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Completionist

Do you know what the most common super power is?

Butt cheek strength.

I admit, it’s the first one I got too. Watch TV for 10,000 hours and you get super butt cheeks. You can sit on anything – anything – without hurting yourself. It’s like a right of passage for teenagers to post videos on YouTube confirming this. They sit their bare asses on shards of glass or hot coals without any ill effect. Thanks a lot, internet.

Speaking of which, that’s another common ability: digital enhancement. Spend 10,000 on the internet, and you get this strange power. No one is sure how it works but it’s postulated your brain becomes a mild signal booster for your WiFi. Some people report headaches if they push it too far – trying to get a 4k video to play on a 56k connection for instance. But for normal web surfing you don’t feel anything and everything just goes faster.

Of course, I have all the ubiquitous powers, like everyone else. You need to remember even simple activities result in uninteresting, often modest abilities.

For instance, everyone becomes a tireless chewer. 10000 chews and you can chew forever without fatigue. Or how about the ability to sleep in louder than normal environments. That only takes 10000 hours of sleeping. Most people have that power by age four.

These are everyday powers, so common they’re hardly powers at all. I call them the “banal powers”, and nothing sums them up better than the scatological ones. I suppose some people are satisfied with a slight increase in bowel regularity. I guess pooping is the bee’s knees as far as some people are concerned.

But I myself have always sought the more difficult, more powerful abilities. I blew through the fitness panoply before the age of 13. 10k squats, push-ups, sit-ups, arm curls. I can jump three meters high, survive a bullet to the abs, or tear off your arm in an arm wrestling contest. I could move Christ’s boulder if I needed to.

Don’t get me wrong, the fitness abilities are pretty cool, but people everywhere still achieve that. So I aimed higher. My teenage years consisted of me searching for powers to cross off my list. I found cheats around the requirements sometimes.

For instance, I read 10,000 books by 19, but most of then were little kids books. I still got the awesome power though. I can flip through the pages of a book like a damned android and have the same experience as if I’d read it over a month.

I made 10k cups of tea and 10k cups of coffee, both in tiny cups with total garbage product in tiny amounts. Now I can turn hot water into any kind of coffee or tea I want with a thought.

I started rock climbing, real low level climbs, over and over, until I had climbed 10,000 vertical miles. It took two years, but now I can adhere to walls and ceilings like Spider-man.

If you can conceive of something to do 10,000 of, I bet I did it as a teenager. I got so good at gaming the system that I started a website for it. People paid a subscription to learn about my cheats. It made me a millionaire by the time I was twenty.

By then new records to break were getting much harder to come by. You can only achieve certain goals with serious effort, doing something again and again. Activities measured in units of time, for example, can take forever to complete.

Consider flying an airplane for 10,000 hours. That took three years, even after I was a millionaire and could afford it. Keep in mind, 10,000 hours is over 400 full days of an activity. Of course, it was worth it. After flying my ten thousandth hour the air opened up to me. From that moment on I was an expert pilot of any and all aircraft, no matter the type or size. For years I spent a lot of time in the air, flying from place to place, doing air shows for shits and giggles. It was my crowning achievement for awhile.

Until I started parachuting. On my ten thousandth and first jump I waited expectantly to see what my power was going to be. I jumped out of the plane and fell like normal, and it seemed like nothing had changed. But as I got to about 4,000 feet, I thought about opening my shoot and, in thinking about it – just thinking about it – I slowed down. I trained my mind on the thought – “slow down” – and I came almost to a complete stop in midair, parachute still packed away in my backpack.

I hadn’t yet achieved human flight, but I could fall like a champ. Then I made the wing-suit record. On my 10,001st wing-suit glide I decided to take a gamble. I guessed that I wouldn’t need the suit anymore. I dove without it and as I catapulted to certain doom, I willed myself upwards.

“Up.” I screamed. “Up!”

And there I was, wind in my hair, rising like a bird. The first of many impractical, awesome, phenomenally dangerous human flights. Yeah, wing-suits were definitely my high water mark.

But this is all ancient history, precursor to the present. See, once I ran out of awesome things to do, I found myself driven to find anything new. By this point I’m in my early forties, and I’ve lived a healthful life, without any real vices. I had put a premium on physical and mental clarity. But now I was desperate to break another record, any record. I decided I would try for alcohol.

It was a simple enough idea, I thought. Kick back 10,000 shot glasses of light beer and you’re done. So I did exactly that, but nothing happened. Alcohol proved to be a conundrum. This should have given me pause, I know, but something urged me on, drove me forward.

I set myself to the task, with the grim determination and will power only I can bring to bear on such things. I decided to stick with beer, cans of Pabst in particular because it was light, cheap and easy to get down. Then I drank, regularly. I drank beer more than I drank water.

In the beginning it was a real struggle to get a few cans down in a single day. I hated the stuff. But as time progressed it became easier, and then easier still. Soon enough I found I not only could drink ten cans in an afternoon, but damned if I didn’t want to.

I managed ten thousand cans within a couple of years, but still no results. The effort drew a lot of page-views to my site. My followers suggested that the record might be a measure of liters drunk rather than cans. Worst still, they postulated that it might be based on a certain percentage strength of alcohol. There was no way of knowing at the time.

Well, I know now. It was 10,000 liters of alcohol at a roughly 100% purity. At least based on my rough calculations.

I may be off by a few hundred beers, but I count my last Pabst t number 205,700. Each Pabst can is .35 liters at 4.7% alcohol, so every liter of Pabst is the equivalent of 13.7% of a liter of pure alcohol. Extrapolate that and it takes 7.2 liters of Pabst – just under two gallons of beer – to complete every liter of the record. That’s 72,000 liters of Pabst, or over 200,000 cans.

By the end I was drinking 30 cans a day. My website was a bad joke, a failed internet meme people watched like a recurrent train wreck on the news. I became – hell, I am – an unabashed drunk. My liver is mince meat, or so I’m told. I’ve lost my friends, my family, and most of my fortune in furtherance of this one goal.

It took me two more years to destroy everything I’d built, but I did it, at last. I got the alcohol power.

Wanna know what it is? Take a guess.

Really, you’ll never guess.

*****

Jim sat, sad eyed, and watched.

The old man reached out to an empty plate at the bar. He rolled up his sleeve, held his palm over the plate, and from thin air filled the plate up with a pile of salted nuts. The stream of nuts continued to pour out of the palm of his hand, until the plate was overfilled and nuts spilled onto the bar.

“That’s it,” the old man said, his voice slurred from too much drink. “I suppose the powers that be have a fucked up sense of humor.” Hopeful, the old man offered the plate with a smile and Jim ate a couple of nuts out of politeness. They were warm and stale, as if they had been inside someone’s pocket for days during a hot and muggy summer.

Jim bore it with a grin and swallowed. His beer no longer seemed so appealing and he was eager to leave.

“Well, uh, thanks for the story,” Jim said, “Um. Have a good one.”

The old man, his nose a pockmarked ruin spread out across his face, smirked ruefully. He looked down at the mahogany of the bar with his rheumy eyes.

“Sure thing pal,” he said, “Thanks for the ear.”

Without another word, Jim laid some cash on the bar and got up to leave. As he walked out onto the street Jim looked back once and saw the old man from behind the door as it swung shut. He was drinking the flat remnants of Jim’s warm beer.

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