Within Reach

Dust jacket

In this story by T. H. Mercer, quiet magical realism meets the texture of a life in D.C.: a man with a small, perfect gift does the obvious right thing, while the while the story drifts sideways to catch the tiny powers and smaller mercies keep the world stitched together—often without anyone taking credit.

Here is something most people don’t know: everyone has a superpower.

Not the spectacular kind. Not flight, not telekinesis, not the ability to commune with weather systems or bend light around your body. Just someone who can always find the ripest avocado. A man in Düsseldorf who is immune to paper cuts on his left hand. A woman in Reykjavik who has never, not once in forty-one years, burned the roof of her mouth on hot coffee.

Most people go their whole lives this way. They have a thing they can do that nobody else can do, and they never find out, because it never separates itself from the ordinary texture of a life.

The universe is running on this. Not on the people who can fly. On a man in Lisbon who always wakes up two minutes before his alarm, a bus driver in Chicago who has never once missed a connecting passenger by less than ten seconds, and a medieval history professor in Washington, D.C., who can catch things.

Ben Tomaszewski could catch things.

This was not, on the surface, an obvious statement. Ben was fifty-one, taught medieval history at Georgetown, and had the general physical presence of a man at war with the objects around him. He walked into furniture he’d owned for years. He routinely failed to operate his umbrella. He had once, during a faculty meeting, gestured so enthusiastically about the Investiture Controversy that he knocked his own coffee into the lap of the department chair.

But if something was falling and he was within arm’s reach, he caught it. Every time.

His lifetime batting average was 1.000. The mug his roommate knocked off the counter in college: caught. His niece’s ice cream cone at the boardwalk, already tilting past the point of no return: caught. A full glass of red wine that his partner James had clipped with an elbow during an argument about the dishwasher: caught, left-handed, without spilling a drop.

His partners, James and Liv, thought of him as “weirdly coordinated for a guy who tripped on flat ground.” Once, at a barbecue, he’d snagged a toddler’s sippy cup out of the air mid-arc and the kid’s father had said “damn, nice catch” and he’d said “thanks” and that was as close as he’d ever come to recognition.

He also missed. At least he thought he did. A glass would shatter on the kitchen floor and he’d think, well, I can’t catch everything. But he hadn’t been within reach. He’d been two steps away, or leaning the wrong direction, or in another room entirely. The power was perfect; the opportunities weren’t. From where Ben stood, it looked like he just happened to catch things sometimes and didn’t other times, and that fit approximately everyone who had ever lived.

On a Tuesday in September, on the Orange Line train to Vienna, a briefcase tipped off a vacated seat and Ben caught it.

He didn’t lunge. He didn’t reach. His hand was just there. One moment the briefcase was falling; the next it was in his grip, heavier than it looked, brown leather, scuffed at the corners, old but maintained. Its owner was already on the other side of the closed doors as the train pulled away from Farragut West: fifties, grey coat, turning just too late to see the gap where his briefcase had been.

Ben stood there holding it while the train moved. A woman across the aisle glanced at him, glanced at the briefcase, and looked away. He could feel the polite civic irresponsibility forming in the air around him: someone would turn it in, someone always does, it doesn’t have to be me.

He got off at Foggy Bottom.

The lost-and-found was the right answer. It was the system built for exactly this situation. But he’d seen the man’s face, and he’d felt the weight of the briefcase, and something about consigning it to a plastic bin in a fluorescent office felt as wrong as sending a twelfth-century charter to the wrong abbey and trusting the archive to sort it out.

He crossed the platform, waited four minutes for the eastbound train, rode it one stop back. The man was still there.

He was sitting on a bench at the end of the platform, hunched forward, phone in his hands. Ben recognized the posture. He’d seen it on James when his mother was in the hospital, on Liv after she’d lost the fellowship. Someone recalculating a future that had just gotten more expensive.

The man was trying to make a call. His hands were shaking, and as Ben walked toward him the phone slipped, bounced off his knee, and was heading for the platform edge and the gap beyond it: three feet of open air above the rail.

Ben caught it.

His left hand came up and took it out of the air at the outer limit of his reach, fingertips, in the last step before it cleared the edge. He was standing there, slightly out of breath, holding a stranger’s phone in one hand and a stranger’s briefcase in the other.

“Sorry,” Ben said, and handed the phone back. “Also — you left this on the train.”

He held up the briefcase. The man looked at the phone in one hand, the briefcase in the other, and his face crumpled first, just for a second, before the relief arrived.

“Thank you.” His voice was rough. “I can’t — thank you.”

“No problem. Rough day?”

The man almost said something. Ben could see it building behind his expression, a sentence that would have explained the briefcase and the shaking hands. But they were strangers on a train platform and the full weight of it was too much for the moment.

“Yeah,” the man said. “Rough day.”

“I hope it gets better.”

“Thank you. Really.”

Ben nodded and walked away, back toward the eastbound platform, already pulling out his phone to check the time. James was cooking; he would be late.

He opened the group chat.

Ben: chased a guy down to return his briefcase. had to ride the train backwards. I’m going to be late

James: of course you did

Liv: was it at least a cool briefcase

Ben: it was actually sort of a nice one. Old leather

Liv: ok that’s worth it then.

James: risotto will keep. also you’re a good person and I love you

Ben: love you too. tell Liv to set the table

Liv: I’m right here

Liv: setting the table

He put his phone away and watched the tunnel lights slide past and didn’t think about it again.

The man was Tariq Ahmadi, and he was on his way to sign the papers that would end his family’s restaurant: fifty-six years of it, folded into a briefcase, on the specific afternoon the Washington Post had chosen to call and say they loved the place.

His grandparents had started it. His father had grown up in the kitchen. He had grown up in the kitchen. The numbers hadn’t looked good for three years, and he had finally stopped pretending they would.

He was crossing K Street when the phone rang. A food writer from the Post; the fall dining guide; the restaurant had made the list. She needed to confirm some details. His grandmother’s name. The year they’d opened. Whether the mantu were really made from her recipe.

Tariq stood on the corner of K and 17th for a long time after the call ended. The briefcase stayed closed.

He did not go to his meeting.

In Montréal, a woman with a gift she’d never discover reached into her bag for her keys and pulled them out on the first try, as she always did, and always would. In a suburb of São Paulo, a girl who would never get a splinter walked barefoot across her grandmother’s unfinished porch, and her grandmother called after her to put on shoes, and she did, because she was a good kid.

The powers were small. Parsing errors in the source code of a universe too vast and too busy to have opinions about any single person. But they were there, and they worked, and on a Tuesday in September, on a platform under the capital, a man who could catch things reached out and caught a phone, and a fifty-six-year-old restaurant on Connecticut Avenue survived, and he never knew.

He went home. The risotto was good.