My superpower is: I am impervious to external and internal distractions

I think my grandmother can smell electricity. Is that crazy? Maybe I’m crazy. Maybe she’s crazy. I guess it does sound crazy, but I really do believe that the unidentifiable aroma she claims to detect sporadically in arbitrary locations are electrical currents sparking around her.

I heard about her bizarre sensory phenomenon several months ago when I was at home for a weekend and Grandmom came up to the house to visit. My mom asked her about the funny smell (they must have discussed it before) and Grandmom reported that she noticed it at indiscriminate moments—sometimes near the stove, sometimes in the hallway, sometimes in the car. She couldn’t name the scent and couldn’t pin down a source.

A bit later, my mom booted up the dinosaur PC in our family room. She might have wanted to look up “imaginary odor” on WedMD (or I might be making that part up). I heard the computer crank up and Grandmom said, just then, “Now, there it is again. How odd.”

“There what is?”

“The smell,” Grandmom said. She sniffed. The PC hummed and whirred beside her.

“It’s the electricity,” I said. Grandmom must be picking up on collective bursts of electrical power.

“Oh, no it’s not,” my mom said as she Googled “insane asylum” +”family weekend retreat.” Okay, I made that part up.

Right or wrong, my diagnosis makes me ponder what super sense I’d want if I could choose one. I don’t think I need to smell electricity. It’s driving my grandmother crazy. I thought about smelling trouble, but I know that would cause nothing but trouble. I wish I could sniff out my size on sale.

All this was called to mind by George Saunders’ shout and murmur in last week’s New Yorker. “Antiheroes” is about a world full of people who think they have superpowers but don’t.

Not only do they not have superpowers, but the superpowers they think they have aren’t actually that super. A cheerleader feels entitled to be “impervious to physical harm.” The boy who can throw a wad of paper into the trashcan thinks he ought to be able to make every shot. His grandfather believes he can make it to the bathroom in time, every time, because he remembers that he used to be able to and yeah, wasn’t that nice?

As I read the piece, I kept thinking of that half-glib, half-wise expression that defines insanity as “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”