For most people, living in a $2,000 box leaves little room for anything aside from necessities. However, being a penniless twenty one year old working overtime each week just to make ends meet, I didn’t need much other than a mattress that sits directly on the floor and a toaster oven to fulfill my undying need for Pop Tarts. Each night, after a strenuous day of work at the local hardware store, once my legs have turned to jelly and my soul is crushed into a fine powder, trudging into the lobby and away from the chaotic rhythm of the city is the only thing I desire.

From living here, I’ve learned how often silence is taken for granted. It’s one of those qualities that people undervalue until it disappears from every aspect of their lives. You go for a stroll in the park, and there’s workers cutting down branches. You go to the library, and they’re hammering together another book case. No matter the time of day or the dead of night, the city’s constant boom-tap rattles on even if you choose to ignore it. So, instead of peace and quiet, many urbanites like myself have come to find solace in the finer details of the world. For me, the touches that each person brings to the table is what keeps me calm, because I know that everybody has their own story, even if I am merely an extra.

I enjoy the minute interactions between me and the nameless figures that tiptoe in and out of existence. In TV shows, they are scripted as one-shot characters. By definition: They are the people that serve an essential purpose to the story of a single episode, never to appear in the series again. Think of that woman on the subway who screamed at her dirty, cheating husband that she refuses to leave, or that child that knocked over a fruit display in the supermarket while trying to pick out the perfect orange. That is who I mean. Of course, not all one-shots are that memorable. Now remember that elderly man who caught you looking at an ad in the newspaper, telling you to go for a job interview, or maybe that woman who complimented your plain white shirt and jeans while passing by on the sidewalk. No matter who they are, all of these one-shots have something in common: They are disposable. Most even seem like they’re not real people at all. In my eyes, this means that I can be whoever I want to be around them. I can create my story and tell them all the false tragedies and dreamed successes I wish. The reason I preface this is because last night I came face to face with someone who thought of me as a one-shot in his story.

I dragged myself into the lobby of my building smelling of sweat, axle grease, and old copper. Passing by the woman at the front desk, I faked a smile in a desperate attempt at flirtation only to have my face grow cold upon turning the corner. From down the hallway, I noticed the elevator doors screech open as it stopped at ground level. From the elevator, three people pushed past each other, darting to the automatic revolving door past the front desk at the exit of the building. They got there at the perfect time so that they all had to stand by so it could swing back around in order to continue their race and find out who could wait for a taxi first. Two more people scampered past me, one a businessman and another a bus driver, both leaving the same drawer of their filing-cabinet home and allowing the world to treat them with varying levels of respect. One man in the elevator stayed put, not bothering to make room for me as I shimmied my way to the left of him. My head bobbed with the polite yet insincere nod I had been taught to greet with. He didn’t nod back, nor did he acknowledge my existence whatsoever. I pressed my button and made my way to the other side of the elevator, placing my back to the wall. As the elevator started to move, I realized something: There was only one button lit up on the panel.

“Hey, man. What floor are you going to?” I asked him, walking back over to the buttons.

“Same as you.” His voice had an unexpected softness to it, yet still rough like gravel made from pebbles.

I decided to strike up a conversation. “You live here?”

“No.”

“Then why are you here?”

“To see someone.”

I nodded, taking the hint that he wasn’t one to chat.

Outside of the elevator doors, the desperate wails of steel cables struggling to lift the car echoed throughout the shaft. I felt it begin to slow and suddenly screech to a halt.

“Again?” I rolled my eyes. “I’m telling you, this has happened to me at least five times now.”

“Hmph.” The man scratched at his stomach through a bulky, brown work coat.

“You ever been in a stuck elevator?” I asked him, “‘Cause I’ll be the first to tell you that it ain’t fun. I’d say we have about…” I checked my watch.

“28 minutes. Give or take based on traffic.” He pulled down on the front of his hood, concealing everything but his mouth. “There is time.”

“You’re right.” I swallowed heavily, remembering cheesy conversation starters that my therapist had told me to use when meeting new people. “So uh… what’s your story?”

