(For a while, some friends and I planned out a multimedia story with some vague, ill-defined inspiration from vaporave. Like a lot of grop art projects, this one dissolved, but I'm going to have some fun and continue it on my own every now and then. Hope you enjoy!)
The day begins, except it’s already noon. You fed yourself breakfast with half a grapefruit, and congratulated yourself for it, though only because you’ve been told that only if you appreciate these small steps can you ever make progress: become a functional human being. Today you’re on a roll: not too many hours wasted so far, you jump in the shower because you understand that’s what normal people do. You pee in the shower, because that’s what everyone does when they’re home, and look at your piss as it pools around the drain. Dark like a dead leaf. Remember to hydrate yourself later, but for now rush out of the shower and put on the first full set of clothing you can reach, anything to replace the blanket you slept in and wore like an ill-wrapped toga throughout the morning.
Three minutes to noon, and in the four hours you’ve been awake, you’ve done what anyone can do in twenty minutes. Try not to think anymore about what’s wrong with you: that’s how you spent the morning, but that’s not how you can afford to spend your day.
What next? Music. If you don’t play music you’ll only hear the howling wind that tormented you all morning, too perfect an accompaniment to your grim contemplation. YouTube: but wait, the site recommends some lectures with interesting titles. Despite how minute the predicament, you wonder how you’ll ever get through it. Then you remember how you managed to dress yourself (another small step to appreciate, if you find yourself capable) and decide you can proceed only in a rush.
YouTube search term: “Rush playlist.” Select the top result: “Freewill.” Do your best not to contemplate the subject. You only sought music to drown out the wind. Figure out what you need to do.
(No: figure out what you want to do. Know that you have tasks to accomplish, but don’t forget to do this one either.)
Take a break and eat the other half of that grapefruit. You have a lot left to do today, and half of it passed before you even get started. Don’t pause to ask why you do this to yourself: just get back to work.
You’ve completed your first task! But even though you know there’s a second task, you don’t know what it is. Take two breaths and make sure your jaw stays unclenched: you’ll figure out what you need to do.
Almost three hours later you realize night has fallen, and “Freewill” by Rush has started playing again. While you can’t say you’ve done nothing, all you’ve accomplished since you completed that first task has been an effort to address mistakes you made yesterday, and you can’t help but think that you’ve made even more mistakes while trying to address the prior.
Without anything else to do, you decide you’ll push forward. That grapefruit will keep you going for another hour at least, though now you realize that’s exactly when you’re scheduled to meet with your virtual team.
You decide that’s a problem you can deal with 45 minutes from now. In the afternoon you forgot the maxim you adopted when you streaked from the shower: to rush forward without hesitation. Now you just need to know what to rush into next.
Nothing caught your interest, and you realize with a sigh that you didn’t even start figuring out what you want to do. Instead you spent half an hour with eyes closed, dreaming while awake of simple pleasures you immediately forget when your alarm warns you that the meeting’s about to begin.
The virtual meeting goes fine, or anyway as much as your teammates can tell how little you feel invested in the project, you can spin a few ideas off the top of your head that keeps everyone from freaking out. You actually laugh, thinking back on it (the first time you’ve laughed all day), because every supposed ambiguity that caused them so much panic had been easy enough to unravel for someone who just doesn’t care so much. One hour later, they might think you’re an idiot, but for now you’re a productive idiot: five minutes after the meeting ends, and you’ve already got the outline finished.
You’ve been awake for eleven hours, and you decide that’s long enough. Whatever’s left to do, you can do on a smartphone while you lay in bed thinking of the unknown tasks for you to accomplish tomorrow, and of long list the mistakes you’ll have to fix. You realize you forgot to drink water: something else to fix tomorrow. Something you should plan, but you don't ever follow your own plans, don't ever see anything through to the end. All you do is rise again, again, again: your lifetime routine.
But tomorrow, you tell yourself, you'll do your best to get out of the house, if you remember. Not good to stay inside all day: you end up having days like these. Fall asleep, reenter that reverie even though you'll only forget it when you wake.
. . .
