little weasel you are with your mediocre-to-average looks, you could get pretty much any girl you want just by telling her the truth.”

            I paused for a moment before I said anything.  “You’re gonna think I’m on crack or something for saying this, but I think I could get Anna regardless.  I mean, we have a lot in common.  She loves the Beatles as much as I do.”

            “Oh, wow, she likes The Beatles.  Because liking the most successful band in the history of the entire fucking universe makes you two such kindred spirits.  You should ask her if she likes to drink water too.  Yeah, bond over water.  The two of you were clearly meant to be together forever.”

            I hadn’t really appreciated his blatant sarcasm.  I just walked out of the room and headed towards Anna’s room.  I had to say what I had to say.  And hopefully she would respond positively.  I knocked on her door and immediately realized that I had absolutely no idea how to talk to her.

            She opened the door.  It was late at night on a Thursday, so she was about to go to bed.  When I saw that she was donning a dark blue bathrobe, I almost apologized for bothering her and almost walked away, but I continued anyway.

            “Anna, we need to talk,” I said.  “Well, um, not so much we need to talk.  Um, er, I just gotta tell you something.”

            “Yeah, sure thing.  Anna ushered me into her room and pointed at a turquoise sofa in the corner of her room.  “Rachel won’t be back for a while so we can talk however long you need.  What’s up?”

            “Well, it’s, it’s, it’s not like it’s something that’s really super urgent or anything.  But I just, um, really wanted to ask you something.”

            She maintained steady eye contact with me.  “What?”

            I began to get a lump in my throat.  I took a deep breath and said, “You wanna go out for dinner on Saturday?”

            She briefly contemplated the question.  “Whaddayou mean, like go to McDonald’s or something with you and Brett?”

            “Well, no, that’s not really what I was going for.  I was thinking more like, um, we could go out to Delpiero’s and get some dinner or something.”

            Anna was silent in her initial reaction, but when she finally said, “Oh.  So you mean like a date?”

            “Uh, um, I guess you could, uh, call it that.”

            Anna took an uncomfortable breath.  “Look,” she said.  “I really do appreciate your friendship but, well, I just…I’m not really looking for a relationship right now.”

            This took the energy out of me.  But she continued.

            “I’d love to hang out with you on Saturday.  But dating’s not, it’s just not something that’s really on my radar right now.”

            Lacking the ability to convert my raw emotion into even the most remotely cogent statements, I simply nodded and contributed a few false sentiments.

            “Oh, no, yeah, that’s fine.  I mean, I wouldn’t want to risk our friendship or anything, either.  I’m glad to have such an awesome friend.”

            Of course, this was all complete bullshit.  If I had wanted to be just friends, I wouldn’t have said anything to preserve the status quo.  But instead, I got the pleasure of walking home to my dorm with my metaphorical tail between my legs.

            When I got back, I wanted to cry.  But I restrained myself.  It just seemed so stupid—I did anything I could to make Anna like me and then nothing was going to come of it.  I thought I’d earned her interest.  So I made it happen. 

I eradicated Anna’s memories of my humiliation.  And I made her love me.

I walked over to Anna’s dorm again.  She was much more receptive.  Then it crossed my mind how absurd and irrational that I had been acting.  Here, I could control everything in my life and I wasn’t doing a thing.

I’d always wanted to go to the Eiffel Tower.  So I went.  I’d always wanted to coach an NFL team, so I took over the Pittsburgh Steelers in the Super Bowl.  It all became preposterously simple to get everything I wanted.

Of course, I still did my good deeds.  I willed for a temporary ceasefire in Gaza.  I got running water in some sub-Saharan African villages.  As opposed to my initial reluctance, I embraced the celebrity.  I got on the covers of Time, Forbes, Sports Illustrated—I even filled in for Bono at a U2 show at Madison Square Garden.  And then I decided, you know, what the Hell, I’ll institute world peace.

And the fighting stopped.  The Sunnis and Shiites began to live in harmony.  Irish and Northern Irish lived in religious neutrality.  Everything on Earth began to strike an utterly perfect sense of equilibrium.  The entirety of the world existed as a singular, harmonious institution.

Now obviously I had full authority on my romantic life as well.  But I wasn’t some kind of raving lunatic who was out to treat every woman on Earth as some kind of conquest—furthering my progress with Anna was good enough for me.  Of course, I no longer had any particularly use for my Chemistry classes either.  I set Anna and myself up in a nice mansion in Beverly Hills.  For a time, the two of us really began to enjoy our newfound status as the industrious couple of billionaires who use their spare time to save the world from itself.  But God damn it did things get tedious.

