Fiction: Hero Worship
Decade old unpublished story that I used to hope I could lie and say was my first published
Word Count: 4700
Original draft written in 2010; my last edit, 2013.
Zombie Whorehouse is my first published story, but it’s not a story I want to share with my mom. When I wrote Hero Worship, I hoped it would be the “first” published story I could share with family and friends to announce my imminent arrival into the illustrious company of authors. I submitted Hero Worship to McSweeneys and they declined, but they wrote a brief yet kind note in response, which meant the world to me then (and still does, honestly).
So, it’s old. It’s not how I write anymore. For example, I avoid food comparisons when describing people now. And like Zombie Whorehouse, it builds tension (I hope), through back-and-forth time jumps. I don’t really care for that trick anymore. And (sadly!) the me-then could casually reference Jesus and Superman much faster than the me-now. (Can I blame my kids for not going to church for over a decade when my oldest is only 6? Probably not. Ouch. Forgive me, God. Fist-shake at you, wife!) Also, the me-now would completely cut the italicized interludes. They develop an incredibly fascinating idea! My father really said that and later denied it! But it halts momentum in a story already pausing with every breath to flashback. In their defense, this story arose from a challenge to write a story using different prose textures, so the interludes, in the beginning, were the prompt challenge. But I’d still cut them, now.
Additionally, I’ve convinced myself that the story’s use of a heavily protected and copyrighted character will prevent it from ever being published, even if I were to redo the parts I find most awkward now.
But! I still enjoy it! It captures the heart of me and who I was a decade ago and it’s a fairly accurate portrayal of my alma mater’s student union and the conversations I had about Superman and Jesus with the boyfriend of one of my residents when I was an RA there. And until I reread it, I had completely forgotten about the almost-hallucinations that kept me from looking at the ceiling when I was younger. Creative types are both blessed and cursed by their minds, amirite??
At any rate, I hope you enjoy it, too.
HERO WORSHIP
by Wil Dalton, 2013
Did you ever wash your eyes, and instead of using a paper towel, you used one of those hot-air hand dryers that can pivot up to dry your face? Or did you ever set up a do-it-yourself fumigator instead of calling an exterminator, and when you leant over to pull the start tab, instead of leaning back and rushing out of the room like the pictures on the box illustrated, you ended up spraying your face full of the gas intended to rid your parents’ house of cockroaches?
If you can imagine those two together, you’ll have a pretty good idea of how it feels in a burning building, except you should add the panic of diving into the neighborhood pool to touch the bottom and then surfacing into the underside of someone’s inflatable float and not knowing which direction to go for air or whether you would be able to hold your breath long enough to keep your lungs from ripping apart.
Oh, and that dive? You stayed under longer trying to prove your strength. Showing off. Trying to impress a girl. Protecting your honor. Maybe displaying your faith.
That’s me in the burning building. Eyes watering. Lungs coughing. Everything sweating, even my toes.
The smoke makes me squint. It’s a fight to widen my eyes. I scan the dark room, feeling my way along the wall and staying low. Hunched over, my wet belly presses on my shorts and I regret eating a large pizza last night. And the night before. And all last week. I should have agreed to join Arjit for his morning runs around campus. Maybe I could have stuck with him for the first mile. Before he’d pick me up and run the last four holding me over his shoulder like a broken book bag.
I hope he’s conscious when I find him.
There are stories about old ladies lifting flipped cars to save their loved ones explained by some abnormal adrenaline rush in times of stress. Tales about people able to hold their breath longer than they ever have before to search for a sinking sibling. God, I hope they’re true.
My eyes water and through the resulting blur, I call out for the big goof. No answer. My fingers trace the frame of the bulletin board beside the Student Officers’ room door. Inside the room are chairs and a large conference table. Though it’s easier to breathe down there, no one is hiding underneath the table.
I yell his name down the Student Activities Office hallway.
“Arjit,” I say, “Hero, can you hear me?”
An inside joke about who we are and who notices.
