He was not even a frightening one.

He was a small, pale, cornered person in a rented suit, standing beside a dance floor with no one left in the room willing to look at him with anything but disgust.

That is the thing about a man who is all surface: take away the surface and there is no depth underneath to fall back on, no core of real substance to weather the exposure.

He had built himself entirely out of other people’s belief, and when I took the belief away — not with an accusation, which he could have talked around, but with his own voice, which he could not — there was nothing left of him to stand up.