“You don’t do this too often, do you?” The man answered.

“Do what?” I placed my thumb between my teeth and bit my nail. “Get stuck in elevators?”

“Meet people.”

I smiled slightly, allowing my teeth to peek through my cracked lips. “Funny.” I tried my best to match his stoic energy, a trick I learned from a search on how to get people to like you.

From outside the elevator door, I heard the murmuring of people discussing how to fix the problem. As the sound of metal clanking and drills spinning began, my thoughts scrambled and I lost focus on everything that wasgoing on. I closed my eyes and slowly breathed in and out through my nostrils.

“Makes you nervous.” The hooded man stated. “Why?”

I shook the worry away from my face. “I’m around the damn things all day,” I joked, “This is supposed to be my happy place away from the clatter.”

“You work at a hardware store, yes?”

“No,” I lied, “Construction.”

“You’re too skinny for that and your lack of vest and helmet say otherwise.” The man coughed, attempting to clear his throat, but his voice returned just as gruff as before. “I’d appreciate you telling me the truth from now on.”

Panic had sewn my lips shut. How did he know, I thought to myself. I went into full concentration, searching my memories for even a hint of where I knew him from, but only flashes appeared in my mind. Something about his outfit looked familiar, but his face was hidden under that cloak.

“Sorry, do we know each other?” I asked, holding back the traces of fear hidden deep within my throat.

“No,” he said in a sharp, jagged voice that could shred tree trunks directly into paper. He reached up and ran his nail across a scar just under his eye. His hand followed well above his eye and onto his forehead, although it was still covered by that damn hood.

“Are you some sort of celebrity then?”

He quickly turned to face me. I felt his eyes burning through his hood and into my own. He stared at me with the same blank expression plastered on his bleached face.

I followed up and said, “I just thought you looked familiar, that’s all,” once I noticed his hand balled into a fist at his side. As he watched me, my face slowly looked downward, doing anything to avoid the possibility of making eye contact with that awful sight once again.

“Maybe you’ve seen me before… or perhaps I’ve just got one of those faces.”

“Well I haven’t even seen your face yet,” I shot back at him, “So I doubt it’s that.”

“Better that way. It’ll just scare you more than you already are.”

My body tensed up. Was it that obvious, I thought. Brushing past that, I said, “Why? Are you that ugly?” Attempting to lighten the mood.

Without changing expression, he responded, “Not ugly… frightening.” His black leather glove reached between the buttons on his brown workman's jacket and adjusted something underneath. Every ounce of hope in me prayed that it wasn’t a gun. His hand came back out of his jacket holding nothing. I noticed that I hadn’t been breathing, and, without thinking, I let out an audible sigh of relief. He nodded with an I-know-you’re-scared head-bob. I responded with the respective point-taken nod but said nothing.

A loud clunk sounded out in the shaft below us. I shuddered at the thought of me and Mr. One-Shot plunging to our deaths if the repairman screwed up. What scared me more was that the last person I would be with was some nobody. He didn’t seem like a typical one-shot though. He was just too interesting and too unique. I’m sure in someone’s life, he was an important character.

“Why are you here?” The man asked me.

“I already told you. I live here.”

“You never told me and that is not what I mean. Think deeper.”

I thought deeper and eventually came up with something. “I’m just trying to make ends meet. Isn’t working thus far.”

“Not what I mean. Think deeper and further.” The one-shot’s pained voice drilled through the walls of my skull. “What brought the two of us to this exact moment?”

I looked at him with confusion.

The figure groaned. “When you’ve lived as long as I have, you begin to see the same eyes in different people. I know you.” His head turned to face me. “You carry eyes of deceit. You believe that you’re getting one over on the world, and you’re not. Each time that mask slips, I see the coward that hides beneath. I need to know why. I want to understand.” As he took a step closer to me, I gripped the bottle in my pocket. “Take me back to where it all began… Tell me about your worst memory.”

I felt myself slipping. “It was because of… her. That’s why I’m here.”

“Who is her? Tell me your story, kid.”

