Superman Saves The World

He spins the miniature globe that is a pencil sharpener really. Cheap, made from tin, bought from that shop in town where us girls used to hyperventilate over erasers, pencils, notebooks.

“Look,” he says. “I’m Superman. I’m saving the world.”

He thinks he’s turning back time. Perhaps he is. Perhaps there are miniature people on that tiny globe, suddenly having their lives reversed to a point where some, one, none of them can make new decisions, change the path their life took.

He is bored. I can tell. He is going through motions, spinning the globe, now fast, now slow. He reverses the reverse thrust, batting the edge of the sphere with one finger. I love that finger. The globe spins the right way, the way we all spin.

“Are you Superman now?” I ask him.

“Nah,” he says. “I’m just bored.”

I knew that. I want to tell him that I knew that, but instead I just watch him, across the room, across a lifetime of knowing him.

He isn’t here at all, really. I’m not watching him spin that globe in anything other than memory. I’m sitting here, alone, and hallucinating the past. But a past that never happened. We never had that pencil sharpener globe. That was something of mine when I was 14, and I don’t think he ever spun it. It’s a construct. My mind telling me something about regret.

I have done a stupid thing. I can feel it. I forgot the colours of the pills that popped out of the blister pack. Six hours ago. Or more. I don’t remember. I forgot the colours, and I poured in alcohol on top of them, and now I feel my heart skipping beats and then racing to catch up.

I remember a conversation, about rates of heart beats. The thought that we all have the same number of beats in a lifetime. A mouse’s heartbeat feels like something fluttering, it ticks so fast. Counting down the beats it is allowed until the last beat brings it to death.

I am sinking and watching him over the table, across the room, looking like he did the last time I saw him. I am watching him spin that globe, now this way, now that. He isn’t Superman. Nobody is.

I am thick with it tonight. My head, my eyes, my mouth, my body. Heavy and thick with its weight.

The world is a whisper that is a circle. A globe, spinning relentlessly. We might as well be static. Would that work?

“Would that work?” I ask him, but he isn’t listening. He has stopped spinning the globe. It slows to a rest. He is humming some melody to himself.

I think about all the things I haven’t done today. I haven’t done the dishes. I haven’t cleaned out the cat’s litter tray. I haven’t done my laundry. I haven’t left the house.

What have I done? I have breathed. In and out. I have stood still in my small part of the world, not knowing what the earth spinning beneath me feels like. Hand around my near-empty glass, I close my eyes for just a minute.

When I open them again, it is morning, and I have been sitting here all night. The cat is asleep on the table in front of me, one paw stretched out. I stretch, and she opens her eyes. She stretches with me. I get up and look in the small mirror that hangs where I can check that my hair is straight and my face isn’t slipping each morning before I go to work.

We have cheese for breakfast, the cat and I, and I remember that he never sat in this kitchen. Just like I never sat in the last kitchen he knew. Pieces of each other that we never knew are scattered through the air. Books in a library that have never been read and lodge among the best sellers, waiting to be discovered, waiting for their untouched pages to be opened and savoured.

I should greet the day, or I should sleep. Spend another 24 hours hiding from the world.

I would like one last touch. I would like my hand to be held, my body embraced, some human comfort with no other meaning than I care. I would like the world to stop spinning in that moment. I would like that to be the last beginning’s end.

I put a load in the washing machine. I fill the yellow plastic bowl that sits in the sink with hot water, washing up liquid and dirty dishes. I do not greet the day. I move through it.

© J R Hargreaves 2006