“Blasé is ‘uninterested because of frequent exposure,’” Abigail clarifies.
Evelyn nods. “Right, girls. And I’m so glad you said that, Brendan.” She turns around to scribble on the chalkboard: blasé. “Is anyone else feeling some existential despair? Perhaps grappling with the meaning of life in the face of death?”
“Uh, what?” Jared asks, squinting at Evelyn through his clear-framed glasses.
“That wasn’t exactly what I meant,” Brendan mumbles nearly inaudibly.
From the side of the room by the windows, the heater makes a noise like a mouth breather choking on its own air, and Evelyn pulls a finger puppet out of her pocket. Abigail and I look at each other with wide eyes. The puppet has dark hair and a creepily stitched face with lopsided eyes and an actual Cheerio for a mouth.
“Don’t worry, this is why I brought Albert Camus,” Evelyn says, holding her pointer up, then turning the puppet to look at her. (She waves to it.) When she turns the puppet to us and waves, I’m the only one who waves back. And then I want to sand my fingers down with a nail file. “Does anyone know who he was?” Evelyn asks.
Predictably, no one does. Not even Josie or Abigail. Over the course of the next twenty-five sweaty minutes, Evelyn tells us all about how her undergraduate thesis was on this French guy who devoted his life to the theory that life is absurd, meaningless, etc. “Camus wasn’t a nihilist, though,” Evelyn says, scribbling even faster on the board. “No nihilist can say, ‘In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.’”
“Come again?” Josie says, looking around the room to see if anyone else found that quote a bit startling. No one else is really close to awake.
“Thank you, Josie!” Evelyn says. “It’s beautiful, right? But how can someone find beauty in the world if it’s meaningless? Aren’t the two antithetical? Well, according to Camus—”
Evelyn puts a reading up on the projector about a guy called Sisyphus, who was sentenced to push a rock up a hill but the rock keeps falling back down. (Gravity is the unsung hero of the story.) We take turns reading it out loud, which is probably even more annoying than pushing a rock up a hill.
“This, folks,” Evelyn says, speaking as Camus through the side of her mouth as her finger puppet scans the room, “is what I call ‘the absurd.’”
She returns to the projector and draws two circles in the margin of the story, one in red and one in yellow, and then a red squiggly line between them. “This is the fundamental conflict between what humans want from the universe—reason, meaning, answers—and what the universe actually is: chaos!” She writes chaos in the circle on the right and meaning in the circle on the left. Then she writes the absurd above a line with arrows pointing to each.
“This class is absurd,” one of the hockey guys in the corner says, just loud enough that Evelyn might be able to hear him.
Evelyn continues, “Camus claims that Sisyphus is the ideal absurd hero and that his punishment is representative of the human condition: He must struggle perpetually and without hope of success. So long as he accepts that there is nothing more to life than this absurd struggle, then he can find happiness in it.”
“Well, that’s depressing,” Doug pipes up.
“No, it’s not,” Brendan says. His voice is firm, and I’m not the only one who turns around to look at him. He’s not wearing a tutu today, and his hair is all down, and if I saw him on the street and knew nothing about how he sings everywhere, I would think he was cute in a seventies-rock-band-type way.
“This is good,” Evelyn says, clapping her hands together. “Yes, let’s get into some more dialogue now. Why is it depressing, Doug?”
Doug kind of stutters a bit, and she takes pity on him. “Anyone else want to chime in? No need to raise your hand, just call things out.” When no one does, she looks at me. “What do you think, Cham?”
I look around the room. “Um, you mean about a guy pushing a rock up a hill?”
“Sure, you can talk about ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’… or what about the absurd? Do you agree that there could be an ‘absurd’ relationship between what humans want and what there actually is?”
“Um…”
She wheels the projector to the side of the room, and Abigail leans over. “Are we really supposed to be enlightened right now? It’s freaking Friday.”
Doug raises his hand, even though Evelyn said we didn’t have to. I guess we’re just fantastic robots after twelve years of this stuff. “What I think I meant is that it’s depressing to keep looking for something that doesn’t exist.”
