The Scientist

The Scientist was attempting to occupy his time. The sky outside was grey but he didn’t mind that because he had his specimens to look at. It was a beautiful thing to see the square ribs with the vertices jutting out – little pins protruding from the ideal of the shape. The repeated, perfectly-spaced patterns. It was a great distraction from the grey sky, the lack of friends and his derogatory view of his own self. The twisting hexagons and overcrowded civilisations – pervertedly gasping at the infinitesimally small women. The ugly desert outside knew no curves and could only format itself in ramps, sharp edges and flat surfaces. It was as if there was a plane for every square piece that made up the desert and the sand displaced travelled past the edge and into a theoretical space. He realised at some point that this was all a silly distraction. He knew that this was all junk food. He wasn’t learning anything new. He was looking at his specimens almost as background noise to his own lack of thought. He knew that he no longer loved his specimens and that they had nothing to offer him. He considered leaving his laboratory. Nobody had checked in on him for such a long time -either out of concern for his well-being or to verify he was still doing his work. He stepped outside. Everybody was still doing their work without him. His name being on one of the lockers and referenced in the schedules felt almost patronising. Like they were not acknowledging his absence for his own benefit. As if he was a mental deficient that couldn’t do his job. No, he simply did not do his job. That was the sum of it all. Nobody took notice of him. Nobody heeded his presence. They were the actual workers. He was simply an object. He was carved out from time – an object, a cuboid separated from their timestream, a lump, a something. He couldn’t deny these charges and that made him angry. He decided that he couldn’t handle the passive hatred and the reminder of his own difference from the workers. He wasn’t a serious guy. He was mickey mouse. A goofy bastard. So he left.

The Scientist witnessed several individuals fade into nothing around him. He did not think anything of it. It began to rain but that did not faze him. He continued on to the beach, which was just as cumbersome as the surrounding desert. There were several corpses strewn about. Some of them were brought down by gravity into theoretical space. He noticed The Surfer. The Surfer had not washed in many days, preferring natural odours for both him and his wife. The only water that had touched his skin was sea water – spray from the waves and the result of him being knocked over. He was not taken seriously by the world – he was one of those spiritual nutjobs. He worshipped the sun and considered himself apart from the world. He convinced himself of this even when he dined at KFC. His wife was mute at the KFC, head tilted toward the ground. The Surfer was ambivalent toward his wife, viewing her as an accessory and birthing machine. No, he was not actively abusive. No, he did not hit her. But that didn’t matter. The Surfer took her in when she was pregnant with a child of rape. As soon as the child was twelve, she ran away. Her name was Easter and the date of her departure was New Year’s Eve. The Surfer did not care about this. Apparently, he was a Beast. But he had none of the influence required to be a Biblical Beast. No-one but his wife accepted his mark. Instead, he was apart from human morals and society. But as a human, he would always benefit from the labour of those who accepted the common tenets that upheld society. Both were amoral but The Surfer was clearly benefiting from an unfair arrangement.

“When you’re in the office, it’s like everyone else is in fast motion. Like in the movies where they wanna emphasise the presence of a character. Like he’s out of place. But while I am out of place, I am no character. My passions are prestige television and data wrangling. My politics are moderate to non-existent. My aesthetic views are not informed by the Classical Greats or A Great Big Urinal. I see no value in any of them. I am speaking. I am giving a speech and still the rain comes down on me – I know that makes me silly. I should react. I should yelp due to the cold. But if I did, it would be a Performance For No-One. Just you, you slimey caveman faggot bastard. How strange is it when even eclipses or a beautiful blue cannot embody anything anymore? When even the amazing beauty of this world – deemed not enough by those invested in an afterlife – can turn into merely a distraction or a something or other? I say this not to argue that everything is pointless. I am a lucky man for I have not had to spit any rain out of my mouth. I simply accept the foreign wetness of my lips. The moon can be blue but the common pink is a far greater beauty. For the sun will always be there. Why concern oneself with pearls and diamonds when the embrace of warmth will always persist? When Anat herself comes in the guise of a prostitute – I find that people like myself are often fond of overwrought metaphors and symbolism. A lot of scientists on some level fancy themselves artists. I scoff at them but also myself. We are far too machine-like to be a something but I disdain the artists who look down on me and lead princely lives. An artist should work as a gun store cashier. I married Anat on a Tuesday and on the next Wednesday she had disappeared like a warm day or a name. No note or anything. I would consider myself an incel. Yes, I would consider myself an incel. Oi, caveman. Do you admire stoicism? Then you should admire me a ton. For I am very stoic. Look at me, any other man would be shivering. Both of us are kings among peasants. The squires with their umbrellas. Black umbrellas that once upon a time deflected bombs. Silly man, silly bastard. Boom boom boom pa-rum-pum-pum ti-ri-ri la-la-la,”

