The Quiet Man

Compulsion

If I nurse this cup of tea, I can probably stay here an hour or more without anyone giving me any dirty looks. Free wifi, over-earnest jazz playing at an ignorable background volume, people walking in and out: it’s a nice place. It feels alive. Busy, but not too crowded, not on a Friday morning, at least. There are a handful of other people sitting alone, like me. Among the friends and lovers, the parents with their children in tow, there are the solitary coffee drinkers with laptops or newspapers, ragged old books in their hands. It’s not just me. There’s nothing strange about me sitting here, not from the outside, at least. Just another bloke in a coffee shop, staring down at his screen. Nothing strange at all.

Well, I’m lucky today. Or it’s just a matter of matching weekday morning habits: this is the third time I’ve been here that I’ve seen him. He’s always in the same place, in the corner by the door. Hat on his head, wearing those glasses with the thick black frames that are all the rage. Earbuds stuck into his ears, the white cords hanging down and swinging slightly against the window. Plaid shirt hanging out of his jumper, artfully torn jeans. But when he leans over his book, something in the way he sets his back, he reminds me of you. The shape of him, somehow. He’s all folded in on himself, limbs tucked in and curled around, like he’s holding himself in. Lack of confidence, probably. He’s young. Late teens, early twenties, maybe. Awkward and uncomfortable, suspicious. Like you must have been at that age. Full of rage and uncertainty. A loner, lonely. Seeking solace in public places while resenting the world and everyone in it.

Like me, really.

If I don’t look directly at him I can imagine that I’m sitting here with a version of you. Like any other day when you don’t feel like talking, with a companionable silence between us. I shouldn’t take comfort in it, but I do.

I’d bring him a coffee, but that would make me feel like a creeper. He’s just a kid. I think he’s reading a comic book. Maybe it’s a graphic novel. He’s not covered in nicotine patches and pondering the chemical composition of some stranger’s urine: he’s not you. Just some kid. Some kid whose back twists just like yours does.

Wow: over a thousand comments on my new story in The Strand online. That’s unbelievable. You don’t like me writing about unsolved cases, but I guess readers are satisfied by different kinds of endings.

Romance and trifles. Pointless details. Poetic turns of phrase.

I think I’ll take that as a compliment, thank you.

I’m doing more than chronicling my memories of your cases now; I need to do more than that. It’s you I’m resurrecting here, one story at a time. All the sides of you, all the things that made you so amazing. Readers seem to like seeing you frustrated, thwarted. They want to see that you struggle, they want evidence that what you do isn’t so easy for you. I mean, it wasn’t. You worked hard at it. You gave up so much. You make it look so easy, even when I know it’s not.

You lose in this story, you fail. You make a mistake, in the end. I have to hold you back so you don’t run back into the burning house, throw yourself on the flames to collect evidence. You’d rather die than not solve a puzzle, I know that. It’s a little heartbreaking, I think, this story. I almost cut the epilogue out, but I’m glad I didn’t. People are raving about it. It’s so simple, so quiet: I brought you a cup of tea, and you smiled at me. But you looked so shattered. Readers like a little of that now and then, I suppose. Heartbreak, sadness from you. They want to see you suffer. That sounds cruel, but I think it’s the opposite: they want to see you suffer the way they suffer. They want to know that you’re not just a genius, you have a compulsion to solve these puzzles, and it goes beyond right and wrong, or being a show-off. A compulsion like their compulsions. It makes you so human. Bit of pathos.