CHAPTER 12

Reboot

I come from nowhere.

—Andy Warhol

In the comic-book industry, a reboot is when writers rework a character from scratch or very nearly so. Origin stories are rewritten so that superheroes can have a fresh impetus. Time lines are revised so that characters can move into new eras. Continuity is broken so that caped crusaders can have the freedom to leap into different story lines. On the business side of things, reboots allow creators to produce new sorts of material, thus appealing to new generations of fans. On the narrative side of things, reboots make it possible for superheroes to have whole new lives.

Wonder Woman is probably the earliest well-known example of this revisionist history so commonly found in the superhero genre. Created in the 1940s by William Moulton Marston—a Harvard-educated psychologist who invented an early version of the polygraph—the original Wonder Woman was royalty among the Amazons of Paradise Island, a superhero whose superpower was a golden lasso that compelled others to tell the truth. In 1968, in the hope of broadening her appeal for a feminist audience, new writers gave Wonder Woman a new story: a reboot. No longer a warrior princess, Wonder Woman turned in her name, her costume, and her special powers and became Diana Prince—a modern woman who fought crime with karate and in pants.

Although it generated some new drama, the “Diana Prince era” angered old fans, too, including Gloria Steinem who preferred the idea of a woman with superpowers. In 1973, Wonder Woman was rebooted again in The New Adventures of the Original Wonder Woman. Back were the superpowers and the costume, as well as her Amazonian roots, though when she was not saving others she disguised herself as everyday woman Ms. Prince. Most recently, in 2017, Wonder Woman was rebooted once more, this time as the sword-wielding heroine of a blockbuster Hollywood movie.

Supernormals often write their own reboots. Recall that for resilient children there are origin stories, and the quests for survival and triumph that follow come to define their lives. Every day, they put on their costumes and masks, and they use whatever powers they have to fight back against the dangers in their world. But just like superheroes on the pages of comic books, many supernormals find themselves battling the same perils year after year. It gets old, and exhausting, and many begin to wonder, “Is this ever going to change?” For supernormals, then, a reboot is the opportunity to take control of their origin stories and begin again so that they, like Wonder Woman, might get to have whole new lives.

Anton had it all worked out. Just the night before, he had organized into a playlist all the songs he could find about leaving, and as he pulled onto the highway they began to blare out of the windows of his car. The speed and momentum. The loud music as it blew through the wind. It all made Anton feel important somehow, or like something significant was happening. Which it was. Anton was doing it. He was getting away.

On his way out of town, Anton had passed by the bookstore where he used to look at travel guides. It was there he had chosen the Great Northwest as his destination, though he could not say why, other than maybe because it sounded like the opposite of where he was now: “the shitty fucking Southeast.” He had driven past the mall, the one where, on a back-to-school shopping trip, he and his mother had trudged back and forth across the food court in the center to the four department stores, each of which had declined her different credit cards. He had seen the convenience store that refused to take their checks, and the gas station where his father once worked as a mechanic—and where Anton did, too, after he got his GED, and even after his father was caught stealing money from the register. On what seemed like every storefront, Anton had noticed a newspaper vending machine offering up newspapers, the ones that listed the arrest reports that sometimes included his father’s name.

Anton was going to a place he had never been on a side of the country he had never seen, and that was the glorious point. At nineteen years old, Anton had long felt like a prisoner in his own life. In the mornings, he had gone to a dead-end job he knew he was lucky to have, one where he could not shake the feeling that people expected him to be stealing, too. In the afternoon, he went home to a run-down house where the sound of a ringing phone made his heart race: “Don’t answer it,” his mother said, expecting debt collectors on the other end. In the evening, Anton read until late in the night up in his attic room where, in the wintertime when the lights went out, mice sometimes dropped from the rafters onto his bed. He would never forget the sound and sensation of them plopping down lightly near his feet.

Today, however, Anton was making a run for it. He felt like he was breaking out of jail and leaving what felt like his criminal past behind when, really, it was his father who was the one behind bars.

