He was the world's tallest dwarf, the shortest giant, the smartest retard, the dumbest genius. He was mediocre when it occurs to people to laugh because mediocre sounds like meaty ochre.

Edgar felt like he was walking around in a glass box with walls two inches thick. He neither loved nor hated this. He liked to be alone in a crowd and felt crowded when he was by himself. His favorite thing to do was to walk around in places normally busy but deserted. It was not enough for him to be by himself in an empty room. It had to be an empty train station, bus terminal, city street, or football stadium.

Often he found himself in a bathroom, washing his face, and looking at his reflection in the mirror. His head slightly down so that the water dripped into the sink and not on his clothes, he would look into his own eyes and wonder what he was going to do. Then he would dry off his face and walk slowly around.

Anyone would assume Edgar was lost in deep thoughts, but a mind reader would be disappointed to discover that often as Edgar walked he had in his head only a few words that reflected whatever he happened to be looking at. "Tree tree tree," or "the hairy dog, hairy dog, that hairy." Sometimes he had songs in his head, and he would fight them, try to break them, by first allowing the lyrics to run along, and then he would try to sing the same line over and over again, and then just one phrase, and then just one word, one syllable, repeating it faster and faster until it was just one lone tone, like a dial tone on a disconnected phone.

Edgar was the sort of person who does not believe everyone else in the world is a robot, but if one day he were to find a secret manila folder that incontrovertibly proved this, that he was the only actual human being in an enormous experiment, he would get over it very quickly, say, in an hour or two.

It's not that he didn't care. Edgar cared. Edgar was earning some money working in a free kitchen. For a month, every other day, a man in a motorized wheelchair came in to get some soup and sandwich, since the timing on his disability checks got messed up by the new tax laws. After a month everything was fine again and the man stopped coming, and even made a small donation to the free kitchen. Edgar had talked to him a few times. He was nice enough. But for years after, Edgar would see the man, alone and tiny in his chair, his moustache and beard maybe a day or two past a good trim, his old 49'ers jacket a bit too big for him and a week past a good cleaning, and Edgar wanted to just go hug the man, hug him and hold him and feel his warmth and draw from his dull eyes and unwashed hair as much sorrow as a man needs to live on.

Or another time. On the train. Edgar had one of the free papers, was looking at an article about neighborhood reform, and barely glanced at the woman. Just a tenth of a second glance, and in that glance, Edgar saw and dismissed her gap-toothed mouth, her large, out of style thick glasses, her plain flat hair which hung thin to her shoulders. He didn't even see the child she carried as they sat behind him. She was white trash, in the ethnic sense of the word, and Edgar forgot about her before he even saw her. But the child was crying. Edgar didn't even notice it until he realized he had been listening. It was a cranky cry, then a frustrated cry, and Edgar realized, the cry of a child in dull, unescapable pain. Edgar listened. He was irritated. The child probably had that big-head disease that babies born of alcoholic women get. Edgar listened. He was empathetic. The woman said nothing, was she drunk? Did she notice? Edgar wanted her to cry, to receive the gift of being able to take her child's pain away and make it her own, make her happy that she could suffer so that her child would not. Their stop came, Edgar's necked ached from hanging it over his paper, and he looked up as they got off- the child stopped crying for a moment, glanced at Edgar as they descend the steps. An enormous purple bruise fed from the child's right eyebrow, and in the tenth of a second glance that Edgar gave it, it pulsed, and Edgar cared.

Edgar was a five paragraph essay when it was entirely appropriate to write a five paragraph essay but people just looked at it and decided that since it was only five paragraphs it must be rudimentary or uninspired which might be true but not for the reasons they think.

Sometimes, Edgar didn't care. The temperature was exactly right for removing your coat and then putting it back on a few minutes later. The night sky was the color of easily forgettable faces. Plainly, slender, Edgar descended the stair which led down from a converted townhouse, now a Starbucks, with a cup of something rapidly cooling in his hand. It had been a game- how long could he stand the burning of the cup? But he'd forgotten to double-cup it, and so after only a few intense moments of dry, dry heat, the pain faded and left his hand numb. A sip still scalded him, however.

