If one god damned person in the world had cared about him, things might have turned out very differently. At least, that was what he told himself. He was in the middle of telling himself that as he was downing the last of the Captain n� Coke in his glass, the ice sliding down his throat like Prozac, and the bar�s sound system increased in volume, playing that song that always made him smile, because it was his Fight Song.

�Another, please,� he said with a sarcastic sort of politeness. He was feeling it now, that swell of who-knows-what in his head that always came after the third or forth rum and coke of the night, provided that the nicotine helped it along. He liked this place for two reasons; good music, and a bartender who never told him he had had too much. It had been quite some time since he had been here, but he couldn�t remember why he had stopped coming. He could sit for hours, alternating between a cigarette and a drink, throwing his head around to his Fight Song, and wake up in the morning without the slightest knowledge of how he made it to bed. This was how he had always wanted his life to be.

Or maybe it wasn�t, but at least he didn�t feel like the rest of them, like a slave.

He felt the gun in his coat pocket resting against his hip, that was for anyone who wanted to make him a slave, be they his teachers, his government, or God him-mother-fucking-self. He chuckled, reminding himself that he had never shot anyone in his life, and would probably be too spineless to do it if he wanted to.

Probably? He knew he was too spineless. There could be no better test of that than the week he was now trying to drown the memory of with alcohol. It started with the day he didn�t shoot his landlord after being informed that eviction would come soon. The day after, when he didn�t shoot the cop writing him a speeding ticket, didn�t help. The next day, when his Algebra teacher handed back his three most recent assignments, and he read aloud, �Hmm� F� F squared� F cubed,� and he also did not shoot her, he had thought that this would certainly be the end of his string of bad luck.

It wasn�t.

By the time he got around to not shooting the Mormon�s at his door explaining to him the greatness of the Lord, he was certain that he would never have the guts to shoot anyone, or he would have done it already.

And he didn�t. He simply trudged to the bar and drank and threw himself around to the blare of his Fight Song. He threw his head forward and unsurprisingly lost his balance, falling from the bar stool and crashing to the ground. Somewhere in that headlong tumble, for a split second he thought he saw a woman jumping out of her seat as if to come to him, he barely had enough time to note that she looked strangely familiar before the floor rose up to hit him. And there he sat.

No one noticed. He nodded, that seemed about right. He rubbed his side, the worst pain of that fall was where the gun had jabbed into him. He sighed and looked up; the bartender was offering his drink down to him. He smiled and took it, wondering again why he had ever stopped coming to this bar. I love this guy! The feeling was most likely not mutual. After all, no one loved him. No one cared.

He had forced himself to come to terms with the fact that not a single person in this world or the next would care if he were to simply die. He suspected that there were a great many people who shared that rank. He began to understand, then, why some people concocted elaborate suicides. They knew that their death would be insignificant to anyone unless they could make the manner of their death interesting enough to consider.

He wanted just the opposite. He wanted to die in a natural disaster or perhaps some act of terrorism, something to make him a number, not a name. He was comfortable now, with no one caring about him. To have some attention placed on his demise would be rather unsettling.

Before he was quite so comfortable, he did seek companionship. He had always liked guns, and there was, of course, a war going on. He strode one day into an army recruitment center. There was an American flag hanging on the wall, and he suddenly realized he had never liked the way that flag looked. There was a poster encouraging him to �Be All That You Can Be�, and he suddenly realized (with a twinge of regret) that he probably was just that already. There was a young man in a uniform who asked if he needed help.

He left the slave inside without saying a word. He took a bumper sticker that said Army Of One, slapped it on his truck, and drove away.

Some years later, he walked into a church. There was a cross hanging above the pulpit. And he remembered now that he had never liked the way that cross looked. There was a bible on a table. He remembered that he didn�t much care for reading. There was a chorus of people singing their worship to the theological culmination of mankind�s own fear of death. He realized that he had no such fear.

He left the slaves inside without saying a word. He took a pen that said �Jesus Loves Me, This I Know�, and drove away.

His search for companionship didn�t go much further than that. Women didn�t seem to think he was handsome. He didn�t care enough about his friends to keep them for very long. It didn�t matter; he liked his isolation anyway. Sometimes, it almost felt like isolation was the only thing keeping him from going crazy.

Some years later, within a week of each other, that bumper sticker had been peeled off of his truck, and he lost the pen.

The coincidence seemed small and insignificant, like him.

As he sat on the floor, he held his Captain n� Coke with one hand and rubbed the bruise on his side with the other. Damn gun.

He really hated that thing, and he wasn�t sure why he kept it. He had stolen it one night from a drunken friend who looked like he could accidentally shoot his foot off at any moment. Since then, whenever he was bored, he would take the gun down to the firing range and spend an hour or two discharging shots at lifeless paper with red circles drawn on it.

He didn�t know why he did it, but he did. The more he did it, the less he felt he could stop. Maybe it was an outlet for his rage. Maybe it began to feel as if the gun was a part of himself. Maybe having the gun always with him made him feel like he wasn�t alone.

Any or all of these reasons would also explain why he hated it.

He liked to play the Fight Song while he blasted away the paper. If he didn�t listen to it, then he felt as if he were doing exactly what he was really doing, shooting paper, and he would repeatedly come to the conclusion that it would be far more efficient to burn or shred the paper, if he wanted it destroyed. But when he played the Fight Song, he could look at the paper and see all the slaves to god and country and with each screaming shot tell them, �I�m not a slave, not like you.�

Not like them, he thought as he looked around the bar. It was a motley sort of mix. There were skin-heads and metal-heads and pot-heads and everything in between. His gaze was snared by any familiar face, regulars of the bar or former acquaintances. And a woman.

