A Useless Superpower
Last year I entered a writing contest.
Like some kind of masochist, I entered another one this year.
This time the stakes were higher, and while I didn’t win, I did place in the top 35–out of about 280–in my drawn genre, which was Useless Superpower.
My character finds through trial and error that his useless superpower involves the ability to pick up any piece of trash and be able to locate the person who threw it away. You might think of an immediate loophole of how that’s definitely not a useless superpower, but this “gift” comes with a few interesting caveats.
The Labyrinth Game
“It’s just a material thing.”
The attempt was weak, and I knew it. His hands, which had been covering his face, fell limply between his knees as he turned his puffy, waterlogged eyes toward me. They were strikingly blue against raw-red.
“I know,” he said.
But he didn’t know.
***
It was ten ‘til eleven when that middle-aged fuck pushed the front door open and walked across the empty dining area of Saint Anthony’s Pizza. This customer was not only oblivious to the fact that we were ten agonizing minutes away from closing for the night but seemed unaware of the white-hot rage that was bubbling up inside every employee currently being held hostage by his late-night cravings. We call these customers Bottom Feeders, which is a tame moniker compared to the profanity the line cook might use if they had to fire up the ovens again.
Mister forty-something Bottom Feeder wanted two slices; thus, we had lost tonight’s gamble by prematurely tossing the leftover pizza mere minutes before his grand entrance. The line cook’s ensuing vulgarity all but melted the tile off the kitchen walls.
I busied myself with front-of-house duties while our Bottom Feeder ate his pizza in solitude. The entire time he munched, his eyes were locked on some unknown point between his nose and infinity. His thinning hair was wild and unkempt. When he was finally finished, he tossed a few dollars on the table and wordlessly shuffled out of the shop to return to whatever bachelor hellscape waited for him at home.
The table, spotlighted by the low-hanging pendant lamp, was a stage dressed with depressing, discarded props. After stuffing the cash tip in my right front pocket, I grabbed a fresh napkin from the dispenser on the table and wrapped up his greasy plastic fork, forever stained orange from tomato sauce. I put that in my back pocket and bussed the rest of the table clear.
***
As I was chalking my pool cue, I stole a glance at Kyle. “It’s not a symbol of love; it’s a shiny receipt for three months’ of your life you’ll never get back.”
He was looking at me over the rim of his beer glass. His eyebrows were knit together. I watched his throat bobbing as he swallowed the beer.
He burped, then said, “Yeah, I get it.”
But he didn’t get it.
***
One of the remaining slices of Bottom Feeder’s pizza hung from my mouth while I activated the security alarm and locked myself out of the restaurant. It was getting darker earlier in the day now, and I was glad that I’d brought my jacket. My car, a certified shitbox 1987 Nova, sat alone in the parking lot of Saint Anthony’s Pizza
Despite my current career choice, the interior of my car had that vague maple syrup smell of decaying glue. Even pizza grease couldn’t overpower it. I shifted in my seat and fished the flimsy, napkin-shrouded fork from my back pocket and unwrapped it. The harsh security lights of the parking lot made the tiny smears of pepperoni oil shimmer.
I heard a sudden, loud THOCK! in my head and a creeping weight in my skull.
When I was a kid, my grandmother had a tabletop game called Labyrinth. It was a box with two knobs sticking out of adjacent sides. On top was a wooden maze platform that the player could tilt by manipulating the knobs. The game seemed simple: drop a marble at the starting point and worry the knobs around until you navigated the marble to the end of the maze.
Winning the game was made more difficult by the holes spaced along the route, which could wholly swallow your marble and end your game.
The substantial sound of the marble hitting the inside of the wooden Labyrinth box reminds me of the sound in my head when I focus on a worthless piece of garbage like Bottom Feeder’s fork. That pressure sitting behind my left ear was a great big marble.
I tossed the fork on my passenger seat, ripped off a bite of the cold pizza, and said a useless prayer over the labored cranking of my shitbox.
***
I panted on the treadmill next to him, failing to keep up.
“It’s an archaic tradition. You don’t need it.”
Kyle’s thick arms were pumping as he jogged. He was giving me the side-eye.
“Sure.”
But he wasn’t sure.
***
Imagine a six-year-old me.
