The Absurd Hero

Prologue: The Kebab and the Burrito; or A Monologue in the Washing Machine

–Accute stress reaction, often known simply as shock, is a psychological condition arising in response to a terrifying or traumatic event. By definition,acute stress reaction (abbreviated ASR) is the result of atraumatic eventin which the person experiences or witnesses an event that causes the victim/witness to experience extreme, disturbing or unexpected fear, stress or pain, and that involves or threatens serious injury, perceived serious injury or death to themselves or someone else.

"No. No no no no. Fuck. Please no."

"Vision is a rather complex process. It begins at the moment that light bounces off of whatever is being viewed. This light travels to the retina, part of the eye, where it is transduced into a neuronal signal and sent on up to be processed by the central ganglia clusters in the brain. Once in the brain, it is assembled into a complete image by the visual association cortex, and this image is the thing that you actually see.

Now, the entire process up until this point takes a fraction of a fraction of a second. Point being, what you see when you look at something is not actually the object as it is right now, but the object as it existed an infinitesimal moment ago. Thus, it is not a stretch to say that the only thing we'll ever see in the world are reflections of the past. It is the objective truth. We are all always living in the past, everything that we do a result of something that has already happened, and the chains of causality wrap us so tightly that they manifest in our very physiology."

Darkness cracks horizontally, light flows in. Eyelids rise, slowly, tentatively, an automatic garage door, or a guillotine resetting. They bring an image, the mind rejects it. Guillotines of thin flesh slam down again, darkness. Yet the image remains. Yet the image remains, large and horrific, all-enveloping, like a movie theater screen from the front row. Consciousness a steamcar windshield struck by a baseball at two hundred frames per second, Ai Weiwei's vases full of rupees. Mind, at a loss, dredges up another old memory and projects it on to the back of the eyelids. Time lapses, like the shores of the lake of fire.

–Hot. So hot.

Heat, nightmarish and bellicose, rose up

Under stygian night and sundered moon,

Lay thick the froth of rage—

Flame! Voracious Flame!

Sweltering, bloated toad, crouched over treetops,

Tasting the sky with ten thousand sharp tongues.

And hounds and men and men and hounds,

Wriggling mass of madness,

Charging scuttling bounding shapeless

Coming closer closer closer!

A night on the run,

All men and nature—

Though they deserved not those titles

—enemy.

Carefully borne through by eyes of snowmelt,

Water whispering through the branches,

A loved, loving woman, chubby-fingered trust,

And the hot maw of the forest, swooping in.

…

She was a pointy-eared vixen. A survivalist. I remember. Blue-eyed and blonde haired and finally, after all these months, scared. Desperate. Mother. I could see it in her eyes. In the way they twitched back and forth, the way the pupils were dilated to the point where the cool azure of her irises was nearly blotted out.

But I could see it most of all in the tear. It came at the moment when the blaze and the men and their howling dogs caught up to us all at once: a single translucent drop that dropped off her chin and struck my little forehead. The calm, cool kiss of a wet butterfly's wing, or perhaps the icy impact of a meteorite, aged ten eons in the vacuum above. I knew, then. No matter how many times brushed my hair while she whispered in another language, and told me things would be okay in ours, I knew she was lying. That one tear told me everything I needed to know.

As the tree she was speaking to took me in its branches, I looked at her. She smiled. "No more tears." I blinked, relieved.

An arrow took her in the throat. Softly, suddenly.

Time sped up. The maw of the forest closed around her and the flames and the men and the howls vanished as one.

The whispering leaves,

A tree's lullaby, and heavy little lids,

Falling down.

I threw open my eyes. Here again. Seeing the now. Or as close to it that humans can get. I still felt the heat of the flashback, and the fear. I looked up. A giant metal skewer, and blood. So much blood. Consciousness runs spasmodic fingers over the disjointedness between objective and subjective reality.

What is this? Where am I?

Again: the cicada drone of my old psychology professor, lecturing, as he always did.

–Common symptoms that sufferers of acute stress disorder experience are: numbing; detachment;muteness; derealization; depersonalization or dissociative amnesia; continued re-experiencing of the event by such ways as thoughts, dreams, and flashbacks; and avoidance of any stimulation that reminds them of the event. During this time, they must have symptoms of anxiety, and significant impairment in at least one essential area of functioning.

Losing it.

Stop.

Not.

Again.

"No." A mental howl, a hoarse whisper.