A woman in a black sweater and dirty blue jeans. The one who had jumped up when he tumbled to the floor. She had sat back down by now, and when he looked at her, he couldn�t help but think that before the exact moment he started to examine her, she had been staring at him. The familiarity was uncanny, but he couldn�t place her. In fact, he couldn�t even begin to attach her face to any name or experience. Looking at her was just a strange feeling like d�j� vu. D�j� vu squared. Fucking cubed.

Before he could waste any more thought on it, however, six faces were an instant reminder of why he had stopped coming to this bar. He saw the angry faces staring at him, spiky hair rising up over them in all the colors of the rainbow. Their words came back to him. He had been too drunk then and was too drunk now to possibly remember why it had come to these words, but he remembered the words.

�You ever come back here, we�ll fucking kill you.�

They meant it. He was smart enough to know that a broken ego is less painful than a broken skull. He ran then, and he stood to run now.

He made it outside and staggered in the rain as he moved for his truck. He heard behind him what was happening. The half dozen young men with spiked hair and torn jeans and tatooed and pierced everything were rushing out, one of them jumping into a vehicle and turning the key in the ignition in case he managed to reach his truck and start driving. But that wasn�t at all what he did. Because as the punk turned his car on, the stereo inside kicked in and the music grabbed him. The Fight Song.

He stopped, and he thought that they did too, perhaps surprised by what he was doing. He had his hand in his pocket, on the gun. Could I do it? Could I? Yes�

Unfortunately for him, even with a decision to gun down the gang, the question had taken too long to answer, and as he was flicking the safety off in his pocket, a body slammed into him from behind, tackling him forward. His head shot straight through the passenger side window of his truck, and for a moment, he was released, left staring down at broken glass stained red on the dirty passenger seat.

He pulled his head out of the window and turned around to see through the blood in his eyes concentric circles of human bodies surrounding him. The first was composed of the six gang members, the second was the patrons of the bar, gathering around, and making it quite clear what they had come to see.

�Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!�

Sure, why not, he thought. The Fight Song was blasting from the car stereo. What do I have to lose, anyway? Fuck the gun.

He broke his repose to, obviously unexpectedly, as he managed to pull off the attack, swing for the nearest face. His fist flying through empty air, horribly off-mark, reminded him that he was still drunk. They were ready for his second swing, and caught his arm before it ever had a chance at a strike. Then, of course, they began to hit him.

He had been in fights before. As a child, for every lesson he had in reading or math, he had had two in the ways of pugilism and grappling, raw and brutal education in speed, impact, and pain. Nevertheless, it never failed to amaze him how different fighting was in real life than in the movies. In the movies, two men could batter each other for an hour and then go off to model clothes for the remainder of the day. This� this was different.

The first thing he felt after someone caught his arm was a boot slamming into his midsection. As he keeled forward and the air blew out of his lungs, a fist came to greet his face. The fist connected and stayed with him as it spun him around and his molars punched and grated a sizable hole in his cheek.

He spat blood. The crowd loved it.

�Fight! Fight! Fight!�

He used the momentum to come up and managed to land a fist into a face. As the strike landed, he felt the nose break, felt bone collapsing and heard the almost certainly imagined sound of cartilage snapping.

There was little time to feel gratified about it before something metal that he didn�t see, a tire iron or a crowbar, perhaps, was brought down on his outstretched arm. The angle that the forearm took on after the strike, making it look as if he had an extra elbow, gave him a reasonable assurance that the arm was broken

�Fight! Fight!�.

More strikes came then. One of them did to his nose what he had done a moment ago. The next sent two of his teeth falling to the pavement. It�s different from the movies. When you get hit, you fucking feel it.

He staggered and blundered through the affray and thought about everything except that he was being beaten to death.

Be All That You Can Be!

He knew what he was. Being an army of one was all well and good until an army of six decided to batter you senseless.

His head had been struck too many times. He wondered if it was because he was drunk that he thought that he was looking at his attackers and the pavement at the same time, but judging by the pain, it was far more likely that one eye no longer resided in it�s socket.

The crowd had stopped chanting, this was becoming too much. Most of them were leaving, perhaps to call the police, but by then, he had fallen to the asphalt. He saw nothing out of one eye already, and he purposefully closed the other as they began kicking him. His entire body was pain.

Jesus loves me, this I know�

He wondered if when he next opened his eyes, it would be that bearded face telling him, �I�m sorry, if you�d only listened to those Mormons.�

But it wasn�t. When finally the strikes ended and he heard with his ear against the pavement the punks fleeing his body, he opened his eyes to see a woman approaching him. Torn jeans, black sweater. So familiar�

All he could do was lay in pain, unmoving, unable to focus on anything else.

Pain�

When the woman reached him, tears were flowing down her face, but she reached down and she rolled him over, which only made everything worse.

Pain squared�

He couldn�t begin to imagine why she did it, but she opened his pocket and took his gun, and then she walked away, crying in the rain. He knew that before long, an ambulance would come. He idly wondered if he would be dead by then, but it seemed insignificant somehow as he watched the woman walking away and somehow, with her leaving, everything was even worse.

Pain cubed