Brad got up, went to his CD player, and popped out the disc inside. Flipping through the clamshell case that held his spare CDs, he found The Cure’s Pornography and put it in. If you are going to be depressed, it is very important to have the right soundtrack. Soundtracks are everything: without them, movies suck.

Brad was determined that his life, even if he was the only audience member, should have high production values. His vision was good, so he had that part (even if the only time the colors had achieved proper, full saturation and hue had been that time he'd dropped acid and torn the world apart; that wasn't really the point). Normal saturation and hue was fine for most shots, including this one.

Brad stared at the wall with all the bleak emptiness he could muster. He imagined a camera there, capturing him. Had anyone else ever felt so bad, yet so bravely stood up to it? I mean, surely, not throwing yourself in front of the nearest bus when your outlook was this bleak had to be a sign of enormous strength of character. He was definitely very brave.

He'd make a superb member of the warrior class of some ancient society. Samoan, maybe. They were big-boned like him. Had he been given the fortune of being born to such a life, he would've definitely been a dependable member of the tribe – the big, quiet guy you went to when you needed someone who wouldn't flinch. He might not charge into battle with enthusiasm, but he would never give his ground.

A distant, sarcastic voice pointed out that his ownsociety and culture had a military tradition…and a fairly large standing army, for that matter, but he dismissed the voice as unrealistic. Even during times of war, they rejected fat guys. Brad found stairs daunting. There was no way he'd survive a boot camp.

Jesus, that was the whole point of being the dude who stood his ground, right? Less running that way.

Being in a dark place, Brad decided to bring up friendship. It was always fertile ground for festering thoughts. He'd had a few, like everyone else, but he'd never managed to keep them. He always moved and ended up with less when he got there than he'd begun with. Even his "best" friends – the ones he'd figured to have his whole life – were increasingly difficult to track down. Not that he made all that much effort.

Friends were like girlfriends. They made you human. Their lack gave Brad a pervasive, sneaking suspicion that he really wasn'thuman, not by most standards.

So…just what the hell was he? This was where he usually got stymied. He wasn't human, clearly, not the way every other human he'd run into was. Nor was he batsh–t crazy, like most of the homeless people talking to themselves he'd seen over the years. Those sorts were usually devoid of friends, too.

Were they the downslope of the curve that Brad was already sliding down? That seemed possible, although Brad didn't think he'd survive very long on the streets. He liked air-conditioning, and if you traveled far enough north to not much need it during the summer, you were bound to turn into a boxed corpsicle during the winter.

Plus, someone would just cut his throat and take his stuff, anyhow. He'd be the homeless guy to set up housekeeping in the wrong spot. Piss off some meaner, crazier homeless guy. Die early in his career.

The final iceberg his mind liked to jump to in these situations surfaced before him, like a bad joke spurting from your mouth when you'd had too much to drink: the French Foreign Legion – the place where broken men had been going for years to get a fresh start. They'd always been at the back of Brad's mind, like a get-out-of-life-free card. Still, he wasn't sure how or where one went about joining, and he had a sinking feeling that they'd want him to be able to pass the same sorts of physical-fitness screening the U.S. military required.

And anyhow, what did he have to run from? The fact that he sucked? He couldn't run fast enough, or far enough, for that to matter.

Desperate for something to cheer himself up, he opened hotornot.com and started rating strangers with a very critical eye. He liked to think that, no matter how loathsome he might become, there was always the possibility of some sort of mail-order bride. Intellectually, this seemed vaguely possible. He wasn't abusive. Perhaps, by Second World or Third World standards, he'd be quite a catch (and not just because he'd nearly swamp the boat as they tried to bring him aboard).

Hot or Not^®wasn't a mail-order site, obviously, but it was free. Those mail-order bride places were happy to hook you up with a foreign wife, but they expected some fairly hefty payments up-front. Brad, in spite of his great, self-evaluated, mental genius and varied, potent abilities, had, as yet, managed to sock away pretty much nothing. He existed paycheck-to-paycheck, and his apartment could best be described as “squalid.”

