Christopher - A Nihilist Reads Camus

[Thy Dungyeon Maestyr]

A Nihilist Reads Camus
NaNoWriMo 2013
-Christopher Shelton

Chapters

1) Enter the Nihilist

2) Sisyphus: Suicide

3) Sisyphus: The Absurd Man

4) Sisyphus: Creation

5) The Myth of Sisyphus

6) The Plague I

7) The Plague II

8) The Plague III

9) The Stranger

[Thy Dungyeon Maestyr]

CHAPTER ONE: ENTER THE NIHILIST

      Ernest Newman came to class. It was only ten minutes early, but he sighed in relief that no one else was in the room yet. He claimed his prize: a seat at the back of the class, as far from the teacher as possible. A trickle of sweat came out of Ernest's natural-styled halo of hair. He hated sweating, but getting to school on time had been a rush lately, and more than sweating, he hated being tardy. He put his bag down on the chair and straightened himself out, then lowered it to the floor and carefully sat down. The sky lightened dramatically, unseen from his angle, but for the way its glow filled the room. Class began.
      Soon it was the time of day - at the time of year - when the sun came in this room sideways and blinded everyone. The teacher began to teach the class hazily. Literature III. These were not AP students. And, perhaps owing to the sun, they were mostly invisible to the him. Ernest was invisible to him, and rather wished he could be invisible to everyone. It just didn't work out like that.
      Ernest was wearing turquoise socks with shiny black shoes, slim fitted pegged grey glen plaid pants, a matching vest and tie, and a lemon yellow shirt with the sleeves neatly rolled to the middle of his arms. The school started enforcing the hat ban again because of fears of gangsterism, so his flatcap was in his bag.
      Meanwhile, the fellow next to him was wearing sagged jeans like hakama, striped boxers, and a flowing silky shirt festooned with dragons, hypodermic needles, and dollar signs. This was a bit closer to the school uniform, which is why Ernest found invisibility difficult to achieve, but he gave it his best effort, crumpling into himself at the back of the class. His fellow back of the classman snored calmly.
      The teacher sat at the edge of his desk, some sort of white man obscured by buttermilk yellow shafts of light and grey spears of shadow. The class was supposed to be discussing Hawthorne's “Young Goodman Brown,” but in practice it was just the teacher discussing with himself, hoping the qualities of his speech were hypnotic or just somehow intriguing enough that the words would stay with the teens until the next day. Ernest didn't care for Hawthorne. God didn't seem an important enough figure in the world to be worth responding to, and maybe Hawthorne would agree on some level, but he still spent a lot of pages wrestling with the ghost.
      He didn't hear anything. Theresa and Shantea weren't very loud, but they did speak quickly and insistently, whispers of who did what to whom and why, and what the next person would do about that. He didn't want to hear or understand them at all, but couldn't help it. Taylor blew Shy at the party at Ginny's, and Shy told Robert but didn't expect Robert to tell anyone else, but he did and then Taylor heard about it because Sim and Kissy were asking her what dick tastes like and it was pretty funny but also terrible but still funny because she got so mad and Sim was just rolling, but maybe Kissy wasn't there because Elizabeth said was talking to Claude between first and second lunch and he said Kissy was on office assistant and every morning she had to get there early so she could get the memos filed and just coast through the hard part of first period.
      He pushed the flesh of his forehead around with his fingers, hoping to drive the nuisance out. A voice startled him. The snorer - Horace - had awakened.
      “Uh... You alright, dude?”
      Ernest accidentally made a semi-loud thwang as his hand bounced off the top of the desk-chair. Theresa and Shantea looked at him for a moment, then went back to yammering. No jokes about the male Janelle Monae yet. Good. He responded to the torpid man.
      “Erm, yes. I certainly am. Just a bit uncomfortable in this chair.”
      Horace didn't care enough to press the issue on that obvious half-truth. He nodded and nodded off. Ernest fumed while he waited for class to end.
      In the space of the class's allotted hour, the sun went from barely up to out of sight, crawling far enough above the windows to stop blinding the students. It was less intense and just covered the window seats like a lemon yellow curtain. Ernest waited for the crowd to thin before getting up. He made sure nothing had fallen out of his messenger bag and twisted as he walked to avoid bumping into the desks between him and escape. He reached the teacher.
      “Mr. Hepler, excuse me.”
      Hepler didn't look up. “How can I help you?”
      “What's the, uh, short version of all that... lesson today?”
      “Hm. Well, it's about the path of a man to self-discovery, the way it's tainted by a strict and absolute religious background. It's textbook allegory and focus on the way the man interacts with his wife when you answer the essay question.”
      “Thank you.”
      Almost every day he asked this question and every day that he did Hepler answered. Between that and reading the books as early as possible, Ernest was able to get by without hearing Hepler's voice for most of the class. Hepler only ever seemed to look at him in the most glancing way, if at all. He was Ernest's least hated teacher.
      Ernest left.
     
      The school was a brick schoolhouse about a hundred years old, wall interiors lined with asbestos, surfaces slathered with lead paint. Nothing could be nailed into the wall through the impenetrable asbestos plates, so mostly everything hanging on the walls was held aloft with scotch tape or thumb tacks. The classes were scuffed white paint and the halls accented with green and yellow stripes. Orange lockers lined the walls, most with patched of dingy grey showing through.
      Outside, the bricks were nearly black from pollution, some partially crumbled and uneasy looking. The grounds were verdant sixty five years before, when it suddenly seemed like a good idea to pave everything that wasn't a building. Basketball courts and such were just metal poles with appropriate headgear and boundaries delineated in worn off-white paint. On the other side of the building was parking, with everything closest set aside for faculty and furthest for the students that drive. In this city, that was only a few. Yet another side of the building had several “portables” - extra cheap mobile homes converted to scholastic purposes, awaiting the day they'd be replaced with a permanent expansion of the school – a day that would never come.
      Students passed through the halls like blood cells in veins, aggregated in clots, dispersed, and reconvened in rhythm, until the appointed hour. Lunch was broken into three lunch periods, with students randomly assigned to one and spending the rest of that time period in the fourth class of their day. Lunches came and went. The school day came and went. Nothing remarkable happened to anybody and nothing changed in a meaningful way. The pulse of the school frittered to a stop some time after the final nell rang. By and by, the place became empty of teens, then of people of all ages.
      The school sat through the night cold and empty, until before dawn the next day, when if began to regenerate. The old unlocked the school and moved their papers around and drank coffee, and the young came as it suited them.
     
      Ernest Newman came to class. It was one minute early, and he was aghast at the crowded seats, the snickering and the critical and the common. He looked a mess, corduroys cut off just below the knees without hemming, collared mustard yellow shirt untucked, glasses oily from sweat and dishevelment. His hair was the weirdest thing of all: it was twisted into some kind of loose spikes with some gluey, unpleasant looking product. His dark skin was stippled with beads of sweat. His messenger bag bulged with his jacket awkwardly jammed into it.
      Mr. Hepler appraised the boy. He didn't recognize him.
      “I'm sorry, can I help you?”
      “I don't know. Am I tardy?”
      “Officially no – if you're in the right class.”
      “I am, dammit. Where do I sit?”
      By now the surreptitious laughter and chatter was in full force. Ernest was extremely angry, but had an unusual sense of focus today. He found a seat in the second row and stomped toward it. Hepler called out from behind.
      “Was it Newman, Ernest?”
      “Yes! Duh!”
      “Do you prefer Ernie?” Now Hepler realized he was making things worse, as the class erupted into laughter. The slim boy crossed his arms, hunched up his shoulders, and glared at him like an angry animal.
      Hepler pulled at his collar and tried to quiet the class. “Everybody, please. Sorry, Mr. Newman. Let's proceed.” He touched the center of his forehead like it was a reset button and quickly collected his thoughts. “So today, we're breaking you into groups of five. I'll assign them.” The class groaned. “Martinez, Tran, Sherrard, Newman, Cole, you're group A. Seat yourselves about there. Simon, White, Barris, Newton, Guillaume group B...”
      Ernest just stayed in his seat as people moved around. His group ended up sitting near him. They obviously didn't want anything to do with each other, except Tran and Cole, who were friends. They practically whispered to each other and he couldn't make out the words and probably didn't want to. He waited for the teacher to make order out of this chaos.
      Hepler said, “OK, I want each group to discuss among yourselves what you think the moral lesson of 'Young Goodman Brown' is, try to sum it up as briefly as possible, and present your answer. Each group should pick someone to speak for them. You have fifteen minutes. Don't waste time or we won't be able to review any material before the written test.”
      There were grumbles and mumbles and a few groups started to speak – mostly about sports and gossip, but some also tried to pick the presenter just to get that out of the way. As things often went in this class, the presenter would be responsible for bullshitting together a statement that no one else had contributed to at all.
      In group A, it was a foregone conclusion the presenter would be Newman. After all, he had glasses. Bell Tran and Martin Cole continued their whispered conversation at a more audible volume, while Devon Sherrard tried to look cool at Alma Martinez. Ernest opened a spiral notepad and began composing his thoughts.
      Bell said, “I know, that's why Karls had to be put on the field, disability or no.”
      Martin said, “No, see, that's why they shoulda gone with a whole diff'rent strategy. I mean, shit, Karls was the only dude on the team who consistently got over fifty yards. You can't take a chance on that shit when you're about to go against the big dogs.”
      “They were already up against some big dogs, you don't think Holcomb and Whitaker couldn't steamroller the whole fuckin' team by they damn selves?”
      Devon said, “Hey, ya name's Alma, right?”
      “Mm-hm.”
      “Maybe, uh, you an' me should get to talkin', like, about the assignment 'n' shit.”
      “Tssht, I don't know. I'm sure Ernest has it covered. Don't you Ernest?”
      “I know!” He waved his pen hand at them angrily like they were so many mosquitoes, and went back to composing his thoughts.
      “Yeah... That Ernest, um, sure has it covered. Hey, so I see you sometimes before class, you come an' always sit by the window by yourself. You ain't got any friends in here?”
      “Yeah. All my friends graduated last year. Everybody that's left is so immature.”
      “Oh, yeah, I know, I mean, sure, they're just a bunch of kids, right? Don't even know how real it is out there. Now, you an' me, you know what's up. So...”
      “Devon.”
      “Yeah?”
      “No, it's just not appropriate.”
      “What? You thought I was tryin' ta? Naw, boo, I just thought, y'know, since you don't got any friends in here, maybe you'd wanna be friends, right? It's coo if you don't wanna tho, I can jus' read my shit over here.”
      Alma looked out the window, not interested in doing any reading of her own, and considered the offer.
      “OK, Devon. What's up?”
      “Whitaker is a machine, man,” Bell said, the volume of the class's general discussion beginning to ramp up by the minute. “You really think he'd be tapped by that road trip? What about the series last year? Are you kiddin'?”
      “Man, that series was in jus' two cities, same state, all in one then the other. They just came, like, a thousand miles in a fuckin' bus because the clubhouse is too ghetto to fly they ass. First game of that series he just come off a trip like that, his game was total bullshit. He was lucky ta not get DLed bad as he got sacked on that shit.”
      (ed. note: I know fuckall about sports.)
      “Are you for real?”
      (ed. note 2: I know fuckall about how tha kids speak these days.)
      Fifteen minutes elapsed.
      “Well, you must all have a lot to say, as much as you were talking. You there, are you done now? OK. Group A, who is your presenter?”
      The youths deferred to Ernest. He didn't say anything, just nodding slightly. His skin had dried but his hair let out a creepy drop that soaked quietly into his messenger bag.
      “Good, well, in short, what was the moral lesson of 'Young Goodman Brown'?”
      “There isn't one.”
      “*siiigh*” Hepler rolled his eyes, cocked his neck, ignored the chuckles and groans, and turned back to Ernest. “That's a non-answer. You have to understand as long as I've taught, every year someone thinks he's figured out a clever new trick and drops that answer on m--”
      “Whatever. There's no damn point. Hawthorne obviously has big feelings about puritans or something, but they're all dead and he's dead and who cares? This is as meaningless to me as a dog or a tree.”
      Hepler considered the young man, while the kids sitting near him squirmed and shook their heads to try to distance themselves figuratively from their representative. “I shouldn't have to explain this, but I will. Things long past, and art from the past can tell us about human nature, about truths that outlive the moment in which they existed. It's why you have a history class.”
      Ernest sat in his desk-chair like an immovable object, more heavy than his size would suggest, his head stock still, not from a nervous tension, but from a determination that he had lacked the day before. “Yeah, but why do we bother? All that thinking and thinking and what is it for? Real life is about eating, shitting, sleeping, waking up, and dying. It doesn't mean any damn thing.”
      Hepler really didn't recognize him, but was beginning to take interest. “... You're going to talk to me after class, but for now, does anyone else in group A have something to say about Hawthorne's moral?”
      The other boys looked at Alma. She blew on her bangs. “Tssht. Stupids.”
      She gave it a try. Ernest didn't move. The class continued.
     
      When the written tests were passed forward at the end of it all, Hepler made sure to take a quick glance at Ernest's. It was spelled out in crisp, largish block letters. The comprehension and factual questions looked flawless, but the essay was very short. It read, “FAITH REPRESENTS HIS FAITH. HE LOSES IT. DON'T CARE. THE DEAD BABY RECIPE WAS FUNNY THO.”
      He shuffled it into the pile and continued. As the teens left the classroom, he could see Ernest behind them, still sitting. He scribbled in his notebook. Then there were just the two. Hepler walked closer to the boy and he stood up abruptly, knocking his desk-chair over. The noise stopped Hepler in his tracks, which seemed to be the intended effect.
      Ernest said, “You aren't going to make me tardy to my next class. You got three minutes.”
      “Yes. OK. I have a job to, well, if you're thinking about hurting yourself, to let --”
      “No. What are you even talking about?” The kid was weirdly oblivious.
      “Good. If you're not in danger, then I can just handle this like a teacher. Two things--”
      “Two minutes.”
      Hepler rolled his eyes and glared at the petulant student. “One, don't let your attitude keep you from answering a question again, or I'll mark it wrong.”
      “You better not!”
      “Two, don't think you can intimidate me acting like a punk. And since I have half a minute, thing three: I'll give you extra credit if you read a certain book and write an essay about it.”
      “I guess I'll need the extra credit, if you're going to be a jerk.”
      The teacher scribbled a title and handed it to the student. Ernest read it as he briskly walked away, and disappeared into the hall.
     
      THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS & OTHER ESSAYS – ALBERT CAMUS

[Thy Dungyeon Maestyr]

CHAPTER TWO: SISYPHUS: SUICIDE

 
    Ernest got to second period Food Science in one and half minutes, as estimated, and again was stuck near the front of the class. Damn it. He was slightly surprised to notice Horace was in this class, as he was usually not up front when the last people entered. Horace sat in a chair near the sink and leaned his head back on the counter, brazenly starting to sleep in plain view of the teacher. Ms. Cameron ignored the slothful youth and began to take roll. Ernest wasn't tardy, but that was proving to be more hassle that day than it was worth.
    Bright yellow light on the concrete courtyard contrasted with the blue-grey shadow that filled the room. It was a bright shadow, suffused with reflected radiance from outside, completely overpowering the fluorescent lights that buzzed uselessly above. This room had blocky tables bolted to the floor, for Science. A few chairs were gathered around each. Ernest was in the front closer to the window, Horace in front on the opposite side.
    Roll ended and Ms. Cameron split people up into groups arbitrarily for a project. Ernest ended up with every other person in the front row – Shy Powell, Tyna Terrell, Trevor Stratton, and Horace Parker. They were gathered around the front center table, each with a packet of photocopied busy work. They had to run a rote experiment and record data, and the school could only afford materials for one experiment per four and a half children.
    Shy and Tyna turned up their noses at the other three, and proceeded as if they weren't there. Ernest didn't let that fly when it came time to write the results into his packet and Tyna was standing in the way.
    “If you're going to block my way, just tell me the stupid numbers so I can write them down, damn it!” He let his glasses hang at the end of his nose, requiring him to tilt his head back slightly to keep them from falling.
    Tyna stared up his nostrils in shock that such a geek would dare speak to her. Shy could tell the little weirdo meant business and gave him the answers quickly. “Uh, 4.2, 5, 9, 10.1, and acid.”
    “Thank you,” he said with absolute disdain. Trevor pretended an Erlenmeyer flask was a bong and Horace let out a quiet raspy chuckle.
    The experiment was run, but slower groups were having issues, leaving Ernest's group idle. His eyes drifted over the jars of specimens lining the counter. These had nothing to do with food science, but the room was used for other science classes as well. A movement caught his eye.
    A severed pig head rolled its eye around to stare back at him.
    He jumped a little in his seat, crumpled his face, and sat stiffly. The thing did not look away.
    Horace noticed his strange look. “Uh... You alright, dude?”
    Ernest could not look away. He responded to Horace.
    “Erm, yes. I certainly am. Just a bit uncomfortable in this chair.”
    Horace followed Ernest's gaze toward to jar. Just before his own eyes reached it, the pig sneered dramatically at Ernest. Its face was stuck that way as Horace saw it. “Damn, dude. That shits is fugly.”
    “Uh, yes. It certainly is. Uh, yes. Well, did you, uh... Do you think it's gotten uglier since class started?”
    “How? It's in formaldehyde yo.”
    “True.”
    The pig continued to sneer, continued to have its eyeball pointed directly at Ernest.
 
    As class ended, Ernest waited for the room to mostly empty before getting up. He walked one direction, then the other, watching the pig follow him with its eyes, before approaching the terrible thing.
    “What do you want, damn it?”
    It mouthed words to him, nicked and bloodless lips writhing with exaggerated animation to make the meaning of the words obvious. Just fuckin' with you...
    He left in a hurry.
 
    Only lost a minute talking to the pig, leaving enough time – if he was lucky – to check out the book from the library and run out to the portables for Poetry. He moved swiftly, aware of increasing eyes upon him. Word had gotten out about his odder than normal behavior and appearance today, and people were naturally curious. Naturally.
    He reached the library and went to the card catalog. The computers were too slow in the underfunded school, so he used a more archaic technology. The card hadn't been updated in fifteen years, but he guessed the book would be older than that.
    As he walked through the aisle, he felt like he was being watched still. Nothing was obvious. And there's nothing for it. He easily found the book, and jetted back to the front counter. Mr. Milgram was slow as balls, but Ernest had been quick on his feet, and was reasonably confident he'd get to the portables on time.
    Finally, he snatched up the book and jogged for the door.
    “Don't run in the libra- Ah, never mind.”
    Horace stood at the library door, and took to jogging alongside Ernest. He was a little out of shape, or maybe his apathy for being awake extended to other basic physical acts. Ernest didn't know what to make of this.
    “What are you doing, Horace? Don't slow me down! I don't want to be tardy. You have no idea *huff* how much of a pain in the ass that's been today.”
    “I don't like runnin', just wanted to know what the fuck's up with you. You're all weird today. You alright, dude, like, really?”
    “...No. Who cares? I'll see you.”
    “Uh... OK.” The larger young man came to a stop out on the concrete field and watched the weird one jog on to the portables. He smiled a bit and went back inside.
   
    Mr. Hallstrom had everyone in class reading their poems out loud. Some people didn't seem to even be able to pronounce words they'd supposedly written. It gave Ernest a lot of time, provided no one noticed he wasn't paying attention, and he opened the book of Camus...
 

                           Preface
          “For me 'The Myth of Sisyphus' marks the beginning of an idea
          which I was to pursue in The Rebel. It attempts to resolve the
          problem of suicide, as The Rebel attempts to resolve that of
          murder, in both cases without the aid of eternal values which,
          temporarily perhaps, are absent or distorted in contemporary
          Europe. The fundamental subject of 'The Myth of Sisyphus' is
          this: it is legitimate and necessary to wonder whether life has a
          meaning; therefore it is legitimate to meet the problem of suicide
          face to face. The answer, underlying and appearing through the
          paradoxes which cover it, is this: even if one does not believe in
          God, suicide is not legitimate. Written fifteen years ago, in 1940,
          amid the French and European disaster, this book declares that
          even within the limits of nihilism it is possible to find the means to
          proceed beyond nihilism. In all the books I have written since, I
          have attempted to pursue this direction. Although “The Myth of
          Sisyphus” poses mortal problems, it sums itself up for me as a
          lucid invitation to live and to create, in the very midst of the
          desert...”
                   —Albert Camus, Paris, March 1955

 
    Nihilism..., he thought, This book is written by someone who is starting out from "within the limits of" nihilism. That means you don't believe in anything, right? Mr. Hepler thinks I'm a nihilist... Maybe I am. Also seems like it's answering a question I didn't ask - why you shouldn't commit suicide. So Hepler thinks I'm a suicide risk too? He rolled his eyes, but then took a moment to consider the issue the book was setting out to answer - apparently, why a nihilist shouldn't kill their self. I don't see any reason not to, but I don't see any reason to do it either. I don't see why this should be an issue for nihilists either, but whatever. He read on.
    A second foreword he found so context-specific - so dependent on prior knowledge of the subject - that it made no sense to him at all. It did clue him in to the idea "the absurd" would be something referenced throughout, and something he'd need to know the definition of. Flipping around he found the book had no glossary, and wrinkled his mouth in dismay.
    Nabila Mohamed was reading her poem, a sestina called "No Lactase." It went a little something like this:
 
    Everyone has at one time possess'd lactase,
    'Tis the bless'd enzyme to digest mother's lactose.
    Infants smile and wriggle at the taste of sweet cream,
    Yet not only infants can taste of this sweet dream.
    Adults should drink milk, to hear the Man's suggestion,
    'Tis the bless'd enzyme to aid in milk's digestion.
 
    An enzyme to aid milk's digestion,
    The enzyme of babes, it is lactase.
    Hear and drink to the Man's suggestion,
    Use your enzymes to process lactose.
    When you drink milk, life is a sweet dream,
    When you drink milk or eat the ice cream.
 
    They say eat the ice cream,
    With ease of digestion.
    This is the Man's white dream.
    Adults should have lactase,
    Adults should drink lactose,
    The Man-said suggestion.
 
    I fall to suggestion,
    I eat the Man's ice cream.
    I eat the Man's lactose.
    Suffer in digestion,
    For my lack of lactase.
    Discomfort steals the dream.
 
    America lives in a white dream,
    And gives the rest of us suggestion.
    Persistence is in having lactase,
    Persistence is in drinking the cream,
    Pull from the bootstraps your digestion,
    Persistence is in drinking lactose.
 
    Never again will I drink the Man's lactose.
    Never again will I strive for the Man's white dream.
    Never again to sacrifice good digestion,
    Will I submit to the Man's milky suggestion.
    With the haram I shall consider the sweet cream,
    For as an adult I have given up lactase.
 
    Lactose has virtue, it is the Man's suggestion.
    Dream only of devouring lily white ice cream.
    Digestion is assumed, as is having lactase.
 
    Ernest didn't process any of that, concentrating furiously on the cryptic words in this book. "The absurd?" What is that? Reading again, "the absurd, hitherto taken as a conclusion, is considered in this essay as a starting point." Earlier he said he was starting "within nihilism," so the absurd is maybe another word for not believing in anything? ...or maybe, more like if nihilists are right, then it's the big truth of life - there's no truths. He read on.
    First Camus announced that the most important question of philosophy is something like (paraphrased) "Why doncha just kill yourself?" If that question is even being allowed, Ernest thought, it did kinda make everything else seem silly. Camus went on in his fancy way (or an Anglo guy's translation of his fancy way) about why people commit suicide, before getting to something that seemed to explain "the absurd."
 
          "Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even
          instinctively, the ridiculous character of that habit (making
          the gestures commanded by existence), the absence of any
          profound reason for living, the insane character of that
          daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering...
          A world that can be explained even with bad reasons is
          a familiar world. But, on the other hand, in a universe di-
          vested of illusions and lights, man feels an alien, a stranger.
          His exile is without remedy since he is deprived of the
          memory of a lost home or hope of a promised land. This
          divorce between a man and this life, the actor and his setting,
          is properly the feeling of absurdity..."
   
    So he wants to make this big nihilistic truth - "absurdity" - into something fancy and poetic and cool...
    More confusion ahead. There was some kind of philosopher-speak at play here - code words the uninitiated couldn't quite understand. He muddled through, starting to forget to be subtle about his inattention to the class, but fortunately, no one noticed. Aha! He means if you aren't a hypocrite and you believe life is pointless, it might be you should kill yourself, but he's going to try to answer that... Oh good grief. More philosophy words.
    It quickly got much worse.
 
          "...It is wrongly assumed that simple questions involve
          answers that are no less simple and that evidence implies
          evidence. A priori and reversing the terms of the problem,
          just as one does or does not kill oneself, it seems that
          there are but two philosophical solutions, either yes or no.
          This would be too easy. But allowance must be made for
          those who, without concluding, continue questioning. Here
          I am only slightly indulging in irony: this is the majority. I
          notice also that those who answer 'no' act as if they thought
          'yes.' As a matter of fact, if I accept the Nietzschean criterion,
          they think “yes” in one way or another. On the other hand, it
          often happens that those who commit suicide were assured
          of the meaning of life. These contradictions are constant. It
          may even be said that they have never been so keen as on
          this point where, on the contrary, logic seems so desirable.
          it is a commonplace to compare philosophical theories and
          the behavior of those who profess them. But it must be said
          that of the thinkers who refused a meaning to life none except
          Kirilov who belongs to literature, Peregrinos who is born of
          legend, and Jules Lequier who belongs to hypothesis,
          admitted his logic to the point of refusing that life."
 
    Damn it!
    "Ernest, are you ready to share your poem?"
    "I wrote a poem?"
    "Yes," Mr. Hallstrom said. "The assignment was to write about a way in which you as an individual are in tension with society. Did you write one?"
    "Oh, yes, certainly. But it's in my notebook. Just... Give me a moment..." The class was chuckling. Chuckle on, jerks! He fished it out.
        "'Don't Talk By Me,' by Ernest Newman.
        Don't talk by me in class.
        You annoy me with your sass.
        I'm trying to hear the teacher,
        Go talk under a bleacher.
        You talk about things that annoy me,
        Like being mean and how that is funny.
        You annoy me with your sass,
        So don't talk by me in class."
    Students were silent for a moment, then snickered. Mr. Hallstrom interrupted them with a loud clap, an unsubtle reminder that the rule in this class was to applaud everybody. Ernest pushed around the flesh on his forehead. No no no. Then Hallstrom spoke.
    "It's good. It answers the question of the assignment perfectly, if literally. Next, Sharese Walker..."
    His face went slack for a moment in disbelief. He'd written the poem last night, but it seemed like an eternity past. He was almost surprised that Ernest of yesterday wrote something that spoke to the feelings of Ernest of today.
    Then he continued reading, then stopped again. This language was too weird to get, in a sensible way. Maybe he needed to look at the whole and see if it added up to something more easy to understand than any one part. He committed himself to reading a few of these long paragraphs in a single push before pausing to see if he understood any of it.
    There was a small title up ahead in the book: “Absurd Walls.” It stood to reason that a complete idea was expressed in the paragraphs leading up to it. He marked that as the end point of his reading sprint, backed up to the bizarre paragraph about Peregrinos (whoever that was), and took off reading. As he went, he tried to take any snippets of half-meaning he gleaned from the unfamiliar language and add it to anything else he was carrying and keep going, until hopefully he landed on “Absurd Walls” with a sense of what everything that came before it meant.
    Marvin Dees read his poem. It was in the form of a rap. Conscious rap, specifically, which was only appealing to self-important types. Ernest didn't care about "consciousness" and wasn't listening.
    “'Me versus Us' by Marvin Dees.
        Someone wanna rap about individuality?
        Somethin' 'bout me and somethin' 'bout society?
        I never had to think about a heavy reality,
        Or may be I did but I didn't wanna see.
        Here's a little story bout me and my posse,
        Never wanna fight because we're brothers, G.
        Everything we do we always agree,
        It's like we're one mind though we number three...”
    The lack of stuttering made it slightly harder to ignore, but Ernest persisted. Camus was starting to speak to him, though it may as well have still been in French, something was coming through. He had found a method to try to understand the writing, at least impressionistically, but there was still a long way to go. He read on, reached “Absurd Walls,” and looked back.
 
     “When Karl Jaspers, revealing the impossibility of constituting
        the world as a unity, exclaims: 'This limitation leads me to
        myself, where I can no longer withdraw behind an objective
        point of view that I am merely representing, where neither I
        myself nor the existence of others can any longer become an
        object for me,' he is evoking after many others those waterless
        deserts where thought reaches its confines. After many others,
        yes indeed, but how eager they were to get out of them! At
        that last crossroad where thought hesitates, many men have
        arrived and even some of the humblest. They then abdicated
        what was most precious to them, their life. Others, princes of
        the mind, abdicated likewise, but they initiated the suicide of
        their thought in its purest revolt. The real effort is to stay there,
        rather, in so far as that is possible, and to examine closely the
        odd vegetation of those distant regions. Tenacity and acumen
        are privileged spectators of this inhuman show in which
        absurdity, hope, and death carry on their dialogue. The mind
        can then analyze the figures of that elementary yet subtle
        dance before illustrating them and reliving them itself.”
 
    OK, he thought, a bit choppy in the middle, but I feel like... Oh hell, I'm gonna need to read this like two or three times to even guess at what he's talking about. Damn it!
    Class was slow, but not as slow as reading this whole chapter three times would be. He kept on. The portables were angled in a weird way that neatly dodged the light. The sun seemed to pass directly over them on its arc through the day, leaving the interiors brightly lit just never. The light coming through the blinds just sat there. Mr. Hallstrom looked like a wooden phantom leaning on his desk, glasses catching diffuse scraps of light and turning his appearance as blank as a cathode ray TV on channel Nothing. Kids clapped between poems.
    Ernest's new reading method was maybe paying off. “Absurd Walls” was trying to define the way the absurd traps all people. It started by describing the feeling of the absurd, while simultaneously saying no feeling can be truly understood – just described. A few pages later, he was describing the feeling of the absurd in three different areas. One was time, where routine seems to satisfy a person that the world makes sense, but reflection on it places one outside where you can see it goes nowhere. Another was the way the objects of the world around us have an existence independent of the meanings we ascribe them, of the purpose we give them, and that moments where one senses how alien everything is to real understanding, you get the absurd feeling. That even extended to natural objects as personal as one's reflection. Lastly, he considered death and its absurdities, before looking back at those and saying they're just circling a reality, decribing feelings. Then says he moved onto “intelligence,” which Ernest took to mean more rational doings in the brain, and some complicated explanations of how reason defeats itself... complete with a quote from Aristotle that probably made more sense before translation into French, then English.
    After all that strain, he came finally across another paragraph that struck an emotional chord.
 