“The world doesn’t usually think about bank robbers as having children—though plenty must,” said Del, the protagonist in Richard Ford’s Canada, a boy whose father, like Anton’s, was a thief. Plenty of bank robbers do indeed have children, as do plenty of violent offenders, drug offenders, sex offenders, and other adults who find themselves on the wrong side of the law. In fact, of the more than two million men and women who are incarcerated in the United States, over 50 percent are parents. According to a report by the Pew Charitable Trusts, almost three million children under the age of eighteen have a parent behind bars. That is 1 in every 28 children; just thirty years ago, it was 1 in every 125. Two-thirds of incarcerated adults are, like Anton’s father, serving sentences for nonviolent crimes, such as drug offenses and crimes against property.

When parents break the law, their sons and daughters are often the unintended, and unrecognized, victims of their crimes. In the home, they are left with less money, food, structure, supervision, and security, and as teens they become more likely to drop out of school and to break the law themselves. In the body and the mind, there is more stress as children wonder: When will I see my mom or dad again? Am I safe? What are people thinking about me? What will happen to my parent? What do I tell people about my parent? What will happen next? Is there enough money to buy food? Who is at the door? Who is on the phone?

Incarceration has an impact on so many families that, in 2013, Sesame Street took up the topic on its show. In a video segment—and an accompanying online toolkit—adults, children, and puppets explain what incarceration is, as well as the sadness, loneliness, and embarrassment a child may feel when his mother or father is away in jail. In its way, Sesame Street was giving voice to the fact that losing a mother or a father to “the system” is a lot like losing a mother or father through abandonment or death. Yet because this loss is more stigmatized, there are fewer services and supports for these so-called orphans of justice, or the children who are left behind.

Mass incarceration has been called “one of the signature social changes that occurred in America in recent decades,” so we are only beginning to understand what this means for the sons and daughters of the imprisoned, including those who, like Anton, are on the cusp of adulthood. Recent research suggests that children pay a steep penalty for their parents’ time behind bars, even after their parents come home and even after these children grow up. In their twenties, adult children of incarcerated parents are more likely to be depressed, to abuse drugs and alcohol, and to be offenders themselves; they are 33 percent less likely to attain higher education, and they are less likely to earn as much money as their peers.

None of this was going to happen to Anton, though. He had a plan, which began with leaving the town where it seemed every street contained a bad memory. “I hadn’t done anything personally to feel humiliated about except have parents,” Ford’s Del also said in Canada. Neither had Anton, but regardless, he wanted out. He was going to reboot his life.

A reboot might take place at any time, but the transition to adulthood is when life suddenly presents the greatest number of what have been called “second-chance opportunities.” It is a developmental period of unparalleled possibility and change, a time of great reorganization when children become adults, students become workers, and sons and daughters become partners and parents. Many supernormals spend their child or teen years marking days off the calendar, scanning the environment for or fantasizing about their chance to get up and out. Then one day the resilient teen becomes an adult, and life is no longer something that must be gotten through. For the first time, life is something that can be changed.

At the same time, adulthood can also be a time of increasing vulnerability, particularly for those who are on their own. Sons and daughters who receive little guidance or support from their parents may, at the age of eighteen, be left without even the few benefits they had before: public schools, teachers or coaches who care, reduced-fee lunches, after-school programs, foster care or other social services. The overwhelming uncertainty that is a part of modern young adulthood is difficult to navigate in the best of circumstances, not to mention for those whose parents are unable or unwilling to help them find their way. Cumulative disadvantage and strain may begin to exact their toll: Adulthood is when stress-related mental health problems, such as depression and anxiety, typically begin to emerge, and it is a time when many begin to use substances to cope.

Young adulthood is, therefore, an inflection point for many. It is a time when one’s life can take a turn for the worse or for the better, a time when one good move—or a series of good moves—can redirect the life of the supernormal. Often, it is the only thing that does. Numerous research studies have followed children who faced a wide range of adversities in early life—the Great Depression, violent neighborhoods, sexual abuse, foster care, teen parenthood, mentally ill parents, alcoholic parents, early delinquency—and while some of these children followed in the footsteps of their parents, or remained on the paths their childhoods set out for them, those who changed direction did so, in large part, because they were able to see and to seize a second chance at life.

