There's an interesting angle here of what a "superpower" does to someone's psychology. He internalized the ability to do these extraordinary things - including using the phone staff as a therapist line - as such a part of his identity, that he was devastated by having to live normally again. It's hard for myself to imagine myself getting to the point where I think I'm that special, but I'm not so naive to think that if I had a bunch of money and/or privilege for decades it couldn't happen to me too.

> “So in my incoherent state,” he writes, “I would book a seat for Dan or Laurie just imagining that they might come. I was making reservations and didn’t know whether I was even going. Here is why. I was up and [alone] in my home office and bored. So I would call the 800 number for the AAirpass desk and talk to the agent about the news or the weather or about Paris or little London. Then, after an hour of nothing they had to hang up. So I would make a reservation and ask them to fax it to me. Then the next day I would take the fax and cancel the reservation. I needed someone to talk to at midnight. The 800 number was open.”

Even his son says up front that he doesn't see what his dad was doing as such a sensational, extraordinary thing, that that description "doesn’t quite land," which is astonishing too.