        “Of whom and of what indeed can I say: 'I know that!' This
        heart within me I can feel, and I judge that it exists. This world
        I can touch, and I likewise judge that it exists. There ends all
        my knowledge, and the rest is construction. For if I try to seize
        this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize
        it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers. I can
        sketch one by one all the aspects it is able to assume, all those
        likewise that have been attributed to it, this upbringing, this
        origin, this ardor or these silences, this nobility or this vileness.
        But aspects cannot be added up. This very heart which is mine
        will forever remain indefinable to me. Between the certainty I
        have of my existence and the content I try to give to that assur-
        ance, the gap will never be filled. Forever I shall be a stranger
        to myself. In psychology as in logic, there are truths but no
        truth. Socrates’ 'Know thyself' has as much value as the 'Be
        virtuous' of our confessionals. They reveal a nostalgia at the
        same time as an ignorance. They are sterile exercises on great
        subjects. They are legitimate only in precisely so far as they
        are approximate...”
 
    Forever I shall be a stranger to myself... Nothing but water slipping though my fingers. I'll go this dude one better. I am actually pretty damn sure I don't have a 'heart,' soul, or whatever you wanna call it. What am I? "I" is just a short word for a collection of messy software on a meat computer. It's the human operating system.
    One more poem from a young woman proceeding from the assumption that she as an individual was an entity, rather than a mushy pile of biological directives with an exaggerated sense of its own coherence. Applause, and the class bell rang and people sprang into action. Fourth period meant some of these kids were going to lunch. Ernest was going to lunch.
 
    There was a seldom used bathroom at the far side of the building from the cafeteria. Sometimes, people went in there to fuck or do drugs, but sometimes the trip didn't seem worth the hassle. Ernest stood alone, looking in the dingy mirror. He wondered.
 
     “Men, too, secrete the inhuman. At certain moments of lucidity,
        the mechanical aspect of their gestures, their meaningless
        pantomime makes silly everything that surrounds them. A man
        is talking on the telephone behind a glass partition; you cannot
        hear him, but you see his incomprehensible dumb show: you
        wonder why he is alive. This discomfort in the face of man’s
        own inhumanity, this incalculable tumble before the image of
        what we are, this “nausea,” as a writer of today calls it, is also
        the absurd. Likewise the stranger who at certain seconds comes
        to meet us in a mirror, the familiar and yet alarming brother we
        encounter in our own photographs is also the absurd.”
 
    He pointed a gun at his reflection.
    “No damn point.” He stuffed the gun back into his bag and put that over his shoulder, then tried to clean himself up a bit. “I can't believe they let teenagers read that kind of shit. Jesus.”
    Horace and his friends Tammy, Pharoah, and Scott were smoking when he came outside. At first, they didn't react, but then Horace noticed and waved, and then the rest stared at him. He stood still for a moment, as if pinned by the eyes.
    “What do you want?,” he asked peevishly.
    They giggled. He recognized the smell of these cigarettes – Swisher Sweets with added … something. It was like formaldehyde marshmallows. Horace said, “Want some?”
    Ernest didn't want to destroy his brain cells, or get “gateway drugged” into doing hard stuff, but this was an unusual day. He wondered, “What do those drugs do? What does it feel like?”
    Tammy flashed him a gummy smile and offered him a drag with plump, elaborately decorated fingers. “Only one way to find out.” Her tiny teeth were very clean.
    “No thank you ma'am. Horace, really, what does it do? Why do you guys do it?”
    Horace rubbed his head. He was a bit plump as well – it seemed to be a defining feature of this clique – and spoke from behind a puffy wall of hanging hair like a heavy metal black. “I dunno. High for a few minutes. It's like, uh... Hard to describe. Stupid and kinda good.”
    Ernest crossed his arms and considered it a moment, body language like he was cold. He shook his head. “Not today. I have a lot of reading to do. I have a bizarre feeling like if I don't finish it today, I'm never going to finish it.”
    “Cool, man.”
 
    He took off. Only sixteen minutes left to eat some nuggets and use the bathroom before class started. It was going to be close. He practically loped with long strides, not wanting to run – running attracts bullies. In the lunch room, he weaved through the crowd like the world's most ungraceful basketball player, still somehow not running into anybody. The line was relatively short now. Still, he stood behind the last girl tensely, like a coiled spring.
    The heat off the kitchen came in invisible drafts, and the air over the heat-lamped food line was thick with foody but hard to define auras. He looked at his still empty tray, then the girl's hair, then his tray again. Then a movement caught his eye.
      Some bacon cheeseburgers sat under a heat lamp nearby, and began to open and close, mouth-like. They pointed themselves at Ernest, and mouthed words in an inaudible chorus. They looked as if the bacon itself was pushing the top bun up and down. Hello hello hello, they said. Just fucking with you.
    He thought, If this a delusion, I should try to answer with my mind. It would be less embarrassing than looking like I'm talking to myself... Hey bacon. What do you want from me?!
    They kept mouthing, nothing much, kid. Just trying to be friendly. You look like you could use some help. You don't want to lose your way.
    I've heard this before. Are you a damn ghost?
    That's no way to be friendly, said the bacon. I'm sure you can think of a way to be nice to a guy... A guy like you. Probably got lots of experience, being nice to guys.
    Shut up before I buy you and shoot you full of holes.
    You can't afford us, kid. You're in this line for nuggets. Haha!
    “Move it, faggot.” A crappy guy was pushing Ernest forward. He became aware of the gun again, but decided it was indeed nugget time. Stupid bacon cheeseburgers could get the last word for all he cared.
    As he collected his nuggets and moved on, the crappy guy was close behind. He made weird noises, then started in again. “What the fuck's in your hair, dude? Smells like... givin' me a nosebleed. That's nappy as fuck, faggot.”
    Ernest looked at the nearest clock. If he ate all the nuggets in the hall on the way to the bathroom and took the usual six minutes in there, he'd have three minutes to get to class, meaning he could spare a minute on this guy if he rushed later. He turned around.
    “Don't be rude. I'm in NO MOOD today!”
    People jumped up at potential excitement. Could violence happen? Oh boy!
    The bully wasn't impressed. “Oh you some kinda psycho nerd, huh? You wanna die? No, you wanna listen to screamo music and shoot all the girls that won't fucks with you, right? Eat shit, kid.”
    Ernest considered the possible outcomes of this minute. Nothing facilitated his ability to execute the rolling nugget consumption maneuver. Egress was the only option.
    “Hm. All valid points, and I'll take them into consideration.”
    He breezed past an agitated administrator who was hoping to deal with a scene. The bureaucrat had to content theirself with a round of “carry ons” and “nothing to sees.”
 
    Human Societies class. Whatever that meant. Back to the portables from whence he came. Mrs. Spurling seemed alright, but the subject of the class was ridiculous. It was some kind of mysterious effort to integrate a politician's pet priorities into a curriculum and force kids to take it. There was a notion that if “kids these days” just learned about how society works, they'd be less antisocial. Making seniors take it seemed like, even if the idea was valid, it was too little too late. The point was too abstract for most of the kids to get at this point in their lives, leaving the class exercises seeming totally random. Make a collage out of old Time magazines. Start with the word “family” and write every word you can think of in free association. Whatever.
    Ernest was most definitely reading in this class today. He got into it.
 
        “There exists an obvious fact that seems utterly moral: namely,
        that a man is always a prey to his truths. Once he has admitted
        them, he cannot free himself from them. One has to pay some-
        thing. A man who has be-come conscious of the absurd is for-
        ever bound to it. A man devoid of hope and conscious of being
        so has ceased to belong to the future. That is natural. But it is
        just as natural that he should strive to escape the universe of
        which he is the creator. All the foregoing has significance only
        on account of this paradox.
          Certain men, starting from a critique of rationalism, have
        admitted the absurd climate. Nothing is more instructive in
        this regard than to scrutinize the way in which they have
        elaborated their consequences...”
 
    Ernest hunkered in at the back of the class, for the first time today reaching a class early enough to easily do so. Thank you. In this paragraph he saw a familiar feeling – that once you know something to be true, you can't stop knowing it even if ignorance was more pleasant.
    Well, at least he found that to be true of himself, which would put him in a league with the fancy philosophers Camus was spending so much time dealing with. This part of the book was about how existentialists would see the truth of the absurd, but then try to get out of the implications of that with strained logic. A bit heavy on philosopher-speak, but at least it was usually the terms that had a less specific corollary in the parlance of our times (dude).
    A while later, in a response to a straw man of Kierkegaard, Camus got sassy.
 
        “...But there is no reply here to my intent, and this stirring
        lyricism cannot hide the paradox from me. One must there-
        fore turn away. Kierkegaard may shout in warning: 'If man
        had no eternal consciousness, if, at the bottom of everything,
        there were merely a wild, seething force producing every-
        thing, both large and trifling, in the storm of dark passions,
        if the bottomless void that nothing can fill underlay all things,
        what would life be but despair?' This cry is not likely to stop
        the absurd man. Seeking what is true is not seeking what is
        desirable. If in order to elude the anxious question: 'What
        would life be?' one must, like the donkey, feed on the roses
        of illusion, then the absurd mind, rather than resigning itself
        to falsehood, prefers, to adopt fearlessly Kierkegaard’s reply:
        'despair.' Everything considered, a determined soul will
        always manage.”
 
    Oh snap, Camus. You didn't. He continued, through Kierkegaard and Husserl and so on. He seemed to conclude once more that the absurd – characterized mainly as the tension between people's yearning for an orderly world and the irrational reality that greets it – while recognized by various philosophers early in their journeys, it is usually so distasteful to them that they try to drown it in convoluted reason. Infuriatingly, he then went on to say addressing this was yet another diversion (“I am not interested in philosophical suicide, but rather in plain suicide. I merely wish to purge it of its emotional content and know its logic and its integrity...”) before getting down to the main event. Why shouldn't a nihilist kill himself?, Ernest thought. We don't have all day.
    Nope. Not there yet. There was a section titled “Absurd Freedom,” which seemed to be writing up how cool it is to know that ya don't know nothin'. Once one acknowledges and embraces the absurd it throws life into a different sort of light, which... I dunno, gives you superpowers?
 
        “That path now emerges in daily life. It encounters the
        world of the anonymous impersonal pronoun 'one,' but
        henceforth man enters in with his revolt and his lucidity.
        He has forgotten how to hope. This hell of the present
        is his Kingdom at last. All problems recover their sharp
        edge. Abstract evidence retreats before the poetry of
        forms and colors. Spiritual conflicts become embodied
        and return to the abject and magnificent shelter of man’s
        heart. None of them is settled but all are transfigured. Is
        one going to die, escape by the leap, rebuild a mansion
        of ideas and forms to one’s own scale? Is one, on the
        contrary, going to take up the heart-rending and marvel-
        ous wager of the absurd? Let’s make a final effort in this
        regard and draw all our conclusions. The body, affection,
        creation, action, human nobility will then resume their
        places in this mad world. At last man will again find
        there the wine of the absurd and the bread of indifference
        on which he feeds his greatness.”
 
    Yeah, I'm totally great. But should I kill myself? Lalala...
    He continued. Very shortly, he read, “Now I can broach the notion of suicide.” FINALLY.
    Or not. “Ernest! You should be paying attention! What are you reading?”
    Ernest had heard far too many quiet collective snickers and chuckles today. Oh well. One more. She approached, and he held up the book. She took it into her hand, read the title, and handed it back.
    “I can't believe they let teenagers read that. You aren't planning to forsake morality for 'absurd freedom' yet, are you?”
    “I don't know. What do you know about it?”
    “The ideas in the book seem to prefigure my least favorite things about postmodernism. I'd say don't take it too seriously, but at least you aren't reading 'Atlas Shrugged' or 'The Fountainhead'.”
    A voice from nearby squeaked, “Now I'm reading 'Atlas Shrugged'!”
    “Also, don't base your life on trying to be the opposite of people you dislike.”
    Mrs. Spurling returned to the front of the class. Ernest knew he'd go back to reading soon, but had to play it cool for a bit. She was wearing and orange sweater and her hair was permed into a sort of Dionne Warwick circa 1986 thing. She turned back to the class and leaned on her desk.
    “Now let's get back to discussing the issue of system justification. What are some systems in your own lives?”
    “Uh... A sewer system!”
    “Sorry, Roger, I guess I mean social systems, like cultural paradigms or institutions.”
    “Prison!”
    “OK, Bobby, but for this discussion, let's narrow the focus to systems we have direct experience with...”
 
    The clock spun round a little bit and reading happened. Ernest had to try to drown out the stupid around him and focus closely on what he had just read in order to proceed. The absurd, as described here, is something like an embodiment of the feeling of nihilism, defined more narrowly as the tension between human desire for sense and the reality of a world that makes no sense – in which all attempts for knowledge can quickly be drowned in doubt and confusion. The question is whether living with awareness and earnest attention to “the absurd” – that your life has no purpose – requires a logically consistent person to commit suicide. He claimed existentialists started with an awareness of the absurd and then threw themselves to a conclusion that negated part of it, which he likened to philosophical suicide. And finally, proposed that to address the question one needs to put the absurd in front of him and not flinch – that there is something empowering about it too. What's all that about?
    So he gets into the matter with, “to find out if it is possible to live without appeal.”
    Reading the next bit got confusing again, but he figured out what his problem with comprehension was. Camus started referring to “revolt” as an integral element of the absurd (or had he already been doing that for a while?) and Ernest hadn't quite digested the meaning of that. The revolt was in being aware of both your desire for order and the impossibility of it. If you found a way to stop desiring order or to pretend you've found some kind of sense, then you would no longer be in revolt against nonsense, and you'd escape from the absurd.
 
        “Negating one of the terms of the opposition on which
        he lives amounts to escaping it. To abolish conscious
        revolt is to elude the problem... Living is keeping the
        absurd alive. Keeping it alive is, above all, contem-
        plating it. Unlike Eurydice, the absurd dies only when
        we turn away from it. One of the only coherent philo-
        sophical positions is thus revolt. It is a constant con-
        frontation between man and his own obscurity. It is an
        insistence upon an impossible transparency. It chal-
        lenges the world anew every second. Just as danger
        provided man the unique opportunity of seizing aware-
        ness, so metaphysical revolt extends awareness to the
        whole of experience. It is that constant presence of man
        in his own eyes. It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of
        hope. That revolt is the certainly of a crushing fate, with-
        out the resignation that ought to accompany it.
          This is where it is seen to what a degree absurd
        experience is remote from suicide. It may be thought that
        suicide follows revolt—but wrongly. For it does not re-
        present the logical outcome of revolt. It is just the contrary
        by the consent it presupposes. Suicide, like the leap, is
        acceptance at its extreme. Everything is over and man
        returns to his essential history. His future, his unique and
        dreadful future—he sees and rushes toward it. In its way,
        suicide settles the absurd. It engulfs the absurd in the same
        death. But I know that in order to keep alive, the absurd
        cannot be settled. It escapes suicide to the extent that it is
        simultaneously awareness and rejection of death. It is, at
        the extreme limit of the condemned man’s last thought,
        that shoelace that despite everything he sees a few yards
        away, on the very brink of his dizzying fall. The contrary
        of suicide, in fact, is the man condemned to death.”
 
    ...What does that mean for me? I get to school this morning and nothing makes sense. I'm on Camus's page when he talks about how everything absurd and if there's a point it isn't one I can get, but I don't know about all this... Why did I start this? Extra credit. Like that matters. Why do I do anything? Because I have to. Except I don't, do I? So why don't I kill myself? I don't want to. Does that make me a hypocrite? If my life doesn't mean anything and all this stuff I feel compelled to do is pointless, shouldn't I be true to that perception and be done? And what does this guy's brain gymnastics have to do with any of that shit?
    He says always being aware of the absurd is living in a constant state of rebellion against the nonsense of the world. That rebellion becomes rebellion against death, because it's holding onto a desire for sense even in the face of knowing it can never be fulfilled. You have to keep going and trying, even knowing you'll fail, because giving up suggests you've found a solution...
    This is all just silly bullshit. Maybe Mrs. Spurling is right about... whatever it was she was talking about. I have to focus at all times on the pointlessness of life because f I decide that's motivation to kill myself, then I've decided that there is a point – killing myself – therefore in living I get to say I'm not a hypocrite, but WHAT? Who cares if it's morally consistent to live or die when you're aware of the pointlessness or not? If your life sucks enough, dying seems like a reasonable thing to do. Who is Camus to shit on that? Or would he, given how he seems to flop all over the place in this fishy-ass thesis?
    Ernest decided that if that was indeed Camus's hot idea for how to live in the face of a pointless existence, it was useless wordplay. Now he really would just be reading for extra credit, because this book seemed more pointless than ever. He looked up at the clock, made a gesture to pretend he was paying attention to the class. Look at me! Ha, psych. Then he tried to finish this section with the rest of his class time... And immediately ran into an elaboration that made him wonder why he'd stopped on the last paragraph.
 
        “That revolt gives life its value. Spread out over the whole
        length of a life, it restores its majesty to that life. To a man
        devoid of blinders, there is no finer sight than that of the in-
        telligence at grips with a reality that transcends it. The sight
        of human pride is unequaled. No disparagement is of any use.
        That discipline that the mind imposes on itself, that will con-
        jured up out of nothing, that face-to-face struggle have some-
        thing exceptional about them. To impoverish that reality
        whose inhumanity constitutes man’s majesty is tantamount to
        impoverishing him himself. I understand then why the doct-
        rines that explain everything to me also debilitate me at the
        same time. They relieve me of the weight of my own life, and
        yet I must carry it alone. At this juncture, I cannot conceive
        that a skeptical metaphysics can be joined to an ethics of
        renunciation.
          Consciousness and revolt, these rejections are the contrary
        of renunciation. Everything that is indomitable and passionate
        in a human heart quickens them, on the contrary, with its own
        life. It is essential to die unreconciled and not of one’s own
        free will. Suicide is a repudiation. The absurd man can only
        drain everything to the bitter end, and deplete himself. The
        absurd is his extreme tension, which he maintains constantly
        by solitary effort, for he knows that in that consciousness and
        in that day-to-day revolt he gives proof of his only truth,
        which is defiance. This is a first consequence.”
 
    Well, pride now. And somehow life is supposed to be more exciting when you are living it in defiance of its certain and pointless end. Color me unconvinced, but at least it's better than the first part of his conclusion. Now how much is left to go? About six pages. Monsieur Camus is a wordy wordsmith... He read on.
    The next paragraph rejected the philosophical question of free will, segued into some talk about how the hopelessness of the absurd is liberating on a personal level. After that, he explains how he gets to that conclusion. People live as if they have freedom to control the outcome of their efforts, but realizing that freedom is an illusion grants the absurd guy a different freedom – to live like there's no tomorrow. That must have been what Mrs. Spurling was getting at. Now that could be interesting.
    Suddenly, he came on a crappy metaphor that made him certain Camus was white. He saw something on the dust jacket of him being part Algerian and he knew Algeria was in Africa, but this showed he had no clue about the black experience.
 
        “In the same way (this is my second comparison) the slaves
        of antiquity did not belong to themselves. But they knew that
        freedom which consists in not feeling responsible. Death, too,
        has patrician hands which, while crushing, also liberate.”
 
    Yeah. Freedom from responsibility. Sure was good havin' white folks take all that awful responsibility off our shoulders, God bless 'em. You piece of shit.
    He sat it down, and rolled his head on his shoulders. The sensation of his hair hitting him about the temples was weird, as was the feel of it on his head – dry, thick, disgusting. He shuddered. Yuckers. He held it back with his hands and tried to erase his mind. Was … not … working.
    OK, motherfucker. Let's do this. He kept reading.
 
      “...It is clear that death and the absurd are here the principles
        of the only reasonable freedom: that which a human heart
        can experience and live. This is a second consequence. The
        absurd man thus catches sight of a burning and frigid, trans-
        parent and limited universe in which nothing is possible but
        everything is given, and beyond which all is collapse and
        nothingness. He can then decide to accept such a universe
        and draw from it his strength, his refusal to hope, and the
        unyielding evidence of a life without consolation.”
 
    Blah blah blah. Revolt, freedom, passion, Nietzsche, better try it again when I have more time to think about it. Hark, the bell. The class bell rang. Time for fifth period.
 
    This time, there was time. He moved over the concrete like a robot made from some airy plastic, bouncing mechanically to his destination. The second floor of the school building, and World History II...
 

[Thy Dungyeon Maestyr]

INTERLUDE: DESCRIBE EVERYONE IN
    EXTREME DETAIL 4MOARWURDZ

Ernest Horatio Newman: Ernest is somewhere between five and six feet tall, slim but
not skelly, weak but not totally soft. He has plain brown skin, dark in dim light, unremarkable in most conditions. His face is shaped a bit like an almond standing on end, his nose slopes gently with nares that rise from the sides like parentheses. His mouth is largish with thick lips not very far from his skin color except in a seemingly brushed on streak of dark pink in the middle of the lower lip. The design of his newest glasses isn't very good for his face, and they slip down the minimal rise of the bridge of his nose whenever his skin isn't perfectly dry from a recent washing. The frames are thick and dark at the top and thin gold wires at the bottom, making them produce an artificial flat expression. His eyebrows are sparse and do less for his expression than the flesh of his brow, the way its contours contort with his frequent displays of outrage, incredulity, disdain, and so on. His eyes are largish with dark irises and a lot of sclera, giving him occasionally cartoonish expressions.
His hair is just slightly chocolate tinted black, with smallish curls, and about four inches long. On a regular day, it's fluffy and covered on top with a grey flatcap – outside of school hours. On the day when Hepler hands him Camus, it is twisted into loose spikes with some gluey, unpleasant looking product. It started the day wet, but congealed into something more dull by fourth period.
His usual style is boyish dapper with jewel toned notes for his skin tone, but his clothes are more ragged on that day as well. He usually smells like incense-themed cologne of some sort, in moderation, but on the day he smells like salty sweat mixed with something that makes people feel like they're getting a nosebleed.

Horace Jamiel Parker: Horace is a little under six feet tall and a bit thick in every dimension, mostly the belly. He has very light cream-colored skin, short wispy facial hair, and tufts of ill-kempt dull black hair with frizzy micro-curls – usually hanging in his face. His face is medium-wide and medium-macho, with small brown eyes, a projecting aquiline nose, and small, curvy lips in a light orchid color.
He wears very sagged, oversized jeans, which clearly display his striped boxers, and require a helping hand to stay aloft when he has to move fast. He wears flowing shirts covered in complicated filigree and patterns reflecting his “urban realities.”
He often smells like sugary cigarettes, drugs, or alcohol.

Tamara “Tammy” Aria Givens: A friend of Horace, she is well-coiffed in a clean ghetto style, with animal prints and large earrings and long, shellacked nails. She is a bit above five feet tall and distinctly fat, with an indistinct figure in tight fitting clothes with loose jackets. She has sparkling smallish eyes with long thick lashes, drawn arches for eyebrows, and colorful glittering eyeshadow. Her lips are small and have dark velvety lipstick tracing her smiles. Her teeth are small, so they show a lot of her pink gums when she smiles. Her complexion is close to bone colored and her hair is has tiny black curls, carefully arranged and highlighted to look pleasantly phony.

Pharaoh: Another Horace friend, hitherto unspoken and undescribed. Has cool backpack. Lives in Horace's building.

Scott: Another Horace friend, hitherto unspoken and undescribed.

Theresa: Chatty girl from Ernest's 1st period Lit class.

Shantea: Chatty girl from Ernest's 1st period Lit class. Known to refer to Ernest as the male Janelle Monae.

Taylor: Victim of Theresa/Shantea gossip, she may have administered oral sex to Shy Powell. She's probably skipping school now, because last she was present, people were making suck faces at her and all that kinda shit.

Ginny: Someone who hosted a party, at which Taylor may have administered oral sex to Shy Powell. May have witnessed the act at that time and subsequently spread the rumor, though only Robert has expressed that possibility in his own defense, as he is broadly suspected to the original gossip. Her ostensible motivation is jealousy, because she has some designs on Shy. But the real interesting thing a few days later was that she had a fever of 106 and couldn't even get out of bed. Did she catch mono from making out with Elizabeth to tease Robert, since Elizabeth has a tongue piercing and that's not hygienic?

Robert: Allegedly untrustworthy of Shy Powell, who may be responsible for the rumor of Taylor's oral sexings getting out into the wild. Due to his efforts, everyone already knew of the incident by the time Kissy publicly shamed Taylor for it, unless he isn't lying when he claims it was Ginny who spread the rumor.

Sim: One who heard the rumor of Taylor's oral sexing of Shy Powell and used it in a villainous act of slut shaming styled bullying. She or her friend Kissy asked Taylor what dick tastes like, thereby implying that they did not know and that Taylor should, because she was presently well known for administering oral sex to at least one penis.

Kissy: Alleged accomplice of Sim in the bullying of Taylor. Kissy had been thought perhaps innocent of the bullying due to not there on that occasion due to a professional obligation in her morning routine (She is an office assistant in first period), but was later revealed not only to have been present, but to have personally voiced the hurtful words. She has second period Food Science with Elizabeth.

Elizabeth: A person familiar with Kissy's routine who suggested to Claude that Kissy was not present at the slut shaming of Taylor. Later told Theresa or Shantea that she found out Kissy had skipped 1st period the day in question and indeed delivered the slut shaming joke. She has second period Food Science with Kissy. She has a tongue piercing, which is rumored to be unhygienic and to have given Ginny mono. Ginny was supposedly making out with Elizabeth to impress Robert.

Claude: Someone who was informed by Elizabeth of Kissy's routine and somehow communicated that information to either Theresa or Shantea. It is unknown whether or not he subsequently learned from Elizabeth or another that Kissy had skipped that day and indeed was responsible for the hurtful words, but it is known that he thinks Shy is crappy for not saying something in Taylor's defense. Still, no one cares what he thinks.

Bell Tran: Vietnamese American youth and sports fan, friend of Martin Cole. Thinks Karls should have been put on the field despite an injury. After all, Holcomb and Whitaker were fierce opponents in the game in question, which it seems Karls's team lost.

Martin Cole: Sports fan and friend of Bell Tran. Thinks they were right to use Karls sparingly, with upcoming games against more challenging teams.

Devon Sherrard: A young man in love, he has used friendship as a possible “in” to the graces of Alma Martinez.

Alma Martinez: A mature and sassy young lady, she sees herself as beyond the school, like her friends from previously graduated classes. In early stages of friendship with Devon Sherrard. She is close to five feet tall and has a stereotypically foxy body shape, aside from the minor ways in which shortness skews her towards munchkin. Her face is broad and looks like a Mayan sculpture with well-crafted modern makeup. Her hair is elaborately primped and permed into tiny tight curls with blatantly false colors changing by the week. She is the picture of a hottie straight out of Low Rider magazine, but her height makes it so she isn't noticed most of the time. And of the people who do notice her, the kind who have romantic feelings about the frail get creepy obsessive about her. She has 5th period History with Ernest and called out his weirdness in there.

Shy Powell: Over six feet and athletically built, this fellow is the man to be. He tries to avoid hassles, but is perhaps a bit of a hassle himself. His skin is red-brown and smooth, his folks have money, and he looks just a bit like Denzel. Allegedly given oral sex by Taylor and has remained silent in the face of her public shaming, presumably to continue the appearance of being all cool and indifferent in a world full of the undignified.

Tyna Terrell: A snobbish girl perhaps an inch taller than Ernest, in his food science class.

Trevor Stratton: An invisible man in Ernest's food science class.

Nabila Mohamed: She doesn't wear hijab every day, but she's usually got some kind of cloth in the straightened and wound knots on her head. She doesn't appreciate the way lactase persistence has convinced the rest of the world that lactose intolerance is abnormal. Down with the Man!

Sharese Walker: An undescribed poetry student.

Marvin Dees: An undescribed poetry student who wants to rap, maybe in a “conscious” style. Sometimes gets away with low-key cussing in Mr. Hallstrom's class.

“T,” "the Crappy Guy," or "T Scroggs": A bully who thinks he totally has Ernest's number, and wants to beat him for being offensively weird. Keeps attracting attention which impedes that goal, due to an inherent loudness or largeness in his presence.

A Little Bird: T Scroggs' apprentice in the bullying trade.

The Administrator: A school employee with the will of a petty tyrant. They wander grounds looking for trouble.

Mr. Hepler: This teacher does not know who you are, unless you're a problem. Initiated the Camus reading stuff in response to Ernest being disruptive in class. Disruptive but not tardy. Never! His hair is typically in a lank brown bowl cut, and he wears a moustache and silver wire frame glasses. His taste in clothes is similarly terrible, with ill fitting short-sleeved collared shirts tucked into high-belted sort-of baggy pants in ugly colors.

Ms. Cameron: She teaches an impoverished science class in an impoverished style.

Mr. Hallstrom: Sometimes poetry teacher. Perhaps colored like wood; wears glasses.

Mrs. Spurling: Teacher of various Social Studies classes, once taught Ernest the word “metacognition.” Has opinions about Camus, Rand, and postmodernism. Wearing an orange sweater and hair permed like Dionne Warwick circa 1986.

Mrs. Bougy: An ancient among the academics. Teaches History from personal experience.

Veritay Michelle Duchesne: Ernest's mother. She is adequate at best. She has thin, sandy brown hair brushed into long wisps with medium-sized bends. Her skin is a medium cream color with much acne scarring on the front/middle of the cheeks. She is usually seen in a tiger striped bathrobe and a rotating cast of pajama bottoms and socks. Her face shape and body size are similar to Ernest's, save for lady-like proportions. Aside from that, there is only a slight family resemblance. Her eyes are smallish, her nose projects more at the bridge and is more rounded at the bottom, her lips less full, and her chin soft with the fat of youth. The only sign she is appropriately older than her son is one deep line on her forehead. She works at a call center part time and connects the rest of the dots with child support payments and various government assistance.

[Thy Dungyeon Maestyr]

CHAPTER THREE: SISYPHUS: THE ABSURD MAN

      Ernest was angling for the stairs when that creep from the lunch room came out of nowhere, throwing a caveman punch at his head. He ducked the blow and it slammed into a locker, making a noise so loud everyone stopped to stare. Ernest ducked behind the wall of onlookers and disappeared into the stairwell.
      He walked up the steps. He wasn't strong at all, and this was strong work. He tended to throw himself at stairs, try to get forward momentum, and just be exhausted by the time he reached the top. Partway up, he passed Horace again. This was not all that unusual. They passed each other all the time on a regular day, but this day was unusual in that they had exchanged more words than in all days previous. Horace followed him up, and started talking.
      “Hey. Ernest.”
      “Hey Horace. What do you want?”
      “Don't be hostile. Hm. Uh, well, wanna hang out after school?”
      “What?” Ernest didn't get it.
      “Y'know. You come over to my place or I go to yours or we bum around somewhere else. I dunno. You seem like you don't got any friends.”
      “Who cares? Besides, I have some friends online.”
      “Really. OK...”
      They were at the door to Mrs. Bougy's History class. She was a fossilized human of some sort, not so much teaching as continuing to live in front of an audience. People felt bad for her, so they fucked around in relative quietude. That plus a lot of them were worn out from running around. If anyone was going to fall asleep in a class, fifth period was it. But this was not where Horace would be sleeping.
      Ernest said, “Wait, uh... I'll call my mom and see if I can go to your place. Where do you live?”
      “Benson Heights project. Apartment 506.”
      “Right. What bus you on?”
      “I don't remember the number. The driver has all that rainbow shit on her mirror.”
      “I'll look around.”
 
