The bad guy sits on his couch with a lemonade, watching a ball game on TV. The bad guy is depressed. He doesn't want to be a bad guy. He would like to be a good guy. He feels like a good guy sometimes, has held briefly in his rough hands a good deed and marveled at it, how delicate it is. But it is a fleeting feeling. He is nothing but a good guy Cinderella, and at the stroke of midnight, poof: bad guy again. Like the time he looked out his window and saw his neighbor Tom teetering at the top of a stepladder, cleaning the leaves and other accumulated gunk out of the gutter that ran the rim of Tom's roof. The gunk was stubborn, the bad guy could see the strain on Tom's face as he used a paint scraper to loosen it up, and he thought, This is my chance. Tom is oblivious to his teetering and I can change that. So the bad guy ran out of his house and across the yard to Tom's yard and gripped his hands on the ladder and said up to Tom, "Tom, hey, whoa there," and Tom, surprised to find the bad guy suddenly on his lawn, gripping his ladder, promptly lost his balance and fell, spraining his left ankle. The bad guy said, "Oh my god! Tom, I'm so sorry," and helped Tom hobble back into his house. Tom told the bad guy not to worry, it was just a sprain, and he knew the bad guy was only trying to help. But later that night, in bed with his wife, Tom said that he didn't know about that guy next door, that despite his good intentions he could sense something dark behind the guy's eyes, and maybe they should think about moving before having any kids.
But that was before the experiment. Because a moment ago the light bulb of inspiration shined brightly over the bad guy's head and he stood up with a start, spilling his lemonade. Maybe if I can't be a good guy, he thought, I can at least be a neutral guy. The type of guy who if someone asks a friend of his, "Hey, what do you think of that guy?", the friend has to pause a moment before answering because he's forgotten who that guy is.
A nothing guy.
So the newly minted nothing guy sits on his couch with a new lemonade, now watching the Home and Garden Network because he figures it's a neutral channel. His old lemonade is still sticky at his feet. He's not sure yet whether a nothing guy would clean the mess up or leave it be. Perhaps, he thinks, the very definition of a nothing guy is to hold two choices in his head, wavering, wavering, never doing anything except for nothing. On the television screen, a couple is remodeling their living room. The husband wants to keep a ratty overstuffed leather chair because it's his favorite chair. But the wife curls her lip and says something biting and after the commercial break the chair is gone. At the end of the show, a Realtor appraises how much value the remodel added to the house, and the result is less than they spent on it. Suddenly the nothing guy realizes that he's taking satisfaction from the bickering couple's despair: he is turning back into the bad guy. In a panic, he shuts off the TV. Being a nothing guy isn't easy, he thinks.
The nothing guy decides to take a walk. He passes Tom, his foot in a brace, washing his car in the driveway with a garden hose. Tom waves, but the nothing guy simply nods at him, acknowledging his existence yet cutting off any small talk about the weather or the local baseball team. The nothing guy walks on. Four blocks later he comes across a black and white cat lying underneath a truck parked on the side of the road. The nothing guy loves cats, the way their soft fur and the gentle vibrations of their purring makes him feel as if he's in a warm, squishy place, which has uneasy psychological connotations he prefers not to think about. The nothing guy wants to pet this cat. But then he thinks about Patches, and Scatchy, and Brownie, and Uncle Pickles, and all the other cats he had had in childhood, cats who had died in a constellation of sad and painful ways. So he merely returns the cat's steady gaze as he walks by, although in one part of his mind he's petting the cat, and in another part he's saying, "Stop being a bad guy!"
The nothing guy ends up walking to his local bagel shop, where he stops in weekday mornings before work. The counterman, Aziz, always greets the bad guy by name, but today he stares blankly at the nothing guy for a second before exclaiming, "Hello! My favorite customer! How are you? The usual?" The nothing guy thinks, Sweet, it's working.
That night the nothing guy decides to extend his experiment to a dive bar in town. He walks in, sits down at the bar, and orders a Bud Light. To his left sits a beautiful woman, her hair cut short in a way that he finds irresistibly attractive. He wants to talk to her, but his new nothing guy brain can't come up with anything neutral to say. Instead he takes a swig of beer. But then in the mirror behind the bar he notices the beautiful woman tilt her head back to take a sip of her wine, and her neck is long and graceful and suddenly he feels a bit weak. The Bud Light slips out of his hand and makes a sharp noise on the countertop. Beer foams and spills onto the counter and the nothing guy tries frantically to contain the foaming with his mouth. Glaring, the bartender wipes down the mess with a towel. The nothing guy silently curses himself and his bad guy thoughts.
The beautiful woman gets up to go to the restroom. When she returns, without thinking the nothing guy pulls out her stool a little so she can more easily get into it. Except the beautiful woman isn't expecting this and nearly takes a pratfall. The beautiful woman calls the nothing guy a jerk and takes her drink to the other side of the bar. The nothing guy is stunned by this turn of events -- sometimes it shocks even him how quickly his good guy Cinderella transforms back into the bad guy -- but before he can chastise himself for his thoughtless action he notices the woman on the other side of him is laughing so hard she has to pound the countertop. Between sharp intakes of breath, she says to him, "My god, you're a regular Buster Keaton." The nothing guy takes her in and thinks, Wow. They exchange names and pleasantries and talk and talk some more. He's careful to be a nothing guy, to think neutral thoughts, say neutral things. At the end of the night she kisses his cheek and calls him a name that sounds like his name but is not his name, because his nothingness has caused her to forget it. Something inside him shrinks. He ends the nothing guy experiment right then and there.
Months later, the bad guy is in bed with the laughing woman, who is now his girlfriend. He is resigned to being a bad guy, has decided that this is his lot and he may as well enjoy it. Things are getting hot and heavy in bed. He reaches for a condom on the nightstand. But when he tries to put the condom on, it shoots from his fingers like a rubber band and bounces off her forehead. The bad guy is mortified and begins to plaster her forehead with kisses and apologies. But his girlfriend is giggling, squirming under the kisses. She tells him, "What I love about you most is that you always try." At that moment the bad guy realizes there is no such thing as a bad guy, or a good guy, or a nothing guy, and that small something that has been diminishing deep inside him grows suddenly and expands outward, rocketing along his arms and legs until his whole body is full of it. He tells his girlfriend he loves her. She stops squirming, kisses him softly on the lips, and says, "I love you, too, Nate." Because that is his name.
