This is Why it Doesn't Work   

    From the mattress on the floor, John typed into his laptop, took a sip of
coffee, and typed into his laptop some more, his eyes never leaving the
screen. The clock struck noon. John watched the minutes pass, the seconds
tick by, the time waste away. He assumed that there was some change in the
sun’s position in the sky, but never payed enough attention to mark it.
       The white curtains were always half-drawn, and through them, had he cared
to look, John would have seen red and orange leaves flying by on a wind that
wasn’t particularly unusual for this time of year, or the solitary twig that
poked into his view from the skeleton tree whose roots were two and a half
stories below.
       Restlessness wasn’t the word for it, but John eventually felt the
compulsion to amble down the few flights of stairs to the city streets, and
up the relatively straight route to the local supermarket, where banana ice
cream awaited him, as it did most Thursdays, having been delivered with the
other ice creams to the supermarket’s back door the night previous. John put
on a scarf.
       He took the steps one by one, glancing backwards but once to make sure his
door was locked. Faint sounds emanated from the apartments near the
stairwell, including the one he assumed belonged to Margot. The fluorescent
lights flickered in the casually unsettling way that fluorescent lights
flicker. There was a piece missing in the bottom step.
       Being outside wasn’t something that he was entirely used to, and the chill
of the wind would have raised the hairs on the back of his neck, had the
scarf not been so dutifully holding them in place. He wished his old friends
were back in town.
       He thought of all the sitcoms he had watched when he had watched sitcoms,
of all the characters who, single into their thirties and forties, watched
all their friends and relatives marry, until there was no one left to be
with them.
       John’s friends and relatives hadn’t married. Maybe that said something
about them. But they had trickled off to other towns, the entirety of his
relationships with them reduced to the occasional email. Only John remained.
Bummed around. Lay on a mattress next to the wall of his apartment, and
worked on freelance web design. Occasionally, he went to get banana ice
cream.

       And so it was that he was on the relatively straight route to the local
supermarket, where banana ice cream awaited him on Thursdays like today. The
traffic on the street belched out a smoky smell, and the wind tugged at
everything, and every so often a cyclone-like swirl of leaves and litter
would form on the streetcorner. One . . . two . . . three streets he passed,
though he certainly wasn’t counting, before he encountered the commotion in
the jewelry shop near Fifth and Macon.
       He probably wouldn’t have noticed, had he not at that moment in time been
thinking of Spiderman, a superhero whose comics he had long ago ceased to
follow. Oh, how idealized the life of a comic superhero was, to never have
to deal with painful bruises, itchy Spidey-suits, and those really shallow
scrapes that hurt like nothing else. Spiderman was supposed to live in the
grungy city, but never once did he pick up a spot of dirt. John kicked at a
clod of the stuff with his boot. And then a commotion, of the sort that
would catch Spiderman’s eye, caught his.
       The sidewalks were mostly empty, this time of day, and the storekeepers sat
bored in their shops. The one exception of this was a young woman in a
jewelry shop, whose name was Maria Finkelstein, though John would never
learn it. As the tip of John’s boot hit the clod of dirt with a thwock so
quiet he barely heard it, a man inside the jewelry store, wearing varying
articles of brown and charcoal gray clothing in an undistinctive manner,
shoved the woman behind the counter and indicated with his gun that she was
to remove all cash from the register. He eyed the items with large numbers
on their price tags, and, even more, the ones with no price tags at all.
John eyed him.
       Unnoticed, John saw that the door was still ajar, held open by a small lead
or pewter golfer figure, tackily beckoning the casual window shopper into
the small, display-case filled room. Slowly, he stepped into the opening and
bent down towards the figurine doorstop. At that moment, Maria Finkelstein
visibly registered his presence, and the robber turned to see what had
surprised her. Without hesitating a second longer, John grabbed the golfer
doorstop and flung it at the robber, hitting him in the shoulder. The gun
fired, but it wasn’t pointed at anyone. A display case shattered. And the
robber, surprised, fell.
       John looked at his hands. The female cashier was threatening the robber
with a large shard of glass, calling 911, attempting to tie the man’s wrists
with packing tape. He could hear her shouting at him, through that door that
had now swung closed, asking for his help. John looked at the ground, and at
the street beside him, and within a few seconds he was moving again, towards
the store where his banana ice cream awaited.
       A flurry of thoughts went through his head. Some of his limbs still
prickled with adrenaline. This was the first time in a long time that he had
felt alive, that he had done something worth doing, and the only thing he
could think to do was walk away from it. He stared at his hands again.
Somewhere back there, Maria Finkelstein was probably still shouting. He
thought of the things he should be doing -- helping her tie the man up,
keeping an eye on him, standing there proudly while the police arrived.
Maybe attending to the lady’s wounds, if there were any.
       But instead he was walking along the concrete sidewalk, as if nothing had
ever happened. Following his Thursday routine without exception. He reached
and entered the supermarket doors, and let his feet take him to the freezer
section. His trusty banana flavor lay, as always, between the strawberry and
the chocolate (though he noted that the mint had been moved two spaces from
its normal location). He grabbed himself a pint.