How exactly do they do it?

There is no one way.

Decades ago, especially for women, marriage seemed the only way out of an unhappy childhood: “Marriage to Jim brought me escape at the time,” said Marilyn Monroe about finding a husband at age sixteen. “It was that or my being sent off again to another foster home.” Becoming a wife or a husband is certainly one way to leave home—and childhood—behind, but there are hazards, of course, in partnering young and fast as a means of running away. All too often, one difficult family situation is traded for another.

Today young women and men have far more options for starting anew, many of which we have heard about already. Some—like Emily or Martha or Michelle—use the talents they have, such as swimming or acting or polo, as their way of getting themselves to a better or safer place. Often, that better or safer place is college, as it was for Vera who escaped drug abuse and neglect at home, and for Mara whose dream-school key chain sustained her as she watched the globe in her public library turn around and around. Higher education can indeed be a key to a better life, a way to earn degrees or certifications that open new doors. There is also more to it than that. College is a place where, maybe for the first time, there are hot meals and clean beds and doctors, and it is a place where new friends, new mentors, and new ideas introduce the supernormal to a whole new world.

Some find that whole new world not at school but by joining a religious organization or the Peace Corps or some other purposeful group. Others, like Paul, the boy who was bullied in school, discover new lives and new roles in the military, and recent research has found that those who have experienced hardship are more likely than their peers to enlist in the armed forces. Still others, like Anton, release themselves from the environmental traps that homes and hometowns can be simply by moving away. They “pull a geographic”: They get in their cars, or on a bus or a plane, and just go.

As Anton made his way from east to west, for a while, he stopped as infrequently as he could. Each state looked much the same as the one before, so mostly he watched the odometer tick higher like progress. He took his first real detour off the highway and into St. Louis so he could pass ceremoniously through the “Gateway to the West,” or the arch that, Anton discovered, did not seem much like a gateway at all. It was disappointing, but not so long after that Anton noticed the landscape began to change into sights he had never seen. He spent a whole day driving in one straight line through the flat, open prairies of Kansas, reading Catcher in the Rye propped open on his steering wheel, one eye on the road. At sunset, Anton saw the tall grasses glow red, an image he would never forget. It was the first truly beautiful bit of nature that Anton had ever beheld.

There would be more.

North and west of there, the sky was bigger and more open and Anton felt like he could breathe easier, like there was more air. He slowed down around Yellowstone National Park, which—with its mountains and bison and geysers and moose—Anton decided must be the most marvelous place on Earth. At night, he slept in his car in driveways that led up to empty vacation cabins, and during the day he sat for hours in steamy natural hot springs just outside the park. He gazed up at rocky slopes and at the pine trees that stood on them in swaths, so neat and orderly and all about the same size. From a distance, they looked like the tiny trees that architects use in models, and Anton felt like he had been plunked down in a whole other, more perfect world. He even saw a double rainbow.

If all that sounds too picturesque, consider that, on his way to the Great Northwest, most nights Anton slept in his car in truck stops where he had the benefit of streetlights and bathrooms. Other nights, he pulled far off on the shoulders of frontage roads and clutched a tire iron as he fell asleep in the backseat. Anton was willing to do almost anything to protect himself, to get some distance from the past.

If the essence of trauma is that “the past is always present”—that the events of yesterday are forever intruding on the thoughts of today—then one way to reduce the impact of childhood adversity is to keep the past and present as separate as possible. Some may do this simply by setting their minds to it, but this can be difficult, especially when the past is very powerful or very near. So many, like Anton, perform the ultimate act of compartmentalization: They put as many miles as they can between the past and the present by physically leaving the past behind.

Remember that one way supernormal children may adapt to their circumstances at home is by distancing themselves from the bad things in their lives. They may hide out in their rooms, or stay late at school. Some keep busy with friends or hobbies or jobs. When adulthood offers fresh opportunities for separating themselves from the stressors around them, supernormals use those same instincts to move out of their houses or out of their towns. This might sound like escapism, but there is more to it than that.

