An ambitious collection of interwoven short stories about negotiating life’s meaning in a corrupt, violent world…

Michel Sauret’s aim is to create stories that grab readers and pull them into the high intensity and emotional curves of the storyline. With Amidst Traffic, his collection of darkly humorous and brilliantly evocative
short stories, he’s hit an absolute bull’s-eye.

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The Staring Game

I started the staring game because I wanted to see what it felt like to be God. To watch people closely, and judge who they are. To stare at them and develop a commentary about their lives. Inspect their cleanliness. Their demeanor. Their level of self confidence. Their gestures toward friends. Their words against strangers.

The game started when I was shaving in my small Chicago apartment one day. My bathroom window looks out to a back alley that’s filled mostly with trash. Drug dealers go back there to do their business. And normally I wouldn’t care. There’s nothing really interesting in people exchanging money for drugs.

But one Sunday morning I watched a young man and a woman meet a coke dealer together. The girl was beautiful, with wild, dark hair. She dressed like a hippy, with hundreds of bead necklaces and colorful bracelets. The thing that caught my eye, though, was her tattoos. Her body was covered in them.

They weren’t your typical tattoos. They were words. At least that’s what it looked like from three stories high. Her knuckles, her arms, her shoulders, her ankles… They were everywhere. When I first saw her, I was angry with her. Angry that she would ruin her skin and her body by covering herself in words like that. But the more I saw her coming back, the more I felt compassion for her. She seemed trapped. Trapped in her tattoos and those words. Trapped in this city. Her gestures were jittery and distrusting. She seemed troubled. It made me wonder about her.

What kind of woman covers herself in tattoos like that? Just words. Not pictures or artwork. There was something poetic about it, but also disturbing.

The couple came to pay for their fix on a weekly basis. I watched the exchange from my private window, and I felt a little bit what God must feel like. High and above watching humanity effectively destroy itself.

Then one day, the guy came to pick up the cocaine, but the woman wasn’t with him. He was with a little boy. What kind of man brings a boy to a drug deal? And the dealer made nothing of it. Here’s your money. Here’s your drugs. Okay, have a wonderful addicted life now. Take care. Bye, little boy.

After that, I never saw the couple again. I never saw the woman with the tattoos. But by then, I was hooked. The staring game had taken hold of me, and now I needed my fix.

The rest of the dealer’s customers were boring. Just regular junkies. So I had to take my game outside of my apartment.

On my free weekends, I would go to a park, or a coffee house, or a bar at night, or anywhere crowded, and I’d pick a person and stare at them for a while.

There’s a coffee place by the lake where the girl barista has a tattoo of a flying crow on the back of her neck. She never smiled at women with children. She looked disgusted by their motherhood.

The businessman who walks his terrier in the park carries a green baggie with him, but never actually uses it to clean after the dog. He carries it in hand just for show. The terrier seems old. He lets the dog off the leash most days even though there are signs that prohibit it. He cleaned up after the dog only once, and only because he noticed me staring at him.

There’s a dago-looking dude at the Irish pub on the South Side who will drink nothing but Jagerbombs and Yuenglings. He never buys anyone a drink. Ever. He always leaves three dollars for a tip regardless of who is with him or how much he’s had to drink. He comes and goes with a different woman every week.

I thought I’d begin hating people rather quickly when I started this game. After all, if God exists, he’d hate us for sure by now. What else can you feel toward a people who ignore you for centuries, and whose favorite activities are consumption and self-gratification? What else can you feel toward a people who murder, lie, steal, rape and abuse their own bodies? Then they blame you for everything that’s wrong with this world.

But in playing my staring game, I didn’t get the benefit of watching people in their most vulnerable settings. In order to avoid getting caught, I had to play the game in thick crowds. I rode the public bus to work just so I could watch people during the week. There’s a man who thinks his shoes are talking to him. He’s young and handsome, and if he didn’t talk to his shoes, he’d look like a regular guy. From the look of it, his relationship with the shoes has gone sour. He does a lot of shouting.

But as the game went on, I was less interested in being secretive. In fact, most times I wanted people to feel watched. I wanted them to know I was there, judging their actions, decisions, discomforts.

