The Parasociopath
and the Long-Distance Runner
by Jules
part 1
The crowd at the River of Sight stands dreaming under patterns of colored lights and threnody. The solo act known as Long-Distance Runner lays out scenes from a dystopian version of the world. The lyrics find an abstract, detached beauty in the ruins. The music is not urgent. Quite the reverse. The dissociated vocals and cryptic lyrics make the music seem like shards of glass wrapped in gauze. It is up to listeners to interpret how to feel about them.
Most of the listeners get it wrong. Dennis B. Hulls should know. He grimly tolerates the cheers of the crowd around him. When Long-Distance Runner starts a call-and-return chant between himself and the audience, they bring out phones with the flashlight turned on.
Hulls does not take his phone out of his pocket. He does not want to be just another light in the crowd at the River of Sight. He does not want to sing the chorus back at the singer. He wants to be on stage. He deserves to be on stage. Only he knows what these songs are really about. Only Dennis B. Hulls has experienced them in the same way that Long-Distance Runner has... even if Long-Distance Runner doesn’t know that yet.
Some of the audience are too drunk to bother with a phone light. Others are high. Still others are wrapped hand-in-hand with their partners in a repulsive display of public affection. Hulls doesn’t like the smell of sweat and alcohol. He doesn’t like the constantly shifting crowd, where he cannot keep track of everyone moving into and out of his orbit.
Instead of looking at them, Hulls looks at his own reflection in one of the big, gilt-framed mirrors beside one of the booths to the side of the venue. He is the sole figure in focus amidst a blurry, shifting crowd. He compares himself to the sole member of Long-Distance Runner, a skinny man named Colin. If Hulls is honest, Colin doesn’t look as good as Hulls does. Not with those freckles and strawberry waves of hair. His long nose narrows to a pencil-point.
At least Hulls has visible eyelashes and eyebrows. He is a head taller and definitely more muscular. Hulls works on himself. Still, he wears a shirt a size too big, so it falls the way it would if Colin wore it. Hulls has replicated the shirt Colin was wearing on the “Suntime Hours” insert. It shows the phases of the moon arc across the shirt, glitched so that the red and blue colors are out of sync with the image.
Oh, he knows what that glitched shirt is supposed to represent. He knows it the same as Colin does. Even now, Hulls senses iterations of people and places as shadows cast by events onto the ever-receding wall that was the future.
Some of these iterations are more probable, overlapping dense and dark. Others are less so. They only appear in a few, far-flung timelines relatively isolated from the rest... difficult to get to and even more difficult to depart from. The closest analogy Hulls can come up with is standing on a rock in a river and discovering that the next rock is far off, while the one behind is high up.
Hulls is pretty far out from the well of possibility now. This is an outlier world. Here is an outlier version of the man he thinks of as Colin, as though they are on a first-name basis, because they soon will be. Hulls knows this because he and Colin are both travelers between possible worlds.
Bright light glances into his eyes: Colin has raised his guitar and let a single beam of light shine off the metal scratch guard. He tilts it so the beam of light shines across the crowd, lighting up individual features. Hulls doesn’t realize his face is lit up until the beam has already moved on. Too late to make eye contact and make Colin pause.
“Thank you,” Colin calls, as he always does, and disappears into darkness.
Hulls hates the queasy feeling when the house lights came back up. The steady yellow lights are the visual equivalent of stepping onto land after being at sea.
* * *
Months have passed since the show at the River of Sight. There haven’t been any impromptu shows or even social media posts on the Long-Distance Runner account since then. Not content with waiting, Dennis B. Hulls scrolls through Pixagram looking at old posts.
Pixagram is the only social media Long-Distance Runner has, and Colin has no personal accounts. Hulls has assured himself of that. Most of the pictures of Colin are either in the half-darkness of the stage, or heavily filtered, or taken at dusk. Most are obviously taken by him rather than of him: a river at sunset, a cave mouth and interesting buildings.
The posts are old. They are few. Hulls already has copies of them saved to his computer in this and other possible worlds.
Hulls comments on a mackerel-scale sunset with a gas station below it: “Where are you that gasoline is $4.50 a gallon?”
He clicks around through other tabs on his screen, waiting for an acknowledgement. He listens to the music on his own startup channel — in this range of possibilities the site is called SoundScape — while playing poker. He plays for entertainment rather than money: He likes the glittery graphics and the sound of the digital voice praising his efforts.
