The Irony of Being a Hero
What’s worse than being a superhero?
That might sound like the start of a joke to you. If you’re anticipating a punchline, stick around. Felix Welter comes into the story in a moment, and his life is the punchline of a very, very cruel joke.
But first, let me tell you about Collins, Illinois, population 14,000, the safest town in America. If there was ever a normal, all-American town, Collins was it. The houses were respectively wide apart, complete with white picket fences and grey shingle roofs and long driveways leading to a two-car garage where people stored their family memorabilia and college graduation photos. In front of the house, a brightly-colored mailbox and carefully, perfectly pruned begonias; inside, at least two bathrooms; products of familial photo-shoots framed and hung above the fireplace; and a basement, used as a gym, maybe, or something else of the sort.
You may be sensing some acidity in my tone – bitterness, maybe? Collins was a perfect town for perfect people, and if you say you wouldn’t want to live in a perfect town with perfect people and lead a perfect life – well, you’re a liar. We all do. Life in Collins may not have been especially exciting, but it wasn’t scandalous, or shocking, or outrageous either. For the most part, that is.
This is where we get back to Felix Welter, who was the only exception besides his great-grandmother, who ran away with her gardener years back. Felix sometimes thought that the only thing she left behind – except for his grandfather and a gambling debt the size of Texas, that is – was a legacy that skipped two generations and landed right in his hands, and it was soiling the perfectly normal reputation of the Welter family name. His mom had cried when she heard, and his dad stormed off to a bar in the next town over where he could drown his abnormal sorrows. And Felix? Felix locked himself in the basement for a solid five hours and thought and fretted over why, why can’t he just be like everyone else.
It’s not like Felix was fucking the gardener, or anyone else on that matter. No; his sordid secret crossed every border that there could possibly be crossed where sordid secrets are concerned. In his mind, Felix conjured a diagram to show it. It was a scale, like a thermometer, except near the bottom there were words like ‘proper’ and ‘straight’ and as you progressed further and further up the scale of disgrace the words escalated to ‘dishonest’ and ‘scandalous’ and ‘outrageous’ and ‘abhorrent’ and, at the very top, ‘inhuman’.
'Inhuman', he thought, was the best way to describe it, really. Not just because his secret was beyond any scandal the world has ever seen but because it was, literally, inhuman, and Felix wasn't one to throw around the word 'literally' so easily.
So here it is, after much build of tension – Felix Welter's sordid, inhuman secret:
Felix was a superhero.
Well, technically, Felix wouldn't say he was a superhero – he had superpowers, but it's not like he used them – the mere thought was mortifying for him. Besides, Collins was the safest town in America, so there wasn't anyone to save, or be a hero for, really. But for the sake of the joke, Felix Welter was a superhero.
What, then, is worse than being a superhero?
Being a teenage, angsty, sexually-frustrated, unemployed superhero in the safest, most normal, perfect town in America.
Now that's one hell of a punchline.
& & & & &
When Felix finally told his parents that he could see through walls and shoot laser from his hands and probably fly – that particular hypothesis he had yet to test – there was a brief scandal, whereupon Felix's father accused his mother of cheating and disowned Felix for approximately three minutes.
"But Frank!" Felix's mother had yelped in a pitiable sort of half-shout half-sob while his father had been facing the window, a grave expression which he had seen Horatio Caine make several times out of the television screen adorning his face. He was looking out of the window, which had a double function: to seem dramatic and to watch out for neighbors. "Frank, that's ludicrous! Don't you remember? 1996, yoga retreat…?"
The last thing Felix really wanted was to hear the details of his conception, but he decided he may be able to endure it if it meant Frank would not think he was the product of an illicit affair.
His father had, at this point, turned around from his place by the window, a nostalgic smile on his face. Yes, he remembered, he said, with a wiggle of his eyebrows which Felix sorely hoped he could erase from his memory. No doubt they would have sat together and reminisced if not for the issue at hand.
"Superpowers?" Frank wondered, taking a seat by Felix and resting his hand on his shoulder. Felix hoped that meant he was de-disowned. "But how?"
Felix considered suggesting that it was some kind of genetic mutation or that maybe his parents were related somehow – nearly everyone was related in Collins somehow – but decided that even if that was the case, he'd rather stay ignorant.
"Heaven knows," his mother sighed, her eyes brimming with tears. "What should we do? Shall we tell anyone?"
And almost as soon as the words came out of her mouth, she started sobbing at her earnest. "We can't tell anyone!" she wailed, throwing herself into the armchair. "They'll take you away, Felix! They'll turn you into a circus freak! Imagine what the neighbors will say –"
The mere thought was enough to bring on a fresh wave of tears and she stormed upstairs, where undoubtedly she buried herself in a grave of tissues and then opened one of her chick-flick novels to make her feel better. Frank hadn't stuck around to find out, and neither had Felix. They diverged, each their own separate way – Frank out of the door and Felix down to the basement, where he lamented over how, if he lay awake in his room facing the door, he could probably see his parents through the wall getting up to pee at night.
