Part Sixteen

I slapped the old man on the back as I passed him on the sidewalk – the old high-school-jerk-off-quarterback move with the ‘kick me’ sign. It still works. He didn’t even notice. Just grumbled and kept hobbling down the road. As I hobbled past him, I eyed a sad middle-aged woman who had clearly a few hours earlier dressed up the best she could manage on her budget and put on a little too much make-up, trying with devilish fervor to impress some guy, and now, having left his place, having been dismissed and disheveled, had that left-over look of self-loathing. Trying to write in a larger, bolder font than I had with the old man and to maintain my pace, I wrote ‘dejected woman’ on a postit. Pulling the postit from the pad, I let it stick to the end of my index finger. As the woman and I approached each other, she, in her state of dejection, took no notice of me or my arm raised slightly as if I were about to wave. I placed the postit on her shoulder with a dexterous flick of my wrist as she passed by, and I kept walking. I heard her stop for a moment, give a brief desperate gasp. I may have heard her say something along the lines of “asshole”, but I was already moving on and no longer paying attention to her – another sad installment in the serial story of her life.
Too many people were passing me too quickly and I could not keep up with them all. Even when I finally stopped moving and tried to work ahead by gazing up the sidewalk, pick several people, and prepare postits for them, there was no way I could keep up, no way to tag everyone. But I was satisfied with the work I completed, and as night crept into late night, the pace of the street finally slowed to a point that I could keep up with it. Sadly, at that point I was too exhausted to pursue my mission much further. I decided to make one last postit for the day before I found some food and a place to sleep.
A lone man moved up the sidewalk toward me. I watch him and tried to come up with a good label for him. He was a hulking man, the size of a former football player, wearing a thick wool sailor’s coat, and hunkered down, curling into himself in an attempt to escape the cold that wasn’t present, or to escape his past, or a future he could not attain. His head was shaved and the street lights gleamed across the top of it. He strode with a dismal certitude and I doubted that he would even notice the falling-leaf-like touch of my postit on his massive shoulder. I wrote ‘bitter’ in a diminutive, rather feminine, curly-cue font and readied the postit on the end of my index finger. His heavy footsteps reminded me of the thrumming pain in my body that I’d been ignoring since the culvert and that now came roaring back to keep time with his footfall. Yes, Yes, Again, Yes. In the brief second of his passing, I reached out and swiped the postit onto his shoulder.
Editors at NONzine: I am a slight man of slight build, superhero or no. My powers are of the mind not of the body. My neck, though wrapped in a brace continued to have muscle spasms, my ribs were fractured, and my knee throbbed with swelling and ache. I was hungry, thirsty, and utterly exhausted. I was in no condition for my mission, to be sure, but I was driven. You may be wondering at this point why anyone would have done anything to disturb a man like the one above-described, but I was not thinking in those terms. Heroes forsake themselves. It’s all about the sacrifice – personal time, personal well-being, all of it out the window. We’re there for the people. We’ll throw ourselves in front of cars if we have to. So, if you are so inclined to ask, “What was he thinking?” I will be so inclined to answer, “I wasn’t.”
The man stopped. He raised his head. He straightened his back. He uncurled from a lone, stooping man into a man the size and breadth I’d not encountered before. He’d been a linebacker or a guard. He had never been considered for quarterback. I could see him forming fists in the pockets of his coat, even before he turned around. He gave me a hard look over his shoulder, glanced down at his shoulder and reached over to peel the postit from his coat. His hands and fingers were so thick he could hardly manage to pinch the small square of paper between his thumb and finger. He read the postit, and I stared up at him, my back against the glass of a shop. Fear did not register with me. I had nothing to hide. What I suspected least though was that he would become so violent.
He sighed. He turned to face me. I kept thinking he was going to say something, maybe ask me what it was all about or something. He didn’t. His arm, his fist, came suddenly and furiously from the left, right out of his pocket. I was still simply staring up at him, waiting for him to say something, when his knuckles connected with the side of my face.
I spent another unconscious night on the curb – yet another entry in the serial story of my life too.