I close my eyes, cough, and crouch to the ground. It’s funny, really. I’m about to be burned alive because Superman is more popular than Jesus.
My fingers spread across the crossed texture of the carpet. I trace an angel-shaped coffee stain, the color of the smoke collecting at the ceiling. I crawl towards a closet at the far end of the room and hope Arjit will be smiling inside it.
God, please let him be in there. And please let there be air I can inhale without coughing.
Hope may be longsuffering, but my lungs are not. I bet he’s inside the closet reading a detailed description of how smoke affects our organs in the long and short term. I bet Arjit’s lungs come equipped with a filter and he’s sucking in big gusts of smoke and purifying that closet into a walk-in cooler.
I bet there’s a good chance the next person I see will be St. Peter standing on a fluffy white cloud, asking me why I didn’t stay safe and pray outside of the Student Activities building. Asking me why I didn’t wait for the firemen to arrive.
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Superman’s been called the American Jesus and some stories go to great pains to parallel their lives, but ultimately Jesus is never going to smash the moneylenders through a mountain or knock out the Roman guards with his heat vision when they come to arrest him in the garden. Nevertheless, there are many echoes in Superman’s history as an otherworldly savior coming from the heavens, raised as one of us, and using his power to tackle social ills, inspire individual righteousness, and refusing to give into the temptation to use his power to force humans to live justly, love mercy, and take care of one another.
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I met Arjit a month ago. Shelli, one of the cuter residents on the floor, brought him to my room.
“This is my boyfriend, Arjit,” she said. “Arjit, this is my Resident Assistant, Ryan.”
Shelli said, “Ryan, tell Arjit about how Jesus got rid of your waking nightmares.”
A week earlier, Shelli came to my room asking directions to the Campus Writing Center. The semester was new and I had recently finished a board for the hall detailing effective study habits and the various campus resources available. It hung four doors away, but instead of pointing to it, I asked her what was bothering her.
Which was when the tears started to flow. Her mom kept calling to complain about her dad, her dad kept calling to complain about her mom; and their recent trial separation now that she was in college cast doubt on her happy family memories. Also, her academic advisor had suggested she take Logic as an easy elective, but she found it far from simple and too much like math which she was never very good at; she was worried she had chosen the wrong major; and she had two papers due in a few days and had no idea how to make a bibliography.
I gave her a hug and offered to pray for her if she would let me.
She nodded and I held my hand on her shoulder and asked God to give her the peace I knew He wanted her to have in her heart. She thanked me and as she left the room, she wiped her eyes, pulled back her blonde hair, and said she felt much better.
A few days before she brought Arjit to my room, she had knocked on the door to tell me she had got an A on both of her papers, she had dropped the Logic course, and her parents had moved back in together. “It’s like a miracle or something,” she said.
The waking nightmares was from an earlier talk with Shelli about why I believed Jesus cared about me personally, (which was a point emphasized by the campus ministry I was involved in to share during evangelism). In short, my mind would play tricks on me and Jesus gave me more control. I use to imagine bloody corpses hanging above me while I showered and I would be afraid to look up at the ceiling for fear they might really be there, but after I started attending a bible study my freshman year and started praying regularly and trusting Jesus to help me I felt more in control of my mind and began to imagine the bloody and ridiculous less and less.
When Arjit walked into my room, he turned sideways and ducked his head to avoid knocking the frame. Hershey’s chocolate dark, with arms thicker than my Collected Works of Shakespeare and Intro to Psychology stacked together, he could easily have been mistaken for a companion sculpture to the over-sized statue of Doak Walker by the newly built stadium - our school’s most illustrious football alum that greeted stadium visitors with his legs bent in a frozen run.
Arjit crushed my hand in a friendly hello. Arjit shook everyone’s hand when meeting, whether for the first time or twentieth, whether they were a stranger or close friend. He never stooped so every time we met, he lifted my arm.
He said, “What is this bullshit about Jesus?”