       Later that night, John flicked on the news. He only caught part of it, but
they were talking about him. A mysterious hero who had stopped a jewelry
store robbery. The anchors gushed over it, but only for the fifteen seconds
before the next segment. John washed what few dishes he had used that day.
The pint of banana ice cream still lay open on the table, it’s contents now
reduced by half and steadily melting.

       It took John a long time, that next morning, to get out of bed (or at least
to start doing something more productive while lying on that same damn
mattress on the floor). He lay on his back and stared at the ceiling, his
arms straight out beside him, the laptop screen uselessly dark a few feet
away. Eventually, he sat up and looked out the window, leaning on the sill.
He pondered the uselessness of his life.
       Every day, he lay on a mattress on the floor and typed into a laptop. The
world wouldn’t be any worse off short of one freelance web designer. But
yesterday, he had been genuinely useful, and that shook him up a bit.
       Still in his clothes from the day before, he got out of bed.
       Margot wouldn’t be home. She had a job somewhere, as a bank teller or a
video store clerk or something. But he found himself heading for her door
nonetheless. She didn’t answer, but, stinking as he was of sleep and
unwashed clothes, that may have been a blessing. Eventually, he found
himself sticking a post-it note to her door, asking her to get coffee with
him, later. He drew a smiley face on it to make it look happy. Then he
returned to his apartment.

       He’d been living in the same three-room apartment for six and a half years
now. The carpets and furniture hadn’t changed since the day he’d moved in.
He sat down in the single chair next to the worn wooden table and leaned
against its smooth surface, nursing a glass of water. He thought, as he
hadn’t thought in a long while, of when he had first moved in. He had
expected the stay to be a short one, until he went on to bigger and better
things. He’d never even bought a bed for it. But here he was, over half a
decade later, and he could see himself staying in this same dingy place
forever. The idea frightened him, made him restless in a way that it hadn’t
done so before. He spilled some of his water, and raised himself from his
chair to clean it up with a paper towel. The roll was almost out, so he
started a shopping list on a scrap of paper and taped it to the fridge.

       It was mid evening when he finally heard a knock on the door. Though his
laptop lay open and on in sprawl of blankets on his mattress, he’d been
unable to focus all day, and his work was no closer to done than it had been
in the morning. On the worn wooden table still sat his glass, which he had
emptied of water many times in the course of the day, next to it a messy
pile of newspapers that he had rifled through. In the sink were the remains
of a flower, which he had found among the fall leaves outside and then
picked away at as he had fidgeted and thought. And at the door was,
undeniably, Margot.
       John peered at her, for a few seconds, through the grungy, clouded glass of
the peephole that he’d so rarely had occasion to use. A part of him didn’t
believe that any visitor would come intentionally to his place of residence,
but there was Margot nonetheless -- no doubt prompted by the note he had
left for her. He was suddenly unsure of what to say. Uneager to seem rude,
he hastily opened the door and faced Margot.
       “Hey,” she said a little uneasily. “I -- I got your note.”
       “Oh,” John said, “that’s great.”
       “I was thinking it’s a little late for coffee,” Margot continued, “but I
haven’t eaten yet. We could go get a light dinner or something.”
       “Yeah,” John said.
       “We’ve been living so close to eachother for a few years now. It’ll be nice
to finally get to know you.” Margot smiled.

