Adventure Story- Chapter 1

Adventure Story

A Novel by Kushal Chatterjee

Cynic, n: a blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be.
- The Unabridged Devil’s Dictionary, Ambrose Bierce

1

The older you get, the less you care about birthdays. I watched my twenty-first birthday roll by with twenty-first century ennui and said that it wasn’t anything more than a license to buy cognac in a bar. I bought a lot of cognac though. It was a fun thing, and until then the only things I really liked to do were fun things. Fun things are good because you don’t think while you do them. Thinking is such a drag, but that’s all I ever do. Talking is just more of a drag.

            From the start, I was exhausted. Exhausted with the classes that made no sense, the lectures that went on for hours, the girls with plastic lips and glass eyes I made out with, the endless pile of joints and beer bottles on my dorm floor. I didn’t really hate it. That’s too strong an emotion, and I didn’t really feel anything. And I think that’s worse than hate, because hate feels strong and fiery like whisky in the gullet but apathy feels cold and runny like snot.

            The solution came to me during a boring lecture in a stuffy hall in a university, a little before I turned twenty-one. It’s in America. You probably know of it, but that doesn’t matter. I haven’t the faintest clue what the lecture was about, but the speaker was the kind of guy that speaks lullabies. When he opened his mouth and said, “Hello,” everyone in the room yawned. His voice was congested and robotic, with an eerily detached tone that epitomized the scientific archetype.

The guy was lecturing on something important. That much is clear, judging from how badly I failed the exam a few weeks later. I failed the exam because I did not go to any of his other lectures and I did not pay attention to this one. I was not a very good student, but I got straight As, so no one else believed me when I said I was terrible in school. And frankly, if you have the statistics, no one cares. We live in a world of statistics. My friend majored in statistics and she makes more money than I do. I make a good amount of money nowadays, but I was not a good student.

            The lecture wore on for ages. His voice was drone boring. I saw the numbers and the words on the projector. I did not write them down. There is no point in writing something down if no one’s going to read it.

            That makes me wonder why I’m writing this down. Then I remember that someone is reading it right now.

             I was playing on my phone. I don’t remember the game. I’m not that good at games. But I’d lost for about the seventh time when everyone started laughing, and I looked up, expecting the speaker to have said something funny, or at the very least, something interesting.

            But no, he was just pointing out something on his PowerPoint and some people were laughing. I did not understand those people. I did not understand why they liked being here or why they liked thinking or why they liked scientific cardio liberal engineering or whatever the hell my major was, or why they seemed to care. People who care are the absolute worst, because they’re either extremely happy because everything’s going right, or they’re extremely sad because everything’s going wrong. I suppose the only thing worse than being caring is being sensitive. If you’re sensitive, you just notice the bad stuff before everyone else.

            I decided the lecturer was an idiot and pulled out a book from my backpack. I find reading to be one of the few worthwhile pursuits in life, and I especially enjoy good literature. I flipped to where my bookmark left off, and started reading. You can always find yourself inside a good book. Hopefully in a more exciting place.

            The routine began. It was a ritual we followed in lectures. You had to satisfy the professor somehow. It was good for the grading curve. One person laughs, another joins in, and then the whole class is in stitches, whether they get what’s funny or not. It’s not Harold and Kumar. It’s a lecture. It’s not funny and I don’t find anything funny about being interrupted when I’m reading a book, so I ignored them again and went back to my book. It was a good book. I don’t remember the name, but the attractive girl in my book club said it was a good book and so it had to be a good book. If I didn’t think it was, she wouldn’t have slept with me.

            Laughter is grating sometimes, especially when you’re not in on the joke.

            I ignored them and continued to read.

            I read until the lecture was over, and people started filing out. People said things to me, or to each other.

“Hey man, you coming?”

“We’re going out to dinner!”

“Dude, sick party at that frat across Professor Hall-”

After a while, it all started sounding the same. Inane babbling of the bright young leaders of the future. And sure, I’m just as bad as any of them, but at least I have the decency to be sick about it.

            Soon, the room was empty, and all I could see and hear was the story. It was a grand adventure. It was a story about a hero who was very brave and noble. He fell in love with a girl who was beautiful and gentle. They suffered greatly and lost many friends but emerged victorious. That is how men and women were meant to be, I think. Men were to be brave and noble and women were to be beautiful and gentle, but somehow humanity screwed up. Men are often cowardly and women are often ugly. People aren’t usually victorious.

            I wanted to be a hero. But nothing ever happened to me. I went to school and got an education of some sorts, though I can’t recall much from high school, and then I started majoring in something in college. I was sitting in a lecture hall, reading an ancient book, and wishing I was something else, someone else, somewhere else, anywhere else.