      Ernest buried himself in the back of the class and it began.
      “Th- um, th-an-huh?,” the teacher asked.
      “Thanh. Here.”
      “Very well. Um... Tuvu, um, Tu-”
      “Tulaga, I'm here.”
      Actually, that was Shy Powell covering for Tulaga, who was not there, but she'd never notice Shy had answered roll call twice.
      “Hey, stupid.”
      Ernest had to assume it was some addressing him from a position of inferior intelligence. It was Alma Martinez, so hard to say. She was seated next to him. This classroom was narrow in such a way that instead of cramming in desk-chairs, they had it lined with two rows of low, thick tables that each seated two students, a walkway down the middle leaving plenty of room to maneuver. He was in the back corner, so essentially Alma was seated between him and his only civilized point of egress. Trapped!
      “That's not my name.” (Sorry for Ting Tings reference... Wait, no I'm not.)
      “Sorry, Ernest. What the fuck was that this morning?” They spoke quietly.
      He snorted a little and smiled. “What? Too real for you?”
      “Tsst, whatever. I know from real, stupid. You were supposed to make us look, like, passable at least. Didn't have to make the Gettysburg Address, but that type of shits was ridickless!” She hissed and looked at him squarely. He just stared ahead. Don't make eye contact with the beast.
      “Whatever. It wasn't being graded.”
      “Have you ever heard of 'participation points'? It's how teachers punish you for having an attitude. And because of you, I'm sure we all lost some.”
      “...Maybe. Who cares? You going to college?”
      “I shouldn't have to let someone else decide that for me. What if I wanted to?”
      “...If I apologize, will you leave me alone?”
      “Tsst, what-ever!” She faced forward at last.
      They sat staring forward. There was nothing to say.
 
      As the class progressed, papers passed around, dry notes read from an overhead projector, the usual, sun began to creep across the window sills – but just barely. The black table tops were scored and smudged with naughtiness of youth in a cage. Ernest finally opened the book, deciding to get into a new chapter – “The Absurd Man.”
 
        “'My field,' said Goethe, 'is time.' That is indeed the absurd
        speech. What, in fact, is the absurd man? He who, without
        negating it, does nothing for the eternal. Not that nostalgia
        is foreign to him. But he prefers his courage and his reason-
        ing. The first teaches him to live without appeal and to get
        along with what he has; the second informs him of his lim-
        its. Assured of his temporally limited freedom, of his revolt
        devoid of future, and of his mortal consciousness, he lives
        out his adventure within the span of his lifetime. That is his
        field, that is his action, which he shields from any judgment
        but his own. A greater life cannot mean for him another life.
        That would be unfair. I am not even speaking here of that
        paltry eternity that is called posterity.”

      That's right. Who can judge you, amoral absurd hero? Even history will soon forget you. Oh, but the cops might shoot you, so there's that. But nevermind! Carry on.
      He read on. It seemed like Camus was saying in the absurd world, there's no basis for morality of a judgmental type. There can be practical concerns, but inherent value or sinfulness of an action is meaningless. I guess he would dodge the cops. Probably should, after writing this stuff. Then, just before getting into the next section of specific examples of his Absurd Man, he makes a disclaimer about how these are meant to be illustrative and not exactly heroic ideals to emulate, or something like that. The examples began with “Don Juanism.”
      Don Juan is shown to be a man who embodies absurdist ideals because he lives for the present and is true to himself. He follows his passion from one woman to the next and scoffs at the notion there is only one true love waiting in the world for him. Critics over time built up notions of him as a failed or tragic figure, dying old alone or neglected, but Camus characterizes him as acting in full awareness of what fate has in store for him – unashamed and happy to live for the time he has. Ernest wasn't familiar with the story of Don Juan – only that the name was synonymous with seducers at this point in time. But he took the meaning in easily, and was thankful for that. Since he jumped the gun on trying to understand Camus's escape from suicide, he decided to press on through the pages to the next section before reflecting on it.
      Ernest had to admit, he did agree the only morality that was justified was doing what felt right, which, Mrs. Spurling would probably say, couldn't help but be influenced by what you'd always been taught. So by means of cultural indoctrination, even someone acting in whatever way felt right to them would still hew pretty closely to the same morals espoused by the mainstream.
      A line of feeling cut through that whole line of reasoning, vibrating like a piano string moving backward through time, increasing in intensity to the moment the hammer unstruck it. He could put a name to it in his mind but didn't want to.
      How should I feel about the things I've done?
      He still felt haunted, harried, disturbed by something, but on reading this and reflecting, felt certain he shouldn't be obligated to feel guilty about any of it. Perhaps it would take a little getting used to, this new sense of self-assurance. He would act from now on without consideration of guilt – only of practical matters.
      There's some big-ass practical matters you still gotta take care of. Later.
 
      “You can take a few minutes to talk amongst yourselves. I have to run a short errand.” She made it sound like “errund,” like she was emphasizing the pronunciation of a “u” that was not there. Was that a Georgia thing? Folks were all mixed up these days, so it could be from anywhere. Then again, she was pretty old.
      Ernest was left in company with Alma. After a moment, she looked at him again. The murmur of the class quickly burst into dozens of loud conversations which ensured Alma and Ernest couldn't be heard by anyone else, not that they had anything scandalous to say to each other. Alma spoke.
      “Seriously, why are you so freaky today? You know it's hella creepy. Why you wanna creep us out? Is it a 'cry for help' or something?”
      “*siiigh* No.” His “no” hit a nasal note. “I don't think I... Man...”
      “Spit it out, man. Wassup?”
      “Nothing, dammit. Just a bit uncomfortable in my chair.”
 
      Mrs. Bougy returned. Class went on. Sixth period approached. The class bell rang. Ernest ambled out into the hall after everyone else, and began moving immediately toward his destination. He wasn't thrilled to be going back down to Mr. Hepler's room, but at least that was the one place in the school where the teacher expected him to be reading Camus. It was Study Hall.
      He had a phone call to make. No hurry this time, though, because Study Hall had twelve kids in it and a back row seat would be easy to get. He went to less sunny end of the second floor hall and stood near the window. As he opened his bag, he didn't even pay attention to the visibility of the gun. No one noticed. He tapped a few buttons and put the cheap cellphone to his ear. Voice mail.
      “Mom. I'm going somewhere after school. Call me if you have a problem with that. I'll check my messages before I get on the bus.”
      As he put the phone away, he noticed his disgusting hair situation and realized it might have been a good idea to go straight home anyways. Stupid. He was a filthy mess. And had big-ass practical matters to attend to.
      The hall was down to a very low density. Fewer of the schools classes were on this floor, with some rooms used for other purposes, there were fewer lockers, and almost anything anyone would want to do on a short break was downstairs. In about seven minutes, it would get more crowded again, but at this moment, a mere dozen teens wandered the large hallway, like tumbleweeds in a Hollywood ghost town. The sky was yellow with sun and smog, pouring in violently from the huge window at the far end of the hall. Ernest went to use the drinking fountain.
      A little bird espied him and fluttered away. It told somebody. As he stood up from the fountain and wiped his chin, somebody charged up the stairs. As he turned to head toward the stairs, a crappy guy came up from them. The bully was staring straight at Ernest and walking toward him with an air of absolute menace. Ernest knew he was just going to Study Hall, but he didn't want to be tardy. Not after all the effort he'd been through to avoid that today.
      “Are you going to beat me? Because I have somewhere to be, and if we could do it later, or maybe you co--”
      He was picked up roughly by the shoulders and slammed against a locker. He continued. “Be quick, but be careful. The safety is kinda loose on this gun in my bag, and it might go off if you hit me wrong.”
      The crappy guy snatched Ernest's bag and threw it to the little bird. Bird looked inside, then dropped the bag. “Holy shit, T, that nigga has a gun in his shit.” The onlookers were agape.
      “Why you had a gun, faggot? You wanna be one of those school shootin' fucks, is that it? I'll fuck you up, kid. I don't give a fuck you got a gun or what.”
      “Do you have a gun? It isn't even mine. You can have it. Just let me go. I don't WANT TO BE TARDY!”
      “T” (short for “T”he Crappy Guy?) was a bit confused. Not much fazed him either. After a moment, he turned to the onlookers – who now included a timid teacher – and barked at them, “Fuck OFF. I'm a take care of this.” The onlookers backed away quickly. He took one hand away from Ernest's shoulder and punched him hard in the gut.
      Ernest could feel the fist flatten his innards to an improbable degree against the locker. His spine was shocked by the pain of bring crushed against the metal, but otherwise, the pain didn't last. His guts popped back into their proper shape and he collapsed first against the locker, then the ground.
      From the floor, he could see T pick the gun out of his bag and stick it into an interior coat pocket. He walked away without a word. The little bird was suddenly more concerned with how his homie was now publicly known to have a gun and how that might come back to get him, and others who fucked off before stayed that way.
      Ernest picked himself up, sorted out his shirt, and grabbed his bag off the floor.
 
      Study Hall and there was Mr. Hepler again. The man sat in an easy pose behind his desk, hair in an embarrassing brown bowl cut, a moustache on his lip, silver wire frame glasses, and his hands folded around a coffee mug. He regarded Ernest warmly. Wasn't I kinda arguing with this guy? Ernest gave him a wild look for a moment and shrugged, then went to a seat by the window. There was no daylight left in the room this afternoon, and the weirder yellow of the fluorescent lights washed weakly over the desks. Ernest was not tardy. That was all he needed at the moment.
      He wiped the sweat off his brow. He noticed his hair had grown tight and uncomfortable. This was not a hair product he was ever going to use again, fate willing. At last, he took out the book. He noticed Mr. Hepler smile at the sight and rolled his eyes, before he finally got back to reading.
      This section was titled “Drama,” and turned to the idea of actors as absurd icons. He made sure to express that he didn't think every actor was living the absurd ideal and yadda yadda, but did think their profession served as an apt metaphor for the values – such as those are – of the absurd man. He read on...
      Actors have a fleeting fame – he seemed to speak only of stage actors – built on moments which come and are quickly gone forever. They live alternate lives of passion and brief existence, many times over within their own lives. Again he seems to be advocating quantity of life as more important than quality, and sees the diverse experiences of the actor as a way of multiplying one's self. It didn't matter that the characters actors play are ephemeral or fake, because life itself is ephemeral.
      Ernest didn't buy that, but there was an interesting anecdote in the midst of all this.
 
        “Adrienne Lecouvreur on her deathbed was willing to
        confess and receive communion, but refused to abjure her
        profession. She thereby lost the benefit of the confession.
        Did this not amount, in effect, to choosing her absorbing
        passion in preference to God? And that woman in the death
        throes refusing in tears to repudiate what she called her art
        gave evidence of a greatness that she never achieved behind
        the footlights. This was her finest role and the hardest one
        to play. Choosing between heaven and a ridiculous fidelity,
        preferring oneself to eternity or losing oneself in God is the
        age-old tragedy in which each must play his part.”
 
        That's pretty cool.
      It was getting a bit easier to read. In the next part of this section, Camus suddenly started writing everything in quotation marks without attribution – he was acting the part of “The Conqueror.” He used the first person character of an idealized fighting dude to spell out a philosophy Ernest didn't completely get. It involved staying aware of your death and living for the moment and that kind of stuff. Beat that drum, Albert.
      And then it was onto a different section of the book, about the relationship between Camus's ideas and writing. Ernest wasn't ready to wade in there, and sat the book down. Without considering it, he put his head down as well. What a damn day. His glasses fell off his face onto the desk with a light rap. Maybe they'd be scratched. He couldn't care.
      His hair felt like a vise. Why did I think this was a good idea again? Good grief! He had a choice before first period: Wash it out, or do something with it. Based on where he was and what was going on and how long he had before class, he chose to do something with it, and twisted those silly spikes.
      At last, he picked his head back up, got out of his seat, and walked to the front desk. Mr. Hepler looked up. “What do you need, Mr. Newman?”
      “I want to go to the restroom and wash my hair, so it might take a little while.”
      “Mm. OK. Not liking the look?”
      “... No.” He turned away from Hepler and walked out of the room.
 
      Ernest walked through the hall. Now most of the light was from above. Orange, beaten lockers bracketed the world. He walked to the bathroom, passing a random young lady. The bathroom interior the light shifted, becoming even more dominated by the artificial, shading now toward blue. He bowed at the knees for a moment, glancing under the stall doors. No one was in the room. He stood before the sink.
      He looked at himself again. He suddenly felt like all his secrets were revealed plainly in this image, that he'd been walking around all day obvious as hell, and people either didn't care about his secrets, or they were pretending not to know as some kind of joke at his expense. Obvious. As hell. His hair twitched as he looked around in paranoia. No...
      He shook off the feeling, turned on the water, and put his head under the faucet. The goop seemed like it was going to resist – to stay solid forever – but finally softened enough to add soap. The hand soap was that pearlescent, slightly gritty pink stuff that smelled like bubblegum. He worked it into his hair as quickly as possible, but the initial work had to go a bit slow, to keep from pulling a bunch of hair out or tangling things worse. At one point, he picked his head partway out of the sink and looked out toward the hall, a skinny finger pressed tight against his skin to keep soap and waste out of his eyes. The he put his head back under the flowing water. In front of him he could make out the blurry image of the stuff swirling and draining in the sink, almost powder like chunks and rusty swirls dissolved into the medium. Below that, the porcelain was craquelure with ancient grey and scratched and dinged by the erosion of decades of nearly grown children – the damage they inflict without thought and without end.
      He thought about the water coming off his head, the way it would hit his shirt. Normally, that would make him uncomfortable and he'd go out of his way to not get his shirt wet, but today it was already in a wretched state from sweat and struggle. He just came up from the sink with a flip of the hair, hoping to start the drying process. Then he walked to the paper towel dispenser and started drying with those.
      A few moments and twenty towels later, time slowed as a large man came into the bathroom, a t-shirt across taut over his torso, a character on it smiling with a large, sparkling eye. It was a pig with a knife, chopping itself to pieces. The ghoulish thing winked at Ernest and he stiffened. The other young man saw Ernest's reaction, stopped, and stiffened in his tracks. The leering t-shirt animal had a few things to say.
      Washed it all off, you think? You'll never be clean. Hahaha!
      Ernest remembered to answer with his mind. God! From food products to textiles?
      I'm all over the place and your life is all over too! HahahahahaHA!!!
      The t-shirt wearer said, “Dude, what the fuck?” and Ernest shook his head.
      “Sorry, you surprised me, haha.”
      OOOOOOOOOVEERRRRRRRRR!
      “Yeah.” The suicidal pig was taken away, and Ernest walked back into the hall.
      He stood still in the early afternoon light. School would be out soon. He was glad he wouldn't have to go to Horace's apartment with that crap in his hair, but he was keenly aware yet again of the sense that the future was utterly unwritten, and it was very easy to imagine that cartoon pig was right, and that there wasn't anything left of it. Would he ever go home again? Don't care. He walked back to class.
 
      He knew Mr. Hepler would want to talk to him after school, and he knew he didn't want to do that, so he got completely ready, scribbled in his notebook until the final bell, and zipped out the door, nearly tripping three times. Hepler barely managed to lift a finger to say good-bye.
      Ernest was so fast off the line that the halls were momentarily almost empty. He beat the crowds out to the bus area. It was a stretch in front of the building that had multiple wide lanes marked out with paint, each lane now end to end with yellow buses, waiting to take the crowds home. He jogged out into the spaces between the buses, looking for one with a rainbow motif in the driver's personal décor.
      He found it, walked to the appropriate side, and slipped in. Horace wasn't there yet and he couldn't be positive the rainbow macrame hanging from the rearview mirror was truly unique among the collected buses, so he disembarked, squeezing past some other kid to do so, and stood on the concrete outside.
      People bustled past, one way and the other, twirling him around, acting the fool. Teens ran and screamed and teased each other. He stepped off the curb to the sad footof concrete between it and the bus, and the people flowed past him more easily. He focused his attention on the door, waiting to see Horace going into it.
      One kid then another ran into that door, jogged up the steps, and walked the aisle. He could tell the bus was filling up. Someone gently punched his arm and he span around in shock. Horace and Pharoah were there.
      Horace said, “Hey, come on.”
      They all got into the bus, walked down the pine green rubber aisle runner, and took their blistered cornflower blue vinyl seats. Pharoah took the window seat, Horace the aisle seat beside him, and Ernest ended up across from that, displacing an angry looking freshman towards the window. The bus driver closed the door without ceremony, her weathered arm reaching into the aisle's view just long enough to pull the large switch, then disappearing. The engine started.
      Kids started conversations and Ernest knew he wouldn't be able to talk with Horace at all. He just sat there, a stranger in a piece of the world that had absolutely nothing to do with him. The freshman glowered.
 
      The bus left the school and anything resembling it behind, driving out into barren city of concrete, steel, plastic, glass, and materials in between. All was lit in the blue reflected from high above, save for random spears of bright yellow-white that found the city's floor, making bits of chrome and stainless steel and clean glass blaze with hot white flashes in transient moments. The cars bumped along slowly. Rush hour wasn't in full force, but did start about that time. The bus driver would certainly take longer returning to base than they did along the router dropping off its human freight.
      The yellow beast found poorer neighborhoods and began to shed some weight. On 375th and Washington, it rolled up to a seventy year old brick behemoth, one hundred twenty feet tall. Benson Heights Project. Eight passengers disembarked. The bus driver gave Ernest a wild eye, from beneath her weird faded denim summer hat and miserable looking frizzy dark brown hair, but let him go unquestioned.
      He staggered out onto the sidewalk alone, Horace and Pharoah already three long paces away. His mind rebelled against looking like he in any way needed something from his rude host, so he strolled behind. The other two chatted quietly, backs to him. Pharoah's backpack was covered in spiderwebs and gold skulls. The bottom was encased in translucent plastic. Otherwise, it looked a bit like a relic from the late eighties. The two walked in the front door, the lock broken and the doors swinging freely. Ernest trailed in casually, looking like an explorer who had lost all enthusiasm for his exotic destination.
      Only one in three hall lights worked, cracks revealed corrupted wood, streaks of burns and slime and all manner of defacement lent a sad kind of interest to the hall. They passed elevators, with a rather permanent looking “out of order” sign on display, and walked into somewhat daylit stairwell through doors barely covered in broken up old white paint. The stairs smelled terrible, some piss here, a used diaper that fell out on someone's way to the garbage over there, and so on. Pharoah and Horace walked through a knot of children smoking and drinking. Ernest drew especially nasty looks from them.
      On the fifth floor, Pharoah kept going upstairs and Horace turned to face Ernest. “In here, man.” Ernest fumed at him silently and followed him into an even darker hall. The only working light here was the sun itself, with windows at either end of the hundred foot long hall admitting an especially wan light. Horace led him to an apartment, unlocked it, and they came into a much more pleasant world.
 
      Horace's apartment was well-cleaned by somebody, humble but well-organized and hygienic. It was also in full light, as if someone with deteriorating vision lived here and needed extra lumens just to feel like they weren't blind yet. The thickly built young man turned around walking backward a few paces, dropping his coat on the couch.
      “Welcome to the Parker place. I hope you don't freak about roaches because the motherfuckers get in sometimes.”
      “Yeah, whatever.”
      Horace turned to face forward, walked a short hall, and led Ernest into his room.
      The room was less tidy than the rest of the place, and smelled just a little like stale teenager. Horace pushed open the window. The screen was missing and the barometric pressure in the room changed immediately. Ernest felt himself sucked forward slightly, then rocked back on his heels. There were only two pieces of furniture in the room and Ernest opted for the bed, laying with his lower legs dangling over the edge. Horace pulled up the chair and sat looking at the guy.
      “Sorry. You live somewhere nicer?”
      “Only a little.” Ernest pushed himself upright and looked at Horace with a slack expression. “What's your deal, Horace? What are you, um, about? Y'know?”
      Horace smiled. His chunky hair hid the corners of his eyes. “Nothin', dude. Wanna play some games? I don't got a lot of two player, except... some old fighters.”
      “I prefer multi-user dungeons and text adventures.”
      “Whats and whats?”
      “I'm no good at video games, Horace.”
      “You used my name twice already. That's weird.”
      “I'm just a flippin' weird guy. What do you expect?”
      Horace cocked his head left, right, center with little cracking noises. “Sorry. I am. I don't know what the fuck I'm doin' from one minute to the next, I must confess. I do not remember why I had you come here.”
      Ernest flopped down again, looking blankly at the ceiling. The paint there had a strange texture, like an old “popcorn” finish had been scraped off and then painted over flat without sanding first. A random cobweb hung near a corner, pointing to and from the window with the breeze. He cleared his mind, and some thoughts from earlier came springing back into it unbidden.
 
        “If it were sufficient to love, things would be too easy.
        The more one loves, the stronger the absurd grows. It is
        not through lack of love that Don Juan goes from woman
        to woman. It is ridiculous to represent him as a mystic in
        quest of total love. But it is indeed because he loves them
        with the same passion and each time with his whole self
        that he must repeat his gift and his profound quest.
        Whence each woman hopes to give him what no one has
        ever given him. Each time they are utterly wrong and
        merely manage to make him feel the need of that repetition.
        'At last,' exclaims one of them, 'I have given you love.'
        Can we be surprised that Don Juan laughs at this? 'At last?
        No,' he says, 'but once more.' Why should it be essential
        to love rarely in order to love much?”
 
      Where did masturbation fit into that? It's the only amorous activity Ernest was familiar with. What is love? Haddaway wasn't the only dude looking for an answer.
      “We don't have anything in common, do we?”
      “Nope. Wanna beer? My mom lets me drink here if I don't get too fucked up.”
      “No thanks. You go ahead though.”
      “Uhh, OK. Wanna pop?”
      “OK, but not diet.”
      Ernest waited and considered the problem. Someone wanted to be friendly because he looked like he needed a friend. This is why he didn't have IRL friends. Too much trouble. What do you do with someone if you have nothing in common?
      Probably try out each other's interests. Well, Ernest thought, I'm not going to make a bong out of a human skull and smoke rat poop and cyanide out of it, thank you. Horace would have to find out about online role-playing games or Ernest would have to get good at video games in ten minutes.
      “Hey, so,” Ernest began, “You got the computer there. Does it work OK?”
      “I dunno, good enough. You wanna play a game on there?”
      “Kinda. I thought maybe I should show you what I do online.”
      “That's kinda personal, isn't it?”
      “What? Tshh, no, what? No. Good grief!”
      “Hehe, sorry...”
      Horace gestured to the chair and Ernest assumed the driver's seat. Horace sat on the foot of the bed, which was very nearby. Ernest tried pushing the mouse a bit and nothing happened, then pushed the switch on top. Fans roared to life and the stuff chunked and clunked along. White system text on black. Windows trying to wake up. Obligatory password. “6-9-p-s-y-c-o-6-9.” Graffitiesque skull image for wallpaper. Oh look, it's weird malware pop-ups. Three minutes had passed by the time the hard drive noises died to a low grind.
      “Uh... This is weird. I never used somebody else's computer before.”
      “Yeah. Well, uh, don't pay attention to, um, like, bookmarks and stuff.”
      Ernest's forehead went through a rising and falling tide of weird contortions and his eyes lurked to the side and back. “HoooKay.” He opened internet explorer. The internet exploded.
      It wasn't the worst he'd ever seen, but it was bad. Two “toolbar” style spyware deals shoved the window down a ways, but it was a good-sized monitor. Some pop-up ad about “monster cocks” bounced with relative modesty at the bottom left. This could be any grandma's computer.
      “I don't know if I want to log into anything from this computer, but maybe I'll just show you the site...” Another pop-up ad for “hot local studs.” Huh. Could just be a coincidence. He typed the URL of the main forum he used for role-playing, noting the way the letters flashed and the hard drive chugged, suggesting a dozen hidden processes recording each keystroke. Show him the place but don't log in...
      In addition to going to www.shadomasters.kt/xboards?display=thread/swordnsorcery_9822_+_elven/exctesfefeax'.0102.html, another tab was opened. He could only see part of the title: “gay cu.” He let the office chair carry him in an awkward squeaking arc to face Horace. “Um, did you have something you wanted to tell me, young man?”
      Horace looked a little red. “Uh. Well, naw, but my dumbass computer wants to talk about it. Anyway, I figured you was gay too, so you wouldn't freak. So... What's this... stuff?”
      A piano string was threatening to vibrate in his mind, but he put a mental palm down on it, drew a breath and a thought, and continued. “Well, your computer is a towering pile of Orwellian spybots and runs like a wounded dog, so I think we'll find something else to do maybe?”
      Horace leaned back. His hair fell out of his face for the moment, and he drank some beer. Then he leaned forward again. “I know enough to know those weird shits is spyin' on me, but I figure, they already know what they know, so fuck it. I kept lookin' at stuff. I dunno. What do you do?”
      His mind was buzzing now, but he tried to wave it away. Here now was something to do. Instruct a young man in the ways of using the internet safely and with relative anonymity. But there was buzzing.
      Two thoughts pushed at his mind, besides the practical. One he did not want to give a voice to, did not want to capitulate to. The other posed itself as a question.
      What would Don Juan do?
      “Errm, ahem...” He crinkled his brow and tried to focus. When he opened his eyes, he bore the expression of someone asking permission for something that they expect to get beaten for mentioning. “What would... I … do? I, ahem, would not use porn when I can, er, just , uh, do the real thing.” Yeah, totally hot dirty talk. Nailed that one.
      At first nothing. Then a smile spread slowly over the shaggy guy's mouth, and he said, “I was hopin' you'd say somethin' like that. Heh.”
      The larger man leaned over from the bed, tilting toward Ernest. The vibration was too intense. The less pleasant thought sounded in his head, and he practically fell out of the chair. Before he knew it, he was standing halfway to Horace's door.
      Horace put a hand up in a placating gesture. “It's OK, dude, man, we don't gotta do nothin', shit.” He stood up and looked like he wanted to hold the situation down, somehow physically keep the Universe from moving. It was not going to work.
      “Yeah, I know, I just, er, remembered I have something important to do is all! Yes. Um... I'll let myself out.”
 

[Thy Dungyeon Maestyr]

CHAPTER FOUR: SISYPHUS: CREATION

    If there was one thing Ernest had learned in high school, it's that you start and finish an essay with a summary. Camus was usually strong on that point and needlessly discursive on every other. Ernest figured at least 15% of this writing could be left out and make the point better for him. Nonetheless, it always started strong.

All those lives maintained in the rarefied air of the absurd could
not persevere without some profound and constant thought to
infuse its strength into them. Right here, it can be only a strange
feeling of fidelity. Conscious men have been seen to fulfill their
task amid the most stupid of wars without considering them-
selves in contradiction. This is because it was essential to elude
nothing. There is thus a metaphysical honor in enduring the
world’s absurdity. Conquest or play-acting, multiple loves, ab-
surd revolt are tributes that man pays to his dignity in a campaign
in which he is defeated in advance.

    Well said. The second point seemed more meaningful (would Camus object to that word?) than the first though. Earlier in the book he claimed that in order to live with due passion, you had to hold in front of you the idea of the absurd as much as possible, which is only meaningful if you accept the premise that awareness enhances life. Many people, to Ernest, seemed quite blissful in ignorance. Camus would call that “philosophical suicide” and say it makes you less cool or whatever, but Ernest was usually more concerned with effect than cause.
    Which brought Ernest to thinking of the reason for his own lack of faith in … anything. If he was OK with other people having their illusions, why not embrace some of his own? Because he had no choice, obviously. To him the word “belief” meant “feeling something to be true.” You can't decide what to feel, even if you can influence what you feel through some kind of mental discipline.
    That being the case, you can't “decide to believe” something. It must feel true to be a belief. If you've decided to believe, it's an admission that you don't actually believe yet. It also says that you feel like you should believe even if you don't, which wasn't an idea he could get behind. After all, if the desired belief doesn't feel true, what makes it desirable? A false feeling of comfort? Because from his point of view, it could only feel false. And that made it seem like something that could fail, leaving one in worse condition than if they'd never raised that hope in the first place.
    Throughout the book, Camus was advocating a life lived without hope and in literal spite (“revolt”) of hopelessness. He could see why Mr. Hepler thought that might be helpful to a nihilist (he was getting used to that label), but to Ernest, this reasoning seemed to be a denial of lived human experience. Hopelessness does not feel good. To Camus, holding it before you at all times, focusing on the absurdity to fuel your passion, it just seemed like it couldn't work.
    A simpler and more familiar way of saying it all would be “live for today because tomorrow may never come,” or getting a bit further off “it's better to burn out than to fade away,” or further still “the Devil sends the Beast with wrath, because he knows his time is short.” Ernest smiled at that last notion, then tried to steal back his focus. In this simpler version, there isn't a necessity of holding hopelessness in front of you, because you can live without thought.
    It was certainly more appealing. Ernest surmised Camus would consider thoughtlessness a form of escape which made the whole endeavor less honest, but Camus's big hard-on for honesty seemed very hypocritical for a man obsessed with meaninglessness.
    The bus was a lurching chamber of dim lights which did nothing to illuminate – merely served to blind you to the world outside. That had become quite dark in the time the crawling ancient machine was taking to get to Ernest's block. He resumed reading.

“Creating is living doubly. The groping, anxious quest of a Proust,
his meticulous collecting of flowers, of wallpapers, and of anxieties,
signifies nothing else. At the same time, it has no more significance
than the continual and imperceptible creation in which the actor, the
conqueror, and all absurd men indulge every day of their lives. All
try their hands at miming, at repeating, and at recreating the reality
that is theirs...
    Such men know to begin with, and then their whole effort is to
examine, to enlarge, and to enrich the ephemeral island on which
they have just landed...
    The place of the work of art can be understood at this point. It
marks both the death of an experience and its multiplication. It is
a sort of monotonous and passionate repetition of the themes already
orchestrated by the world: the body, inexhaustible image on the
pediment of temples, forms or colors, number or grief...”

    Writing as a way to squeeze more out of life by creating false multiples of one's limited experience of it. A silly notion. Time spent writing was time not being lived in some other fashion, so unless someone wrote faster than they could live, the math wouldn't come out in favor of the exercise. Therefore slow writing was pointless?
    Camus didn't bother with those equations.

“The absurd work requires an artist conscious of these limitations
and an art in which the concrete signifies nothing more than itself.
It cannot be the end, the meaning, and the consolation of a life.
Creating or not creating changes nothing. The absurd creator does
not prize his work. He could repudiate it. He does sometimes...
    There is a certain relationship between the global experience of
the artist and the work that reflects that experience... That relation-
ship is bad when the work aims to give the whole experience in the
lace-paper of an explanatory literature. That relationship is good
when the work is but a piece cut out of experience, a facet of the
diamond in which the inner luster is epitomized without being
limited. In the first case there is overloading and pretension to
the eternal. In the second, a fecund work because of a whole
implied experience, the wealth of which is suspected.”

    Less is more. An implied message is better than a dully explicated one. Writing 101? Camus went on to say the absurdity of visual and musical arts was self-evident (okay...) and so he would, “speak here of a work in which the temptation to explain remains greatest, in which illusion offers itself automatically, in which conclusion is almost inevitable... fictional creation.”
    He proposed to “inquire whether or not the absurd can hold its own there.” That seemed silly from Ernest's point of view in history, because writing had become very diverse – it could be anything one wanted it to be, within the domain of information that can be delivered by the form of words. Did elementary school teachers love T.S. Eliot back then? When did that guy write?
    Camus enumerated some things he liked about the potential of prose, then...

