The Superman Jump

By Albert L. Rodriguez

To my shame, yes, all of it is true. I did jump out that window that night and broke a few parts of my body. Most of my dignity was also shattered when I landed like an idiot in front of Bianca’s stoop. This little occurrence, as grandiose and self-serving as it was, was completely out of character for me. So I have questions just like you.

Yes, I was drunk that night. But that’s beside the point. I’m a tranquil drunk, not a tragic one, and I don’t like to show off. But I’m afraid the facts do speak for themselves. Something went awry that night and out the window I went like a numskull with outstretched arms, like the celebrated superhero that we all know.

“The Superman Jump,” was the moniker that people gave it weeks and months after the fact. It wasn’t a compliment.

The morning after, however, I woke up in Methodist Hospital in Park Slope. What followed were three days of pain and darkness, like the three days that Jesus spent in the grave, if such stories are true (I believe I might have some corroborating evidence).

At home the whole Jesus-and-the-after-life thing stumped me, not only because I had an encounter with another realm, but because his name kept coming up everywhere. Every Hollywood flick I watched, from Casablanca to Die Hard (and I watched a lot of them after the accident), seemed to mention his name in some vital and climatic scene.

“Jesus Christ!” said the head of the CIA when the agency finally caught up with Jason Bourne on CCTV footage.

“Jesus Christ!” said Captain Andrew Henry when Hugh Glass (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) returned to camp in The Revenant, after being mauled by a bear.

“Jesus Christ!" said Holly in Die Hard when John MacClane emerges from the shadows to confront the terrorist Hans Gruber.

At the hospital the name also came up in the most perplexing manner. Nurse Susie was working the hospital room diligently, dealing medications, observing medical instruments, testing body parts, recording numbers on charts. But when she stepped out of the room, presumably to get lunch, the Spanish speaking cleaning lady (Clotilde Mendoza) eagerly entered the room. She was earnest and had a bit of a wild eye. When she figured out that there was no one there but the patient she swiftly slid towards the edge of the bed.

Then she uttered the name: “In the name of Jesus Christ, be healed!”

I was startled. She proceeded to touch me with her excessively warm hands (they left a bit of a heat mark). I would have stopped her but her boldness was riveting, sharp like an angle grinder. Any pushback would have just folded like leaves of grass.  So I just received what she wanted to give.  It all happened in quick succession. In a jiffy this pious, ultra-religious, woman was in and out of my room, and she didn’t even clean it.

The next day, surprisingly, I felt a lot better. The staff was very impressed with my improvement. Doctor Chen, a tall and studious Asian-American doctor with unparalleled manners, who didn’t seem to be prone to exaggeration, used the word “unprecedented” when describing my new prognosis.

I ran into Clotilde Mendoza in the visitor’s lounge. She was changing the cartridges for the coffee machine. When I told her what had happened she responded: “Oh ye of little fate.” But she advised me not to tell anyone else, because “the hospital was full of unbelief,”  and because “we are living in a time of universal blindness—like in the times of Noah.”

She was serious about the Noah thing.

I cut her off and explained to her the prevailing opinion of the times—that such stories of world-wide floods and talking animals (Narnia type stories) are considered to be fairy tales.

“Fairy tales!” she said.

She brought up a headline on her smartphone.

“Look. Read.”

A geological discovery in China that supposedly supported the premise of a worldwide flood.

Then she whispered: “How do you think all the oil got underground?”

That Friday night I arrived at my shared apartment in Sunset Park. Clara called me that Sunday when she heard about the “freak accident.” I told her it wasn’t a freak accident, but “a hiccup of the will.” I also called it “a strange psychedelic night with visions of angels and lovers.” To this she answered that I had always been prone to “melodrama.”

At the time Clara was spending the holidays with our girls in some upstate resort. They were past Poughkeepsie. Past Albany. Somewhere in the nether regions of Lake George (which might as well be Canada). I had never been so far from my girls before—it was heartbreaking.

A divorce is a disastrous thing no matter how you look at it. For me it wasn’t the divorce itself that was so painful, but the cascading indignities that came afterward the divorce that I found truly tortuous. The shame of going backwards. The humiliation of living college students. The stigma of being forever broke. The disgrace of having my daughters (ages ten and twelve) take public transportation in the dead of winter, instead of being driven around in the family SUV (which we had to sell).

I reckoned things could have been very different. Things could have been better. But Clara’s overall take was probably correct: “We just got tired of each other.”

Personally, I blamed it on Clara’s therapist. That monstrous creature, which gave me the heebie-jeebies, convinced my wife that she deserved a lot better than she was getting in her “mediocre marriage.” It was distressing watching this single woman take my marriage apart deliberately and systematically. With her overwrought terminology, and her pop-psychology fluff, and her colored charts, somehow she had been given the authority to rearrange family trees across the metro area.  And she went about her business with a sinister smile. My gullible wife fell for it.