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I breathe easier in the closet, but there is no Arjit. No trapped and terrified students to rescue. Only six bottles of warm soda lined against the wall and a sticky plastic bag filled with plastic bags. I open one of the soda bottles and drink deep scratchy gulps. I shut my eyes for a moment and pray, not my will, but Yours, but I’d really like to live, and I’d like to be a hero. Help me find Arjit. Help us get out. In Jesus’ name, I pray. Amen.
My eyes sting. My nose runs and I smear the snot and soot across my cheek before wiping my hands on the carpet. I have to find Arjit and fast.
Crouching and moving towards the door, I wonder if I will be able to drag his couch-sized frame out of the Student Activities Building. If my hand could even wrap around his wrists. I’ll have to wake him if he’s passed out. Pull his short and spiky black hair, shiny like the Starlings that dot the Campus Green.
There’s no way I will be able to bear him away from the flames.
When I asked if he played basketball, he laughed.
“Too much swagger,” he said. “Not my style.”
When I asked if he played football, he shook his head.
“Too violent,” he said. “I don’t want to hurt anyone.”
“Or get hurt,” I countered.
He laughed at the idea.
Arjit wanted to play soccer, but he said unpreventable circumstances prevented him from learning the game when he was young and he considered his time for games past. He wanted to focus his energy on becoming a biologist and finding cures for everything. HIV. Cancer. Malaria.
“One person can change the world,” he said. “All they have to do is know what is right and stay committed.”
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In the depiction of Superman’s early years on the television show ‘Smallville,’ which Arjit watched occasionally, Lex Luthor’s friendship with Clark Kent served to increase the stakes as every viewer knew that, despite their shared adventures, easy camaraderie, trust and support; their story could only end in violence against each other. Ryan pointed out to Arjit that in the Dreamworks animated film, ‘The Prince of Egypt,’ a dramatic plot involving the brotherly friendship between Moses and one of Pharoah’s sons was inserted into the storyline. This detail, Ryan and Arjit agreed, while absent in the book of Exodus, nevertheless felt true. It was in the context of these thoughts (and after Ryan had coerced Arjit into watching the claymation Jesus movie where the disciples roll their eyes at being told to drop their nets on the other side of the boat) that Arjit posed the question, “What if Judas was the childhood friend of Jesus’ whose at his wedding your savior turned water into wine?”
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The door is hot, but not stove-top hot. How hot is too hot to open?
Dear God, I pray, if I live, I’ll always be your man. No more dirty movies. No more jerking off. No more pretending to not be home when I’m tired and a student’s knocking to complain about the noise coming from the room above or across the way. No more daydreaming when I should be taking action to improve myself or improve the world. Only living an authentic life. A life of truth. Help me get out safe. Help me find Arjit. Help me be the man you made me to be. Let me get us out of here. Amen.
I blink to flush out my eyes as best I can, take a large breath, brace my shoulder to the door, and push. A gust of smoke and heat pushes against my neck and hot air courses across my face as I rush out into the hall around the atrium. I can’t see five feet in front of me. I drop to the floor and crawl. Eyes shut. Running my hands along the floor. Searching for a leg or arm or someone needing saving. I run into the half wall railing that circles the atrium.
The clang from the blow rattles from the top of my head to my chin. I rise up and look over the edge. Below me, beams of light cut across the smoke and reveal shiny pools of radiant blue from what used to be the student couches. I shout and wave.
“Help,” I say. “Up here!”
The firemen’s flashlights continue to cross the smoke, but don’t raise up to my voice. They can’t see me. They can’t hear me. I’m a hero in fumes who will melt, waving and screaming, while hoping for a miracle.
Jesus, I’m your man, I say, and a moving brown mass crashes me into the carpet, skidding my back. Arjit’s eyes widen as he sees my face. He shouts my name repeatedly like it’s a curse word.
“Ryan,” he says. “How did you get here?”
“I’m your savior,” I say.
A loud pop sounds from our left. A crunch and a crash sounds from behind. Arjit pulls me into a room, slams the door, and pushes me forward. We crawl into another room that the smoke has yet to claim. The room is dark, but lit up by small green and red lights, which reveal a chair, microphone, and a desk stacked with audio equipment. There are no windows.
