Look Sideways
A city in pain. A man with answers.
There was once a very successful man.
He owned ships that never sailed, roads he had never walked, and conversations between strangers he would never meet.
One morning he wandered into the city and noticed a faint smell in the air.
Not rot.
Not sewage.
Something older.
The smell of resentment.
A stench.
——
People are easiest to lead when they are hurting.
Not because pain makes them weak.
Because pain demands an answer.
The city was full of it.
Factories had closed.
Wages had stalled.
Dreams had shrunk.
Parents worked harder than ever and owned less than those who came before them.
The rich man saw opportunity.
Not in solving these problems.
In owning them.
He gathered the city’s anger and studied it like a merchant inspecting precious stones.
Then he performed his trick.
He took every fear, every disappointment, every humiliation and gave it a face.
Not his own.
Never his own.
A different face.
A foreign face.
A darker face.
A stranger’s face.
“There,” he said.
“There is the reason.”
The people looked where he pointed.
And because pain demands an answer, many believed him.
The rich man grew richer.
The city grew poorer.
Yet the strangest thing was this:
The people he blamed laughed as children laugh.
They buried their dead and celebrated their weddings.
They worried about bills.
They lay awake at night fearing failure.
They loved imperfectly.
They dreamed impossibly.
They carried old wounds.
They made mistakes.
Inside them beat hearts no different from any other.
Red blood travelled the same pathways.
Tears tasted of the same salt.
Hope arrived in the same fragile form.
The rich man knew this.
Of course he knew.
That was why he chose them.
A villain is most useful when he looks different enough to be feared, yet similar enough to be believed.
And so neighbour turned against neighbour.
Not because they were enemies.
But because somebody very powerful had convinced them that they were.
——
The people were aggrieved.
Life had shifted in imperceptible ways.
Memories had been replaced by a new reality.
Of neighbours who no longer spoke.
Of workers who no longer believed.
Of people convinced that somewhere, somehow, someone else had stolen what was meant for them.
——-
Most men would have tried to clear the air.
The successful man had a better idea.
He bought a thousand fans.
He pointed them in every direction.
And he watched.
The smell spread through streets that had never known it.
Families argued over dinner.
Friends crossed the road to avoid one another.
Entire districts became convinced they were under attack.
Business was excellent.
The successful man sold air fresheners.
Then masks.
Then books explaining why the smell existed.
Then subscriptions promising to reveal who was responsible.
The smell grew stronger.
His fortune grew larger.
Soon the city was choking.
Children born into the fog assumed it had always been there.
Those who remembered otherwise were mocked.
The successful man became the richest man in the city.
One day a child asked him why he had done it.
The successful man looked over the rooftops.
He looked at the crowds fighting below.
He looked at the towers bearing his name.
Then he smiled.
“Because,” he said, “clean air belongs to everyone.
But smoke belongs to whoever lights the match.”
———
The city burned now.
Cars overturned, people displaced from their homes; families shattered.
Smoke billowed.
All the while the rich man watched from above.
Smiling.
For as long as people looked sideways, they never thought to look up.