(III) The Reluctant François

"Five out of six people who ever lived are dead."

François looks at the prompt, then at the professor, then back at the prompt.  Prompt?  This isn’t a fucking prompt.  A prompt is a fucking question, not a ten-word statement.

The very fact that François has to take World Philosophy 201 to graduate has bothered him mightily for months now–since registration, really, and it’s not because he can’t discern a quite real connection between political science, his actual major, and philosophy.  He can.  He even believes the professor when he claims that, "Life without philosophy is just eating, humping, and killing.  And all three artlessly."  (Though the joke he makes now, to himself of course, is that he eats too much, humps not nearly enough, and kills nothing but time.)  François isn’t certain why it bothers him–or why anything minor bothers him, in fact; he knows, knows with a foolish and impossible certitude that he’s grown into an irreparably neurotic adult, and so he approaches these inward foreign objects like a toddler–he sees them, he can touch them, he even knows them, but he cannot name them.  And, oh fuck it all, how he breaks them into itty-bitty jagged incisors that are cast across some internal open maw.

François re-reads the instructions.  Below these bullshit instructions ‘s your fuckin’ prompt.  François likes to rephrase written ideas as he’s reading them.  He finds it to be much more entertaining.  It made attending his grandmother’s rather dreary funeral a bit like crashing Tupac’s.  It’s also how he managed to bite off about eleven percent of "War and Peace," which, judging by an informal survey taken after class amongst his peers, was more than anyone had bitten off, much less digested.  You got 5 minutes to think ’bout it.  Then forty-five minutes to write.  Write and write and write.  The less you think, the better.  You write ‘fore the forty-five minutes begins, I’ll fuck you up.  You write after ’em, I’ll fuck you up.  Good luck.  Don’t fuck it up.  And the prompt:

"Five out of six people who ever lived are super fuckin’ dead as shit."

François sighs.  A lot of his breathing is sigh-related; about eleven percent, he figures.  He looks up at the clock.  It’s old, like the ones from high school, so it steps back before striding forward.  The girl next to him–woman, she’s a fucking woman–raises her hand.  Don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it.  You won’t like it.  "Professor Jenkins, I’m confused."  François cringes, hiding his face behind his hands.  I’m not here I’m not here I’m not here…

Professor Jenkins’ bushy eyebrows rise in his lined forehead.  It reminds François of the lines on a sheet of loose-leaf, and he pictures his thoughts scrolling across as they occur.  The thoughts are not political, philosophical, or professorial, but instead graphic depictions of undiscovered sexual positions only safe for seasoned acrobats or invertebrates.  I’m projecting.  "That’s good," he says, deadpan.  "Promising.  You should do well."  Michael Jenkins is one of those professors who has confused speaking in riddles with wisdom.  In many ways, the man is trite, a person who went out of their way to fulfill a stereotype.  A man who became a professor to be professor, not do professor.  As a result, <spanstyle=”font-family: Arial;”>François figures, his willingness to do anything more than be gazed upon and admired while in the solitary confinement of his water closet office during his one office hour a week has waned considerably since his appointment some twenty-three years prior, and the gaining of tenure some four years after that.  I don’t think sitting in a dark office with your wang in your hands qualifies as research.  François rubs forehead.  Aw, hell, maybe it does.  Still, his response to the woman’s declaration, much less hostile than François expected, told François all he really needed to know.  Just write.  This guy doesn’t have two shits to give, and even he had all the shits in China, probably still wouldn’t give two of ’em to save my life.