The Surfer held nothing but disdain for the modern bastard.

“The real world is what justifies Heaven. You know it, you’re a smart man, I suppose. Love is when you consider yourself no better than the chairs or tables. Love even requires smiling at your enemy. A loving man is a pathetic, pacifist one. And yet, no man or woman can resist aspiring to him, least of all me. Sometimes I consider myself a noir protagonist. The dame in the hut who held an unwanted child. I delivered the child. So many cuckservatives on the TV – they spread lies about race and IQ, they passively allow the people that tell women to leave their husbands and abort children. The woman shall one day be my Princess but there needs to be a ritual. I will cut a goat’s throat and I will show her the insides of the neck. I will prise out the teeth and show her their perfection. I will even note the evidence of God’s love inherent in the anus. The great anus that degenerate Bataille derided as solar. There needs to be violence in this bastard world. For the individual whose letters are locked in the tetragrammaton had intercourse with some earth and said toodle-oo cheery pip that’s all folks. And we cry for our dear mother and father. The retard Mainländer was more correct than I’d like to admit. The world cries out for death. An abortion. That is why the platonic form will remain only an ideal. Dear God, you mention the rain? The rain is a mere annoyance sent by Satan with the false justification of feeding crops. Bastard shitting rain and Satan. Lucifer shitting Loki bastard fuck. Rain is a dog ripe for marriage. Rain is a shade of blue or a pain in the knee. Or perhaps a flower with too much to carry. My wife is deeply miserable. I consider it my duty to allow her to sort it out on their own. The gap between men and women is simply too wide. Plus modern women have the hypergamy and shit. They’re too modernity disease-riddled, I’m sure. If I were to earnestly try, I would simply mess them up. Men cannot understand women for a woman is a different species. Ah, but you seem effeminate. A man who announces his dominance by declaring his newness, his integration with the modern world,” he said.

“Ah, what is it like to be a caveman? To survive on only what one can catch? Pretty damn miserable. The moment you get tetanus or a broken knee, you’re done. Stupid bastard. Little shit. The anus can never be solar – I shall not facilitate the theories of those who glorify insanity and weakness. Deleuze and his ilk are the territory of the ivory tower intellectual and should be shot,” responded The Scientist.

“You’re someone else’s dream. We have similar enemies. Come sleep in my hut. You will be visited by a dream concocted by chthonic world located in the underside of the brain,”

“You talk a lot of shit. Hypergamy, the gap between men and women – they’re not a different species. The gap isn’t that wide. It’s made by the world, not nature,”

“I do not recognise the world outside nature so I can only defer to what I see,”

“Your ignorance says nothing regarding truth,”

“But the scientists have discovered the non-existence of such a thing,”

“But now you rely on our discoveries. You are not outside man’s creation. You never will be,”

“Come. Say no more. Wanker,”

The Scientist obliged.

“Sleep on the sand in between my bed and the wife’s,”

“Very well,”

The Scientist did so without complaint.

“The literal brain?” he questioned.

“Of course,”

“Which section? Which specific part?”

“The underside. No more explanation necessary. The rest was concocted by people paid too much money to swill beakers around,”

“Like me?”

“Yes, like you,”

The Scientist chuckled.

“Wanker. Aight, I’m off to bed. I hope wifey isn’t too depressed out in the rain,”

The Surfer said nothing.

The Scientist was not visited by a dream. This disappointed him. He felt as if he had been deprived of a spiritual experience that would have given him a great purpose. All the windows had disappeared from the concrete block buildings. He looked over at the muscle-bound Surfer.