I felt more a sense of amusement than hatred toward these strangers. Some of them were truly despicable people, sure; like the number of guys at the bar who got young women wasted just so they could drag them out to their car, practically carrying their drunken bodies on their shoulders. Or the drug dealer in the back alley, who will sell to anyone, even children. One time I watched him beat an old junkie to the ground and stomp on him because he owed him money.

What kind of God just watches these things happen and doesn’t intervene? How passive and removed can you possibly be from our suffering. It made me question whether he exists at all.

I watched the junkie lie on the ground for a long while.

God, do something! Help him out!

I’m not sure if that was a prayer or what. Did God enjoy watching the man suffer? I felt repulsed by it. Saddened.

I thought I was going to watch this man die right before my eyes, but several minutes later, he stumbled away. He was okay. He was alive, at least.

No. It wasn’t hatred that I felt toward these people. Perhaps a sense of pity. But who was I? Just some guy with an office job and a slight addiction for watching people. Who was I to hate them?

But I would discover hatred. Not my hatred toward them, but their hatred toward me.

That’s the first thing I discovered from the game: That people hated the idea of being watched. Of being studied. Judged.

I watched the barista girl hold the biggest grin as she served an espresso to a punk-rocker kid with messy hair, and then dropped that smile completely as soon a woman with a baby on her hip ordered a pumpkin spiced latte.

I spent three hours in the coffee house just staring at her.

At one point, she became noticeably tense. The place was pretty empty, except for a girl waiting for her drink to go. The barista made her coffee, but she tightened her lips and shot glares at me the whole time. I never looked away. I didn’t care. This was my game. This was my experiment. I wanted to know what people would do if they knew they were being watched all the time. I wanted to know what people might say to God if they had a chance to confront Him.

The customer got her drink and left.

The girl with the crow tattoo came up to my seat.

“You’re going to have to leave, now,” she said.

“I like your tattoo,” I said.

This paused her, but only for an instant.

“Listen. I don’t know what your problem is. But you have to go.”

“My problem? I don’t have a problem. I’m just people watching.”

“Go. Just, get out…”

“Why do you hate mothers?” I said.

She didn’t answer me. Instead, everything on her face tightened. Her brow, her cheeks, her chin. Everything.

“Get the hell out of my coffee shop right now!” she screamed. “You insane creep!”

Insane? I wasn’t insane. I was just watching her. I didn’t wish her any harm. I just wanted to study her and make a judgment of her character based on her actions and interactions with others.

This was my first experience with her hatred, anyone’s hatred, toward me. And I was quite taken aback by how convulsive she had become; how aggressively she had exploded. When I started this game, I figured that at some point people would confront me. I wanted that. But I thought we’d go into it with a chance to explain my experiment.

I stood, slowly, and she took a step back. She stared me down as I walked out of the coffee shop. I didn’t like the feeling of her eyes on me. I hadn’t done anything to her.

But that wasn’t my worst interaction.

The guy from the Irish pub was worse.

I knew he had finally noticed my staring when he kept making comments at his girl and pointed at me from the other end of the bar. The girl would half-drunkenly pat his chest, trying to tame her man, dismissing his overly exaggerated rage.

I knew he would come confront me at some point, so I ordered a Yuengling and a Jagerbomb. I sat them down in front of me. It took him longer to come up to me than I thought. The beer glass began to bead with sweat.

When he finally came up to me, I said, “Here. I got you your favorites,” and nudged the two drinks toward him.

“What the hell is your problem?” he asked.

“That’s the same thing the girl at the coffee shop wanted to know,” I told him.

He winced at my comment, like he had no idea what I was talking about, which, of course, he didn’t.

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means sit down, have a drink with me, and I’ll tell you what my problem is,” I said.

“Dude. I don’t want nothing to do with you. Just leave me alone and quit staring at me. I don’t like it. I see you looking at me one more time, I’m going to beat your eye sockets into your skull.”

“I’m just looking, man. I didn’t do anything to you.”

“Well, stop.”

“Before you go…” I grabbed his wrist. He looked down at my hand, and I let go.

“What?” he groaned the word.

