In Which I Attempt a Lifelike Portrait:

Aɴ Iɴᴛʀᴏᴅᴜᴄᴛɪᴏɴ: Alfred Mansfield, Esq., born in 19__, is a rat catcher, reveller and gentleman thief. He smells not of lilacs but of mild brow-sweat, which is surprising as he detests toil of any kind. He is altogether innocent of social niceties, of tubercular growths, and of having an opinion on the urban poor. Stoicism masks crippling shyness; his rough beard, the weak chin of a decaying bloodline (of which he hopes to be the last); indolence, a genuinely charming and simple personality; and so on, and so on. This is, of course, a picture of Vanity, all figures distorted, looked upon by an indulgent eye – that said, it is also a work of fiction. It is only logical that he fail to capture the spirit of the Bʀɪɢʜᴛ ᴀɴᴅ Yᴏᴜɴɢ in all its splendour or even accuracy. (This is, by necessity, a justification. May we be excused. – The Author.)

When finally released from his bed (never before two), he writes columns for failing women’s magazines. This has been, so far, the one notable exception, and the first in a series of sorry stories.

The boy called Mouse was a lonely one, because he knew no others. Past a formative age, he lost the inner stirring for human company, preferring the cracks in the pavement, the broken groove, the racial slur upon the wall. For Life was built upon hints, and not on what was voiced – that he believed, truly, and he believed, too, in Man as Rule-breaker, given a voice, and with it the choice to lie and circumvent the obvious, which is, in the end, the same.

Every morning he took a walk, eyes misted, and each morning he took it to himself to look at everything but the People. The raggedy and the rich were the same, equally guilty in their obstruction of Truth. It is to his credit that no distinction was made between the two, as would a social Darwinist or armchair revolutionary – the first unjustly adjudicating intelligence to those who rose to the top; the other, alleging some purity or sincerity or goodness in the downtrodden. For they rose from broken premises, forgetting that the Game is played by all, and that the only difference is that the poor are made weak.

A block from the bus stop, he felt a brush by his leg, and recognised it at once. He stretched a thin, bright hand in communion – the nose got a whiff, then, a look of recognition from twin agate stones. An impromptu meeting between the Old God and the Young, each dispossessed of his People, rendered useless; one beaten, one cast out of his own accord – which being which, that is for the Reader to make a pick. The Old Dog and the New. Six legs bent with rickets, hips creaking, the boy thinking, “Kindred spirits.”

What the limping collie thought of him, we will never know. That is of no importance – for the boy found, in this encounter, when he thought himself alone, a most elevated aesthetic experience. Communication! So difficult, so rare in the present century, when one argues as would a lawyer, blind and deaf to any evidence against one’s own, his opponent’s premises but obstacles to sort through and shut down. The combatants opposed in what is traditionally called “the masculine space”, where he who yells the loudest is proclaimed winner – the term is inexact, for the world is rife with talented female debaters, who win not by the prolonged silences of The Art of War, but by sheer force – a masculinity repressed, because of what?

I propose that it is so for the lack of ritual violence. The boy called Mouse, affected by the maddening phases so common in solitary youth, who are numerous but unseen, at the very moment, thought the same.

For our boy was a fine artist of sophistry. He thought he could not convince himself of truly believing in anything. Paradoxically, the converse was also correct: he gave his sins the most logical justifications, sin being simply what one calls “the Mistake”, an inconvenience. (In this, he contradicted himself. He did not know it.) And socially accepted violence required a much larger space than what it was given these days, if it was to have an effect, and pacify men in daily action.

Extreme sports and war correspondence did so little. So he gave the dog a kick, and it fled, not giving even a yelp, for the kick was half-hearted. Immediately he repented, but the shepherd was gone ‘round the corner, looking back not as one who forgives, but as one who has already forgotten, its dark ruff marking the silhouette of a neck; it licked the tip of its nose – what it meant, the boy could not know, either – and was never seen again.

The boy resumed his walk, one unsteady step after the other. He felt distinctly queasy. Halfway through the ride North, he hurled eggs and boiled sausage, out the back door, on a perfumed woman who tried to pick a fight.

Yet he was not there.