       John had ceased dating, as well as most other forms of major social
interaction, before he had ever even moved into the Macon Street Apartments.
Getting back into things felt odd, but John decided it was a welcome change.
Weeks passed in which he saw Margot more and more often, spoke with her more
and more engagingly, and thought of her more and more in the time when she
was not around. He even started once again to consider the purchase of a
bedframe. His apartment always seemed so inadequate when she was in it,
though he knew hers was little better.

       But he also thought more and more of the incident that had preceded his
initial note on Margot’s door. It had been so ridiculously easy to catch the
jewelry store robber off guard. No one expected a man to appear off the
street and foil a robbery. No one expected or believed in superheros. And
yet -- it was so possible. Any human being had the potential to step in and
change the way things were going. Any human could stop a crime, maybe save a
life. All he had to do was go looking for it.

       John’s costume wasn’t reminiscent of any fictional superhero’s, but he felt
transformed and powerful roaming the streets in his dark jacket and jeans.
He imagined himself slipping invisibly through the night. He walked in a way
that he thought a stealthy superhero might walk. And he searched for crime
and evil. After many hours of walking, he found it.
       He was walking through a mostly residential neighborhood and keeping a
sharp lookout for any kind of trouble when voices drifted to him on the
breeze. They were hushed and gruff, like the voices of “bad guys” on
television or radio shows. It took him a few minutes to pinpoint the
direction from which it came, but John eventually found the speakers in a
small alleyway between two houses, both wooden and rotting, with chipped
paint, but clearly occupied. They were two men, dressed in dark jackets not
so different from John’s own. Their hair was shaggy, but they were
clean-shaven and moved with the swagger of people who know they have power.
The pair had recklessly built a fire in a birdbath, and were conversing by
it’s light, cursing and stomping out the sparks and flames whenever a piece
of kindling fell to the ground.
       “ . . . Waiting for him . . .” John heard one of them say, from his hiding
spot near the mouth of the alley.
       “Not coming,” the other one replied. “’E’s an hour late.”
       “He’s been an hour late before,” the first one said.
       “He still not coming,” replied the second. “You ask me, he’s probably
gotten hisself killed.”
       “He’s good at what he does,” the first one said.
       “He’s desperate,” said the second.
       “We give him fifteen more minutes.”
       “If we leave now, he’ll still be too dead to tell the difference.”
       “Goddamnit, he ain’t dead,” the first one said, his voice rising a little
in volume but dropping a little in tone. “I’m waiting for him.”
       “Well, I’m leaving,” said the second one, and shoved the birdbath over onto
the house, which quickly began to ignite. “Looks like you better be leaving,
too.”
       The original voice cursed.
       John ducked behind a pile of refuse as the pair ran from the mouth of the
alley and off in another direction, then sprang from his hiding place and
ran to the burning house’s door and started banging on it. “Get out!” he
shouted. “Your house is on fire!” But no one seemed to respond to his
shouts.
       He ran to the side of the house opposite the fire, and broke the window
with a large brick he had found lying on the ground. Though there were still
sharp pieces around the opening, he brought his leg up to the window frame
and climbed through, hoping his jacket and jeans would protect him some.
       John found himself in a small, sparsely furnished room. The rug was dirty,
and old cigarette butts littered the small table and floor. A broken chair
sat lamely in the corner. John rushed through the room and into the
low-ceilinged hallway on the other side. The light was nearly nonexistent,
but he could make out the doors that lined both walls. Underneath one, a
line of light glowed. John could faintly smell smoke, but he wasn’t sure if
the fire had burned its way to the interior of the house yet, or if the
scent was just a phantom of his own panic. He lunged for the doorway under
which the line of light had crept. Unlocked, it opened easily.
       Before him was another dingy room, containing a sofa chair and a television
(blaring). A small window decorated the opposing wall, and a single bulb
hung from the ceiling. In the sofa chair was an angry-looking man, woken by
John’s entrance.
       A second panic overtook him. The man in the chair was rising to his feet,
and he looked enraged, and he looked much bigger than John.
       “Fire! Your house is on fire!” John managed to shout before the meaty fist
impacted with his head and the world turned black.