I came back one day from checking in on the United Nations in New York, just to see if anything worthwhile was happening.  Not really.  The German and Polish ambassadors were talking about the international friendly coming up between their countries—as though this was the most pertinent thing for representatives from those two countries to discuss.

I walked into the mansion as Anna seductively sipped on a glass of dark red wine.  I can’t really explain what I did that got Anna to this point—I didn’t even like wine, I didn’t particularly find the act of drinking wine to be sensual, yet I somehow turned my ultimate fantasy into the clichés I had learned from Bond movies.  At this point, I had grown exceedingly bored of dictating what Anna would do.

“Hey Anna,” I said.  “Instead of going to the Golden Globes tonight, we should have a game night.”

“What do you mean?”
            “We can play some Trivial Pursuit or Monopoly or Life or something.  I don’t know; I remember in college that I always wanted to play with you.”  I paused, as I had realized how cheesy that sounded, how absurd my fantasies seemed in comparison to the lush and vast escapism that had emerged as a result of my absolute power. 

“I’m sure that sounds really corny,” I added.

“Heh,” Anna said half-heartedly before taking another casual sip from her glass.  “That sounds really cute, you know?”  She then began to laugh, not in a way which was overwhelming but in a way which still managed to dishearten me.  But she could clearly see I was dejected by her response, so she immediately backtracked.

“You know, sure.  Let’s play Trivial Pursuit.”

So I brought Trivial Pursuit to the table and we began to play.  Anna went first and landed on History.”

I read the question.  “What was the only state won by Walter Mondale in the 1984 United States presidential election?”

Anna gave a vacuous stare back at me.

“Oh, come on now, Anna,” I angrily added.  “You’re a U.S. History major; I know you know this answer.”

She took another sip.  “I don’t even know who Warner Mondale is.”

“It’s Walter Mondale!” I yelled.  “God damn it, I know you’re just playing dumb here!”

“Look,” Anna replied, “I know it’s Minnesota.  But no one likes the smart girl.  I had a 3.9 GPA knowing American history but it got me nowhere.  But now I get to live like this and so do you!”

“For God’s sake, Anna, don’t dumb yourself down!”  I was confused why the pretty, somewhat nerdy girl for whom I had fallen felt compelled to act this way. 

“Excuse me, I have to go the bathroom,” I said.

I didn’t but I had to get some time to myself.  But for all of Anna’s frustrating desire to act the way she believed everybody wanted her to act, I always did have one ace in the hole.  And just like that, Anna became smarter.  Not smart enough to beat me in Trivial Pursuit, but enough for a healthy conversation.

But as I lay in bed at night, after Anna had already gone to sleep, I pondered what I had done.  Initially, it was a matter of ethics, but since Anna was happy and I wasn’t hurting anybody, my worries over morality had largely subsided.  At this point, I was simply bored.

Like, I remembered how when I was eight, I discovered a way to break into the game code of my favorite computer game and I immediately started to win every time I played the game.  But then I stopped getting satisfaction whenever I won.  So I stopped cheating and instead, I just played it straight.

So like any computer game, I pressed the reset button.  Oh, how bored a God must be!  Thank God I’m a heathen, or I’d start to have some genuine sympathies. 

It’s like if you put Lebron James on the basketball court against a bunch of eight year-olds; he’d kick ass and maybe even enjoy doing so the first time, but eventually he’s just going to get tired of it.  Obviously he could move up to the NBA eventually, but what would happen if he was stuck in that same game forever?  You think he’d keep fast breaking and throwing it down on some four foot tall kid, or do you think he’d start shooting left-handed or closing his eyes or something.  You know, just to keep things interesting.  That’s what I wanted to do.

So I went back to before the fame, before the billions of dollars, before Anna.  Hell, I even went back before the David Garrard game.  A perfect world is perhaps too subjective of a term—we say we want world peace and infinite wealth and whatever else, but we say it with the absolute certainty that neither would actually happen, allowing their realities to never interrupt and ruin the fantasy.

Predictably, David Garrard had a somewhat average game and I lost.  This really wasn’t too bothersome—it’s just a game, after all.  Brett and I went to class and went through a boring lecture about an article I had already read.  And then we walked back to the dorm.

Again, I heard a scream and saw a slight blonde struggling against a man.  But this time, I did nothing.

The woman continued to scream.  Prolonged, loud, and blood-curdling screams.  How was I supposed to ignore this?  I knew, with absolute certainty, that I could stop this.

So I examined the situation and decided to stare at the robber.  Instead, I did not fight.  The man, a relatively young man in above-average physical shape, dropped the woman to the ground and began to clutch his chest.  He then fell, landing to the side of the woman he had been robbing.

“Holy shit!” Brett exclaimed before pulling his cell phone out of his pocket and calling 9-1-1.

And then we walked away.