“Why don’t you ever buy anyone a drink? Why do you always tip exactly three dollars? Why do you come here with a new girl every week?”

The look on his face was appalled, and I thought maybe I was striking a chord. Maybe we would get to the root of his weekly routines. We might be able to discover something together here.

“Why are you so sad?” I asked, thinking that question might break his silence and we could sit together and enjoy a few beers over deep philosophical matters.

But a rage set off in him that I didn’t expect.

He grabbed my neck, and before I could slip away or push him off, he slammed me against the bar. The edge caught my cheek and blood poured from my face. But he wasn’t satisfied with that. I was on the ground and he was upon me with fists and jabs and kicks and knees. All I could do was go in a ball, but I caught a look in his eyes that was filled with hatred so pure that the look of it hurt as much as the blows he delivered.

Eventually people stopped him and pulled him off me. But by that point my face had bled down to my shirt and my body hurt so bad that I had to be dragged out of the bar. I didn’t make it home that night because I could hardly walk. I hobbled to a side alley and spent the night with my back against a brick wall, crying out in misery and pain.

But despite the pain, the beating, the hatred—I couldn’t stop this game. There was still the man who walked his dog at the park in a business suit.

The next morning was Saturday. I regained some strength and made it to the park.

I sat down at my usual bench. As people walked by and saw me, saw my bloodied shirt, my busted lip, my swollen eye, their look of disgust was petrifying. You don’t know me, I wanted to tell them. You don’t know anything about me. I’m not a bad guy.

Their stares made me feel exposed. I felt like they could see past the bloodied shirt and the bruises. They could see my inability to keep a girlfriend. They could see me wasting hours on my work computer playing meaningless games instead of doing actual work. They could see the time I ran over a dog and didn’t stop to see if it was okay.

Later, I felt bad for that dog. I felt bad for whatever family it had belonged to.

Now I felt like all of my mistakes, my sins, had bled onto my shirt for everyone to see. None of them liked what was there or what I had to offer.

The man with the terrier showed up at nine in the morning, just like every other Saturday. Except, this time he paused, looked at my beaten body and walked up to me.

He sat down next to me with the green plastic bag in his hand, empty.

“What happened to your face?” he asked.

I didn’t want to answer him.

“Why don’t you ever pick up after your dog?” I asked him instead.

“So you have been watching me.”

“I have.”

“Are you one of them?” the man asked.

“Am I one of what?” I mumbled through my busted lips. My vision was blurred through my right eye. My brain hurt.

The man opened his lips to say something, sighed, and then thought better of it.

“Never mind,” he said.

The terrier sat quietly next to the man’s feet. No leash needed. The dog panted as he watched people go by.

“I’m Jack Carlos, by the way,” he said, extending a hand for me to shake. I didn’t take it.

“I’m no one,” I said.

He dropped his hand.

“Why have you been watching me?”

I brought my hands to my face. I tried to massage some of the pain away. It didn’t work. A strong gust blew from the lakefront. It almost blew the dog away, but the terrier held his ground and the wind passed.

“It’s just something I’ve been doing. It’s an experiment. I wanted to know what it felt like to be God.”

“That’s perhaps the weirdest response you could have given me,” the man said.

“What did you think I was doing?”

“I thought you were… someone else. You haven’t been the only one watching me, I think.”

Great. This guy was a skitzo.

“I’m not crazy,” the man said.

“I didn’t say you were.’

“No. But you were thinking it. And I don’t like that. I don’t like that you would judge me without even knowing me.”

There was a pause, and I could tell by watching the man’s lips move that he wanted to ask me something.

“Ask,” I told him.

“What did it feel like? To play God?”

“Hated,” I said.

“Hated?”

“People hate you when they feel judged by you. Even if you’re just looking. Even if you haven’t figured them out yet. It’s like how that saying goes.”

“Which saying is that?”

The terrier jumped on the man’s lap. Jack pet him.

“Hell is other people. A French philosopher said it, I think. People hate looking at themselves through the mirror of other people’s eyes. We stand in perpetual judgment when we feel watched by others. We don’t like what other people see in us. It makes us uncomfortable and vulnerable. We feel exposed. Like we have been called out on the fraudulent show we have been putting on. Our mask is lifted.”

