"Now what did Thoreau mean when he said, 'the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation'? Videl?"
"I think that he meant that most people are unhappy inside." (Episode 202)
with their songs still in them
Here's a great essay question: what do you do the day after you save the world? Five-paragraph form, please; use full sentences; fully expand upon all ideas; spelling counts. Use a blue or black pen or a #2 pencil. You have two hours for this exam.
Here's a perfectly acceptable answer, for the brave or philosophical: you go back to high school. The morning after the business with Buu was finished Gohan's alarm clock goes off at the usual hour and Gohan stumbles, shell-shocked, through breakfast, finishes his homework, isn't really aware of what he's doing until he's on the Nimbus looking down at Satan City.
Gohan allows himself a moment to bask in the warmth of a million individual energies. The people like candles flicker with confusion: theirs is, quite suddenly, a very different world than the one Mister Satan had saved from Cell. There are no scars on the earth, no holes in buildings, no shattered glass. Below him people amble about as if dreaming, perhaps wondering why they remember things for which there are no records. Out of the deep Porunga had pulled the planet fully healed, but memory is a fickle thing, and will hold on to grief so tightly that no god or gods' pet could ever pull it away.
Videl finds him on the roof of Orange Star High. She's climbing out of her helicopter, her eyes a little glazed over.
"Hey," he says.
"Hey," she says.
The look in her eyes shocks him out of his reverie. He must have looked the same way the day after the Cell Games, slouching waist-deep through the dream of somehow still being alive. She needs him. He holds out his hand and she takes it, her palm cool and dry.
"Couldn't sleep last night," she murmurs, as he presses the panel on her helicopter to release it into its capsule, tucks it into his pocket. "I kept thinking about today - you know. Lying about what happened. Not knowing how much people know. Having to be strong." They take the stairs one at a time, hit the hallway just as the first bell rings. "Story of your life, huh, Gohan?"
"Story of my life," he says, and then someone shouts holy shit guys it's the Great Saiyaman and Sharpner shouts you dumbass, he's the Gold Fighter and all hell breaks loose.
By the time the school has calmed down they're well into first period and their teacher still hasn't arrived. Maybe he's forgotten, or maybe the recent events have made him reconsider his career; death will do that to you. Gohan's mind slips back to the six months with Piccolo and the way Buu's lips had formed around the words all that time on the cliffs. That had been a different Buu, the Buu that had devoured Goten and Piccolo and the real Trunks, the boy who'd had a childhood. People are whispering, avoiding engaging Gohan and Videl in conversation. There's an electric charge in the air. Someone clears their throat. Gohan taught himself trigonometry, he can teach his peers statistical calculus, can't he? He stands up suddenly, disturbing the peace, and a damp silence follows him down the stairs to the front of the lecture theatre.
The book is still open on the lectern. "Turn to page 59," he says, putting himself on automatic, the automatic that had gotten him through the first four months in the Time Chamber. He takes the book and grabs a piece of chalk, turns to the blackboard. "Okay, derivatives of logarithmic functions. Consider the function defined by the natural logarithm of x." There's two halves to him, an omnivore that dreams, and a cannibal that waits eternally for the full moon. Saiyans can turn their thoughts on and off; humans daydream. "Let's do this by first principles. Take the limit as it approaches zero…"
"Do the thing with your hair!"
"Could you beat up Mister Satan?"
"...of h, that is, the natural logarithm of x minus the natural logarithm of x minus h all divided by h…"
Someone chucks an eraser at him. The Saiyan in him immediately perceives the situation as a fight - how unlike the day he'd taken Sharpner's fastball straight to the face - and time slows, then snaps back like a whip. He catches the eraser without turning around. "...and as h approaches zero, the distance between the two points narrows to nothing, and the limit approaches infinity." His blood sparks; the eraser instantaneously combusts, leaving nothing but the rotten smell of burnt rubber.
There's silence in the room after that.
