This summer I learned that the Mark of Cain was on my forehead. I have never had a brother (a few thuggish and abusive stepbrothers during my mother’s second marriage; a few more benign close friends who are like brothers; that’s about it), nor have I murdered anybody. Even if I possessed the desire to fulfill some sick fratricidal fantasy, the reality of who my mother popped out of her uterus would quickly kibosh the gauche bloodlust. (For the record, my official position on murdering members of your family is that it is a very bad thing to do and it should be avoided. It’s a far better policy to stay in shape and sustain a healthy pescatarian diet just so you can outlive your more annoying relatives, encourage them to eat food drenched in saturated fat, carbs, and cholesterol, and then tap dance on their graves when they die five to ten years before you do.)

Nevertheless, the Mark was there. It has always been there. A forensic head specialist — a learned gentlewoman who is friendly and congenial (aside from the belligerent manner in which she screams at her manservant) has put in several decades examining cranial protrusions that exist in some liminal state of palpable observation — later informed me that the Mark was forged in early childhood when my head became stuck between the slats of my bed and I screamed for help and somehow fell asleep, waking up to very kind firemen who delicately raised their thick boots over the toys sprawled messily across my bedroom floor so as not to crush them. The firemen rescued me and neatly restored the bed to its original condition, but the baleful presence of my nasty and abusive father had created circumstances for a barely visible mist to penetrate my noggin and produce the Mark in question. It appeared that the foolhardy clumsiness of my youth had unknowingly sown the seeds for my incredibly annoying middle-aged predicament.

The Mark decided that 2026 was the big year for a coming out party. Sometime around April, friends began drifting away from me and, when I asked why, they invented lies to create excuses so that they could skedaddle from me permanently. One of my friends was absolutely convinced that I had kidnapped her dog, boiled it in a large pot, and served it for dinner with asparagus and potatoes au gratin. When I told her that her dog was presently raising its leg and pissing on my shoe, she said, “You’re missing the point! Get out!” And I removed my urine-stained shoe and hopped to the subway with various people whispering, “Look at his head.” My girlfriend accused me of unspeakable things that I had never done and we broke up and I became homeless, staying for weeks in a Harlem warren with a very long and creepy hall and being beaten daily by two Russian women so I could get the discount rental rate. Now I did have to turn around so that the two Russian women would not see the Mark and they could focus on the important business of desecrating my bottom with painful red welts. But as humiliating as this all was, it did allow me to move into my new apartment under budget. (If you are a boarder between apartments faced with such a predicament, I have one piece of advice. The ass heals. Deal with it.)

Needless to say, my life swiftly turned to shambles. I thought I was being unintentionally untoward or a little clumsy. Yes, it’s true that we’re all living in the worst timeline, but how could all of these misfortunes have happened to me so quickly? When I held the door open for a woman as I was about to buy some groceries, she stomped hard and painfully on my foot, pointed to my head, and said, “Don’t you see it?” “See what?” I replied. Then she screamed, “You idiot!” And she kicked me in the balls and I could not get a rise in my pants for three weeks. Not that I had any lover waiting in the wings to pleasure. Somehow that latter detail was more humiliating.

The Mark was entirely indiscernible to me in the mirror. But when I traced my brow with my fingers, I could find no grooved texture on my skin, nor any scaly malodorous patch, nor ruddy ridges, nor any unsightly bump resembling the carcass of a long-popped cyst. I only knew that the Mark was a soft spot indistinguishable from the rest of my flesh, roughly an inch and a half on my forehead closer to my right eye than my left. I knew that was the source of what scared so many away because that was where I felt my grief when I shed the dead weight of tears as more misfortunes accrued.

Yet everyone else could see the Mark as plain as day. The Mark was not as flagrant as a neon sign advertising a roach trap motel fifty miles off the two-lane highway to Vegas. It was more like Peggy Guggenheim’s nose, but worse.

The Mark had been placed on my forehead by a fictitious deity that I had never believed in. Or perhaps it was some secular cosmic joke from the universe. None of the experts knew for sure. I consulted doctors and psychiatrists and even a professional knife thrower who thought he could crack the case but who accidentally tossed one of his tangs into the secretary’s abdomen. (The injury didn’t kill her, but when she woke up and saw my Mark, the paramedics couldn’t resuscitate her and I felt even more depressed.) They all told me that the Mark couldn’t be cauterized or frozen off with liquid nitrogen. Part of the problem was that every time someone felt even a whit of compassion for me, the Mark would fade ever so slightly into this ephemeral halo, making it difficult to angle a scalpel or aim a lesion gun. I was told that I was burdened with the Mark even though I had never known an Abel. You might say that the people who rebuked me practiced an altogether different form of Abelism.

I had tried to cover it: a difficult task for something I could not see. And not just corporeal touchups, but an understated grace that I never announced. An invisible kindness practiced daily that I hoped that others would detect, but that few took the trouble to see. The Mark was intended to neutralize all natural good will that I tendered.

When I started lowering my watch cap as the rains began to pelt Brooklyn in the fall, the Mark was still there. Invisible to me but an eyesore that caused others to recoil. Texts and emails went unreturned. Invitations were politely declined at a steadier clip. I had managed to pull myself out of yet another abyss, but now the Mark was more radioactive. A stranger muttered, “It glows,” before running away from me as if I was a leper offering a handshake. It was a stigmatic symbol that even the astigmatists could espy with their twitching eyeballs.

I think one of the reasons why so many people with physical and mental infirmities began to revile me was because they had finally found a subhuman specimen in which they could feel superior. I adopted a policy of taking it on the chin. But this grew tiring and I succumbed to a great state of depression. None of the therapists I called would agree to see me because they said that the Mark made them feel physically disgusted. Unlike the two Russian women, they could sense the Mark even when I was lying on a couch with my head turned opposite from the therapist’s exacting chair. I considered trying to carve up my forehead, doing the very thing that the surgeons and the knife thrower claimed they could not do, but, because my new landlady was so nice (the new landlady, who called herself Justice, was fond of wearing a blindfold at all hours for reasons that were never explained to me; so this may explain why I was granted this unanticipated kindness), I felt it would be rude to stain the hardwood floors of my new apartment with blood.

So I’ve decided instead to live with the Mark and hope that eventually someone will emerge with an even more hideous and unsightly Mark than mine. I mean, the way things are going, pretty much everyone in this sad and dystopian nation will probably have a Mark at some point. So maybe I’m simply an early adopter.