Indeed, the rating is for language. Something in sincerity --
_____________
“I love you,” she said. “Like the absurd, irreverent, incredibly fun thirteen year old brother I never had.”
“Just like him,” said Christian, grinning with an insincerity she couldn’t kill. “And I love you too.”
The house was ordered; things that weren’t in their places still managed to communicate the fact that they did have a place, and that if you were paying attention, you should discover where it was. Yet it was also clear that this house had children, although mostly children had it. Discordant paintings, like windows into a more sensible world, smiled in a self-satisfied way from the symmetrical walls. And a girl with dirty blonde hair and a vague sort of face sat beside a boy with dark hair and a good sort of face; they looked almost as contradictory as the funny paintings littering the walls.
“You know what I decided?” said the nameless girl.
Christian said something dirty and absurd, just like his feet, and the girl took a moment to decide whether is was funny or not.
“Nope, that wasn’t funny.”
“Yes it was.”
“No, it wasn’t. But I will tell you what I decided anyway. I decided that doing whatever you want is boring. I used to do whatever I wanted -- I was vaguely atheist -- and then one day I got so bored that I almost died. Causing me to once and for all decide to find a profound, exciting, preposterous challenge to occupy my stupid head.”
There was a short, indecisive silence where Christian muttered something unintelligible.
“Was it a good idea, Christian?” she asked, smiling because she was happy that he existed.
“Staying alive is a big enough challenge for me,” said Christian suddenly, and then jumped to his feet, dragging her with him. “Let’s climb on the roof and then throw ourselves onto the trampoline! Whoever doesn’t die, wins. Okay?”
“Staying alive is sort of a challenge,” she said, allowing him to pull her toward the door. “It will be for a while, but it’s one of those challenges that only challenges part of you, and the other part gets angry for being left out. You know what I mean?”
It had started to rain. The sky seemed to grow larger, and then sink across the world like it thought it was the ocean -- which it clearly was not. The trees were smeared, their green dripping with the rain into a metallic puddle of grey. Of course Christian wasn’t feeling all that concerned about slipping off the roof, but the girl with the absurd ideas to match the absurd world wasn’t all that excited about hurting people for no reason. She may have been oddly unique in this respect.
“It’s raining, freak. We’ll die,” she said , not letting him pull her out the door.
“Oh fine. Then tell me the story of where you got your pants ripped off falling out of that tree.”
“But you still want to know what I decided was more exciting than just staying alive,” she protested, pulling him back toward the couch. “Because staying alive is like making a great pizza -- if you don’t do something with the pizza once its done (eating being only one of the many options) it’s kind of a waste.”
Christian offered something disgusting that you could do with a pizza besides eating it. She cringed. And then laughed just because she liked him.
“I was thinking more food fight, but that works too, I guess. Maybe. But really, what do you --”
“Okay, okay!” he shouted, flinging himself onto the couch with some amount of agility. “Just tell me. You’re right, staying alive isn’t all that great. What’s better then?” His eyes looked more fascinating when he was asking a question. She wished they would stay that way. And then she sat down on the coffee table in front of him, crossing her legs and leaning forward like she was about to tell the most dangerous and orthodox secret of the age. Which she might have been.
“Well, I got some books, right? Books written by all these religious people who seemed to think they knew what the point of life was. It was easy to tell which one’s were stupid bastards -- and those were the one’s who seemed to think that having fun was, like, some kind of strange evil that needed to be abolished. I threw them at the wall. But then I found this one guy, and I didn’t even know what his religion was until later. But he was crazy. Like legitimately insane.”
She paused, her eyes sparkling, and Christian finally looked faintly intrigued. “So, only insane people really know what the world is about?” He snickered, gazing out the window at the dripping of just about everything.
“Sort of. Depending on how you define crazy. But you know what he said? he said that everything you believe, you should believe violently, and that telling the truth is only as good as being told the truth, and that the world is allowed to make no sense if you decide to make your own sense, and that you can never really lose, because no matter what somebody loves you when you’re stupid, pathetic --”
“Disgusting,” added Christian.
“Because I love you even though you’re disgusting. And I can’t forget you, because people are the only things I don’t ever forget. Mostly because they’re the only things worth remembering. Climbing into someone’s brain is like turning the world upside-down, and I haven’t gotten bored of it yet. Or, in other words, knowing people is the only thing really worth doing. Finding people like me. People who want to know you just because you exist.”
“I do exist.” Existing was clearly something to be proud of judging by his tone.
“I think I do too.” She paused. “Have you ever read one of those stupid philosophers who writes a whole book about the fact that he isn’t sure he exists? Doesn’t that seem like a waste of time? I mean, of course you can’t really be sure of anything, but you have to decide to be sure, otherwise you get nowhere. You have to decide to believe something unbelievable before you can move, or think, or change. Humans can’t really exist, and yet they do anyway.”
She leaned back, her cheeks red from a million different things running around in her ridiculous head, and then she fell off the coffee table laughing.
“Sounds kind of like that weird movie Pay it Forward,” said Christian, ignoring the fact that she was on the floor laughing. “Except that no one gets lit on fire. I guess I could just light you on fire,” he told her, getting up off the couch and kicking her in the back. “So,” he sort of said to himself, “if you don’t want to be bored, try to really know and love someone. It’s fucking hard, I guess.”
She tried to nod, having heard him despite her gails of laughter. But finally she recovered herself, staring at the ceiling like it spoke to her.
“Did you notice that when you laugh at something childish and absurd you laugh longer than if it’s about something like --”
“Like sex.”