Suspended in darkness, floating. I inhaled, long, ragged. Broke away from myself, processed what was happening, discompassionate. Facing the monumental task of incorporating the world as it now was into my world, my mind was conjuring up random images from the past; attempting to reharmonize dissonant realities. The real question was if this subliminal onslaught of imagery would bridge the gap or widen the rift between the two.

A voice comes: sound waves, rippling tendrils of light, floating through the void, through the ever-dancing chaos. "Shut up, Link." The tendrils wrapped around me, jerked me back into reality, to the past-present, to my self.

She continued. Here's something you really need to 'know.' There's something I never told you." Her tired voice, the tendrils of light in my hallucinations. I ran my eyes away from it. Kept my sight, the whole of my consciousness on the old woman and her voice.

Robed-wrapped, she had a strong, sharp whisper. Her face was some combination of wizened nut and sun-burnt leather. I glanced down, saw it again. I recoiled, neck straining to keep it away. Out from the gaps of her edentulate smile I felt emanate all the beauty and all the sadness in the world, its pain and its joy, its light and dark. She was a wise old lady.

She lay, curled up against the wall, as the hot steel of the airship vibrated around her. I forced myself to look at it. At the thing, the bad thing, the thing that was wrong. It was a shard of sheet metal. A steel spike, about the size of my thigh. And it protruded from the old woman's stomach. She poured crimson around its edges. It was pinning her to the wall.

This was it. The image I hadn't been able to make sense of. Partly probably because of whatever had happened to my head that was making so much blood drip down into my left eye, but mostly because this image was part of a reality that was utterly foreign, utterly incompatible with myreality.

Yet horrifying familiarity sat in the pit of my stomach, like tapeworm. The many-tongued fire, the icy comet—Mother. Can't keep thoughts out. Things go fast this hurts can't breathe can't breathe she looks like a photo nailed to a corkboard like a teriyaki chicken kebab idiot shithead idiot shut up shut up shut up. Exhaled, chest rattling, feels like I'm vomiting out air vomiting out the tapeworm ha oh I'm actually going to– bleahhhhghgghg.

"Link." She whispered. A cooling…a calming…I was slipping in and out. Blurring. Collapsing. On my knees. Looking up, the steel skewer looked like an arrowhead, instead of milky irises and wrinkled crags I saw sapphiric orbs and smooth skin. Mother. Grandmother. The smile, however, remained the same. Why?

She had something to say. And when this woman had something to say, she damn well said it, kebab or no kebab. I found her strength like a starving wolf, sucked out its marrow. I crawled along the ceiling, which had actually been the floor for the last few minutes, knelt, grabbed her hand, and listened.

"Well, there's a lot of things I never told you," she continued, building momentum, "but only a few important things. So listen, Link." My whole body was shaking, shaking far harder than the damaged, upside-down airship, but I nodded. I had to listen. I had to see everything, until the very end this time.

"Saving the world, it's not as clean cut as that. Solve a few puzzles, kill a few bosses, learn a new instrument, cut Ganondorf up again, and then at the end walk away completely unscathed with a hot new girlfriend?"

She laughed. My eyes darted to the noxious black wisps I saw seeping in from underneath the cabin door. As far as I had seen on the way to the cabin the rest of the ship was on fire. "Naw. Oh no no no. There's no takebacks, or redos, or extra heart containers." I had absolutely no idea what she was going on about.

As she continued, I heard in desperate edge and ragged timbre of her voice the terrible gravity of those who are mortally wounded. In the unflinching momentum of her speech, the oceanic, undulent contiguity of her words, I heard her knobby, uncrackable chestnut core, the taut, unconquerable bite of her spirit. I loved her, in that moment. I truly, truly, loved her.

She continued, or rather, she had never stopped. "I love that story, I want it, but it's a lie. The friendly type, the type of lie we feed to our kids to allow them to make sense of the world, keep them plodding along on top of the institutions we built. The prophecies and all that. Pah!" Those noxious black wisps were quickly becoming more of a gaseous black yogurt. "The whole thing has sort of a formulaic cleanliness, don'tcha think, that nice manufactured smell to it?" She winked. She winked. "One plus one plus one equals happily ever after, they'll tell you!

