The Empty Cup was such because his heart was empty. He wasn’t the cup at all. The cup isn’t important in this story. He was the nothingness inside.

Listen. There are two ways to define evil. First, evil is the direct opposite of good. A sound enough argument. Second, evil is the absence of good. The second definition seems more attractive because it presupposes that good is the default condition of the universe. If that’s the case then God, the Creator of all things, didn’t create evil, no. Evil exists because there are men who do not have God (or goodness) in them. Then again, by that definition, good God allows evil. That in itself is evil.

Let me give you a little inside information. Evil is not the absence of good. Evil is malice. Malice is not the absence of anything. Malice is real.

Now, the Empty Cup was a man who was neither good nor evil. He was simply nothing. He was invisible in the moral compass of the cosmos.

The Empty Cup was the man in Unit 634.

It wasn’t the midday sun pouring like Persian fire through his studio apartment’s windows that awoke the man in Unit 634. He’d more or less been a nocturnal creature for the past 7 years and had learned long ago the art of sleeping in a sun-lit room. Had Ra upon his fiery barge deigned to come in unannounced, the Egyptian sun god would’ve been disappointed by 634’s noticeable lack of awe.

It wasn’t the fan suddenly shutting down when the power went out either. Living in the Third World for all his 28 years had taught him to ignore minor inconveniences like brief Metro Manila ‘brownouts’ and other utility problems. A man surrounded by so much misery tended to develop a reasonable sense of perspective on his own woes.

What awoke the man in 634 was the savage ruckus that seemed to emanate from the hallway outside his unit. It wasn’t the half-assed yapping of a mutt warning strangers to stay away from its demesne. What he heard were the snarling, foaming, chain-rattling, bare-toothed paroxysms of full-blooded hate only crazed street mongrels can summon when faced with objects of their loathing.

He tried to ignore the beast and go back to sleep but it wasn’t letting up. And so, with a sigh of resignation and an unuttered cuss just behind his teeth, the man got out of his sweat-stained cot to check if his neighbor was being torn to bloody shreds by his little pet. He navigated through a no-man’s-land of human detritus (thrift shop paperbacks, rancid Styrofoam bowls, pirated CDs, comic books, dirty underwear, his old laptop) and finally reached the door.

Outside his apartment he discovered a dark hallway. The 6th floor corridor of this run-down building was a depressing, badly-lit affair when there was electricity. Now it would’ve been pitch black had 634’s door not been open. With nothing on save for a ragged pair of boxers and flip-flops, he followed the sound down to Unit 637. He knocked on the door and called out his neighbor’s name.

“Your dog’s about to have a stroke, man,” he said.

No answer but the animal’s even nastier barks. He knocked again, harder.

“Listen, if you don’t do anything about that mutt of yours I’m going to have to complain about this. You know we can’t keep pets in this building.”

Still no answer. He flipped his middle finger at the door, hoping that his neighbor was seeing it through the peephole, and started towards his unit. It was then that he noticed a crack of light on 635’s door.

***

635 was a twenty-something call center trainer who’d moved in a couple of weeks ago. She was pretty and (by virtue of the several brief conversations they’ve had while waiting for the elevator) he thought she was also very smart-- exactly the type of girl who wouldn’t have bothered to look twice at bespectacled bohemians like 634 back in college. He also knew she was unattached for a couple of days now. He’d heard her through the wall as she broke up with her pet penis, a monstrous specimen of a man whose arms were as thick as 634’s thighs.

“Don’t even go there, sweetheart,” 637 had once said to him. “That way lies madness.”

637 had been passing by (carrying his large and marvelously queer handbag, the device with which the aging queen smuggled his dog in and out of the building) and had noticed 634 poking his head out the doorway to ogle 635 as she walked down the hallway towards the elevator.

“Unless you’re already in love with her,” 637 added. “If that’s the case then knock yourself out, hombre. God, in His infinite wisdom, had thought it would be devilishly funny and so made the greatest of human conditions—love and madness—basically the same thing.”

“What’re you talking about?” the young man asked, and then pulled his neighbor into the room. He opened a can of tuna and gave it to the dog.

“I hate your dog, man,” he said. “I mean, I don’t hate dogs in general. I actually like animals. Sometimes I suspect I like them better than people, you know? But your dog… that thing is puny. It’s like a big rat.”

The queen clucked his tongue angrily and slapped the young man’s hand away from the beast. “Animals understand, you know. Not the words. Of course not. Still, they understand. They understand because words don’t have power over them.”

The young man looked at his neighbor and shrugged. “What do you mean?”

“That animals—”

The young man laughed. “No, not the animals. ‘Don’t go there.’ What do you mean by that?”

“That you don’t have a fucking chance with the little trollop.”

“You jealous?”

“Don’t flatter yourself, darling. I like you but I don’t fuck little boys.”

“Okay, fine. So?”

“Have you seen that guy she’s been fornicating with? Simply Teutonic. You don’t stand a chance.”

“She broke up with him yesterday.”

“That she did. But do you seriously believe that your little Asian sidekick is up to the task of filling up the void of perdition that Aryan Übermensch left in your chinadoll? Her cunt will devour you whole and you’ll spend the rest of your days dodging jizz. That would be rich. I could just imagine it all in tabloid red: PUSSY EATS SCRAWNY TELEVISION WRITER.”

***

He noticed the crack of light on 635’s door and went towards it. He was awash with a cold feeling of dread.

What am I afraid of?

He raised his fist to knock on the door, just to check on the girl.