In the brain, the amygdala has a job to do, as we know, and that job is to detect danger in the environment. If a threat is identified, the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex work together to evaluate the amygdala’s alarm, the hippocampus by placing experiences in context and the prefrontal cortex by appraising whether the danger is, in fact, as bad as it seems. When the brain is subjected to chronic stress, however, the amygdala can become too good at its job, and the hippocampus and the prefrontal cortex may become overloaded, impaired, or otherwise unable to discriminate well. When this happens, every loud noise must be a gun, every angry face must be mad at me, every ringing phone must have a bill collector on the other end, and this overgeneralization is how “the past is always present.” From an evolutionary perspective, it makes sense to be conservative about danger—better safe than sorry, it seems—although for many, it is unclear where exactly safety lies.

“My boundary is the Mississippi,” Anton said. For him, safety lay on the other side of the country. Without exactly knowing it, Anton was helping his brain by reducing the cues that set off his amygdala: the particular sound of the phone that rang at home, the corner store near his house that no longer took his family’s checks, even the bookstore where he had drawn up his plan for a second chance. Now Anton’s days were filled with new sights and new places and that suited him just fine.

By changing his surroundings, Anton was helping his brain to forget—or, more accurately, he was helping his brain fail to remember. The brain remembers best in context, because our senses trigger memories. If we want to fill out our memories about something, the more familiar sights, smells, sounds, tastes, and touches the better. This is why we remember more about being at a grandparent’s house as a child when we visit that same house as an adult, or when we eat the treats Grandma used to bake or smell the cigars Grandpa used to smoke. And this is why, to facilitate recall, detectives take witnesses back to the scene of a crime.

Indeed, countless studies demonstrate we are better able to remember information if we return to the place where we learned it. A classic experiment conducted in the United Kingdom in the 1970s makes this point simply and well. In it, a group of deep-sea divers learned two lists of vocabulary words in two different environments; they learned one list of words on dry land and a different list of words underwater in their scuba gear. Afterward, the divers had better recall for words when they were tested in the environment in which they learned them. Words learned on land were remembered best on land, and words learned underwater were remembered best underwater.

Of course, memory is not entirely dependent on where we are, and changing locations or moving to a new place is not a magic eraser. If it were, then every soldier who comes home from war would return to baseline functioning—to his old self—as soon as he sits down in his living room. And we remember frequently used information, such as old addresses or our multiplication tables, no matter where we go. But context does matter, and the fewer cues and reminders we have, the less likely we are to feel that the past is right there with us. “Out of sight, out of mind,” the old adage goes.

Yet remember what neuroscientist Joseph LeDoux suggested: “Emotional memories may be forever.” They are so powerful that we never really forget or “unlearn” them; we just crowd them out with new learning and new emotional memories. For the first months, and even years, that Anton lived out west, he was crowding out the past with new people and new places. To the brain, being somewhere new and different can feel like an emergency, albeit a good one. There are new streets to navigate, new stores to find, and new faces to remember. The brain is so busy getting to know its new surroundings it scarcely has time to think about its old ones.

New places and new experiences keep us from ruminating on—from accessing and rehearsing—our memories of old places and old experiences. To get your mind off one thing, you usually need to put it on another. Indeed, trauma research suggests that to keep unwanted thoughts at bay, it helps to engage in some sort of activity that requires mental work, whether that be solving crossword puzzles, playing tennis, cooking a meal, or working on a project. Activities that are too passive or too familiar only allow the mind to wander back to old places. “Memory lane was a sucker punch,” said author Paula McLain, and Anton preferred never to walk that way again.

The true spirit of a reboot, of course, goes far beyond just changing one’s circumstances; the intention, for most superheroes and supernormals, is to change one’s identity. It is an opportunity to start over not as the same person in a new place but as a new person altogether. To this end, many supernormals wake up in their new surroundings and experiment with who they are. They reinvent themselves again and again, trying to be this sort of person or that sort of worker. Some find power in symbolic gestures, such as by refashioning their lives with changes to their lifestyle or their appearance, or by getting rid of objects and possessions from the past that weigh them down. Others change who they are, quite literally, by changing their names.

