Free Giving Up by Mike Steeves

afford it – that offends the sense of fairness that we’re either born with or that gets planted in us at an early age. When I looked at his eyes now, eyes that I’d found so wild and mysterious, I saw what was there all along, the blank stare of someone high on hard drugs. To him, I was nothing. The story was nothing. There was only the four hundred dollars. It was possible he wasn’t the sort of person who would normally go around cheating people. Maybe in his former life he’d been a minor success, the product of years of patient and unhurried work. He hadn’t been ambitious and didn’t expect that anything great was in store for him, just a quiet decent life. But a skiing accident, or maybe something even more banal, like a car crash, left him in constant agony and he ended up a slave to his pain meds, lost everything, turned to the harder stuff, and wound up so racked with need that he even tried the old money order con that nobody ever fell for anymore, certainly not with such a strung out and wasted addict like Luke MacDonald. As we made our way to the ATM he insisted on keeping eye contact with me the entire time, which meant that he had to do a mix of side-stepping and light-jogging, at one point even facing me straight on as he jogged backwards. But he wasn’t very good at it. He kept bumping into me and tripping us both up, all because he insisted on looking me in the eye while he kept firing questions at me or interjecting with stories of his own childhood, keeping up a staccato pace that was clearly designed to distract me so I wouldn’t have an opportunity to back out or to consider more closely everything that he’d said to me and discover some inconsistency or implausibility that I hadn’t noticed before, because, as far as he understood, up until now, I wasn’t suspicious of him or his story. ‘Why, if he had even a shadow of a doubt, would he agree to my proposal?’ is what he would think. It’s unlikely that I had been his first mark that day. It was late and I imagine he’d already been walking the streets for hours, meeting with continual rejection, most marks not even letting him get a word in before cutting him off and moving on, while those who listened, even those who listened to the whole story, may have let him down a bit gentler, but until he’d found me he’d been refused by what I’m sure were dozens of people. So he certainly wasn’t expecting to be able to get me to listen to him, let alone agree to cash his money order , and even once I agreed he must’ve been skeptical at first, that I was trying to trick him and instead of going to the bank machine I was leading him into a trap. He was an addict after all, and the cruel irony of living in the street, so I’ve heard, is that they get mugged and ripped off all the time (often by other street people ). But whatever doubt he may have had about my sincerity disappeared by this point, and he seemed convinced that I actually believed everything he had said. This is why he was so intent on keeping up eye contact, I thought, so he could gauge whether or not I was bullshitting him, or if I was awakening to the fact that he was bullshitting me. By looking into my eyes he believed he could determine if I was lying to him, which is exactly what I believed when I’d still been in doubt over whether the story he was telling was true, and it would be fair to say that in both cases neither of us had any luck with this method. I looked into his eyes – he looked right back at me – and there was nothing I could see that either gave him away or confirmed his story. There was nothing to see, except that his eyes were wild and unblinking, and it was certainly the same with me. I wondered if my eyes looked as wide open and abstracted, like doll’s eyes, the realistic kind, where the resemblance to human eyes is uncanny and all the more disturbing for their