Inside The Box

Zack was tired of people. They were all around him and they wouldn’t stop bothering him with their inane queries and their obvious observations. He didn’t know what had come over him, but it was as if he had springs sticking out from all sides which repelled him from everyone.

They were all delusional and naïve. Of course he couldn’t say that to their face, because then they would delude themselves further into thinking that they were fine and he was an asshole. There were some of them that tried to have intelligent conversation with him, but he found it trite. He couldn’t care less about worldly things at this point. His close “friends” who might have understood a little better, tried to say profound things to gain his approval, but he couldn’t care less about ‘approval’ - besides, the things that they thought were profound were basic building blocks for Zack’s thought process. “Maybe one day I’ll just write a compilation of all my basic thoughts and publish it and make them all pay to read it” – he chuckled, it was the only amusement he could give himself from the situation.

Zack was tired of societal norms and rules and “culture”. “It is already hard enough for the people in this world to keep an open mind about anything, the last thing we need is more ways to box our minds in with trivialities like being socially acceptable. Maybe I should just start doing completely socially unacceptable things just to show them how confined in norms they have all become.” But it wasn’t worth the effort. If they didn’t understand why he was doing it, it would be pointless and just lead to more delusions.

Zack had been walking all this time, not thinking about where he was going. “What does it matter where I go anyway?” he thought. “Regardless of where I go, I’m just going to go back eventually.”

“You know how people get caught up in semantics while having an argument and this takes away from the whole purpose of the argument? Well all of you are getting caught up in the semantics of life.” he wanted to scream. But they wouldn’t understand. Their delicate minds would be shielded by their delusionary defense mechanisms which would tell them not to pay attention to the madman but worry about what they were going to have for dinner and what the most recent events in their social circle were.

But then Zack stopped in his tracks. “I must always allow for the possibility of being wrong. That is the light which leads me out of the tunnel.” What if they were right and he was wrong? He had thought about this a thousand times before. What if choosing the right meal for dinner was in fact the best way to achieve a higher purpose in life? No, that was still semantics. He heard some vague noises in the background but ignored them. The noises were just trying to pull him back into the inescapable net of semantics. They were probably just more restrictions on his free existence anyway.

Zack still always found it amusing that these same people in their jobs and research kept telling each other to “think outside the box” and to “push the envelope” but they were never really able to expand their minds enough to be able to do it for greater things than just their operations pipelines, their cancer research, their government conspiracies, and their technological advances. Of course all of these helped to evolve the semantics of life, but what about life itself? Of the few people who opened their minds a little bit to achieve better semantics, even fewer tried to do anymore than that. A handful tried to break the shackles of morals and ethics but were ostracized immediately by their fellows and put in physical shackles. “Expand your minds beyond yourselves, beyond your beliefs, beyond your culture, beyond your life!” he wanted to yell. “Not this afterlife stuff,” he added with a smirk, “by calling it afterlife you are necessarily limiting it.” And then it hit him.

Zack woke up in the hospital, surrounded by his friends and family – the doctor was busy telling them that the bus hit him because he had suddenly stopped in the middle of the road in full traffic. People in the neighborhood had seen him acting strange, talking to himself, and occasionally yelling incoherently at unsuspecting passers-by. “He seemed a little off color today, he didn’t even pay attention to me when I was talking to him” one of his friends said. The doctor switched to a low voice “We think he may be suffering from multiple delusions. One bystander heard him shout something about the afterlife so we would like to put him in therapy for being suicidal as well.”

Encounter at the Zurich University

Stéphane managed to find a relatively cosy corner in the giant atrium. The University center was teeming with students who were studying, chatting, sipping coffee, socializing. Not really sure what to do with himself, Stéphane pulled out a tattered paperback from his overflowing backpack, and turned to page 36, where he’d left off.

By page 42, Stéphane’s bottom began to feel numb from the cold stone. He groaned silently and looked up as he shifted uncomfortably. His eyes involuntarily followed the girl with the cigarette. At first he thought it was because of the oddity of someone with a cigarette inside the atrium, but the he realized his eyes were attached to the brown hair flowing over a perfectly fitted black coat. The girl placed the roll of cancer lightly between her lips, as if to challenge it with their beauty. She strolled casually toward the sliding doors and suddenly Stéphane’s eyes couldn’t follow her anymore. It was almost fortunate, for he had never finished shifting his sitting pose, and now his left hand was numb and beneath his buttocks.

Stéphane looked down at the text staring up at him but he couldn’t tell what the black stuff on the paper was. With a sudden and violent inspiration Stéphane stood up and almost fell over. Gathering himself along with his things, he headed toward the sliding doors that led to her path.
The first bite of cold pierced Stéphane’s cheeks as the sliding doors opened and for a moment he forgot what he was doing. Out of inertia he stepped outside, and reached into his pocket. The familiar cigarette carton lent some comfort to his shivering hand, and he lit up. At that moment, the corner of his eye reminded him of why he had dared to brave the Swiss winter. He was very careful not to spin around suddenly, but rather paced around for a few seconds till he was just 10 feet away from her. He summoned the courage to look at her face again.

She was huddled between the smokers’ outpost and the wall, breathing out three times the volume of smoke that she took in. Stéphane, not wanting to stare, immediately looked away, puffing on his cigarette. She was trying, unsuccessfully, to read the top of a sheaf of paper that her non-smoking hand carried. Not wanting to be the only idle smoker, Stéphane held up page 42 again – the cold was clearing his senses and he started reading. His eyes saw words, but his mind kept dreaming of the girl commenting on him reading Dostoevsky - a conversation starting with that offhand remark but budding into an engaging camaraderie which led to her showing him around Zurich University – he was only in town for a single night after all.

At page 44 Stéphane looked up, but she was gone.