Pause Button Man

It’s not all it’s cracked up to be, this superhero lark. I mean, not all of us get our deserved recognition. Take me.

What do you mean you’d rather not? Okay, I’m not your traditional superhero, your 6ft, 185lb, looks good in tights type. Or 6ft 3in, 235lb if you’re Superman, the man of steel, everybody’s favorite hero. Okay, I can top that, I’m 250lb. But then again I’m only 5ft 6in, so hardly the ideal muscular physique you associate with superheroes.

I don’t get my superpowers from an experiment gone wrong, lifesaving treatment, gifts from wizards or aliens, endless training or from the fact that I was born on a different planet. I’m not strong, quite the opposite. Mom used to tell me I couldn’t knock the skin off a rice pudding. But why would I want to do that anyway? I cannot fly, cannot see through walls, cannot make things freeze or heat them up. In fact on the face of it, I’m just your ordinary Joe in a world teeming with superheroes.

But there is one thing I can do. I can stop time.

It was quite by accident that I discovered my skill. I was walking down the street one day, minding my own business, when I heard a high-pitched scream and a squeal of brakes, and although I normally wouldn’t want to see the scenario that follows a high-pitched scream and squeal of brakes, I looked. Over to the left, and there was this woman, screaming because her small daughter had run into the road and there was a truck coming. You know how it is, something like that happens and suddenly everything goes in slow motion as the inevitable draws ever closer. Except this time, it went from slow motion to stop. 

There was the woman, groceries tumbling to the ground, a look of complete horror as she faced the inevitable. There was the man in the truck, gripping the wheel, eyes bulging, a look which said he was standing on his brakes but still they weren’t working fast enough. 

I went up to the guy next to me – he’d been smoking, and there was his cigarette, a lazy wisp of smoke curling up from the end. He’d been exhaling at the time, and you could tell by the track of the smoke which way he’d been facing when he began to turn his head. I walked to a woman next to him. She had blond shoulder length hair that was suspended as she turned towards the where the scream had come from, her bag was swinging, her skirts swirling. 

Where was Superman when you wanted him, I thought? He’d have scooped up the child, stopped the truck, and been applauded by everyone. I looked round. No sign of a blue and red streak. I checked in all directions. Still no sign. In fact nothing was moving as far as I could see. There would be no saving that little girl.

Unless.

I moved closer to where the truck was. This was the first time anything like this had happened. I wasn’t sure what the rules were.  I checked what I thought the driver was doing, which direction he was trying to swerve to, and I went to the other side of the road. Gingerly I put my foot in the road. Nothing. The truck remained where it was, the girl remained where she was, the mother remained screaming, arms outstretched. I ventured a little further, getting ready to jump back if everything started up again. Nothing. Time to take action. 

It was obvious the girl couldn’t move by herself, but would I be allowed to pick her up? I went towards her, and yes, I could. It would have helped if mom hadn’t been feeding her so many donuts. Hell, it would have helped if I didn’t eat so many donuts. But I managed to pick her up and put her down next to mom. 

Now what? The girl wasn’t in front of the truck any more, so how did we get things moving? It was then I noticed an outline of a figure right next to smoking man, just past blond hair lady. Perhaps I had to go back to where I had been.

I crossed back over the road, keeping one eye on the truck as I did so, and stepped into the outline I could see there. First I felt my feet snap into place when I got them right. Then it was my leg, hips and body. As each part filled the outline correctly, it snapped into place. And as I snapped my head back into position, the world came back to life.

There was that scream, a screech of brakes, a thud, and everyone was rushing over. I looked round. There was the woman looking confused with shopping on the ground, the girl clinging onto her, and in front of the truck was a young man on the ground. He’d been rushing to try and save the girl when I’d stopped time, faltered when suddenly there was no girl to save, and ended up in front of the truck himself. 

Thankfully his injuries weren’t that bad, considering; two broken legs, a broken collar bone, concussion. But the guy lived and recovered. Eventually. And the kid was fine. Okay, so I screwed up, not exactly a superhero, but hey, it was my first time. I wasn’t sure what was happening, what I was doing. This superhero talent I had didn’t come with a guidebook, you know. But I learned a valuable lesson, which is I had to look round for other potential consequences. Hell, at the time I wasn’t too sure it had even happened until I saw the local news on TV that night.

They tried to pin it on Superman of course, but he wasn’t having anything to do with it, what with the other guy being injured and all that. None of the others would admit to it either. But I went round for a few days saying to myself, you saved a kid’s life. Fancy that. You. Jerry Martin.

Well, nothing like that happened again for a while, so I thought it might just be a one off, but then I was in the bank, waiting patiently in the queue, when suddenly a couple of guys burst in, shooting at the ceiling, and telling everyone to get on the floor. Women screamed, men shouted, and I could see one of the tellers reach under his desk. Then everything froze.

I stepped to one side, there was my outline waiting for my return, and I began to assess the situation. I checked outside, I wanted to see if the whole world had stopped; it had. Next, who was in danger.

Firstly there was the teller. His name was Bill by the way, and Bill had been in the process of pushing the emergency button under the counter. Had he pressed it? I didn’t know, but what I did know is one of the gunmen had spotted him, aimed and fired. And from what I could see, the aim was good. Or bad, if you were a teller called Bill. As I saw it, I had two options. The first option was to move Bill out of the way of the bullet. If I moved Bill, I would need to get behind the counter, and hey, wasn’t that the door to the back office opening? So for that I could move that filing cabinet so it was in the path of the bullet. But the filing cabinet was kinda big, looked heavy like. To say nothing of how the hell do I get over the counter and the barriers in the first place. Which left option two. 