“We’re in the radio room,” I say. “This equipment must be on some sort of battery back-up.”
Arjit says my name like it’s a curse word again.
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In my dorm room, the first time I met Arjit, he sat on the bed I never slept on, the one a roommate would have occupied if I had not been a Resident Assistant, and I explained the Four Spiritual Laws and gave him my three-minute personal testimony.
“Don’t waste my time with that shit,” he said. “I went to Catholic school. Let me tell you why none of that matters.”
I waited to hear his formulation of the problem of evil or some rant against the Crusades. A history of oppressing women or supporting slavery.
Arjit said, “You go to India. Some remote village where there’s no plumbing. No television. No cars.
You show these villagers two symbols. The Cross of Christ. And the ‘S’ of Superman. And I am not lying. They will recognize the ‘S’ of Superman. It will be a symbol of righteousness to them. Of doing right to others. There will be meaning behind it. But they will just shrug at the cross.”
I argued that the recognition of Superman’s symbol over the cross by Indian villagers didn’t invalidate the historical reality of the crucified and risen creator of the universe.
“History is now,” he said. “When Jesus gets a publicist better than Superman, maybe I will believe.”
Shelli interrupted. “Tell Ryan about the time you saved that girl.”
Arjit waved the suggestion aside.
“Later,” he said. “First, I will let him chew on the wisdom I just dropped.”
“What wisdom,” I asked with feigned surprise, rose, and grabbed a book from my shelf. Where it had stood, several more copies of the same book remained. I’d already given several away.
“Read this,” I said, handing him a copy of C.S. Lewis’ ‘Mere Christianity.’
“This book was like a slap in the face to me the first time I read it,” I said. “Each page, pow! I’m full of pride. Pow! Pow! It changed my life. Now I’ve read almost every nonfiction work by him. C.S. Lewis is to me what Shakespeare was to Keats.”
“Ryan, you have lost me in multiple ways there,” Arjit said and stood to leave, but a pleading glance from Shelli turned his dismissive hand gesture into an open palm and he took the book and said, “I will see if I can make some time for it when I am not learning how to treat obstetric fistula.”
As he turned sideways to pass through the door, he paused and pulled three Superman comics out of his bag. After holding them up to show me their covers, he laid them on my shelf.
“And you can read these,” he said.
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At first, Ryan found the idea of Judas and Jesus being childhood friends a good sci-fi premise, but beyond that, ridiculous and maybe sacrilegious, unless it served to get his non-Christian friends thinking about the gospel. But to Ryan’s surprise, for an atheist, Arjit remembered a lot of the bible. “It would explain why Jesus didn’t kick Judas out of his group when the rest of them caught him stealing,” he said. “That didn’t happen until after the betrayal,” Ryan said. “Look it up,” Arjit said, “And ask yourself why there isn’t a scene of Judas being called like with Simon and the other fishermen.” And Ryan read all four gospel accounts that night, underlined the sixth verse of the twelfth chapter of the Gospel of John, and went to bed wondering how much more it must have hurt Jesus to have been betrayed by someone with whom he may have shared many youthful adventures and dreams.
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An orange light glows brighter when I press the button on the microphone base and say, “Help. There are two of us trapped in the radio room.”
“Trapped,” Arjit says. “We are not trapped. I am never trapped.”
He enters the large closet connected to the sound booth, covered floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall with compact disks and starts pulling them out of their shelves. They clatter to the floor. Clear plastic cases bust open and silver discs roll out.
“Help,” I say again into the microphone, “We’re trapped in the radio room.”
I look at Arjit creating a pile of freebie singles and college radio favorites on the floor between us.
“Do you think this still works?” I ask him. “Want to call for help?”
“I don’t think we should wait to find out,” he says and nods to the smoke beginning to sneak into the space from under the door.
“This wall is cool to the touch,” he says as he yanks off the shelving. “Maybe there’s a window on the other side of it.”
