The Third Day, Elsewhere
A wooden chair in the kitchen scrapes against tile, severe in its grind as if an exceptionally heavy frame most recently inhabited.
He fumbles for his eyeglasses, his chest feeling the residual ache of his arteries winching in shock, mouth still agape and not yet remembered to breathe for the engulfing fire in his lungs. The eyeglass frames clatter as they scrabble across the hard teak of the living room followed by the slow shuffling of burdened feet with a favored left leg.
“I can see you there, Walter.”
“Ah-ah-ah,” short pelts of panicked air gasping provide him enough oxygen to continue, slumping temporarily resigned to the back of the couch.
He shapes words with his panting. “My name… what are you… isn’t Walter…” He thinks he can finally make out some moving dark from stationary dark, massive shoulders approaching from the kitchen. “What are you… Who are you? What are you do-… this is my home.” Pulling up his frail naked legs to his chest, he prepares to launch backwards along the length of the couch. It doesn’t occur to him that this doesn’t qualify as a “plan of action,” for it’s the only idea he can muster through the rushing chemical fog of his terrified brain.
[ — If bad equaled good, at least in so far as the benefit it provided, would it not be necessary, from an ethical standpoint, to be perpetrated and perpetuated?]
Oh, that old soggy chestnut. Why God created the devil, why evil exists in the world, bad things happening to boo-hoo good people… it’s all logic-loop hyper-reality hogwash, and I really thought better of You than to bring such a contrivance up.
[ — What do you mean ‘hogwash’?]
Causality-linked perspectival triviality at a particular frame of reference. The premise itself tautology solved or impossible to solve, for it connotes an infinite sum without the functional meta-application of an hyper-real assignation.
[ — I do see where you’re coming from, but just bear with me for a moment. I was just assessing the situation of this newly-appointed Walter, and I think I grok the game here. But what I’m saying is that the mathematical abstractions focus just as solipsistically on themselves as the individual. Ergo, the functional equations, even when writ from outside the formula, the Invisible Hand, if you will, of Science, they have historically always forgotten the ‘plus one.’ The Human who discovered them. As each of Us explore our own morality, they can do one of two things — they can overweight their own pedestrian experience, or can ignore it altogether, and any tilt in a binary world will trigger the true or the false. But there is a third option: not just good and bad, but nothing. Null.]
Yes, but that nothingness is the balance. It is a universe without a birth-tilt. Just beside the sharpest knife-edge of equality, there is nothing. The positive and anti-positive meet the negative and the anti-negative and merge to create absolute nothingness. They are not somewhat similar to something that may have existed at some point long ago, they are nothing, and never were, and hence, can never be. This language is paltry for such discussion.
[‘Let’s take this offline, then.’]
“Walter, you know that ain’t right, nigga.” The darkness solidifies again as the intruder approaches. “Don’t tell me you gone bad on me, son!” The voice gets louder in its irritation. Shivering, he begs his memory for anything he can map this voice to… A narrator? A black father in a sitcom somewhere, no, but now all he can think of is Cosby’s chortling bumble. And this is no Bill Cosby.
God, he called me Walter, there must be… must be some misunderstanding. I can plead with him. His motor skills are starting to return, but are on auto-pilot; as an infant stretching itself awake in the crib, he is just randomly throwing a halt sign.
“I don’t know who this… Walter is.” He attempts to phrase the name with disdain as if to present some allegiance with the intruder. “But whatever he did, I’m the wrong guy. You’ve got the wrong guy.” He has volleyed his plea to the room, hoping to be heard. The silence is not insulation, it is excoriating, singing his flesh, rippling in extreme alert. Nothing. Nothing.
Nothing until a puff of warm breath slaps his neck and he cringes into a ball, leaving him yelping, “Please, do you need money? Anything? Help!”
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