“A million!” he said, slowly bringing one knee above each slab of dirt-stained concrete, and pressing down on it to raise him higher and higher towards the exit - “I will invest it and start my own business, and then I will...then I will...then I will not have to bow down to anybody. I’ll not have to be told by a less intelligent person what to do and what not to do, and what I can do and what I cannot do, and what I should do and what I ought not to do... And about love – romantic love – and this cultural obsession with physical intimacy...I’ll have all that money can afford – and even more because I will be a millionaire! A millionaire is a powerful man relative to his population, and people will flock to him because he has the ability to get more material goods than other people, and thus by virtue of this fact he has more nonmaterial social goods than the relative population...Is that not what I’ve wanted? Has that not been the goal since the beginning? It should be like this because I deserve it. I was mistreated all my life – I am owed this. Ha, my life is a movie after all.”

“But didn’t I come here for something else? Where am I going now?” he thought all of a sudden as he made it halfway up the staircase. “It is so weird; I came here for something other than money. As soon as I met those annoying girls, I deviated from my goal... I was going to steal the system from Aleku, my friend. That’s what I was going to do, and instead his daughter is making me a wealthy man. What for? Why? And why am I giving up the chance to rectify the past for a measly amount of money? What if...What if she doesn’t care that I am a millionaire? What if I cannot get over her regardless of the amount of money I have, and how much pleasure that can bring me? Maybe I can pay everyone off so that she is forced to talk to me...That’s a curious thought. Why would a man think like that? What brings me to think like this? Is it appropriate? But I am a millionaire...”

He pondered at himself. That woman in question, who he had been ruminating about everyday for the last few years since meeting her for the first time in Year 1 of his medical degree, and who dominated his mind even now when the prospect of riches was in his grasp, never yielded to his financial gifts, never allowed herself to be manipulated by his generous hand. It was something that still bewildered Rod to this day; not that in the past his financial gifts (his paychecks) worked to secure a relationship with his romantic interest, but she, that woman...that woman had something about her which Rod was unwilling to let go. She had this self-respect, and yet this compassion as well. Oh, it was remarkable that she allowed him to contact him for all those years even though it was one-sided, which contributed much to Rod’s resentment, and probably hers as well.

He tilted his head upwards to look at the slow, flickering ceiling light, which was long and thin and scarcely white with illumination, and thought some more. Indeed, he was a terrible communicator. His teachers had often said that about him: in fact, on parents evening, his A-level English Literature teacher complained to his mother, right in front of him, that he was a poor communicator. How upset he was inside about that remark, since that had been the chief complaint throughout his academic life, throughout his working life! He failed his Mcdonalds job interview because he was a poor communicator. When he was doing an unpaid trial for an apprenticeship in a barbershop, the Turkish owner absolutely humiliated him in front of an older boy who had gone to his primary school and his highschool, by insulting him repeatedly about his incompetence in cutting hair! Yes, he had completed a level 2 in barbering in college, but he was by no means professionally ready yet! That is why he sought to do an apprenticeship in the first place. All because he had said to the owner’s wife that he thought it beneath him to learn from their daughter, who had never gone to college to study barbering, and who had only started with them in the last couple of months, how to cut hair. No, he was sure that he had been bamboozled. It was the state which had failed him – it was these social institutions which had failed him. Institutions whose very existence depended upon grades, and performance metrics, which his peculiar condition, his poor communication skills, threatened to upend. But his parents, both of them, chided him relentlessly on his uselessness and his odd behaviour, his laziness and his bad personality... He did not drink, nor smoke, nor do drugs and yet those who did so were better off than him. He could not access the party that was the social sphere of human life.

“NO!” he screamed suddenly, his face contorted into a twisted grimace, his lips curled like pink coiled snakes. “I am the victim of a fucking society which has discriminated against me all my life. I have been abused by these social institutions, discriminated against, mutilated...” Then in a flash he was reminded of the last book he had picked up, which was an introduction to Marxism, where he had first encountered seriously the economic philosophy, and he recontinued his train of thought, “It is all about the means of production; they own the means of production and thus that is why people like me,” he winced as he said those last few words, “are discriminated against by the social infrastructure that surrounds us.” He then became even more scornful as his thoughts darkened like an enveloping shadow, thoughts of the potential he had that was not seen by other people, and he clenched his fists and said, “If I could, I would wipe out all these social institutions because they have let me down; they have kept me from pursuing what I want to do – all because they think that I am a stupid-”