“She… my mother.” My voice raised. “She kicked me out and told me I was a waste of air! She beat me until I bled and then some! She locked me away every time she left the house and starved me and hit me each time she came home!” I placed my head in my hands and spoke through my palms. “Called me names and ignored me for days on end. And she held me up in a closet and let me sit in soiled clothes.” I leaned back and heard myself say the story I had been wanting to tell for years. “Every night I’d pray to God to let me live and by morning I’d pray for Death to come and end it.”

“Terrible.” The man tilted his head forward, revealing more of his ghostly white face. “If only it were true,” he whispered to me, “I can only help once you start telling me the truth.”

I stared at the man and sucked up the last of my fake tears. “No stop. Why don’t you believe me?” I tried to use a trick I read about in a book on psychology. “She hurt me,” I muttered.

“There he is. The coward.” His face contorted into a miserable grin. “You loved her, yet you hide behind this deceit and curse her name.” His expression returned to stone like before. “How did she die?”

I was taken aback by the question. “How did you know?”

“Lucky guess.” He leaned forward, towering over me like a brick wall. “How did it happen?”

I pressed my lips together, trying to let out the thing I had tried so hard to forget. I took a deep breath. “She was shot during a home invasion.”

“Tell me how it happened.”

“Through the head,” I shuddered at the thought of her blood painting the living room walls.

“Why don’t you start from the beginning instead,” he told me.

“Right. Yes. The beginning.” I closed my eyes, breathed in, and spoke. “I was young. Maybe seven or eight. It was late and stormy. I remember staying up in my room, watching cartoons with the sound off so my mom wouldn’t know I was awake.”

“And what did you hear?” He asked.

“I heard banging. Metal on metal. Each strike of lighting, a crash of thunder, a clink of steel.” I reached up to fix my inside out hood. “After a while, the clinks changed to bangs and the bangs to smashes. This was when I had had enough. I thought that maybe a raccoon or a squirrel got into the house at first, but then I realized that the sounds were too consistent and deliberate to be natural.” I let out a single laugh. “It’s weird, your mind always thinks the worst in those types of situations. Maybe it’s instinct or even just plain fear, but it’s for the best.”

“You’re getting off track.” He said, redirecting the conversation. “You got up to investigate, or no?”

“Yes, I had my baseball bat with me. It was one of those aluminum ones, all silver with a black grip made of tape.” I felt tears welling in my eyes, except these were real tears instead of the fake ones from before. “I uhh… I met my mom in the hallway outside my room. Dad wasn’t home, I remember he was out of towne on business, so there were just the two of us against the unknown.” I swallowed hard and continued. “My mom told me to go back to my room, but took my bat as a weapon. I could feel the fear that she had within her, but she acted strong.” I shook my head. “She was strong… for me,” I reconsidered.

“This must be when it goes south,” he interrupted.

I nodded. “About two minutes pass. They were the longest two minutes of silence I had ever heard. All was quiet aside from the pouring rain and the occasional clap of thunder. Eventually that was broken by a scream from downstairs.” I turned away from the man in the elevator. It hurt to look at him as I talked about what happened. “It was hard to watch the two men grabbing my mom by the hair and throwing her to the ground.” I shook my head and stuttered. “I-I wasn’t a hero. I couldn’t be. It was like I was powerless. Or maybe just hopeless-”

“Hey,” the man snapped at me, “The story.”

I obliged, not knowing what would happen if I disobeyed him. “The larger of the two men saw me on the stairs and aimed a gun at my chest, yelling to get my hands up and walk slowly down the stairs. Once I got close enough, he whacked me in the side of the head and I went black for what I guess was a few minutes.”

“Then he killed your mother,” the one-shot man suggested.

“Yes, well no… there’s just more stuff to tell.”

“Do tell.”

“Right.” I thought for a second, then asked, “Where was I?”

“You went unconscious. Woke up next to Mom,” He reminded me.

“Yeah. The two men had us in the living room. The large man held a gun on us while the skinny one filled bags with valuables. The two were professionals. They didn’t have to look for what they wanted, instead they just took what was there, like they already knew.”

