Chapter One: Just Another Tuesday
for a Nobody
〔 God's Perspective 〕
The night is
young.
The moon's
out, fat and bright, doing its job throwing cold silver light over rooftops and
fire escapes and the tops of cabs that haven't been washed in weeks. Down on
the streets it's alive. You know the kind of alive that a city gets after nine
PM on a warm night that low, buzzing,
restless sort of alive where everyone is somewhere, doing something, or at
least pretending to be. Young people with their noise. Families out late
because summer lets them be. Old men on stoops watching it all like they've got
front row seats to a show they've already seen but still like.
Nothing
unusual. The world being the world. You know how it is.
Except
You see those
two buildings on the east side of the block? Big ones, close together, the kind
of buildings that lean on each other like two exhausted strangers on a subway.
Between them there's a gap. A narrow, unlit alley that the city didn't plan and
nobody owns and the garbage trucks skip because turning into it would scratch
the mirrors. There's a dumpster in there that hasn't been emptied since the
Obama administration. A fire escape so rusted it functions more as decoration
than escape route. A single flickering light from a window three floors up.
And slumped
against the dumpster, on the ground, in the dark
A figure.
Tattered
clothes. One shoe half-off. Bruises spreading up both arms like ink dropped in
water purpling deep, still fresh enough to throb. A cut sitting open above the
left eyebrow, not quite done bleeding yet, like it's still making up its mind.
Chest heaving. The heavy, stupid breathing of someone whose body just ran out
of argument.
Yeah. I see
you staring.
I know what
you're feeling. Pity. Maybe a flicker of it, maybe more. Something that sits in
the throat and says: oh, that poor - well. Go on. Have the feeling. I'll wait.
...
Done?
Okay. Now let it go.
Because
here's what I need you to understand, before this story goes any further that
man you're feeling sorry for? The battered, wheezing, half-shoe-wearing man in
a New York alley at eleven-something PM? He is not pitiful. He is, in fact,
something the universe has been quietly building toward for twenty-six years,
and I say that as someone who was present for all twenty-six of them.
But we're not
at that part yet. You'll get there. Read the book.
Now, before I
pass things over to him because yes,
he's going to narrate his own chapter, he insisted, and I've learned to pick my
battles I need to address the face.
Look. When I
say 'figure in an alley,' your brain does a thing. The story-brain, the one
trained on a million paperbacks and streaming thumbnails, immediately dresses
the main character in a jawline. Gives him some smouldering something in the
eyes. Maybe a scar in exactly the right place. You can't help it. It's
practically a reflex at this point.
So let me
save us both some time.
He doesn't
have any of that.
Glenn Maxwell
is, and I say this with the calm, unbiased authority of someone who watches
everything from everywhere a below-average looking young man. Not ugly. I want
to be clear about that because 'ugly' is a dramatic word and drama is not what
this is. It's more ordinary than that. He's just... the face you forget. The
one that doesn't register in a crowd. The one that, if you passed him on the
street, you'd be unable to describe ten seconds later. Brown hair. Tired eyes.
A nose that's maybe a little too much nose for the face it's on. Nothing cruel
about any of it. Just nothing memorable, either.
And I know I
know you've heard the speech. 'Looks
don't matter.' 'It's what's inside.' 'Beauty is subjective.' All of it
technically true, in the same way that 'the city bus will get you there
eventually' is technically true. People believe it when they say it. I don't
hold it against them.
But this is
the world as it actually runs, not the world as the motivational posters
describe it. And in the world as it actually runs, walking around with a
forgettable face is a kind of quiet, daily tax that nobody acknowledges and
everybody pays if they have to.
Glenn has
been paying it his whole life
Anyway.
Enough from me. For now.
-------------------
〔 Glenn's Perspective 〕
Okay. Hi.
My name is
Glenn Maxwell. I'm twenty-six years old, I work in IT, and before you picture
anyone interesting please refer to whatever the narrator just said about the
face. He covered it. I'm not doing it again.
I'll tell you
about myself but I'm going to do it my way, which means I'm going to bounce
around a little and not go in a straight line, because that's how memory
actually works and anyone who writes their life story in perfect chronological
order is either lying or writing a résumé.
I grew up in
an orphanage,
There. That's
the sentence that makes people's expression change. The one where they tilt
their head slightly and their voice gets softer and they say something like
'oh, I'm so sorry' and then don't quite know what to do with their hands. I've
seen it so many times I could draw it. I'm not saying I mind, exactly. I get
it. It's a heavy word. Orphan. Sounds like something out of a Dickens novel,
all thin soup and winter and dramatic candlelit sadness.
