Across a grey, otherwise empty courtyard, a dark figure strode briskly towards a destination that only he knew. Lean, his oversized coat and long hair trailing behind him, he seemed slightly out of place, wraithlike in these dull and unremarkable surroundings. Not far off, a motorbike buzzed noisily by.

The man thought of the knifelike wind, hated it, and then rebuked himself. Feeling the rhythm of his own paces against the dirty concrete, he tried to synchronize them to his thoughts. The moment was approaching – no. It was no good. Chuckling inwardly, hollowly, at the surrealism of his predicament, he wearily forced his mind to the issue at hand. In a few minutes, he would be there – he would be there. What would he do? He had thought, vaguely, about what would happen many times: played it over in his mind, the outcome always blurred and indistinct. Uncertain. He shivered slightly.

“Excuse me!”

Broken momentarily from his trance, he murmured an apology to the woman whose child he had almost walked into. Somehow, he had made it out onto the street without even noticing. For a short while he fixed his gaze on the buildings ahead, but his eyes quickly lost their focus as he slipped back into his walking reverie. Angry traffic and young people distributing leaflets passed him by.

Perhaps the confrontation would kill him. That would be a nice irony. He grimaced; somehow, he doubted it. It might be a tough challenge – impossible, even – yet to him it was somehow clear that at worst he would be pushed a little closer to the edge, but not over it.

It was strange, he mused; some days he felt almost normal, like any other human being. Almost. Where did you draw the line? It wasn’t that he felt a manifest destiny – far from it, in fact. On the other hand, there was no mistaking some of the odd looks he drew sometimes. He felt it himself: something wasn’t quite right, if right was the word. A lot of somethings. Small, perhaps. No doubt, it would depend on whom you asked, and when.

He walked onward, ever-aware of his own footsteps counting down the seconds. Familiar shop faces stared indifferently past him. How many times had he walked this path, sure of what lay at the end of it? A chill threatened to grab him, but he turned inward and shrugged it off. It was no use worrying now about what might happen; he’d done enough of that already. He knew that he knew that he could only be hurt if he let himself, and that scared him the most. But this was not the time to let his mind wander down fruitless avenues of thought; it was the time to prepare for what awaited him.

A fleeting doubt crossed his mind, but he dismissed it. He was ready. As ready, he thought, as he’d ever be. Confidently, he turned the corner, his destination now in sight.

Time flickered, and he found himself taking out a key. A pair of eyes looked blankly at him. Was he ready? He was ready. He turned the handle, stepped forward and crossed the deserted area leading to the stairwell. His mind felt empty as he ascended, though he knew it was not. He tried to conceal the worrisome static of half-formed thoughts from himself, as if they might betray him.

Almost without realizing, he suddenly knew that he was there.

He was there –