Name changes can be found in the life stories of many of the self-determined—not just celebrities who want their monikers to be more appealing—from Bob Dylan to Bill de Blasio to Jon Stewart to Barack Obama, and usually they represent a break with the past as well as a sort of rebirth. Erik Erikson, the psychologist who popularized the concept of the identity crisis, or the search for self that takes place across adolescence and young adulthood, changed his own name—from Erik Homburger to Erik Erikson—to mean “Erik, son of himself.” Said Marilyn Monroe about her name change from Norma Jean Mortenson: “I had to get born. And this time better than before.”

Pop art hero Andy Warhol changed his name, too. Born Andrew Warhola, the son of Eastern European immigrants, Warhol grew up in poverty in a Pittsburgh ghetto. From an early age, he possessed a natural ability to draw, an inclination he may have inherited from his mother, an artistic woman who used to make tin flowers out of cut-up kitchen cans. Warhol’s mother was a resourceful woman, too, and she sometimes mixed up a sort of pauper’s tomato soup for the family—Heinz ketchup combined with water, salt, and pepper. Campbell’s tomato soup, however, was her son’s favorite—or so the story goes.

As a boy, Warhol was sickly and frail, but he was also a serious and determined student. “The way he fought out of his background through his art and his talent is extremely important,” said one friend. “It explains him.” According to biographer Victor Bokris, Warhol drew “compulsively, constantly, and amazingly,” and his talents earned him a scholarship to art classes at the Carnegie Museum, a place where he glimpsed wealthy children and their families. “He never forgot what he saw,” said another friend. When he wasn’t drawing, Warhol liked to make collages out of pictures of heroes and celebrities he cut out of comic books and magazines. He dreamed of escaping one day to Hollywood or New York City, of leading a life like the ones he saw in newspapers and glossies.

At age twenty-one, Warhol did make his way to New York City, and it was there that he rebooted himself. The art world was a sophisticated and glamorous scene, a place where Warhol felt like an outsider—like he was from another planet, he said—because of his childhood and his accent. To fit in, he mimicked the behavior of those he saw, especially movie stars and the well-to-do. He told others of his background in bits and pieces, only some of which were true. “Never take Andy at face value,” said art critic John Richardson at Warhol’s funeral, a fitting suggestion about an artist who rose to prominence working at the intersection of identity, celebrity, and commercialism.

Although Warhol is the man who said that, in the future, everyone would be famous for fifteen minutes, he himself became a cultural icon whose own fame has lasted far longer than that. Among his masterpieces are silkscreen prints of images of other cultural icons—from Superman to Marilyn Monroe—works that suggest that who we are is, at least in part, a myth, something that can be copied and manufactured. And then, of course, there are his thirty-two paintings of Campbell’s Soup cans, symbols for Warhol of loving comfort and also of something that could be bought at a store. In his life and work, Warhol advertised the notion that identity is something that is always being created and re-created, both from the inside out and from the outside in.

“Sometimes I wish I could reboot,” said Sal, one of the protagonists in the science-fiction series TimeRiders. “Empty my head and start over.” Getting busy with a new life out west did not exactly empty Anton’s head but it did fill his mind with new things to think about. Enchanted by this feeling of newfound anonymity and possibility, for a while Anton moved again and again, spending some weeks here and some months there. He swelled with the power of being released from all that had come before, and with the potential to be someone else. Some things sound easier than they are, but moving somewhere new and forgetting the past—or forgetting to remember the past—can be easier than it sounds. For Anton, it was simpler than almost anything he had ever done. Anton had never lived in the present before—he had spent his childhood dreaming about a future somewhere else—and it did indeed feel like being reborn every single day.

Anton settled in a small town far up the coastal Northwest. Four days a week he worked as a mechanic, and the other three he marveled at what it felt like to wake up and decide who to be and what to do with his time. He rented a room in a second-floor apartment in an old house two streets over from the beach. There was an abandoned lot between his place and the water, so there he could sit on a long, wooden, rickety old balcony and look out across the weeds, watching the fog roll in and out. His first birthday out west—his first birthday of his new life—Anton lay on that balcony and read a book the whole day long. Two new friends pulled into the driveway and yelled from below—“Come out with us!”—but Anton stayed home with his book instead. He had never had a birthday without arguments or disappointments about what there had not been money to buy, and he was enjoying the gift of just being free.