Option two was to move the bullet, which I did very carefully. Hell, if I took it out of time, I’d no idea if it was going to go off or anything or continue on its way. So rather than pluck it out the air with my pinkies, I thought it safer if I used a waste basket, which is what I did. No explosion, it just rattled around a bit, but I made sure that when I put the bin down on the floor that the bullet was facing towards the wall, just in case.

That done, I looked back at the two guys. They still had guns, were still a threat. I went up to the one who’d tried to shoot Bill, took hold of his gun, oh how I hate those things, and tried to pull it from his grasp. I found that if I moved one finger at a time, I could loosen his grip just enough so that I was able to get it away from him. When I’d got both guns, I put them in a corner behind a desk. If anyone asked how they got there, I’d say I put them out of harms reach in what I hoped would be the ensuing confusion.

But the guys were still a threat. They were big, nasty, wearing masks, and I dare say when they realised their guns were gone, they’d get nastier. First the masks came off. Urgh. Big, nasty and ugly. But what to do with them now? Missing their masks would make them even angrier, so I looked around at the other customers. I judged there were at least three of them that might be able to keep these goons in place till the police got here. But let’s give them a head start.

Now I might not be good at many things, but I was a good boy scout, and I like to think I’m good a tying knots. I would have liked to tie their feet together, but as their feet were so far apart, that wasn’t really feasible, so I had to make do with tying each leg to a chair. I went round all the guys in the queue and ‘borrowed’ their ties for the purpose. I made sure I included my own tie that I would remember to ‘miss’ when time started again.

I was about to step back into my outline when I noticed that an old lady had been knocked and was falling over. If she fell where she was, she’d break a hip for sure. There was bearded guy quite close, and although it didn’t look like he’d catch her, if he had a well-placed chair to hand…

There was nothing else I could do. I stepped back to where my outline was waiting, clicked into it a bit at a time, and bingo. The bullet exploded in the waste bin, Bill pressed the button, the old lady sat down suddenly on a chair that the bearded guy just happened to have his hand on, and two very confused would be bank robbers were being wrestled to the ground by the fit guys just as Superman showed up and shortly before the police arrived. Superman took most of the credit for that one, though he did say he had help from an anonymous source. I could see he was confused about the guys being tied to chairs. 

Of course, I’m not like other superheroes. Nobody thinks oh yeah, there goes Pause Button Man. I don’t have a fancy costume, I’d look ridiculous in one anyway. Nobody knows that Jerry Martin is other than he seems, a man in his thirties, still living with his mother, a lowly accountant who works at the Daily Planet. My superpower is not something I can switch on and off like these other guys, it just happens if there’s a tricky situation that I might be able to do something about. I’ve saved a couple of kids from drowning when they fell into a river, I’ve saved a crowd of people when a man was having a massive heart attack at the wheel of his taxi. Couldn’t save the driver though, he was already dead. My gifts are limited to the here and now.

But there was one occasion where I found out something very interesting. We were on a night out with other people from work. I was walking along and Perry White was saying “So, Jerry, what part of the organisation do you say you work in again?” Behind, I could hear Clark Kent was trying to chat up Lois Lane. He was droning on, trying to impress her, when there was trouble up ahead. A fight had started in a bar and had got ugly. One guy had pulled a knife, another a gun, and it looked like it was about to turn into a free for all, until it paused. Hell, what was I supposed to do here?

I looked round at the others. Perry looked like he was about to crap himself, Lois hadn’t yet noticed and was dreaming about Superman – when wasn’t she – and Clark…

Well, Clark Kent was running away. But the truth of the matter was that he was further away than he had any right to be considering that a split second before he had been telling Lois how nice her hair was looking. If he’d started running the moment the trouble started, he wouldn’t have had time to go more than a couple of steps. Yet there he was, half a block away, turning into a side street. What was all that about?

I looked at the troublemakers, they weren’t going anywhere, so I decided to take a closer look at Clark. As I got closer, I noticed that he was pulling at his collar, like he was undoing his tie, and he’d already taken his glasses off, making him look more like…

A quick peak under his shirt and there it was, red and gold, the S emblem. And further down, I’m sure I caught a glimpse of blue. Well, well, well, Clark Kent, you dark horse.

So, now for some fun. I went back to the troublemakers and looked at what they had for weapons. There were three with guns, four with knives, a couple with pool cues and one with a chair. I looked around, and close by noticed a grocery store. From there I picked up supplies and replaced the guns with bananas, the knives with cucumbers, the pool queues with bread sticks. Oh, and I grabbed a tablecloth from a café to replace the chair. The weapons I chucked in a dumpster. There, that would stop any immediate threat. After all, I was pretty sure that someone else would turn up soon enough to apprehend the thugs.

Before I restarted time, I looked around to make sure I hadn’t missed anything crucial. No, everything looked fine. Then I clicked back into place and waited.

Sure enough, a couple of seconds later Superman turned up to apprehend the guys attacking each other with the contents of the grocers’ store, and I could see he was wondering where all the weapons they’d had only seconds before had gone. The troublemakers had forgotten what they were arguing about and were starting to laugh about it, convinced they’d picked up the wrong weapons because they’d drunk too much. Superman checked everything was okay, and it was then I went up to him and said “Oh Superman, I think they put their weapons in that dumpster over there before you got here,” all innocent like.

I could see him looking at the dumpster, probably using his X-ray vision, and after he’d flown off with them, Clark Kent suddenly appeared again. Of course Lois only had eyes for Superman, so had no idea that Clark had even been missing.

I could feel Clark looking at me over the next few weeks, wondering, but hey, I’m not one to gossip. I moved on after that, thought I’d go see a bit of the world. Time I left home anyway. And over the years I’ve learned all about the secrets of Hal Jordan, Diana Prince and Barry Allen. Just off to my new job in Gotham City where I’ve got a job with this guy called Bruce Wayne. Wonder what secrets that will bring?