All My Friends Are Superheroes - Andrew Kaufman [18]
‘That was fantastic!’ he screamed. The rest of the evening just disappointed him.
Just like his friends were disappointing him now.
‘What are you doing?’ the Amphibian repeated. His voice was filled with disbelief. It made Tom and the Perfectionist stop. When they stopped, their reflections stopped. All four turned and looked at the Amphibian, who was sitting on the floor across from his reflection. The two Amphibians were sharing the same glass of wine. They both looked annoyed.
‘These are friends of yours?’ asked the Amphibian on the right.
‘Two of the best I have,’ answered the Amphibian on the left. They rolled their eyes and continued their conversation.
The airhostess comes around and collects Tom’s headphones. Tom hands them over. He turns towards the Perfectionist, leans in close.
‘I know you’re fighting yourself,’ Tom says. ‘I know you want to see me.’ But the Perfectionist keeps staring out the window of the airplane.
FIFTEEN
TENSE
The Perfectionist continues smelling Tom. It’s his post-exercise smell. She looks at her watch. She has thirteen minutes before the plane lands. She needs to talk to the Clock. Putting her tray in the upright position, she settles back in her chair, closes her eyes and falls asleep.
The Perfectionist’s eyeballs flicker behind her eyelids. Even though she and the Clock both live in Toronto, and it’s not even a ten-dollar cab ride between their houses, they never manage to find the time to get together. So, at least twice a month, the Clock visits the Perfectionist in her dreams.
They sit in matching yellow mesh lawn chairs. The strapping pinches the Perfectionist’s left thigh. She shifts in her chair, looks over her shoulder and sees the cottage her family rented every summer until she was eighteen. She wiggles dry sand between her toes. It’s 3:30 in the afternoon. She hopes she’s wearing sunscreen and sniffs the air.
‘Can you smell that?’ the Perfectionist asks the Clock.
‘Smell what?’
‘Tom.’
‘Only if Tom smells like dead fish,’ answers the Clock.
‘I swear I can smell Tom,’ she says, folding her hands in her lap. She looks at her fingers. Her nails are never bitten here.
‘What’s it like?’ she asks the Clock.
‘What’s what like?’
‘Travelling. Being able to travel to the future.’
‘It’s nothing like you think,’ the Clock tells her.
‘Will you take me?’
‘You wouldn’t like it.’
‘I just want to see it.’
‘It’s not like you’re imagining.’
‘Take me there,’ the Perfectionist pleads. She puts her hand on the Clock’s arm. ‘I really need to see it.’
Part of the reason the Perfectionist is so desperate to see the future is that she once got stuck in the present. She had a fling with Terry Cloth, whose superpower is the ability to make every day feel like Sunday. They met on February 11th and spent the next five months in bed. They didn’t have a lot of sex; they moved the TV into the bedroom. They ordered in and had supplies delivered. They started screening their calls and then stopped answering the phone altogether. June went by and neither of them had left the apartment.
Then one morning, the Perfectionist woke up early. She let Terry Cloth sleep. Puttering around in the bathroom, she stepped on the scale and waited for the needle to stop swinging back and forth. When it did she was so shocked she jumped off the scale, spilling red wine on her white housecoat.
She’d gained fifteen pounds. All her clothes were too tight and her housecoat was the only article of clothing she felt comfortable in. The washing machine was broken. She pulled on a pair of Terry’s track pants and a white T-shirt that stretched over her belly. She carried her housecoat down two flights of stairs to the street.
Outside she sniffed in the fresh air. The sound of traffic was overwhelming. There were so many people. She walked to the laundromat watching the sidewalk.
The wash cycle was twenty-seven minutes long. The Perfectionist read a newspaper, had a coffee and eaves-dropped on people talking about their jobs. She looked at her watch; it didn’t feel like Sunday any