Brendan sighs. “It’s only depressing if you want it to exist. The actual relationship is kind of hysterical. Like we’re all screwing off or trying to do something that matters, but nothing does and we all keep doing it anyway.”
Participation is 20 percent of our grade. Given the status of my essay, I take a go at it. “Maybe it’s only depressing if you think about it too much. On a day-to-day basis, when you’re living life and doing your thing, you don’t really have time for, um…”
“Existential quandaries?” Evelyn provides.
“Er, yeah, so I vote that thinking about it too much is the problem. Like, philosophy is the problem.”
The whole class laughs. Even Evelyn has a smile on her face.
“I like Cham’s solution,” Doug says.
“But I don’t think we can help thinking about it,” Brendan says, and we all turn around again. He is relentless. “It might be okay for a little while to do things like homework and college applications and plan prom, but at some point we have to wonder what it’s all for. It’s gotta be for something, right?”
A few people roll their eyes and I’m about to be one of them, but I detect something less than a smile behind his lips.
“Yes, this is why philosophy is important,” Evelyn says happily. “It’s not just an academic subject. It’s the consciousness we bring to our lives.”
After that, I think we’re all pretty tired of so much thinking. Evelyn hands out a book that’s actually another thing Camus wrote, a play called Caligula, and then she gives us the rest of the period to start reading it. I want to want to start reading it, but instead I flip through the pages in my agenda because there are sixty-five days ’til prom. There’s only two weeks left to get tickets, which means Gene’s going to have to ask me soon. Will it be public? Will I be naked, which has only happened 1.5 times altogether, but still?
Opportunities abound: Gene’s last track meet; Senior Night, which Abigail is dancing at; prom; graduation; Senior Volunteer Trip. It’s just a little hard to think about how despairing the human condition is, when a few weekends ago we danced until we threw up, and in a few more weekends we’ll be dancing until we throw up more. All the things we’ve been looking forward to since high school started are finally happening to us. My time capsule is filling up, and it’s freaking amazing. Of course life is worth living. Maybe it’s a sobfest if you’re an octogenarian philosopher who devoted his life to that curvy bit of punctuation known as the question mark, but when you’re seventeen, the world is just an oyster loving an oyster loving an oyster.
Dear Universe,
Could the half-life of the best time of my life be forever?
Days ’til prom: 64
Things aren’t going well in the college essay department. No offense to my brain, but holy shit, it is a barren wasteland. I’ve been able to sweet-talk Evelyn into giving me more time, but I don’t know how long my honey-dripped e-mails will work.
Frantic text exchange with Abigail from my bed:
This college essay is going to be the death of me C
A JUST DO IT AND SEND YOUR COLLEGE APPS IN ALREADY
Last night I dreamt that Gene put on a parade to ask me to prom. I sat upon a float-sized condom. C
A You’re obsessed
Sorry, rom-coms have set me up for a lifetime of unrealistic expectations C
A Ok bye Cham you’re doing you
r essay now
Ugh fine C
Ok here I go C
I’m turning my phone off now C
I’m serious C
Don’t text me ’cause I won’t answer C
’Cause I’ll be working. C
Hello? C
DID YOU SERIOUSLY FREAKING LEAVE ME? C
Dear Universe,
I just want to know what in the name of kegs and libraries I’m supposed to write a college essay about. We want to know the real you. Do you, though, random college admissions person #8099? Do you really want to know that I feel kinda stupid, even though I should feel all liberated, when I take baths and explore those random body parts that Teen Vogue says are open for “my pleasure”? Do you really want to know that I cried harder when Jack died in Titanic than when my own grandmother died in her bed, because at least she was old, whereas Jack, JACK HAD SO MUCH TO LIVE FOR. And lastly, do you really want to know that I throw pennies away because it seems like more work to actually find my wallet than to pretend one penny could ever make a dollar of difference in a world where everything costs so much more than we know? No, you don’t. You don’t want to know that I haven’t volunteered in some random country and I didn’t start a fund so that three-legged lemurs could learn a second language.… You don’t want to know the real me. I don’t even want to know the real me. So what do I do? I’m drawing blank after blank here. Send me your rough draft, Universe? I won’t show anyone, I promise. As usual, it’ll just be between you and me.
