Free Third Class Superhero by Charles Yu Page B

town square. Walk two units south and one unit west. Find the white house with a blue roof. Go in. (The door will be locked. The key is under the mat.)
    Our staffers have verified that Wayne's tip works. To try it for yourself, follow these directions:
    A. From the entrance, go down the main hall to the second door on the right. This is the guest bathroom. Turn on the shower. Make sure the water is very hot. Close the door and let the bathroom fill with steam.
    B. When the mirror is cloudy and opaque with the condensation from water vapor, stand in front of the mirror, about a foot to eighteen inches away. This is the optimal length for all eye-looking vectors. At this length, an eye-looking vector has unique properties. Use your hand to wipe off a small area—maybe six inches by three inches—from the glass so that the mirror can reflect your eye-looking vector. Now look at yourself. Keep looking. Do not look away. Stand still. Do not look away. The game will ask you over and over again if you want to look away. Resist the temptation. Note what is happening. Your eye-looking vector will begin bouncing off the mirror and into your reflection's vector-accepting eye, and then back out again. The vector will keep bouncing, back and forth, into the mirror and then out, into your own head, and back.

    C. After a while, small windows will pop up and the game will ask you over and over again: Are you sure Are you sure Are you sure Are you sure? Click away all of these little boxes. New windows will spring forth, asking if you want to terminate the subroutine. The game will assume there has been some kind of error. Keep clicking these closed, too. Stand still and whatever you do, do not look away.
    D. If you wait long enough, the game will give up and override the defaults. It will recognize your reflection in the mirror as a different player, Player 2. Now you are Player 1 and your reflection is Player 2.
    Now, say you are sorry. Say a true thing. You will know it and you will know you know it and you will know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know you know it. You will know an infinite number of things about yourself, an infinite regress, telescoping up to a vanishing point, a hierarchy of statements, longer and longer, more and more abstract, receding into the distance, farther and farther from the world, none of them beautiful, all of them true.

Realism
    MY MOTHER IS READING A BOOK called
Realism
.

    It is a collection of stories, arranged like a museum. She bought it for herself. For her birthday. She is hoping it will help her understand her life better.
    "Why do they call it realism?" she asks.
    "It's not really realism," I explain. "Realism is just another way of choosing facts about the world."
    "That's confusing," she says.
    I say to her: You take a person and list some of her physical attributes. Make them seem significant.
    I say: You accumulate details, where that person lives, what she likes to eat, what she sees from her kitchen window every morning.
    I say: You make time flow evenly, in a straight line, one instant to the next. Events occur in some logical order.
    Effects follow causes. What has already happened and what has not yet happened are divided by a thing called the present moment. There is a thing called memory. That's realism, I say.

    My mother will not admit it, but she bought the book because she felt she needed to read it before she couldn't read anymore. Before it was too late.
    My mother is going to die.
    My mother is going to die, my mother is dying, my mother has already died.
    All of this happens in one night. The night she dies. All of this happens in one frozen frame in the flight path of Xeno's Arrow. In the luminiferous aether between Point A and Point B. Between two arbitrarily close points on the infinitely dense real number line.
    Everything that will ever happen has already happened. Xeno's Arrow doesn't really ever move.
    What is a story in this