Brad wondered, briefly, if anyone had ever made a connection between how someone's dwelling looked and how the dweller looked…similar to the popular connection between dogs and their owners. Brad and his apartment were both sad and unkempt, the primary difference being that his apartment was small. Nothing to be done about that: No analogy was perfect; not one he could come up with at the moment, anyhow.

He felt like the boxer again. Uppercut. Jab. Jab.

Glancing between his knees at the floor, he saw more proof of his own deficiencies: the paperwork and crap that littered his workplace, archaeological deposits which gave testimony to his slovenly nature. He was really quite lucky to be working at a civil service job. Even if it had started out as an internship, he was fairly certain he'd passed whatever time limit was required for permanence. Now, the only way he'd be fired was if he killed a coworker in front of a lot of witnesses, or if they downsized the City-Parish workforce overall (in which case his severe lack of seniority would be his undoing).

The Cure, being early Cure, sounded appropriately depressing. Nice to know someone, somewhere, shared the notion that life was pain, and its only real saving grace was that it probably beat the hell out of death. Not that the songs said as much, of course. He was just pretty sure they had to mean that, or something close.

Who the hell could understand every single word that came out of Robert Smith's mouth? The dude was British, for chrissake. He could search online and find the lyrics, but it seemed like, if he had them to read, the songs would lose some of their power, like an aboriginal tribe having their spirits stolen by a camera, only less condescendingly amusing to Westerners.

Brad figured those ancient tribes were probably right. He'd seen pictures that looked like they'd trapped the souls of their subjects. The famous one of Sitting Bull was a good example.

Westerners were simply immune, because they never wore their souls on the outside. That was the mark of a primitive, a savage. Becoming cultured meant you buried those things. Maybe let them peek out of the eyes every so often. Fake smile. Marionette body. But it was hard to keep your true self from peering outside. For this reason, Brad nearly never made eye contact. This habit contributed to his quasi-retarded social skills.

Pornography was a short album. It was already starting over. It was hard to stay in a properly deep funk when your CD was on repeat. You started getting bored with the music, and while boredom wasn't exactly a fundamental change from depressed, it was a different flavor of darkness…one with more motivation built in.

After a lopsided battle, ennui won out. Pornography kept playing. Brad kept staring at the floor, then the walls. The brownish stains of boogers past reminded him that, whatever wonders he might someday accomplish, he was still, for now, the pimple on the world's ass, slightly infected.

Any day now, the world would reach back when nobody was looking and squeeze. Maybe it already was. As the world's ass-pimple, such squeezing was inescapable and irresistible. He'd pop, like many ass-pimples before him. The form of that popping simply remained to be seen.

How much worse the squeezing would become before it broke him was another mystery. Like when you waited in class to get back a test you hadn't studied for, on material you hadn't understood. You didn't know much about what was coming; you just knew it was bad. And unlike the sitcoms, there'd be no amusing dream to wake from.

Failure was, for Brad, a very real regularity in life. The only ironic part was that his job, the closest thing to homework that he now had, was something he was pretty good at. Sure, he might hate everything about it, but he got plenty of As, aside from the occasional downgrading for turning something in late.

But the Civil Service, it seemed, sort of expected tardiness in the fruits of its workers' labors. So, usually, it was just the As he got: meaningless grades earned without effort, like beating yourself at a board game, or winning in a footrace against a toddler.

Brad wiped fop sweat onto his shirt. The ventilation shaft was stuffed with rolled-up paper in an attempt to keep out the heat, but with a windowless, internal office, there was basically nothing he could do during the winter months to get any relief. Even with a window, Southern Louisiana was a fickle bitch come the chilly part of the year. One day you could actually feel almost cold, even wake up to a little frost on the ground; the next, you had highs in the seventies or eighties, with moist Gulf air to keep the gills in your skin nice and moist.

As much as he hated humidity, its loss did spell some trouble for him. Winter was his "shedding" season. His skin, always bad, got worse as the air dried out, and he became his own shambling snowstorm. It always pissed Brad off when he watched TV and some a–hole was terribly upset because he had a few flakes on his shoulder in the elevator. Brad could, by standing and shaking his shirt, create a snow flurry of dandruff like unto a white cloud of powder.