 I was too exhausted to fight back. When I did fight back it was too late. Clara’s therapist, who at this point had become wantonly powerful, made a sweeping pronouncement: “It's a weak effort—don’t fall for it.” And that was that—the end of us.

Today Clara is no longer my wife. Not by a long shot. She’s supposedly dating some humorless Russian dude that works in the diamond district. Anyone that works in the diamond district must be a scoundrel—that's my opinion. And the douche wears the same stinking leather jacket in every distasteful social media picture he takes (and he takes a lot of them). I tried pronouncing his long, Russian, name once, but those clunky syllables rolled off my tongue like a metal bearing bouncing inside an overheated engine.

More power to you Clara. Slava Ukraini!

My mother is also very sick. I don’t talk about this much, but perhaps this is the gist of my suffering. The doctors keep telling me that she is going to die of cancer. There is not much to do about this but weep.

Three months before the Superman jump, also, I also failed to get a critical job promotion. This failure stunned me. It still weighs on me even today.

There are reasons that people get stuck in life. Maybe my situation could have been prevented. Back in the 1990’s, the Clinton & Monica Lewinsky years, when I was a young pup, the American economy was growing by leaps and bounds. The unleashing of the World Wide Web was firing up the imaginations of investors and entrepreneurs everywhere. The economy had an engine once again, and everyone was taking risks. I also took a risk. I dropped out of college to sell luxury cars. BMWs to be specific. I was good at it. Looking back, however, it’s easy to realize that it was a huge mistake. I should have learned how to code, like my beloved mother told me to do.

A decade later the American economy has flatlined like the movie making careers of Christian Slater and Freddie Prince Jr. I also greatly overestimated my abilities as a true salesman. I just didn’t have the motor-mouth that is necessary in this line of work. The opposite is true of Eva. Eva—the natural. Eva—the superstar. She came from left field and overtook us all. And even when the luxury car market was sputtering out and faltering, somehow Eva managed to rock the life of every car buyer she met.

I didn’t get the promotion. The thing landed like a Japanese earthquake. They promoted Eva instead, and they gave her a fat sign-in bonus, and the newly built mezzanine office overlooking the kill floor. When I heard the devastating news I walked back to my spot by the watercooler with my head hanging low. Sometimes some of my coworkers rebuke me for having a bewildered expression on my face during working hours. What can I tell you?

For weeks I didn’t leave my room. It was work, home, and greasy dinners from the local Chinese food  joint in Sunset Park that was obviously overrun by mutant rats. I watched loads of TV. But many of those nights I spent awake, like a night owl, nibbling at the corners of my pillowcases like some feral creature caught in a forgotten bear trap.

Then there was Zula. I met Zula at the counter of the last Papaya King in central Brooklyn. She had one of those cocktail dresses that tend to give people in passing cars neck spasms. I spoke off the cuff to her. She enjoyed my spontaneous verbiage, which she found refreshing and described as “poetic.”

We started going out. I took her to places that I never took Clara (not because I didn’t want to, Clara was just so high-strung and overbearing). We took romantic walks across the Brooklyn Bridge. I took her to Peter Luger. The girl could put down a ribeye steak like a Green Beret in a foxhole.

I was a little older than Zula but at the time I didn’t mind the exuberance of youth. In my opinion things were going very well. We were having a good time together. But then I invited her to one of Bianca’s parties and Zula ghosted me like she invented the art of ghosting. It was a true vanishing act.

At the time I felt the loss. Zula threw cold water on the flame of our romance and ran back into the wilderness of the Manhattan dating scene. This is the new modus operandi of many high-flying females nowadays. They take a guy like me on a hot ride; they have him utter cute, embarrassing, things; they extract an inordinate amount of dinner dates and other resources; they get him pinkish on the face with hope; but then—before the hot wax of romance could fully solidify they pull off a Harry Houdini—they moonwalk their way straight into oblivion to the tune of one of those Britney Spear jams from back in the day.

I went to the party alone. Maybe I shouldn’t have. But who rots at home during the holidays?

But I should have known by the way the music was spilling down the shaft-ways and across the foyer when I entered that pre-war building, like water from a broken pipe, that it was going to be an eventful night. I was taken aback by the level of frenzy. It was a very different party from the lighthearted parties that we used to have at the turn of the millennium. If the vibe would have been right, maybe things would have transpired differently. But as it turned out, there was a sense of inevitability in the air, making the night feel volatile, as if everything was moving furiously, like a freight train, towards that inescapable window.

