The Smiling Man

 There’s a man in this world, and he shouldn’t be here.

He walks with no destination. His arms swing by his sides with ease. His old boots spit dirt and kick pebbles. The sun glints and winks off the perfectly circular lenses of his steel-rimmed spectacles. He wears a bottle green travel coat, the hems of which drag their tattered ends to just above his knees. Beneath that cloak, there is an old black tee-shirt with a happy yellow face whose smile is slapped dead in the center.

He enters a town, time and time again. Just another place, another insignificant cluster of human lives nestled cozily somewhere in America. Weak, foolish, easily broken. Just waiting to be put out of their misery. It’s a fine day when he arrives. He comes with harmony, and people wave neighbourly waves to him when he flashes his bright, flawless white smile. Oh, what a pathetic place. One main road stretches through it, with a few straggling unpaved ones straying away like dirty veins of blood. Houses galore, though. None too large, none too small. Pleasantly painted and terrifically trimmed. Small, inexpensive vehicles in driveways. Laughing children frolick through spitting sprinklers, some chased by the family dog. Bicycle bells bling blissfully. Women hang clothes on lines, men are cooking cutlets on grills. An ice-cream truck passes, its song straying into the sunshine. A few children rush after it, quarters clenched in their fat, prepubescent fists.

Welcome to Haven, Ohio. Welcome to suburbia. Welcome to 1960.

The smiling man thinks and thinks, walks and walks, walks and thinks. Kennedy is alive somewhere. Osama Bin Laden has never been heard of. Global warming is naught but a silly idea somewhere in the dark abyss of human thought. No one knows what an iPod is. No one knows what a cell phone is. No one knows what hi-definition means. No one knows Obama, Jobs, or Rowling.

No one knows the smiling man.

But he knows them. A little boy with a flaming cluster of freckles sprayed across his face rushes past in his underwear, wet from a sprinkler, eyes on the ice cream truck. Billy Jones, the smiling man thinks. Born 1953. He’ll become a moderately succesful lawyer after college, but his wife will cheat on him and leave with their baby. He’ll fall into a depression and bite the bullet a short year later after a bout of alcoholism. He’ll be twenty-three, it’ll be 1976, and his wife (ex) won’t come to the funeral.

This is not decided, not till he glances in passing at the smiling man. The bad omen. In that moment, Billy Jones’s future is sealed with a kiss and locked away forever. Such is the nature of the world, and as the smiling man relishes it, a few of the age-old wrinkles worn round his eyes fade away. It rejuvenates him, adds a brisk perkiness to his step that had been lacking.

People wave as he passes. A man spraying his Ford with a hose grins and waves to the passing stranger, and he’ll die of a heart attack seventy-four hours later. And that little girl beside him, his daughter? She’ll be hit by a bus when she’s forty-two years old. The mail man who just passed? Tuberculosis, 1970. The florist arranging a bouquet of roses, the one who offers the smiling man a “Mornin’, neighbour,” as he passes? He’ll fall off a ladder next year and will be paralyzed for a year before his wife decides to pull the plug.

Oh, foolish humans. Condemning themselves without ever realizing it.

Welcome to Haven. The smiling man continues walking, eyes brighter.

He comes to the Quick Stop. A shambled old establishment with a lone gas pump out front. Low prices for a gallon. Low indeed, the smiling man thinks. In 2013, those prices are more than triple. Raise the prices, that’s the cure. He smiles in spite of himself. They’ll never learn that the paper they fold in their pockets will do nothing to save them, no matter how much or how little they possess. And in the end, they lose it all.

He enters the gas station on a whim. That’s life, for the smiling man, anyway. Do as you please, it’s just one long ride. Especially for a man who’s not quite there, if you can dig it. The smiling man swings the door open. Glorious cold air blasts him. Fans everywhere. Air conditioners aren’t too widespread yet, but fans and open freezers will do nicely. There’s only one person here in the store, and she’s an elderly lady with graying hair. She is sitting on a tall stool behind the counter reading the town gazette, a pitiful little publication with little to discuss and much free space to fill with nonsense. He knows all this from the front page.

