His tweed herringbone sports coat reveals a lack of sensibility in the moist Spring heat. He has no desire to camouflage to bland like everyone else around him in the mall. His clothes betray his own age in the same way a burning treachery in his eyes betrays his kindly, old and wrinkled face. Tattered as as his clothes are they hang on his thin frame without desire for self-preservation; as if moths and broken thread cling to him. Sewn with a bold double stitch, even his seams are more like cautionary tales than some whimsical, taped-on myth—Victor Hauser’s frayed clothes don’t frame him so much as bury him, and his grip on a debt that he firmly believes life still owes him.

He stoops. Bending down to tie his shoe in the grand white plaza of this latest new sterile mall, Vic removes his homburg hat and sets it on the concrete, momentarily so that his sixty-five-year-old hands might have opportunity to wrestle with an errant shoelace without the crown falling over his eyes. His face, a straight nose drowning in jowls, is a picture of creased concentration as he loops one string over the other, hands shaking. Vic Hauser’s way never fails to trickle out, through his shaky movements, his defiantly agitated grimace, from beneath gravity’s favorite cheeks; he isn’t yet ready to be bullied by old age. Indeed, to Vic, every day is just a new fight as long as Life continues to see fit to give him another twenty-four hours like the last—a decreasing probability of getting back everything he ever lost—a challenge like a third turn up at home plate after striking out twice and breaking your arm. He could have just tried to tuck it in towards third and then run in slow small steps to stumble to first base. He could have.

Shoe retied, the homburg is placed back up top and he moves again, shuffling toward the far end of the plaza, where the buses wait. Vic had let go his car too or rather driving it. It sits unused in his driveway, and these days the bus is his sole transport, leaving him to the restrictions and impersonal curfews of the city of Columbus’ bus schedules. The only unfortunate aspect of his life lately: he spent a lot of time at home–and a lot of time at home alone. Nodding politely at every passerby with a total lack of conviction Vic makes his way to the bus only to have it drive away without him, as he watches his reflection shrink in the slightly reflective back end. It is fifteen minutes until the next bus comes and Vic shifts his feeble trajectory to move toward an unoccupied bench by the curb. It is Friday afternoon and there are very few people out and about, most existing inside office buildings where Vic himself could have once resided, only after, of course, he’d become no one at all.

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