The reality
was more... beige.
The orphanage
was fine. Managed. The kind of place that had rules and routines and adults
whose job was to make sure you were fed and clean and not actively falling
apart, but whose capacity to love you in the way a child actually needs to be
loved was spread thin across fourteen kids and was maybe never quite enough to
reach everyone. Not their fault. Just the math.
There was a
gate at the front. Black iron. It was always open, which is maybe a strange
detail to remember, but I remember it because that gate is where I learned,
early, what waiting feels like.
Kids would
come and go. Come in scared, go out chosen. Families would arrive sometimes a
couple, sometimes a single parent, once a woman with three already-adopted kids
who wanted one more like she was completing a collection and they'd walk around
and talk to us and eventually look at someone the way you look at a thing
you've decided to keep. And that kid would get a bag, and a new adult, and
would walk through the gate and be gone.
I watched it
happen maybe thirty, forty times. Watched kids I'd shared a bathroom with for
two years walk out with strangers who were going to be their family now. I
always thought it would happen to me next. You'd think that each time, the
thought would get harder to hold. It didn't. Children are stubborn optimists in
a way that adults eventually lose and never quite get back. I kept thinking:
next time. Next family. Next month.
I thought it
until I was sixteen, and then they opened the gate for me too except there was no family on the other side.
Just a bus pass and a document and a caseworker named Patricia who gave me a
phone number to call 'if things got complicated.'
Things got
complicated.
I never
called.
Anyway. I
survived. That's the short version.
The longer
version involves a Tic Wok phase that I'm going to tell you about because I
feel it's important context for understanding who I was at eighteen and also
because it's funny in the specific way that things are funny when they've been
dead long enough.
I was trying
to figure out how to exist online how to be a person that other people wanted
to engage with, which is just loneliness in its modern outfit. Everyone was
doing the trends. The dances, the challenges, the food videos. I tried the
cooking content. I tried the reaction content. I tried, in what I can only
describe as a moment of catastrophically optimistic misreading of the room,
twerking.
On camera.
Posted.
Now. There is
a very specific category of internet humiliation that comes from doing a dance
move as a below-average-looking male with no rhythm in a beige-walled room on a
Tuesday, posting it publicly, and then refreshing the page every six minutes.
The comments were comprehensive. Thorough. The internet, when it decides to be
unkind, is extremely good at it. I'd give them credit if it didn't still make
my neck hot to think about.
I deleted the
account. I closed the laptop. I stared at the wall for a while.
And then I
found anime. And then I found novels.
I know how
that sounds. I know 'I found anime and novels' is the sentence that marks a
person as a certain type. And yeah, okay. I was that type. I AM that type. I'm
a twenty-six-year-old IT worker who has strong opinions about fictional power
systems and has cried more than once,
more than I'll specify over the endings of stories about characters who don't
exist.
I'm not
embarrassed. Those stories kept me company when nothing else did. When I was
seventeen and sick with a fever in a studio apartment, no one to call, sweating
through a mattress I'd bought second-hand I had a story. When I was nineteen and
studying for exams alone at 2AM in a fast food booth, running on terrible
coffee and borrowed Wi-Fi I had a story.
When I was twenty-three and went a full week without a real conversation with
another human being, not counting customer support calls
I had a
story.
They kept me
here. I owe them.
The
girlfriend thing I'll keep this short because there's not much to keep. I've
never had one. That's it. That's the whole thing. I'm not tortured about it,
exactly. It's more like... there's a version of my life where that was a thing
that happened, and I can see that version clearly enough to know it exists, I
just don't live there. Somewhere around nineteen I accepted that I was not
someone people instinctively moved toward, and I stopped waiting for it to
spontaneously change.
People
connect. I observe. That's not a complaint. It's just a fact about how I've
been operating.
The mirror.
I'm going to tell you about the mirror because it keeps coming up in my head
and if I don't say it now I'll say it later and later will be worse.
I was six.
First time I ever properly looked at my own face not a glance, not a reflection in a window,
but actually looked. Sat in front of the bathroom mirror in the orphanage and
just... took stock.
And my first
real thought, at six years old, was: oh.
Oh. This
is it. This is the face.
Kids are
honest with themselves in a way adults spend years unlearning. I didn't think I
was ugly. I thought with a clarity that
honestly kind of impressed me in retrospect — that I had not been given much to
work with, and that this was going to mean something for how things went. And
then my second thought was that at least I had parents somewhere who maybe
compensated with something. Personality. Talent. Something
And then my
third thought was that I didn't have parents. That they were gone. And so
whatever they might have given me was also gone and I was just this. Just the face and the too-quiet room and
the hand I'd been dealt and that was that.