“...These at least are the charms I see in it at the outset. But I
saw them likewise in those princes of humiliated thought whose
suicides I was later able to witness. What interests me, indeed,
is knowing and describing the force that leads them back toward
the common path of illusion... I can perform absurd work, choose
the creative attitude rather than another. But an absurd attitude,
if it is to remain so, must remain aware of its gratuitousness. So it
is with the work of art. If the commandments of the absurd are not
respected, if the work does not illustrate divorce and revolt, if it
sacrifices to illusions and arouses hope, it ceases to be gratuitous.
I can no longer detach myself from it. My life may find a meaning
in it, but that is trifling. It ceases to be that exercise in detachment
and passion which crowns the splendor and futility of a man’s life.
In the creation in which the temptation to explain is the strongest,
can one overcome that temptation? In the fictional world in which
awareness of the real world is keenest, can I remain faithful to the
absurd without sacrificing to the desire to judge? So many quest-
ions to be taken into consideration in a last effort. It must be al-
ready clear what they signify. They are the last scruples of an
awareness that fears to forsake its initial and difficult lesson in
favor of a final illusion. What holds for creation, looked upon as
one of the possible attitudes for the man conscious of the absurd,
holds for all the styles of life open to him. The conqueror or the
actor, the creator or Don Juan may forget that their exercise in
living could not do without awareness of its mad character. One
becomes accustomed so quickly. A man wants to earn money in
order to be happy, and his whole effort and the best of a life are
devoted to the earning of that money. Happiness is forgotten; the
means are taken for the end. Likewise, the whole effort of this
conqueror will be diverted to ambition, which was but a way to-
ward a greater life. Don Juan in turn will likewise yield to his
fate, be satisfied with that existence whose nobility is of value
only through revolt. For one it is awareness and for the other,
revolt; in both cases the absurd has disappeared. There is so
much stubborn hope in the human heart. The most destitute men
often end up by accepting illusion. That approval prompted by
the need for peace inwardly parallels the existential consent.
There are thus gods of light and idols of mud. But it is essential
to find the middle path leading to the faces of man.”

    ...Essential to the task of writing absurd fiction, which Camus implies is the worthiest fiction when he says, “I can perform absurd work, choose the creative attitude rather than another.” It isn't creative unless it lines up with your pet philosophy? That's a bit judgmental, isn't it? As Ernest was considering before, he didn't really agree the absurd needed to be focused on to be lived in accordance with.
    Camus went on to use the example of Dostoevsky's work to illustrate some points:

“In Dostoevsky’s novels the question is propounded with such
intensity that it can only invite extreme solutions. Existence is
illusory or it is eternal. If Dostoevsky were satisfied with this
inquiry, he would be a philosopher. But he illustrates the con-
sequences that such intellectual pastimes may have in a man’s
life, and in this regard he is an artist. Among those consequen-
ces, his attention is arrested particularly by the last one, which
he himself calls logical suicide in his Diary of a Writer. In the
installments for December 1876, indeed, he imagines the rea-
soning of “logical suicide.” Convinced that human existence
is an utter absurdity for anyone without faith in immortality,
the desperate man comes to the following conclusions: 'Since
in reply to my questions about happiness, I am told, through
the intermediary of my consciousness, that I cannot be happy
except in harmony with the great all, which I cannot conceive
and shall never be in a position to conceive, … I condemn that
nature which, with such impudent nerve, brought me into being
in order to suffer—I condemn it to be annihilated with me.'
There remains a little humor in that position. This suicide kills
himself because, on the metaphysical plane, he is vexed. In a
certain sense he is taking his revenge. This is his way of proving
that he 'will not be had.' It is known, however, that the same
theme is embodied, but with the most wonderful generality, in
Kirilov of The Possessed, likewise an advocate of logical suicide...”

    Ernest had thoughts similar to Dostoevsky's before – why live if it can't be forever? – but didn't feel them with the same potency. He realized at some point that was because he'd never been indoctrinated well enough in Christianity to honestly believe in the afterlife as sold there. Really, if forever had never been promised as possible, how would life be made to seem cheap by comparison? It wouldn't.

“He adds to his fatal logic an extraordinary ambition which
gives the character its full perspective: he wants to kill him-
self to become god. The reasoning is classic in its clarity. If
God does not exist, Kirilov is god. If God does not exist,
Kirilov must kill himself. Kirilov must therefore kill himself
to become god. That logic is absurd, but it is what is needed.”

    This reminded Ernest of a Jack Chick comic he'd read, wherein a little boy is told by his mother that “Evolution does away with morals!” He goes on to reason that:

“Wow, Anything goes! I can lie, cheat... What's to keep me
from becoming a god? Since there is no God, I am a god!
I'll decide what's right and wrong! I am the god of my
universe! Nobody can tell me anything. I can get away
with murder! Black is white... There are no absolutes.*
Everything is relative!**
*Lie! Here's an absolute: the words of God (KJV)!
**Relative means Subject to your opinion.”

    He was not impressed with the clarity of reasoning on either side, but if Chick had read Dostoevsky, he did find that slightly impressive. At this point, it didn't seem likely to Ernest that he would get around to that.
    In The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky ends with an affirmation of faith in the afterlife, and so Camus says he ultimately shook out as an existentialist. To Camus, existentialists are failed absurdists, so when he writes at length with great admiration for a guy just to turn around and label him as something he fundamentally disagrees with, it seemed to Ernest like a huge waste of time. If your ideal “absurd” artist is so rare you need to spend most of your time wrestling with existentialists, maybe there's a good reason for that. Of course, Camus did specify he was trying to illuminate his point with counter-examples, but to have so much of his word count invested in that seemed telling.
    The next section, titled “Ephemeral Creation,” again called attention to the lack of absurd art in his absurd art essay, but then moved on to a rather moving expression of the impermanence of things.

“But if it is still too early to list absurd works, at least a conclusion
can be reached as to the creative attitude, one of those which can
complete absurd existence. Art can never be so well served as by a
negative thought. Its dark and humiliated proceedings are as
necessary to the understanding of a great work as black is to
white. To work and create “for nothing,” to sculpture in clay,
to know that one’s creation has no future, to see one’s work
destroyed in a day while being aware that fundamentally this
has no more importance than building for centuries—this is
the difficult wisdom that absurd thought sanctions. Performing
these two tasks simultaneously, negating on the one hand and
magnifying on the other, is the way open to the absurd creator.
He must give the void its colors.”

    Must he? Still, Ernest thought, a beautiful paragraph. The assumption shot through everything was that absurd art = the only real art, what with it having the one big truth and all. Ernest couldn't believe that. Even art he didn't appreciate, like the acting on soap operas, could touch the heart of somebody – be worth something to somebody. Ernest didn't know he was thinking in an elementary postmodern way, which in itself was a sign of the extent to which postmodernism had quietly come to dominate contemporary thought at the turn of the second millenium CE.

“Of all the schools of patience and lucidity, creation is the most
effective. It is also the staggering evidence of man’s sole dignity:
the dogged revolt against his condition, perseverance in an effort
considered sterile. It calls for a daily effort, self-mastery, a precise
estimate of the limits of truth, measure, and strength. It constitutes
an ascesis. All that “for nothing,” in order to repeat and mark time.
But perhaps the great work of art has less importance in itself than
in the ordeal it demands of a man and the opportunity it provides
him of overcoming his phantoms and approaching a little closer
to his naked reality.
    Let there be no mistake in aesthetics. It is not patient inquiry,
the unceasing, sterile illustration of a thesis that I am calling for
here. Quite the contrary, if I have made myself clearly understood.
The thesis-novel, the work that proves, the most hateful of all, is
the one that most often is inspired by a smug thought. You demon-
strate the truth you feel sure of possessing. But those are ideas one
launches, and ideas are the contrary of thought. Those creators are
philosophers, ashamed of themselves. Those I am speaking of or
whom I imagine are, on the contrary, lucid thinkers. At a certain
point where thought turns back on itself, they raise up the images
of their works like the obvious symbols of a limited, mortal, and
rebellious thought.”

    More hate for the literal, OK. The point of all this yet? Ah, here it is:

“Thus, I ask of absurd creation what I required from thought –
revolt, freedom, and diversity. Later on it will manifest its utter
futility. In that daily effort in which intelligence and passion
mingle and delight each other, the absurd man discovers a
discipline that will make up the greatest of his strengths. The
required diligence, the doggedness and lucidity thus resemble
the conqueror’s attitude. To create is likewise to give a shape
to one’s fate. For all these characters, their work defines them
at least as much as it is defined by them. The actor taught us
this: there is no frontier between being and appearing.
    Let me repeat. None of all this has any real meaning. On
the way to that liberty, there is still a progress to be made.
The final effort for these related minds, creator or conqueror,
is to manage to free themselves also from their undertakings:
succeed in granting that the very work, whether it be con-
quest, love, or creation, may well not be; consummate thus
the utter futility of any individual life. Indeed, that gives
them more freedom in the realization of that work, just as
becoming aware of the absurdity of life authorized them to
plunge into it with every excess.
    All that remains is a fate whose outcome alone is fatal.
Outside of that single fatality of death, everything, joy or
happiness, is liberty. A world remains of which man is the
sole master. What bound him was the illusion of another
world. The outcome of his thought, ceasing to be renun-
ciatory, flowers in images. It frolics – in myths, to be sure,
but myths with no other depth than that of human suffering
and, like it, inexhaustible. Not the divine fable that amuses
and blinds, but the terrestrial face, gesture, and drama in
which are summed up a difficult wisdom and an ephemeral
passion.”

    So where does “100 Years” by The Cure fit into that? Nowhere, says ghost Camus. It's music, or poetry, and he's all about prose here. Shut up, ghost Camus. Ernest slapped himself in the face with the book and dropped it into his bag. His head rolled back to look at the ceiling of the bus – edged with black marker tags, dull scratchy fiberglass board of indistinct pale color. The flimsy old fluorescents lined it like an incomplete frame – burned out here, covered with tags there.
    He was surprised to find a feeling spring back into his mind and body without a warning. Lust. He never considered himself into “bears,” though he'd had passing fancies for guys in all kinds of body types before, but the near miss tonight hit him like a ton of bricks. He had been reading the tedious book just to kill his physical arousal, and it worked for a time, but he needed to stop reading or he'd miss his stop.
    Why miss? That scene could have been great and still safe without condoms, given all the stuff you can do without going all that distance. But something had bothered him badly in there. He felt ... threatened? Something was going to stop him unless he stopped it first. Argh.

    The bus whined to a stop on 325th and Blake, two blocks from his home. Ernest hiked his messenger bag up to his shoulder and ambled down the aisle, the stairs, and into the street. He walked through decades old pinkish amber incandescent street lights, ducking and weaving through small crowds of restaurant goers and bar hoppers, and the homeless people that begged from them. Around a corner the crowd thinned to a few random people coming from or going to the places they'd parked. A little later, and
    The apartments here were of that sort that still bothered to pretend they weren't money printing machines for unethical slumlords. They were poorly maintained slums, but they threw sprinkles of lemon scent on surfaces and vacuumed the halls. He was on the 14th floor and the elevator sort of worked. The inside usually smelled like a dog hadn't made it down to walk or some other small disaster, and the vinyl “wood” paneling was scratched and tagged with tiny bits of graffiti. The lights were hidden above a grid-patterned plexiglass board, flickering and diffusing into the cramped space uncomfortably.
    At his floor, he debarked and walked to the apartment with weakening legs. He was aware of the enervating effect of his mother's presence, but stole a bit of energy from the promise of gaming tonight. He'd lose himself in stories about ogres and vampires and such, no problem. He fumbled with the lock and let himself in.
    Veritay was watching TV, but his unusual delay in getting home needed to be addressed with some manner of emotion, so she lurched to her feet and closed the distance to him.
    “What do you think you were doing, little man? You coulda been raped and murdered out there! It's sooo late...” Her sandy brown hair was thin and brushed into long wisps with medium-sized bends. Her face was half blue in the dim TV-lit room. Yellow-orange light from the kitchen rimmed her hair from the other side. She embraced him, released him, and held onto his arms just a moment more after that. “And you need a bath, boy! Whew.”
    “I know. It was a long day. Um, I'll go take a shower now.”
    “Er, um, yeah... Yeah, you do that, Ernes'. And take care of yourself!” The emphasis in the sentence was meant to show concern, like “don't do dangerous things,” but the literal meaning rang with the young man – that she wasn't going to take care of him.
    That was a given at this point. He hoped he'd be closer to finding a job and roommate so he wouldn't have to stick around after graduating, but things just didn't work out like that. He had no plans, beyond going to the shower right now, and hanging out on the internet after that. “I'll do that...”

    Ernest ended up taking one shower – long and thorough and soul-scorching – to clean the day off of him. He had to run cold water for a minute after the washing just to cool down from how high the heat had been. Then he went to his room, did a few rounds of something age-appropriate and entirely necessary that worked up a sweat again, then another shorter shower after that. His mother hadn't noticed the fifty-five minutes between showers, and it was just as well. The evening news hypnotized as effectively as the commercials. “Anheuser-Busch would like you to drink responsibly,” they said in a rushed and hushed addendum. She sneezed loudly in the darkness and he missed a step.
    He assumed once more the throne – a humble office chair that had served stalwartly under his lightweight behind for four years now. The compact fluorescent in his desk lamp painted his domain in a pale, comfortably nocturnal blue-white. His carefully tended machine hummed to life before falling into an agreeable near-silence. Login: Ernesto, Password: Presto!
    What was going on in the land of RP tonight? He had a few games to check on. Unfortunately, nothing would be live right now, so he'd have to settle for one response to whatever had transpired in his absence.
    First to the vampires! That ought to be a quick one. People were slow-playing on that board. www.shadomasters.kt/xboards?display=thread/swordnsorcery_9822_+_elven/exctesfefeax'.0102.html He logged in and looked for “new” flags. As suspected, all the action was in THE DARK HAVEN. His machine loaded the page near instantly, many of the graphics already waiting in the cache. It was a classy charcoal black with satiny purple sidebar and orchid-colored highlights. The text was white, except where people felt the need to do something interesting.
    The scrolling text of these adventures was dotted with the likenesses of characters – avatars culled from a variety of sources. One person used the swarthy actor from that old Highlander show, most sources were more current and youthful looking, as was the fashion of the day. Ernest's character – Clarice McQueen – was played by the fashion model Ify Jones. He had copied the image, decorated it a little, and hosted it on his private tumblr to keep from drawing the attention of copyright holders.
    The story was just starting to take off when four people decided to join at the last minute. Two of them made one post and hadn't responded to anything since then, and one of the others didn't seem like he knew what he was doing. The game master would have to clean up that mess. Ernest couldn't help with that, but he could at least keep his character involved in the scene. From the top of the current page, the way it was:

      STARJA_MORNINGSTAR
      Reply 51 – 3 days ago – at 1:21 AM
      starja graces into the room witg style and wit her shimering jeweled shoes glimer in the candelihgts. she glid across the ballroom floor to stand in front of the king of the vampires in shadovale. she dipped her head to bow but not too lower herself to much and smiled winsome. she said, “your magesty, i come from new orleans and am new to your domains. allow me to pressent myself in humbelness.”
      ________________________________
        “the night has a thoussand eyes”


      XxLilith'sBeautyxX
      Reply 52 – 3 days ago – at 4:17 AM
      The most beautiful vampiress that anyone in the room had ever seen walked out of a shadow in total mysteriousness. She had one violet eye and one teal eye and was clad in a dress of the deepest black velvet. Her cold white skin promised and eternity of delights that her cruel claws would ever deny those who dared to come close to her and she stood on seven inch golden heels. She seemed to approach the king from without moving a muscle, bowing with customary respect, she knew all of the rules perfectly because of her photographic memory. She said in a voice that sounded like seventeen diamonds falling out of an infant's hand into a crystal chalice, “Your Majesty, I hail from Lansing, Michigan and am also new to your domains. Allow me to present myself in humbleness.”
      ________________________________
        (Her sig was a banner ad for her deviantart page – a
      customized prefab 3d model of a sexy purple-haired lady.)


      King Stephen Darkblood-MacCleod (This was the Highlander guy.)
      Reply 53 – 3 days ago – at 12:32 PM
      “Welcome to my domains, honorable ones. I would have your names.”
      He sat on his throne of ivory with calm dingity, his family tartan kilt deep blue and green and a mighty claymore balanced gracefully at his side.
      ________________________________
        “Who dares to love forever?”


      Shainobi-san, Ronin Ninja of the Danger Clan
      Reply 54 – 3 days ago – at 3:06 PM
      Shainobi was a stranger in a starnge land filled with loathing for the hideous gaijin all around him. he stalked the night with a dark purpose for only the purest of japanese blood were worthy to rule the night. Over the last weeks he had patiently walked in the shadows of the city's vampires judging them and he found them too weak to be of use. There leader had to die. He approached the throne from behind. (I got 11 successes on my stealth roll. You can see my sheet if you want.)
      ________________________________
        ninjas rule, robots drool


      The Voice of the Universe
      Reply 55 – 3 days ago – at 6:42 PM
      (No, Shainobi. Read the rules before you post again.)
      ________________________________
        Whose house? MY house.


      Clarice McQueen
      Reply 56 – 3 days ago – at 6:58 PM
      (Good job, Josh. How obnoxious! I mean the throne is up against the wall so there's no way he could sneak up behind it! Good grief.) Clarice was gently perched on one of the tall stools near the bar, amid the city's native vampires. “Hm,” she purred. “Those new two look like trouble.” She twirled a long thin finger in her hair and contemplated the tableau.
      ________________________________
        (Ernest had no signature.)


      ENVY_ME
      Reply 57 – 3 days ago – at 7:12 PM
      Spiderlicker flipped his butterfly-knife around in his hand -- ready for action. If the new bloodsuckers were gonna be truoble, they wouldn't be trouble for long. “Yeah, Clar. They won't get out of my sight for a second.”
      ________________________________
       (ENVY's sig looked like a randomly generated fractal image, in banner proportions. Kinda cool.)


      Dovelia Moonsorrow
      Reply 58 – 3 days ago – at 7:23 PM
      Dovelia flipped her hair and bit her trembulous lip. Why did things always have to change like this? Ever since Hasham had been executted for bringing her unto undeath, she was adrift, afraid, always knowing that the blade used against her fallen father could be used against her just as capriciously. But she tried to look brave, curling her nicotine-stained fingers around the stool beneath her. “Y-yes... Keep an eye on them, Spider...”
      ________________________________
        “A beast I am lest a beast I become...” ~~,~'~{@


      Arthour Malcroix the ~devillish~ one
      Reply 59 – 3 days ago – at 8:42 PM
      A newly arriving vampire crossed the threshold of the Dark haven, sporting a black leather trenchcoat and a wry grin. He was 6'4” tall and 182 pounds of lean muscle, with silver wrap-around shades on his greyish pale face. His hair was pure white and flowed to his waist, and while his authentic Masamune katana was perfectly concealed, anyone could see by his manner that he was possessed of a killing edge. He exuded confidence with each step of his rattlesnake-skinned boots. As he approached the throne, he took off his glasses, revealing blood red eyes wreathed in snowy white, flowing eyelashes. He bowed to the king and said, “Your Majesty, I hail from Seattle and I am new to your domains. Allow me to present myself in humbleness.” The wickedly fanged grin on his feral face was anything but humble!
      ________________________________
        “Do not trust your own shadow!”


      ENVY_ME
      Reply 60 – 3 days ago – at 9:00 PM
      (Wow, cool entrance, dude. Arthur sounds hella bad-ass.) Spiderlicker paused for a moment, wondering if he had seen this new vampire somewherebefore, in his days as a human hitman. The West Coast crime scene in the '80s was no motherfuckin' joke.
      “Hmm... Trouble all night.”
      ________________________________
        (the fractal image)


      Arthour Malcroix the ~devillish~ one
      Reply 61 – 3 days ago – at 9:04 PM
      (Thanks, ENVY! I'll say he recognizes Arthour, but he was already a vampire back then. Maybe Spiderlicker saw him in a yakuza hangout!) Arthour eagerly but casually awaited the King's reply.
      ________________________________
        “Do not trust your own shadow!”


      King Stephen Darkblood-MacCleod
      Reply 62 – 2 days ago – at 12:31 PM
      King Stephen carefully took full measure of this new vampire, who obviously meant business, and was obviously too full of pride to be young in this dangerous world of the undead. “Welcome to my domains, honorable one. I would have your name as well!” He steepled his fingers and calmly appraised the new one.
      ________________________________
        “Who dares to love forever?”


      Binky the Bonkers
      Reply 63 – 2 days ago – at 2:33 PM
      (whoa, what I miss everybody/? shit) Binky was in his straight jacket tonight, since Mastress Sheila was in her dark phase. He flopped on the floor by Dovelia and finished counting his Hail-Marys. “The new ones are ogres from the hamster wheel machine! Don't eat yogurt tonight or they'll get you!” He was leaving streaks of blood on the floor from a scratch on his nubile chin.
      ________________________________
        “Cheesecake in the Mouth of Madness”


      Clarice McQueen
      Reply 64 – 2 days ago – at 3:52 PM
      “Oh, Binky, you are the living end. I sincerely doubt that anyone present will be indulging in yogurt tonight.” She pondered secretly if his mad ramblings held a deeper meaning. Perhaps “yogurt” was a reference to blood, and he meant that if we fed tonight, we'd be in some kind of danger from these newcomers. Clarice wondered what the king would say to them.
      ________________________________
        (no signature)


      Arthour Malcroix the ~devillish~ one
      Reply 65 – 2 days ago – at 5:18 PM
      “I am Arthour Malcroix, formerly of the court of Louis the Eighth, a knight without a lord. But I will honor you as lord for the time I dwell in your domains, majesty.” He bowed his head just a little and swept his hand in a magnominous gesture.
      ________________________________
        “Do not trust your own shadow!”


      King Stephen Darkblood-MacCleod
      Reply 66 – 2 days ago – at 6:01 PM
      King Stephen was pleased, but never lost his highlander's edge of wariness for the wolf in sheep's clothing. He extended his hand. “Well met. The hospitality of my kingdom is yours.” (I am going to assume he gets the ladies' names here and move on...) “... And yours as well, my dears. Tonight, you may drink of any you desire.” It was a traditional saying for the situation, but it should be understood even for youths that this offer did not extend to the mayor, celebrities, and other high profile prey... He hoped!
      ________________________________
        “Who dares to love forever?”


      Arthour Malcroix the ~devillish~ one
      Reply 67 – 2 days ago – at 6:07 PM
      “Gladly, sire,” the white-haired man said, and wheeled about to take in the scene. He realized all the vampires were near the bar, and gallantly strolled over to meet them. Now that he had the king's approval, he didn't have to consider using his katana in this room. He grinned wolfishly at the young vampires, knowing them honor-bound to treat him with respect. “Good evening, ladies and fellows. I am Arthour Malcroix. And who, might I ask, are all of you?”
      ________________________________
        “Do not trust your own shadow!”


      Clarice McQueen
      Reply 68 – 2 days ago – at 7:00 PM
      “I am Clarice McQueen, these are Spiderlicker Williams, Dovelia Moonsorrow, and Binky. Pleased to make your acquaintance, handsome,” she cooed like a dove.
      ________________________________
        (no signature)


      Dovelia Moonsorrow
      Reply 69 – 2 days ago – at 7:03 PM
      Dovelia flipped her hair out of her eyes nervously. He was handsome – too handsome, like Hasham had been. Why had she been turned into a vampire, lowly, disgusting girl that she was, to see all of these beautiful people that she could never be like, to see them senselessly destroyed when the promise of forever was once there own? Why?! “I- I'm Dovelia. This is Clarice, um, Spiderlicker, and d-down on the floor is Binky...”
      ________________________________
        “A beast I am lest a beast I become...” ~~,~'~{@


      Clarice McQueen
      Reply 70 – 2 days ago – at 7:06 PM
      (Jinx, Dovey, you owe me a coke!)
      ________________________________
        (no signature)


      Dovelia Moonsorrow
      Reply 71 – 2 days ago – at 7:10 PM
      (The hell I do, fool! Flippin' ninja.)
      ________________________________
        “A beast I am lest a beast I become...” ~~,~'~{@


      Clarice McQueen
      Reply 72 – 2 days ago – at 7:15 PM
      (No, that was Shainobi. Ha ha ha I'm literally LOLing!)
      ________________________________
        (no signature)

    Sadly, no one had checked in since yesterday. Damn, and that new guy seemed like he was so hot to play! Was everyone sick or something? Well, no more fooling around. Clarice will talk to him again.

      Clarice McQueen
      Reply 73 – Today – at 9:22 PM
      “So,” Clarice had easily heard Arthour from across the ballroom with her heightened vampire senses, “Louis the Eighth, huh? That kind of vintage should make you a force to be reckoned with. Should we be afraid of you, O Mighty Warrior?” She seemed jocular enough, but with an edge of measured ferocity...
      ________________________________
        (no signature)

    He sat staring at the screen for a moment, felt empty. Then he remembered Camus's example of the actor. Was that not exactly what he was doing? Did he feel like this “multiplied his life”? Was this moment the absurd staring him in the face, and shouldn't that make him feel more passionate about his righteous craft as a role-player? It was all a huge crappy joke.
    He put his hand over his eyes and slumped back in his chair. What would happen with the gun situ-- No, he couldn't even care about that. It wasn't his gun anyway. Who cared? About anything? I guess everyone. But why do they? The illusion of a permanence to life? Of sensible and meaningful aspirations and purposes?
    It seemed unlikely that most people weren't aware of the yawning gulf of unreason beneath the veneer of society, or at least difficult for Ernest to imagine. Yet society's continuing existence probably attested that that was exactly the case.
    There was another role to play that night, and at the pace that forum moved, he'd lose his place completely if he didn't check in every single night. Someone like Binky would never be able to handle it. He didn't want to lose his place the same way he didn't want to be tardy to classes, but it he just didn't feel it. He had to do it, but he didn't want to do it. What could he do?
    He went to www.thydungyeonofdespayre.org/forums/&displayboard=RP.shtml and sighed loudly as he opened the MALSPIRO'S KEEP thread. What had happened since yesterday?
    This dungeon was a forum as well, but much more compact. There was a pixel art person on the board who insisted on making standardized avatars for everyone. They were a little globby, but it was fun to use the variety they'd given everyone to make “chibi” expressions. Ernest was playing a demi-goblin knave, and had reached 7th level. That was pretty unusual because the GM was notorious for killing characters.
    It seemed the party had gotten through the locks and traps on the last door, and entered a new thirty by thirty foot stone chamber, with two doors leading away from it, moss, a broken potter's wheel and three strips of leather in the corner, and a two-headed gargogre in the middle of the room.
    His character hadn't been able to take a turn for four rounds of the fight because he hadn't been able to log in that day. He'd earned the respect of the GM, though, so his character was allowed a relatively dignified excuse for missing the action thus far: He'd gotten his foot stuck between some broken stone tiles and couldn't move. The others kept the behemoth monster busy with flanking maneuvers. It must have had magic resistance because it was laughing off the Briary the EleMage's fire streaker spells. Not even half damage!
    Still, he couldn't get very excited. Something was agitating him very badly and he would not sleep well tonight. Of course this was all pointless, but it usually didn't feel quite this pointless. He considered what he would do. Then he typed.

      Imparious the Demi-Goblin Knave – 7th level
      Reply 1064 – Today – at 9:36 PM
      Imparious had struggled mightily against his stony fetters, eager to do what he had spent his whole life doing – eager to kill, to draw the blood of his foe. But the scene suddenly hit him as totally false. What difference did it make to see another foe fall, or to fall himself? To see more friends slain by the violence they threw themselves mindlessly into, day and night?
      There was Briary the halfling EleMage, so beautiful with her pudgy fingers and fuzzy unshod feet (just like his mom), taking d10+4 damage to the torso for what? A one fourth share of some shiny metal? Her face contorted in pain.
      There was Elgor the elven Arrowsmythe, his piercing damage blunted by the thing's stony hide, eyes wide and blank with dread. There was nothing else he could do. Archery was all he knew.
      There was Sweet Bobby, the dwarven Smashlock, his mohawk ruined by near-misses of the giant creature's unthinkably long limbs. Just how many attacks per round was this beast entitled to? He just couldn't reach it. If he could reach it, he could smash it, but his smashing had a five foot reach, and it blocked him every time.
      And then there was the two-headed beast, product of some unimaginable sex act between an ogre and a gargoyle, thrashing its long limbs in a fifteen foot square, spittle flying from its fangs as it laughed. The little humanoids danced around it, punch drunk, furious, exhausted. Fire and lightning and ice from Briary's hands – the powers of creation – wasted in endless struggle for glory that would be forgotten, or worse, to become another ignominious pile of bones in the corner of a thirty by thirty foot stone chamber.
      The monster laughed, and Imparious laughed too. All he could do was laugh.
      ________________________________
        (no signature)

    He used the laughing avatar for his expression and hit "Post Reply." Hopefully, the game master wouldn't see that as a repudiation of the world he spent so much time creating and his character would survive the night, but Ernest just couldn't bring himself to care right then. It was time to stare into darkness alone and wish he could sleep. And he did.

[Thy Dungyeon Maestyr]

CHAPTER FIVE: THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS

      King Aeolus had several sons who grew to be men of great ambition. One was Ernest, founder and first king of Corinth. He sat upon a throne of blood, attended by his bride Tammy and children Shy, Ginny, Robert, Sim, Kissy, Elizabeth, and Claude. Another child of Aeolus was Pharaoh, king of Elis, loathed by Ernest above all others. And as this tale is ultimately of Ernest and his loathing for Pharaoh, of the others we will say nothing.
      Ernest was a cruel and treacherous tyrant. He had his nation deceive and exploit others for financial gain, engaging in every manner of malfeasance short of piracy and open warfare. Sometimes visitors in his kingdom would meet terrible ends, but he always managed to make it seem as if their dark fate had befallen them on the road or elsewhere, even as the halls of his palace became stained throughout with blood.
      Ernest hated Pharaoh so much that he consulted with the Mrs. Spurling of Social Studies on how he could slay his brother without attracting the ire of the gods, but she was totally not into it. In one scheme, he seduced Pharaoh's adopted son and heir Horace, but when Horace discovered Ernest's schemes to slay his father, he threw himself from the fifth floor of the Benson Heights Project in shame.
      Ernest also betrayed one of Zeus' secrets by telling the river god Asopus where the sky god had taken his daughter Aegina, in exchange for causing a spring to flow from the Corinthian Acropolis.
      Zeus got sick of King Ernest's crap and ordered Thanatos to chain him in Tartarus. Normally Hermes would ferry souls to the underworld, so when Death himself came for him, Ernest grew suspicious of the influence of Zeus. Fortunately for Ernest, Thanatos was a raging dumbass who was not cut out for that particular job. He slyly asked the personification of mortality to demonstrate how the chains that bound him worked. As soon as Thanatos granted his request, Ernest seized the advantage and trapped him instead.
      This caused global chaos since no human could die with Thanatos disabled. Because of this, sacrifices could not be made to the gods, Ares was cross because nobody died in battle, and those that were old and sick were suffering. The gods sent messengers to threaten King Ernest with their collective wrath – all elements of the cosmos turned against him. He then had no choice but to release Thanatos.
      Before King Ernest was reclaimed by Death however, he told Queen Tammy to throw his naked body into the middle of the public square – ostensibly as a test of her love for him. This caused him to end up on the shores of the river Styx, rather than Tartarus proper. Then, complaining to Persephone that this was a sign of his wife's disrespect, he convinced her to allow him to return to the upper world and scold Queen Tammy for not burying his body and giving it a proper funeral. Once back in Corinth, he refused to return to the Underworld and had to be forcibly dragged back there by Hermes.
      King Ernest's trickery and crimes were so great they had broken natural laws and upended the universe. A severe punishment was required. He was sent to Tartarus and made to roll a huge boulder up the side of a mountain. Before he could reach the top, it would always roll back down, and he'd be forced to start over at *the bottom. The point, one might guess, was to teach people forever that the pursuit of power is ultimately an empty, endless, pointless endeavor. Or just don't fuck with the gods. He also was never allowed to know what became of his annoying brother Pharaoh. Ain't that some shit?

