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16 July 2024
The Superhero came back from a long series of adjudications in the court system of a far-away country, helping them to establish the rule of law there. This was something that in the long run would prevent him from having to fly over there and deal with criminals, or at least cut back on that. The adjudicating work was tedious, mentally taxing, and emotionally draining. The Superhero was not trained in law, so he had to quickly study.
He came back from this long series of adjudications exhausted and just wanted to relax in his little house on the edge of town, painted white with a hedge around the front. His hedge kept him from view and hid the wild grass and weeds in his front lawn.
But after a couple of days off, a huge fire broke out in town and the fire department called him. "Can you do that thing where you drink water from the fire hose in great drafts and then spew it on the fire? Like a couple years ago? The fire is really big and is threatening a whole section of town." The Superhero asked the fire department if they could just use fire trucks. But as in the past, the fire department was underfunded and somewhat mismanaged, so there weren't enough working trucks. "I really just wanted to take a break" said the Superhero. "Well," said the fire chief, "It's either you or the town burns."
The Superhero gathered his wits, shook off his fatigue, and drove over to the fire. He parked by the side of the street and walked over to where the fire department was gathered around the fire hydrant. He could see the flames, smell the smoke, and feel the heat, of the town burning.
They had the firehose already fitted to the hydrant, and when he had gathered his physical courage, he put the opening of the fire hose in his mouth and the firefighters opened the valve, letting water flow into him.
His stomach and ribs expanded painfully, and he grew to much more than human size. The water tasted bad, the chemical/fabric badness of the firehose. His instinct was to gag and choke from the flow of water, and his stomach wanted him to vomit, but he had to take in the water and suppress his instincts so that at the right moment he could spew the water on the fire, aim for the right spot.
After twenty-four hours of this, he and the firefighters got the fire under control and he could go back home.
He ached from the work but reasoned "Well, if I had to do this day after day for the rest of my life, I could do it without literally going crazy." And after all, he was the Superhero. Who else was going to do what he did?
After a few days off, but before his body was feeling back to normal, he was called in the middle of the night. He really wanted to sleep, but he knew from experience that it was better to respond to these calls. "Hello? Is this the Superhero?" "Yes," he said, half-asleep. The woman on the other end said "We have a problem downtown. The Exner Building is starting to sway. We think it might be a hyperlocal earthquake. The Exner Building was not built for earthquakes." "Uhh, but because of geological change, the little earthquakes..." he muttered. "Yes, geological change, please, can you help us stabilize the building? You're the only one who can do it on short notice."
He thought for about five seconds. If the building fell down, he would have to spend all day tomorrow rebuilding it, and also explaining to people why he thought his good night's rest was more important. Ultimately it would be more work, even if he needed his sleep right now. "Oh. Okay. I'll head out there in a minute."
He went and held the building up for four hours while they got everyone and everything valuable out. And then they were able to bring in some cranes, counterweights, and temporary flying buttresses, to hold the building in place while they decided what to do with it.
He made it home an hour or two before dawn, and did his best to sleep through the morning.
A week passed. In many ways he felt better, but his attitude toward being the Superhero and doing Superheroic things was worse. He felt absolutely burned out on being the Superhero and really felt like he couldn't do that kind of work ever again. He was trying to word his "resignation letter". It was hard because he had never been formally put in the role of Superhero. There was no hiring process for him, so there was no quitting process. He was getting together his courage to do this yet another wearying task.
Time passed. He was starting to heal from the yoke of servitude, and simply needed to formalize his decision to become free. But then on a day when he might have been working up his courage to make the fateful announcement, in the middle of the day, he got a call. Mrs. Abbot's cat had gotten out onto the fire escape of the building and couldn't make it back into her apartment. The fire escape itself seemed to be broken so Mrs. Abbot couldn't go out on it herself. Could he come and use his super-tallness power to pick the cat off the fire escape and put it back in her room?
Mrs. Abbot's cat was merely a cat, and perhaps the fatigue of a Superhero can somehow outweigh the need to save the life of a cat, and protect a heart from breaking if the cat should die. At that moment, he felt that it did. He said "I really don't feel like I should do this. I'm tired to the bone. I did months of adjudicating" (but he silently knew that his interlocutor had no concept of the value of that work) "and then I came back here and had to distend my body with water from a fire hydrant and spew it on fires for twenty-four hours. And then not long after in the middle of the night I had to get up from my bed and go stabilize the Exner Building, put my weight into it to prevent a fatal collapse. And I've been doing this kind of thing for years. That's just the most recent things I've done. I am completely depleted. I'm sorry."
But the voice on the other end of the line was persistent. "But... Mrs. Abbot's cat is the town mascot... we need Mrs. Abbot's cat... That's all we have to keep us going here... Mrs. Abbot's cat needs you. We all need you. It's not like it's a big deal to just use your tallness power. You're the Superhero."
Pinned to the wall by the reality created by this phone call, the Superhero thought for ten seconds. Which would be harder, to say "no" to the voice on the phone and let them figure out how to save the cat (at some risk of letting the cat die, he well knew), or to just go out there, pop a few tallness pills, do some rapid, painful growth, and pick the cat off the fire escape?
When we measure a person, we often think of how they look right now. But a person is also made up of the things that make them change and determine the direction in which they change, and also, made up of the thing that changes the way they change, the change of the change. That which is on a higher level drives that which is on a lower level. Behind the scenes, in a person, is a tendency which enables the rest of them to become evident to all.
In that moment, it dawned on the Superhero that he had a secret superpower he was not aware of, but which, he realized, everyone who called on him for help was instinctively aware of, which had kept him going and kept him stuck in his job for years and years, ever since it became apparent to him and the people around him that he was the Superhero. This secret superpower was the ability to respond to the need in front of him, despite his fatigue, to have part of his life be independent from his body and its exhaustion, and to be able to use that part of his life to will and to act.
He considered, in that ten seconds, "Who am I? What am I? Do I get to choose?" The ten seconds ended but he still didn't speak.
The voice spoke. "Oh, so you're not going to help us with Mrs. Abbot's cat." The voice was offended. "You have better things to do, I guess cause you're the Superhero. Fine. But you're never going to hear the end of this. Imagine that, a Superhero who wouldn't save a cat." The person with the voice hung up.
Now he wondered, what should he do? His awareness of the questions of "Who am I?" and "What am I?" opened to him an uncertainty that he felt too tired to resolve. He could not decide to send the letter of resignation, nor could he, from that point on, respond to phone calls asking for help. "Who am I?, What am I?" "Am I a Superhero in who I am? In what I am?" When his mind got together its wits and faced reality, he considered these things.