After a lot of hours spent making not a lot of progress, I put my sneakers on. If a few days go by and I don’t run, my body develops cobwebs. It’s not spiders that spin the silk; it’s anger and other things that crawl. Running with Gene helps, but I also have to run by myself, preferably at midnight. It feels like a secret that I’m telling and keeping. I’m onto myself.
Outside in the cold, cars whoosh past me. I play this game with my feet where I try to step only on the white line technically made for bicycles. (I force my place in the world when I have to.)
Running didn’t always feel this good. Actually, for most of my life, running was truly terrible. I just didn’t get it. Like, no, I do not want to play tag with you, random elementary school friend. We will run if a bear starts chasing us, but do you see any bears? Me either. Also, I have short legs and small lungs, which is not a medically sound description of my respiratory system, but I don’t know how else to explain why it’s so goddamn hard to breathe when I’m power walking to make the bus on time.
Once Gene and I started running together, I was out of that anger management class so fast they doubted I was ever there at all. I ran and I ran and that’s how I realized you don’t have to be anatomically gifted to move fast. All you have to do is want to get out of someplace bad enough that you don’t care about the sweating or the panting or the ferocious cramping of your shins, ribs, and thighs. All you care about is what you need, and what you need is out.
When I get back home, it’s dark in the house. I don’t want to have to talk to my parents, so I tiptoe toward the stairs in my socks damp with toe sweat. When I reach for the railing, my hand touches something warm and soft, with fingers.…
“What the—” I jump back, heart pounding as I scramble for the light switch.
“Sorry, sweetie,” my dad says from the foot of the stairs. He’s gripping the railing with his right hand and the doorway to the dining room with the other. His nose is nearly touching the wall, and I feel claustrophobic looking at him.
“Are you okay, Dad?” I ask. I don’t want to crowd him more. “What are you doing out here so late?”
“I was just trying to get up the stairs,” he says, rocking back and forth a bit, but he’s still wedged in the corner, trapped by the railing of the stairs and the doorway to the kitchen, and something we can’t see too.
“But how did you get here without your chair?”
“I don’t need that thing.”
I gulp. I never know what to do in situations like these, and they’re happening more and more. If Mom were here, she’d do the right thing because everything she does is right. Everything I do is wrong, which is why it’s better if I don’t do anything. “Dad, how did you get out here?” I repeat, then loudly, “Hey, Mom?”
“Shh, I don’t want to bother your mom. If I could just… Cham, here, grab hold of my arm. I’m exhausted.” He moves his hand down the railing, and it shakes so much it rattles the wood.
“Dad,” I start, but the porcupine is in my mouth, and if I swallow it, I might cry. I grab his arm like he asked me to, and the shaking subsides. “Why were you out here?”
“I thought I heard something upstairs. I wanted to make sure it wasn’t someone breaking in. You’re the only one who sleeps up there.”
“But you can’t get up the stairs, Dad, remember?” I swallow. It hurts.
“Sure I can. I just need to turn around.” He looks at me, then toward the kitchen. There’s sweat on his forehead, and his knuckles are white on the wooden doorframe.
“Okay, let’s move your leg.” He’s in the socks with white chicklets on the bottom. I think my mom took them from the hospital the one and only time he was there. “This leg, Dad.” I tap it so that he understands. It doesn’t move.
“My feet are stuck to the floor,” he says quietly. “The floor is just so sticky.”
I don’t know how to respond. We both know the floor is smooth as a lie. “Let’s get your chair, okay?” I spot it by the sliding door, but as soon as I move my hands, he tilts back.
