Karen King sat in her office, long after the rest of her staff had left for the day. Her joy over the incident she’d orchestrated that morning had faded under the pressure of keeping her empire running smoothly, and she barely spared a thought to what had become of the crying man after she had ordered one of the other women in the office to take him home.

They’d done what they set out to do. They’d broken him. What happened next wasn’t her problem.

‘As if that scrawny little excuse for a man could ever be a problem for me,’ she thought, a savage smile playing across her lips. She pushed herself away from the desk and reached for the ceiling, trying to stretch the knots out of her back.

Then she saw the small figure in the doorway, dressed in a sweatshirt and jeans with a bundle under its arm. She thought it was one of the office girls coming in to work late, until she realized it was him.

Her smile stretched to a grin

“Well, hello, Pauline,” she said sweetly. “What brings you here?”

The man cocked his head and looked at her. He looked ... odd. Unnaturally still.

“This morning,” he replied, his voice strong but oddly emotionless.

“What about it?”

“That’s what brings me here.”

Another silence.

“Have you come to complain?” Her eyebrows rose. “Because you’ll get no sympathy here, sweety.”

“I expected none.” He shrugged. “I deserve none. No, actually, I came to thank you.”

“Thank me? For what? Humiliating you?”

He shook his head. “No. For the clarity you and the other women gave me. I’ve never seen the world and my place in it so clearly, in my entire life.” He took a breath, and let it out slowly. “It’s very liberating, knowing who you are and who you aren’t. And who you’ll never be.”

“What do you mean?” The conversation rapidly began to slip sideways, beyond her control. She hated when that happened.

“You ripped my mask off. Didn’t you know?” His eyes stared straight into hers, and she found herself shivering at the emptiness she saw there. “You and everyone in that office tore my mask off, pushed me in front of a mirror, and showed me who I was, and who I wasn’t.”

“What the hell are you taking about?”

Paul looked at her, not unkindly, and sighed.

“I am a small man,” he said, as if he were asking a stranger in a diner to pass the salt. “Always have been. Looking at me, there isn’t much to see. Soft little voice ... a pretty boy even. Not what I ever wanted to be, not even close. I almost look like a girl, but I’m not, and I never wanted to be one. Not that it mattered.”

“I grew up the butt of endless jokes about my size, my looks, my strength or lack of it. No friends, because no one would have me. l spent my years being beaten up by everyone ... classmates, my brothers and sisters, my father at home.” Again, his tone didn’t change. As if he was talking about someone else. “Everyone got to take their shot. The only things I was good at were numbers and computers. So I hid in my room, playing games online and wishing things could be different. I kept thinking that maybe, once I was out of high school, I could make a life that would be better than the one I had.”

“Eventually, I graduated, got out in the world, and discovered it wasn’t any different than before. I was still small, but now there were more people to point it out to me and rub it in my face — or worse, ignore me for being ... insignificant. After a few tries at asking women out and being laughed at, I just stopped. Why try again? It wasn’t going to change.”

“Then, as a fluke, I got the job with your company. Surrounded by women, dwarfed by many of them. I could see myself becoming a joke here, too. I certainly wasn’t going to find a friend. Past experience had taught me that friends were something other people got without even trying.”

“I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know what I could do. Then one day, I realized that the one thing I could change was my attitude. If I couldn’t BE bigger, maybe I could ACT like I was. Maybe if I acted important, smarter, sharper ... like my opinions mattered more ... maybe I could get people to see me as I wanted to be seen. As something more than a punchline. After all, what did I have to lose? So I did.”

“At first, there was a feeling of confidence attached to it. I heard the laughter but ignored it, because for the first time in my life, I didn’t care what they thought. The confidence was ... addictive. I couldn’t ignore the laughter forever, so I made myself believe it was jealousy, because after all, I was so damned good at everything, wasn’t I?”

A small edge crept into his voice, his eyes still locked on hers. “The problem with believing your own lies is that eventually, you stop seeing the truth. I created the mask I wore as a sword, so I could fight my way towards something that looked like respect. It became a shield that I hid behind, because a small part of me inside knew the truth of my sorry-ass existence and didn’t want to face it. And the confidence turned cruel, and became arrogance. I went on the attack.”