I didn’t know why an adventure hadn’t found me. In the books, the characters always stumble upon it, and they go on it reluctantly, but always have a wild raucous ride with lots of laughs and tears and fights and grand escapades. But the grandest escapade I ever had was hooking up with a drunk girl last week.

I got to thinking that maybe my problem wasn’t the adventure itself, but the characters. In adventures, the characters drive the story. They have quirks. That was it. I needed to meet quirky people. My college counselor had told me to be quirky on my applications so I said I wrote poetry about how I felt inside. I do write poetry, but it’s about nothing, so I was only half-lying.

Quirky characters are an uncommon necessity. They aren’t found in a college. They’re found on the streets and on the road. And I thought that maybe once I found a character that inspired me, I’d begin my adventure.

At that point, the custodian told me I had to leave the building, so I did. But I kept thinking about it on the way to my dorm and I decided I had to go on an adventure. I realized that it was different nowadays. In the old days, adventure was everywhere, and anyone could do it. Nowadays, people have to search for the adventure, or else they never find it. Adventure isn’t a part of life anymore.

But then I reconsidered and figured that maybe adventure was actually just romanticized and that people back then didn’t think they were on adventures and it only sounds exciting to us because we live in modern times when life is so much easier. So I fell asleep with no idea about what to do. Not a problem. I’ve done that for most of my life, and so have you.

I didn’t think about it for another week or so, because I had a test of some sort in Analytical-metric-ology or something or the other. There was always some –ology or the other I was taking, and it didn’t make much of a difference for me. I slept or drew pictures in all my classes if I bothered to show up and got As in everything anyway.

But halfway through the exam, I saw a fly buzzing around the classroom. It came near my ear, and I swatted it away. It went away for a few minutes, and I swatted it away again. It came back. I swatted it away. Back. Again. Back. Again. Back. Again.

Sometimes, it feels good to lose control. Sometimes, the rushing in my head overpowered the hollow decorum and mundane sensibilities I adhered to. I picked up a heavy textbook from under my desk and smashed the fly down on my desk with a resounding thump. It was in the middle of the exam.

“See that, fly? You’re dead! You’re dead! I crushed you!” I became aware that I was laughing, and everyone was staring at me, and it felt good because I didn’t care that they were staring at me. I looked at the crushed fly and smirked.

“See that window, fly? It was open. You could have left anytime you wanted. Why didn’t you? Huh? Why didn’t you?” By now, the professor had noticed my stunt and started in with the threatening and the disciplining and all the things a professor is supposed to do. But I kind of tuned out and stared at him blankly, because I was thinking, and when I think, I can’t listen to people talk about nothing at the same time.

“-if you feel the need to behave outrageously in class, I shall-”

“Why didn’t he go out the window?”

The professor stopped midway, his mouth ajar. “Excuse me?” he said.

“Why didn’t the fly go out the window?”

 “I don’t know. Why do flies do anything? It’s because they’re stupid and they don’t know anything, of course. When a fly gets trapped, and he sees an exit, he won’t get out unless someone forces him. And if you want to prove that you’re more intelligent than a fly, you’d better behave-”

“Thanks,” I said. I threw my stuff into my bag and walked out the door. No one tried to stop me, and no one said a word.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

The story as it follows is pretty simple. I messed around in classes for two more weeks, avoiding the real issue, but I skipped most of my exam days, and consequently my grades dropped. So, by the time the end of the semester rolled around, I was in a pretty bad state grade wise. So, the guidance counselor called me in, and she had it in her mind to fix me. People were always trying to fix me back then. If you don’t smile when you’re supposed to, you’re broken. That’s psychology for you.

She is a nice lady and she wants the best for everyone and actually likes helping people. But you can’t really a help a dog that decides it wants to lie down and die. And you can’t help someone who is fine, like me. That was the thing. I was fine. I wasn’t happy. But they always need me to be happy and smiling all the time, they always try to help me when I don’t need it, and they always give me sympathy.

That’s sick, that is. Giving a man sympathy against his will! People should really be hanged for that, for it’s a cruel and unusual punishment in every sense of the words. If you force your sympathy down someone’s throat, he’s liable to cough it back up as bitter bile that stings and bruises your skin. Sympathy doesn’t breed a more caring person, just a more pathetic and irascible person. Kind of like me, I guess. All this dependency and apathy would never have existed if people hadn’t been so nice to me.

