All that remained to him was his watch—apparently something which sneaker creatures knew nothing of—his shoes and socks and his slacks and polo shirt. His sunglasses were a forgotten casualty of his mugging, laying somewhere behind him. The reading glasses were thankfully still at home. His papers, the referral to the specialist surgeon, who might castrate him and to the chemotherapy clinic where he might be methodically poisoned, the pharmacy script—all gone. He supposed some sneaker creature with a fanciful name would be using his pain medication and sleeping pills for recreational purposes by the time he managed to get to his delicately gabled house in old Northwood.

The late morning sun stabbed his sensitive eyes with the harsh rays of August.

His stomach ached.

The agonizing pressure behind his testicles mounted with each step.

He neared the YMCA along the north side of 33rd Street and smiled hopefully to see the upscale people of all kinds coming and going. His left foot began to burn at the base of the toes within his Rockport loafer. The ankle socks he was wearing to aid his poor extremity circulation were not padded like his wools or well-fitted like his Gold Toes and seemed to offer little protection.

The cars and buses rushed by, the gusts they generated cooling him as sweat began to bead under shirt and slacks.

Fit women, mostly slightly younger than he, danced and smiled absently behind the window above to his left. He steeled his heart and refrained from musing after what might have been, if only he had had the courage to enroll in a Zumba-Yoga-Cross-Fit class stocked with…

He was thirsty and wondered if there were a water fountain within, and thought better of the torment that seeing sweaty women close up would cause at the close of his lost cause life and continued on.

He had a watch, a house, a well-stocked pantry, a landline even. He would call and cancel his credit cards, get hydrated, and begin his own therapy. He would walk, walk, walk in good socks and beat this thing growing in his guts, develop an ancient, forgotten kind of willpower...

He smiled at himself over his false hopes, but still thought that the heroic pedestrian battling cancer on his feet appealed more than laying butchered on white sheets, waiting for his brother, Ed, to fly into town for an obligatory goodbye.

He was at the mouth of the driveway and looked to his left to see two refined ladies with well-coifed hair, a white driver and a black passenger, both tall and beautiful at about 35, the right age for…if. He stood on the shaved curb to let them pullout and heard, from his right, the shuffle of sneakers and the telltale bounce of a basketball, and, “Yo, excoose me, Misser, do yo gots da time?”

Operating according to the principals of rote civility that his well-meaning parents had nurtured him on, he looked down into the eyes of the muscular young athlete, two of his fellows looming taller behind him and said, “Certainly, young man,” and raised his left wrist to gaze into Grandpa Decker’s old watch, a Swiss watch which utilized the pleasing, ticking arms of the clock, not the digitized window into nothing.

As he saw the minute hand hit 4, with the hour hand still on 11, the young fellow gently held his hand with his own as his friend bounced the basketball behind him, and expertly unhitched the watch that was Grandpa Decker’s last remaining legacy.

Theodore looked into the boy’s face and said, “Wait a minute, that’s my watch!”

The boys crowded past him as the woman driving clicked her door locks shut audibly and her African American passenger admonished her for being a racist and insisted she unlock the doors of the 10-year-old Buick, in mint condition and bespeaking the hands of the auto collector.

The women had eyes and words only for each other and their ethical debate about the white woman jumping to criminal conclusions as they pulled off into traffic behind their air-conditioned heat shields.

The boys had continued on their way, the muscular one and the six footer admiring his watch, the towering one with the bald head and sloped shoulders bouncing the ball and looking back at Theodore, daring him to follow. The sound of the basketball bouncing seemed to have a metallic sub-sound that bit into his ears, disturbing his fatalistic complaisance. He was exhausted and did not even bother raising his voice and was certainly in no condition to follow these giants and dispute their recent find.

He stepped down into the drive and felt his hip seize up. This was a problem he had not experienced in some years, since he stopped playing tennis because of it. Now the old injury was rising as if from the dead to torment him further. This angered him, pointed his building rage at himself for being weak, for being naïve, for being a coward—no, something worse than a coward. For a coward would at least experience fear or the desire to recover his property.

What was Theodor Decker’s malfunction?

He decided, in a pain-filled moment, that what was wrong with him was being soft, being white. So he hobbled on, his foot blistering painfully, the other one beginning to sting, his gut and groin afire with a wicked ache, his hip out of alignment and wracking his every damaged and cancer-ravaged part with the shock of each wooden-footed step along the concrete path that was this sidewalk, this strip of secondary space, reserved for cast-offs and criminals in this wheeled city.

Self-hatred welled up within him and he began to take a cruel delight in pounding out each crooked step and shuddering with pain. On and on he hobbled, jarring every joint and nerve, until he made his way up Loch Raven to The Alameda, and felt the skin tearing from the base of his left foot, the big blister that had developed on the right foot squishing with every heavy and increasingly crooked step.

He took a step and groaned with pain, whispering to his hated self, “You’re weak, Decker!”

He took another painful step, bit his lip, and snarled, “You suck, Decker!”

He took another agonizing stride and as he snarled in pain, sneered between gritted teeth, “Die, Decker, die!”

He was at the curb, in position to cross The Alameda to get to Northwood, to climb the paved path to that cozy placed he had paid for with his mechanical engineering degree and one contract more meaningless then the next—fucking designing a better wrench for tightening the nuts at the base of street-light poles—my contribution to society, my legacy—please! he thought.

He thought about looking for traffic but simply snarled, “Fucking die, Decker,” as he hobbled out into the street and no pain shot through his body, just a dull, exquisite numbness, as if he had gained access to a miracle drug.

He heard a car horn beep, heard another roar past him, heard yet another screech to a halt, and an angry voice, half his age, yell, “Ged da fuck outta da road, whiteboy!”

The automaton he had become kept hobbling, creaking like the very crooked timber of humanity his hobbled morality had staggered fitfully through over the course of his pursuit of the Grand Life Meaningless. He reached the other side and climbed up on the curb, disgusted with his footwear, tearing off shoes to reveal bloody socks, and tossing them back over his head into traffic. Raising his two hands overhead and giving the world behind him the finger in duplicate as his feet began to tear on the concrete and he limped upward into a community without a soul, for the first time in his life he felt vital and whole.

“Fuck you, Decker,” he snarled, with unconcealed relish as the young woman and her nervous beagle darted out of his wretched way up onto a sun-scorched lawn.

“Out of my way, bitch!” he sneered as he hobbled ever faster, ever more crookedly up the street, on two bloodily pathetic and belatedly penitent feet.