His entire body flaked, shed, itched, and bled. And the dryer the air, the worse it got. Brad harbored some nebulous notion that he could, if he so chose, go to the dermatologist and have something done about his condition. Thing was, he'd done so before.

In his experience, dermatologists were fond of goop…lots and lots of goop. Sticky, slimy, greasy goop. In other words, you went from bad – leaving a trail of skin crumbs wherever you went – to worse: sticky or greasy. Just the thought of the dermatologist made Brad want a shower. He hurriedly wiped his hands on his slacks, really digging in, trying to strip off any vestige of leftover, imaginary ointment that might remain.

In an abstract, intellectual sort of way, Brad knew that dermatology, as with all medical science, was not a static art. It advanced. There were new treatments for shedding freaks such as himself. Heck, you saw commercials for them now all the time. But he'd investigated, briefly and halfheartedly, one of those new treatments. It seemed to involve going in for a weekly shot and vaguely threatening warnings about compromised immune systems.

So, rather than sticky-slimy, he could play with needles on a weekly basis and catch every cold or flu virus that wandered his way. For all his complaints about life (and for all the sick days he took), Brad was rarely truly sick – and he had convinced himself that this immunity or resistance was due, in part, to some strange side effect of his skin affliction.

In the final analysis, dislike of doctors, dislike of needles, dislike of unguents and ointments and topical treatments of all sorts left him with one fairly mediocre weapon at his disposal: the cleansing, burning rays of ultraviolet light. UV light, he had found, was one of the few things that really and truly would clear up his skin, given enough time and quantity. In a perfect world, this would mean that he'd own, say, a tanning bed. He could sleep in it, nude, every night, and emerge with a full set of skin – the sort of flowing, unbroken skin everyone else had. The kind of skin you didn't have to vacuum up every few days.

But, just like every other aspect of his rat-maze existence, there was a catch. Mostly, it was this: Ultraviolet light only worked on skin it could shine on. This meant no clothes. This meant no hair. This meant he needed some way to lie out, in all his glistening rolls of fat, and soak up the rays with his swim shorts hiked up as close to his genitals as the fabric would go – turning boxer shorts-style trunks into makeshift banana-huggers in an entirely unfashionable and unflattering manner.

Not that they made flattering swimwear for folks of his girth. To Brad, the only "flattering" piece of clothing he could wear to the beach would be a Hawaiian shirt in the 4X size range, perhaps coupled with vast cargo shorts reaching down below his knees – clothing made from enough material for an entire scout troop's pup tents.

Brad had heard, at some point, about "tan-through" clothing, but he never really followed up on it. If he did sit out in the sun, he quickly got so hot that any clothing he wore sweat-molded itself to him in a way that merely accentuated his undesirable curves. Paying extra to look even worse seemed silly.

Nor was there anywhere near his apartment where he could properly sun, anyhow. Tigerland wasn't one of those "swimming pool in the middle" complexes, or, at least, his part wasn't. It was possible some of those bigger, newer complexes in the region were. He lived in the squalid corner of a quadplex, with nothing but oak trees and dirt outside.

Still, whenever it was warm enough outside and he could find some sunny spot that was vaguely sheltered from the mortified stares of passersby, he would lug out his folding beach chair and spread out on it in all his glory. After a few minutes of pre-baking, his nerve finally up, he'd even peel off his enormous T-shirt, draping it over the back of the chair and using it as an ineffectual sweat rag, as his body's stinging, salty defense against the oppressive heat began to blind him.

Typically, he'd have some paperback in hand, his way of saying to the world: "No, obviously, as a giant fat guy, I'm not out here to get a tan;I'm simply getting my healthy dose of the great outdoors while I enjoy this wondrous book. Quit staring at me, or I'll lumber menacingly in your general direction, and you'll feel highly guilty for the heart attack I'll suffer in the process."

However, this entire convoluted process was a summer-only thing, and it also benefited from the effects of elevated humidity. During the winter, if you sat out half-naked on your folding chair, people reallystarted to stare. Someone might even try to strike up a conversation, his primate curiosity unable to pass such a spectacle without having its insatiable curiosity spiked.