He was now a step or two from the exit, his eyes dazzled by the dizzying bright light seeping through the cracks of the door frame, and he wobbled for a moment, scaring the life out of him; he felt as though, for a split second, that he would fall and smash his head upon the concrete ground below, or, even worse, strike the back of his head on the sharp edge of one of the bottom steps. He was in terror for that split second. For that breathtaking moment, he seemed to recall all that he had failed to do while at university: after his multiple failures of making sincere friendships and relationships with others like he had believed was possible for all human beings, he had become seriously aloof from everyone, stalking only social media for that cheap and effortless dopamine hit his brain received when a member of the opposite sex messaged him. He more or less ignored his new classmates, thinking to himself that it was pointless after all considering his previous ones accused him of misconduct and tried to get him kicked, not only out of his student accommodation (to which they succeeded with ease), but to kick him off the course as well. Well, they succeeded in doing just that by corroding his mental health to such a degree, and his reputation to such a degree, that it was advised to him by his lecturers that he take a year out of his course to “heal”, and to “get back on his feet”. “Well,” he wondered harder to himself, “well the people got what they wanted. Isn’t that right? It is supposed that we live in a representative democracy...well who represents me? Eh? Who represents me?” It had gotten to such a point, it had gotten to such a point...it had gotten to such a point, he was so isolated from the rest of his society, from the rest of his peers, that he had begun, a long time ago now in fact, well past the resentment stage all disturbed youth descend into, to look down on all of society. He started to laugh a little – at first, he cracked a smile, his eyes glinting with humorous delight – and then he bellowed. His heart was once again in disrepair.

With the Eastern European woman, at least, she had tolerated, or at the very least, forgiven him for his odd and eccentric behaviours, and even sometimes going so far as to humour his rants, but everyone else, excluding Aleku and Jam to a certain degree, but only to a very certain degree, they had vilified and ostracised him. They had bullied him and discriminated against him. How could he now integrate himself into a society of these people? No, he could not; he would have to reinvent society, remold it, reshape it into his own image. He had to take a page out of Nietzche and impose his will upon the world, the will which had been suffocated since his beginning. He will stomp on everybody and everything that threatens this goal, this mission, this striving...It was impossible not to still love that woman, that beautiful brunette. She was exceptionally compassionate, an excellent listener, well-read and able to conversate intelligently, classy in both appearance and mannerism, though hidden beneath such was a well of adverse experience difficult to uncover, except through the drip-feeding of information from her beautiful lips, and she was hard working to a fault – often at the expense of her own health. Many times she told him that she could not hang out with him because she was working to cover her coworker who had gone back to their home country. Inwardly, whenever this happened, Rod would feel greatly grieved, slighted even, and would grow increasingly resentful of her and their relationship. It took great effort to hold in this hot, heated anger, and in doing so he only served to worsen this effect. She drunk, and she smoked, no doubt to suppress her past misery to which life throws at its marginalised citizens. A few times he thought that he had seen her in the street; and a few times he was sure that it was her, by the way that she walked with grace and timidity, the way that her eyes were curved like a piece of art, by the way her chin was uniquely diamond-shaped...

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“Why,” he muttered, leaning against the door frame, which glowed with the light of the corridor beyond it, “why did she leave me? Why did she leave without explaining why? Oh, isn’t it unfair?” He fell against the hard wooden frame, his shoulder butting against it, as he became once again overwhelmed with feelings of anger and shame. “That girl,” he thought suddenly, thinking of Lena, “she reminds me of her...damn it.”

“Of course, with all this money I never have to work again, and I have come to realise over the years that money is correlated with stress levels, and stress is correlated with my psychological health, and my psychological health is correlated with my physical health; but what do I do? What can I do? I’ve already been surviving without having to work by reducing my expenses and making money here and there by selling the odd thing or two that was given to me by someone or other...” Rod thought, “but what difference will more money make to the quality of my life? Oh, sure, I can go holiday more frequently, but what will I do there? I’ll just end up spending it on pleasurable activities like deep-tissue massages and fancy restaurants. Suppose that satisfies my drive for socialisation, suppose I can replace friendships and romantic relationships with paid services, whereby people are paid sufficient sums to provide me with the social goods others can get freely and easily, for they are better and naturally equipped to get them...hm...Well and what then? What should I do with my wealth, my superior status, my pleasurable life? Is a pleasurable life all that I seek? Won’t I be accepted because of my superior status, my ability to achieve a pleasurable life relative to the poor and impoverished? Won’t people, mainly those of the opposite sex to whose’s good company I treasure more dearly than my own, be more receptive to my outlandishness because of my own superior wealth?”

These questions concerning his own future antagonised him greatly, appearing solemnly on his face like a grimacing gargoyle, much more than he himself was aware; he kept rummaging through his past for things that might confirm his ex-lover's current feelings for him, whether they were true or false, as his therapist constantly led him to believe.

