What would she do when she did? At that moment, she looked up and saw him. He wondered when the woman would notice him. What would the woman do? Would she cross the road at the sight of the man? Was it maleness that caused the fear? The man walked past the woman, who hadn’t crossed the road. The man, tall and a little bowlegged, walked toward the woman. He saw the form of a woman far up the street and he made himself smaller. When he went past, he always touched them. They were the only things in the world that were good to him. The trees took up part of the pavement, obliging people to go around them one at a time. He made his way down his street, with its double row of plane trees. One evening, he was going home from the small advertising firm where he worked. All this only made people avoid him more. He walked sideways, to be less conspicuous. He made himself shorter and less threatening. He experimented with different kinds of walks. He concluded that it had to be the way he walked. Therefore, it had to be something about his shape, the way he moved through space, that made people want to avoid him. He reasoned that, from a distance, at dusk, it is difficult to see the details of a person. The experience of being fled from at dusk, and not seen in daylight, struck him as a paradox.Īfter a while, he decided to test whether it was really him they were fleeing, and what it was about him that caused this reaction. But the more he looked the less they seemed to see him. Why didn’t they see him? He was purposefully looking at them, to see if they reacted to something strange in his face. This was as baffling as when they crossed the street. But people hurried past without noticing him at all. He wondered when they would see him, and act on that seeing. When it was daylight, on his way to work, he looked nervously at people. He wanted to talk to someone about it, but he couldn’t think of anyone. This troubled him so much that he was unable to sleep most nights. Which aspect made people cross the street to avoid him?
The mirror revealed aspects of his face that he hadn’t noticed before. Something was wrong with him that he couldn’t see. He couldn’t see what was wrong with it, but the longer he looked the more certain he became.
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