Hulls watches faceless neighbor children play their meaningless games in the yards next to his own. Eventually he goes to work at City Light and sets his lazy co-workers straight. He doesn’t much care about the players in this world of mannequins, but he does care about keeping the stage itself lit.
Finally, almost a week later, the distant-internet Colin replies to Hulls’ Pixagram comment: “Haha wow you really zoomed in.”
Finally, the acknowledgment Hulls deserves. He had zoomed in. He is dedicated. Colin sees that. Soon, he will realize that Hulls is more than just another fan. When they start to talk — and they will, soon — Colin will find that Hulls understands him on a level that no one else he knows possibly can. Colin will tell Hulls about aspects of his life he’d never speak aloud to anyone else. He will find out that Hulls already knows them all. Hulls feels like he does, anyway.
Shortly after they connect on this new level, they will begin to write songs together. These will be much better than anything Colin has come up with on his own. They’ll also have to change the band’s name. Long-Distance Runner only acknowledges one person. The new material and a snappy name change will do what Colin alone has never done in any possibility range that Hulls has visited: vault the two of them to mega-fame.
Hulls has already decided not to gloat about this or hold it over his future band-mate’s head. Of course not. Colin certainly deserves the credit for the initial spark that inspired them both. Hulls would never have embarked on this journey without him.
Hulls has gone through these conversations before in his mind. He even writes his favorite ones out. He plays out out so many of them so often that they take on the quality of a much-thumbed book or well-worn trail. Now, though, they are made brighter, more vivid, by this spark of connection. Hulls can’t move forward or backward in time, just side-to-side the way Colin does but, this evening, their future friendship is as certain to Hulls as the reply to his comment.
He pulls up the tab so he can go over the words again: “Haha wow you really zoomed in.”
When he considers this, Hulls has to wonder if Colin takes Hulls’ dedication to detail seriously. “Haha?” Who laughs at their future confidant? Who puts their best friend down? Hulls is cast abruptly back to his time in school, before he figured out what he was. Conversations could take a turn into mockery before he realized what happened. Hallways were lined with whispers and laughter he was certain were directed at him. Even compliments contained hidden barbs.
Or is this supposed to be friendly teasing? Hulls has seen it amongst his co-workers, even if he hasn’t got the hang of it himself. Maybe a talk with Colin is in order. “Sometimes it’s hard to read tone over social media,” he will tell his friend and band-mate, “especially when we’re just getting to know each other.”
“Except I shouldn’t have to tell you that,” Hulls says aloud. “You ought to know not to joke around before you’ve become friends with someone.”
Or — and here is an encouraging thought — does Colin already consider them friends? Except if he does, why aren’t they direct-messaging with one another already? Why hasn’t Colin even followed Hulls back on Pixagram?
Because he is waiting for Hulls to make the first move, of course. This makes sense. Colin is notoriously reserved off-stage.
So he sends Colin a direct message: “We should meet.” Then he waited for seconds, minutes, an hour. The clock in the hall chimes a single for 1:00 a.m. Hulls sends more direct messages, to no avail.
“Hey.”
“I know what you are.”
“We’re the same.”
“I want to help you.”
If they are friends, and if Colin was teasing him, why ignore him now? In fact, why hadn’t they met face-to-face, one-on-one? They could be tuning up their instruments and discussing lyrics. They could be doing that right now. The joints of Hulls’ fingers, wrapped around his computer mouse, have gone white. The plastic creaks.
He sends another direct message. “I don’t want to be angry with you, but you’re really pushing my buttons.”
Nothing. None of his messages have even been read.
Hulls reads Colin’s comment again. “Haha wow you really zoomed in.” Nobody says “wow” unless they’re impressed, right? If Hulls works from the assumption that Colin is teasing the way a friend would, then yes, “wow” expressed admiration. The sentiment is not very clear, but Hulls decides he can forgive his future bandmate.
They will definitely have to talk about this kind of communication before it causes them real problems: the kind of problems that Colin will regret.
This new conversation plays out in Hulls’ mind, placed in an appropriate sequence to the previously established deep, philosophical conversation they will have about their song lyrics. Hulls will take the opportunity provided by Colin’s admiration for his attention to detail to bring up communication skills. He wants this new conversation to glow as brightly in his mind as the others did, just an hour ago. It should have, given the fact that Colin has interacted with him.
Yet the feeling of euphoria eludes Hulls. Something is missing.