Dear God, I pray, let there be a window on the other side of the wall Arjit is punching. Give Arjit the strength to punch through the wall without breaking his hands. Please let there be a way out. I’m sorry for not being a better friend to the friendless. I’m sorry for not calling my mother back sooner on the weekends. I know you have a plan for us both. Please let there be a way out. Amen.
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You would have thought that you would notice someone of Arjit’s height walking across campus. But before Shelli introduced us, I don’t remember ever seeing the tall Indian walking to class. Which in turn, made me notice how often we bumped into each other after that day in my dorm room.
“Have you read those comics yet?” he would ask me on my way to Romance and Allegory.
“Soon,” I would say, catching him leaving Ethics in Medicine, “Did you like the trilemma?”
“Speak English, please,” he would say, “I had to learn it when I moved here.”
In line at the cafe in the campus bookstore, I would tell him, “I saw a photo spread of a model wearing only a Superman tank top. Well, for the first four photos, at least.”
“What enters a man’s eyes affects his soul, Ryan,” he would answer. “But don’t get too haloed up. I saw a girls-only fantasy hospital porno last week where the cross was tattooed on the ankle of one of the nurses.”
I would shake my head and he would grin, “Medical research.”
He always ordered tea. No sugar, no cream.
I always ordered coffee blended with chocolate and ice.
Sometimes, picking up a student paper outside the Science Building, I would hear Arjit’s voice say, “What type of SUV would Jesus drive? On which model would he stick his fish decal?”
In front of the gym, I would answer, “Which burger joint would Superman choose for his value-meal movie tie-in? Which country’s children would make his action figures?”
In the Student Activities Building, I reviewed my Later British Literature notes while sitting on the blue student couches and waiting for my hall director. We had a meeting scheduled to discuss the next month’s floor programming. A large hand gripped my shoulder from behind and I heard Arjit’s voice.
“Hey preacher,” he said. “Do you want to hear about the time I saved a girl’s life?”
He sat down beside me and we watched our fellow students walk past, carrying back-packs, side-bags, purses. Some dressed for the runway. Some for business presentations. Some wore sweat pants.
“All these people, they have hopes. Dreams. They want to be someone special. They want to do something in life that matters. They want to know their life was not a waste.”
Doodling guitar played from speakers, which hung from bars that crossed the top of the atrium below a glass-paned half globe that topped the open space. My hall director waved from the second floor balcony and indicated that he needed another ten minutes. I nodded.
“My life is not a waste,” Arjit said.
“I’ve done something special. Something that mattered. I am a hero. Because of me, another person is alive today. This was back in my home country. My home-town. I was much skinnier. I would be teased when I was a kid for being tall and thin. One day, I was walking down the street in a neighborhood not far from my house and there was this gang and they were raping this girl in this alley and I heard them and I said, ‘Stop.’ They beat the shit out of me. I mean, broken ribs. Eyes swollen shut. I couldn’t see for days. But I fought as hard as I could. And they left and that girl held me and she cried and she said, ‘thank you, thank you,’ over and over. I must have looked a mess. Bloody and skinny and shaking, but in that moment, I was that girl’s Superman. She will never forget me. I saved her.”
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Once describing to his father his reason for wanting to do a summer ministry trip with the parachurch organization, Campus Crusade for Christ, Ryan’s dad said, “You know Judas was trying to hurry up the kingdom of God.” And Ryan said, “What?” And his dad said, “His big sin was not so much betrayal as impatience.” Years later, when Ryan discovered the Borges story, ‘The Gospel of Judas,’ he asked his father if he had been referencing it. His dad behaved like he couldn’t remember ever having said anything of the sort and concluded, “if I said that, I must have been joking around with you.”
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Cold air rushes in through the hole Arjit pounded through the sheet rock. He seizes a piece and pulls it off the wall, taking out more shelves in the process. Blood and skin collect between his fingers. With his long legs he kicks at the sheetrock on the other side.
“Come on,” he says, and turning sideways steps through the gap.