“Yeah, like sex.”
“Oh my god, you said sex!” squealed Christian, dancing around like an affronted Trevor.
“I love Trevor,” she said getting to her feet slowly. “But you shouldn’t hit him so much. He’s, like, half your size.”
“It’s cool to be beat up people who are smaller than you,” laughed Christian.
“No, because then it would be cool to beat me up.”
“But you’re older. Four flipping years older. So it‘s different.”
She didn’t respond, knowing that he knew he was wrong. And then she sat down, imagining how strange it would be to actually see out of someone else’s eyes. Imagining it was almost as good, really, and she thought Christian was extra cool because he had eyes to be looked out of. Some people just walked around dead. But Christian did his best to be alive, and he was good, and she loved his freckles, and the way he was (almost) always sorry when he had made a mistake.
Sort of like her brother. He used to always say, “I didn’t mean to,” whenever he would hurt her -- but no one believed him, and so he stopped saying it. Now she believed him, though. She believed that Christian (most of the time) meant good things. Because she loved him.
_
Once upon a time there was a thirteen-year-old boy named Christian. He had a bastard for a brother and a witch for a sister. His parents succeeded at teaching him one thing: This is stupid. And he never forgot it.
He had freckles from the sun, and his hair was dark and almost always stuck up in some way or another. But it wasn’t what he looked like that made him so brilliant. He was smart, and sometimes his eyes looked like he was seeing something that no one else could see. Which was probably the case, since his mind didn’t always fit as well as the rest of him. It could actually be quite bothersome.
What was the fucking point of being smart anyway? What was the point of knowing anything? School definitely didn’t make it clear. Who cared who married the Queen of Austria even though she wasn’t even hot? Or, even better, why learn anything at all? Well, so you could get a good job. But why get a good job? Clearly to make a lot of money. But why make a lot of money? So you can do whatever you want whenever you want. But why do whatever you want whenever you want? Because it’s fun. Why is it fun? He didn’t know.
Was it just an animal instinct? Was he just a machine that wanted (for evolutionary reasons) to fulfill whatever inclination he felt? But somehow that didn’t seem to explain all of it. Yes, the desire to eat was brought on by the will to survive, but sometimes he wanted to eat when he wasn’t hungry at all, and when it was nowhere near necessary -- so why?
These questions seemed to draw him in circles, never really accomplishing much more than giving him a damned headache. Just the fact that he was asking them seemed to be some kind of answer, but he couldn’t figure out what sort of answer that was.
“Hi, Christian,” they all said. But he ignored them.
The morning sun punched through the limp curtains, causing him to roll over in bed, dragging a mountain of dirty blankets over his strange head. He wanted to tell the world he was tired, have the sun feel some amount of compassion and make an about-face, giving him just a few more precious hours of forgetfulness. But the world was animal, alien, gnawing at him like a vaguely faceless mutation of something horribly good. It heard his plea, but it just laughed.
“Get up, bastard,” said a familiar voice.
Christian said nothing -- his door slammed with a livid sort of violence. Like he had done something to evoke such strong emotions. It was just stupid.
School was waiting. Hours of staring into the blank face of a huge incongruous creature, and more hours of throwing himself off dilapidated futility, hoping that no one would catch him so that when they didn‘t, people couldn‘t laugh at him for hoping. It’s funny to not believe something simply so that no one can accuse you of believing it. Sometimes people believe or don’t believe things based on their own merits -- that seems like the sensible way.
Help me, he thought. Please, make this stop. The sun just got brighter.
“You ruin everything,” repeated the world in his head, “you disgusting excuse for a person. You will always ruin everything. Why did you do that? What’s wrong with you? Stop existing. Just stop. You obviously meant to hurt me. Don’t lie. You meant it. I know you did. Kiss me, Christian, and all your problems will go away. I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.”
The world was cruel, and it stuffed your ears with so many things you couldn’t hear past it, or around it, or under it. Of course it wasn’t always clear whether or not there were other things to hear. But he suspected.
“Christian!” The house shook. The voice was like nails. “Get up off your dirty ass! Don’t you dare make me late again!”
Christian willed himself not to flinch. He took a deep breath, and then, laughing, climbed out of bed. Rubbing his burning eyes, he grabbed a t-shirt and jeans, pulling them on with only one thought: Which place is better? The question repeated in his head over and over while he dragged some gel through his hair and shoved some possibly important items into his back pack.
“I’m ready,” he muttered to no one as he left his room. It didn’t seem all that unfortunate that the floor pasted in dirty clothes, and the walls pasted in dirty posters, arbitrary numbers and drawings, was going to be left behind. People always said they hated sharing their rooms with other people, but they never minded sharing it with loads of nasty, non-thinking crap. Christian sometimes thought his room might be better off with a thinking thing, even if it was dirty like him.
“What is wrong with you?” asked his good mother as he fell into a chair before a bowl and a box of sugary cereal.
“I want to ruin your life,” he said, chuckling to himself.
“Excuse me?” she asked, her plastered face and the tangles of bleached hair looking sort of like his nasty, soulless room. They were probably related.
“I love you, Mom,” he said, grinning at her with his most absurd attempt at total insincerity melted into truth.
“You’d better,” she scoffed, pouring milk into his colorful cereal. “Eat that fast. I’m getting in the car to make a phone call…” And then she marched out. He poured the cereal down the sink and ate a candy bar that didn’t belong to him. Then he turned on the TV and waited for her to finish her phone call so she could phone the house and scream into the answering machine until he threw up. Or something like that.