“Con-artist. Shithead. Reactionary. Fuckhead,” he thought to himself.

He smiled to himself. Why had he ever thought that this bastard was interesting? The Surfer woke up as if in response to these thoughts.

“Hey,” he said, “cuckold boy. Science fag. Little bitch. You stink. You stink more than me,”

“The size of your hut is impressive. Where did you get the wood?”

“Home Depot. Where’s The Wife?”

“I don’t know. I don’t keep track of your concubines,”

“Ha ha, shithead science. Let’s do some surfing first. I like to surf the waves. The thing about you is that you care about what faggy shitheads think of your status as a human being. What matters is muscles, not whether your peer-reviewed paper got enough medals,”

“Papers usually don’t get medals,”

“I knew that, cuckface. What’s big is ‘Why?’ but the ‘Why’ is small like a grain of sand. ‘Why’ that the scientists seek is small because the big is in the small. The sun on you, the Wife, the sea, the hut constructed from Home Depot wood. You get it? Why is it important for there to be a ‘Why’? The doing is enough,”

“Hm. I thought fascists were more fans of being than becoming,”

“Ah, yeah. Well, fuck those guys. I like surfing. I like being racist. That’s it. There doesn’t need to be anything more complicated. I may not be a fleshed-out character but nobody’s watching. There’s only you and me. No need to perform complexity for others. No, there is only hatred, neglecting your wife and sigma surfing,”

The Scientist then thought for a second.

“Your wife probably drowned herself, fuckhead. And for the record, you probably shouldn’t use the f-word like that. The gay one. The one about gays. I’m gonna take your fucking surfboard. And I will never give it back. And you will always be alone. And me? I will always be winning,”

The Scientist then rushed out, grabbed the surfboard and began to paddle out into the sea. The Surfer then knelt down into a lotus position. He knew The Scientist was right. He did a silent prayer that absolved him of any responsibility. He then did a couple stretches. No matter how much he tried to convince himself of his sadness, his face remained unstained with tears. This depressed him truly. He had become so distant to what he once thought he was. He looked out of the window cut into the side of the hut. It was always cold as a bastard in the hut. Dark sand that looked like gravel. He felt like screaming. He felt the inability to change. His past self, over whom he had no control, held him in place. His past self’s choices closed neural pathways that formed the basis of his current identity. Still no tears. He wanted to punch his ducts.

The Surfer was indeed a fascist but The Scientist began to wonder if he was indeed correct that the search for the answers to the big things was in fact small. Just a big smallness – an adolescent dream. And indeed, he was surprisingly good at surfing. Yanking that board and running with the cold-ass wet sand touching his feet – finally feeling as if his skin had been stripped and the only thing that remained was his sight. The water baptising its own name or something. He was surfing to spite the bastard. The Surfer presented it as a be-all and end-all, a cure for suicide. He would enjoy the surf and then kill himself just to prove the bastard wrong. Maybe the people back in the office would feel sorry for him. But that would be the most painful of all. The people saying that they sympathised with his plight. The tears broadcasted on television. The wet-faced co-workers blubbering that they never knew him enough to save him and if only they had been kinder – reducing his existence to a pre-school message. No, the solution was not to “be kind”. No, the solution was to leave him alone. The Surfer screamed with his legs apart – a strong stance. He then, continuing to emit a ritualistic noise, ran into the sea. Bastard had no tears. Maybe the lie was how you knew it was real. But deep down, The Scientist just thought that The Surfer wasn’t capable of such a thing. Stupid fucker ran into the sea and died like a bitch after much struggling and gasping and a couple genuine tears. Ha ha ha. He was surfing to spite a corpse. And he was pretty damn good at it. The sun made everything beautiful. Anat was at the beach.

“The Sun is a woman!” The Scientist cried from the top of a wave.

