States Evidence

The rule McMillan lived by was older than most of the people who broke it, and it went like this. You do not want the good spot. You do not want the last one either. You want the third best of anything, always, because the man who takes the best gets watched and the man who takes the worst gets pitied, and both of those are ways of being seen. The third best of anything is invisible. The third best of anything is a long life. He had not invented the rule. A man had given it to him a long time ago, on an afternoon that still lived in him more clearly than most of last week, and McMillan had spent a quarter of a century sanding it down and building his whole life on it until the rule and the man were the same shape in his mind. The city helped. Philadelphia was the kind of city that ran on people not looking at each other, a place of too many faces and not enough hours, row houses and cheesesteak lines and the El rattling overhead, a town that wore its grudges out loud and kept its real business quiet, where a man could stand at the same corner in the same neighborhood for a year and never once be seen twice by the same set of eyes, and McMillan had learned to move through it the way water moves through a crowd, filling the spaces nobody wanted, taking the seat with its back to nothing, ordering the thing no one remembers anyone ordering. Invisibility was not a costume he put on in the morning. It was a discipline he practiced every waking hour, the way other men practiced a faith, and like a faith it asked everything of him and promised only one thing in return, which was more of the same. More mornings. More quiet. More of the long gray unremarkable life that was, to a man in his trade, the rarest and most expensive luxury there was.