He wore a suit, immaculate but unremarkable, stitched by hands that understood the virtue of anonymity. The tie at his throat was a single muted flourish of red, almost crimson yet not quite, like a wound drawn vertically on his chest. He had nothing to do, and all eternity to squander. He had nothing to do, and all eternity to waste and misuse. He had nothing to do, and all eternity before he died.
In truth, he had long ceased to think of himself as a man among men. Not as part of a society, or a group, or even a human collective. He preferred himself an outcast. When others passed him by—if they passed him at all, if they even took that consideration in their monotonous monstrosity—their eyes batted a glance his way and slid off as fast as rainwater on glass. He who is seen belongs to the world; he who is forgotten belongs to himself. And regarding the outcast he was, he did belong to himself. Solely and completely to himself.
He preferred it thus. To be seen was to be claimed, to be trapped in the ceaseless machinery of obligation. Better to float unseen, and belong to himself rather than to others.
He felt a strange kinship with the places that made men blanch. They were neither alive nor dead, just waiting. As he was. He would sit for hours where people would mourn to sit for even minutes, and that’s what made him him. That was his identity. He paused before a blank wall or a door that had been shut for decades. He would tilt his head slightly and listen, breathe in. There are truths so pure they cannot clothe themselves in words, lest they die of shame. He wanted to find those truths, to uncover them whole.
The man heard them. He heard them talking to him. He did not question why he heard them. Madness was a word for men still chained to meaning. He knew that to think too hard, to summon the analytical mind and to succumb to rationality now and then, was to miss the point entirely. It was to miss the very concept of truth, the truth of the unexplained. Some truths were not meant to be unclothed by intellect, but by neglect.
Thus he drifted. Thus he descended.
There were nights—if nights they still were; he, who had succumbed to non-rationality, would not know—when he forgot even his own breathing. On such occasions, he felt himself thinning, evaporating almost.
A man must dissolve himself to cross the threshold of real understanding, he told himself. Though this was a rational thought, and thus held no certain truth.
The sight of a calendar or a working clock struck him like blasphemy. What fool sought to divide eternity into petty squares and circles? The world of the others, the labourers and shopkeepers, the dreamers and liars, grew brittle in his mind. He pictured them under their own fluorescent suns, tending to their gardens of vanity, and he pitied them. Their suns were one, and so was their vanity. They were one, and so was their behaviour. They were humans, all of them. Monotonous humans. He believed duty is the chain the dead place upon the living, so they might sleep more soundly. Another rational thought, if he may.
One day soon, he knew, entering door after door across eternity, meandering with no goal in mind, a door would open that did not lead to another empty room, another peeling hallway, another stairwell coiling downward into inertia. It would yawn wider, more hungry than the rest. He would pass through, and he would not return. He would not return. That, he was sure of. He would succumb, something he had been doing all his life, and he would experience the truth as a whole. Would it be death? Or transfiguration? Or some third thing the living were too fearful to imagine?
He did not care. It existed. That was all he needed to know. He would fix his crimson tie and step through that door.