Yesterday, my superpower manifested itself again. It’s not a talent like a photographic memory, or an idiot-savant talent like being able to glance at a number and instantly know its square root (I’ve been called an “idiot” many times, but rarely a savant). Instead, it’s a usually dormant power, a kind of dedicated healing mode when a cold or a ‘flu attacks.
I rarely get a bug, but, when I do, my body instantly leaps to the attack. My temperature rises slightly, and my caloric intake rises sharply. Suddenly, I have an infinite capacity to sleep. This period lasts about twenty to thirty hours – maybe as long as two days for really virulent strains. Then, suddenly the mode reverses itself, my metabolism returns to normal, and I’m healthy again.
“Clean living,” I like to explain smugly when people around exclaim over my resilience, but I don’t really know. Perhaps it comes from some fluke in the crossover of chromosomes after all, making me some kind of third rate mutant.
Of course, crashing so throughly for a day or so could be inconvenient. But it almost never is. For about six semesters in a row at university, I finished my last exam or handed my last paper in, then retired to bed as soon as I got home. Similarly, yesterday, the ability manifested after I had met my monthly quota of articles – not my idea for a way to spend spare time, but economically convenient, all the same. My body seems not only unusually efficient in fighting infection, but, to a certain extent, able to hold off infections for a brief period as well.
I can’t say that this healing ability is what I would have chosen, had I been bitten by a radioactive hamster or fallen into a vat of nuclear waste. I’d go for flight, myself, or maybe eternal youth and immortality. Often, several years go by between manifestations, and I wonder if it’s gone or diminished.
Still, as I think how wretched I felt at this time yesterday, and compare the memory to how rejuvenated I feel today, I’m not complaining. Anyway, I make a lousy patient, and feel guilty when people do things for me that I can ordinarily do for myself. So, as super-powers go, it’s not a bad one. I just wish sometimes that it was more flashy.
Off the Wall 