The man is old enough to be my father.

He dresses well—and I don’t mean in that glossy Esquire Magazine sort of way. His clothes are simple and understated: Jeans, polo shirt, and leather jacket. Khakis, cotton shirt with buttons over a tee shirt, and a windbreaker. His hands, with those neatly trimmed nails, reveal his age.

When he smiles, his cheeks squish up against his eyes. He looks like he’s squinting. His smile is big and toothy and bright—it’s like his mouth is a sun-lit window and his cheeks are heavy curtains that have been drawn apart.

“How have you been?” I ask. He flashes that illuminating smile at me and holds it steady like a flashlight beam.

“Good, good! Good!” he answers. “Sun is out… weather is good… air smells good… good!”

He starts to laugh. I can’t help but smile back at him.

“What have you been doing?”

“Oh, same thing. Eating… sleeping… sleeping good! No problems with sleep! Smoking. Smoking.” He begins to mimic the motion of smoking, taking a drag from the invisible cigarette poised between his fingers. “Same thing, same thing all the time.”

He knows the questions I must ask; I know the answers he provides. We run through the script and neither one of us misses a line.

“I think about my family,” he says, the light disappearing entirely from his face. He only frowns this way when he thinks about his family. They literally ran away from him. He wonders where his wife took his children. He wishes that he could see them again—what does his son look like now? how is his daughter doing in school? does his wife think about him?

“I know,” I reply, wishing that things were different. Although we can never be sure, the clinical history we have pieced together suggests that shortly after the manifestation of his symptoms, his family abandoned him. Maybe something else happened—maybe he threatened them? maybe he destroyed something and frightened them? maybe he had threatened himself? That’s not the way he tells the story, though.

He now avoids people—not to the point that he isolates himself in his studio apartment with the balcony from where he smokes his pack of cigarettes a day. Maybe it’s more accurate to say that he ignores people.

“Why?” I ask him.

His face hardens and his eyes focus on the square of carpet in the far corner.

“Because people are not good to me. I walk along the street and the people who use drugs—drug users, people who drink alcohol, lots of alcohol—they ask me for money, but they never give me money. They say they want money for food, but then they go buy alcohol and drugs. At night, they drink alcohol and are loud, yelling. They don’t buy food, they buy alcohol and drugs.”

His sister had been encouraging him to join the local church.

“Why not?” I ask him.

“Because they ask too many questions.”

“What do you mean?”

“I go to church and they ask, What is your name? What is your age? What is your work?”

He pauses—not for dramatic effect, but because the pause reflects his answer: Nothing.

“They ask, Where do you work? Where is your family?”

He pauses again. Sadness softens his features.

“Are you married? How many kids? How come they are not with you?”

He stops, his right thumb tracing the border of his lower lip. He doesn’t cry—not because he’s holding tears back; his eyes are completely dry. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t remember how—his family left him a long time ago. I don’t ask him. The moment isn’t there.

We sit together in silence.

“That’s why I don’t like people,” he finally says. “Being alone is better.”

Suddenly, he smiles at me, big, bright, and toothy. He’s squinting at the brightness of his own smile.

“I’m sorry,” I murmur, unable to look at the sun of his face.

(Part of the ongoing Relationship Series.)