Chapter 6 — Strategy
When he opened his eyes, he was welcomed by the familiar sight of the lounge room and his first thought was how lucky he was to be back home.
The mind is a strange thing that can twist and stretch to no end and accommodate almost anything, no matter how logically unsound, when caught in the push and pull of human rationalizations.
Who would have thought only a few short months ago that this room, which he could not escape, would become the only place in existence where he could find some peace?
We all imagine we have all our ducks in a row, imagine we know what we could live with and what we could not, and think we’re in control. It only takes one minor adjustment, the slightest thing, a ridiculous detail, to wake us up to the fact that we’re barely one rung above an eating and breeding machine, programmed to stay alive at any cost.
Some people find a savage nobility in accepting this thought, in embracing their instinctual nature, they consider it a mark of courage in the struggle for survival they perceive life to be.
It clarifies their purpose, removes their internal conflicts and sets them free from the agony of moral choices and from the obligation to uphold one’s own standards of behavior in the face of insurmountable odds.
Tragically for him, he was not one of those people.
Even more tragically, he didn’t have a martyr bone in his body and this controlled maze in which he found himself trapped didn’t look like the hill he wanted to die on.
There was no point to it, really, just random iterations of chaos, which seemed both intentional and spontaneously generated, and which would have been interesting enough to entice him to take a closer look if only they weren’t peppered with death threats, absurd details and pointless interruptions.
Of course, that was the very nature of chaos, and if one decided to study it, its guiding principles oughtn’t surprise one.
But chaos doesn’t have guiding principles. That is a contradiction in terms, which makes sense once you remember that chaos thrives on the denial of logic.
One characteristic of the human spirit, which people only find in their darkest moments, is that it suddenly becomes clear when it finds itself inside danger, uncertainty and sorrow, and then one can see the real reality through its shell.
One can not deny its real nature going further, no matter how shockingly it presents itself.
‘I’m a lab rat,’ his rational mind announced proudly, as if it was some scientific breakthrough worth sharing, some cathartic watershed moment that solved all of his problems and precluded further research.
His soul bounced, embarrassed, between relief and defeat, violently contorted by his over-thinking mind, until his weak flesh, still reeling from its recent traumatic experience in ways a strong spirit can’t fix, won the fight and set his priorities straight: he had to find something that would help him stay warm.
Still shivering, he walked barefoot to the bar, trying to figure out where he was going to find clothes, since the ones he had on were ripped to rags and not weather appropriate.
Whenever he needed something, the lounge always seemed to provide, so he went to the kitchen, his heart filled with trust, expecting to find a change of clothes in the dryer or in one of the open lockers. There weren’t any.
‘Idiot!’ he mumbled to himself.
Talking to himself seemed like the reasonable thing to do under the circumstances, his only weapon against his total dissolution as a person.
Like Robinson Crusoe on a deserted island, he was beginning to understand that he would have to learn to live in a world with only one inhabitant. How does one adapt to being the only person in their universe? Does one forget to speak after a while? Or stop thinking altogether? To him it seemed quite the opposite. The more the world fractured itself away from his strange boxed existence, the more questions it seemed to rise, deep philosophical questions he never pondered before.
Before what, that was the question, because he couldn’t remember his previous life at all, if he ever had one; it was as if he’d been born to this room, fully grown, with no preexisting thoughts or emotions.
‘Maybe I’m a clone,’ he thought, not the most ridiculous hypothesis under the circumstances. And if so, what of it? Did that make him less of a person?
He shrugged. Nobody gets answers to these questions just for the asking, otherwise the world would have become a much better place a long time ago.
There he was, alone, raggedy and cold, holding a drink that didn’t yield the expected effect of getting his blood moving.
‘Is it me or it just got unpleasantly cold in here?’
Goose bumps on his arms confirmed that the sensation was real and that alarmed him, because he had figured out by now some of the patterns of this giant lab experiment.