Maybe Hulls’ so-called friend hasn’t replied to his messages because Colin simply typed out a comment then walked away from his device. Maybe he hasn’t thought about deepening their connection at all.
That means Hulls is sitting here staring at a screen without an eager counterpart on the other side.
That cannot be true. Cannot. But how dare this man make Hulls doubt himself? How dare he be able to capture worlds in music, and how dare he bring them to the dull, time-bound crowds of mannequins while ignoring the one person who understands him? Colin will pay attention. Hulls has the right to that. He sends two more messages:
“Time for me to step up my game.”
“You will come around, you’ll see.”
Hulls suspects that he has lived in the same county as Colin for a long time now. In the various possibility-ranges, Colin usually does live around here. It is a comfortable stomping ground, even if the details do occasionally surprise him: a missed street name here, a vacant lot there. The colors of sports teams are wrong. The font on the street signs is wrong, which more than anything else makes his surroundings feel like a missed step on a familiar staircase.
This is an outlier world, of course, but it’s more than that. The more Hulls skips across the shadows of possibility, the less real the people around him become. They’re sweaty mannequins taking up room.
* * *
Still, it is easy to look up the gas prices at various stations, and cross-reference that with the landmarks in the skyline below the sunset. Using that, Hulls works out approximately where Colin must have been when he took the picture. There is no guarantee that Colin lives where he took it, of course, but the green wrinkles of the mountains in the background sure do look familiar.
From there, Hulls does what he usually does. He pays a local private investigator $150 cash to get this version of Colin’s home address. This naïve world hasn’t put up any significant barriers to personal information, which is a sign that Dennis B. Hulls has the right to access it.
Hulls parks across the street from Colin’s home. It is difficult to see through overhanging trees and deep hedges. Even the view through the gate is like looking into a darkened tunnel. That also means anyone who enters the yard will not be seen from the street. Hulls smiles happily.
He only waits an hour and forty-three minutes before the gate opens. Hulls’ breath catches. He has seen other versions of Colin in other possible worlds, but this is the first time he’s seen this one in the light of day. The shock of adrenaline tingles his fingers wrapped around the steering wheel.
Colin does not pause outside the gate to lock it. Either he adopted the naiveté of this world or that the gate locks from the inside. Hulls makes a note to check it.
Colin raises one long, bony arm and waves. A smile stretches across Hulls’ face. He lifts one hand from the steering wheel to wave back, but a red truck pulls up between him and Colin. Not only that, but he hears the unmistakable click-clunk that means a side-door opening and closing. When the truck continues down the street, there is no Colin on the sidewalk.
Frowning, Dennis B Hulls follows the red truck downtown to a place called Old King. “What an insipid name,” he thinks. By the time Hulls finds a place to park, Colin and the truck-driver have joined three others at an outdoor table. The rest are leaning forward, gesticulating and speaking loudly enough that, when the wind is right, Hulls can hear snatches of conversation.
Colin is still and quiet, staring into the middle distance with the same bemused lack of expression as in the pictures Hulls has gathered. Yes. This is right. The sole member of Long-Distance Runner is apart from everyone else even when he is with them. The driver of the red truck probably dragged him here.
There is a void in their gathering, a superficial flatness to it that the citizens of this world don’t notice because they are part of it. The mannequins speak their lines and tilt their heads, jerking their arms and rolling their beady eyes to over-compensate for the fact that they might as well be scenery.
Both Colin and Hulls understand. That is why they hold themselves apart.
One of them says something. The wind is wrong, so Hulls doesn’t hear it. Colin startles, then puts his hands over his face in a silent fit of incapacitating laughter. The conversation crashes to a halt. The mannequins yelp. “I think you broke him.”
“Wait, what did I say? What was it?”
At first, Colin just shakes his head behind the curtain of his long hair, and Dennis regains a ray of hope that Colin sees through these inane comments. Maybe he is laughing at the sheer pointless stupidity. Then he leans into one of them, resting his head on her shoulder in an easy way that tells Hulls that the two are familiar with physicality.
This is wildly at odds with the Colin that Dennis B. Hulls envisions, who is essentially isolated and lonely. Why else does he create music alone, if he isn’t waiting for a special person to come along and elevate his work?
“I don’t want to be angry at you. But here you are,” Hulls says, so quietly he can’t hear himself over the wind. They must meet. Just the two of them. They’ll sort some things out. It is only a matter of time before an opportunity presents itself.
* * *
Copyright © 2026 by Jules
