One time at a convention I ran across the Man of Flowers, the Superman of Daffodils, a long-haired guy, indestructible (of course), who slept in his car and drank a lot of cough syrup and didn’t really fight crime, unless the crimes were happening pretty close by. He was old by then, maybe fifty years old, but with stubble and green eyes and that ageless Tom Petty So-Cal face, and we’d gotten used to the idea that this particular ubermensch was more super-hero vibe than actuality.

The convention was unpopular, as always, lots of protesters on the street—anti-capitalists in black masks holding up signs, just the usual mishmash, trans rights, Palestine, NAFTA, stop vaccinating, whatever. And inside everyone was on edge—we sat on floating platforms talking past each other, wondering how we’d lost the mandate of heaven. How do we convince these kids outside that we really are doing shit, that we’re really out here every day protecting them from extragalactic threats and stuff that’ll destroy humanity, and that all their ticky-tacky human concerns are way below our pay grade?

And the Man of Flowers, as usual, dropped some perspective on us: “Why bother?” he said. “They can’t do shit to us. Let them protest.”

He was obviously correct. We were superheroes. They were nothing-burgers, worm-food, normal, mundanes—worthwhile because all human beings are worthwhile, but otherwise not worth a lot. His point was inarguable, so nobody argued with it; instead, people just ignored him—all the geniuses and strongmen and robots just kept mishmashing their mouths, complaining—whining, really—about how they were so misunderstood and how they needed better PR and the climate had gotten so hostile out there for supers.

Afterward, I found the Man of Flowers in a corner of the convention, sitting by himself, and I said, “I thought you were totally right. I mean, yeah, if I was one of these kids I’d be protesting too. They’re like, why can’t you fix world hunger and shit? From their point of view, it makes perfect sense. They don’t get that this life they’ve got, this life that they hate, could be like a billion times worse—that they could be burning alive in the Maw of some Planet Devourer right now. They don’t get it. And that’s fine. We don’t need them to get it.”

The Man of Flowers smiled and said, “Hey, what’s your name? I haven’t seen you around.”

We did introductions, and I sat down with him. We took coffee, and we chatted for a little while, complaining about the other superheroes, the way you do. We were in a far corner of a pretty nice hotel, ensconced in some couches and pillows, sort of screened off from the rest of them, but we could feel the psychic energy as the supers out there got more and more worked up.

Finally, the Man of Flowers said, “You know the crazy thing? The crazy thing is obviously we could do it. I could stand on the seashore and vaporize seawater with my laser eyes all day long and use the steam to spin big turbines and generate lots of fresh water and electricity, and with that we could make the desert bloom. You could go around punching hurricanes and tornadoes all day long, putting the weather to rights. We could get together, divide up the responsibilities—assign the Spark to deliver meals to the hungry, and the Mason to build houses for the homeless. It’d be work—but we could do it—we could probably materially improve peoples’ lives, if we were willing to really work, day-in-day-out. Just fucking grind away at it, you know? Just wake up, go out to the beach and instead of laying in the sun, just turn on my laser vision and boop, vaporize water, all day, every fucking day. We could do it.”

“Yeah,” I said.

“And everybody here knows it,” he said. “We all know it. We could do it. We could go out there, improve everybody’s life, if we wanted to. It’d be a fucking grind, but we could do it.”

“Yeah.”

“But we don’t,” he said. “And we’re not gonna. Because it would be a drag. Fighting galactic planet-destroying monsters is fun and meaningful. Being a human turbine isn’t. And the people out there? They get it—they work their shitty jobs because they need the money. If they didn’t, they wouldn’t. If they had powers, they wouldn’t be human turbines either. And if we were them, we’d be out there protesting too. Everyone is doing exactly what they’re supposed to do.”

“So . . . that’s it?” I said.

“That’s it.”

This makes the conversation sound like a downer, but it wasn’t. We hung out the rest of the convention, just holding court in the corner, saying hi to whomever dropped by. And when it was over, I went back to my castle, and he went back to his car, and the protesters got married and got jobs and acquired more debt (in either credit card or mortgage form) and the world tottered unfairly, unequally onward.