OK, maybe he watched too many movies. Movies like “The Dark Knight,” “X-Men” and the “Spiderman” franchise. All the DC comics stuff. Barış couldn’t get enough of them.

You could argue that at age 40, Barış was a little too old for comics, that he should be into sturdier material, perhaps historical figures. There was after all “Fatih,” for example, which many of his countrymen viewed as a fine series on the great conqueror. At least he was a real person.

But no, it was the superhero that concerned Barış, who was a bit of a geek – short, balding, and unmarried.

In the mornings, when Barış took the metro across town to his job as an IT manager, he liked to fantasize, to use the different powers of his heroes on his journey. When he was racing alongside other Istanbullus through the crowded metro station at Yenıkapı, he became Flash, swishing around the corners of the station at light speed.

By night, when he took a solitary walk in his Üsküdar neighborhood to get some Pepsi and chips from the bakkal, he became the Caped Crusader, patrolling the dark Istanbul streets for knife-wielding muggers, child rapists, and glue-sniffers.

And when he took his annual holiday, usually to visit his parents in the town of Muğla, Barış steeled himself (for he disliked travel generally) for potential bomb attacks at Sabhia Gökcen Airport by imagining he was Wolverine. His sharp steel claws ready to slash open the throat of the first unlucky available terrorist, and with his Wolverine intelligence quickly locate and disarm the bomb.

We won’t play amateur psychologists and try to analyze the reasons for Barış’s superhero fantasies. It would be easy to say that they were manifestations of a lonely, single, middle-aged man’s unfulfilled dreams, that he lacked a wife who would keep an eye on him, children to command his maturity. That he had no one to reign in these childish impulses. Or that he vicariously hoped to transcend his nature, which was as peace-loving as his name Barış suggested.

Let us instead just take Barış and his superhero fantasies at face value. After all, he isn’t hurting anyone, right?

Well, he wasn’t, until one morning on the way to work. As was his custom, Barış bought a cup of coffee at the metro station near his office. He liked to have the coffee outside, to look at the traffic along the busy boulevard, and daydream before starting the day.

That morning he was doing that, when suddenly some nearby commotion caught his attention. Loud voices, an agitated scene. Turning (irritably, actually, for the scene interrupted his daydreaming) Barış found a heavily pregnant covered woman shouting at a man. The man appeared to be a beggar, and was hitting up the woman for spare change.

“Hadi git!” the woman shouted, waving the beggar away.

The beggar responded with a volley of curses, his face rough and unshaven.

Barış generally was a timid man who shook at such confrontations. Ordinarily he would have turned away, drowned out the commotion by plunging ever further into his dreams. In fact, he was in the process of doing that when suddenly he was shoved. Fortunately, he had just placed his hot coffee on a bench so it didn’t spill.

The shove was accidental – the beggar was so occupied with getting money from the pregnant woman that he walked into Barış by mistake.

Nevertheless, when it happened, the already stressed beggar turned on Barış.

“Watch where you’re going, abi!” the beggar shouted, tossing a few swear words in.

It all happened very fast. Before Barış knew what he was doing, he picked up his fresh coffee and flung it in the beggar’s haggard face.

Screaming in pain, the beggar stumbled a few steps. The strange scene might have escalated, but then a security guard from Barış’s workplace came along and ordered the beggar to leave.

“Thank you!” the relieved pregnant woman said. “I couldn’t get rid of him!”

After the woman left, the security guard laughed and clapped the still-stunned Barış on the back.

“Way to go, man!” he said. “That was really quick thinking!”

By lunchtime, word of Barış’s exploits had become legendary in the office. His colleagues all came by and offered salutations, commendations on his having saved the pregnant woman from the clutches of a madman. As in all big cities, very little sympathy was reserved for the beggar. After all, his colleagues reasoned, the beggar was a healthy-enough young man. Why did he need to be begging? Why harass poor pregnant women for money? No, our Barış had done the right thing, was the general consensus.

As for Barış, he replayed the scene in his head a thousand times. Like most naturally shy and timid men, he had very few opportunities to act the part of the hero. Over lunch in the cafeteria, where Barış found himself the center of gossip, he couldn’t decide which superhero best fit his coffee heroics. One could say that he had played a very passable Clark Kent, saving Lois Lane from a stray bullet. But then, the hot coffee trick had a certain flair, a quick-thinking wit, that one could also associate with Neo of “Matrix” fame.

In his own eyes, Barış rose in measure. By four o’clock he had even struck upon an idea: Why not devote himself to crime fighting more often?

This was something he could do. Of course, he needed to work at it, practice. Why not a crime a week? A crime a day? Surely in a city the size of Istanbul, that was not too ambitious. There was crime everywhere, one just needed to seek it out.

###

You might think, reader, at this point that some issues need to be addressed. For example, should Barış have a superhero name? Should he wear a uniform? Should he seek counseling?

Actually, Barış opted to keep his regular street clothes. He liked the idea of being just a regular guy, anonymous. It would be too obvious, too cliche, too conspicuous if he had a definite super-identity. I mean, come on, Istanbul is a cosmopolitan city. You see women in burkas passing beside women in mini-skirts. On the metro, you will see tall African men standing beside groups of short Chinese tourists. Along the iskele in Kadıköy, you find extremely wealthy Arabs having the same fish sandwiches and lemonade as the most beat-looking collegiate backpackers, and so on.

But even in this colorful environment, a guy walking around in a ninja outfit, or wannabe Superman garb, is going to stand out.

So with this reasoning, Barış chose to retain his modest appearance.

The next day, after his first rescue, Barış set out for work. He walked with purpose, scanning the metro, alert for potential pickpockets or sexual harassers. But as he always commuted early, the metro at that hour was not very crowded. The few people aboard the metro were half-asleep, or just playing games on their phones. One pony-tailed fellow even had the temerity to read an actual book.

Nothing happened on the streets of Fatih either, when he got off the metro. Walking to the office with his fresh cup of hot coffee, Barış looked about desperately. Surely, there had to be another aggressive panhandler, like the day before. But no … perhaps word of his exploits had gotten ‘round.

It was frustrating. I mean, just when you decide to become a superhero, everybody becomes so well-behaved all of a sudden. It was like the reverse of “Where’s a cop when you need one?” Where was a crook when you wanted to be a crime fighter? It was like they all just disappeared into the back streets of the city.

The rest of the day passed uneventfully. Barış’s heroics of the day before were already forgotten, and most of his colleagues instead chatted about the World Cup, or about the upcoming anniversary of the failed coup attempt. One of the girls in the office had gotten some new hair extensions, and that was the hot topic, as the girl paraded around the office, declaring herself to be “Carmen, the great singer from Spain” and her colleagues even posted pictures of her to their Instagram accounts.

Alas, Barış was already forgotten.