“Could I have been wrong about her? Maybe she didn’t love me at all in the way that I thought she had loved me, in the way that I had loved her – in the way I still love her. She accused me of not accepting her...and maybe that was true; but did she accept me? Would she accept me now?” he asked himself in bewilderment.

He wondered there, the doorframe sinking into his fat, muscly shoulder (for he had the habit of lifting weights regularly), and he felt his brain strain under the sheer weight of the innumerable number of thoughts swirling around in there. After a few minutes of this, but which felt like an eternity to him, a thought struck him spontaneously and though by chance, as though in direct contradiction to his belief of biological and socioeconomic determinism, and catapulted itself into his throbbing, pulsating head.

“Hm...one-third of my life is already gone, wasted away, crumpled by the ineptitude of this terrible government,” he said rapidly, with confidence and an air of objectivity, of rationality, “I shall get into politics, and change this nation once and for all...Yes, yes, I shall go and uplift the weak and stomp on the strong. I will destroy capitalism...I mean, why not? I cannot imagine ever working, ever helping anybody out when the true root cause of their predicament, of their illness, is the capitalist machine, which runs off the exploitation and inequality of material and nonmaterial goods. I mean, think about it... why would I think that I am doing a good thing, that I am spending my life well and rightly taking care of people when I know the truth of the matter is that the system that surrounds us all is broken? How can I ignore that? I want to be the person who runs the system...I want a bird’s eye view of it all; I want to lead the charge to change everything. I want reform. I want...” he trailed off suddenly, and paused to catch his breath.

And immediately he realised where he was going in this chain of thought.

“What the hell am I thinking!” he cried, seizing his hair violently, turning so that he faced the opposite wall, his back pressed to the wall behind him. “Oh, what the hell is going on? All my life I have been under the illusion that I knew what the hell life was, but it’s not how it was portrayed to me. Everything is topsy-turvy! All that time wasted, all that time I spent miserable and... maybe Frued and Schopenheur and even Charles Fourier were right in that repression is the cause of must human unhappiness!” He wanted to be happy, he wanted to be free, but he knew that he could not because his heart was utterly devoted to that woman. “Oh, God!” he cried, “Oh, God, are you there?” He shuddered terribly; he forced himself out of the stairwell and into the bright, chaotic light of the corridor. He stared down it, his knees buckling under him out of nervousness. All that was stopping him from being a millionaire was his hesitation. Why was he hesitating? Why was he questioning? Why was he so stuck in this mindset that he had to think about every little thing over and over again? He thought of just running down the corridor, sprinting down it like a child...but he knew that he wouldn’t be a child, no, he would be an adult who sold out to capitalism.

There it was again!

A crazed, electric shudder passed through him, and a tremendous amount of guilt began to swirl in his gut. He felt himself torn, split into two, whilst at the same time unsure whether what he was experiencing was in fact real or imaginary. Was it implanted into him by the culture at large? By the mass media? By the government? By the corporations? Did he actually want this money? Would it not completely ruin him? He thought this because he himself admitted regularly to himself and to others, although he was a tiny bit ashamed about it, that he was not in fact a hard worker, and the more he had pondered about it the more he had come to realise the hard truth that all that had been created, all that had ever been of worth, was created and achieved through hard work. Even his failed relationship was hard work, and yet if it was any less hard work he probably, in his own opinion, would not have held it in such high esteem in his own mind. He was bewildered at this possibility. With every kind of effort he tried to suppress these reasonings, these feelings, trying to call to mind that he had the propensity to think in black and white terms – referencing all these psychological notions and concepts to affirm to himself that he could live in the world, that the world was alright and the world was not in need of changing, but that it was the individual that needed to fit into the world...Ah ha! That is what he then thought: his mind wandered over to psychology; he thought about how terrible it was to liberty, how much of a snake this psychology was, for it tricked the individual into thinking that he was the problem and not the society at large. He gritted his teeth and anger flared in him at this reasoning. He was sick at being lied to, sick of being tricked. He felt dizzy, and swayed from his right leg to his left leg, back and forth slightly. He thought that he heard a fly buzz in his ear, but was unsure if it was just his mind playing tricks on him. The young student looked about it, and wondered where all these doors led to, and whether his friends were behind any of them. With a sort of wishful thinking, the sort that he had always practiced and had honed in the many years that his highschool had taken up, he thought to himself that the woman would soon enough come back to him some way or other: perhaps by way of a phone call, or a chance meeting; she would hear of him through the grapevine that he had amassed a sizeable fortune and she would be so overwhelmed with interest and curiosity that she would finally come back to him.

He was overwhelmed with this internal craving, this fanciful imagination that he did not see the door directly in front of him swing open. When he did notice it, he lifted his head with a start and looked immediately around himself, he forgot at once all these intellectual musings and the ramifications of such delusions would necessitate to should he have continued down that dark path.