Socratess: A Philosophical Tragedy pt 2

* * *

I tried not to come home on Sundays. During the week, it wasn't too bad; they had arranged their schedules so they weren't ever in the house at the same time. Ma had a secretary gig during the day, generally failing to answer phones or do any paperwork while she was there, at least according to the gossip that always stopped when I came into a room. Significant looks, don't ask, don't ask. I didn't ask. Pa worked night shift at the factory, so when she came home, he was leaving. The few hours they might have intersected, in the morning and evening, she was gambling away half her paycheck, and he was drinking away his. The oh-so-helpful school counselors got it into their heads for awhile that this wasn't a “happy home environment” for me, and tried to act as surrogate parental figures, until I told them to go to hell. Don't get too far in this world needing people to worry over you. I had food to eat, and neither of them was beating me or anything, so all I needed was to avoid being in the same building with them when they couldn't avoid each other. Try telling a psych that you're perfectly self-sufficient, thank you, though – exercise in futility.

Sundays they didn't have any excuses to be out of the house, either of them, much as they tried. So I went to church while they slept, and went to Miss Rosalee's for dinner, and then wandered around for awhile, or sat in the graveyard underneath that tree and read. And she often came too, to read, and I can't say I objected too much, though her tendency to yell at the authors as she read was a bit distracting. Well, she was distracting.

I often ended up reading the same page for three hours when she was around, without noticing.

She was working her way through the philosophers and theologians, which didn't really come as much of a surprise to me. And, well, that's what she was reading, so I figured why not. The fact that I was reading Kierkegaard probably contributed to the “one page in three hours” situation as much as she did. I wasn't a big fan. Neither was she, but her aversion most likely had something to do with his philosophy; I just didn't like him because his writing style seemed deliberately tenebrous. And I spent a great deal of time finding the word “tenebrous” in order to describe my feelings towards him properly. I liked a lot of the other existentials though.

“You can't pick a philosophy based on writing styles.” She insisted one day, sprawled across the ground beneath our tree and tossing rocks at the grave of one Mathew Culberson, beloved husband and father. Poor guy ended up with a gravestone with a cute little carved stone lamb on top.

“Why not?” I wondered idly if I could do the guy a favor and knock the lamb off. He was dead and probably didn't care anymore, but really – a lamb?

“What do you mean, 'why not'?” Her rock chipped the grave. “I can't think of why you would think that was a good thing to base your life on – which guy was the most exciting with his prose.”

“Not which guy was the most exciting.” There went an ear; score one for masculinity. “Which guy was the most comprehensible. I understand Sartre; I don't have a clue what Derrida was babbling about. The world is made of words and nothing really means anything, or at least what we think it means, all I could gather. Can't agree with someone when you don't understand a word they're saying.”

“Still...”

I rooted around for the rock that had been digging into my back all afternoon. That ought to be big enough to take the whole head off. “I figure, if they can't describe their ideas clear enough so people can understand them, they don't really know what they're talking about.”

She threw her rock up in the air and caught it again. “Maybe we're just not smart enough to understand it.”

I missed Culberson completely, and took out part of Edna Henslee's Psalm 23 instead. Just as good; that one is overquoted anyways. “ Or maybe they're not really saying anything.” I grinned. “At least according to Derrida.”

For that, she threw the rock at me instead of the grave. “A) You said you don't agree with Derrida, b) I don't think that's exactly what he said. ”

I stared up at the sun through the leaves of the tree for a moment; it was setting. “I said I didn't understand him. And if he's right, then what he actually said isn't really important and says something different that what he really was saying, or something like that, which makes it all doubly incomprehensible, so what the hell. I'll stick to dead greek men rolling rocks up a hill, thank you, because that makes sense to me.” That rock had hurt.

“Camus and his Sisyphus were technically absurdist, I think,” she said. “And isn't the whole point of absurdism that things don't make sense?”

“Which makes perfect sense to me.”

It was dark, and I couldn't see her face. She stood up, shrugged, brushed the dirt off, and set off for whatever home was. I wondered if she was smiling or scowling as she walked away.

* * *

I still wonder. I lay in bed, staring up at the ceiling fan going round and round and round, all lazy and creaking, and try to figure out how she felt about, well, us, not that we were really an “us”. She never said anything one way or the other. She didn't seem to mind me being around, but she didn't exactly go out of her way, either. If I showed up, she made room; if I didn't, she never said a word about it, just picked up right where we left off like I hadn't been gone for two weeks. But she didn't for no one else, neither, so that didn't make me as depressed as it might have.

It's hot, stifling, and the damn fan doesn't do anything to cool things down. Just creaks its way around again. The offwhite papered walls are sweating like human skin, shedding scablike strips. I irritated her, I know that; I didn't take things seriously enough. She accused me so many times of thinking life was just some cosmic joke.

I'm not laughing now.

* * *

She never let go of the whole damn yield sign question. You would think that some of the other questions she was worrying about would have been a little more important to her – all those deep philosophical issues, the free will and nature of truth and all that junk – but no. Somehow, as far as she was concerned, that stupid sign became a symbol of everything she hated about the universe, the rusted emblem of uncertainty and illogic. Figuring out its story would be the first blow in the war to strike back against absurdity.

Viva la revolution, I guess.

We were into the early stages of winter, and it was mostly too cold to hole up in the cemetery anymore. Her suggestion was the local library, which had the benefits of being heated and having some nice overstuffed leather chairs to read in, at the cost of privacy and being able to throw rocks at things. Well, we could throw rocks at things, but the librarian tended to frown on it and hit me with a ruler. I thought only nuns hit people with rulers. Anyways, I figured it was just a locale change: reading and goofing off inside instead of out. She, however, had different plans.