When back on land, The Scientist stripped naked and began to run toward the desert city.  He felt the wind on his entire body and existed as a thing within the world. He began to cry like a bitch. Ha ha ha. Several people noticed him but no-one did anything. Surfing was not a cure for suicide. Neither was McDonald’s or playing CS:GO. But he heard the McRib was back. So he ran into the McDonald’s and asked for the rare McRib sandwich. His balls rested very comfortably on the plastic seat. He wondered why no-one else did this. The sun’s brightening cleared the greyness of the sky. Everyone but The Scientist complained that the glare was too strong. But for The Scientist such things were irrelevant. When at home, he was content to simply stare at the ceiling. But before long, tears started to come down his face. It wasn’t because he felt pity for The Surfer nor was it because he cared about the opinions of the sun-shunning demos. He looked at the webpage on his computer. A planned platformer videogame about a young girl exploring the landscape of her dreams. He didn’t even like videogames. He likely wouldn’t care if it came out and there was a high probability that it would have been a mediocre product. There was something innocent about the main heroine. She had a fishing hook that allowed her to glide across levels. She was fully integrated into her fishing activities. A man by the name of Baal walked across a bridge and collapsed into a sitting position against its walls. The atmosphere cleared and the stars could be seen. A star then knocked into one and this caused the stars to bounce off of one another and all The Humans gazed up at this display. The Scientist was busy shivering and looking down at the floor. He was cold because he was naked. He was thinking about the monarchical civilisations that existed on the skins of his specimens. He wondered if they were okay without his eye looking down on them. He never saw The Wife. She could have been a fantasy and he would have been none the wiser. She wasn’t. Perhaps when out of view, the kingdoms died too. The internet was a graveyard. So much beautiful stuff. And corpses were always more beautiful than the living. For corpses had kingdoms on them. The Scientist wanted to get so thin he could see his ribcage. So he decided to fast for a couple days. He came across Baal’s body. He carried it to the lab. Everybody was shocked when they inspected him. He had special cells that suggested the genetic heritability of an artistic disposition. The Scientist didn’t want to hear it. It was a fantasy of those who wanted a genetic answer to everything. It was worrying to see his colleagues sound so odd. He wept.

“Jesus never wasted his time on tears,” said one of his co-workers.

“I’m not Jesus, you stupid bastard,” The Scientist said in return.

The Scientist then assembled a suicide machine from objects found in Home Depot. But upon completion, he found he could only stare at the mechanical angel.

“You did good,” said Baal to Titus.

“I suppose it’s time to call it quits.” said Titus, “The world dances for us. It is very beautiful,”

“No need to redeem it. No need to say anything. We fade from newness and production and all that crap. Life sucks too much for that. What the world gives us doesn’t redeem, it allows us to interpret. It leads us on paranoid chases. It fucks us,”

“So, The Scientist was forever alone?”

“A thin bastard who never quite fit in. Reminds me of someone,”

“Hmm. Someday, children will claw up from the ground like zombies and shout ‘No more!’. Someday, I’ll wake up and the world will leave me alone. Yes, that’s it. He never saw anybody again. And if he can be okay with that, I can be,”

“You’re kinda mean,”

“No more than you,”

“No sympathy for fascists!”

“For sure. The moon is a psychopath. It will kill us!”

“Yes, but realistic fiction is a bore. Let the moon do its talk. The outside shines with bright light that contains no information,”

Titus and Baal shake hands. The moon steadily approaches them. They both leave the house. Everyone else in the world had disappeared. Baal did a mock wolf howl. Titus simply stared. The moon had it out for them specifically. Titus went to the bookstore.

“Is this a time for reading?” asked Baal.

“It’s a time for nothing,” replied Titus.

“Sometimes I think you have fantasies of being a little girl. Weirdo. Fucking weirdo,”

“I suppress things that harm me,”

“Hmm. Well, no-one else is around,”

“You are,”

“But if I was gone, you’d be too scared. That’s the bugger of it. If someone can see you, you can’t be your ugly self. But if no-one sees you, you curl up in the corner. It’d take a true stoic like The Scientist to be an ugly individual,”

The two came across the corpse of a homeless man. They knelt down to inspect it. The corpse came to life and stabbed Baal through the neck. Titus ran.

“That’s right, run, you stupid bastard! Run!” the homeless man screamed.

The homeless ex-corpse then proceeded to kiss the moon.

“I love you, goodnight!” he said.