“If you, Jam, had half as bad of a life as me you would surely covet such a device as what Aleku has in his possession.”
“There is no going back,” remarked Jam, “not for you anyway. You are tormented by your past mistakes; that is good, that is how things ought to be. You have told us all plenty of times the abuses you have committed against those who tried to be your friend. Must I drag them up again for you to get it through your thick skull that you are a bad and terrible human being?”
“Woah, Jam, when I say it, I say it in a half-serious, half-joking kind of way, but when you say it, it just cuts to the bone,” chuckled Aleku. “But you do bring up a good point, actually,” continued the businessman, lifting his finger to his fat upper lip, “we cannot empathise with you because you are in a league of your own in terms of how utterly depraved you are. I mean, really, do you remember when we went on that school trip-”
“Wroclaw?” butted in Jam; he quickly blushed when he remembered as well, and said, cracking up in laughter for the first time since joining the call, “oh, yeah, that time I got lost in Warsaw.”
“Of all places,” roared Aleku heartily. When he stopped wheezing and coughing and spluttering all over his bedroom, his face suddenly flattened, and he wore a giant frown, and said, crossly, his thick, bushy eyebrows furrowed, “I distinctly remember that time, for that was the time I had to go and take a five hour train to a city I had never before visited. I still hold resentment towards you, Rod.”
“Me? Why?” said he exasperatedly.
“Because you refused to come with me to go and help our mutual friend. It is a very basic thing to go and help a friend in need.”
“But you understood why I did not go, right, Jam? There was no need for two of us to waste money on tickets when one was good enough.”
“That wasn’t the point,” said Aleku sternly. “It just goes to show how we are in different leagues. You are a selfish prick.”
“Jam?” Rod looked at him with surprise.
Jam simply shook his head and lowered his eyes.
“See how offended he is?” said Aleku.
“This isn’t fair,” cried Rod, “if I had gone also, the outcome would not have changed whatsoever. And besides, it was your native country – you spoke the language – and it was not mine. Perhaps if it was London or some other place...”
“I would eat broken glass for my friends, but you wouldn’t simply buy a train ticket for yours. We are not the same.”
“Leave it,” said Jam suddenly, “his brain is still stuck in the child stage; his ego is too enlarged for him to listen to reason.”
The businessman laughed. “That is why I treat you differently, my boy, for you are too stupid to comprehend how to actually act towards people. Remember when you went up to one girl outside of the changing rooms, who was a friend of a friend might I add, and said that all girls belonged in cages? We all laughed at it then, but who knew that in doing so we would in part help to create such a monster as yourself?”
“Oh, give me a break,” muttered Rod. “Sure, maybe...I am not sure,” he said, thinking out loud.
Jam squinted his eyes and studied the young student’s shifting facial expressions. “See, you have never seriously considered, until now, how your words could have affected that young girl, have you? And because you went unchecked at that moment, you carried on throughout the next decade acting like that because the laughter of your friends were interpreted by you as a source of validation for the specific behaviour, and thus, it is not unreasonable to hypothesise that the conceptualisation and association with an unpleasant emotion of a particular behaviour’s consequence towards another human being, most notably towards the opposite sex, was never fermented, for you were always rewarded by the company you chose to keep. Therefore, it is not surprise that you then went on and tort-”
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“Not so,” said Rod angrily, “I-”
“Shut up for once,” interjected Aleku, “and listen to the man: he speaks wisdom.”
“Wisdom? Wisdom? The man speaks utter hypocrisy and pseudoscience!”
“You know that I am right,” said Jam, his voice betraying a hint of passion, “you are not as smart as you think that you are.”
“Shut up,” said Rod, his face aflush with red hot anger.
“When I reflect upon how you were in highschool, it all becomes clear as to why you are the way that you are,” said Jam.
“And yet,” continued Aleku, in his high-pitched, musical voice, and with that lengthy, brown cigar seesawing between his thick, pink lips, a habit which he coincidentally took up when he chose to end all communication with Rod during Covid, “I believe that I have scarcely touched the surface of your failures. Now that I think about it, all that you have committed in your young adulthood were defects that were clearly present with you in highschool. I therefore believe that if you were to go back to your highschool days, and commit yourself fully and completely to the opposite action, the alternative way of doing things to your natural, baser impulses, were to control your dysregulated emotions, were to control every instance of despair, every instance of anger, every instance of jealousy – I believe that your mental illness would become so impalpable that you would drop all this bitterness and resentment completely, and return to the previous personality you had before the devastating trauma which you say occurred at age eleven –to something even better, grander, more pleasant than your past untainted personality, it might do. But that would require the ultimate sacrifice, the ultimate redemption arc – something to which is completely unachievable for a man like yourself without outside help. If you were to go back, you would certainly need external intervention...No, not just external – it would have to be divine. The humiliated little child has unfortunately found a way to survive in the adult body. The personality disorder within you is just so strong. You are flogged when you refuse to act. You cannot even think of any other way. Every impulse in you strives to attack those you come in contact with, or rather, those who come in contact with you. Everybody who has come in contact with you has utterly humiliated you, and everyone who you have come in contact with you humiliate. Nobody can humiliate that which has already been humiliated. You humiliate yourself so that nobody can humiliate you. You are an expert at self-humiliation. Nothing remains inside then that isn’t designed, evolved rather, to be worthy of humiliation; the more the better. Nothing remains then but the memories of humiliation. Nothing remains then but the thoughts of humiliation. You are worthy of nothing but humiliation because you are a creature whose only ever known humiliation. You are worthy of nothing but humiliation because you are humiliation. Nobody wants to be humiliated for it is painful. But they were only humilated once or twice. You were born in it, molded by it. You didn’t stop being humiliated by everyone around you until you had left home, by then it was nothing to you but pleasure! The only way to get rid of this propensity for humiliation is to be punished for it, which you are now being. Go back, and you will only humiliate some meek and poor soul in your place with the same ignorance we had. It has been said that mistakes are costly, and somebody must pay. And it has also been said that experience is simply the name we give our mistakes. It is from these mistakes, and our mistakes only, that we truly learn. You, Rod Beasely, you yourself, with your terrible personality and your terrible behaviour, you have made many of the same mistakes over and over again, especially in your, albeit very brief, romantic relationships, acted in ways that are indeed very shameful to even repeat like-”
“Shut up!” shouted Rod Beasely, forgetting the people about him, “Shut up! You too are against me. I cannot believe this. If only I could escape you two, if only I could make better friends, friends higher up on the social echelon, friends that were more popular than you freaks. Just shut up. Don’t speak about highschool. Let me just return and fix my fucking life. Or, rather, return her back to me, convince her to become my friend again.”
For nearly fifteen minutes Rod stood outside Weatherspoons, motionless, with dead and grey eyes like the clouds above. He was barely aware now of his surroundings, for his entire consciousness was devoted to the rumination of the past, of his mistakes, of those he had lost. Suddenly, a picture of his first girlfriend emerged, and he there and then almost broke out into a violent frenzy – for it was too much to bear! His mind was a film reel of violence. Yet he was disgusted at the mere thought of doing such things. The few words that his Eastern European friend had said to him – words that were said to humiliate him, no doubt, and with condescension – had so affected him that it was though at that very moment he had just been exposed to the secrets of the universe, for his heart, which was before full of anxiety and fear, became at once warm and excited at the thought of what he was about to do.