Take my aunt for example. She didn’t want me to be pressured, so she sat down and she told me to follow my passion and said she supported me all the way, and so I, trying to be funny, picked Gender Studies and the look on her face was priceless. I watched the conflict roll along her face. She wanted to be accepting and loving like a good mother figure should. She probably figured everything that was wrong with me was because of my mother.

But sure enough, my dad came and yelled some sense into me and I signed up for some major of his choice. It was some –ology, and I didn’t hate it, but I didn’t like it much either, and I didn’t care about it much. I just did it, because it was there and I hated most of the stuff on that list anyway.

Anyway, I sat in the counselor’s office, staring into her blank eyes. Mrs. Compassionate Counselor was a forty something with big eyeglasses and a face that has been eroded by time and boredom and caring too much. She’s the type of woman who spends her spare time volunteering at the library and pretending she has a sex life. The only problem is that everyone knew her husband was having an affair with the attractive waitress who was struggling through college and Mrs. Counselor was just too stupid to know or care or say anything.

And of course that made it impossible for her to tell me anything.

“I think you need to improve your performance next semester. Your professors-”

“They can go to hell.”

 “I think you’re being unreasonable and you really should try to put more attention in your studies.”

“Why don’t you just get to the goddamn point?”

“That is rude. I am trying to help you.”

“Help me do what?”

 “To help you complete your education, of course!”

“What education?”

“Your college education!”

I did not respond.

 “I’m here to help you. I’m not your enemy. Don’t reject my help. Don’t push everyone away.” Slow, short sentences. Spoken to me like I was a child. Nothing like that. I’m more than a child. People don’t realize it.

I smiled. “This has nothing to do with you. I haven’t learned anything in the last few months. Don’t think I’ll learn anything soon. Bye Mrs. Counselor. I’ll see you around, maybe after your third divorce.”

I left for summer break, where I did not do much. I locked myself in my room and read many books and did Google searches. I drank many bottles of liquor. My father visited me a few times. He did not live in our old house anymore because I was not usually there and my mother is not around. We had monosyllabic conversations over dinner, and they were good dinners with good conversations because we did not need to say much to be understood.

“How’s school?” We were eating dinner. Cold pasta with Alfredo sauce.

“It’s fine.” It was a lie. “How are you doing?”

“Good,” he said. It was a lie.

We ate our meal in silence.

By the time the fall term was halfway done, I was failing all my classes and facing suspension from the university. That suited me just fine. On the day I left, I got a brief email from my father telling me to fix my grades. I deleted it, and proceeded to deactivate my email and every other internet service I used. I packed my things, put them in my car, and left the university.

I had everything planned out. I was going to destroy any links to my existence and any links to the internet and just disappear into the world. I was going to travel around the entire country. First I would go to San Francisco and talk to hoboes, and then I would travel south to Los Angeles, and engage in acts of debauchery, like a Greek hero. I was also going to meet some real characters and meet a great love interest. Every hero has a love interest, and she has to be more interesting than the girls I hooked up with at college. All they cared about was sex and their majors, which were usually liberal arts majors. If I ever asked a girl what liberal arts meant, she said it was about “being a free-thinking individual who contributed to society”. Then she’d down another shot of tequila and stick her tongue down my throat.

I left the college town and drove to my house. It was about an hour’s drive. I left my cell phone and laptop in my room and took about two thousand dollars in cash from inside, and stored it in three locations. Two hundred dollars in my wallet, four hundred dollars in the car’s glove compartment, and the rest stuffed in a small safe I threw in my trunk. I had on me three credit cards and two debit cards. I cut the credit cards in half and kept the debit cards, each of which had a few hundred bucks apiece. My father was a retired businessman. He was very successful in the dotcom boom. He invested in a lot of software startups. That’s his claim to fame. There’s a lot of money lying around our house. I’m lucky to be his son.

I took a sampling of food, including granola bars, chips, a pack of water bottles, and apples. I proceeded to dismantle the GPS in car’s dashboard with some tools from my garage. I stowed a couple of maps in the glove compartment, and got every CD I owned.

I was all set to go when it hit me. I walked back into the house and into my room. I stared at my computer. The innocuous lights on the side of the machine winked at me. It was just a toy. It couldn’t hurt me. I stared at my cellphone. It seemed to stare me back. The Apple logo leered at me. You can’t get rid of us, it said. We are your cocaine.

We are your heroin.

We are your diamonds.

We are your everything.

Breathe us, live us, taste us. You die without us.

The hammer flew down, once, twice, thrice. Again and again till all that could be seen were smashed circuitry and plastic.

I was out the door and on the highway. The hammer lay beside its victims, long forgotten.