“I’ll let you know what I am indeed desperate for,” replied Rod breathlessly; his expression was twisted with bitterness.
“I am listening, Rod,” said his on and off again friend.
“It isn’t much, I tell you that, Aleku ,” answered the medical student; “and I do not think you will understand at all. I’m afraid your privilege would blind you to it.”
Aleku bed squeaked again, but this time it was followed by an ugly grunt. “I really must go, but I’ve been without such amusement for so long that I’m compelled to listen more to your unhinged rants, your copious excuses, your rigid and airtight explanations for your misery. Go on, tell me like you’ve told me countless times before the thing that you think that you need to be happy. I did think for a second that you had just shared what you indeed were most desperate for, or rather, what you thought you were desperate for; but it is exciting to me that you seemed to have developed further from what you have held on for years the thing which has dominated your mind since, the thing which has made you more insufferable than that which was insufferable incarnate already. And yes, I call it a thing because, like I have said earlier, you see people as things and not as they truly are. I promise you that I will understand you. We went to the same highschool after all.”
Rod descended the steps leading out from the bridge to the neighbourhood he destined to be half an hour before, when he exited the student accommodation, and left the warm, yellow light of the streetlamps, which bathed the entire centre of the city all night from dusk to dawn, and entered a quiet road blanketed in darkness. He merged onto the pavement, where a short distance ahead split off into two: a footpath next to the water crowded with trees, and another, wider path, hugging the road. He picked the former. The trees in front of him swayed gently, and their heavy dark leaves, a few of which caught in the moonlight, glinting dazzlingly white, flapped like a flock of birds. Beneath the trees, submerged in the grass, clusters of Fen violets began to shift to and fro, the slight night breeze opening and closing the four corners of their petals, so that it looked like a bunch of purple mouths opening and closing, whistling a sweet, breathy tune. Rod felt as though he was back in highschool hearing the mockery of his entire year group again. “What if,” he thought bitterly, “I could destroy the whole school system? It is school that has made me the way that I am. It is their fault.”
“I want to be popular,” said Rod finally after some time, looking over his shoulder at the river to the side of him. “Yes, I want my ex... friend’s friendship back, but when I think back on the past, I cannot but admit that she was attracted to my social status. I was popular back then. By back then, I mean first year of university. Back then, I had lots of friends – both same sex and of the opposite sex – and I was even dating! But why do I refer to her as an ex-friend, and not as an ex-girlfriend? I’ll tell you why: I refer to her as an ex-friend because she was my friend – a true friend! She accepted me; she accepted me, Aleku, she accepted me. She found fault with my behaviour, yes, but she made the astute separation of myself and my behaviour – one that had been cojoined since I was twelve, no, since birth.” As he said this, he struck his chest exasperatedly, a pained expression on his face as though he had just been winded. “I hung out with lots of people... And what I don’t understand is that she liked that about me – it's what attracted her to me. I thought it making her my one and only friend, my one and only interest would endear her to me further; but no, the more I pushed, the more she retreated; the more I tried, the more I lost. I still remember when I met her: it was in a cafe...the first time I laid eyes on her...she was sleek, defined, a natural beauty; her long brunette hair flowed down the nape of her neck and the crux of her back like an untroubled river. It was just like me to want to disturb it. When I met her blue glistening eyes, those cat eyes, those sharply defined Egyptian eyes, I felt as though all the sufferings of my life were at once justified, were at once made all right, were at once made complete sense. The storm had quieted. The sky had calmed. You know, Aleku, my history, how completely inept I am at social communication. But here, my childhood friend, here, I finally had the life I had dreamed of all those years since the beginning of highschool. Oh, Aleku, you should have seen me, seen me to believe me, I was, for once in my life, accepted. Until I met her, I was a miserable wretch. I was a man seeped in so much guilt over how I treated my first girlfriend (what a monster I was), and so this was another chance for me – another chance to rectify my wrongs! I contained myself to the best of my ability – contained my emotions, that is – all until I couldn’t anymore. I...I don’t know how else to explain it, Aleku, but I was, like I said it before, and I will say it again now, I was for the first time in my life...At least, since I was twelve, I was normal. Normal, I say, normal! Can you believe it? Of course you can’t, but I was normal – she made me feel normal. I was normal. Normal! But then her friend..my friend...he was jealous you see, you see? He was jealous and he told me things that I wish I had not taken to, but I did, I did...I did and I let her have it, yes, I did I let her have it and that’s why I love her, dammit, I love her because she took none of it, I tell you – that woman changed me, dammit. That woman was a good woman. I told her, I did, I told her, Aleku, I told her. And you know why I reconnected with you all those months back, back in Christmas time? You know why? Because of her. Because of her. Because of her I reconnected with you after several years. Because of her suggestion. She was the one who proposed to me to reconnect with you; she was the one. And yet you made fun of her...You vile, you utterly vile, self-serving creature. You privleged twat!” Rod snarled and looked about him in a panic, hanging his gaze on the one second story lit window across the road. “No,” he said suddenly, covering his wet face with his hands, “no, I am a bad man. I am guilty.”
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“All these problems that you have listed are solvable, Rod. This is why I don’t read self-help books because I generally think that 99% of problems people face are materialistic in nature and can be worked out by changing the material reality around them. The system I have developed can achieve this if (and this is a big if) it is adopted nationwide by the government. No university would profess this of course, this general esoteric theory on how life should be organised, but it works for me, and I am a billionaire, so I assume that there’s something to it. The biggest detriment to improving your life is yourself and your mentality keeping you locked in that. But what if we could change your mentality? The lack of a willingess to change brings about stagnation, which then brings about depression and darker thoughts. This in turn leads people turning to vices, evidenced via the Rat Paradise (not Rat Utopia) experiment where rats were given two choices of water, one normal, one laced with heroin. When they were caged, they would always go to the heroin water and die from overdoses. When kept in a paradise environment, however, where they had open space, other rats to play with, toys, tunnels, places to rut in and so on, only a small number would ever get addicted to the heroin water, most would taste it and then go to the normal water. Therefore, If you have dark thoughts, it is worth seeing what is in your immediate environment and whether you can change it and how.”
“I don’t know what the fuck you are talking about sometimes,” remarked Rod, raising his head to the night sky, his tears sliding down his reddened cheeks, “the way that you think reminds me of a pre-soviet agricultural peasant before they were forcibly indulstralised.”
“You are so up your own ass that it boggles my mind you haven’t fallen into a ditch yet,” replied Aleku. “I was going to help you but now you can suck it.”
“I do not mean to insult you,” said Rod, “but you always seem to miss the point.”
“No,” snapped Aleku, “you are the one who misses the point. Dammit, you are such an insufferable asshole. I am sick of repeating the same thing over and over with you, so that is why I devised the system in the first place.”
“What do you mean?” asked Rod.
“The system has another purpose other than medical.”
“What is this other purpose?”
“You’ll have to wait and find out.”
Rod sighed, and then started to chuckle, and then broke out into a laugh. “I cannot be helped because I have tried everything. My ex-friend (the woman I have been ruminating about for literally years has a restraining order on me! How can I be helped?”
“You deserve it you moron. Go and move on.”
“That’s what all my therapists have said, but they are so dismissive of it. I hoped that you wouldn’t be, but here you are,” Rod said. “I think about her all the time, like I have said, and I am wrecked by guilt because of the way that I treated her. How can you not have guilt? How does it not destroy you?”
“I don’t have that problem with guilt because I can just make new friends.”
“And you call me the narcassist...” he replied, lost in thought for a moment. “I can make new friends, but I cannot keep them. It has been this way since I was twelve.”