I put the
thought away.
I'm good at
putting thoughts away. Too good, probably. The storage facility in my head is
enormous and extremely well-organized and I never, ever visit it.
Here's where
I am now, tonight, at twenty-six: I have a job that pays rent. I have no
friends, technically I have co-workers I
eat lunch near and neighbours I nod at in the elevator and people online whose
usernames I know. I have a studio apartment with a futon I have not replaced
because it functions as a kind of loyalty test that my apartment keeps failing.
I have IT skills and a pretty good memory and a knowledge of fictional worlds
that would be impressive at a trivia night if I ever went to a trivia night.
And I have
this this thing I carry around that I
don't have a good word for. It's not ambition exactly. Not depression either,
though it sits near enough to depress me sometimes. It's more like... knowing
there's a door somewhere. Sensing it. Feeling the frame of it in the dark. And
not being able to find the handle, no matter how long you walk around with your
hands out.
I've been
looking for it my whole life.
But I am,
and have always been, still looking.
— ✦ —
It was that
thought that was keeping me company tonight as I walked home.
Nothing
dramatic about it. Warm night, late, the city doing its thing around me the noise of a bar somewhere, the smell of
someone's takeout, a car playing a bass-heavy song that I could feel in my ribs
half a block before I could hear the melody. I had my hands in my jacket
pockets and my eyes mostly on the pavement and I was just... moving. Getting
from the train station to the apartment. The most automatic thing.
I wasn't
thinking about purpose or mirrors or orphanage gates. I was thinking about
whether there was anything in the fridge worth calling dinner, which I'm pretty
sure there wasn't.
Then I heard
her.
A woman's
voice from the left, from the dark, from somewhere between two buildings:
"Hey you BASTARD. I am NOT doing it!"
I stopped.
The voice was
doing that thing voices do when someone is trying to be heard without wanting
to escalate. Too loud for a private conversation. Too forced to be confident.
The sound of someone who is scared but still fighting.
I turned.
The alley
between the two buildings and it was a
real alley, narrow, dark, the kind of gap the city just has between old
buildings that were built by different people who didn't bother to account for
each other was mostly shadow. I could
make out the shapes. A woman, back against the brick wall. And behind her, one
hand pinning her wrist, the other flat against the wall beside her head a man.
Thick through
the chest. Standing like he was allowed to. That smile on him the slow, pleased, wet-lipped smile of a man
who has already decided how this is going to go and is just now enjoying the
part before it goes there.
I saw the
smile.
I stood
completely still for three seconds.
And I want to
be honest with you about those three seconds because I think honesty matters
here. I was afraid. I'm not a big guy. I'm not trained. I have never been in a
real fight in my life I've been shoved,
once, by a drunk at a concert, and I fell into a stranger and apologized to
everyone involved including possibly the drunk. I know what I am physically. I
know the math here.
But somewhere
underneath the fear, something else was moving.
I've read a
lot of stories.
I know what
the hinge moment feels like. The page where everything pivots. The moment that
doesn't announce itself loudly but that you can feel in the chest, in the throat as the thing that,
years from now, you'll be able to point at and say: that's where.
I felt it.
Not like a
revelation. More like recognition. Like turning a corner and seeing a door
you've been looking for so long that for a second you almost walk past it by
accident.
Save her.
Simple.
Clean. No conditions
My fists
closed. My jaw clamped so hard I heard it. Every cell in my body every underfed, average-faced,
below-average-looking cell of me seemed
to get very quiet and then very loud all at once, the way a sound does right
before it hits you.
I did not
think about consequences. I did not calculate. I did not pause to remind myself
that I was the man who once apologized to a drunk who shoved him.
I ran into
the alley.
"GET
OFF HER NOW!!!"
My own voice
came back at me off the walls. Bigger than I expected. Rawer. The kind of sound
you don't know you have in you until it's already out.
The thug
turned.
Just for a
second just one full, complete second —
his smug certainty faltered. His eyes found me. Some small, animal part of him
recalculated.
I didn't give
it time to finish.
I want to
tell you that what happened next was heroic. That the purpose I'd been
searching for my whole life arrived clean and bright and I rose to meet it
beautifully.
I want to
tell you that.
What actually
happened was: I threw myself at a man twice my weight with no plan and no
training and nothing but the specific, reckless certainty of someone who has
finally finally found something worth
being reckless for.
And the alley swallowed both of us up.
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