*When he gets to the bottom he goes back to the top of the slide where he stops and turns and goes for a ride, then he gets to the bottom and he sees you again. Yeah yeah yeah.


      Ernest awakened to the violence of the alarm. He felt bitterly cold and feeble, shocked, drugged, disordered on every level. He flailed at the cruel machine until it shut the hell up, and curled in a fetal ball on the bed.
      Almost as if the pillow was a battery and charging would cure all that illed him, his symptoms fell away one by one – he warmed, gained an ounce of strength, recovered his wits, his alertness, his faculties, leaving only one thing lacking: the desire to do anything. He forced himself to move the way an able-bodied young human can, even when the will is lacking. He freshened up a bit, packed his bag, dressed in good clothes, put his “B” flatcap – a yellow and black plaid number – and headed out his labyrinth into the big city. RIP, “A” cap.
      The morning streets were busier on this part of the block, with people heading out to work – and a few sad graveyard people coming home. He had to walk four blocks in another direction entirely to get to the obscure spot which was the closest the school bus was programmed to reach for his neighborhood.
      He had good reason to be on edge this morning, with the possibility of some kind of recapitulation of yesterday's early AM difficulties looming large over his path. He jogged instead of walking, occasionally casting frantic looks at foggy shadows. The streetlamps had the pre-dawn world looking quite similar to the nighted world he had come home to.
      In the distance he could see the stop. Fifteen surly teens stood around looking mad pissed, at least six with cigarettes stuck in their lips, puffing as furious new addicts will. Somebody threw one down quickly, then another, then another. Ernest nearly ran into the reason why.
      A policeman had been spotted. The creature was coming out of a building with a jaunty spring in its step, a tip of the cap to Ernest, and headed to its unmarked car. As its hand was nearly upon the door, its head suddenly twisted completely backward and looked on Ernest with a very different face. It laughed staring straight at him, as its body continued to go through the motions of opening the door and getting in.
      “HA HA HA HA HA, kid! Just FUCKing with you. HAHAHahaha--”
      It got quieter as the car door closed, but he could see it staring at him until the car rolled blindly out of sight. He was in total paralysis for a moment, thinking about its gun, about the gun he lost, about mortal peril.
      The need for oxygen snapped him out of it and he started to breathe again. He looked ahead to the bus stop, and kids lighting up again. A few people coughed quietly. No one saw or heard any of that.
      “Fucking PIGS,” he said bitterly.

      As he settled into his seat on the bus, he was still a bit shaky. Clearly, the pigs had an advantage in this fight. He needed to be ready for them – courageous. Maybe if he faced them without fear enough times, they'd stop pestering him, and he could eat bacon again. Not that he'd thought about eating bacon recently, but it's nice to know you can do that without the meal talking shit in your mouth.
      He pulled out his notebook and pondered with a pen in his hand.

      1) THE ELEMENT OF SURPRISE - - NOT MUCH FOR IT.
                  WELL, MAYBE SPEND TIME WITH BACON, GET USED TO IT.

      That wasn't a very pleasant thought.

      > DON'T NEED BACON, CAN JUST DRAW A PIG.

      Scary. What would the limits of that be? If he drew a smile face, would it suddenly start talking if he gave it a pig nose? Would ears be required? What if he drew a bacon strip? Bacon is geometrically simple. What if he was just testing a pen by scratching it in the corner and accidentally drew something that could be interpreted as a bacon strip?
      Too many tangential thoughts. Focus was needed.

      2) FOCUS, ERNESTO. - - HM, INCREASE MY COURAGE.
            THEY CAN'T BOTHER ME IF - - WHAT? I'M BEING BOTHERED BY
                                                                          SOMETHING & THEY'RE TAKING
                                                                        ADVANTAGE OF THAT. STOP
                                                                           BEING BOTHERED.
      3) DO I FEEL GUILTY?
                                          I DON'T KNOW.

      This wasn't going to be easily resolved. He decided to just switch to planning his day. As he went through the items, he realized there wasn't much to do. How much of late high school is just showing up and doing busy work? Most of his classes didn't even have homework, and when they did, it was something he could bust out while the teacher was taking attendance.
      So... another day of furtively reading Camus. He would be in the back of the class again, and maybe without the bad hair day, Mr. Hepler would go back to not recognizing him. Safety... Obscurity... Time to reclaim it.
      The bus reached the school in darkness, the sky subtly beginning to electrify far above, street lamps randomly switching off leaving the world almost darker for a short time than it had been during the night. Ernest filed off the bus with the rest and hustled to class at a moderate pace – not letting himself quite break a sweat.

      Ernest Newman came to class. It was fifteen minutes early and no one else was in the room yet. He claimed his prize: a seat at the back of the class, as far from the teacher as possible. He put his bag down on the chair and straightened himself out – putting the forbidden hat away in it neatly – then lowered it to the floor and carefully sat down. He was wearing eggplant colored chinos and a matching vest over a white collared shirt. His socks were mustard yellow and his shoes were reddish brown leather brogues. He'd wiped his glasses, leaving them sparkling nicely in the dull artificial light. He began to read “The Myth of Sisyphus.”
      Horace came into the class seven minutes later, and strolled to the back of the still empty classroom. Ernest glanced up, down, flipped the book upside down in front of him, then looked at Horace again.
      “Er, good morning?”
      Horace's body language was a bit embarrassed, tentative, but he regained enough form to try to make himself comfortable in the crappy desk chairs. He replied.
      “Yeah, man. How's it goin'?”
      “I'm feeling much better today. Um... What do --? I'm not --”
      Bell and Theresa independently happened into the room at the same time and Ernest went quiet. Horace spoke more quietly than before, “You got first lunch, meet my guys like yesterday?”
      Ernest considered it, looking chronically but mildly surprised this morning. He nodded, looked at his hands, then flipped the book up and resumed reading.
      The sky lightened dramatically, unseen from his angle, but for the way its glow filled the room. Class began. Soon after that, the sun came in the room sideways and blinded everyone. Mr. Hepler began to teach the class hazily.
      Normally, Ernest tried to pay attention in class, but he knew it was futile and today he had something else to do, so he continued reading. Camus's take on the Myth of Sisyphus began to unfold. Camus went through his artistic, condensed version of the legendry, lacing it with hints of his ultimate thesis.

“...Sisyphus had put Death in chains. Pluto could not endure the
sight of his deserted, silent empire. He dispatched the god of war,
who liberated Death from the hands of her conqueror...
...It is said also that Sisyphus, being near to death, rashly wanted
to test his wife’s love. He ordered her to cast his unburied body in-
to the middle of the public square. Sisyphus woke up in the under-
world. And there, annoyed by an obedience so contrary to human
love, he obtained from Pluto permission to return to earth in order
to chastise his wife. But when he had seen again the face of this
world, enjoyed water and sun, warm stones and the sea, he no lon-
ger wanted to go back to the infernal darkness. Recalls, signs of
anger, warnings were of no avail. Many years more he lived facing
the curve of the gulf, the sparkling sea, and the smiles of earth. A
decree of the gods was necessary. Mercury came and seized the
impudent man by the collar and, snatching him from his joys, led
him forcibly back to the underworld, where his rock was ready for
him...
    You have already grasped that Sisyphus is the absurd hero. He
is, as much through his passions as through his torture. His scorn
of the gods, his hatred of death, and his passion for life won him
that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted to-
ward accomplishing nothing. This is the price that must be paid
for the passions of this earth...
    At the very end of his long effort measured by skyless space
and time without depth, the purpose is achieved. Then Sisyphus
watches the stone rush down in a few moments toward that lower
world whence he will have to push it up again toward the summit.
He goes back down to the plain.
    It is during that return, that pause, that Sisyphus interests me. A
 face that toils so close to stones is already stone itself! I see that
man going back down with a heavy yet measured step toward the
torment of which he will never know the end. That hour like a
breathing-space which returns as surely as his suffering, that is the
hour of consciousness. At each of those moments when he leaves
the heights and gradually sinks toward the lairs of the gods, he is
superior to his fate. He is stronger than his rock.
    If this myth is tragic, that is because its hero is conscious. Where
would his torture be, indeed, if at every step the hope of succeeding
upheld him? The workman of today works every day in his life at
the same tasks, and this fate is no less absurd. But it is tragic only
at the rare moments when it becomes conscious. Sisyphus, prole-
tarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole ex-
tent of his wretched condition: it is what he thinks of during his
descent. The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same
time crowns his victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted
by scorn.”

      Doomed revolt. That was everything to Camus. The dust jacket said the guy had fought in the French Resistance during World War II. Ernest could imagine that before the war turned in their favor, it was important to resistance fighters that they would have a motive to fight even without hope of victory.
      He tried to relate that to his own experience to understand it better. Had there been times in his life where he rebelled against a circumstance, knowing he would lose, just because of anger? Yes.
      Could that be considered a victory for Ernest? “At least I tried,” said the loser. He wasn't sure this was right, but it seemed more relatable than other arguments Camus had put forth in the rest of the book. And it should – this essay was starting point of it all. As he said in the foreword, the collection was mostly comprised of essays written following the release of The Myth of Sisyphus and written in support of it.
      After this point, maybe the rest of the book could be skimmed. “Summer in Algiers” did not sound promising. He kept reading, and quickly realized he was absolutely not going to parse this segment with the class distracting him. He broke it down point by point.

SISYPHUS -- POWERLESS - AWARE OF TORMENT - HATE=CONTROL/FREEDOM
      -- ALSO JOY? WHEN FRESH DEAD / REMEMBERED EARTH WAS SADDER
            SAD=THE ROCK WINS SAD TRUTHS ACKNOWLEDGED=REDUCED?

      EX: OEDIPUS (ORIGINAL MOTHERFUCKER?) GOT SCREWED UP WITHOUT
            KNOWING, FOUND OUT, AND THEN WAS OK -- “ALL IS WELL”

    THAT=THE ABSURD VICTORY HOW? - - - - - - -
                                      BECAUSE WHEN U KNOW UR SCREWED,
                                                            U CAN BE “HO-HUM” ABOUT IT?

WHEN REALIZE ABSURD, TEMPTED TO “WRITE MANUAL OF HAPPINESS”
 HAPPINESS+ABSURD COME FROM SAME WORLD
      HAPPY NOT ALWAYS FROM ABSURD
      BUT ABSURD SOMETIMES FROM HAPPY -WHUT

  “ALL IS WELL” IS SACRED -- SEZ ALBERT TEACHES LIFE ISN'T OVER
                  & GOD'S PLAN OF DISSATISFACTION & FUTILITY,
                    -- MAN OWNS HIS FATE EVEN IF CAN'T CONTROL IT
                  “HIS ROCK IS HIS THING.”

      WHEN ABS. MAN “CONTEMPLATES HIS TORMENT”
                            IT “SILENCES ALL IDOLS” (MEANS=?)
                        - - - - TOO MUCH POETRY DON'T GET NEXT PART

        “ABS. MAN SEZ YES & HIS EFFORT = UNCEASING.
            IF FATE IS PERSONAL IT IS NOT HIGHER DESTINY
                        OR IF IT IS, IT SUCKS & DON'T CARE. FOR THE REST
                              HE CONTROLS / MASTER OF HIS DAYS”

                    SO... WHEN AWARE / LOOKING BACK, HE SEES:
                        A) HUMAN ORIGIN OF ALL THAT IS HUMAN
                        B) HE IS BLIND MAN EAGER TO SEE BUT KNOWS HE CAN'T
                        C) HE STILL KEEPS GOING

                        ALBERT STOPS W/ SISYPHUS ABOUT TO START ROLLIN'
                    BEING STUCK FIGHTING STUPID ROCK BUT AWARE OF JUNK
                        HAS NO MASTER, ONLY HIS FATE, OWNS IT + HIS OWN WORLD
      “THE STRUGGLE ITSELF -- IS ENOUGH TO FILL A MAN'S HEART.
                  (ALL THAT POOP THEREFORE) ONE MUST IMAGINE SISYPHUS HAPPY.”

[/size][/blockquote]
      Must we? The main thing absurd in Absurdism seemed to be the reasoning and conclusions. As a philosophy is nothing but reasoning and conclusions, Ernest supposed that meant the whole thing was absurd – in the more familiar sense. Good grief.
      This was it. Camus had curated this collection of essays, placing the first one somewhere in the middle, proceeding with the assumption that the reader had some previous exposure to him and his ideas. That was not a valid assumption for this young man. Ernest had to claw his way through to an understanding that he still felt was hampered by a lack of time to process the whole of it, and a lack of familiarity with those assumed priors. He rubbed his forehead and reflected.
      “The struggle is enough... to fill a man's heart. We must imagine Sisyphus happy.” That was the big twist, the “he was really a ghost the whole time” of this affair. A mythological figure who embodied the misery of futile struggle was actually a hero, living out his fate with mastery of the mind that it allowed him to have, or something.
      A question at the outset – if things are pointless why don't you kill yourself? – was answered with this same sort of claim. Understanding the limitations of your life supposedly made living to the fullest extent (using gimmicks like acting to “multiply” your experience) within those limits possible. Having an illusion of hope for a future that gives meaning to the present is the mistake.
      Similar to Ernest's own feelings but quite distinct from them, to the point he had to wonder if there was something in their life experiences that informed their whole approach to these subjects differently. Camus thought even a terrible life could have some redeeming corridor in which to live – if not a spiritual, metaphysical, or meaningful redemption, a personal one based on the scope of one's freedom – be that the size of a paralyzed man's field of vision or the size of a condemned prisoner's allotted space and length of life. Ernest agreed that life was limited in length, purpose, and meaning, but didn't see how being mindful of limitations was necessary to live honestly – and could easily see how it would be grossly harmful to those who do not have the overweening pride to feel like they deserve to live in spite of those things.
      Pride was the unseen, barely mentioned essential underpinning to it all, which was paradoxical because the philosophy was built on taking nearly the humblest view of the limitations of one's senses, reason, and abilities. You cannot live forever, cannot deduce or observe a greater reality, cannot have it all. But you are proud of yourself – the mighty genius trapped in a world you can never conquer and eternally revolting against its limitations. “To a man devoid of blinders, there is no finer sight than that of the intelligence at grips with a reality that transcends it. The sight of human pride is unequaled...”
      But pride isn't a given. Humans are made out of meat. Brains get fucked up, and there's no self-help-assed philosophy to magically cure that. Some people hate themselves and want to die. Camus did not answer them at all, and Ernest found himself thankful in this dark moment of reflection to not be a person who felt that way.
      How messed up is that? Reality is more sad than Mr. Darkness here would even cop to. Or... maybe he would just see those feelings of self-loathing and suicidal ambition as another limitation, another stone for the absurd hero to grapple with, and that he could still find pride in working against them. Philosophy is slippery like earthworms. You could bend it to mean whatever you like, but that still wouldn't translate into pride for someone incapable of loving their self.
      Maybe. Ernest had to concede he was no expert on the human condition, and his understanding of all of what he had read was contingent on the accuracy of some uneducated guesses he'd made along the way. Have it your way, Albert.
      Theresa and Shantea were at it this whole time as well, and now Ernest had lost focus enough to get sucked into following the narrative. Elizabeth found out Kissy had skipped first period the other day and was, in fact, the one that asked Taylor what dick tastes like – not Sim, who was there but didn't say anything but it didn't matter because everybody already knew about when she blew Shy because of what Robert said, even though Robert claimed it was really Ginny who spread the word because she saw it happen and was pissed because she wanted to go out with Shy. Anyway, it was all over but the crying for Taylor because now people were making suck faces at her and doing all that kinda shit. It was getting ugly and Shy wouldn't say anything to stop it because he had to look cool, which Claude thought was pretty crappy, but no one cared what Claude thought about anything, really. But the real interesting thing today was about Ginny. She had a fever of 106 and couldn't even get out of bed. She caught mono from making out with Elizabeth to tease Robert, because Elizabeth had a tongue piercing and you just know that's not hygienic.
      He looked over at Horace – abnormally wakeful looking. The guy smiled at Ernest and he smiled back, then looked at his hands quickly. Whoa. Ahem... Calm down. He went back to Camus briefly, to take up the skimming he'd promised himself. Next up was a book report on Kafka and then an essay about how awesome it is to be a detached rich guy in that Algiers. Awesome indeed!
      In the space of the class's allotted hour, the sun went from barely up to out of sight, crawling far enough above the windows to stop blinding the students. It was less intense and just covered the window seats like a lemon yellow curtain. Ernest waited for the crowd to thin before getting up. Horace did leave ahead of him, with a little wave. Ernest then made sure nothing had fallen out of his messenger bag and twisted as he walked to avoid bumping into the desks between him and escape. He reached Mr. Hepler.
      “I read the important parts of Camus.”
      Hepler considered him. “Essay or it didn't happen.”
      “Yeah, yeah. What's the short version of the lesson today?”
      “Mark Twain was the most famous example of an American author doing the thing after Romanticism: Realism. Pay attention to his use of naturalistic language.”
      “Thank you.”[/blockquote]

[Thy Dungyeon Maestyr]

((The last chapter has text added from the red paragraph on.))

CHAPTER SIX: THE PLAGUE I

      Ernest was thinking about Camus and that larger picture he was missing. He'd finish The Myth of Sisyphus & Other Essays, undoubtedly with some skimming in the process, but he wondered if the school had anything else by him that might prove illuminating. He speed walked through the crowd and came into the library with enough momentum to clear the short stairwell down to its main floor, landing with a skip.
      “No running in the -- Oh, good lord.” Technically, Ernest was still speed-walking, not running. He hit the card catalog, the bookshelves, and then came back by the librarian's desk in mere moments. As he stopped there his fluffy hair rocked, spending the remaining energy of his motion.
      Mr. Milgram was obviously taking extra time just to annoy Ernest. What a jerk! Ernest blew a sigh through his nostrils and rolled his head around. The books were his. He left the library with The Stranger in one hand and The Plague in the other.

      Ernest got to second period Food Science quickly despite the detour. He paused at the threshold before a kid behind muscled him forward and out of the way Oh crap... The damn pig. He slinked around to the window side of the room quickly and sank into himself and a seat there. Kissy and Elizabeth looked at him like he was diseased, disrupting the natural order of the universe by sitting at their table. He ignored them and kept his head low.
      Bright yellow light squares beside him, blue-grey light everywhere else. Fluorescent lights buzzed uselessly. Roll ended and Ms. Cameron started up a slide show. As the class waited quietly chattering among themselves, Ernest heard one voice above the rest.
      ERRRRRNESSSST … ERRRR!NESSSST …
      Man, he thought, shut UP!
      ERRRR!NESSSST …
      It was a long, long class. The thing didn't bother to say anything informative, just endlessly trying to get his attention. Rude! He packed his bag with the new books and did nothing while he waited for the bell to set him free. It was a long, long class. He was so distracted that he hadn't thought about or noticed that Horace was missing.
      Kissy and Elizabeth gradually got back to talking, as was their way. “Naw,” said Elizabeth. “I didn't do none of that. Y'all are stupid. That's stupid.”
      “I swear,” said Kissy, “I didn't say anything like that. Had ta be somebody else, girl. Look, duh, I mean, of course you couldn't have, 'cuz you'd have it to, right?”
      “Yeah, but I don't even wanna talk about it. It's stupid. Too stupid.”
      “I know, I swear...” She rolled her Asian eyes around, thinking as much as she ever would between sentences. ERRRR!NESS-- “So, who you gonna go to prom with?”
      Elizabeth clicked her lips. “Tch, what do you wanna know that for? Why should I tell you of all people?” She was obviously in possession of the moral high ground.
      “You know, I might have heard there's somebody you like, and maybe, I dunno, that's kinda exciting and you'd wanna tell somebody about it...? Think maybe he likes you back, maybe...?”
      “I remember the las' time I told you anythin', that was hella stupid on my part, ya know? It's like you can't even help yourself, like you're addicted or somethin'.”
      “What? Whaaaat? I'm totally offended. OK, one time, maybe one time, I told somebody something, but it was just one person, an' I know they told some other people and I shouldn't have trusted them, and I won't again, so it's totally safe with me, f'rill.”
      “I ain't gonna tell you nothin', girl. You gonna hear somethin' and think it's right and say it to someone else even if it's wrong and the whole damn clique gonna believe whatever it wants ta believe anyway, so why say anythin'?”
      “Aww.”
      ERRR--
      “Anyway, enough about me. Did you hear what Taylor was doing after school yesterday?” They continued to near the end of class. Every piece of paper that was passed to Ernest got hastily stuffed in his bag, to ease the escape.
      Finally, class was over, amid a shuffle of chairs, a bit of coughing and nuisance. For Ernest, it also meant the damn severed pig head cut through the din. This time, it said something other than the usual nagging and mockery.
      DON'T GO! I … I GOT SOMETHING TO TELL YOU!
      He turned to face it for just a moment, a step away from the exit.
      What?, he thought at it.
      A riddle! The thing stared at him wildly and flapped its nasty mouth, stirring lazy bubbles in the viscous preservative. You and your homie are standing there with a pig. Your homie turns away for a moment, and the pig sprouts wings and flies away. He turns back and it's gone, asks you, “Hey Ernest, what happened to the pig?” What do you say, Ernest? WHAT DO YOU SAY?!
      Ernest had no idea. I wouldn't say anything because he'd think I'm crazy, and you're crazy if you think I'm telling anybody about you! He stepped into the hall, leaving the thing spinning and laughing.

      Ernest escaped, striding across the sunny concrete to the cool shadows of the beige portables. He walked in and found the room completely empty. Was Mr. Hallstrom a smoker? Most likely. The relative peace of the room made him feel like falling on the floor and napping under the desk chairs. Instead, he just straightened himself out and sat down. Time to finish skimming Essays...
      People filed in, first Hallstrom, then the other students. The portables sat in their own weird shadows, and Ernest's mind became useless for a little while until he was positive that he'd been marked “present” on the attendance sheet.
      Mr. Hallstrom finished taking attendance, coughed quietly and dabbed a bit of sweat from his chestnut colored forehead with his tie. He stood up uneasily and leaned on his desk while he talked.
      “Alright, children, yesterday when I examined your poems I discovered, to my chagrin, that my lesson about plagiarism did not take. Understand, just because I *kaff* ahem, excuse me. Just because I didn't have you punted to the alternative school over it doesn't mean that wasn't an option for me. Plagiarism is an extremely serious matter. How would your parents feel if you went from having a B average to failing out of high school at the end of your senior year?”
      He'd been through all of that a week ago, and looked like, yes,
      “We're going to do this again. I'm going to spend the entire class discussing with you why plagiarism is bad, and you must never do it in your further education or professional life.” Students groaned. Some looked very offended. “...And I'm going to name everybody who stole verse from other poets today, and you're going to have to apologize to your classmates for stealing this time from them, and convince me that you're never going to plagiarize again. Are you ready?”
      They were not ready, but Ernest just chuckled to himself. A perfect opportunity to get some reading done. He looked into The Myth of Sisyphus etc. again, wondering what his book report was going to look like at the end...
      He started at the end of The Myth of Sisyphus again, glancing over his book report of Kafka. Seems he was into The Trial, that it was cool and absurd, but that taking Kafka's books as a whole, he concluded the guy ended with hope, turning him into another existentialist, O bane of Camus's existence.
      Summer in Algiers was next, and it was basically a philosophy-laden travel guide from the point of view of a privileged jerkface. The “About the Author” description mentioned Camus starting out poor and rising to recognition as a journalist by raising awareness about the difficulties of Algerian Arabs. Ernest's cursory reading of Summer almost made it seem like they didn't exist, or at least that their experience of life was foreign to him and not worth mentioning.
      The Minotaur, or The Stop in Oran was next – more travel guide stuff. More reiteration of his philosophy. Then Helen's Exile, he skimmed so fast the meaning eluded him, Return to Tipasa and The Artist and His Time likewise. The end.
      The last one seemed like an interview in which he was explaining himself and his positions, so it would be necessary to read in more depth for his own book report. As he prepared to do that, he heard someone say his name loudly and jumped a little in his seat. Looking around, no one was looking back at him. A kid coughed quietly, covering their mouth. Then he heard it again, “ERNEST!,” and looked to the front of the class.
      Mr. Hallstrom was still reading these kids the Riot Act, but when he coughed, it sounded a lot like Ernest's name. Not cool. The man didn't seem to be looking at Ernest at all. He eyed the teacher carefully. Hallstrom's glasses were opaque with the weird light of the narrow room, his mouth moving about steadily extolling the virtues of good scholarship and the perils of the bad kind.
      “ERNEST!” Oh no. When Mr. Hallstrom coughed, his mouth doubled in size, lips rippling, teeth going strange for an instant, then returning to normal as he kept talking. No one else noticed. What do you say, Ernest? WHAT DO YOU SAY?!
      The vice principal's voice piped in over the PA, with a dire message. Everyone stopped and looked up, a reflex to look at the direction of a voice despite knowing a face would not be there. Ernest didn't look up, staring at Hallstrom. The teacher was now staring back at him, face twitching, sweat beading at the temples.
      “Attention, all students and faculty. We have been made aware of an outbreak of illness which may be unusually bad. To protect those of you with weaker immune systems or respiratory health, it is recommended that anyone with cold-like symptoms or fever go home for the day. Buses have been called back to the school and will depart on their afternoon routes after third lunch. Faculty with symptoms contact the office and we will replace you with substitutes as soon a possible, if possible.”
      Hallstrom started snarling and mocking Ernest, his mouth coughing itself now fully into the mouth shape of that pickled pig's head as it spoke. “ERNEST! What happened to the PIG, ERNEST?!” His eyes were still invisible behind the shining glasses.
      “I repeat, we want to minimize the spread of the swine flu.”
      The swine flu. The swine flew. Ernest would groan at the horrible pun if he wasn't now getting extremely nervous. Oh no. Oh damn it. Mr. Hallstrom remained a monster, his body language casual as he leaned on his desk, gestured at others, but his head aimed straight at Ernest, his mouth agape, giant bloodless white tongue lolling about. Ernest was utterly paralyzed. The creature bellowed unnoticed by the other students, spraying spittle on the front row. Ernest began to tremble.
      “THE SWINE FLEW! THE SWINE FLU! GET IT? AHAHAHAHAHAHA! JUST FUCKING WITH YOU!! HAHAHAHAA!!!”
      I get it. You don't have to rub it in.
      Well, he wasn't getting any more reading done in this class. He put his shaking hands over his ears and tried to make himself as small as he felt. The abuse went on and on. The clock ticked by at a cruelly slow pace. Camus tried to encourage him, but it just came off as more mockery. Crushing truths perish from being acknowledged, Ernest. You can see the face of your Sisyphean stone before you. Time to conclude, like Oedipus, that “All is well.”
      “Damn it.”

      The class bell rang and Ernest leapt up so fast he got tangled in the desk chair and spilled onto the floor in a huge clatter. Everyone stopped in their tracks to laugh at him, Swine Hallstrom louder than any. His mouth shrank to a tiny squiggled line of fury as he crawled to his feet, stood, and stormed out.
      Laughs seem to come from random corners for a minute before dying down, as he jogged out into the middle of a concrete lot, as far from all other humans as possible. He leaned on a chain link fence and tried to get his strength back.

"Beyond it lay the tranquil radiance of a cool spring sky; inside a word was
echoing still, the word 'plague.' A word that conjured up in the mind not only
what science chose to put into it, but a whole series of fantastic possibilities
utterly out of keeping with that gray and yellow town under his eyes, from
which were rising the sounds of mild activity characteristic of the hour; a drone
rather than a bustling, the noises of a happy town, in short, if it's possible to be
at once so dull and happy. A tranquility so casual and thoughtless seemed al-
most effortlessly to give the lie to those old pictures of the plague: Athens, a
charnel-house reeking to heaven and deserted even by the birds; Chinese towns
cluttered up with victims silent in their agony; the convicts at Marseille piling
rotting corpses into pits; the building of the Great Wall in Provence to fend off
the furious plague-wind; the damp, putrefying pallets stuck to the mud floor at
the Constantinople lazar-house, where the patients were hauled up from their
beds with hooks; the carnival of masked doctors at the Black Death; men and
women copulating in the cemeteries of Milan; cartloads of dead bodies rumbling
through London's ghoul-haunted darkness, nights and days filled always, every-
where, with the eternal cry of human pain. No, all those horrors were not near
enough as yet even to ruffle the equanimity of that spring afternoon. The clang
of an unseen streetcar came through the window, briskly refuting cruelty and
pain. Only the sea, murmurous behind the dingy checkerboard of houses, told
of the unrest, the precariousness, of all things in this world. And, gazing in the
direction of the bay, one called to mind the plague-fires of which Lucretius
tells, which the Athenians kindled on the seashore. The dead were brought there
after nightfall, but there was not room enough, and the living fought one another
with torches for a space where to lay those who had been dear to them; for they
had rather engage in bloody conflicts than abandon their dead to the waves. A
picture rose before him of the red glow of the pyres mirrored on a wine-dark,
slumbrous sea, battling torches whirling sparks across the darkness, and thick,
fetid smoke rising toward the watchful sky. Yes, it was not beyond the bounds
of possibility....
  But these extravagant forebodings dwindled in the light of reason... True, at
this very moment one or two victims were being seized and laid low by the dis-
ease. Still, that could stop, or be stopped. It was only a matter of lucidly recog-
nizing what had to be recognized; of dispelling extraneous shadows and doing
what needed to be done."

