The Misery Voyer

The couple seated at the table nearest to me were fighting. Not loudly. Not obviously. Not in a way any normal person might notice. At that moment, they were sitting in almost perfect silence, save the heavyset man’s occasional sniffling (which, given the time of year, could very well be attributed to allergies).

In fact, since they sat down five minutes earlier they had not said a word to each other, and their waiter, practiced in his art, must have picked up on the same tension in the air that I had. He greeted them kindly, poured them each a glass of water, and emphasized the happy hour specials — “You can’t spell happy hour without ‘happy,’” he’d said.

Indeed.

Their faces expressed no emotion, either. They were entirely blank-faced, eyes devoid of even the slightest twinkle. When the man sniffled, it gave the impression of a tick. The woman blinked seven times in the five minutes I’d been sitting next to them. I counted. They were locked in a Cold War the likes of which I had only seen once before in my years of silent observation. In that first instance, I was an unwilling observer, but the skills I developed then have since become pivotal to my hobby.

I am a Misery Voyeur, though I receive no sexual pleasure from my scrutinization. The pleasure I receive is purely spiritual, a nourishment of the soul so exquisite it could be compared to a vintage wine. It brings me inner peace to see others miserable.

In other words I am a complete bastard.

Over the years, I’ve learned to pick up on subtle signs of misery. Most people displayed at least one. They stopped smiling too quickly after laughing, for instance, or they glanced at their phone just a bit too often. Perhaps they owned a car, the surest sign of a miserable life.

And this couple were two of the most miserable people I’d ever seen. How could they not be?

What was left of the man’s hair was rife with dandruff, his suit was several inches too small in almost every measurement, and every time he sniffled a small bit of phlegm interrupted his breathing so that he also needed to clear his throat, resulting in a steady rhythm of subtly annoying sounds that clearly drew the ire of his wife.

His wife, for her part, would likely have had a better life if not for the man sat in front of her, though the dark circles under her eyes gave away a profound lack of sleep and her posture indicated years of untreated scoliosis. These things alone could not have made them so miserable, though — there was surely something else, and I was determined to find out what.

I turned to the man seated next to me at the bar. He had sat down about 11 minutes before the miserable couple, ordered himself a Manhattan, and sat with his eyes glued to the basketball game on the television. He exuded no remarkable amount of misery, no more than the average person, nor did I believe him to possess the keen perceptive prowess that I did. There was truly nothing special about him.

“Look at those two,” I said to him. “Have you ever seen a more sorry pair?”

The unremarkable man looked back at me with an unremarkable expression, in which I could only read that his drink was stronger than he expected. The unremarkable man was drunk. His gaze drifted slowly down to my pointed finger, then followed the line of sight to the miserable couple. I looked in their direction too and was surprised to find the woman looking back at me.

“Pathetic aren’t they? This fat piece of shit is spilling out of his suit,” I observed. “I’ll bet she’s only with him for his money, just waiting for him to die so she can move on to someone better. What do you think?”

Still, the unremarkable man would not answer. He stared at me again with that same drunken expression, and simultaneously we turned back to find that the miserable man was now looking at us as well. To my particular shock, the miserable couple’s otherwise stoic expressions had been replaced with agape mouths and furious eyes. It was as if they had heard me. Surely, this could not have been the case. I was a wallflower, a master of the craft of silent observation, accustomed to speaking in the quietest of whispers — it wasn’t me they were looking at, no. It was the unremarkable man.

“Quit being so obvious, would you?” I said to him. Again, he did not respond with anything more than his inebriated goggle.

In my periphery, though, I could see that the miserable couple were speaking with their waiter and motioning in my direction, and as the employee approached I realized the unremarkable man had, through his slow-wittedness, given me away. The jig, so to say, was up, but I would not go down without a fight. I raised a fist and struck at the unremarkable man, and in a surprising display of reflex he raised his to strike back. Our two fists collided in a sudden burst as bits of sparkling light rained down around me.

When I looked up, the man was gone and in his place was a wooden wall and the frame of a shattered and rather expensive looking mirror. There was a tap on my shoulder as a man I had not seen before told me, “Sir, you need to leave before I call the police.”

Ah, shit.

I had, to be use a rather crude expression, screwed the pooch.

The unremarkable man had, in fact, been nothing more than my own ghastly image reflected back at me. This was tragically not the first time I’d made the mistake in my drunken fugue. And as I was escorted out of the building I thought to myself that it surely would not be the last.