I’m at the park waiting my turn for the slide and absentmindedly grabbing at the crotch of my denim overalls, only vaguely aware in my little, smooth brain that I need to pee.
Mommy calls me out on my weird behavior and tells me to go to the restroom but doesn’t go with me because I’m a big boy and it’s still the nineties.
I finish peeing and spy an oddly shaped, colorless balloon tossed in the corner of the grimy tiled room. Left behind by what I could only imagine as a very sad clown. It isn’t even blown up.
Inside my brain, which is really no different than a chewed-up wad of Juicy Fruit gum, I hear the loud sound of losing the Labyrinth game and feel a marble rolling around.
I pick up the balloon, which feels wet and gross, and wander out of the bathroom. As I turn my tiny-kid head from side to side, the marble rolling around up there seems to be stuck like a magnet, pulling me to a picnic table set far away from the playground.
A big guy in a black jacket has a cigarette hanging out of his mouth while he carves something on the top of the table with a crazy large knife. There’s also a lady there, squishing her own cigarette out on the green, carved-up surface.
The marble in my head isn’t rolling around anymore. I feel it sitting right in the middle of my brain when, suddenly, it pops out of existence. I’ve found the sad clown and hold out the gooey balloon to him, proud that I’ve done a kindness.
The guy shoots smoke out of his nose like a dragon. “Fucking gross, kid.”
***
I started to drive a slow circle around the near-empty parking lot of the pizzeria. As I turned the wheel, the marble traveled the contours and grooves around the inside of my brain pan. After two left turns, the marble settled right between my eyes, which informed me the direction I needed to travel.
I barely paid attention to the names of streets. I just made my turns to keep that marble in the center of my forehead like a third eye made of glass. It would shift to my left temple after a right turn, so I would compensate by turning left at the next intersection. I chewed on the pizza crust like a dog with his rawhide.
I found myself parked outside a darkened bungalow. The only light was from a flashing television screen. I squinted my eyes to try to make out the person sitting on the couch across from the screen, but I really didn’t need to validate…I knew it was my forty-something Bottom Feeder. The very moment I looked at his familiar thinning pate bathed in the blue-white light of his T.V., the marble rolled to the center of my head and popped into nothingness.
I leaned over the passenger seat and cranked the window down. The night had a hint of winter on its breath as I leaned further to open Bottom Feeder’s mailbox to toss his used fork into it.
It was then that I realized there really wasn’t a limit to the distance I could travel to uselessly reunite a person with their trash.
***
Lying in bed, I fired off a text: “Kyle, forget about it, it’s a pressurized carbon pebble that was dug up by someone earning pennies. Then their boss marks it up 4000% and sells it to people who think it will single-handedly move their relationship to the next level.”
I sighed and dropped my phone to my chest. I looked at the ceiling and thought of his dimples.
My phone vibrated his response: “I understand, bro.”
But he didn’t understand.
***
Kyle was my roommate, and Marie was his long-time girlfriend. They’d been dating since high school, so she was basically a permanent fixture ever since Kyle and I moved into our apartment together.
He had dreamed up the whole idea of how to propose to Marie and immediately commissioned me to record everything on my phone as his best friend. There was a bridge in town that they found particularly romantic for whatever reason. His plan was: halfway across, Kyle was going to dramatically drop to one knee and profess some kind of lasting love for Marie while brandishing a ring he’s deftly plucked from his pocket.
The mundanity of the plan guaranteed its success–except for the last part. It unfolded just like the videos you see online. Kyle produced the ring, but “deft” was not an accurate adjective for his nervous, fumbling hands. One moment the ring was pinched between his pointer finger and thumb, but the next moment it was loose. It bounced once, ting, and disappeared over the edge and into the current.
Of course, Marie agreed to marry Kyle, but in that moment we all froze. The phone in my hand was almost forgotten, but I didn’t stop the recording before catching Kyle falling back heavily on his ass, defeated, saying “What do we do now?”
***
Kneeling at Kyle’s bedside while he’s sleeping, I leaned in and whispered, “It’s just a circle made of metal and stone. Your love for each other is more powerful than the combination of those elements.”
I waited.
Nothing.