"Five out of six people who ever lived are dead."  François had heard this before, only switched around–one out of six people who has ever been born is alive today."  <span style="font-family: Arial;”>François rubs his eyes, and then yawns.  He stealthily picks at the wax in his ears and then rubs it on the desk, which is gross, but he knows gross is a fair approximation of honest, which is ideal and nice and scary as all hell.  Scratching the patchy beard on his cheeks, he surreptitiously peeks at the woman who’d confessed to her confusion a moment ago.  Her pen is scratching furiously across the top line of her little blue book.  François’ knits his brow into a curtain of consternation.  Jenkins spotted her.  François coughs in that obviously fake way, some phlegmatic sound between clearing the throat and purposefully congesting it.  Too late.  Jenkins swoops like a vengeful dive bomber, his expression of boredom never changing as he snatches the pad of paper from beneath her still-moving Bic pen.  She squeaks in surprise; her hand darts halfway to the paper, and then she thinks better about it as he walks away, but the look of bewilderment asks impertinent, honest, and innocent questions, all nice and scary as all hell.

"Understanding the directions is key to a lot of things, including in philosophy, especially in Philosophy 201."  He turns one indifferent eye to the suddenly book-less woman.  "You will be returned your paper in twenty minutes.  Everyone else may begin."  The woman–Amanda, François is pretty certain–seems near tears, cheeks red, face contorted and flustered.  A chorus of felt tips scratching fills the room.

Mind mostly blank but for ten railway workers swinging sledges at the same beaten iron spike, François puts his pen to paper.
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Amanda reminds me of a young woman.  A lifeguard.  Lifeguard.  That’s amazing, isn’t it, that across the world, hundreds of thousands of people trust their lives and the lives of their loved ones to barely post-pubescent teenagers too afraid to do anything but pretend to be someone else?  Six dollars an hour.  Six dollars an hour.  It took five minutes from broken nose to awkward silence, her face so close, gross and monstrous and luminous and exotic in its unapproachable and reproachable humanity.  God, big words, stupid, I know, but meant.  Do the math; six dollars an hour, five minutes; my life was bought and sold for fifty cents, which is maybe more than the "Buy it now" price I’d have asked for at any one of a million times in these thousands of lives I’ve lived and lost.

To lose.  After I had sex for the first time, I went to her en suite bathroom.  I sat on the toilet seat, tears in my eyes, lost in all the most important, bullshit, adolescent ways.  In so many ways, so many wayward weary ways, I knew me to be an unmitigated fool of an ass of a man.  Too wrapped up and therefore constrained by my limited and seemingly shrinking consciousness; unable to step outside of who I was and understand who anyone else is, and will be.  "There are no truths, only interpretations," you taught us, words from a man I idolized when I was young enough to idolize anyone, heartless enough to steal away their humanity like that.  But I believe we keep working at it, that unknowable and wily thing, pushing for it, diving, arms out-stretched to lay one gnarled finger upon it to burst us open and reverse us eternally.  For others to marvel at, recoil from, push toward.

My father is one of the five that died so I may live.  Him, my mother, Julius Caesar, Biggie, and Elvis.  When Dad died, that dumb bastard had over twenty yarmulkes, all of which my mother nailed above the hearth after his funeral, which, by town gossip, was taken to be pretty fucking weird, though she claimed to have her reasons.  From all accounts, the man didn’t believe in God (or hats), but I’d bet that he knew that if he went to Temple, and let the confusion and faith and doubt and love and self-hate wash through him, open as a medium, a conduit, he could leave that place cleansed, rain rushing through the eaves and taking all the leaves.  He also believed in one soiled hand washing another clean, that him and my mother were bleached linen, a beckoning, unblemished page, a foot-deep snowfall in an isolated field in an undiscovered corner of Alaska.  Not because they were blameless, faultless, or guiltless, but because by cleansing each other of blame, fault and guilt, they killed and birthed one another, murderer and midwife, pristine and new…

…The misanthropy endemic today is a result of unreasonable expectations.  I’d like to think that we’re born a hundred times.  A thousand  times.  I’d like to think that for every minute I live, I am again reborn, and that over-burdened husk of a man I once was dies, and I am new.  Weightless.  Free to float or founder.  There is a primeval side of me, and a foolish side of me, and every moment that kill and birth one another, murderer and midwife, and I am once again pristine and new.  I am quite confident in saying that out of the million-and-one of me that have ever lived, and out of the infinite number of me that could have been, there is only one François.