Nobody's Hero

The first thing Ren noticed was the smell.

Rotting pineapple. Damp cardboard. Something underneath both that he decided not to think about. He filed these observations away before he even opened his eyes, which suggested either a sharp instinct for self-preservation or a very bad morning. Possibly both.

He opened his eyes. Dark green plastic on all sides. A rectangle of gray sky above him. He was in a dumpster. He registered this the way a person registers a minor inconvenience, the way you register that it’s raining when you forgot your umbrella. A problem, sure. Not the end of the world. Probably.

He shifted. A pizza box collapsed wetly beneath him.

He looked down at his chest. He was wearing a silver glitter shirt. Very tight. The sequins caught the weak morning light and threw small bright sparks across the dumpster walls, which was either festive or deeply inappropriate given the circumstances. He had not yet decided which.

He reached into the pocket of his equally tight black jeans. He found a piece of paper. The word REN was written at the top in thick ink, like whoever had written it was furious, or late, or both. He looked at it. Ren. He turned the name over in his head. It fit the way a word fits when it belongs to you, which was interesting, because it was the only thing that did.

He had no memories. Not a single one. No face, no street, no favorite color. His mind was a whiteboard someone had scrubbed clean and forgotten to refill. He knew what a dumpster was. He knew what morning was. He knew that not knowing your own name was generally considered a bad sign. He just had no context for any of it.

Underneath the name on the paper was a list.

TASK LIST (0 POINTS)

Return something that doesn’t belong to you. (8 Points)

Sit with someone who is alone. (5 Points)

Make a child laugh. (3 Points)

Stop a fight. (15 Points)

Find a lost dog. (10 Points)

He read it twice. He did not know what the points were for. He reached into his other pocket. A second paper, softer than the first, the folds worn through from handling he did not remember doing.

POWER LIST

Speak to Animals: 50 Points

X-Ray Vision: 100 Points

Super Strength: 150 Points

Flight: 300 Points

Regeneration: 500 Points

Invisibility: 1,000 Points

He looked at the prices. He looked at his arms, which were thin and pale and had clearly never lifted anything more ambitious than a bag of groceries. He would need to find five lost dogs just to talk to one of them. He understood somehow, without knowing how he understood, that once he had enough points he could cross a power off this list and it would be his. No ceremony. No magic. Just a line through the words and then it would work. He would keep it until he died. He did not know how he knew that either. He put both papers back in his pocket.

He also found a cheap ballpoint pen and a small square of yellow sticky notes, a dozen sheets folded once, all of them blank. He did not know why he had them. He had a feeling they were important in a way he could not explain, the same way he knew his name was Ren and the lists mattered and the dumpster was not, in fact, his home.

He stood up. He grabbed the rim and hauled himself over. He misjudged the drop completely, came down hard on both palms on the alley asphalt, and stayed there on his hands and knees for a moment, breathing, while the city hummed somewhere beyond the walls like it had somewhere better to be.

No memories arrived. He had not expected them to. He got up, brushed the gravel off his hands, and walked toward the light at the end of the alley.

The pigeon was on the fire escape above him. Gray and purple, one toe missing on the left foot. It watched him pass with orange eyes that did not blink. Not the way birds watch things, casually, instinctively. The way something watches when it is paying attention on purpose.

Ren glanced at it and looked away. He had bigger problems than a pigeon.

The street was loud and wide and full of people who all knew exactly where they were going, which Ren found both impressive and slightly irritating. He walked because standing still felt like admitting something. The buildings were tall. The billboards were taller. One of them stretched across the full face of a glass tower, a man in a blue cape with a jaw like a geometry proof, smiling down at the intersection with teeth too perfect to be anything but a warning.

CAPTAIN VALOR SAYS: REAL HEROES NEVER SKIP BREAKFAST.

Below the image, a ticker scrolled in bright letters. VALOR CORP +3. JUSTICE INC -2. GUARDIAN BRANDS REPORTS RECORD Q4.

Ren looked at it. It was the kind of world, then. The kind where heroism had a stock price and a PR team and a breakfast cereal deal. He filed that away and kept walking, because he was hungry and had no money and there was nothing he could do about the billboard.

He checked his pockets again. Two lists. A pen. A pad of blank sticky notes. A bus ticket so old the date had worn off. No wallet. No phone. No keys to anything. He had the glitter shirt and the tight black jeans and a pair of boots that fit perfectly, which was genuinely the best thing that had happened to him so far.

Three blocks down he found a diner with a handwritten sign in the window: DISHWASHER WANTED. CASH DAILY. He stopped on the sidewalk and looked at it long enough for two people to walk around him. He had no ID, no history, nothing to offer except the fact that he was standing here and presumably had hands.

He pushed the door open.

The woman behind the counter looked at his glitter shirt the way people look at something they have questions about but have decided not to ask. She was maybe fifty, with the posture of someone who had been on her feet for thirty years and planned on thirty more.

“You looking for something?” she said.

“The sign,” Ren said. “Dishwasher. I can do that. I don’t have any money but I can work for food if that’s useful to you.”

She looked at him. At the shirt. At his face.

“You eat first,” she said. “Then you work.”

He did not argue.

