Chapter 1

In his apartment that morning, he knew himself well enough to declare upon waking that he was no longer the same saint he initially was. Actually, it’s not as though he had one day decided in his youth to become a saint. Sainthood was just a concept or an idea that he thought would be considerably useful in a day and age when the world fell to cynicism and sin, and at one point he attempted to become a saint, perhaps because it was easier to do so when the mores of his world seemed to be crumbling. His sickly sin, he believed, was a condition he could never rise above, but even despite this fact, he assumed that moral living was something worth achieving, and it became a condition he could live with—not to be better than anyone else, but because he wanted to define his existence by becoming a saintly figure—to do good deeds, to have a compassion that exceeded the trappings of luxury and easy sex, to save the world—as that was, at one time, his primary aim.

But after lifting himself off of his bed amidst the empty beer bottles and stale rinds of late night pizza that bed skirted his mattress, he went to the kitchen drawer where the silverware would have normally been kept and lit up a joint that cast its thick shadowy gloom over an otherwise sun-lit apartment. He had taken too many steps backwards to even think about returning to his glorious status as a saint. He was far too removed to pontificate to anyone on how they should lead a good, moral life. He moved beyond this into the shady areas of his own innate hypocrisy, as he was now moral about some things but not about others. He permitted certain behaviors but condemned only those that rose too high above the stink of that which was unpardonable. And in such a circumstance it forced him to judge what was considered pardonable and what had passed along in the muck of sins that were questionable and, therefore, permitted.

And who was Charlie Zero to judge anyone or anything, as only his solitary existence defined him as a man who did nothing of true value and nothing that detracted from its current value. Charlie was no longer a man who could sustain his own existence by what some may call ‘heart’ or ‘will’ or ‘intelligence’. He needed women and only women to validate what hid beyond the number of his name, and yet he had to pay for this validation with women by paying them through the money he made from a job he neither liked nor disliked, with women of his choosing who neither attracted him nor repelled him. And if he couldn’t buy a woman on any given night of the week, especially when alone and sitting in his room, then perhaps this validation would somehow fall from the sky, as though he had waited patiently for it all his life, or even waited a minute or two longer during what he considered to be the bitter sting of patience.

Perhaps it was as simple as a number line that stretched to the right to infinity, and perhaps he could hobble along that line, searching for this validation in his ever-nauseous gut, only to find that after zero, zero becomes one, then one becomes two, then two becomes three, and then infinity becomes infinity plus one, infinity plus two, and so on. He never liked numbers much anyway, and he didn’t really care for them now that he faced a predicament where he both existed and didn’t exist at all. And so Charlie disliked his name but decided to live with it, and perhaps he had been so used to being called a ‘Zero’ in the school playgrounds, in the dining room where his once-living mother called him to supper, within the neatly-printed lines of the junk letters that collected on his coffee table, and within the strict, unbendable lines that became the prison of his life. His name was simply a number that had been passed over. So much for the joint he just smoked.

And yes, Charlie Zero paid for his women, simply because he refused to kill for them, as that’s what most women secretly desired. Granted that he thought killing men to have his choice of women was worth every bit of soft skin moving on top of his in the middle of the night, but in no way would Charlie ever kill a man, whether a woman wanted him to or not. It certainly wasn’t the fault of women that he had to kill other men, as women were naturally predisposed to want no other solution, and if he were to kill one man, it would in a sense be like jumping over the numerical line that extended into something valid. Whether a simple number greater than zero represented a body killed or a status to be held, it would merely perpetuate what was already grotesque into a lust for killing that knew no end. So killing men for a shot at luring a legitimate woman in his bed was certainly no match to the logic of trying, at least, to finagle a woman away from another man, as this could be done without having the blood of a complete genocide on his hands.

So somehow Charlie Zero decided that he must avoid killing other men and still have a woman in his bed, which is why he paid for sex in the first place. But then he thought, why pay for it anyway? Why bother? A woman wouldn’t love him anyway, as though love and matters of passion were also characters in his delusional play. But regardless of how horrible he felt about his paying for sex, he had to leave the apartment at some point, only he didn’t know why he should leave, as nothing really waited for him on the other side of the thin wooden door that separated his apartment from the rest of the town outside. Life on the other side of the door seemed as dreary as the day before, yet it was filled with the possibility that he may run into someone who still smiled and, therefore, understood some little bit about him.

When he finally forced himself to leave his apartment, he walked down a sunny street that blinded him to the other pedestrians on it until he rested underneath the awning of a local grocery store that sold wilted flowers and rotting fruit. Walking past him was a woman, although not such a glorious vision of the woman he had so many times imagined, but a woman whose complexion was fair and her disposition haughty and elegant. She wore a beret that was tilted to the side of her slender head. She also wore a coal-colored scarf that caressed her neck as though it were a continuation of her naturally condescending airs. Charlie had nothing to lose by looking in her direction, as perhaps he would have to kill a man after all, even though he had sworn he wouldn’t, and perhaps this man was the same man who loved her, as surely she must have had someone to love her. Her face was indeed plain and ordinary, but it fit the profile of someone who could certainly validate the parts of him that he had left for dead long ago.

She even smiled to him, after all of his hang-ups, and since he found her quite sweet at this point, he might as well have walked right up to her and asked her a question about where she got such a scarf, or where she found the tight little body that walked around with it, her pants just below her waistline and her mind much too smart and chaste for the likes of him. The fact was that he knew nothing about this woman. He only knew that he needed her in his life.

This, perhaps, was his first mistake. You don’t choose any one woman. They instead choose you, hopefully when the time is right, but usually it was his timing that was always off. Charlie had understood that these women had been fed since birth to accept certain kinds of men who were predisposed to do the same sorts of things that these women were used to. Every inclination of their sex was controlled and mapped out beforehand, such that a woman couldn’t imagine a life that went far beyond that which had already been planned and scouted, even if the life were so ordinary that even the heaviest dose of sin couldn’t provide for its palliative of freedom. But women certainly weren’t bad people to Charlie Zero. They were instead caged- in by circumstance. They were trapped within a mindset that meant extinction to the ones who loved them if they took one spontaneous step one way and not the predetermined step along the predetermined route, and it was a shame, because Charlie Zero, too ensconced within his own past saintliness, did not have the conscience to kill any man for this woman. And because of the man this woman probably slept with, some scumbag or some self-involved plutocrat who had an implicit hand in sentencing Charlie to his given name, a man who fed upon the same maggot-feed of the same Godhead that relegated the many to slavery and the rest to lives of nomadic alienation, then perhaps he would have to avoid the painful act of deprogramming such a woman from the robot she was made to become.