“You think they did?” The shape in the elevator said.

“Did what?”

“Already knew.”

“I don’t know nor do I want to. That just makes it scarier thinking that we were being watched closely enough that they knew where we hid everything.”

The one-shot man grunted.

“Anyways, as the two were leaving, the larger man took his eyes off of my mother and she decided to play hero at the cost of her own life. She ripped off his disguise. ‘I saw your face,’ she yelled, dangling his mask in the air. He turned around and shot her in the face. Blood splattered over the walls and onto my pj’s, and she was dead.”

“Tragic,” he said with no emotion, “Then you moved to the city, got an apartment, and here we are.”

“Not exactly, there’s just…” I trailed off.

“What, kid?”

“It just never made sense to me, you know,” I said, “Like why her? Why then?”

“What do you remember about the men?”

“One was large. Tall and muscular. His face was old, sort of wrinkled, and a few acne scars on his cheeks. I’d know it anywhere. The other is… I don’t know. I never saw his face.”

The man said nothing, so I continued talking to fill the void.

“There was another thing.”

The one-shot man leaned in with interest.

“His gun,” I continued, “He handed it to the smaller man as they walked out. As it passed between them, I saw a silver scratch on the side of it, like he dropped it or something like that.”

The man didn’t care. “They never caught them.” He stated.

I nodded. “Yeah, they’re still out there.”

Silence filled the air. Each clink of metal made me shiver, reliving the night of my mother’s death. I tightened the grip around the bottle in my pocket as I felt the man’s presence getting closer to me.

I turned around, to see that he had not moved one bit. “Who are you coming to visit?” I asked him.

“Someone on your floor,” he answered cryptically.

“Maybe after, you could introduce your friend to me. I mean, even you said I needed to meet people.”

“No,” he said matter-of-factly, “I don’t make good company.”

I nodded, respecting his boundaries. It’s strange how many questions this guy asked without answering any of mine. Everything about him was so black and white. I liked it. It was like we were in our own little TV show. I imagined the two of us on screen, with the elevator doors opening up to a live studio audience clapping and laughing according to the queues given by the director.

“Do you believe in the Mandela Effect?” He asked out of the blue.

“Yeah, like with a lot of people having false memories.” I assured him I knew what it was.

“What about personal memories?” His hood lifted so I could see the bottom halves of his eyes, and what I assume was the majority of his scar. “What if someone told you something so much that you started to believe it was true?”

“Like gaslighting?”

“Like conditioning,” he corrected.

“Yeah… I mean I guess anything could happen, right?”

“So if it can happen, we can probably do it to ourselves with enough practice. Agreed?”

My eyes narrowed. “What are you getting at?”

“It’s a fact that memories are not what actually happened. When you think of something, you are really only recollecting the last time you remembered it. After a while, some details blur together and other ones are created based on what feels important at the time you think of it.”

“It’s like a game of Telephone, but with yourself. That’s what you’re saying?”

He ignored me. “I need you to remember: Who were the men in the masks?”

A loud crash came from the shaft below us. I jumped and the bottle of opioids dropped out of my pocket. It rolled to the one-shot man’s muddy boot. I scrambled for the bottle, but he picked it up before I could get to it. The man lowered his hood just enough to show the whites of his eyes. He inspected the bottle and a large grin spread across his face as if he just found something he’s been searching for his whole life.

“You know what’s crazy about insanity?” He didn’t wait for a response. “It’s a mindset. As soon as you’re insane, everything that you do is just brought down to that insanity. Anger and sadness become mood swings. Fears are paranoia. Retaliation is a defense mechanism.” He crushed the plastic orange bottle in his fist. “Your credibility is reduced to nothing. You only speak in lies.” The one-shot man started coughing uncontrollably but pushed through the fit in a gravelly, broken voice. “And you willingly choose this. Keep forgetting. Become numb. Tell yourself that she was this tyrant and spit on her grave.”

“Who the hell do you think you are?!” I yelled at him.

“I am you. The real you. I am what you have always been. I am what you try to escape every time you take one of these capsules. No matter what you do, deep down you will always have that memory.”