       He found himself coughing and choking on smoke-filled air, his eyes
watering and his ears ringing. His head throbbed, and he could feel an
intense heat assailing his skin. What seemed to be a stiff carpeting pressed
into his face and side. John tried to shove himself up into a sitting
position, but doing so made what little he could see through the smoke and
tears spin around him, and his sense of balance didn’t seem to work. His
head thunked backwards onto the carpet with a jolt that only served to
worsen his headache.
       He tried again, slower this time. His eyes began to clear, and he
remembered where he was. He could make out, through the smoke, the sofa
chair where the other man had been sitting, and the now turned-off T.V. John
stood up.
       “Hel--” he began, before the word caught in the phlegm in his throat. He
coughed and sputtered once more. “Help!”
       He turned and staggered back to the door, leaned against it to catch his
breath. The door was hot. “Help!” he shouted again, to no avail. He moved
away from the door, started to trip, and caught himself. “Help!” He made his
way to the small window on the opposite wall, and banged his fist against it
until the glass broke, scraping and slicing his hand though he could barely
feel it.
       “HELP!” he shouted through the opening. “HELP!”
       This time his call was heard, and was responded to with shouts from
outside. A fireman appeared at the window and used his gloved hand to break
the larger of the remaining shards from the edge of the windowpane before
reaching through and grabbing John’s arms.
       He could hardly fit through the window, but fit he did, though the
remaining bits of glass scraped his stomach, ripping cloth and clawing at
his skin. He was pulled to his feet and guided to a spot farther from the
house, from which he watched the whole thing burn down.

       He was treated for mild smoke inhalation and given stitches, though his
wounds were mostly minor. When Margot heard that he was at the hospital, she
rushed over and doted on him until he was released, though all she really
accomplished was to get in the nurse’s way. She drove him back to the
apartment building and escorted him to his door.
       “What happened?” she asked. “Why were you in that house?”
       John grinned. “I’m a hero,” he said.
       “What do you mean -- Are you okay?” Margot questioned, lifting a hand to
the spectacular bruise that decorated John’s brow. “Should I call --”
       “I’m fine,” John told her. “I’m great. I’m a hero.”
       Margot opened the door to his apartment for him, then turned and walked in
the opposite direction. “Come talk to me when you can communicate
coherently.”

       John spent the next 24 hours in bed, first sleeping, then simply bemoaning
his wounds. “At least I saved someone,” he told himself. “So it’s worth it.”
Eventually, he got up when he heard someone at the door.
       Once again, the person was Margot, and she held a tape in her arms. “I want
to know what happened,” she said. “I was figuring you’d be able to tell me,
now.”
       John let her in, and the two sat down on his couch.
       In a dramatic manner, he recounted to her his entire tale, beginning with
the incident at the jewelry store so many weeks before. He particularly
emphasized his heroism, how he had so bravely gone looking for trouble to
foil and crimes to stop. He boasted and blustered and when he was done, he
grinned. “I’m a hero,” he said. He waited for her to sing his praises.
       She would gush over him.
       She’d be so impressed.
       She’d want to marry him, then and there.
       “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard,” she said. “You fucking
moron.”
       She left the tape on his table and stalked out the door.
       “Don’t call me,” she said.

       That night, John watched the tape. It held the previous night’s broadcast
of the channel seven news, anchored, as always, by an aging woman with a
Botoxed face and hair that didn’t move. “A raging fire struck a home in the
South of the city in early hours of the morning. The owner made it out alive
when he was woken by a burglar in the house, but a small child perished in
the flames. Police are still investigating the incident, but arson is
suspected. If you or anyone you know saw anything relating to the incident,
call . . .”
       John turned off the television.

       The next morning, John awoke at the regular time. He pushed back his covers
and pulled out his laptop, and started to work again on his freelance web
design. Eventually, he got up and made a cup of coffee.
       From the mattress on the floor, John typed into his laptop, took a sip of
coffee, and typed into his laptop some more, his eyes never leaving the
screen. The clock struck noon. John watched the minutes pass, the seconds
tick by, the time waste away. He assumed that there was some change in the
sun’s position in the sky, but never payed enough attention to mark it.
       The white curtains were always half-drawn, and through them, had he cared
to look, John would have seen red and orange leaves flying by on a wind that
wasn’t particularly unusual for this time of year, or the solitary twig that
poked into his view from the skeleton tree whose roots were two and a half
stories below.
       He took another sip of his coffee. He wouldn’t have minded a bit of banana
ice cream, but it was still the beginning of the week, so he resigned
himself to wait untill Thursday.