"But then of course something BIG comes along, something we were never expecting, no matter how many times it's happened before. Something that tears down all our institutions, a destroyer, an earth-shatterer. You know his name. And—"

There was a shuddering bang somewhere to our right, and gravity got fickle. I grunted, flying ten feet into the side wall, then from there fell a few feet on to the top bunk of one of the beds. For a split second, dazed sky blue eyes met cloudy cobalt irises. She continued, her voice spurning the the inconstancy of things like physics.

"—And we all find out exactly how delicate our lives were, how fragile the frames we used to view the world were. We witness all the forces we hadn't accounted for."

As she spoke, we spun around, around. Retching and tumbling, I clung scrabbly-fingered to the bunk. Nailed to the wall, the old woman served as the only stable point in my vision as the flaming steel bird pirouetted gracelessly through the sky. I watched as the world whirled around her, a mad kaleidoscope, anchored by an old smile. Books, swords, blood danced jerkily, in the air, uncoreographed, for a moment, then sprayed, laid splayed, out at the edges of our steel universe.

The steamwing shuddered again and mercifully, miraculously, our oscillations began to slow. Time paused for a moment, and I hung white-knuckled on to the iron bunk as the ceiling swayed beneath me, a bloody ragdoll suspended from the hand of its owner: the lone source of any animation it might possess. Falling through the sky in a metal object like the universe's loose fly does wonders for your sense of agency. Still, I roped one arm into the sheets of the bunk in an attempt to lift myself up. Instead, they tore away from the mattress and came with me as the ship. The ship began to spiral again, and I began to laugh. Futility is the most potent cause of madness known to man. And how in the hell were we even still falling?

"It was we who believed the lie, who needed it the most—" she screamed as I slid off the bunk and flew straight towards the opposite wall. I slammed face first into the porthole on the opposite wall with a loud crack. Funny. I heard the gory snap of my nose on the reinforced glass, but I couldn't feel it.

"—and that is the moment that makes a man. The moment when one of the foundational assumptions of his psyche is displaced, and all his beliefs, the basis of his life up until then, suddenly start to look a lot more precarious."

That put words to it. A thought that had been skulking Gollum-like in the back for a while. One of the "foundational assumptions of my psyche" has sheet metal through her spine right now. Madness moves quickly on to despair.

Smile fractured, wobbly knees broke rank, feet followed out from underneath. My vision split and blurred, the world halfway through mitosis. I half-stumbled, half-rolled, drunkenly towards her, hand outstretched, refracting through the space between us. There was a sound coming out of my mouth. A guttural struggle, somewhere between a moan and a retch and a howl, vocal cords unable to find a series of vibrations capable of expressing the oceanic volumes of pain I was experiencing.

I kiltered towards her strangely, off-balance but with velocity, desperate, terrified, to get to her. Reaching out: pinky, ring, and middle fingers strained towards her, while index curled away. With a vicious lurch and without prior announcement, the galaxy began to spin again. I went with it, banging off various household objects and furniture, strangely relieved though I could barely breathe, could feel more bones snapping, could taste more blood.

Eventually, I realized I had stopped moving. I glanced right, left. Neck still works. There were two bolted-down dressers on either side of the porthole I had tried to break with my face, and as the ship had continued to gyrate I had gotten wedged between them. Back where I started, wrapped up by the sheets I had grabbed like a burrito, looking like an idiot. Somehow the old woman was still murmuring deliriously, and we were still spinning. I had nothing left to vomit up.

"—Yesterday he's making the second-to-last payment for his beach house back on Outset and today there's a moblin taking a dump in his wife's jewelry box. Most men just sort of…sag into themselves, in that sort of situation."

The view through porthole absorbed me as she spoke. As we were currently corkscrewing towards the ocean it was a blur at first, but after a few nauseating rotations I was able to distinguish the horizon, incisive, a thin line of pure light cutting the sea and sky forever apart. The blood orange sun hung low and ripe above the roiling sprawl. Hazy red cirruses curled beneath this imperious hesperidium: its unwanted pericarp, floating dejectedly down to earth. The sky was dotted by the distant gunmetal gray of a thousand steamwings in the heat of battle. I laughed, madly. The greatest airborne conflict since Hyrule had hit the ground, rendered naught but dull pointillism by distance and despair, just getting in the way of a good sunset.

There was another huge bang, off to our left (right?) this time. The quake that followed was thunderous: marrow-shaking, molar-rattling. The sheet metal walls of the little steamwing shuddered, apoplectic, ready to burst like an overfed leech. I braced myself—

—and somehow we stopped spinning. What was left of the airship's wings began to drag against the air, and I could feel our descent start to slow. Evidently, there was someone still alive in the pilot's nest who still knew what they were doing.

