I Have A Theory

Chapter Ten, Finish With A Bow

I watch Park Jeong-Su leave, and my heart sinks.

It's like taking flowers from a vase after they've had their fine go at life--you've got to cut them away eventually, but it's always the most melancholic of occasions, and brushes too close to your own mortality for comfort. I realize that I've liked this competition--that I'll be sad to see it gone.

Breathe, look around me. One person still remains in the room.

"I knew someone like you growing up," I say to Robertson, who now sits crumpled and shaken at one of our clean white tables. He looks like the last person at a train station, long after all reasonable people have left, and the counters have closed. He looks like a faded grocery list cast out into the rain. His gray suit jacket has creases all over the elbows, and his blue eyes lack vitality.

Sighs, "I imagine he ended up in the same wretched state?"

I nod. "It's precisely because you say that that you'll always lose. 'Wretched state.' When you live as you do, you're not allowed to believe in wretched states. Only states--you have to think of everything as merely a rearrangement of something else."

Licks his lips. "Makes sense when you say it like that. Sorry I couldn't draw you into my singularity."

I roll my eyes. "You hardly tried."

He glares, "I did. I laid the traps. I made you go out onto the flesh and see what I'd seen. I made you pity me, and I made you hate me, and I made you believe me."

I scratch my bicep. "Someone else ate a piece of me."

He nods.

"My point is, if you're not going to do something like that to test your ideology, then you've lost. If there's ever an action to which you'd say 'This is it: my boundary, my limit,' then you've stirred morality into the mess. And just like it takes only one lie to destroy the truth, it only takes one meaningful action to destroy the nihilist."

"At every point, I took the best action possible."

I nod, "Maybe you did. But Jeong-Su's better than you, I guess."

He moans, low and pathetic.

A little while later.

I find myself on the observation deck. Packed suitcase sits beside me, even though no one knows how we're actually going to get out. Lots of people died, but a good nineteen of us remain. Everyone else had been hiding, while the titans made war.

Dust has settled. Everything's clear.

I look out onto the flesh--that is meaning, and truth, clear-eyed.

Say a prayer to my god.

"Dear lord, who dwells in the kingdom of heaven in your tripartite lonesome. Dear lord, whose eyes glance down every now and then, and set chaos into orderly spinnings. Dear lord, who was the first person to learn what power does to a person, and gave humans this power so you could study yourself.

"Dear lord, who wishes the best for all of us.

"Let me have the faith to know what I know. To say what I know. To win this vile game. It's the only thing I've ever truly wanted for myself."

I remember a conversation.

One year after I stopped doing my math competitions, stopped paying concerted attention in school, stopped talking.

My mom comes into my room with a plate of cookies, a smile on her lips. It seems like a bargain. Feels like she's trying to buy me.

I'm drawing patterns at my desk, and a bible is open beside me--I never wanted the book, but an aunt gave it to me last Christmas, and it's serendipitously stuck into my room, intrinsic. It's like a smudge that you think is in dry erase, but which turns out to have been transcribed in sharpie--a permanent fixture of my habitation.