      Horace. Supposed to meet Horace. Ernest needed sustenance very badly, but that particular nightmare would have to wait until the last minute. Today he would not have time for the social hell of getting chummy with Horace's clique. No, he had to encourage them to get away from the pig plague before it took them too. Not that he had special love for any of them, but they had been kind and he was going to return the kindness.
      Plus he didn't need to see that hellish pig mouth on Horace, or he'd never get an erection again. Things weren't boding well on that front already. Hard to feel amorous when the world is that disgusting.
      As he walked the concrete, he considered what this meant. Anything even slightly pig can give me the business. Would a rubber football laugh at me? Ignore the small stuff. Swine flu. What did he know about illness? They incubate. You're infected at least a few days before you get sick... sometimes. Was it true of swine flu?
      You don't get symptoms until it incubates. Mr. Hallstrom didn't go pigface until he was symptomatic, so people that are infected won't pigface until then. Merely having the disease wasn't sufficient to turn one against Ernest. But that also meant that anybody and everybody in the school could have it – could turn into a monster at any moment – and that in order to start sending people home like this, it had to have happened several times already.
      What if I get infected? Perish the thought, Ernest. Perish the thought.

      Horace's clique loomed pleasantly chubby on the stony grey expanse, smiling and smoking. One coughed, stopping him in his tracks, but their face didn't swine out, so he resumed his advance.
      “Hey, guys... Um, hi.”
      Tammy and Horace smiled, Pharaoh did some kind of expression, and Scott didn't. He stopped about two paces back from them.
      Horace said, “You ready to be a stoner yet?”
      “Haha, no, choose hugs not drugs, right?”
      They laughed, at least half with good cheer. He awkwardly laughed with them before cutting it short. “Haha-so, so... Did you guys hear the announcement?”
      Scott shook his dreadlocks. Tammy nodded. “Nn, yeah, something about the swi--”
      “The flu, yes!,” said Ernest. “That is what it was about. It's bad, that's what they say, it can kill a healthy person. I saw that on the news, and the way it spreads and incubates, we could all have it already, so...”
      “Ya don't have to tell us twice,” Horace said. “We're on the early bus and fuuuck school.” He high-fived Pharaoh. Ernest restrained himself from batting the hands apart.
      “No! I mean, yes. Good idea... but...”
      Tammy flashed her pink gums at him. “Is something on your mind, baby?”
      Something was indeed on his mind. If even a few of the people going home were actually doing so because they had symptoms, all of the fakers on the early bus would be trapped in an enclosed space with them for a long enough time... But if they didn't, they'd be exposed to any teachers that couldn't be replaced, or freaky nerds who wouldn't go home until their heads were rolling out the doors, like Ernest... What was the least of available evils? Who was infected?
      “ERN.”
      Either Pharaoh or Scott just Ernestcoughed, and he wasn't looking in that direction at the time it happened... Oh no... “Um... um... I have to go eat … lunch...” They looked at him, all curious. He wheeled and ran away.

      One last thing before Ernest could find a dark hole to hide in for the rest of lunch break. Food. He slowed his jog as he neared the lunch room. People standing outside glared at him and he did his best to ignore. He walked to the door, and through.
      The cafeteria was inadequate to the size of the student body, which is one reason why lunch was split into first two, then three periods. Even a third of the student body had the lunch line packed. Ernest would be waiting in germ paradise forever if he went in now. He heard coughing within and shook his head. No.
      As an adolescent, his body was furiously at work growing in ways that weren't even visible – finishing touches on the nervous and immune systems, that sort of thing. The work caused hunger to hit him fast and severely. The jogging today made it worse. He staggered, not knowing where to go or what to do, and feeling like starvation in a day was somehow possible for him.
      Out here lurked the remains of a baseball diamond, where the school's baseball team would practice, if there had been enough interest to field one. Behind the spot where home plate would have been, there was a tall, curved chain link fence full of wooden slats and covered in graffiti. This wall alone reduced visibility of this corner of the playground to nosy administrators looking out from the building, and so it was frequented by ne'er-do-wells. A young gentleman with an illicit baseball cap propped up on his head (the bill folded on the center line into a sharp steeple) was chilling with Alma Martinez, another friend, and a pile of nuggets so large he couldn't possibly eat them all before they went cold. Such wealth! Ernest's stomach growled. He collapsed on the concrete that would have been home plate, staring up at the lip of the back fence and the blue sky, wondering how people survive wars.
      Casually, someone terrible loomed into view. “T” the Crappy Guy and Little Bird were easily identified by their respective proportions and profiles, even as streaming sunbeams over their shoulders made individual features harder to read. Ernest closed his eyes and took off his glasses.
      T kicked him in the side of the neck and he tumbled to the side. He flopped loosely on the ground, wanting to rise and face this menace with dignity, but unable to for want of energy. “Foood,” he moaned quietly. T and Bird approached again.
      Alma's voice cut in, “Hey, Scroggs! Why you kickin' that kid's ass?”
      T – apparently also known as Scroggs – replied, “Why you care, girl?”
      “Tsht, whatever. I was just curious.”
      “This faggot brought a gun to school. He's one of those psychos.” He punctuated that sentence with another kick that dropped Ernest back on his face. The concrete had a million tiny details, which his nearsighted eyes could pick out with great accuracy at this range. Almost beautiful, like a rocky beach – myriad colors of extremely tiny stones cemented in a hardened, pale grey mud.
      Bird added, “Yeah, but he ain't got a gun now, right, faggot? What you gone do now? Hahaha!” He also liked to punctuate sentences with physical assault – a grammar Ernest could not relate to.
      Scroggs kicked him a few more times as well. Mostly the blows just compressed part of his body for an instant – he was seemingly made of resiliently springy stuff. But at least one of the sharp jabs connected badly with his ribs. He bounced away from it, but the pain came with him that time. And he was face to face with the concrete again. This time, stars wriggled through his field of vision as well. Strange the way that phenomenon always looked the same – did it follow the course of veins in the eyes? Was it neurological? Why did the stars take those vermiform paths?
      “Foood... Need nuggets.”
      “Faggot, I'll feed you a dick if you want. You want that, don't you, bitch nigga?”
      T Scroggs seemed confident in his ability to read people's minds and assess their personalities, and while correct about Ernest's homosexuality, he was incorrect to imagine that being assaulted would arouse any desire to participate in those sorts of activities, and certainly it would not arouse such desires for the assailant. He reached out pathetically to Alma, in a sassy pose behind the bullies, like a Rapa Nui person standing in the shadow of some Moai megaliths.
      “Foood...”
      She backed away. Bird grabbed him by the vest, dragging him roughly to his feet, tearing the cloth, to Ernest's lament. Bird pushed him away and the iron grip of T Scroggs was upon him, spinning him around, holding him steady in preparation for further brutality. He spoke quietly. Sneakered feet padded around behind him, irrelevant.
      “Psycho, you wanna know what I did with your gun? It ain't on me. Don't think you can just call the school down on my ass and get me tossed for your shit. Naw, but I have it. I have your gun, psycho, and I don't fuckin' like it when some faggot thinks he can kill me. Bitch, that kinda shit makes me wanna kill a nigga.”
      Ernest thought for a moment this might be an invitation to discussion on the topic, and prepared a thoughtful rejoinder, only to be punched in the face. He hit the concrete again and was kicked in the back three times by Bird. On his belly again, he saw the little stones all spinning. “Can't... Need foood...”
      Alma's voice rang out.
      “Hey, Scroggs! Just a minute, OK! Just a minute.”
      He stepped aside, in a state of disbelief. The Angel of Sweetness crouched on the ground, pulling Ernest into her small lap, putting a nugget into his mouth. He eagerly let it pass his lips, sheared only slightly by the molars before passing into his throat and swallowed whole. She gave him a little sip of root beer from a brown bottle and repeated the whole maneuver. She fed him a total of five life-sustaining nuggets, washed down with energizing, cool fructose. She helped him to his feet – her tiny arms stronger than he would have expected, and quietly asked him a question.
      “Did you really wanna shoot up the school, dude?” She handed him his glasses.
      “No... Wasn't even my gun...” He wavered on his feet a bit, then stood up straight.
      “... Well damn. Sorry you're gonna get your ass beat for nothin'. Life sucks.”
      “Yes indeedy.” She backed away and T Scroggs and the Bird closed in.
      With a sudden burst of nugget-fueled energy, he flew past them and ran across the concrete yard, bag flapping behind him. At first getting close to the building meant close to the cafeteria, but he decided to change course and went toward the corner to the front entrance. A random jerk on the wall tried to trip him and he leapt over the offending limb. His bag smacked the guy in the face and he was around the corner before he could even think.

[Thy Dungyeon Maestyr]

((Updated MOARWORDZ/cast section with additional info in red, added some foreshadowing to previous chapters in red, and the last chapter was new from the orange Camus excerpt down.

More: I also felt like the last chapter needed to be longer so I pulled some of this one out and tacked it on there - everything from the yellow paragraph down. In this chapter, everything from the light blue Camus down is new.))

CHAPTER SEVEN: THE PLAGUE II

      The front entrance of the school was a set of tall stone steps up to a set of faded red painted sheet metal doors. They were propped open, admitting a spring breeze to the shadowy hall. He bounded up the stairs, into the hall, and over a short stairwell completely to a lower landing. He ambled awkwardly, his energy fading as he approached the library.
      The library was a choice location for nerds to hide from bullies, but usually only worked on the principle that the bullies were not actively seeking them. If a bully was actively seeking a nerd, he'd probably start to think of nerd places. Otherwise, they would just forget that such places could exist and assume the nerds had ceased to exist – out of sight out of mind.
      If T Scroggs was serious enough about his mission of menace, he would probably find him there. But possibly not. As Ernest had run out the front side of the building, the possibility would remain – from the bully's point view – that he had left the grounds entirely. At that point, would he even bother looking?
      Ernest went walked past Mr. Milgram, up a short flight of stairs to a higher landing, then along a large row of bookshelves. At the end of that row, he went to the last aisle, where a small chair sat with split vinyl covers. A plastic plant and a loudly ticking wall clock kept him in company. He sat with a whump, pulled up his bag, took out “The Plague,” and waited.

“In the heat and stillness, and for the troubled hearts of our townsfolk, anything,
even the least sound, had a heightened significance. The varying aspects of the
sky, the very smells rising from the soil that mark each change of season, were
taken notice of for the first time. Everyone realized with dismay that hot weather
would favor the epidemic, and it was clear that summer was setting in. The cries
of swifts in the evening air above the housetops were growing shriller. And the
sky, too, had lost the spaciousness of those June twilights when our horizons
seem infinitely remote. In the markets the flowers no longer came in buds; they
were already in full bloom, and after the morning's marketing the dusty pave-
ments were littered with trampled petals. It was plain to see that spring had spent
itself, lavished its ardor on the myriads of flowers that were bursting everywhere
into bloom, and now was being crushed out by the twofold onslaught of heat and
plague. For our fellow citizens that summer sky, and the streets thick in dust, gray
as their present lives, had the same ominous import as the hundred deaths now
weighing daily on the town. That incessant sunlight and those bright hours assoc-
iated with siesta or with holidays no longer invited, as in the past, to frolics and
flirtation on the beaches. Now they rang hollow in the silence of the closed town,
they had lost the golden spell of happier summers. Plague had killed all colors,
vetoed pleasure.”

      Ernest breezed through some of the story without processing meaning on a conscious level, at a pace where he couldn't remember from one second to the next what he had just read, but a feeling began to aggregate in his mind, mixed with all the others, but mute. The sting of his injuries was still fresh, a tangible reminder of the immediacy of lived life, of flesh and blood, which made the whirl of thought and feeling within his head recede into a muted clamor. That abused body which held primacy in his experience of that moment was weary, and he began to fall asleep, resisting only at the last stop before total unconsciousness – a place where no thought was possible without falling immediately into a dream, where his body marked time in its unseen way, he breathed, his heart beat, and he did nothing else.
      At last, his sense of time set off a neural alarm. Class was coming, and he didn't have to look at his cell phone to have a pretty good sense of when. Not one to leave things to chance, however, he quickly looked at the device, confirming his feeling, slung the bag over his shoulder, and started moving again.
      As he walked through the library, a wriggling and jerking movement tried to get his attention, from Mr. Milgram's desk. He ignored it and kept walking. It was only a matter of lucidly recognizing what had to be recognized; of dispelling extraneous shadows and doing what needed to be done. Just keep going.
      “ERNEs-ggrggl-ggrgg-ERNESSS--! Ahem, I … I'm closing the library...”
      “Yeah.”
      The last breath of his response escaped into the hall, and he wove through the crowd with somber efficiency. A ripple here, a shimmy there, a complete pig face staring straight at him from a clique of ladies. He stepped out the door into the open air.
      He was on the far side of the building from where he had left T Scroggs – heading across the lot to the portables. He looked around at the threatening new world of plague and swine. A steady flow of youths was coming and going from the little impermanent structures.
      There was a mixed feeling about having a class in the portables. In a way it was farther from the school itself, farther from administrators and hall monitors and whatnot. There was a sense of freedom in that, a sense you could disappear behind them and have a smoke or assault or love somebody, in the way human animals do when liberated. But it was just a feeling, because teachers were out here too, and they had nothing better to do with their time than hassle kids.
      There was also a feeling that the classes themselves were somehow less legitimate. Special Ed classes were more likely to held in portables, making the classes out here feel remedial by association. Ernest's own portable-based classes, he'd have to admit, were simplistic ones. Poetry as an art had the potential to be sophisticated, but rising to that level was strictly optional for the students, meaning almost no one bothered.
      And Human Societies? There was a deeper concept in it somewhere, but ultimately it was just a parade of tooth-grinding student stupidity. Ernest felt sorry for Mrs. Spurling having to teach it, but she didn't seem to mind. That was something he'd never understand.
      But the pigs. They pushed those thoughts away, and all others. He saw them all around. The human bodies they grafted themselves onto would move as if nothing were amiss, walking casually in their chosen paths. But the heads would be twisted to Ernest, mocking and yelling. And no one seemed to hear a word.
      Ernest had to conclude that he was - at least in this moment - insane. Seeing things no one else could see, hearing things no one else could hear, feeling persecuted by omnipresent covert forces beyond your control? He could imagine the school nurse going through a checklist and calling the authorities to take him away.
      The only alternative was that these were, in fact, manifestations of a ghost or malevolent force that he had provoked. Something was seeking justice, and a kind of justice he firmly disagreed with. As of yet, they didn't seem able to change the real world. They can't have actually been moving those burgers, or someone other than just Ernest would have seen them. So they were affecting what he sees, at least. What else could they control? And the idea came back again, what would happen if Ernest was somehow possessed by them? Could that be what was happening already? They possessed his senses. Maybe, despite the appearance it was seated in other people and objects, only one entity was involved and it resided in his body. Could it cause him physical harm? To others, not sharing his visions, would it look like he was harming himself?
      The way the bodies moved independent of the heads made it seem like they were confined to moving objects in ways consistent with others vision of the world. If one of the pig people started moving its body in a way that matched the head, it would mean either that they were real, in other bodies, and able to move them - potentially attacking him - or it would mean his delusions had gotten worse. Either way, he would certainly start running.

      Up the gritty ramp, no hand for the splintered wooden railing, (check later to see if i remembered that his Human societies class was in the portables on the way out) and into the classroom's cheap aluminum and balsa wood door. It squeaked on the hinge. The class size was smallish, and he was able to find a seat without too much difficulty.
      Mrs. Spurling was wearing a voluminous black turtleneck sweater with thin material, large white and red geometric shapes making it either bold or threatening, depending on your aesthetics. Her wrists had chunky bracelets of polished stone and ears fat gold-plated curl-shaped earrings. She held a manila folder with a sheaf of papers neatly clipped to it, marking attendance as people came in. The several people were absent. Of course, the last person through the door had to be wriggly-lipped and pig infected, just to make sure Ernest couldn't be comfortable for half a minute today.
      She put down the folder. "OK, it looks like we're a few shy of a full class today. I do insist that you all stay with me until that bell sounds. If you are sick, there's no point making it worse standing around at the bus stop. Now, pass these dittos to the backs, and we'll do just a little quiz about system justification, before moving onto a new topic..."
      Ernest didn't care if he was noticed. He moved over two seats to make sure when the ditto was passed back, he would get one that hadn't been handled by an overt plague-bearer. He got his pen ready and ripped through the questions in less than three minutes so he could get back to reading.
      The Plague. Camus's thesis about absurd creation clearly stated that he sought to write art showing a smaller picture that was informed by and therefore suggestive of the absurdity of the larger world. This book was written with a bare minimum of descriptive material, sometimes glossing over the substance of a day in less than a sentence, flitting from scene to scene with a very short attention span. That meant that the scenes it chose to describe were granted an extra weight that was transparent. If he thought something was meaningful, there was no question or implication, making it more like a simple riddle of determining what he meant by it. That seemed to Ernest like it was falling short of Camus's own ideal.
      In the character of Jean Tarrou, that failing became even more explicit. The man would describe vignettes of life that could only be seen as small demonstrations of Camus's philosophy. No realistic character would describe things in that way. Unless someone was trying to write a pretentious weirdo like Camus.
      But artistic hypocrisy aside, it was a compelling read. Ernest could imagine that without the background of having read his essays, he might have just read it as a cautionary tale about taking public health seriously and appreciating life because it can be cut short. This less abstract human stuff made the story easier to feel than his essays were. Though Ernest did have to re-read everything he'd tried and failed to digest in the library.
      The infected one coughed into the crook of their arm. "ERNEglmpHAHAHA." Ernest's forehead bunched up and his glasses slid down his nose. If that happened again, he wasn't going to be able to read. He waited a moment.
      "ERNEST!" Its head twisted to face him. "What do you say, Ernest? Just fucking with you. Just trying to be friendly with you. Just reminding you..." Ernest put the book down, rested on an arm with the hand shielding his sight from the thing. "Just trying to be friendly with you, a guy like you.."

      The class bell rang. The buses would be out there now, ahead of schedule, filling up with students using any excuse to ditch school, and with the swinefluent. That was surely no way for Ernest to go, and lingering felt right in one important way - Ernest really hated the idea of having less than perfect attendance, or of having to do make-up work, or any of the other potential unnamed consequences hanging over missed school.
      He did not know why those things bothered him so much, but they did. It seemed like... If there is something to do, it must be done perfectly. He spell-checked every comment he made on the internet, and reread them for grammar. He could remember the feeling of shame from every slip of the tongue in his life that had resulted in an incorrect answer given in class - all three times, at ages seven, eleven, and thirteen.
      Ernest used to get perfect grades (outside of PE), but in junior high he had - for the first time - some classes where the teacher's grading was wildly subjective. Why did he get a B+ on that sculpture of his name in 7th grade art? He could only imagine the teacher - a crappy old jock - hated him.
      But when perfection was no longer achievable, it freed him from feeling like he had to have perfect grades in anything, and he started to let that aspect of his academic performance slip. Now he would generally go for perfect - do all the assigned work and such - unless the class or teacher annoyed him badly. At that point, he would calculate the minimum he could do to pass the class, and achieve that handily. Usually that would just entail skipping every in-class assignment and homework, while acing all of the tests. Those teachers usually came to reciprocate his feeling for them. And with perfect attendance, he would annoy them every day with his persistent presence.
      The swiney one babbled its way out the door and he tarried a few more moments before shouldering his bag and walking carefully toward the door. Mrs. Spurling stopped him with a strong, veiny, manicured hand. He looked up at her, his glasses sliding down again.
      "Ernest, you should go home. You look sick."
      "Damn it I hope not!"

      Ernest made his way around to the school's back entrance. The chance of running into T Scroggs was worse there, but the vision of what would be transpiring at the school buses was too alarming. His hope was that the sick ones would all go to the buses, leaving the building relatively pig free - as well as the bus ride home. It was a very slim hope, given recent events, but a fervent one.
      As he entered the shadowy hall, he could hear a chorus of ERNESTs, getting more frantic as they faded, and saw the backwards pig-heads disappearing through the front door, far down at the opposite end of the hall. That was as it should be.
      Then he saw the back of T Scroggs down by the lockers. He ran for the stairs and up out of sight. The stairs were near empty as he threw himself into them, and he emerged into a nearly empty hall on his destination floor. Sun beamed through the window like a greenhouse, making him squint in the light. He walked to Mrs. Bougy's class.

      Exodus, movement of Jah people. Outside it looked much as if school had simply ended early, with hundreds of youths stumbling over each other to get in buses, chasing friends around, talking, and getting into trouble. Horace ambled up to the bus and walked through the aisle, smiling from beneath his hair and taking it easy. Pharaoh followed and they sat down in something like their usual spot. Horace looked at him with a gentle smile and started to talk. The swine opened its mouth like the lid of a trash can and breathed on him like a dragon - his fire a plague. The buses began to move.

      Ernest came into the class. Given what the hall looked like, he could only expect it to be very empty today. Would he be able to get away with hanging out in the far back of the room? Mrs. Bougy didn't seem likely to notice. He sat and waited.
      Alma came into the room and nodded at him before taking a seat a few rows up. The back of her head did not monster out at him. He put his head down in relief and tried to relax. His arms felt bony under his forehead. He was oily. It was like that - when he mostly managed to avoid sweating, but still had been through some exertion, his skin got too oily. Yuck. He could feel it on his scalp, making his hair feel almost like a foreign object - like a light towel draped over the top of his head. Ugh. Still, he was too exhausted to try to make it right just then.
      Gradually, all that would come did come, and Mrs. Bougy seemed confused by their small numbers, though the situation had certainly been explained to her. She waited a few minutes longer than she should have, then went into roll call. Ernest waited excruciatingly as she called out all the "Aa" through "Nd" names as many as three times, occasionally wondering aloud where everyone was. No one felt like answering the question. Finally, he was marked "Present" and went to work on reading "The Plague" yet further...

“Toward two o'clock the town slowly empties, it is the time when silence,
sunlight, dust, and plague have the streets to themselves. Wave after wave
of heat flows over the frontage of the tall gray houses during these long,
languid hours. Thus the afternoon wears on, slowly merging into an evening
that settles down like a red winding-sheet on the serried tumult of the town.
At the start of the great heat, for some unascertained reason, the evenings
found the streets almost empty. But now the least ripple of cooler air brings
an easing of the strain, if not a flutter of hope. Then all stream out into the
open, drug themselves with talking, start arguing or love-making, and in the
last glow of sunset the town, freighted with lovers two by two and loud with
voices, drifts like a helmless ship into the throbbing darkness. In vain a zeal-
ous evangelist with a felt hat and flowing tie threads his way through the
crowd, crying without cease: 'God is great and good. Come unto Him.' On the
contrary, they all make haste toward some trivial objective that seems of more
immediate interest than God.
     In the early days, when they thought this epidemic was much like other
epidemics, religion held its ground. But once these people realized their instant
peril, they gave their thoughts to pleasure. And all the hideous fears that stamp
their faces in the daytime are transformed in the fiery, dusty nightfall into a
sort of hectic exaltation, an unkempt freedom fevering their blood.”

      All was quiet, hazy, warm, peaceful. The antiquated school equipment idled on the antiquated desk around the antiquated teacher. Papers were distributed, completed, collected and so on. Ernest winced a few throat clearing noises, but no one Ernestcoughed, and he began to feel like the administrative measures just might have been sufficient to make his day survivable. Did everyone sick enough to swine out go home? It was possible to imagine it so. Then the class bell rang and apprehension returned.
      Alma nodded at him again on the way out and he smiled weakly. She had helped him in a trying time, but his trials were certainly not at their end. He waited until the last person walked out ahead of him, then took off, walking quickly.
      The halls were sparse, which made the pigs stand out in a more shocking way. He thought as their bodies went about business as usual, that might be because they didn't want to be caught attacking him. With so few people around, it seemed like the ideal time for all manner of bullies to strike.
      In the upstairs hall, he heard their mocking cries ring out. One by a locker, one standing in the hall, its body turned to chat with a friend, its head looking like it wanted to rip free and bounce down the hall to devour him. He almost leapt down the stairs. It was always easier to go down than to ascend.

      In the downstair hall, he backed into a corner by the sunny window. Its light spilled into the hall ahead, hopefully blinding others to his presence there. He examined the crowd. Three dozen or so... a few coughs. A few ERNESTs. He felt a chill creep across his skin and thought of fever. Was it happening already? Human feet below the field of the sun, moving about in their purposeful way, a bit slowed and reluctant by the long school day. Above that, jeans and leggings and dresses all blown out in a shaft of sunlight. Above that, heads, faded under a scattering of aggressive photons. He could see some were human, but some thrashed and wagged overlong tongues. They looked like they had been dropped severed onto potters wheels and slapped around by erratic hands. He squeezed his eyes shut, cries of his name and familiar words nagging at him, unseen eyes burning into his corner, unable to reach him bound to the whims of still human feet.
      Yep. You're plum loco, Ernesto.
      He ran into the crowd, winding through them one way and the other, messenger bag slapping shoulders, the mockery of the swine blending with protests and complaints. Through the door and
      Study Hall. Mr. Hepler took notice of him again. Ernest avoided his gaze and got into a chair as quickly as possible. He buried his head in a book, but couldn't read yet. He needed to calm down. Calls of ERNEST could still be heard fading away. Not calming down yet.
      No one else came to class. Ernest pretended that wasn't awkward for as long as possible, staring into the book while Mr. Hepler looked around at the empty desks, back to the door, then back again. Finally, he said something, and Ernest had to put the book down.
      "Mr. Newman, why are you still here? Apparently, there's a plague going on."
      "Haha," he said without laughing, "Just like the book, yes. Funny."
      "Seriously, though, you should have gone home. You want something? Maybe some coffee from the student lounge, or a cigarette? This feels silly."
      Ernest looked at him incredulous and annoyed. "And wreck my lungs? No thanks. Coffee is bad for your health, too."
      Mr. Hepler leaned on the nearest windowsill. "Oh? And what about life and death being meaningless?"
      Now he was just annoyed. "What about it? I know what I feel and I know what I know, and I don't need to justify it to anybody."
      "'The unexamined life is not worth living.' You know who said that?"
      "Somebody dead?"
      "When you're right, you're right. Haha, oh, I'm sorry. Anyway, I feel like I should ask you one more time. Do you think you're going to hurt yourself or someone else, Ernest?"
      The piano chord unstruck itself again. He felt like a vein popped in his eyes - a strange sensation. It took him a moment to recover, think about it, and answer.
      "I don't want to, but I don't know. And what if it's too late?"
      Hepler wasn't expecting that answer. He stood up and walked a little closer, trying to engage Ernest's eyes, but the eyes wouldn't see him. "... What did you mean by that, Ernest?"
      He shook his head and looked at the teacher. "Nothing, damn it. Go drink your coffee."
      Hepler made a concerned expression, but didn't see what else he could do. he shook his own head and walked out, snagging the mug off his desk along the way. Ernest was alone. He put his head in his hands and waited.

      Do what needs to be done. Wait for the final bell, go to the bus, don't get shot by T Scroggs, go home. Maybe... As much as he hated the prospect of missing school, ...call in sick tomorrow... Put this in order. As much as he believed the world was chaos, he found that loathsome and strived against it. He had always done so, without putting any thought into it. In all but the last fact, that meant he had been living Camus's ideal. Ernest: Absurd Hero.
      But it gave him no pride, most of the time – and especially in the last few days. This was an absurd struggle, it was loathsome, but more than ever escape seemed like a reasonable recourse. Only a complete lack of interest in dying stopped him. He thought himself the reverse of the criminal that says, “You'll never catch me alive, coppers!” Nonetheless, he would try to evade punishment for his crimes for as long as possible, for that was another form of self preservation, and his instincts in that regard were utterly and hopelessly healthy.
      No, there would be no escape. But if ever he had felt like something could not be overcome, this was the time. He would run and struggle and lose – whatever that meant. He still had no idea what the pigs even wanted. But then he remembered he had a way to find out.
      Ernest opened his notebook and turned to an empty page. At the bottom, he carefully drew a smiley face. He already didn't like it. Next he added largish pointed ears. Could be a cat? Nothing.
      He looked up at the clock, sweated a bit, shivered, and returned to his task. In the center of the face, he drew a circle. The lines started to wriggle on the page, making him drop his pen in alarm, pull his hands back. He shook out his fear, steadied himself, and drew the nostrils.
      HEY! Hello there, fella. It's about time you came to me. How's life, young man? So you know what you did wrong, Ernest?
      I have an idea. I'm not stupid.
      Tsk tsk tsk, there's that attitude again. What are we going to do with you, Ernest?
      I don't know. That's what I'm asking you, damn it. What do you want from me?
      Nothing much, kid. Just trying to be friendly, give you some friendly advice before sending you on your way. You do want to go on your way, right?
      YEAH! Let me go, you jerks!'
      Should I? I really must look after the public good.
      Useless. Are you trying to drive me insane? Am I insane already?
      Ernest, I'm trying to give you a chance to get your life back on track. I'm just trying to be friendly. You look like you could use some help. You don't want to lo--
      SHUT UP, DAMN IT!
      HahaHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
      The paper flapped and howled at him, until he ripped it to pieces.

[Thy Dungyeon Maestyr]

((Last post modified, Camus quote in yellow and all text from later yellow sentence on was added.))

CHAPTER EIGHT: THE PLAGUE III

      Mr. Hepler returned with his mug full of coffee and sat down at his desk. He looked at Ernest, then at the neat pile of shredded notebook paper on the chair next to him, then back to Ernest again.
      “You want to go out, wait in the sun? Nobody will stop you. I'll mark you as pres--”
      “No thank you! I don't want to leave yet.”
      “Oookay... Are you going to work on something?”
      “... Yeah.” Ernest sighed deeply, closing his eyes on the exhale and opening them to breathe again. “I just had to calm down. I think... I can read now.”
      “Good. I'll read too.”
      Hepler took out a copy of Stephen King's The Stand and started reading. Ernest started back in on The Plague. By the third part, the philosophical conversations were more frequent and lengthy, but not intolerable. They were just bit self-satisfied. Particularly this bit where the doctor character and the Camus stand-in Tarrou were discussing doing good deeds in a godless universe.

     “My question's this," said Tarrou. "Why do you yourself show such
devotion, considering you don't believe in God? I suspect your answer
may help me to mine."
     His face still in shadow, Rieux said that he'd already answered: that if
he believed in an all-powerful God he would cease curing the sick and
leave that to Him. But no one in the world believed in a God of that sort;
no, not even Paneloux, who believed that he believed in such a God.
And this was proved by the fact that no one ever threw himself on Provi-
dence completely. Anyhow, in this respect Rieux believed himself to be
on the right road, in fighting against creation as he found it.
     "Ah," Tarrou remarked. "So that's the idea you have of your profession?"
     "More or less." The doctor came back into the light.
     Tarrou made a faint whistling noise with his lips, and the doctor gazed
at him.
     "Yes, you're thinking it calls for pride to feel that way. But I assure you
I've no more than the pride that's needed to keep me going. I have no idea
what's awaiting me, or what will happen when all this ends. For the moment
I know this; there are sick people and they need curing. Later on, perhaps,
they'll think things over; and so shall I. But what's wanted now is to make
them well. I defend them as best I can, that's all."
     "Against whom?"
     Rieux turned to the window. A shadow-line on the horizon told of the
presence of the sea. He was conscious only of his exhaustion, and at the
same time was struggling against a sudden, irrational impulse to unburden
himself a little more to his companion; an eccentric, perhaps, but who, he
guessed, was one of his own kind.
     "I haven't a notion, Tarrou; I assure you I haven't a notion. When I entered
this profession, I did it 'abstractedly,' so to speak; because I had a desire for
it, because it meant a career like another, one that young men often aspire to.
Perhaps, too, because it was particularly difficult for a workman's son, like
myself. And then I had to see people die. Do you know that there are some
who refuse to die? Have you ever heard a woman scream 'Never!' with her
last gasp? Well, I have. And then I saw that I could never get hardened to it.
I was young then, and I was outraged by the whole scheme of things, or so
I thought. Subsequently I grew more modest. Only, I've never managed to
get used to seeing people die. That's all I know. Yet after all?"
     Rieux fell silent and sat down. He felt his mouth dry.
     "After all?" Tarrou prompted softly.
     "After all," the doctor repeated, then hesitated again, fixing his eyes on
Tarrou, "it's something that a man of your sort can understand most likely,
but, since the order of the world is shaped by death, mightn't it be better for
God if we refuse to believe in Him and struggle with all our might against
death, without raising our eyes toward the heaven where He sits in silence."
     Tarrou nodded.
     "Yes. But your victories will never be lasting; that's all."
     Rieux's face darkened.
     "Yes, I know that. But it's no reason for giving up the struggle."
     "No reason, I agree. Only, I now can picture what this plague must mean
for you."
     "Yes. A never ending defeat."
     Tarrou stared at the doctor for a moment, then turned and tramped heavily
toward the door. Rieux followed him and was almost at his side when Tarrou,
who was staring at the floor, suddenly said:
     "Who taught you all this, doctor?"
     The reply came promptly:
     "Suffering."