The man seemed to reflect on this for a moment.

“I know what you mean. When I was younger, like fourteen or fifteen, I met a little girl who was six years old, and she had a stare that could penetrate right through you. Even if you smiled at her, she didn’t smile back. She just glared with those wide eyes. It made you feel like she knew everything about you. Every sin. Every fear. Every weakness.”

“Maybe that’s why so many people hate God, or pretend He doesn’t exist,” I said. “We can’t stand the idea of being under His microscope.”

“How can you be sure God exists?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes I wish He didn’t.”

Across the park, three men in dark suits stood watching the lakefront, but at times it felt like they were watching us. Again, I felt exposed. Maybe I should quit the game. It hadn’t won me any friends, and my face sure wasn’t any prettier from it.

“If you were God,” I began, and paused.

“What?” Jack asked.

“Never mind. Maybe the question is all wrong.”

“Ask me,” he said.

I breathed heavily. I wasn’t sure I wanted to talk anymore. I wanted to go back to my apartment and sleep. Or maybe I wanted to board up the little window in my bathroom and put an end to the game completely. I didn’t want to watch people’s silent suffering any longer.

“Why doesn’t He stop this?” I asked. “Why doesn’t He stop our suffering if He really is there?”

Jack pondered this for a while. A very long while. We passed that stretch of time in silence, watching people live their lives moment by moment. A man walking his dog seemed to be flirting with a woman walking hers. A mother and father encouraged their child as he made an effort toward his first step. The three men in dark suits were still standing there, shoulder to shoulder to shoulder, looking past us.

“I think the better question is, why do we cause such suffering to one another?” Jack said. “What kind of people are we, setting fires, raping women, flying airplanes into buildings…”

I dismissed that last part because I had no idea what he was talking about.

It was late August, and that catastrophe hadn’t happened yet.

“I watched an old man get beat up by a drug dealer last week,” I told him. “And I didn’t do anything to stop it. I called out to God to intervene, to help the poor man, but I just stared at him as he lay motionless on the ground. I didn’t run down to help him off the ground. It’s no wonder we hate God. We blame Him for the things we do, and expect him to act when we don’t do anything ourselves.”

Jack didn’t respond. Instead his eyes were fixed on the three men in the distance. I wonder what he found so interesting about them. They began to walk toward us.

“Let’s go, Blake,” Jack said to the dog.

The terrier jumped down from his lap and Jack stood to go.

“What’s the matter?” I asked.

“I’m going to have to go. I think you should stop your game. You’re not going to solve anyone’s problems by playing it. You’re not God. You can’t pretend to be God. And you certainly don’t want the burden of knowing the things He knows. Have a good life…” he tried to remember my name, but then realized I never gave it to him.

“I’m Eran,” I told him.

“Okay. Bye Eran. Have a good life.”

With that, he left. He walked away quickly. The terrier’s tiny steps scurried behind to keep up.

The three suited men walked the opposite direction and left.

How strange. And perhaps meaningless.

Jack was right. I wasn’t God. I couldn’t pretend to be able to piece these things together. I didn’t know why the girl with the crow tattoo hated mothers or why the guy at the bar got so angry when I asked him why he was sad. I didn’t have enough knowledge to judge these people.

Eventually all of these strangers disappeared from my life. I never saw Jack come back to the same park after that day. I wasn’t allowed into the Irish pub any more. Even though I wasn’t the one who started the fight, I was known as the guy who stared at you. People didn’t like that. I walked past the coffee shop several times, but I never saw the girl barista work there again.

They had all escaped from me.

How do I escape your watchful eye, oh God?

When I returned to work, I made a commitment to play less on my computer. I bought a small, dark curtain for my bathroom window. But I was still terrible with women, and I often thought about the dog I ran over and left for dead on the road.

A few weeks later, 9/11 happened. My first impulse was to ask God why he’d let such a catastrophe to happen. But every time that question came up, I remembered the old junkie getting beat up in the back alley. Why didn’t I do anything to stop it? Why didn’t I help him up off the ground and take him to a hospital?

Those questions silenced me.

They humbled my desire to play God.

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