People who met him barely remembered having met him. When they did, they remembered having sought the first convenient exit. At the party with all the Russians a few weeks back, the ex-marine and the Lithuanian guy, the one who loved knives, the one who had emigrated to study the military arts the American way, actually whispered and pointed not five feet from him, wondering to each other why he hadn’t spoken literally in hours. They cracked jokes about him, forgetting that he could hear despite remaining mute. He could hear without even watching their lips move.

“Why haven’t you said anything all night?”

“I’m listening.”

It’s not that he was nondescript. Not overly handsome, he was at least memorable looking, tall and barrel-chested, with a broad round nose, glasses slightly crooked. Almost as if by choice he let conversations fall into silence until others would shuffle their feet and find excuses to go. Perhaps he seemed unfriendly. He liked it that way. There’s an inordinate pressure to say interesting things to people you don’t know, he thought. Or, more accurately, most folks prefer to form friendships in real time, while he preferred to take in impressions, ruminating over them at his leisure, and if all was according to his liking, introducing cordiality into his demeanor in the subsequent encounter. By then it was often too late. He wondered why people were slow to warm up to him. In fact, lately, they’d begun to develop an outright distaste for him.

It used to be that conversations seemed so cliché, the exchanges so choreographed. Didn’t we see this in a movie? Or do you call them films? He preferred conversations like amateur tennis matches, where he knew his opponent knew where she thought he’d lob it, so he volleyed elsewhere just to keep it interesting. He liked saying what needed to be said at any given conversational crossroad, regardless if it fit the persona he ought to want to convey. Sometimes these techniques failed, though it’s inaccurate to call them techniques, as if they were so by forethought or design. Call it an inclination. But it was an inclination that required through practice keeping the wit sharp and the rhetorical abilities keen.

It sounds pretentious, but it wasn’t not really. It was all in pursuit of attention to detail.

As he spoke less, the words he heard his mouth speak more often disappointed him than not. They didn’t capture the substance of the thought. The thought may not have been particularly grand or well-crafted. It may have been under construction, and he resented being expected to give voice to it before completion. Sometimes, it had seemed like an interesting thought, worthy of words, when it was floating around inside his skull, but as he uttered it he became bored with himself mid-sentence. He suspected that this was a result of his consciousness becoming more fluid—asynchronous? chaotic? alingual. Whatever its cause, the effect was a real awkward manner in his interactions and, as it increased, an increased avoidance of social contact at all.

It would be a sad story, but during those same years, he became a much more eloquent writer, and those who read his writing thought him fascinating, his luxurious words as slippery and inviting to the bare feet of open eyes as a river-wet bed of algae-smoothed boulder bits, mountain-hewn, time-strewn. Writing allowed him the time to find the right word, the time to structure the idea, to frame and embellish it, to buff and wax it. And as people who met him through correspondence grew more emphatic in their admiration of him, and people who met him in person grew increasingly ambivalent, he began to wonder about the divide. It made him smile, though at times it caused him worry. He did not consider it wrong, merely unconventional and hard to explain.