"Can I sit next to you?"
On a stretch of pavement where pedestrians swarmed like dedicated bees toiling within a concrete hive, a man in a sharp grey suit and a perfectly knotted tie paused.
With a quiet, deliberate motion, he lowered a wooden box onto the ground beside an old woman who looked as though she had been carved from the very bricks of Wall Street.
It was the peak of rush hour in New York City, right on one of its most iconic thoroughfares. In a place where the bizarre was a daily currency, no one spared a glance toward the peculiar pair sitting side by side.
They leaned their backs against a low stone wall topped with a metallic fence, which partitioned off a small, shadowed garden from the frantic energy of the sidewalk.
The man radiated a sense of youth and untapped energy. He possessed neat, long black hair, though a narrow, finger-depth groove ran along the side of his head—a strange blemish that looked like the premature onset of hereditary baldness.
His eyes were a startling, abyssal black; the kind that made onlookers feel as if they were staring into a bottomless void. Yet, these eyes emitted nothing but a strange, clinical seriousness.
One look was enough to tell that this man had enjoyed significant success in his career. Yet, here he sat, clutching a wooden box that held the lonely remains of that life, stationed next to a woman who looked like a relic of a different century.
She appeared to be a hundred years old, her skin a map of deep, irregular wrinkles. Her hair was a shock of white that draped over her shoulders like a heavy shroud. Her eyes were recessed into deep, hollow sockets, but they were a piercing, pure blue—the only part of her that still felt tethered to humanity.
She wore a tattered white dress and held a sphere of glass in one hand, while the other gripped a wooden sign with hand-painted letters: Reading Future and Fate.
"A bad day?" the old lady asked. She turned her head slowly, her gaze attempting to bore through the man's polished exterior.
"I can't tell," the man, Thomas, replied with a casual shrug. By every objective standard of the world, he was living through the undisputed worst day of his life. But as he sat there, he felt no sting of sorrow, no burning bitterness, and not even a single speck of loss.
In truth, he didn't feel anything at all.
"I can tell it's a bad day," the old lady murmured, her eyes drifting toward the wooden box. Inside sat a single photograph of Thomas with a dog, and a small, potted tree—a living, miniature masterpiece known as a Bonsai.
Beside the plant lay an envelope, three small books, and a metal case that appeared to hold a commendation or a medal.
"If I could actually feel how bad this day was, I wouldn't have spent so much time and money on therapists," Thomas said, shrugging again. He spoke with the detachment of someone discussing the weather, seemingly indifferent to his own fate.
"I'm curious then… what brings a man like yourself to sit by my side?"
"I see you claim to read fate, right?" Thomas gestured toward her sign. "Why not read mine and see for yourself?"
"Is it a game?" the old lady chuckled, lifting a gnarled hand to cover her mouth. "I have grown far too old for such nice, amusing games."
"I'm not joking," Thomas insisted. "I don't usually talk about my life with strangers. But who knows? By the end of this day, you might find yourself to be a very fortunate lady."
"And you may turn out to be a very fortunate guy," she replied, locking eyes with him.
She slowly leaned her sign against the wall and placed her glass ball on the pavement, extending both arms. "Give me the hand you use to do things."
"Fine." Thomas extended his left hand, letting her cold fingers wrap around his large palm.
"Hmm… I can see fragments of your past…" She closed her eyes, murmuring a soft chant for several seconds. "A detective you are, right?" She opened her eyes slowly, and Thomas simply motioned toward the box.
"Was."
"Interesting…" Her fingertips continued their slow dance across his skin. "I can sense how short your line of life is. No, it isn't just short… it is almost at its end. It looks broken. You… you are going to die tonight!" She spoke those final words in a voice that seemed to echo from the bottom of a deep well.
"Nice guess," Thomas said, giving her a sharp look. "If it was this easy to diagnose, I wouldn't have needed to waste my wealth on hospitals and useless doctors."
"You were trying to live, and that is something I cannot do for you."
"I wanted to know what was wrong with me," Thomas corrected her. "Especially since this isn't the only thing that's broken inside."
"I can tell." The lady released his hand. "I see a great deal of suffering. Silent, deep suffering."
"I can't feel anything, so how can it be suffering?"
Thomas wasn't lying for the sake of drama; it was simply his reality. Since a young age—following an "incident" that had shattered his family—he had been rendered fundamentally incapable of feeling. Pain, sadness, joy, even the basic tether of empathy; they were all foreign languages to him.
The only remnants of his humanity were a cold, analytical curiosity, a sudden white-hot rage that sparked without warning, and a relentless, almost mechanical hunger for the truth.
It was this very hollowness that had made him a legendary detective. In the brutal, unforgiving environment of the military, he was the perfect instrument of investigation.
"But you went to see doctors and therapists," the old woman countered, her voice reaching through the smog of the city. "Isn't the search for a cure a sign that you were suffering?"
"I only went because my rage fits became a liability," Thomas admitted with a heavy sigh. "If it weren't for the fact that I started causing problems at work, I wouldn't have bothered with any of it."
"And I saw long-distance travels," the lady continued, her gesture encompassing his entire being. "To places where you stayed for years, trying to solve the puzzle of yourself."
Thomas felt a flicker of genuine curiosity. How could she possibly know that? He had indeed crossed oceans, spending months and years in the Eastern corners of the world.
He had done so on the advice of experts who insisted his problem wasn't organic, but a profound psychological trauma.
According to the scientists, his childish mind hadn't been able to process seeing his parents murdered by terrorists in West Africa. To survive, his psyche had simply pulled the master lever and shut down all emotional circuits.
So, he had searched. He had mastered ancient Qi techniques designed to stir the soul and heal the spirit from within. He had meditated in silence until his knees ached, trying to provoke a single spark of feeling.
None of it worked. Eventually, he returned to his career, only to be hit with a diagnosis that even he couldn't find a reason to care about. He was in the final stages of cancer, a silent killer that had grown within him as quietly as his lack of emotion.
The doctors gave him until sunrise. That was why he was here—office cleared, career surrendered, clutching the few relics of a life he had never truly lived.
"Nothing worked," he said, his voice flat and monotonic. "Not the travel, not the therapy, not even the superhero comics."