Hero
Part 1
The trouble was explaining away the odd, vaguely round welts I had accumulated during the match.
“It was Superman.” I said. “He’s terrible at Ping-Pong.”
My roommate Mike, known colloquially as ‘Grump’, or ‘Grump Chocula’, or even ‘Peter Peter the Grumpkin Eater’ depending on whichever celestial convergences are responsible for that sort of thing, was not keen to believe that I had been beaten about the upper torso and face with poorly aimed Ping-Pong balls. He wasn’t keen to believe in the existence of Superman at all, in fact. Such was the case with a certain percentage of the population whose brain-wrappings had yet to fully encompass some of the finer points that come with living in a newly amalgamated universe.
“Shut up.” He said.
But super people were coming, and society struggled to adapt. New challenges arose almost daily and were tackled by hastily assembled teams of “experts” trying desperately to normalize reality even as more and more form-fitting-body-suit wearers, sometimes with more than six abs, stumbled out of the aptly named “Fog Zone” and stood blinking at the forest of tanks and helicopter gunships that had amassed there to welcome them. The first wave was met with a knee-jerk military response and was a disaster for all parties involved. A tenuous truce was put into place, but those troops on the edge peering expectantly into the Fog Zone still positively bristled with trigger-happiness.
A few extraordinary folks had gotten through at first, despite the hail of gunfire. For a while the Incredible Hulk could be found thundering through downtown Sao Paulo making shop owners wring their hands while retailers of replacement shop windows cackled madly as they watched the news. Engineering students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were asked to solve that problem, and Hulk could now reliably be found hammering away at an industrial-sized whack-a-mole game in an inland power production complex. In one dazzling display of innovative wizardry the Hulk had not only been placated but also harnessed as a seemingly limitless natural resource as with each whack the rig generated a sizable electric current.
He never seemed to get tired of it.
There were hundreds of specially-abled individuals to account for, and while none were particularly aggressive or openly ambitious about world domination, none had presented the appropriate documentation and as such none had technically cleared immigration. This was cause for much gnashing of teeth.
“Once they have cast away their costumes and donned more inconspicuous garments we’ll never find them!” wailed the concerned faces on every television news program. Furrowed brows and furtive glances cast by those in hushed semi-circles around coffee machines and water coolers dampened office productivity by a significant margin. Stocks plummeted. Canned foods disappeared from store shelves, and the sound of heavy doors slamming on doomsday shelters startled flocks of birds into raucous agitation. Others, like Grumplestiltskin on his corner of the couch in the apartment, simply refused to believe that it was happening and shut out all stimuli suggesting otherwise.
Deliberations both long and boring occurred among world leaders, each syllable analyzed and re-analyzed by statisticians, professors, and television personalities well past the hard limit of human psychological coping capability. Prophets of either doom or salvation overpopulated the entire world inventory of sturdy boxes such that they were forced to share and stand back to back, gesticulating wildly at anyone who would listen. Prophets of status quo were, perhaps not surprisingly, left largely alone on their boxes.
At last a decision was reached: Single combat.
The world marinated on those two words. It had been deemed by the smartest people in the world to be the only peaceful way to resolve what would certainly be a long and bloody conflict otherwise. It would be a test of skill; of savvy and poise, and of unfaltering courage in the face of adversity even as an uncertain fate teetered on the brink of possibility. The registered population of pre-amalgam Earth would text their vote to choose their champion during a televised event. The cross-over community, in a similarly televised event, voted almost unanimously for Superman to be their champion even though it seemed too painfully obvious.
As a cameraman for a major television station, I was one of those lucky enough to attend the event for the choosing of the champion. I was the man behind camera six. I was a professional. I was one of the best at what I did. I was also too preoccupied about the lighting to realize that I was clearly visible through the lens of camera four on the other side of the stadium. I was wearing, as usual, my lucky Ghost Busters hat.
In the moment when it mattered the most, when asked upon whom they should call if something was strange in the neighborhood, Earth’s voters chose me. Humanity utterly failed to take it seriously. They voted for “The Ghostbuster”.
Me.
For reasons that I will never understand, I agreed to it. I was immediately ushered forward by a large man and an even larger woman, both unsmiling. I approached the podium. I put one hand on each side of the lectern in what I hoped was a purposeful gesture. I looked up and squinted at the dazzling lights, the wall of microphones, and at my own uncertain face in jumbo relief on stadium monitors. I looked down hoping to find some note cards or at least a sticky note with “You can do it!” written on it. None presented itself. A wrapper from a bite-sized Rice Krispy treat was stuffed into the microphone cable hole. The air was still.