If he couldn’t find clothes and the brandy gave him chills, there was no reason to expect that there would be any blankets anywhere, or hot soup, or anything that would help him keep himself warm if the temperatures kept dropping. He also understood that the temperatures will keep dropping.
The obvious solution presented itself, so depressing in light of recent events that he contemplated death by hypothermia as the better option, but the survival instinct is more powerful than one believes when one’s life is not being threatened.
He sighed, hating himself more than he ever thought possible, and chose the lesser of evils, the door to the mirrored lounge, in the hope that at least that room would be predictable and warm.
“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you!” a choir of male voices, endearingly off pitch for the extra touch of authenticity, urged him to join in mid-song.
“Happy birthday, dear Helmuth!”
‘Which one is Helmuth?’ he wondered, not taking himself out of consideration for obvious reasons.
“Here he is! Always late! Always late!” one of the guests wrapped his arm around his shoulder in an affectionate gesture, but instantly recoiled at the soil on his rags. “Good God, what did you get yourself into! Helmuth!” he raised his voice to draw the attention of a tall man who was in an excellent mood, compliments of the three glasses of champaign he’d already imbibed.
‘So I’m not Helmuth.’
“Get this guy some clothes, would you? He looks a fright!”
He turned around to face him.
“Also, a shower wouldn’t hurt you. You smell like you spent the night in the cooler.”
‘I probably did,’ he thought. ‘The only question is why?’
“Did you study that proposal I sent you?” his new friend asked him when he returned from the kitchen with a clean shave and a well-pressed suit.
It felt good to be clean, and the champaign was starting to get to his head, blending the sounds into a soothing background noise.
“I’m sorry, what? Aah, yeah. Yeah. Needs more research, though.”
“How much more research do you need? We’ve been running models for six months! I think we covered all the bases!” the friend jumped, suddenly offended. “I don’t know what to say about this. It feels to me like you’re not committed to this project!”
Not knowing how to answer, he stood there in silence, his head bowed so low it touched his chest. Would his answer make any difference? When he inevitably left here, wherever here was, will his decision affect something critical that had been going on in the life of his alter ego, and if so, was he morally obligated to care? Was it reprehensible, in principle, to make decisions about something he knew nothing about? He could be agreeing to sinking a continent for all he knew. He could be agreeing to save hundreds of people from certain death. There was no way of knowing which and no end to the moral agony of figuring out the right thing to do in the absence of this knowledge.
“Well?” his friend refused to let him off the hook.
“Could you flesh out the details for me a bit? I only skimmed over the proposal. I’ve been busy, you know how it is!”
“Oh, so you never read it. That’s what I thought.” The friend got up with a hurt expression on his face. “I thought you were serious about this and I’m sorry I was wrong.”
He sat there and watched his friend leave, noticing how his shoulders stretched back in an elastic, quick and subtle motion which reminded him of tension wire — his only visible reaction to a painful betrayal of trust.
He felt suddenly guilty and ashamed, despite having absolutely no control over this situation, and realized he had just become a jerk without doing anything.
‘There really is no way I could be ok in this environment. No way at all. It is not possible.’
No matter what he did, it would be wrong. How can one be expected to function in a world in which one is parachuted without being asked, unprepared, and with no time to learn anything about it? If the definition of intelligence is an individual’s ability to adapt to new circumstances, he wasn’t faring very well right now. He got instantly aggravated by this unfair game, only to collapse in a bout of laughter. Of course it wasn’t fair! Fair chaos! That would be the day!
His friend threw him a quick glance, startled by the inappropriate laughter; he looked really hurt.
‘I’m a monster,’ he thought, for no reason. ‘I should have said yes to that proposal, whatever it was. What difference does it make, anyway?’
He searched for solace at the bottom of his champaign bottle, found it empty and wobbled to the kitchen to get another.
‘This stuff packs a punch!’ he muttered, in disbelief that he could get so hammered from one glass of bubbly, and he wasn’t even surprised when the familiar sound of muzak welcomed him on the other side of the door.