She looks up at him over large spectacles. Unlike the other citizens of this pitiful town, she doesn’t smile or greet him, though. She only watches him. He stares at her a while and she stares back, and he wonders why he’s never seen a pair of eyes so bright as those. Well, not never. Just not often. Eyes like that are rare, he knows. Eyes like that mean old souls, powerful souls. Souls full of delicious energy, sure. But they’re also full of instinct, a kind of spiritual intuition, if you can dig that. They know what’s going on past the thin wall of their physical perceptions, and they aren’t amused. This woman has grandchildren and children, a mother and father in their graves, a husband at home in a wheelchair…but the smiling man can’t get at them. Can’t move through her, touch them, doom their lives and put them in their graves earlier than the white forces of the good half of the world might allow.

She’s a guardian, and a rare one.

He cocks an eyebrow, enjoying the challenge. As he walks to the back of the store, he thinks, Well, certainly different from little Billy Jones. He was weak. He grabs an orange soda pop and moseys on back to the front of the store and plants it on the counter.

“Five cents,” she says softly. She stares at him all the while, unblinking. He knows that she’s consciously unaware of what he is. But somewhere in that old soul of hers, she can sense his danger, his malice, his greed. She doesn’t like it, deep down, and those feelings are trickling up like a reverse waterfall and cleansing her insight. She’s ready to boot him out of here, isn’t she?

He drops the coins on the counter. But he doesn’t leave, as much as she’d like him to. He leans forward all comfortable, on his elbows, and grins at her. “It’s Edith, isn’t it?” That much he can tell. She nods. He nods back, enjoying her. “Who do you think I am, Edith m’dear?”

“I think you’re not human, and you should leave my store before something wicked happens,” she says softly. She leans nearer him, and she smells the way old ladies should: innocent, sweet. He likes that. He likes her ferocity. It makes some of the lines around his eyes fade. Feeding the fire, honey, feeding the fire.

“I could make you disappear,” he adds conversationally. “I could make it painful. Make your eyes boil and your tongue squirm. I could make you kill your husband, bury your grandchildren alive.”

She smiles. Sweet, oh so sweet. White teeth, bright eyes. She doesn’t think he’s a threat at all, though she knows he could be. “Honey, there ain’t a thing on this wide world that’d make me hurt the ones I love. I’m a wife, mother, grandmother, and everything in between. Why don’t you bother someone with a weaker resolve, eh? Take your magician’s tricks somewhere else, and take your soda pop with you, darling.”

So he straightens and he stares at her. For once the smiling man isn’t smiling. He grips the cold bottle in his hands. He tries one more time. Tries to infuse her with the harshest cancer imaginable, tries to give her the worst canker sore in the world, even. Not a thing. She’s a brick wall, and so he steps backward once.

“Fine then,” he says. He cocks his head and smiles again. “Something else will pick you off eventually, dear.”

“Pray it’s somethin’ worth looking at,” she says sweetly. “Have a nice day now.”

Without a word he turns and leaves. The smiling man leaves that little old town. He isn’t downtrodden, though, he isn’t depressed about it. Just one minor defeat. In that whole ocean of fishies to catch, a few are bound to slip away. And he feels some respect for that brave old lady. With her puny gazette and her old spectacles.

The smiling man has always known how to take advantage of the human race; has always known how to make their fears reality, how to make them wish they hadn’t lived as long as they did, how to make them regret the tiniest action, how to make them fear anyone who flashes a smile. He’s always known how to make them fear their fathers, their imitation God, their government, their money, their arrogant overblown heads….for the most part.

Because once in a while, the smiling man knows he must be forced down. There has to be one that turns him down a few notches, back toward his long lost humanity. Once in a while there’s that human being with an incorruptible heart, a good heart. A solid frame of mind, a good set of morals, and love aplenty. It’s sickening to him, but he knows it’s only natural. And he’s not angry, because that’s just one little fishy. In the great span of things, there’s still a million filthy, dirty human beings for him to handle.

It’s alright for that one good one to slip away. It’s alright for it to escape his clutches. Besides, he doesn’t think they’d taste very good. Their futures are too bright, too full of love and laughter and all that jazz.

So he isn’t crestfallen, he isn’t downtrodden. Humans aplenty, and most of them dirty enough as it is. One thing he knows is that he’ll never starve.

He laughs suddenly at that. “Oh, this banquet’ll never run out!” So he leaves Haven, Ohio. He moves out of 1960 and into another time, another scene, another world altogether. He moves through the lives of the ugly, the dirty, the foolish. He finds them and dooms them, but really, they’re only dooming themselves.

He cracks open his orange soda pop.

There’s a man in this world, and maybe we invited him here.