& & & & &
You may imagine that Felix and his parents did everything in their powers to keep their inhuman secret hidden. So much so, in fact, that you won’t be too wrong to assume that they were fairly successful, and that Felix was never found out, and that the Welter family never suffered any unwanted attention and they lived happily, normally ever after.
And that was almost the case. A few years had gone by, during which Felix had done absolutely nothing with his powers and had undergone no character development and had fought no crime whatsoever, a situation he was perfectly content with. His time in Collins was drawing to a close, the finish line within sight, and all he needed to do was cross it, even if it was in average time and nowhere near the top ranks which, knowing Felix, would probably happen. Graduation – the last hurdle, and then he’d be in community college where, according to Felix’s research, stranger things have happened than a guy shooting laser out of his eyes.
It would be so appropriately tragic for Felix to trip at the last hurdle. Isn’t it what this story is about – poor Felix Welter’s misfortunes? I dare say it might be a bit disappointing if the extent of Felix’s calamity had not gone just a little bit further; plus, the story hasn’t reached its climax yet, and for a climax we need such a shocking, fatal debacle that it isn’t enough for Felix to simply falter, or stagger – no, he has to fuck up monumentally, fall flat on his face, just inches from the finish line, for all to see.
& & & & &
As previously mentioned, things were perfectly fine for Felix to begin with – apart from the obvious inconveniences, of course, like hearing his neighbor’s thoughts about him every morning when they walked to school (which mainly consisted of why does he always wear black and are those skinny jeans and maybe he straightens his hair and variations thereof) and that’s on top of the normal things that he had to deal with on a daily basis, like untimely boners and getting shoved into lockers which apparently isn’t a movie invention. Felix took it on the chin, though, because the other possibility was getting dissected in a lab somewhere and he already figured that being a superhero just wasn’t his destiny, anyway, unlike being a bullying victim which if he wasn’t intended to be, then why would he be born so skinny?
Felix’s mistake was to think that his destiny was entirely in his own hands. A ridiculous notion, really, and quite a bit of wishful thinking on his part, because Felix has already established that he wasn’t destined to be a superhero and yet – some cruel, ironic twist of fate has landed him with the ability to turn invisible and also fly.
Batman would be jealous.
& & & & &
But it’s not whatever divine power has decided to fuck up poor old Felix Welter’s life that we’re talking about here, no. Not in this case, at least.
We’re back at the last hurdle. Graduation. You already know what’s gonna happen – vaguely, you know that Felix will screw up, enormously. Deep down, you want to hear all the gory details, maybe because humans are naturally compelled by things that horrify them or maybe because there’s a degree of sadism and Felix, in all his pathetic glory, is the perfect vehicle for it.
Felix proves himself slightly less pathetic, but that’s later on. Now we’re back to fate.
As it happens, Felix wasn’t on his own on the incongruous front in Collins, IL. Mark Wilson maybe couldn’t see through walls or shift shape, but he had his own screwed-up kinks. One of them happened to be homicidal tendencies.
Mark couldn’t really help it; a mix of nature and nurture, people said later, growing up in a town like Collins can really mess you up, that’s for sure, and some people thought they were damn right.
Mark ended up being factor number one to influence Felix’s fate. The second was his conscience, sort of a separate entity to Felix himself because, well, Felix wasn’t particularly conscientious – not in a bad way, just in the slightly selfish way of not particularly caring if your superpowers could save the world just as long as you made it through high school. But on that isolated incident, completely uncharacteristically, that almost-hidden part of Felix cropped up, stirred, said “get your shit together, you useless piece of trash”, etc. etc. – maybe I’m being entirely too harsh. That’s for you to judge.
Anyways, here’s how it happened.
Felix ended up between Washington, Dana and Wilson, Mark, back row, inconspicuous, the way he liked it. It made his day a whole lot better which, considering it marked the end of Felix's phlegmatic era as a bottom-feeder on the high school food chain – roughly the equivalent of a plankton – really says something. His mother made him wear a suit, which he secretly enjoyed but didn't show. He still had a reputation to uphold.
Felix felt a strange kind of happiness. No, happiness wasn't exactly the word for it – he wasn't non-of-my-pimples-are-excessively-visible happy, or no-one-noticed-me-today-hooray happy, or pizza-for-lunch happy. Felix thought that the correct term would be euphoria – which he sort of associated with light-headedness and a shock of adrenaline which could make him do something crazy. Felix felt prematurely invincible (among other prematurities). (Technically, of course, he already was invincible, in the way that not a whole lot of thing could actually kill him.) For the first time in his sorry, calculated existence, Felix Welter didn't care about what people thought of him. Silly of him to see graduation as an invisible border which, when passed, will take him to a magic land where he could, theoretically, walk around scratching his balls all day and no one would give a shit; but graduation was supposed to be a big step, and everything would be different from that point on, right? Right???
Wrong, but Felix didn't know that.