Many years after Anton crossed the Mississippi and settled out west, Jaycee Dugard—the young woman who at the age of eleven was kidnapped on her way to a bus stop and then held captive in a backyard and sexually abused for eighteen years—would write two memoirs, the second titled Freedom: My Book of Firsts. In it, she recounts her first ride on an airplane, her first friends, her first trip to a mall, learning to drive, even being pulled over for the first time by the police. It is an endearing book about what it feels like to get to know the world for the first time as an adult, about what life is like when the ordinary is extraordinary. In one charming customer review on Amazon.com, a reader says this about the book: “It is a quick, easy read and perhaps a little boring. But, if anyone is entitled to be living a boring life with her animals, friends, and family, it is this woman.”

I am not comparing Anton’s early years to Dugard’s, but maybe she would not mind my saying that the title and subtitle she chose capture perfectly what life after trauma is like for those who—in whatever way—manage to get away and start again. Freed at last from being tied to the problems of others, supernormals relish their many new experiences. As with many young adults, Anton’s life was crowded with firsts—first jobs, first pets, first apartments, first girlfriends—but unlike many others his age, for him it was the seemingly mundane firsts, the average and expectable ones, that he would remember most.

Anton himself could have written a book about the wonders of opening a newspaper and not looking for his father’s name, or going shopping without anxiety. He had certainly been to a mall before, but only now could he buy something in a store without worrying about whether his credit card might be declined. And when he was pulled over by the police for a routine traffic stop, like Dugard, he too panicked with the thought that he was doing something wrong. (Anton still sometimes felt like he might be caught stealing.) He felt a mix of relief and disbelief when he was allowed to drive on.

Anton’s first love was a young woman, a waitress who was also in the process of rebooting herself. They lived together for a few years at Anton’s place, where they played house as best as they could. Anton had never had sex before, and this made everything seem brand-new, even the old mattress on the floor where he and his girlfriend slept and made love, and the recycling bins in which they kept their clothes. Their lives were not fancy but debt collectors were not calling, and mice were not dropping down on Anton’s bed.

Anton did not know much about cooking, nor did his girlfriend, but they made weekly trips to the grocery store, because they had the notion that was what people did. Neither had a comforting childhood favorite, like Warhol’s tomato soup, but they tossed into their cart the few items they knew how to make, and some things they saw more experienced-looking shoppers buy. Standing in the checkout line, they could hardly believe their good fortune to have each other—and groceries—and it must have shown. As the two exited the store one Sunday, Anton rolled the cart along standing on its back, his girlfriend nearly skipping by his side. A smiling, middle-aged grocery clerk called after them, “Good luck, you kids!”

It felt like a good omen.

Anton’s girlfriend was a good omen, or at least a good person in his life. When she looked at Anton, she saw neither a mechanic nor the son of a criminal: She saw things in Anton he had never even seen in himself. The way that he read, she encouraged him to go to school to be a teacher: “We’ll do it together,” she said, and for a while they did. Anton worked at a garage during the day and went to classes with her at night, but his girlfriend missed the big tips she used to make waiting tables in the evening. Soon he was the only one going to school, and not long after that she moved out to be with the manager at the restaurant where she worked. Anton was heartbroken, and he cried more over her than he ever had over anything else. He had let go of a lot in his life already, but he had never lost anything good before.

Anton took his teaching certification and rebooted himself once again, moving south to California. That was where he was, many years later, sitting at his kitchen table, working on his laptop and facing the window outside, when the telephone rang. It was a sunny day, but an unremarkable one, one he was in no way bound to remember until he answered the call, saying hello to what turned out to be a gruff and angry voice on the other end: a debt collector. His father had defaulted on a loan and had put Anton’s name and Social Security number on the application, too. Just a moment earlier, Anton had sat as unbothered and unsuspecting as people who think they are safe tend to do. Then, suddenly, he was a kid again and his heart began to race.

Even the far side of the Mississippi, it turns out, was not far enough.