The truth was that for weeks and weeks I was jittery and panic-stricken. The superman jump, properly understood, was merely the crown molding to finish up a litany of internal movements. If I loosen up at all that night it was out of metaphysical necessity (that’s how predestination works), because a certain amount of lucidity is needed if a man is going to jump out of a window.

I steered away from the dance floor, of course, because I no longer had the same dance moves from back in the day when I was a spring chicken with no worries.

And those Dominicans dudes from Washington Heights owned the dance floor with their perico ripio. There were hardly any Puerto Ricans left in the city (their reggaeton was getting old, and their salsa was old as time); all the ones that I knew had bought homes in the suburbs, or moved to Florida. So I sat on a velvet sofa and I stayed there for most of the night, like a cornball, contemplating with much existential despair the very meaning, or lack of meaning, of life.

I didn’t move until that final sprint across the room.

The night was a mangled cacophony of lyrics, rhythms, and warm bodies against the cold cityscape which from that window extended in all possible directions. Midnight arrived swiftly, but it was all a big blur. There here were females galore there, and hip action everywhere you looked. DJ Perro was keeping things hot and heavy— lust distilled into a sort of rhythmic violence—but I was cold inside. 

Every now and then a throwback would come across those magnificent speakers like a Hail Mary. It was scraps for folks in the crowd, like myself, that thrived on nostalgia. Barry White’s hallucinogenic voice cut through the sluggish despair. It was an old jam from the bottom of the bureau, but it spoke to me. That night that song seemed to be a sentimental anthem for the world. And for all those dispossessed of love. But it was also the worst possible moment to be feeling so vulnerable.

Bianca came over to say hello. “Are you ok?” she asked in her usual mothering manner. She was surveying, checking things out.

“I’m splendid,” I said, but the deception was coming out through my nostrils. It was apparent on my face. Something was simmering under my skin like a nest of ants.

“Are you sure you are ok?”

“Yes—I’m ok.”

I couldn't tell if it was an oncoming panic attack, or a moment of ecstasy that was about to explode into the openness of the world. And there was no way of knowing for sure, so I held it in, like one holds one’s pee.

Bianca had to attend to her responsibilities of managing the party, but Roman picked up on the same line of questioning.  “Are you sure you are ok bro? You look a little out of it.”

He probably saw in my fractured smile the fear of absolute damnation. He offered me some little pills— some little, bitty, mints.

“To take the edge off,” he said. 

But I was too old to be taking other people’s stuff, including their pills; and I had seen this scenario play out a few times. It never ended well.

Nevertheless, and this is the gist of the matter: I do believe that some mind-altering substance probably made it into my system that night (through a drink or otherwise). This is my most reasonable hypothesis. How else do you explain what happened next?

The ethereal realms of the universe opened up to me. Strange things were revealed to me. I saw mansions in the outer realms of the outer galaxies. I found out that at the very edge of the human soul there exists a trench that reaches to the deepest parts of the bottomless pit. I took a look there and never looked again.

When I was back in the apartment, subjectively speaking, the wavelengths of this particular world had changed. The color palettes had shifted. Things in themselves had been rearranged, as if by an editor with immediate and superlative powers. The hourglass passage of time was also drifting in a more measured manner, in the same way that a stroll down the street becomes delayed when there is a fresh layer of snow on the ground.

And then I looked in the direction of the kitchen, past the dancing bodies. There was an angelic being standing there. Tall. A being of physical splendor, standing by the doorway with a breastplate of gold—a sentinel of righteousness. 

I turned to Roman to tell him, but he passed out on the velvet sofa.

I turned the other way and that's when I found her. She was in the heat of that room, elegantly dressed, with a smile—the one and only Professor Eva Mendez.

This was also strange, probably even stranger than an angel.  Eva Mendez had moved to California ten years before. As far as I was concerned she still lived there (if social media reels ought to be believed) with her husband and kids. It had been many years since she had left me heartbroken in a deteriorating street in Bed-Stuyvesant. We didn’t keep in touch, and she didn’t know Bianca, or anyone connected to Bianca, so she had little reason to be at this party. But there she was, in the flesh, or as fleshly as anyone else in the room.

“Hey Tommy-boy,” she said. It was a throw away phrase. But she spoke it in a measured manner, a sign of intelligence, but with a subtle air of seductiveness attached to it, which spoke of her ancient foolishness.

“It’s Christmas time Tommy-boy. Did you miss me?”

True to life, she insisted on calling me by my diminutive nickname, which she invented, which she used with impunity, even when I asked her not to. So for a moment I was tempted to think that it was really her. But there was something falsifying in the shadowy crevices of her deep-set eyes.

Our student-professor relationship had gotten off the rails years before. It had been two years of profound love, a quixotic adventure, like the two horns of a bull that ends up mauling you. It started in her literature class, like a literary romance, with looks, stares, and throwaway smiles.