      Ernest thought the characters were too much of the same mind. The scene was written as if they were different, and some mild tension existed between them, but they were just two faces of Camus having a conversation with himself. Also, they spelled out elements of his philosophy so explicitly at times that the artistic hypocrisy at the core of the book would just flap in the breeze...
      He found it hard to concentrate as the school bell neared, folded the book, packed his bag, and got ready for war. He would have to get out and onto his bus – hopefully without too much pig trouble and without being seen by T Scroggs – and survive the ride home. If swine flu was spreading through the town, just walking down the sidewalk could be dangerous.
      He had heard that it was more common with international travelers, meaning the poor homeless people might catch it slower than the affluent – at least until any convenience store working foreigners came back from respective motherlands. Still, the walk home from the bus seemed much less intimidating than everything leading up to it...

      And then it was upon him. The bell rang, he whipped past Mr. Hepler and ran into the hall. The dweebish teacher smiled as he passed but said nothing. Ernest's bag smacked loudly on the door jamb but he kept going.
      A bunch of silhouetted pig heads marched on him from the far end of the hall. He ran into the sunlight, for the moment leaving behind a cacophony of grunts and squeals. His bus was as yet empty, and he sprinted madly to it. The door was shut. The driver was not inside. He turned around, slapping his palms against the side of the useless yellow beast, frozen for the moment in terror. This is really getting to be a bit much, now isn't it? He jogged to the end of the bus, between it and the next in line, around that corner, and into a corridor of concrete with buses for walls.
      Students would pass through this corridor soon enough – those with buses further from the curb – and some of them would no doubt be pig heads. Ernest shook his head and threw his hands up, mouthing the words, Are you damn kidding me?!
      Under the bus! Just as the first teen started to walk into sight, he went to his knees and rolled under the bus. It had fairly tall suspension, making it easy to maneuver beneath. However, it was also so high off the ground that its underside – and anyone hiding there – could be seen from a short distance. Though they were small, he could see the faces of students emerging from the school – and they could see him. Pig heads with writhing lips, grunts and squeals and shouts.
      In a sense it didn't matter if they saw him. They would always look straight at him, always know he was there, always yell and snarl. But Ernest just didn't want to see it. It was too much to face. He turned around, poked his head out in the alley between the buses, and ran across when no pigs were in sight.
      He moved in a crouch and dove beneath the next row of buses away from the curb. There the narrow space between buses kept a casual passerby from seeing who lurked beneath. He huddled as far from every side as possible, pulling his bag close to his body, looking at all the legs and feet passing by, swinish jeering increasingly coming from all around.
      He spun his head about, watching for danger, until he thought better of it and focused on the area near the door of his bus. As soon as he saw someone go in there, he had to run for it.
      “ERNESS!sssT, ERNESS!sssT, HELLO THERE, FELLA! HAHAHAHAHA!”
      “AHHAHAHAHAHAAHA! ERNESSST, JUST FUCKIN' WITH YOU!”
      “Grnt Grnt SquuuEEEAAL...”
      His face contorted, forehead wrinkles turned into everything wrinkles, and he rocked on his feet. No, no, no.
      Something was changing, and he was so lost in his pain and his narrow focus that he almost missed it. Feet that had previously been passing by with no goal but disappearing onto a bus had started to move with a different purpose. When he finally noticed, they had him surrounded. Legs passing by on all sides suddenly reoriented, pointing squarely at Ernest. As they moved in near unison, their shoes made a noise like a single parade step. He stopped rocking, his wrinkles disappeared, and his eyes widened. A chant rose up.
      “ERNEST! ERNEST! ERNEST!”
      Then it broke out into the usual chaotic jeers, only louder and louder as they started dropping to their knees and crawling under the bus. The buses began to start their engines, but the things kept coming at him, indifferent to the schedules and desires of their human hosts. Each had the face of that dead pig head, bloodless nicks and scars, slightly distorted eyes, lolling white tongues.
      They grabbed at him. He thrashed out of the way. He knew if they touched him he would just die. Then they caught him in their sweaty grips, and he didn't die. That would have been too easy, he managed to snark at himself in a random lucid thought that escaped the constriction of shock.
      He twisted in place, kicking and flailing and kicking again. His kicking legs found purchase on the head and shoulders of one of his attackers, and he thrust himself halfway free of the crowd. The nearest monsters clutched at his legs, but he was in a better position to break free, and their awkward assault less effective. He ran in a crouch between the buses, under his own bus, then flattened to fit between the curb and its bottom, and rolled onto the sidewalk. Pig people lurched toward him from several to a dozen feet away in every direction. He threw himself up to his feet, staggered along the rumbling bus, slapping its side to steady, and ran up the stairs in a moment.
      The bus driver was about to close the doors when someone forced their way in and started stalking the aisle. She glared, closed the door in someone else's face, and shifted gears. The machine started to move.
      Ernest flopped into a seat, sinking as far as possible below the level of the window without falling on the floor. As far as he could tell, there wasn't a single other passenger on the bus when he went to sit, though he was aware at least one more person had come on behind him. He tried not to look out the window, but in his peripheral vision he could see pig heads hopping into view, arms reaching like those hopping shirtless dudes from the video for “Boys of Summer.” Thanks VH1. There were grunts and howls dulled by the intermediary of the thick window glass, but one mocking voice rang clear. The other passenger.
      “ERNEST, HELLO! HELLO, Mr. NEWMAN!”
      The monster came into view, one hand slapping against a nearby seat, another, then it hauled its body into view – some lovely young lady no doubt, clean colorful clothes, skinny brown wrists and fancy fingernails. A nasty dead pig head came into view, jerking and twitching on her shoulders. It stared straight at Ernest and began to reach for him.
      “What are WE going to DO with you, ErNEST?! HAHHHAHAHAHA!”
      The slender hands were nearly on his skin, and he rolled onto his back, shielding himself with both feet, tapping away its purloined fingers with light kicks.
      “NO! Get OFF me!”
      The bus driver's voice joined the chaos and the bus seemed to slow. “DON'T MAKE ME STOP THIS BUS, BRATS! SIT DOWN!”
      The pig straightened up to its full height, leaning against the seats across the aisle from him, glanced to the bus driver, back to Ernest, and then sat down. Its legs were still in the aisle and it was too close to move past without being molested. Ernest bunched up in his chair miserably as the bus picked up speed again and entered the city streets. The head sloshed around lolling its tongue out and laughing.
      “mUAARHAHAHAHAHAHAaaaaaAAAAH!”
      I know, Ernest thought. It's just hysterical!

      Ernest and his nemesis faced each other, it on the edge of its seat and him at the back of his. His body was awkwardly wedged into the corner, both legs up and ready to defend, and bracing him in place. The bus drove faster than usual – perhaps traffic was lighter because of people missing work due to a flu epidemic. How many millions of people live in this city? The pig thing laughed and cajoled without cease. The jabber hardly made sense anymore. The words all sounded wrong. Ernest knew it would wait until his stop, and follow him off the bus. The closer he got to home, the more annoyed he became with that prospect.
      "Hey pig! SHUT UP for a second." The bus driver side-eyed him in the aisle-view mirror, but did nothing. The pig quieted for a moment, with an opportunity for a real exchange before it again.
      "Talk to me, Mr. Newman. Let's rap."
      "Let the girl go home. She's sick and she should be allowed to go. I'm the only guy that's supposed to be suffering for this, right? Right?!"
      "But ERNESSST! I'm supposed to keep the peace. How am I supposed to do that if you don't work with me? I'm trying to do you a service."
      "Damn it. I guess we're going to have to see which of us can run faster. I hate you sooo much."
      "It's not my job to be liked, it's my job to protect people from themselves. You need to avoid the path of violence, Ernest. I want to help you. I'm just tryin' to be f--"
      "JUST--" He caught the words in his throat for a moment and turned down the volume to reduce the bad impression he was making on the bus driver. "--Just, go back to yelling and laughing at me already. I'm tired of your bullpucky, you damn jerks."
      It made a hurt expression for a moment, sucking the nasty tongue back into its mouth and arching its browflesh in the middle. "Mm... OK, chief. muuaAARGGH HAAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! HELL YES YOU'RE IN MY WORLD NOW, MR. NEWMAN! WELCOME TO HELL! HHAHAHA AAAAAAAARRRGGGGH!"
      Ernest's body shifted subtly. He was preparing for action, but he hoped the thing would be surprised by it when it came. As the bus changed lanes on 325th near Nelson, he jumped out of the seat and ran toward the front of the bus, banging his knees along the way on chairs, as the bus rocked on its crappy shocks. The pig was indeed surprised, and hustled into the aisle behind him.
      The bus driver was livid. Fools were walking while the vehicle was in motion in clear defiance of the statutes, the law, the bus rules, and common sense. Brats! She said so.
      "BRATS! WHAT THE HELL?!"
      Ernest didn't have time to consider it. He hopped into the seat behind hers, and braced himself for assault with a deadly manicure. The pig-ridden body took up the seat directly across the aisle again, putting it in full view of the bus driver. The body went stiff, holding itself in place, and the head bobbled around, recovering from the sudden action. It chuckled and settled into staring at Ernest again.
      "YOU THINK YOU CAN GET AWAY? YOUr life is OVER! HAHAHAHA!!"
      "You brats think you can just run the hell all over my bus like that, I swear to Lord Jesus that I'm allowed to drop you off on the side of the road with all the hobos and cocksuckers and make you walk five hundred blocks through that shit, and I'm gonna do it! I'm gonna do it!"
      "She's a pepper," the pig said, "hahaHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!"
      Ernest didn't say anything. Perfect positioning, crackerjack timing. He'd need it all to get past the pig. There was no element of surprise this time. Both he and the monster must know exactly what he was planning. With the seat behind the driver, he didn't have to change direction to get out the bus door, affording him a bit more speed than the pig would be able to manage. Of course, it was in a prime position to reach out and grab him, but he'd have to take the chance.
      325th and Hortense. 325th and Myrtle. 325th and Brainerd. 325th and Southwick. 325th and Stevens. 325th and Dog Park. 325th and Sycamore. 325th and Wilds. 325th and Blake. She reached for the lever. The opponents tensed. She pulled the lever. Hydraulics hissed--
      Ernest shot out of his seat like a bullet. The pig-girl did the same, only coming out far enough to get an arm around his waist. He was snagged, and his forward momentum diverted enough to send his legs off the floor. One of his shoes cracked the driver across the cheek, the other slipped across the windshield, he did a complete and accidental cartwheel out of the monster's feeble grasp and nearly tore his face off on the stairs. His hands caught the rails at the last second, and he jerked forward, falling out of the bus and into the sidewalk. The bus driver was screaming and the thing was hot on his tail. He scrambled along the sidewalk, still totally off balance, but gaining.
      People. Sickness. It couldn't be seen but it was there. The sidewalk was laced with sparse crowds of people outside bars and restaurants, totally heedless of the scrawny youth barreling toward them with a demon swine in pursuit on skinny young lady legs. He couldn't count on them to get out of the way or do anything other than fuck up his path by making the wrong last-second decisions about which way to go, so he tried running along outside six inches of sidewalk past the utility and light poles, risking falling into the street at any moment. He didn't dare look back yet.
      He hopped over a homeless dude's dog, eliciting a bark and a snap of the jaws. He didn't stop. Not yet. He could hear more than one voice behind him calling his name. Two? Three? How many millions of lived in the city?

      Ernest ran a slightly circuitous route home – to the extent he felt capable of running it, only one block out of the way – never looking back. He didn't stop to look back until he was waiting for the elevator in his apartments, spinning around and flattening against the wall. How many times was he going to pull that move today?
      He stared at the door, sixty feet away. Shadows darkened it, faded again, and darkened it again. The elevator hummed and whined slowly behind him. More shadows. Someone came into the hall, a figure in silhouette...
      With a human head. He exhaled, choked, and inhaled sharply again. The elevator doors started to open. Someone else started to come through the front door and he practically jumped into the elevator. He hid inside until the door closed, hammering on the "door close" button, as if that ever did anything.

      Finally, Ernest was home. He walked through the door like a man made of wood and string, fumbling with the lock slowly. He was no longer in a panic, but he was making sure nothing was getting in the door without a key.
      He turned and looked at the dark room. There were no windows in the living room – only in adjacent rooms – and the light they cast was feeble and yellow through the closed blinds. He reached for the light switch, half expecting its illuminance to reveal a row of babbling pig heads. But no.
      He would be alone until his mother got home from work at the call center. He'd be taking two showers tonight. One to get the chase off of him, the grip of the infected, and to relax. Next he'd feed himself, probably working up a bit of sweat in the kitchen, read until mom got home, eat dinner, take another shower, and go to his room for the night. That is what he would do.
      The shower went according to plan and Ernest put his dirty clothes in the bottom of a hamper, washing his hands again afterward. He went into the living room, set the mp3 player on a Cab Calloway list with the volume low, pulled out The Plague, and flopped on the couch...

      In long ago 194-, Dr. Ernest worked his trade in the large Algerian city of Oran. He divided his time between work at his private office and regular house visits for invalid clients. One terrible spring, rats began to emerge into the streets and die, spraying blood from the nose and mouth. Like everyone else, he initially shrugged this off as a mere nuisance.
      The rodent dead reached troubling numbers, upsetting many, but still not provoking a more serious response from the community. During this time, Dr. Ernest became acquainted an eccentric traveler to the city named M. Parker and a reporter from France named M. Sherrard – who was working on a report about sanitary conditions in the Arab quarter.
      Dr. Ernest was distracted from the rodent issue by thoughts of his wife Tammy, who had been suffering from a long illness and left to recuperate at a sanitarium. His mother Veritay came to help tend the house while she was away.
      Then, as quickly as it began, the wave of dead rats ended. Perhaps the city had run out of the things. The same day, Dr. Ernest noticed the concierge of his building – M. Hepler – looking very ill, walking home with the help of the priest Father Swinehead. He spoke with them and promised to visit Hepler that night.
      Meanwhile, he answered a call from a patient – the city clerk M. Scott. His neighbor, secret gangsta Pharaoh, had attempted to hang himself. Dr. Ernest checked him out and found him to be suffering from depression related to fear of the 5-0 busting his shit out. But Pharaoh promised to cool it, and the doctor jetted.
      When he finally got around to helping M. Hepler, the guy was an inch from death, with giant swollen glands, discoloration, and fever. He didn't make it to the hospital. What now, Dr. Ernest?
      Over the next days, the deaths started to rack up. Dr. Ernest palavered with his mentor Dr. Spurling, and they tried to get the authorities to take the threat of the illness seriously. They even went so far as to consider the possibility that shit was The Black Plague, come back from the grave to seek vengeance upon the living. Still, it all seemed so unreal that they couldn't quite deal. M. Scott the clerk was assigned to tally the dead and usually went on the rounds with his new best friend Pharaoh. He reported back to Dr. Ernest and the authorities.
      When the death count spiked, the authorities finally quarantined the town. Shit just got real. Still, it was hard for anyone to take this seriously. The Black Plague? Wasn't that dead and gone? How could this happen in a modern town? But it totally did.
      The quarantine had a more immediate effect on the city's residents than fear of the disease. People were mad sad. Travelers like the reporter M. Sherrard and residents like Dr. Ernest were all bent out of shape about their respective Almas and Tammies.
      Sherrard was the worst, ultimately resorting to sheisty connections to try to escape the quarantine. He would do anything for love, including that. When Dr. Ernest refused to help, Sherrard went off. The doctor mused to himself that the situation was absurd and there was nothing for it but courage. That, and the ability to shut off pity and do your job like a big boy.
      On a crappy Sunday, Father Swinehead decided it was time to cash in on the apocalypse and called a special get-together to bark and gabble and annoy people into giving alms. The Angel of Death is at hand! And stuff!
      Summer heated up and the bubonic plague did its deal. Guards used pistols to dissuade people from escaping quarantine. Groans of torment came from random houses, and sometimes a victim would go for a final stroll, dumping blood and nastiness on the streets. Death tolls were announced daily on the radio. Through this all, people couldn't help avoid the feeling an omniscient narrator was self righteously using their suffering to illustrate a vague point about living life to the fullest, like the director of the Saw franchise.
      The plague serum they ordered from an ad on the back of a cereal box turned out to have been a bad idea. Dr. Spurling had to cook up something better. At work, Dr. Ernest was up to his hip waders in pus-spewing plagueheads, but his mind was on Tammy. She seemed to have been purposefully vague in details about her own health. Would he ever see her again? The plague mutated and went airborne, making everything seem hopeless.
      Somewhere in all of that chaos, M. Scott the clerk kept counting by day and working on writing the Great Algerian Novel at night. He often thought about the wife who left him a hojillion years ago, and the letter he would write her, if he only had a brain.
      M. Parker was too eccentric for his own good and volunteered to gather up a bunch of loonies to go help with the plagueheads. Dr. Ernest was down with it, but the conversation provoked a lot of soulful man-staring, big words, and making out - with tongues. Why fight a battle you know you cannot win? Why struggle against the inevitable? Because the universe doesn't make sense and all humans have is each other and their compassion? Or because how did my pants get unzipped?
      Meanwhile, rascally M. Sherrard was out to get his Alma at any cost. He hooked up with sheisty gangster Pharaoh and the soup was on... And by soup, we mean spending too much money on bribes to unreliable Spaniards – ooh, those damn Spaniards! – and waiting all day in expensive saloons.
      Somehow, Sherrard and Pharaoh ended up in tense conversations with Dr. Ernest and Parker, but there was no man-on-man action those times. Mostly, Parker was judgmental and Pharaoh and Sherrard told him to get bent. It was strange, but Pharaoh – who had been suicidal at the start of things – had come to enjoy the plague. It meant the po-po were too busy to bust him, as well as opening up money-making opportunities for an original gangster.
      Sherrard said he was done with heroics after fighting with the losing side in Spain, and blah blah Alma blah. Parker guilted him into joining the volunteers by telling him about Dr. Ernest's lady outside quarantine. Sherrard said he'd join, but only until the escape plan went through, thus increasing the odds he'd be smuggling the disease out as well as his person. Somehow, M. Parker and Dr. Ernest were cool with that.
      Shit got bad and stayed bad. Crematoriums were smoking 'em because they had 'em. Mass graves were gravy. And the omniscient narrator eased his cold judgment of the victims here, as they came together in the darkness to embrace the truth – all men are created equally doomed.
      M. Parker attended the worst performance of Orpheus and Eurydice since the last one where the male lead died of the Black Plague. The embarrassingly obvious metaphor laid heavy upon his heart. In an unrelated development, M. Sherrard finally got a chance to leave, but felt too guilty to do so, and kept shoveling plagueheads for the man,
      Pharaoh's enjoyment of the plague wore thin, as his paranoia of police informants increased. Too many people knew his gangster-styled secrets. That mirrored the general population's paranoia that homies could be secret plagueheads, but had a harder edge, because Pharaoh was some manner of human-shaped penis.
      Dr. Spurling finally perfected the hot local serum, but would it be in time to save the magistrate's son? No. The baby died screaming because god wasn't real. Father Swinehead caught grief from Dr. Ernest, who was generally through being cool. Then father Swinehead got sick of something other than the plague and died, because maybe god did exist. The jury was still out.
      FINALLY, the death count started to fall. Dr. Spurling's hot local serum was the bomb. People hesitated to show hope, what with all the heavy crap that they'd been through. Indeed, the magistrate got aced by the plague within days of the big announcement.
      The gates were to be opened in a few weeks! Pharaoh foresaw the possibility the cops would return to his case and flipped out. Indeed, he was being followed by men in black.
      M. Parker got the plague! Dr. Ernest and his mom Veritay looked after the sick boy, to no avail. As he died, he said his name was Horace, and he regretted that everyone was only referred to by their surname these days. Dr. Ernest kissed him full on the mouth and had some explaining to do to his mom.
      He didn't end up dying of the plague, but his wife did die from whatever it was she had. Rest in Peace, Tammy. Things went better for M. Sherrard, but he wasn't feelin' it like he used to. It was hard to be horny on your honey when you saw geysers of blood and pus every time you closed your eyes.
      The cops caught up to Pharaoh and he locked himself in his hotel room, firing shots into the street at random. Somehow, no one was hurt. He had to go up the river for a while, and everyone in Oran was ready to call it a day. M. Scott got plaguish, got better, and totally finished that letter to his estranged wife!
      In the end, what did it all mean? Dr. Ernest decided people were basically cool, but still ignorant and doomed inhabitants of an absurd and indifferent cosmos. Also, the only mention of black folks in The Plague was that some guys strolled through the “Negro district,” and apparently didn't see anybody. Ain't that some shit?

      Ernest lounged on the couch, half dozing, too exhausted to do anything. The dim yellow light of the day was no longer powerful enough to illuminate beyond the window frame, and one artificial light did little more than wash out everything in the room to a drab uniform grey.
      There was a click at the door – a key going into a lock. He looked at the time on the outdated media player under the television. 7:52, Veritay was home at about the usual time. He shifted his tired bones to the tweed chair, leaving the puffy velour couch to its rightful inhabitant. She came in, looking exhausted. The commute was certainly draining. Ernest waved.
      “Mom.”
      “Ernes'.”
      She dropped her bags and disappeared into the bathroom. As he sat in the chair, Ernest heard her sneeze, and he jumped a little. The call center, the bus, the plague... Maybe if he retired to his room before the symptoms manifested, the pigs wouldn't notice him... It was possible she was just having the usual allergies and smoker's lung, but he was completely on edge again.

[Thy Dungyeon Maestyr]

((Last post modified, all text from green paragraph on was added.))

CHAPTER NINE: THE STRANGER

      Ernest volunteered to make dinner for his mom, said she looked ill. She assented gladly and it was a macaroni & cheese and green beans kind of night. Over dinner, she made at least one cough that sounded suspiciously like “ERN,” while her eyes watered and her temples flushed from fever. He quickly excused himself and absconded to his room for the night.
      In his room, he pushed a dresser drawer up against the door, sat on the bed, and rocked himself a bit to try to calm down. Get it together, guy! Sheesh. After a little while, he was finally able to get up the nerve to go visit the worldwide web.
      He was more curious about how things were going in the fantasy game, as he'd broken the spirit and pace of things there with his comment, and such transgressions were typically dealt with brutally. To his shock, he had a private message from the GM.

      Thy Dungyeon Maestyr
      Reply 1064 – Yesterday – at 10:02 PM
      That post was amazing Imparious. I relly want people to role-play and for events tp be character-driven but we don't usully have time for that. Good job! I'm giving you 500 bonus experience points!
      ________________________________
        There are no stupid questions - only stupid palyers.

      Well, Ernest thought, that was sweet. He hit Reply.

      Imparious the Demi-Goblin Knave – 7th level
      Reply 1064 – Today – at 9:10 PM
      That's really good to hear. I wrote that because I felt guilty about not being able to do more stuff right now. Things are kind of crazy AFK, ATM. I want to be able to keep playing, but if we can take Imparious out of the action for a few days, that would be real good for me. I'm sorry, and thank you so much for not killing me!
      ________________________________
        (no signature)

      He checked in with the vampires again, and everything they did just bored and depressed him tonight. He ended up following random links on wikipedia for a time, before going to bed. Sleep generously took him in and he ceased to be for a little while.
      Then it came. Ernest abruptly started dreaming about giants made out of thick bloodless meat tap-dancing on a wooden stage that was threatening to break under the strain. Then he became aware he was dreaming, then he became awake – and the sound stayed real. His door shook, beating against the dresser drawer. A muffled voice could be heard over the din, from the other side of the blockaded portal.
      “ERRR-NEST! ERRR-NEST! WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO
WITH YOU, MR. NEWMANnnn? HaHAHAHAHAHA!”
      No, god damn it! He buried his head in his pillow and came face to face with his fears. If someone goes to the pigs, is it forever? Will the plague hurt people just to hurt me? Is my mom gonna die? What about that poor skinny girl on the bus? Is she wandering around the neighborhood hunting for me, all night in the cold with a fever, all because of this?!
      He thought, No, there was no reason to believe that it would last any longer than the disease. Also, it was still possible he was having some elaborate breakdown and all of this was in his imagination. Indeed, based on everything he'd ever experienced in life, he was quite convinced the supernatural and spiritual were wholly human inventions, and the mental breakdown would necessarily be the only explanation for this.
      Still, he didn't relish the idea of letting his delusions get the better of him. He pondered his fate, as his mom's disease ridden body beat itself up in the hall, babbling and laughing. If he stayed, he would eventually hallucinate that a dead pig's head atop his mother's sick body had broken through his door, and was molesting his person in some as-yet unimagined way. Gross.
      Ernest shoved the drawer closer to the door again, dressed quickly, and packed his bag for a night out. He checked himself out in the mirror. Slim-fit midnight blue cords, maroon running shoes and hoody over lemon yellow socks and t-shirt, his yellow and black plaid flatcap, slightly messy hair puffing at the sides, brown leather messenger bag over his shoulder. Ready for action.
      There was no way to predict what his delusion mother would do when she came gabbling and snarling through the door, but he hoped to partially immobilize her. If he did it too tight, she'd be trapped all night, while sick and messed up. Not good for the health. If he did it too loose, she'd be on him too quickly. Ideally, she would be trapped just long enough for him to get completely out of the building, making it pointless to chase him into the night.
      He took his bag off to make fighting easier, and pulled the drawer back into his room. She opened the door. The head on her shoulders spun like a top, looking grey and ghostly in silhouette before the hall's light. It didn't belong there, and certainly not in this world. Her hands went up in claw-like pose, and she charged.
      “ERNEST! AHAHAHA!!!”
      He waited until the last moment, ducked under her grip, and used her momentum to lift her off the ground. She wasn't heavy, but he was far from strong. She bounced off the top of the bed and landed in the corner.
      He did some quick estimations of how different scenarios might play out, and decided to fall back. She was already getting to her feet. He picked up his bag and ran into the living room.
      The couch was large, puffy, and soft, but also very lightweight – made of some kind of cheap wood from a tragically defiled region of Indonesia. He dropped his bag again, hoisted the thing up against the wall, and turned to face the enemy again.
      As she came into the living room, she slowed for a pace.
      “What are you planning to do with THAT, ErNEST? There goes that attitude again!”
      It stalked toward him, head bobbling like it was on a wire, tongue flopping to the side, dull yellow teeth glinting in the cool blue compact fluorescent of a solitary lamp. Then it charged.
      He wanted to just use his very slightly longer reach to throw her on the floor, but it didn't work. She was tangled up with him, and they moved around the floor like a spasmodic tango to a punk rock beat. He couldn't help but focus his efforts on keeping the head away from him. Every time it swung close, it would lick him. He was barely able to keep his nausea down.
      Then he remembered his goal and did something about it. He wrestled her into position, tripped up her legs, and threw her on the floor more brutally than he'd ever intended. He rocked on his heels in momentary imbalance, then went for the couch.
      A moment later, she was struggling to get out from under it, and he was out the door and down the hall, his messenger bag flapping behind him.

      The bus stop had a shelter, which would have made it a draw for the homeless, if not for unchecked police brutality in the city. Ernest wedged himself deeply into the corner of it, doing his best to overcome his fear of germs and get invisible. The shadows of the streetlamps helped. He wouldn't feel right until he got on the bus. Even then, he wouldn't feel great, but at least the terror would die down to a dull roar. Fear had become a sort of eternal static in his mind lately, like the endless noise of ocean waves.
      He felt his eyes close, let them stay that way for just a few seconds, and was looking around again. Another few minutes passed, and he repeated the move. He kept letting his eyes close for increasing lengths of time at decreasing intervals, until he was half-asleep on his feet.
      A car rolled past, stirring him to full attention. As it went by, he suddenly became aware of a person on the other side of the street. They crossed the empty street, jogging up to the stop.
      Just as they crossed the curb, they noticed Ernest and stopped on the sidewalk. Ernest noticed as well: He knew this jerk. The white kid's face was pinched and freckled. It looked like god had put a finger between his eyes and pushed it in, like a pug dog – or, more generously – like George Michaels. It was Jimmy.
      Ernest immediately took one step forward and stopped, arms at the ready. His lips shrank up and he shook his head slowly. No you don't.
      Jimmy put his hands out and low, palms down, in an effort to make peace. He was younger than Ernest and much shorter, but normally the menace in this relationship flowed the other direction. He said, “Ernest? Oh, man, just, be cool for a minute, OK? Shit.”
      Ernest kept shaking his head. “Are you kidding me?”
      “No! Listen, Ernest, I need a favor, an' I know you got every right to say no, an' I know I would, but god, I really need it! I'm desperate an' don't have any choice, I gotta ask!”
      “No.”
      “I need the gun back. You said you were gonna throw it away, right? Didja? It... I borrowed it from somebody and I need to give it back, real bad.”
      Ernest considered this with no small amount of amusement. If he was smart, he'd pretend he still had the gun in his bag, to preserve whatever air of menace he had at the moment. But he was out of control. He just laughed and laughed.
      “Hohohoho, oh, jeez, oh man...”
      “Come on! I mean, I'm sorry! Just, where is it?”
      “Some dude named, hahaha, T Scroggs took it from me. Haha!”
      “What? Jesus CHRIST! Are you fucking ki-- GodDAMNit! I'm so fucked man, I'm so fucked...” Jimmy began to pace in clumsy circles, obviously weak at the knees.
      Ernest wiped a bit of saliva from the corner of his mouth with his sleeve, and calmed the uncontrolled mirth. “Hmmm, oh... OK. Well, just go to Taft High School and start asking around. The jerk has first lunch, if that helps. Hehehe...”
      Jimmy no longer wanted to catch the bus. It was his turn to shake his head. He turned slowly, looking devastated. As he walked away, his body language alternated between desolate grief and cosmic rage. He shook his fists at the heavens one step, nearly collapsed the next, kicked a telephone pole a few feet after that. In this way, he eventually left Ernest's sight.
      As the bus appeared in the great distance – a tiny speck of a disturbance edging slowly along the bank of amber streetlamps. He suddenly became aware of how visible he was, and shrank back into his preferred shadow until the bus drew closer.
      At last, he was riding. He took out The Stranger – a much slimmer volume than The Plague. He got into it.