Then there were voices. First one, then many, then an impossible number of voices all asking the same question: “What are you good at?”
I answered honestly. I leaned toward the microphones and spoke as clearly as I could.
“Ping Pong.” I said.
Part 2
Grump rolled his eyes. “Whatever. I paid the gravity bill, you owe me fifteen bucks.”
“You don’t have to pay for gravity,” I said. “It’s free and anybody can use it whenever they want.”
No part of me was delusional enough to think that my words were getting through. Frankly it was worth fifteen bucks to avoid the argument every month. You just can’t convince people of things sometimes, once they’ve set their minds to believing otherwise. It wasn’t so very long ago, in the big scheme of things, that people believed it was necessary to pitch perfectly healthy young girls into volcanoes lest the harvest be lean. Fifteen bucks was easy compared to that. I needed the Grump. I didn’t have anybody else to practice with.
By Thursday morning I was as ready as I knew I was ever going to be. “Superman vs the Ghost Buster” on pay-per-view, one night only, for the sake of the human race. If I lost, the specially-abled would have the run of the Earth, and who knew what would happen then. If I won, they would willingly cross back through the fog and that would be the end of it. Earth was rooting for me, mostly. My phone rang in the cab on the way to the stadium. It was my grandma.
“Did you remember to call your uncle today? It’s his birthday.”
“Gram I’m on my way to the stadium thing literally right now, I can’t”
“Well make a little time, he was asking about you. Something about King Kong. Did you get a monkey?”
“Ping Pong.”
“That’s a nice name for a monkey. Call your uncle.”
“Okay Gramma. Love you.”
Most of the world saw me get out of the taxi and walk into the stadium. Superman was already inside. Nobody had seen him come in, he was just there. He looked confident. We made eye contact. I was pleased to note that between the two of us I was the only one who had put on my clothes in the correct order.
After much hoopla and shameless product placement, the match began. Superman won the serve and the first shot across the net resulted in increased hot dog sales while the paramedics waved smelling salts under my nose and pried the flattened ball from my forehead. When my vision cleared I raised my head and looked groggily at my opponent I noticed he was wearing a sort of nervous grimace, and for the first time the thought crossed my mind that maybe I had a chance.
“He didn’t do that on purpose” said my brain. He had screwed up. He wasn’t perfect. There was hope.
On my serve I placed the ball expertly in the corner, but Superman had nothing but time to get there and be ready for it. In fact, while it was in the air he had time to go get a hot pumpkin latte and sip it gingerly while teaching himself how to knit. This ended up working to my advantage, because when he did decide it was time to return the ball and finally swung the paddle, his aim was impeded by a large decoratively fringed afghan which had appeared seemingly out of nowhere.
The ball, half-melted from atmospheric friction, struck me in the left shoulder. I decided this would be a good time to pinwheel through the air. By the time I grew tired of that activity and smashed my limp body gracefully into a row of occupied folding chairs, the scoreboard registered a commanding two-point lead. The people of Earth were, understandably, all aflutter.
This sort of thing went on for some time, and I continued to be surprised by two things: One, that it was possible to be horribly injured while playing Ping Pong, and two, that I was legitimately winning the match. He had scored a few points here and there but given the stakes of the game it was no surprise to see that Superman was visibly upset. He had the wherewithal not to let his bottom lip protrude too far out lest a pigeon poop on it, but you could have cracked walnuts in the furrows between his eyebrows.
Finally, mercifully, the ball that would win me the last point of the match delivered what would later look like an extra nipple to the middle of my chest, and the match was over. I had done it. The super-folk were bummed, but they complied. As the last pair of slumped shoulders disappeared into the fog, I was both the most and least liked person in the world. The immigration crisis was solved, but I had simultaneously ruined the dreams of children worldwide and they were mad.
A new crisis arose almost immediately, as is the usual way of things. The world lost interest and it was back to business as usual for me, save for several persistent aches in my body which were later identified as arthritis caused by Ping Pong ball impacts. The condition was named after me. I also received a large envelope addressed to "The Ghostbuster" which contained a nice certificate for my efforts in the name of the human race, for which I purchased a cheap frame. I hung it prominently on the wall in the living room.
Stretch Grumpstrong, unimpressed, shrugged his shoulders, rolled over on the couch, and fell asleep.
The End