"Panic…" Nachary Zewell says in his sleep, head resting in the crook of his elbow upon arms folded atop the bar of La Ville de la Vague Vapeur, his index finger tapping rapidly on the countertop. Tuwile de Ville stands and watches, mop in hand, as her sleeping employee’s momentary of unconscious panic subsides, with her now-peaceful indentured barista drooling in his open-mouthed sleep across the bar. Still, she spends a few minutes watching him twitch through his continuing dream until, suddenly, she hears him stop breathing; but just before she grows concerned, Nachary smiles and says, "…Ignore," meanwhile tapping his index finger in the pool of his saliva, and Tuwile finally smashes Nachary in the head with the her mop's dirty brush.
"Excuse me?" Nachary both mumbles and shouts as he slides off his stool, flailing his arms to deflect any further blows before he gained his bearings.
"We've got a customer waiting on a hypespresso," Tuwile says shortly, and watches Nachary shake his head (in his peculiar habit, a sign she only knows from experience to mean that he understands) before struggling to enter the cleaning code for La Ville's vapolog hypespresso dispenser.
”I just had this dream," he yawned. "For some I worked at an old computer... an artifact, I guess. I don’t even know what I did, but it was definitely pointless. I clicked some buttons, I talked to people on video streams, it seemed to make sense to them. Otherwise I worked alone." Failing again to enter the correct codes for the hypespresso dispenser, Nachary rubs his eyes and, in the same motion, brushed back his mop of hair before trying once more. "Nothing I did mattered at all. I even dreamed it in second-person, with some voice telling me what pointless act I’m doing next." He shakes his head, and fails a third time at entering the codes. "I can’t tell if it’s the most neutral dream I’ve ever had, or if it’s just the nightmare of nightmares, where nothing even happens except permanent stagnation. Either purgatory or hell, with no way to tell.
Tuwile nods, and watches Nachary begin his fourth attempt. "Doesn’t sound too different from what you’ve told me about what you've done before. Too bad you can't go back to that, because a second-world alien from a third-tier planet could clean those machines faster than you," Tuwile remarked off-handedly.
Uninsulted (either from the galactic caffeine or from his inability to dislike Tuwile), the goonish Nachary pauses a moment in his struggles at entering codes. Finally he decides he might as well give in to the blatant saltiness she radiated, and in which Nachary himself neurotically indulged: "Well now you’re just being rude," he says, now punching the correct keys. "And absurd," he adds as the hypespresso dispenser begins its self-cleaning operations. Nachary uses an open hand, as if presenting the keypad standing within his palm, to gesture for Tuwile to input the customer's order.
"I believe it goes, 'The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world,'" Tuwile replies, punching the key-series for the customer's order with absent-minded expertise. "So, kindly respect that rule and engage in silence," came her quick and sharp reply. Due both to the absurdity of her statement, and to its cutting nature, they both know soon customers will hear a scene.
"No," Nachary answers, collecting the customer's cup of hypespresso, "I believe it goes, 'The absurd is the essential concept and the first truth.' So we’re both absurd in an absolute sense of knowledge, whether we know the knowledge or not," he says, handing the cup to a three-armed amphibian dressed in a raincoat, oddly enough, and also equipped with an umbrella.
"I feel targeted," Tuwile says to Nachary before moving to take the next customer's order.
Nachary turns back to the hypespresso dispenser and smiles at his own unpolished reflection. "Good!" he says, admiring the many plaques collecting between his teeth.
Their next customer (one without a face at all, and a body composed of nothing more than polygons at low resolution) at least offers them a compromise: "'So it goes'?" he suggests, believing it something mundane enough that both can agree on it. Neither Tuwile nor Nachary hear him, however: either because of the noise of the hypespresso dispenser, the density Mal-Pal smoke-cloud enshrouding La Ville de la Vague Vapeur, or because neither Tuwile nor Nachary have ever desired anything that even resembles a compromise.\n\nNachary turns and hands the cup to the customer.
"Anything else?" he asks.
"Honestly?" the polygon-person replies. "I wouldn’t mind a grapefruit."