As we slowed and our revolutions finally ceased, and my animal brain finally switched back out of immediate survival mode, I remembered the woman behind me. I refocused on what she had just said, and looked back at her. Something about moblin shits.

I spoke up again, letting her direct the mood, trying to keep her talking. "You know, you're a dirty old lady." Slant-mouthed with downturned eyes, my smile defied a pressure on my sternum so oppressive my ribcage felt vacuum-sealed. The gravity of terror. She gave me a full on cackle this time. "And you look like an idiot in those sheets."

As her cackle wheezed and bubbled its way to the finish line, I laughed, crinkly-eyed, to keep from crying. I could hear the blood in her lungs. Both of us, I knew, the kebab and the burrito, trying so hard to be strong.

I blabbered onwards, trying to prolong the moment of normality our acerbic nips at each other had brought. "Well, I don't know if you knew this, but I didn't grow up with your 'assumptions,' I didn't grow up in your system. My best friends were trees until I was twelve."

She ate it up, and I felt a shot of endorphins. "Exactly! And that's what makes you the hero. It's not that you're stronger than everybody else, or smarter, or faster. It's not that you're fated; the prophesied one. It's that you're the one who doesn't fit. Who never fit. So now that the whole story and everything in it is falling apart, you're not."

I took another look at her. Everything was kind of blurry, but it looked like she had octopus tentacles. Like she sold her soul to Nayru. I laughed, high-pitched and unnaturally. She was a thick ochre octopus. The tentacles were splayed up, down, and sideways from her body like a Jackson Pollack painting. Now they were dripping down the wall around her towards the ceiling. They were dripping. Blood. It's blood. Ah.

After all this time, this couldn't be it right? But here we were, falling twenty thousand leagues under the sky in a flaming metal bird, and she had a spike that was less like a nail and more like a flagpole through her chest. I knew, and she knew. All this talk was just a mindless diversion in the face of ineluctable end.

Isn't that all life is anyway?

My mask cracked. I felt tears mix with sweat and blood and drop down off my chin. "What should I do?"

"What do you do? I sure as hell don't know. You're the exogenous variable. The other. Do something unexpected."

"Link, remember this. When most people realize that the universe isn't as linear or as safe as they thought, when they see all the forces outside their control in action and realize the grand narrative of the universe doesn't actually center around them, they crumble like a muffin. They lose themselves like a raindrop in a hurricane. Their hope collapses in the face of their own powerlessness, uncertainty, dynamism, the senselessness of it all. They go catatonic, they despair, they forsake the universe for its indifference, they become just another drop in the maw of the storm."

Her cloudy irises took on an ethereal silver hue as she spoke, like ghostly comets.

"So how don't you do that? Antifragility."

"Anti-what?"

She grasped my right hand with both of hers, and smacked the off-white triangle on the backside of my palm with a surprisingly strong index finger. "This."

"Courage?"

"I'd call it madness, but I've never been big on labels."

"Oh. Okay." What?

She plunged ahead. "Weave a new story to shape your life around. One that doesn't break so easily." Our eyes met. "Weave your own story, not mine, nor anyone else's."

A moment. A deep breath. Closed eyes. Open them. "I will."

She laughed, and coughed, fading fast. "And Link?" She said, waiting for an answer.

"The same goes to that young lady you'll find. She'll write her own story!" She shook her little liver-spotted fist, and looked up. Despite everything, at that little fist shaken up at the sky, I smiled. I too found again my bravery, my bravado.

I glanced out a porthole. We couldn't have been more than a few thousand feet above the ocean at this point. I shrugged off the sheets still entangling me, strode across the ceiling, and threw the escape hatch open below me. As I poked my blonde head outside, my green cap was instantly snatched by the wind, a thousand feet away by the time I noticed it was gone.

Beyond the metallic sheen of the steamwing's belly, I witnessed the world sliced clean down the middle, and flipped on its head. Not much different than the way things were on the inside. The sapphire sea above, and the fiery sky below. Terrible, terrible beauty.

"I love you Grandma." I don't know if I yelled it or whispered, but she must have heard. She smiled at me, that same all-englobing smile, and closed her eyes one last time.

I gazed ahead, and my hand began to glow. I leapt upwards towards the sea.