***
After repeated testing, the problem is this: I can only return a piece of garbage to its previous owner with two stipulations. First, the person must actually believe the item to be completely lost or garbage. Second, I have to be able to see the piece of trash to find its owner. I can play back the footage and pinch-zoom to my heart’s content to see the modest engagement ring being held out by Kyle, but the first stipulation is more difficult because Kyle was also holding on to some kind of hope that the ring would be found and returned to him.
To Kyle, the ring was not yet lost, nor was it garbage.
No matter how hard I tried to convince him otherwise.
***
I watched Kyle tie a rope through the eyehook on top of the heavy-duty magnet. He was actually going to try to fish the ring out of the river by pure luck and magnetism. I didn’t even know where to start.
“Kyle, buddy, what are you doing?” I paused the video and spied his ropy forearms as he tied.
“I have to at least try, Tim.”
I sat, bewildered. “Kyle, I know you didn’t cheap out on this ring. A gold ring isn’t going to stick to a magnet no matter how big the magnet is. Not only that, but the river moves fast. The ring could be anywhere by now.”
Kyle stopped mid-square knot and jerked his chin in my direction. “What the fuck is your angle? Are you jealous? You’re trying to convince me that the ring means nothing. It feels like you’re trying to get into my head. Like you’re trying to sabotage my relationship.”
He considered his next words carefully. “I’m not…like you.”
I was stunned. He’d been acting so morose that this sudden expression of anger seemed to change the lighting in the room. “I don’t have a fucking angle, Kyle.” I stared down at my phone screen. A freeze-frame of the ring. “You’ve been moping around here bringing the fucking vibe down and the crazy part is that you’re still just as engaged to Marie as you would have been if you didn’t fumble the ring right off the fucking bridge.”
I stopped, then, because I couldn’t really bring myself to address his last point. Kyle dropped the heavy magnet between his feet.
THOCK!
He had given up.
I ran.
***
Thoughts of my unkindness toward Kyle–and a giant marble–crowded my cranium. The glass ball stayed lodged behind my left eye as I drove past the bridge onto a dirt access road that led to some crumbly boat ramps and shoulder-height sedge.
Just past the boat ramps the ball dropped into my left ear. Slamming on the brakes caused my shitbox to shimmy in the loose gravel. I went to unbuckle my seatbelt before I vaguely realized that I hadn’t even used it.
The wind was cold and sharp off the water. I pushed my way through the foliage and stepped into the slick shore, immediately up to my knees in frigid water.
The air whooshed out of my lungs. Distress signals were being sent all over my body, but these sensations seemed to be dulled by the marble rolling closer and closer to the center of my head.
I waded out to my waist, and then my chest. It felt impossible to fully fill my lungs with air. I pushed forward, teeth chattering wildly. Somewhere behind me, I registered another car door slamming shut and someone–Kyle?–yelling my name.
I dove down.
With numbing fingers, I grasped a metal band, and the marble in my head popped away. That was the last thing I remember.
***
I could hear Kyle’s voice. This time I was the one sleeping, and it was him at my bedside instead. He was asking me something.
“Hu..what?”
“How? How did you fucking find it?”
I opened my eyes and realized that I was in the hospital, not at home.
He started: “Hey, man, you’re awake. Thank Christ. Listen, I’m really sorr–”
“No,” I interrupted, “shut up. I’m the one who’s sorry. I’ll have to explain it to you when my brain thaws out.”
A fit Filipino nurse bustled in to fuss over me. Over one of the nurse’s broad shoulders, I saw Kyle exaggeratedly pointing and mouthing the words: “Oooh, he looks cute!”
Goddammit, Kyle.
***
Unlike Kyle, I wasn’t really looking for my soulmate. It felt like I was still trying to figure out who I was and making progress coming to terms with it. I was more than happy to continue third-wheeling with Kyle and Marie for as long as they’d allow me to.
It was only a few months later that I decided to move out while Maria moved in.
I really don’t want to become a Bottom Feeder.
I bought a metal detector. Sometimes I wander around the banks of the river or down the trails of the park until the thing squelches and whines to life. I find plenty of garbage.
Sometimes I find rings and coins, and I follow the marble.
Sometimes it brings me to a cemetery plot or–more disturbingly–an unmarked patch of grass.
Sometimes, though, it brings me to a doorstep.