about perspective

I pushed open the bathroom stall door and discovered on the toilet there a man who looked like Alex Trebek taking a shit. His gaze was locked in the thousand-yard stare—like he was seeing an invisible atrocity unfold in the distance but feeling nothing. A serious shitter. He did not maneuver his eyeballs to see who it was that walked in on his most intimate moment.

A normal man—and he was not one—would have flinched, made a motion, feigned a gesture in a futile attempt to regain agency. Would not a normal man look at the beast moving in on him, threatening the boundaries of his dignity? Amazing. He blocked me mentally; but I knew—and I think he knew—we were the same man.