I hadn't thought people still used microfilm machines. Weirdest thing, hunting through those file cabinets for old newspapers and feeding those little tubes into the machine and staring at the screen until your eyes blurred. Flip, nothing, flip, nothing, flip, flip, flip, put that one back and get another one. It was like being in one of those made-for-tv movies where the crime happened fifty years ago, except without the part where we knew there had been a crime. Unless you count a crime against reason, but if they went around reporting all those in the newspapers we'd never read about anything else.

I didn't know what we were looking for, and told her so.

“Neither do I,” she said as she pulled out another little film roll, and swore when she couldn't get it to feed in right. “But I'm sure we'll know it when we see it. Some kind of council decision to close a road, or a car accident, or...” Her arm brushed up against the box of film and knocked it off, scattering them everywhere.

I sighed and started trying to file them all in some sort of order again. For the fourth time that afternoon. “Yeah, sure. 'Cept half of these don't tell what roads the accidents happened on, 'cause it's way out in the boonies and no one cared. And we already looked all through them once for road closings. And we don't exactly have a date to work with to narrow things down a little. We're looking for a needle in a fifty ton haystack, without knowing what a needle is or whether there actually is one in the hay.”

“You don't have to help.” She waved her arm vaguely in the direction of the door without looking up. “You have better things to do, go do them.”

I picked the last film roll up from the carpet, put it back in the box, and put the box on the table, as far away from her arm as I could without it being on the floor. “I didn't say I wouldn't help. I'd just like something a little more clear cut, is all.”

“If I knew what we were looking for, we wouldn't have to be looking for it,” she said. “Just get me the next box, will you?”

“We looked through that one already.” I handed it to her.

“We looked through all of them already. We must have missed it. Whatever it is.” She took the box, dropped it, stared at the little grey cylinders scattered across the ground, and started pulling on her hair absently.

I sat down on the ground and started filing them all back into the box. “If there's anything there.” I handed her one.

“Do try and think positively for once,” she said with a sigh.

* * *

Think positive. Lots of people say that, like if given two possible theories that seem equally valid, you might as well pick the happy one. The optimist's Occam's Razor, I guess. Or maybe they just think if they believe it enough, it will become that way, even if it isn't now. What do they call it? The power of positive thinking, or something like that. Believe it and it's true, for you, or at least as close as anything gets to being true anymore.

Which is what it all boils down to, of course – why not go for the happy option, since you don't have anything better to base your life on? I suppose my method wasn't really all that different; I just always landed on the pessimistic side rather than the optimistic one. When it all came down to it, I often picked positions because they were cynical. Safer that way. Can't be disappointed if you're always expecting the worst. Which, if you think about it, is another form of picking philosophies that make you happy.

The Japanese have a proverb: the reverse side also has a reverse side. It's a typical kind of saying, in that first it sounds completely obvious, then it sounds really profound and deep, and then you think about it and realize you don't really understand what the hell it's actually saying. I could come up with six meanings right off the top of my head, and I ain't even one of those crazy lit-types who spend their free time coming up with new and creative ways to interpret the same eight words. But maybe that's the point; you look at something and it seems simple, and then you keep looking at it from different angles until you don't know whether you're looking at a sentence or a religion.

And then maybe you get frustrated, and say it doesn't say anything, or anything, or everything, or you get like me, and say you don't give a damn whether it means anything or not, or you get like her and decide to tie the sentence down to a chair and beat a confession out of it.

Where were you on the night...

* * *

And so it went. The snow piled up outside, and her questions piled up on the library basement floor, all individual and neat and perfectly crystalline-cold, enough to burn our fingers when we touched them.

It's a funny thing, when you realize you've started to think like that, in metaphors and similes instead of plain old literalism, and then when you realize you don't know what you mean by half the things you think or say anymore, just that it sounds all pretty and profound. I sat there on that chair and watched her go through all those microfilm rolls for the seventeenth time, and thought to myself about how things change. A year before, to the day, I was in the back of a stolen pickup truck, drunker than... a very drunk thing... heading across county lines in the middle of a blizzard. Just for the hell of it, really. And now, or then, rather, I was sitting in the library basement attempting to come to terms with the vagaries of literary criticism, at least as much as I was able to understand what that was.

I half decided the drunken pneumonia courting was the better option.

I only remembered that it was a year because she saw the article about the accident we got into in one of the newspapers and asked if the kids in it might have been the ones who left the big dent in it.

I told her the dent came from the last crazy girl who got obsessed with figuring out why the sign was there in the first place deciding to take a baseball bat to it. She wasn't amused. She wasn't amused much by anything, anymore.

Thing is, it's easy to lose track of where you're going when you don't really want to get there. She kept wandering off on all sorts of little sidetracks, new angles to research, because she knew the main road wasn't leading her anywhere. Every dropped box of film rolls was ten minutes more of not admitting the film didn't have anything on it. She knew it, and I knew it, same as I knew it didn't really have anything to do with the sign.

Same as I know I'm doing the same thing, chasing philosophical rabbit-trails to avoid getting to the part where she's laying in the dust, grinning in pain, and I'm standing there staring and angry.

She went chasing one thing to avoid catching up with another, and ended up finding something else all together. Ask the wrong questions, get the answers you don't want and no one else wanted you to find.