She put a plate in front of him. Eggs, toast, a pile of home fries. He ate slowly and without ceremony, the way a person eats when they genuinely do not know when the next meal is coming. When the plate was clean he went to the back without being asked, found the apron hanging on the hook by the sink like it had been waiting for him, and washed dishes for two hours. The work was hot and simple and left his hands red. He did not mind it. There was something almost meditative about a task with a clear end.

When the lunch rush thinned the woman found him at the sink and handed him a folded twenty and a paper bag with a sandwich in it.

“Come back tomorrow if you need,” she said, and went back to the counter.

“Thank you,” Ren said. He meant it in a way that felt slightly larger than the situation required, though he could not have explained why.

Outside he looked at the twenty in his hand. He looked at his task list. He had not completed anything on purpose. He had just been hungry. He put the twenty and the list away and kept walking.

He was sitting on a bench in a small park, eating the sandwich, when he noticed the old man.

Next bench over. Maybe seventy. A coat too heavy for the season. A paper bag on his lap. He was watching the fountain in the center of the park with the stillness of a person who had nowhere to be and no one expecting them. Not the peaceful kind of stillness. The other kind.

Ren ate half the sandwich. He looked at the old man. He looked at the fountain. He looked at the other half of the sandwich.

He moved to the bench beside him. “Mind if I sit here?”

The old man looked at him. At the shirt. At his face. “Free country,” he said. Not a yes. Not a no.

Ren sat. He held out the other half of the sandwich. The old man looked at it for a moment, then took it.

They sat without talking. The fountain ran. A kid on a scooter cut across the path and nearly took out a woman with a stroller. The woman said something sharp. The kid was already gone.

“My wife used to come here,” the old man said eventually, still watching the fountain. “Every Sunday. Brought bread for the pigeons.”

“How long ago?” Ren said.

“Four years in March.”

Ren nodded. He did not say he was sorry. He had the sense the man had heard that enough times that it had lost its shape.

They sat there until a phone buzzed in the old man’s coat pocket and he squinted at the screen and said his daughter was coming. He stood slowly, with the careful deliberateness of someone who had stopped trusting his knees. He looked at Ren.

“You’re a decent kid,” he said. Plainly. Like a fact.

He walked toward the park entrance and Ren watched him go.

He pulled out the task list. Crossed out the second item. He peeled a sticky note from the pad, wrote 5 in the corner, and pressed it to the inside of his wrist.

Five points. He had five points and a lot of afternoon left and he had not done a single thing on purpose. He folded the list, leaned back on the bench, and watched a pigeon land on the fountain’s edge.

One toe missing. Left foot.

He looked at it. It looked at him.

He looked away first.

It was getting dark when he heard the shouting.

An alley off a convenience store, two blocks from the park. He was walking past and he slowed without deciding to, the way you slow when something sounds wrong before you understand why. Two men, both bigger than him. One had the other by the collar. A third man, smaller, was backed against the brick wall like he was trying to become part of it.

Ren stopped at the alley entrance.

He thought about his balance. Five points. He thought about the cost of Super Strength and how far away he was from it. He thought about his arms, which had already been the subject of internal criticism once today. He thought about the man against the wall and the specific way he was looking at his own shoes.

He walked in anyway.

“Hey,” he said.

Both men looked at him. The one with the grip did not let go.

“Walk away,” he said.

“I’m just standing here,” Ren said. He kept his voice even. He looked at the smaller man. “You good?”

The smaller man did not answer. His jaw was tight.

“Last chance,” the bigger man said.

Ren did not move. He had thought this through in the three seconds it took to walk into the alley and he knew exactly how it was going to end. He just needed the other man to have enough time to run.

He got one arm up before the first punch landed. It caught his forearm instead of his face. His arm went numb to the elbow. He heard footsteps behind him, the smaller man going, the sound of them fading fast down the alley, and that was the part that mattered.

He took two more hits he could not block. The third one put him on the ground.

He lay on the cold asphalt and looked up at the strip of sky between the buildings. The men were gone. The alley was quiet. His ribs were making a case for themselves in a language made entirely of pain.

He thought: that probably cost more than fifteen points.

He reached for his pocket. Found the task list. He could not quite focus on the words but he knew which one he wanted. He found the pen. He drew a slow, uneven line through the fourth task.

He pressed a new sticky note to his wrist. Wrote 20 beneath the 5. The pen left a faint smear but the numbers were legible.

Twenty points. He had twenty points.

He closed his eyes. The alley smelled like rain coming. His breathing was wrong in a way he recognized meant something but could not name.

The pigeon landed on the dumpster beside him. It regarded him with its one good foot and its orange eyes and its complete, practiced silence.

Ren looked at it.

“I know,” he said.

He did not know what he meant by that. But it felt true.

The rain started. Soft at first, then steady. He felt it on his face and his hands and the silver glitter shirt that had been the first thing he saw when he woke up this morning and would be the last thing he wore in this body.

He did not know that yet.

He just lay there in the rain, twenty points richer than he had started, while the city moved around him like he wasn’t there at all.

He wasn’t afraid. That was the strangest part. He was cold and he was hurt and he was nobody, and he was not afraid.

The pigeon did not move.

The rain kept falling.

Ren closed his eyes, and the loop did what it always did.

It began again.