The Soft Knife

I had a name once. It fit on forms and badges and on the little plastic card that decided whether a door opened for me in the morning. I used it the right way. I smiled when a meeting needed smiling, and I laughed at jokes that weren't funny, because the room got colder when someone didn't. The city loved people like that.

It was a city of glass towers, and everyone in it was being measured all the time. Your worth was a number, and someone refreshed it every quarter. Kindness was something you did when the right person was watching. I worked on the fourteenth floor of one of those towers, at a desk by a window I never had time to look out of. I typed all day. My hands were always cold, and they were good for typing and not much else.

My apartment was fine. My job was fine. My friendships were a list of almosts that ended the first time someone needed a favor I couldn't pay back. That was the worst part, really. Nothing in my life was bad enough to scream about. It was all just fine. Fine was a soft knife. It never cut deep enough to make you bleed, only deep enough that every morning tasted a little like metal.

I was good at one thing, and it wasn't anything anybody wanted. I noticed things. I noticed who was lying in a meeting by the way they held their pen. I noticed when the numbers in a report had been nudged to look better than they were. I noticed which coworker smiled at me only when my boss was in the room. None of it ever helped me. Noticing things was only worth something if you were willing to use it on people, and I never was.

So I watched instead. I watched people climb over each other for titles that meant nothing outside the building. I watched our company give money to a children's hospital and then spend twice as much on the video about it. I watched the news turn every tragedy into a few minutes of sad music followed by an ad for cars. I watched a whole floor go quiet when the vice president walked through, and start talking again the second he was gone. Nobody in that city was greedy in a loud way. Greed there was polite. It wore nice perfume and remembered your birthday. Whenever someone suggested doing the right thing just because it was right, greed would smile and say, "Let's be realistic."

I wasn't any better. I want to be honest about that. I smiled back. I was realistic. I went along with all of it because going along was easier than being the only one who didn't, and because I was tired, and because there was rent.

At night I went home and sat on my couch and didn't call anyone. My phone stayed face down on the table, because nobody was going to call me either. On Sundays I watched nature documentaries about animals that hunted and hid and never had to pretend to be anything else. During the week I read until my eyes burned. Fantasy novels, mostly, and game forums, and stories about people who woke up in other worlds with a System that told them exactly where they stood. I liked those best. The rules in those worlds were cruel sometimes, but at least they were honest. A monster in those stories had teeth, and it showed you its teeth. Nobody in my world ever showed you theirs.

I wasn't strong, either. I got winded on the stairs up to the train. I'd been afraid of things my whole life, of being noticed, of being left out, of saying the wrong thing in the wrong meeting. I told myself none of that mattered. I told myself a lot of things.

The only way I ever got good at anything was by breaking it into pieces. When I was bad at something, I took it apart into small steps and did each one slowly, over and over, until I didn't have to think about it anymore. That was how I learned spreadsheets, and presentations, and how to look calm in a meeting when I wasn't. After a bad meeting I'd go home and go over it the same way, piece by piece, working out exactly where it had gone wrong. It never changed anything. I just liked knowing.

On the last ordinary evening, I stayed at work late because someone else's deadline had turned into mine. It was the coworker who only smiled at me when the boss was around. She'd gone home at five, and her report was on my desk at five-fifteen with a sticky note on top that said "You're the best!" with a little heart. I finished it at nine. I knew she'd present it in the morning, and I knew nobody would ever know I'd touched it. I knew all that, and I did it anyway, because that was the kind of person I was.

It was raining when I came out, a hard, steady rain that turned the street into a black mirror full of headlights and shop signs. I'd bought a coffee from the machine in the lobby on my way out, and I held it close for the warmth while I waited at the corner, my umbrella in the other hand. Water ran off its edge. A bus went by and threw a sheet of water over the curb. Somewhere behind me a man was arguing on his phone about money. Everyone else around me was looking at theirs.

I thought about the report. I thought about my apartment, and the couch, and the phone face down on the table. I thought about getting up tomorrow and doing all of it again, and the day after that, and every day for the next thirty years. I didn't feel sad, exactly. I felt like I'd been holding my breath for a very long time and had forgotten how to let it out.

And I thought, not for the first time, that if there really was something after this, if people really did come back as something else, I wouldn't ask to come back as me. I'd ask for anything else. Scales, fur, a shell. Silence. A forest somewhere far away from all the glass. A life where I didn't have to pretend that wanting more than everyone else was the same thing as being good.

The light changed, and I stepped off the curb. I heard a horn, very close. I turned my head and saw headlights, much bigger and much brighter than they should have been, and I had one moment of plain, stupid understanding.

"Oh," I thought.

Then nothing.