“I began to bully and belittle others, because I knew ... I knew inside that they’d do it to me if I didn’t do it first. And part of me loved putting down the women I worked with, because I knew inside they’d never see me as anything but something to laugh at anyway. The idea that any of them would ever like ... or even love me? Now there was something to laugh at.”

“Then came this morning. You set me up with the new dress code and your free uniforms, then you gave everyone in the office the ammunition they needed to take me down. When I saw that the uniforms were skirts and blouses ... when they saw my reaction ...”

Paul stopped, and then laughed. It was a dry, hollow sound that felt more like the cry of a wounded animal than any laugh she’d ever heard.

“They held me down, stripped me, and dressed me up. I couldn’t fight them all. Hell, I couldn’t even fight one of them. After all, I wasn’t ever really big and strong, was it? Any strength I had — all I had to hold onto — was wrapped in that awful mask, full of ego and arrogance and stupidity. But you took that poor crutch away, didn’t you? Between the clothing, the attack, the humiliation, and your dismissal of my pain as I cried like a baby on the floor, you ripped off the mask and they tore it into a million pieces.”

“And in the end, all that was left sitting on the floor when the mask was gone was the thin, small, practice target I had always been. Actually, I was worse than I had been before, because now, instead of laughter or scorn or indifference, there was only hatred. And that was what I deserved, after all, wasn’t it? After what I’d done? For the crime of pretending to be more than I was?”

His voice was still almost a monotone, but he was still as stone, and she couldn’t look away. A thin spark of the agony he must have felt flickered briefly in his eyes, but it died as she watched. He stepped forward and put the bundle on her desk.

“There’s the uniform they dressed me in. The one I wore home. I have no use for it now. Sorry about the dirty footprint on the bottom of the skirt — that’s when the woman who dragged me home kicked me out of her car in front of my apartment before she drove off. I crawled up the stairs and stood in front of my apartment house door, and got a good look at my reflection in the front window. I saw ... myself.”

“So as I said, you ripped off my mask, pushed me in front of a mirror, and showed me who I was, and who I wasn’t. And who I can never be.”

She shook her head, still confused. He sighed again.

“I can’t go back to that office. They all hate me, and they’re not wrong. I was an asshole, and now I’m nothing at all again. Less than nothing. And I hate them, because they have jobs, and lives, and families, and friends, and people who care about them. And I’ll never have any of that. So I’m done.”

She licked her lips, her throat suddenly dry. “You could apologize.”

He tilted his head and considered it, then nodded. “I could. Then what? They aren’t about to forgive me. I know hate when I see it. And even if they do, what do I have to look forward to? Years stretching ahead of me, all alone and in pain, tormented by all the real people? That’s the clarity you gave me this morning, by the way. I know now that I can’t be anything but what I am — the human joke. It’s not going to change.”

“You could — ”

“Could what?” His eyes narrowed. “I have no options, really. What was that old saying, biology is destiny? The one the mask trotted out the other day. It fits me like a glove.”

“Once I got out of that uniform, I looked you up on the Internet. Spent the day reading about you, before I trashed my computer and left it on the sidewalk along with everything else I owned. You’ve always been beautiful, confident, in control. You rule your empire like a queen, and people respect you. So you have absolutely NO idea what I’m going through or what I feel like. And you never will.”

“Like I said, I’m done. I know you’d rather have a woman in my spot, so hire one and everyone will be very happy. You could even save some money and hire someone who’ll fit the uniform. On the other hand, you could just burn the ones you made for me in effigy, so everyone can get the rest of that hate out and get back to their lives. Think of it as a team building exercise.” He shrugged. “Whatever you choose, I came to thank you for forcing me to see the truth. It’s always best to know where you stand ... and now I know.”

The man turned and started for the door. When he reached it, she cleared her throat, and he froze, his back to her.

“Where will you go?”

“Somewhere ... not here. A place where I can be ignored, one last time.”

“What ... what will you do?”

He looked over his shoulder, and for the first time since his arrival, he smiled.

“You don’t really care, do you? After all, I'm just a man, and a poor one at that. As far as you’re concerned, I‘m nothing but a bad joke. And everybody knows that the best thing about a bad joke ... is how easily it’s forgotten.”

The door closed quietly behind him.