 One day she gave us a playful assignment, because she was a playful professor: “Write an analytical essay, whatever angle, on the Marvel universe.”

I appealed because I was a DC fan, and I got permission to write something else. I compared the American Superman to the German Übermensch.

Übermensch in German means beyond-man, hyper-man, over-man, or superman. The essay that I wrote pointed out the fact that the superman, originally, wasn’t a toy idea, but a deeply philosophical idea.  In 1859 Charles Darwin published his Origin of Species setting worlds on fire: scientific worlds, philosophical worlds, and theological worlds. From this growing conflagration Friedrich Nietzsche drew his own nefarious conclusions. He lit his wick, picked up his quill, and he leapt into the abyss.  Soon after Western Civilization followed him.

This philosopher-poet, a real madman, wrote his own seminal books to add legs to the Darwinian revolution (Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Beyond Good and Evil, The Antichrist, and The Gay Science). By so doing he helped precipitate the last and greatest deception of mankind (which according to Clotilde was foretold long ago). With daring moral turpitude he brought forward a post-Christian.  He made subversiveness cool.

“God is dead,” he wrote, and people loved it. They loved his rarified courage, his air of complete freedom. With a stroke of his pen he made Jesus into a pauper and reestablished Caesar as king; and just like that the millennial reign of Christ was over.

Clotilde: “As it was foretold long ago.”

Then that little diva, Adolf Hitler, took Nietzsche’s ideas on the war-path and sixty million lives were obliterated, because fantasies about superior races are hard to extinguish. But an alternative Übermensch emerged from across the sea, from the home of the brave. He debuted wearing the colors of the American flag, with a frolicsome cape, a docile demeanor, the jet-black hair of a Sephardic Jew, with the superhuman strength of a biblical Sampson. He also had a messianic mandate that could make any Hebrew prophet blush: “Here is my servant, whom I uphold, my chosen one in whom I delight; I will put my Spirit on him and he will bring justice to the nations.”

Once Nietzsche had fully developed his deplorable moral systems (might-is-right & winner-takes-it-all), and then the freight train of his mind rested, he retired, not to a cottage by the sea like other European intellectuals, but to a mental institution to be tortured by demons.

Professor Eva Mendez loved the essay. Especially the part where I portrayed Nietzsche as an antisocial who took it out on the human race because he couldn’t get laid: “This was a man with a narcissism so potent, so revolting, it pushed every female away. They found him excessive, odd, and awkward; and there is nothing that a young woman finds more displeasing in a young man than awkwardness.”

Eva Mendez and I had chemistry. Too much of it probably, and on the day before St. Valentine’s Day she texted me.

Tommy, are you awake?

I am.

I had a dream with you?

We had already been on a few meaningful coffee dates, and I walked her to her subway stop every Tuesday and Thursday for that entire semester.

What sort of dream? I wrote.

A dream that a lady would never admit to having.

I spilled my poetic verbiage and she opened up like a spring flower.

A dream that we were doing something worth your while.

Tell me about it. I need to know.

Only if you are willing to do what we did in the dream.

I was a little too willing to jump out that window. It was a total hiccup of the will, and it ended up mauling me. Here I stand today, without anything to my name.

At Bianca’s party her ghost was playing on the strings of my heart with uncanny precision all over again—a disturbing sonata—and Barry White with his hallucinogenic voice was making every atom in that room spin and vibrate.

“You’re pale,” the ghost said. “You look like you want to jump out the window.”

The seed was planted.

“Beguiling spirits do plant seeds,” Clotilde told  me at the hospital “and eventually those seeds germinate into action. That’s how the spiritual world works.”

“The air is as hard as a plank out there,” Eva said. “You can walk on it. Remember how you used to plank-me, dear, with your youthful vigor?”

I looked to the angel to save me, but the angel was gone.

“Jump Tommy-boy, jump!  The air outside will sustain you. The creator has commanded his angels concerning you.”

I wanted to run. I wanted the night to be over. But a phosphorescent image was beginning to form out of the warmth and fumes where the angel had been. It was taking the shape of my cancerous mother! That’s when I took off running towards that implacable window like a youthful Christopher Reeves. I hit the porous concrete like a dead man. I thought I died. Such was the pain that I said—this must be the pain of death.

The shame of it all made my face warm while I told the story to Clotilde at the hospital.  She laughed it off and then she turned to me: “You gotta stop listening to the voice of demons!”

And then she rebuked me “in the name of Jesus!”

THE END

Author Bio: Albert L. Rodriguez is a new writer based in Brooklyn, New York. He has a degree from Borough of Manhattan Community College. His work has been featured in INK Pantry, The Rye Whiskey Review, Literally Stories, Platform Review, and The Piker Press.

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