The elevator shook with his words. Stepping forward, he unveiled his hideously scarred face and glared at me through a set of blind white orbs that he called eyes. I took a step back and hit my head against the wall. My fingertips pierced my cheeks and ran down to my neck. With the nails leaving behind scratch marks and painting my face like a tribal warrior. “What are you?”

“Think, kid, think! Who was that man!” He grabbed my collar and held me up against the wall. “Tell me the truth.”

My eyes rolled back as my life rewound years at a time. “Picnic,” I muttered.

“Tell me.”

“It happened a year after my mother was killed. My father sat me down in a field and we ate lunch.” Blood pulsed through my ears. “After, we played hide-and-go-seek. I was first to seek.” The elevator screeched and clattered, like a monster coming to life. “He screamed from the bushes. Oh god, the blood! So much freaking blood! It was all over the ground!”

The man slapped me across the face and blood peppered the elevator door. “Get back on track,” he said, “Whose blood was it, boy! Speak.” He tightened his grip around my collar and I felt my feet lift off of the floor. “We don’t have much time!”

“My father’s blood! That bear! The smell of gunpowder! Everything!” I cried, “My father said it was fine, but I knew it wasn’t. He was dying and there was nothing I could do. The bear had a hole in its head and he was dying.” I breathed out of my mouth, holding down the bile I felt rising up my throat. “His gun sat on the ground, a-and there was a silver scratch on the side.”

“So who killed your mother?”

I couldn’t say it. Saying it made it real and I couldn’t believe it. I just started crying. There was nothing else left to do. Our TV show was down to the heartbreaking series finale. Where the hero dies at the hands of some one-shot character whose only purpose was to terrorize me. The one-shot man reached into his jacket and pulled out a large hunting knife. The credits started to roll. He slapped the blade against the wall next to my face which snapped me back to reality.

“Answer me. Who were those men!”

“I don’t know!”

“You know that face! And the other knew your house! Tell me who they were! I know. You know. Now say it and let the world know!”

I looked deep into his eyes. “He was mutilated! He was covered with claw marks and bites. He bled to death right then and there.” I punched the man in the stomach, but he had no reaction. It was like hitting a brick wall. “It was my father! He is what brought me here! He caused the pain. He is why I take the pills. He killed my mother!”

“Yet you think they still got away.” He let me go. “So what was it all for?”

“I wanted to escape. That’s all I ever wanted to do! What’s so wrong about that?!”

The elevator started to move. I cupped my bloody face in my hands. The man handed me a black rag from his coat pocket. I took it and said nothing. The ride up to the sixteenth floor was silent to each other, but the sound of my heart beating in my ears and his struggling breaths removed all sense of calm from my life. As the elevator slowed down, I felt like I could finally start to breathe.

Before the doors opened, he said something else, “That bear was dead before I got there.”

The door opened and a man stood outside. “All good, folks. I seem to have found the culprit right here.” He pulled out a small key and held it up to us. “Must’ve left mine last time I was here. Some people just don’t know how destructive something so small can be, I guess.”

His words went through my ears, but I didn’t hear them. It was his face that tore my mind and soul to shreds. The large, muscular man’s face wrinkled as he smiled, but it was a lie. I watched his mask of calm slip for a fraction of a second as our eyes met. He kept talking but all I heard from him were the clinks of metal on metal.

“He got a bit scared there.” The man in the elevator put a hand on my shoulder and turned me around. I stared into the black hood that had returned to its rightful place over the face of the creature that hid beneath. “Perhaps we’ll meet again someday. Although, for both our sakes, let’s hope not.” He smiled a genuine smile and patted the side of my neck.

The elevator repairman laughed at the situation. “Yeah, this type of thing can give you quite the fright.”

I stepped out of the elevator without a word, passing the old, acne-scarred man.

I walked down the hall and noticed that the man in the elevator had not stepped out.

As the elevator doors closed with both the repairman and the one-shot man inside, I heard a gruff voice say one last thing.

“Do you believe in Karma?”