      Monsieur Ernest lived in Algiers, working as a clerk, dating a nice lady, and swimming or taking in the sights in his spare time. His mother Veritay died, her life ending in a retirement home in Marengo. He took some time off work and made the trip from Algiers on bus. It was slow, hot, and unpleasant.
      At the retirement home, there was a separate area for funerary proceedings, and he was shown there to keep a vigil over her body. In Paris, this sort of thing could last some days, but in Algeria, it had to be quick to beat the stench of decay. It was customary for the casket to be open, to give help people accept the death and properly mourn. At the last moment, he decided not to view the body, and the casket remained closed.
      Otherwise, the vigil proceeded normally. When it came time to put the body in the ground, the trip to the cemetery was very long, hot, and terrible. All told, he was well relieved to be back on his way to a glittering modern city full of youths.
      Back home, he walked, and smoked, and was generally blank. He was slightly sad, of course, but he also couldn't be bothered to wallow in lament. He even went swimming with sexy young Tammy, and everybody was tan and having fun, like a more sparsely populated beer commercial.
      At some point within the next few days, he made friends with violent misogynist Pharaoh. That guy randomly invited him into his home to ask a favor related to his agenda of violent misogyny, and Ernest couldn't decline a new friend. He drank wine and had an ominous headache, because foreshadowing.
      He also had a few other meaningless conversations. His hateful neighbor had lost his ugly dog, and M. Ernest suggested calling the pound. Tammy asked him if he loved her, and he said he thought love was meaningless, but whatever!
      Pharaoh made good on his violent misogynist plan, beating up an Arab girlfriend until someone summoned the gendarmerie. No arrests were made, but the lady got out alive. M. Ernest noted that he hated the police more than he hated Pharaoh. Tammy shrugged it off.
      Soon after, it became apparent the girlfriend's brother had a grudge, and might do violence to Pharaoh. That he would have to deal with in his own way, but for the police, he enlisted the aid of M. Ernest as a character witness. Ernest lied to the police that he had witnessed the Arab lady cheating on Pharaoh, which apparently totally exonerates you – or maybe just when you're a member of a colonizing race in a stolen foreign land and you committed violence against a woman of the indigenous race. No biggy.
      Pharaoh invited M. Ernest and Tammy to go to his friend Scott's beach house on the outskirts of town. He was down with it. They got on a bus that way. However, they noticed the ex-girlfriend's brother and some other (othered) Arabs standing near the bus stop. Suspicious!
      Pharaoh's friend Scott was cool. Everyone had fun in the sun. After lunch, Tammy took a nap in the house with Scott's wife Kissy. The dudes went for a stroll on the beach.
      Oh, snap! They ran into two Arab dudes. One was the brother, armed with a shiny dagger. They were dressed like the lead singer of Dexy's Midnight Runners in the video to “Come on Eileen.” There was a rumble and Pharaoh got cut up a little, but ultimately the natives were chased away due to superior numbers.
      Back at the house, Pharaoh was totally pissed off and embarrassed. The ladies were flippin' and trippin'. He went for an angry stroll. M. Ernest followed.
      They ran into the Midnight Runners again. Pharaoh pulled a gun and M. Ernest felt the need to talk him out of foolery. Somehow, it all ended with the Arabs running off, the colonists heading back to the beach house, and the gun in M. Ernest's pocket.
      At the beach house, the women were still crying and M. Ernest had a headache and just, like, fuck everything. He went for an angry walk in the angriest sun, reminding him of that day in Marengo.
      Unfortunately, he met the brother again, this time alone – one on one – with M. Ernest in a shitty mood. He totally killed that guy for no reason. Shot him five times, like he was a black guy in NYC reaching for his wallet or something.
      So he was arrested and run through an elaborate trial. It would have been a simple case and he would have been acquitted, because obviously colonist don't give half a fuck about natives. However, his demeanor during police questioning and subsequently at trial had revealed a disturbing lack of conscience. M. Ernest just couldn't be bothered to gnash his teeth about anything.
      His supreme lack of give-a-shit provoked a deep disturbance in the community. This was not the way people were supposed to behave. The prosecution brought in his friends, neighbors, and acquaintances as character witnesses, painting the portrait of a man disconnected from humanity – a man who could only be a remorseless killer. People who had seen him at the retirement home in Marengo attested he would not look at his mother, smoked cigarettes, and never cried at the funeral. Tammy attested that he didn't believe in love. Through it all, he just sat there passively, looking to all like an unrepentant, heartless fiend.
      He was sentenced to death by beheading. Wow, they still do that these days? In his cell, a priest really put him through the ringer, until he suddenly felt compelled to go on a big atheist tirade against the intellectually simple chaplain. The cleric was chased away, and M. Ernest was left to sort it out.
      For the first time since it all began, he felt OK. The atheist tirade may have just sealed in the priest's mind the association between atheism and nihilistic privileged racist killers, but for M. Ernest it was enlightening. He had spelled out his feelings on everything, things he didn't even quite know about himself.
      Life was meaningless, yes, but it was his – for now. He was, as a condemned man, one with the meaninglessness of the cosmos, aware of what his life was worth and ready to live the rest of it in peace. ABSURDISM FOREVARRRRRRRR!

      The bus reached the Benson Heights Project and he stumbled off to the cold curb. While riding the bus, his overworked body had stiffened in every sinew, and he had to take a moment to stretch slowly. If he did it too quickly, he'd pull a muscle. The night air had acquired a hint of mist. It tasted like wet dirt and pollution, but was otherwise strangely refreshing. He turned toward the building and – seeing no pigheads – he walked inside.
      The hall was black and he used his cellphone to light the way. It only revealed the faintest outline, but he remembered the way well. Darting cockroaches only made him flinch a few times before they became meaningless, their dark flashing movement like shimmer on the surface of an inverted river. He entered the stairwell.
      As he ascended the stairs, he smelled the garbage, the shit, the spilled liquor, the used up reefer butts, a thousand lived lived in spite of hopelessness. The stairwell was blue-black, splashed with streaks of orange grey from the mixed and diffused light of the city outside. His hand on the bannister sent cockroaches streaking through the wet darkness in a near-mindless emulation of terror.
      At the second floor landing, he was given pause. Somewhere beyond the door to the second floor, a pig grunted and squealed to itself. They were here.


      Two days ago...

      Ernest didn't like mornings, but they weren't terribly difficult either. In a way, they were invigorating, because they involved sensations one would not feel throughout the rest of the day – walking through cool dark places, feeling the morning mist beading in your hair, feeling your body awaken as you throw it through a series of hurdles. Rise. Freshen up (he usually only showered at night). Dress. Take phone off charger, pack bag, hat on head, walk. Through the building. Through the neighborhood.
      The neighborhood was the first and worst place for something to go wrong (followed by the bus, then the walk to class). It was more time in an unsupervised open space, where the wilder denizens of the world could nip at one's heels. A child – certainly a junior high dropout, slightly shorter than Ernest – had been harassing him for a few years. It was embarrassing, but at least it didn't happen every day and it always ended by the time he reached the bus stop. It was like the child feared running into truancy officers there, or just imagined he would be dragged onto a bus and thrust into a world he feared and rejected.
      Ernest's shoes clacked on the sidewalk, covering most other noises at that hour, so he looked around compulsively as he walked. An unusually loud crack sounded out and he wheeled his head to look at it, losing his balance and falling to his knees. He did see the source of the noise – a small chunk of brick that had been tossed from somewhere unseen, landing about fifteen feet away in the street.
      That's when the kick came. It hit him in the back of the head, sending sparks through his field of vision, knocking him almost out into the road. The assailant tried to pin his neck under a sneakered foot, but he slipped out from under it easily enough, forcing himself upright and back onto the sidewalk. He glared at the child.
      “What the hell, Jimmy? If you feel the need to assault people, try not to permanently cripple them. What do you think they'd do to you if you gave me brain damage?”
      The little freckled jerk just stood there laughing. “Hahahaha! I don't fuckin' care. Who's 'they', anyways? Ain't nobody here but you and me, faggot. I could fuckin' kill you. Hahahahaha!”
      Ernest's skin was hot where abraded by the assault, but also in his face. His eyes widened. “Get out of my way. I can't miss the bus.”
      “Make me, stupid faggot. Heeheehee. I gotta stay sharp, get my exercise. It's real out here, bitch man.”
      Ernest felt very strange. It hadn't ever quite happened like this. Aside from the particulars – surprise attacks, homophobic slurs, kicks, yes, but this feeling no. Maybe it had to do with being unusually tired, or more likely the head injury, but his mind was going through a strange rotation. First he was just shocked, then without losing that, his energy flagged severely. He slumped forward at the shoulders and wanted to fall asleep, but outrage carried him into another mental space.
      Even though it had only been a moment and there would be plenty of time to get to the bus if he let the bully have his way for a few minutes, he had lost his sense of time and felt powerfully like he was going to be late. Every second made him more furious.
      “I don't want to be tardy. Let me go, Jimmy!”
      The bully sensed that this victim might be starting to lose respect for him, and he was too fearful at heart to tolerate the prospect for even a moment. He had to prove to Ernest that he was dangerous, and in childish overreaction, went for the nuclear option.
      He started to pull out his gun.
      Ernest was shaking with rage and exploded with just one fast, totally unplanned movement, like a full body spasm. He bent forward at the waist and smashed the top of his head into the middle of Jimmy's face.
      As he reflexively righted himself, he could see Jimmy falling down, face obscured behind Ernest's flatcap, which was covering it. He saw the gun and lunged for it. Before Jimmy even hit the ground, Ernest had both hands on the deadly thing.
      He put a foot on Jimmy's chest for leverage and jerked the gun away from the juvenile delinquent. It bounced in Ernest's hands like a fish trying to flee a redneck, and then he had it.
      The cap fell off Jimmy's face, revealing discolored eyes, split skin, swelling, and flowing blood. He shook his head in disbelief and looked at Ernest like he had no idea what to do next. Ernest held the gun up, letting Jimmy feel like he could at least get to his feet without being blasted. Ernest stared at him through crooked glasses.
      He said, “I'm going to keep this gun for now. Later on, I'm going to throw it in the garbage. And I damn well am not going to be TARDY.” He opened his messenger bag and dropped the gun into it.
      Jimmy just shook his head and stared, otherwise unmoving.


      Presently...

      Ernest listened to the pig squeals in the darkness, his face warm and wracked with despair. He slumped and his glasses slid down his nose. He shuddered. There were pigs in this building. There were likely a lot of pigs in this building. But they didn't seem to sense him through the walls.
      He looked up again. It was just a noise. It was probably a delusion. It was probably going to kill him. He started walking again. At the next landing, he heard grunts, squeals, and a familiar bellicose laugh – all muffled by he didn't know how many interceding walls.
      He didn't belong here, but did he belong anywhere? No one knew he was there. He was completely alone. Even if someone was there, the idea that people could know each other, could really be together, it just seemed like a farce.
      And nothing in his recent travails had taught him anything about human evil. One of Camus's stand-ins in The Plague – Dr. Rieux – expressed the idea that people are only evil out of ignorance of what goodness is. Or something like that. But how often had he heard people bragging on being evil in full awareness of what good is meant to be? He could imagine Camus / Dr. Rieux would answer that to them bad is good and they're just using wack-ass vocabulary to evince their malformed understanding of the correct way to live. Ernest was not into that.
      And why was he thinking about evil in that moment? Someone tried to point a gun at him. He took the gun. Something bad happened. Someone else took the gun away. He could go to school tomorrow and find himself getting shot by T-Scroggs. Or the police, for that matter.
      Fucking pigs.


      Two days ago...

      Officer Sheridan drove slowly through the neighborhood with his camera off. He was feeling stop-and-frisky that morning, and didn't need records coming back to bite him on the ass. He rounded a corner onto a typical scene. Two youths squared off with each other, just staring, the tension of violence still in the air.
      What was unusual is that one of the two was dressed like a gentle little dandy, and clearly looked out of his comfort zone in dealing with the situation in which he was found. He didn't even notice Sheridan rolling to a stop, so intent was he on the face of his foe.
      Then he saw the face of the dandy's foe – a bloody mess. Good job, kid. As Sheridan got out of his car, the thuggish looking kid looked around in a panic before walking away in the worst impression of casual the cop had ever seen. He laughed out loud as the bully strolled away with “Keep on Truckin'”-styled strides. Then he turned back to the dandy, walking up in front of him.
      “Hello, there, fella. Did you hurt that little guy?”
      Ernest snapped out of it and looked up at the officer, his mind jettisoning all cargo and leaving him energetically blank. “Wh-What?”
      “The small fry. Did you do that to his face? You know that's a crime, right?”
      Ernest had never exchanged more than two words with a policeman, and that was in a school room with dozens of witnesses handy. His forehead bounced around and he began to sweat more, despite the cold. “Err... Oh, he didn't want to p-press charges, so... I should...”
      “Come over to my car, OK? I really must look after the public good...”
      “Yes, officer, I will do that, uh...” He walked to the cop car and assumed the position when Sheridan gestured for him to do so. “...but, isn't it, er, illegal for me to, um, miss school, and I --”
      He lost his words when a hand roughly moved over a place they shouldn't have. It had just been for a split second, but it emotionally felt like a kick in the gut. His eyes were wide, his arms totally weak, barely dangling in place from the roof of the car.
      Sheridan withdrew Ernest's wallet and flipped it open. “Newman, Ernest. Well, Ernest, we really need to have a discussion. I want to help you, son, I really do.”
      “... … no … time ...”
      “You probably go to Taft, right? I can give you a ride, OK?”
      The white man slapped Ernest lightly on the side and he turned around slowly, letting his arms fall in place. He accepted his wallet back and put it in his pocket, staring at the man's smirking eyes. The cop had a look he recognized from cruel people that enjoyed inflicting greater harm by putting victims at ease. That, at least, was surely not going to work. He went to pick up his messenger bag. It was heavier than he remembered.
      “Get in the back of my car, Mr. Newman. I'll take you to a good place to talk... It's on the way to the school, OK? Come on... There you go.” He lightly slammed the door behind Ernest and got into the front of the cruiser. Ernest was taken.


      Presently...

      The banister was too disgusting, tacky with slime and filth of god knows what origin. Ernest let it go and floated freely in the gloom, the time between each foot leaving the stairs and returning to them a moment of suspense and potential disaster. He didn't care, but couldn't make himself go any faster. Everywhere his cellphone lit as it waved around, cockroaches either spread like spilled grains of rice, or stopped to ponder their quite binary options in life.
      Through muffling doors and muffling doors, laughs and laughs and calls. But were they calling out “ERNEST” just because that's what they do, or because they sensed he was there? A few footsteps could be heard in halls, voices increasing or decreasing in volume with the opening and closing of doors.
      But it didn't sound like a porcine mob was coming for his blood. Yet.


      Two days ago...

      Officer Sheridan drove Ernest most of the way to school, stopping in a neighborhood with brick low-income housing and convenience stores with bars on the windows, everything locked up and dark still at the early hour. He pulled into an alley between two buildings, curiously with no windows on the lowest twenty-five feet of their height. Disused fire escapes hung in the deep darkness like hundreds of tetanus-infested swords of Damocles. A bit of amber streetlight filtered in the front end of the alley, but the back was an ancient, dark wooden wall.
      The policeman parked the car completely within the alley, turning off all except the dome light. He turned around to look at Ernest through the grate, smiling. “So you know what you did wrong, Ernest?”
      He sat still, sweat running down his neck. “Yes. I should not have hit the boy.”
      “Tsk tsk tsk, there's that attitude. What are we going to do with you, Ernest? Do you really deserve a second chance?”
      “... Yes? What are you talking about?”
      “Nothing much, kid. Just trying to be friendly, give you some friendly advice before sending you on your way. You do want to go on your way, right?”
      “I don't want to be tardy. You should let me go.”
      The cop laughed. “Ho ho, don't be silly. You probably wouldn't make it on time walking from here. I'll drive you, I'll drive you.”
      “Then drive.” Ernest looked at him incredulously. What is your problem, officer?
      “Ernest, I'm going to come back there and talk to you, OK?”
      “What? No. What?”
      Sheridan got out of the front seat, unlocked the back door, and scooted in beside Ernest. He put an arm over the back of the seat. “Ernest, I'm trying to give you a chance to get your life back on track, not go down the path of violence. I'm just trying to be friendly. You look like you could use some help. You don't want to lose your way.”
      “... What are you talking about?!” He was freaking out, holding his bag close.
      “That's no way to be friendly. I'm sure you can think of a way to be nice to a guy... A guy like you. Probably got lots of experience, being nice ... to guys.”
      Ernest stared with eyes wide, forehead furrowed like an alien from latter day Star Trek. He reached into the bag. Sheridan suspected he was about to get maced and abruptly grabbed Ernest's head.
      That's when the bang filled the alley, and his head flopped back then forward. It landed on Ernest's head with a thud, blood flowing out of it into the young man's hair. He shuddered and pushed the policeman's corpse back with his feet, making a sort of high pitched animal noise to himself the whole time – something between disgust and terror.
      No way out! Keys. Out the door. Ouch. Out to the street. This is no good.
      Ten minutes later, he was in a gas station restroom, trying to get clean – at least enough to not get arrested on sight. Pant legs covered in blood! Wait, only spattered, almost all below the knees... Shirt surprisingly clean, paper towels at the neck to keep it that way... Hair. What the hell was he going to do with his hair?
      He looked at the time on his cellphone.
      Twenty minutes later he was jogging through the doors of the school.


      Presently...

      The fifth floor hall was black as a cave, the orange grey light refusing to come through the windows and have anything to do with the place. Coming into the hall, he heard the pigs like a dull roar, their voices bleeding together into a blithering tumult, crashing on his ears from all sides. He was given pause yet again. He shivered.
      And he continued. Because to HELL with you, policeman, that's why. It occurred to him by now that it just didn't even seem possible that there were enough people on this floor with swine flu to really make that much noise. Some of it had to be coming from his imagination. And what if it wasn't? They could throw him out the window. Running was played out. He was done with it.
      The commotion lost some volume, almost imperceptibly. He walked with calm steps, cellphone light aimed squarely at the wall, until it came across the number.
      He knocked on the door of apartment 506. The pigs were suddenly silent.
      Ernest heard a voice within – a tired woman yelling for Horace to answer the door. Heavy footsteps drew near him. The door opened, and a monster stood before him. Horace's hair was huge, fro'd out almost to the ceiling. This was a charming monster, and Ernest laughed at him.
      “HORACE, do your shit and send that boy home! Don't make me get out of bed!”
      Horace made a sassy face in the direction of the hall, then turned back to Ernest. The light of the phone combined with the moonlight in the apartment to turn Horace's face bright cornflower blue. His Prussian blue lips curled up in an impish smile. “You trying to get sick, man? I got that swine shit.”
      Ernest took off his hat and kissed him passionately. “It doesn't matter.”

[Thy Dungyeon Maestyr]

EPILOGUE: SON ROCHER EST SA CHOSE
AKA: THE BLADE OF SHAINOBI

      Shantea looked at Theresa and Theresa looked at Shantea. Then they looked at Mr. Hepler, and the third of class that bothered to show up. If they started talking now, they wouldn't be able to hide their activity behind a wall of students. They would be seen.
      They couldn't resist. Life wasn't worth living if one had to constrain the tongue for even a second. They had to be true to their natures.
      Shantea said, “Mmmm-hm, look who all didn't bother to get out of bed today.”
      Theresa said, “Mmm-hm. What kinda losers are we? Shiiit.”
      “I mean, even Janelle Man-ae didn't come. That dude never misses.”
      “Mmm-hm. Dyamn.”
      Mr. Hepler let it slide. This syllabus was shot to hell anyway. Apparently, Mark Twain would have to take one for the team.
      The sunrise moved across the classroom like a laser beam on its way to a secret agent's genitals, igniting everything reflective into sparkling flares. Bell was sad. Nobody could possibly understand his important feelings about the latest news on the first round draft picks since Martin was out. He glanced over at the dude next to him. Devon. Could he understand? Oh. He's an artist.
      Devon had propped a 3 ring binder up to reduce the glare on the ruled notebook paper before him. It was a canvas now, to work out the depth of his passion – if he could just get it right. Bell could see that he had erased and worked over the portrait several times, a technique that created a soft blur to the shading and made the drawing come to life in a startling way.
      The young man put the end of his pencil in the corner of his mouth as he considered his latest revisions, and – liking what he saw – rendered a seal of approval in curling letters below the image.

            ALMA = SW33T

      It was a really impressive likeness, but Bell didn't bother to say anything. Clearly this was a man who would not understand the importance of sport. Like Alma's body, his mind hadn't come to school.

      Meanwhile in the school office, Kissy moved her bony bronze hands in and out of manila folders, skimming everyone's disciplinary and health records for juicy gossip.
      She let the file cabinet slide shut as someone came into the room. She didn't have to disguise a sense of shame because she knew that this little misdemeanor would be indistinguishable from actual work to most visitors.
      It was Claude. Slim, dark, and exotically beautiful, this Afro-Caribbean man would have been a school sex symbol – if he wasn't such a self-righteous ass. He was wearing sleeveless red t-shirt and folded his bare arms to contain his fury.
      “Claude, ya cutie, what brings you to my cellblock?”
      “It is about Taylor.”
      She dropped the sweetness. “Tsst, bo-ring! Don't you have anything better to do with your time?”
      “She is our friend, Kissy, and now she stays home all the time because of this shaming.”
      “She's prob'ly just sick, man.”
      He looked to the ceiling in a why God? gesture.
      “Just listen. You did this. If you are the one who should apologize, it will make her feel better. You should do this.”
      She shook her head without saying a word. Doesn't he under-stand? That was a once in a lifetime burn. You don't throw it away because someone had to go and be a baby about it.

      Second period food science, the pig's head sulked away as the world moved on around it. Kissy came into class in a huff, and seeing Elizabeth, hoped to improve her mood. She sat down near the pierced young lady, and rattled her ornate fingernails across the desk. Elizabeth took notice.
      “Kissy. Wassup girl?”
      “Hell, nothin'. I just wanna talk with somebody. Get outside my head, ya know?”
      “Sounds like something rilly is up, what are you sittin' on?”
      “No, no, f'rill, I'm cool. Just, like, school shit... Anyway, yesterday people was sweatin' you about Ginny. That over yet?”
      “Tch, why? You wanna admire your handiwork?”
      “It wasn't me, how many times do I have ta say it?”
      “Anyway, Ginny got over the swine shit and she's back, so now it's gonna be even worse for a while. Thanks.”
      Kissy shook her head, but her insides were aglow with this chaos. That joy could not be overshadowed by her annoyance that Elizabeth totally had her figured.
      Nearby, Shy Powell was too bored. He was letting Tyna stroke his ego, but barely returning anything to the conversation. There was nothing in her words of praise that meant anything to him. He needed to talk with a man. A man would understand the things on his mind.
      “It's really amazing you don't workout every day. I work out every day and I ain't built like that. Daaamn...”
      “*siiigh*”

      On the way to third period, Shy was finally hooked up with Robert and got to express proper manly feelings. They took their time getting up the stairs to Business Math.
      “Robert, you don't even know.”
      “I do, man, I do. I watched all those DMX and Michael Jai White joints. Kung fu is hella tight.”
      “See? You don't know. Kung fu is Chinese, ninjutsu is Japanese and waaay cooler.”
      Robert didn't know what to say. “I guess I really don't know.”
      “Just listen and learn, I-- What the fuck is up with T?”
      T Scroggs was smoking in the stairwell and laughing at his erstwhile sidekick the Bird. Little B was looking sad in the mouth, a recent slap still burning there.
      Sun coming through the high windows of the stairwell made it look as if the smoke started three feet above T's head. The bully noticed Shy's look and gave him a wild-eyed grin.
      Shy returned that with a blasé flick of the chin. “You ever comin' to practice again, dude? Not that you're any damn good, you're just big as fuck.”
      “Fuck off, nigga.”

      Business math. Robert noticed Ginny and missed a step. He quickly recovered and went to his chair. Shy hadn't been paying attention, but Ginny noticed and didn't care for it.
      She ran thin fingers over her round forehead into the long part of her high-top fade. Dudes were so obvious. Gross. She didn't like the idea of sitting with her back to him, where she could imagine his creepy eyes sliding up and down her long neck, but the back of the class was full up, so she didn't have a choice. She pulled her hoody half up, slouched in her chair, and hoped Mrs. Bronson wouldn't bust her chops about it.
      As Bronson was taking roll without looking up from her book, someone waved to her from a row away. It was Sinuon “Sim” Muoy, and she made the mistake of allowing the jerk a moment of her attention. Sim made scissors with her hands and rubbed the crooks of them together while making her penciled-in eyebrows dance like Groucho Marx.
      Fuck Elizabeth. The hell was I thinking?
      She gave Sim a less ornate hand gesture in return.
      “MISS WHITE, have you lost your mind?!”

      First lunch. T Scroggs didn't officially have this lunch, but no one was in a position to notice he took all three lunch periods every day except the 4th period teacher who had never seen him. He struck out across the pavement with a reckless strut. He was done taking shit today. It had finally crossed his mind that he might get busted for the gun or might not – and it would amount to the same thing.
      Besides, he was getting annoyed with the uncertainty of his hiding place. It was better to have it on hand, so he'd at least know when he was discovered. He reached the gap.
      The ancient brick of the school had been built in two stages without due consideration, and at the seam where the floor plan changed, there was a six inch gap in the bricks. It wasn't deep – maybe ten inches – but people had been filling it with crushed cans and napkins for decades.
      Amid the trash, there was a tool with the potential to instantly end a human existence. Then T retrieved it, and the trash assumed once more its less dangerous composition.
      Conversely, Scroggs became more dangerous – and in this moment he noticed that the Little Bird was noticing him. He finished concealing the piece and the little coward shook his head and ran off. The bully started after him, but only took a few steps before giving up.
      “BITCH NIGGAAAAA...”
      Sim, Kissy, Shantea, and Theresa came around the corner into the path of the lion's roar. They stumbled to a stop, looked at each other, giggled, and then kept on walking. Scroggs scowled at them, and then smiled.

      Third lunch, Elizabeth headed to her locker in a mostly empty hallway. She stopped with a sharp breath. Ginny was leaning beside it, and clearly in a foul mood.
      “Uh, shit.”
      “Yeah. You in some shit. What the fuck, Elizabeth?”
      “You think I want people talking shit about me too? It was fucking Robert. Think for a damn second.”
      Her lips contorted as she took the damn second. She looked away and looked back, her eyes wet and tiny with frustration. “Still. I shouldn't have... I shouldn't have trusted you.”
      Elizabeth looked around, and seeing only disinterested poindexters and random weirdos, risked the social contact that could forever paint her as a lesbian. She stepped up to Ginny and made eye contact, her arms folded demurely in front of her.       “Maybe you right. I mean, you can't tell who is into stuff or isn't, right? It's a risk.”
      Ginny's lips remained tight.
      “Maybe you can know. I don't know if it's the piercings or what, but I get attention from … ladies, y'know? I know who y'all are.”
      Ginny was shocked.
      “This is some kinda fucked-up trick, right? You're doing this shit with Sim and Kissy and all those --”
      “No, for real! Listen, I bet you don't have to say anything. Just... You know the girl with the wrap in sixth? Just be with her alone for a minute. The way you dress, she'll know. She'll tell you. Maybe you can be friends is all.”
      Ginny looked incredulous and walked away. Elizabeth tugged on her cheek piercing in annoyance and rolled her eyes.

      In the hall people came and went, the hours advanced, lockers opened and shut, the hall filled and emptied like a glass of water. Sweat beaded in hairlines, the sun began to blaze through the west window of the hall and back the student body.
      Fifth period let out. Shy and Robert were together again, and stopped at Robert's locker.
      “See, I don't get the connection, dog. First, you were all about ninjas, now it's, like, zombies?”
      “Vampires, dude, damn you're st-- Well, just, there's a huuuge difference.”
      “OK, but why? Both of those things aren't real.”
      Shy bugged out his eyes in shock. “Aren't... Ninjas are real, OK? Don't you get it? Ninjas are real. OK, vampires are fake, but it's a, like, hypothetical, right?”
      Suddenly, a voice cut in from the side. “FUCK YOU, Robert, you lyin' ass piece of shit!”
      The men whipped their heads around to see a tall thin girl with a high-top fade – Ginny. Robert started pulling a stupid face. “What?”
      “You heard me, byitch. I don't wanna fucks with you and I don't wanna fucks with Elizabeth. Stop spreading lies around like a bitch, dude!”
      Shy was amused, but kept it to himself. Robert looked around at the onlookers with feigned innocence. Ginny didn't wait for any more of his nonsense and stomped away, to a rising chorus of girls.
      It was Sim, Kissy, Theresa, and Shantea again, with “WhoooOOOa,” and “Hey-O!,” and, “You got TOLd,” and such. Robert kept pulling his stupid face until people started to move on. Shy resumed his thesis without missing a beat.
      “They're both creatures of darkness. Ninjas have shadow powers, vampires have shadow powers. So if you had a vampire ninja, he'd just be, like, unstoppable. He could just get anybody. You feel me?”
      “Uh, sure, man.”
      As they set out from the locker, Robert was bowled over by a running man. The crowd parted and pulsed with the new excitement. Bird was running from T Scroggs, who was stomping after him, yelling and swearing.
      “YOU PUNK-ASS, STOP, DAMMIT!”
      As Robert stood up, his arm slapped Scroggs across the chest. Bird escaped as the giant snapped at this new insult. Robert had a gun in his face.

      The hall pulsed again, the crowd surging against the halls, leaving Robert alone in a clearing with the monster. Mr. Hepler was in the doorway of his classroom, and seeing this, turned back to use the emergency phone. Scroggs didn't notice or care.
      “The fuck do you think you are, little Bobby?”
      Robert stammered until T smashed his forehead with the pistol butt. Blood waited a moment before pulsing from his face in spurts, his eyes were wide with terror, and a stain spread in his khakis.
      “You gonna apologize for fucking with the big dog? Huh? Your ass don't wanna get shot, right bitch? Huh?”
      Suddenly, Scroggs was flying, the gun waving at the ugly drop ceiling in confusion. Shy had scooped him up from behind, and dropped him ass first in a trash can so fast the bully was folded like paper, his shins to his face.
      The noise of him clanging into the trashcan was so loud that it took people a moment to notice most of the volume was from the gun going off. The visible parts of T Scroggs were unmoving, and a mist of blood colored the tile floor.
      “A ninja vampire can get anybody.”

      It took some arranging for the buses to pick up students early again, and during that time, the police had any students who could not arrange a ride go to their afternoon classes, or an emergency assembly, as they preferred. In sixth period World History, the only people in the room were Mrs. Bougy, Ginny White, and her new friend, Nabila Mohamed.

                        THE END!