I follow. We’re in another large meeting room. There’s a large oak conference table circled by rolling chairs and portraits of past presidents adorn the wall opposite a row of windows. We rush over and force one open. Inhale deep breaths of outside air. Red, blue, and white lights flash the sky. A crowd of students surrounds the building. Campus police act as barriers, asking the mass to step back. Firemen move about, talking into radios.
“Up here,” I shout, but the words come out in coughs and no one notices.
“Motherfuckers, look up,” Arjit says and heads rise to the window.
I breathe deep. And long. A lot. Outside is relief. Euphoria. Escape. Peace. My dirty hands leave grey marks along the windowsill and it feels like I have dirt under my tongue. The view blurs, then clears. The fireman trampoline is brought under the window and Arjit drops me safely into its center.
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Moments and many coughs before, Arjit and I had been walking by the fountain discussing what inspires deeds of greatness when Shelli ran up and said that the Student Activities Building had caught fire.
We ran to its rear exit where evacuating students and staff were gathering. Dark smoke rose out of its east side.
“Do you see Margot?” Shelli asked, her voice rushed and full of worry.
Her friend occasionally worked late in the Student Officer’s Room.
“I’ll make sure she’s safe,” Arjit said, “And anyone else,” and he ran through the last wave of exiting students into the smoking building.
“Where’s the fire trucks,” I said, looking around at the gathering crowd. “Why isn’t a sprinkler system putting this out?”
A red-head beside me turned and said, “Right, yeah? I’m in debt forever so I could go to a school that can’t even get its pipes in order? I should have volunteered to dig wells in Africa.”
More students gathered around the building to watch the smoke rush into the evening sky. Shelli’s friend Margot pushed to the front of the crowd, near where we stood and moaned about her 1st Amendment History paper going up in flames.
Shelli saw Margot, embraced her tightly, and said, “Oh thank God you’re here!”
Then a loud crash echoed from inside the building and a heat wave inspired us all to step a few feet back, except for Shelli, who stepped forward and strained to see inside the dark glass doors of the building.
“Arjit?” she said.
Another loud crash.
“That paper took hours to write,” Margot said.
“Oh God,” Shelli shouted. “Arjit!”
She grabbed my hand and squeezed tight, hurting my fingers. Her eyes red and watery as she looked for his tall shadow in the door frame and the windows.
And in my head, I heard a voice saying, but what can I do, though in my heart it was the clearest action I’ve ever taken, one so obvious I was already running away from the crowd and toward the building.
Dear God, I prayed, as I ran inside, help me find Arjit. Give me strength to carry him out. Show your strength through me. Let your name be glorified in my actions. Amen. I kept praying as I sprinted up the stairs and jumped through a door frame ringed with flame.
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Years after Arjit fell out of touch with Ryan, another friend of his posted on his Facebook wall a link to the Reddit post, “You Don’t Really Need To Exist To Inspire People. This Is Why Superman Is My Hero.” Arjit remembered the many conversations he had with Ryan when they were in college and regretted that they were not Facebook friends (Facebook not existing when they were undergraduates). He sent the link describing how a page in All-Star Superman prevented someone’s suicide to the last email address of Ryan’s he had. He never heard back. He hoped his friend was doing missionary work somewhere.
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“Did you hear,” Arjit said, a few days after the fire, hobbling into my room on crutches.
He sprained his ankle when he landed on the fireman trampoline. A large grin greeted mine when I looked up. He placed several Superman comics on my shelf.
“You’re looking much better,” he said. “Healing fast.”
After the fire I had a nasty cough and nausea after eating.
Sitting on my extra bed with his long legs stretched out, he leaned back and said, “The firemen who went in to find us found three girls behind the bar in the Billiards Room. They went in looking for us, but found those girls instead. If we hadn’t run in, those girls would have been burnt alive. We didn’t find them and carry them out, but because of us, those three girls were saved.”
“Yeah, I guess they were,” I said.
Thank you and praise Jesus, I prayed.
Arjit and I had many more adventures, perhaps too numerous to mention in detail, but the curing of the waking nightmares story that Shelli said I should share when we first met, I never ended up telling him.