The library was open late, and Edgar shuffled towards it. Five city blocks and along the way he saw a homeless man, clean in dingy khaki dungarees, a well-worn flannel jacket over a ripped T-shirt, carrying a filthy sleeping bag wrapped around a plastic blue water bottle. The homeless man was limping, at first from the weight of the roll, and then from some kind of injury, real or imagined, that wore away the tread on his sneakers unevenly. Edgar dismissed him.

He passed a woman, her arm in her navy blue sweatshirt cocked at an odd angle, the smoothness of her face reflecting streetlights. Edgar passed a dozen, two dozen beautiful people, the pretty women in treanch coats and skirts, the guys in blue jeans and baseball caps. Then, at the steps of the library, as he swallowed the last hot gulp of coffee, making a hot fist in his stomach and tripling a tight need to use the bathroom, he saw still another man with a bad leg, this one shuffling down the steps, swinging his bad knee around to accommodate the steep steps and slippery handrail. Edgar ignored him. It was a big city.

Inside, the bright lights turned his vision green for a moment; he threw his cup away and shuffled towards the new fiction shelves. Books books books. He perused the titles; he was looking for something, but he knew he wouldn't know what it was until he found it. The usual new authors, a few reprinted classics, mostly the kind of writera who only get bought by book club members and libraries, all in shiny library-protector plastic, colors and squares of text fading from having been left in the car all day before being returned.

Clowes. He remembered reading a graphic novel by someone named Clowes once, so he walked to the shelf and looked. There was nothing there, but another title caught his eye. A Life Without Chairs. He read the back, the press praise. It was for a different book. Did the library have. David Caruso's first book? It did. He decided to take out Born in a Box instead.

He went to the checkout desk; the line was longer than he had ever seen it. Four people. The couple in front of him had about ten books each, and on their spines Edgar recognized Russian. The man was carrying what appeared to be at least ten or twelve videos. A week before this Edgar had been sitting in front of the library, on the steps, drinking coffee so he wouldn't have to spill it out before he went inside. A blind man approached him, with a Seeing Eye dog. The dog was a golden retriever. Always retrievers, or German shepherds. And Seeing Eye dogs always looked so sad. As a boy Edgar had visited a friend of his father's one day, and the lady had a very energetic lab puppy. Her job was to raise it until it was old enough for training. Edgar knew that dog would never be energetic after it got leashed to a blind man. This dog was the same. The man looked like his head was made out of an old nylon sock stuffed with cotton and stitched to suggest eyes, a nose, and a mouth. Obviously, either radical surgery or a vicious knife attack had rearranged this man's face, made it puffy. But Edgar hardly noticed, because he was fascinated by how accurately the dog led the man off the curb down a wheel-chair ramp, across the street, and up to the stairs, even twisting on the leash-bar to tell the man he was approaching steps.

Now, standing in line, Edgar saw another man. He only caught the quickest glance at his face before he instinctively turned away, out of politeness. He didn't want to be rude. A Vietnamese man, in his mid thirties or early forties, It was always hard to tell, since Asians seemed to never age until the last minute. He was wearing a thin nylon windbreaker, unremarkable pants, and very thick glasses. But his face looked as if: as if god made faces out of clay, and with this face, before baking it in the kiln, He had reached in and pulled off the mouth, lips and all, and pushed it back onto the man's cheek, and then baked it with the teeth sticking out at all angles. Edgar was fascinated, and decided he wanted to stare. He wanted to show this monster that he did not think he was a monster. He wanted to fall in love with this man.

But the Russian couple was at the next teller and Edgar was at the next one after that. And by the time he had the book checked and his car back, the monster was gone.

Sometimes Edgar didn't care. But sometimes he did. In a drab black and white apartment, in a thin bed crumpled with cool-damp sheets, Edgar sat up, shivering. He had been dreaming about. blackboards and erasers, recess, the smell of fingerpaint. That man, the one with the smeared face. Edgar could see clearly in his memory that there had, indeed, been one single strand of spider-web thick drool running from his mouth onto his shoulder. Edgar's heart was broken. God or the devil had created this face, and with it the insanity of the mentally foreshortened. Everyone he saw on the street, Edgar realized, all the limpers, the one's with bad arms, the homeless and the shouters and wandering eyes and the ones who just sat there, cold and alone, muttering, they were all insane, they were all aliens. And they could never ever love Edgar, they could never love him back.