He was in a strange state of slumbering ecstasy through Principal Truman's speech, which went along the lines of nurturing the students into mature human beings ready for the world, etc., and through the valedictory speech, made by Brianna McKinley, who looked like she drank too much coffee, and through the diplomas up until about Quincy, Zachary, which is when he started to feel like if he wanted to, he could lean forward and grab his new, unconfined future by the hand.
There was a little impediment, though, and that impediment was Dana Washington.
Dana Washington had it all: beauty, wits, athleticism, popularity, money. She was head cheerleader, head of the Yearbook Committee, and editor of the Collins High School newspaper. Felix often heard from his mother about Dana's mother, who she met regularly at the country club, and how much of a bitch she was, which he took as a good sign. Jealousy was a healthy thing in Collins.
Dana Washington was the object of affection of many boys, not least of which Dean Taylor, her boyfriend, star quarterback, full scholarship to a good football college, but it's not him we're interested in. Dean Taylor was remarkably uninteresting; Mark Wilson was quite a bit more so.
Around the Us, Mark got a little restless. Felix assumed it was excitement, or maybe an attempt at concealing a hard-on, because Mark had been staring across him at Dana for quite some time. Crossing his legs, uncrossing, fiddling around under his gown. Felix was silently understanding. Dana's leg was out of her gown, and it was long, and uncovered by anything, which meant whatever she wore underneath must've been really short and probably sexy.
Vyner, Jones had just sat back down, diploma in hand, and Dana had got up. So had Mark. He had a gun in his hand, and it was aimed right bang at the center of her chest.
Felix's first thought: at least he wouldn't have to receive his diploma with an erection.
Felix's second thought:
No, there was no second thought. There couldn't have been, for if there was, he wouldn't have done something so phenomenally stupid as what he had done next.
It had taken Felix a few seconds to process the situation, a few seconds during which Mark and Dana were both frozen in place; the former with hesitation and some intense insanity, the latter with absolute horror.
Dean Taylor had also decided to stand. For what purpose, it was unclear; there were three rows between Dana and him, and even if he had been able to navigate his way through the fresh high school graduates using their plastic chairs as a surely foolproof armor, he wouldn't have gotten there in time. Dean Taylor, I suppose, had enough decency – or foolishness - to be concerned about his girlfriend, precisely in the time when it was wise get cowardly.
Silence; then a shot.
That was about the same time as the moment when Felix's conscience had decided to wake up from its decade-long slumber. It had to have been a combination of desperation and that odd happiness, that euphoria, he had felt before; the circumstances had made it right. A bizarre feeling had stirred inside of him – it screamed at him to do something, to fulfill his destiny, to be a superhero, that a girl was about to die and he was the only one who could stop it. It screamed at him that it was finally his time to be a hero, and screw what people thought. It screamed: if you don't do something now, a girl will die, and you'll regret it for the rest of your life.
Here's what Felix had decided to do: veer the bullet off its course, a few degrees would do. Threat eliminated, instant hero-status. So that's what he did.
He saved Dana's life. He was absolutely absorbed by this fact, by a thrill that went all the way from his center to the ends of his fingers and his toes and to the tip of his nose, that he hardly noticed the bullet idling towards Dean Taylor's abdomen, sliding through some vital organs and lodging itself firmly in the spine.
Dana Washington saw it. She looked at Felix for a second, then at Mark, who looked somewhat irritated by the fact he was so off-target, then back at Felix.
Then she screamed.
She screamed, "He killed him!", and then she pointed at Felix.
Felix wanted to explain that it wasn't his fault, he had just saved her life, Mark had shot the bullet, but his tongue was stuck to the floor of his mouth somehow, and he didn't know how to liberate it.
He was feeling decidedly less euphoric now. In fact, his mind wasn't focused at all at Dana, who was still screaming. It wasn't focused on the fact that he'll probably be arrested now, and that maybe then they'll use him as a lab rat. He wasn't scared: not when the linebacker tackled him as if he was trying to run away; not when the police came and adorned his wrists with a pair of metal bracelets, despite the fact it was quite unnecessary; not when they said, "you have the right to remain silent," which he was anyway; not even when he saw his mother crying, sobbing, like she was the one going to jail.
In fact, Felix's one coherent thought was this:
Should've stayed normal.
& & & & &
Well, this is a fable, of sorts. Felix had a dismal end, but we learn a vital lesson from his mishaps:
Don't be yourself. You'll end up screwing up anyway.
A/N: okay, I have to confess that I'm actually quite emotional to be uploading this. It's not long at all, but I've been working on it for quite some time. Plus it's one of the cleverer things I've written, I think, so I'm proud of it.
If you guys have any thoughts on this, please pleaseeeeee let me know. It's so important to me. Is it too blunt? Is it too weird? Any (constructive!!!!!!) criticism is welcome.
Tamar
25/9/14 so @happylines actually made me this incredible cover which I loooooove, so shoutout to her for being so so so cool.