“Oh,” he calls out. Fear flashes across his face, and I steady him, but now I feel shaky too. Stuck. “Hold tightly to the railing, okay?” He nods. I get his chair outside the sliding door and push it toward him. Somewhere between this part of the house and that one, he decided he could walk. What were you thinking? Where do you go when the disease gets in and jumbles everything?
“Let’s get you back to bed, okay?” He nods but doesn’t move from the corner. “You have to let go, Dad, I got you.” I pry his fingers from the rail and drape his arm on my shoulders. He’s so heavy that I stumble back toward his chair. He falls into it, and I get a shooting pain up my neck.
“Careful, Cham,” he says to me, his face strained.
“I’m okay.”
“Don’t help me next time. I would’ve gotten there by myself. I don’t want you to hurt yourself.”
I don’t know where there is. “I’m okay, Dad, really. Ready?”
Once we’ve both caught our breath, I push him down the hall and into his room. I glare at the light coming from under the door to my mom’s room, as if any of this is her fault.
“I’ve got it from here,” my dad says, wheeling himself around and reaching for the doorknob. “Thanks.”
“Of course, Dad,” I say, lingering in the doorway as he’s still reaching. After a few seconds, I grab the knob for him.
“Do you want this closed?” I ask. He nods.
“I love you,” we say at the same time, then laugh our identical laugh, left eye slightly squinted.
“See you in the morning,” I say as I close the door. Before it shuts, I feel a pang of sadness looking inside his room, where the TV is talking quietly to the furniture, as if nothing needs my dad around anymore to keep doing what it does. I lean against his door. I still need you. We both do.
Dear Universe,
I need to rent a storage space for all my feelings—just a huge, massive building that isn’t my body, something with sturdier insides than organs and bones. Feelings like these are just bad furniture: cumbersome, ugly, and I can’t contain them by myself.
8
Days ’til prom: 61
PREDICTION: IT’S GOING TO HAPPEN. SOMETIME BETWEEN NOW and Senior Night, Gene is going to ask me to prom.
Outlook: sunny with a chance of hell yeah.
Text exchange with Hilary and Abigail:
Wtf do I get Gene for his last track meet C
A Sex
&nb
sp; A Hil says “A lesson in feminism”
I’m going with a chocolate cupcake C
A Boringgggg.
A K we’ll pick you up in 20
You guys literally always hang out without me C
A OMG CHAM WE HAVE A HISTORY PROJECT TOGETHER
Ew who does homework C
A Exactly. See you soon.
When Gene first invited me to one of his track meets, I felt like I was getting smoothies with the queen. “I have a race,” he’d said shyly after one of our runs. “You could come if you want.” A boy had never invited me to something that was his. But Gene wanted me to go. I even put on jeans instead of leggings. I’ve been to almost all of them, and now that it’s his last one, I feel like there should be more. He’s going to have lots of these in college, but I don’t know who he’s going to invite to those.
Track isn’t a very popular sport at school, which is fine by me. You don’t have to pay to get into any of the events, and the good seats are never taken on the bleachers. Me, Abigail, Hilary, and the chocolate cupcake show up at the arena with about two minutes to spare. All the runners are stretching on the sideline, and the air inside is still cool, without a hint of mugginess or sweat.
“Perfect timing,” Abigail says as we slide onto the bleachers. She waves behind us to Kelly and Helga from the dance team, and I do this awkward I-kinda-know-you-from-my-friend-but-mostly-I’m-jealous-of-how-chill-you-are-at-parties smile. When we sit down I notice how much it smells like rubber and B.O., and I doubt I’ll miss it here when Gene’s season ends.
I peek under the lid of the box and don’t see any signs of frosting. “I think it’s safe to say the cupcake has survived,” I say, placing it next to me while patting its imaginary head. “Good cupcake. Hang in there just a little longer.”
“How about this one?” Hilary asks, reaching across me and passing her phone to Abigail. I glimpse dorm room furniture. Given that the present moment is high school, and we don’t even know if Hilary has gotten into college yet, I think this would be very disappointing to the Buddha.
Dear Universe Page 7