Their physics teacher shows up a few minutes late, looking rumpled but otherwise intact. He mumbles through a lesson on electricity and refuses to make eye contact with Gohan. Gohan wonders often about physics, for the rules that govern objects and the rules that govern people often seem so misaligned; he understands that the speed of light is not to be trifled with, but how does that explain what he's seen while making jumps across space with his father?
He jams a chair into the door leading up to the roof for a little peace and quiet and eats lunch with Videl, their legs dangling over the edge. Heights are never the same after you learn to fly. She's packed her own lunch, sandwiches she found in the fridge that she swears weren't there before Buu destroyed the earth, and he has the bento his mother lovingly tucked in his backpack that morning. They eat in silence, watching the city.
"Some of these people must have died twice," Videl says, through a mouthful of Gohan's mother's rice. "Like, killed by Cell, and then killed again by Buu. I wonder what they're thinking."
Someone knocks on the door. They ignore it. The knocking continues, increases in frequency, turns to pounding. After a few minutes of that it stops, and there's a rustle of fabric, as though someone is sitting just inside the door.
"Videl," Erasa calls. "Videl, are you and Gohan up there?"
They turn to each other. "Yeah," Videl calls back.
"Videl, people are, uh," there's a long and awkward pause. "...You're not hurt, are you?"
"What?"
"Gohan hasn't - uh, Gohan hasn't done anything to hurt you, has he?"
Gohan's eyebrows shoot straight up. Videl puts a hand on his thigh. "I can take care of myself, Erasa."
"Ohmygod Videl I didn't - I mean -" She clears her throat. "Gohan, Sharpner wants to know. Did you, like, kill his camera? With some sort of...magic, like magic mind-control powers? You know, at the World Tournament?"
"That wasn't me." It was probably Piccolo. "I have no mind-control powers." Just a little telepathy. "...Hey, Erasa."
"Yeah?"
"Wanna join us?"
"Oh, um. If you wouldn't mind."
He pulls the chair out, and at least fifty kids spill onto the roof, definitely breaking some sort of building code. You'd think they'd be clamouring for a piece of Satan City's newest superhero, or of the daughter of the man who spoke directly to their hearts, commanding them to do their part for the universe and lift their hands heavenward - but no, they're just worried about Gohan and Videl, and the conversation takes a hard left to baseball scores and upcoming inter-school boxing matches. Sharpner's still adamant that Gohan join the team. It's a bright and easy kind of conversation with a lot of casual acquaintances; Gohan never had fast friends growing up, and he decides he likes it.
"Well, I mean, we're used to it," Sharpner says, after the bell rings and people reluctantly start packing up and heading back in. "Look at the kinds of folks who end up at World Martial Arts tournaments. Mom and Pop had just gotten married when the green guy announced Piccolo Day, I think I was five when those aliens blew up East City."
"My mum used to say, strange things happen, but that's what makes the world lovely." Erasa picks at a hangnail. "We got in a bad crash, y'know, while we were trying to get to my uncle's cabin in the mountains, right before the Cell Games. I thought we'd run into a tree, but, um. We ran into Cell. Cell pointed a finger at her, while I was running away - or at least, I guess that was all smoke and mirrors, huh? A month later she found her way home, totally fine."
"Gosh." There's a million ways to apologize for a situation outside of anyone's control, and Gohan can't think of a single one that's good enough. "I'm sorry."
"Gohan, you're kind of a weirdo," Erasa says. He turns to her, but she's smiling. "Like, there's two sides of you? There's the Gold Fighter, y'know, with the muscles and the wild look in your eyes, but also the goofball who's really good at algebra."
"Hey, paws off," Videl says. "This boy's mine."
And Erasa laughs, and Sharpner laughs, and Videl laughs, and something in Gohan's chest does a backflip and launches itself into space. He squeezes her hand, gently. Her laughter is like hope.
Third period's world history. Their teacher is already there when Gohan and Videl take their seats, but she seems distracted, and can't seem to find her place in her lecture. Gohan takes dutiful notes on the Amenbo Island Disaster and considers, during a particularly awkward pause, telling her that he was there - but he has few memories other than the stench of motor oil and the overwhelming fear for his father's life.
Finally, she shuts her book and puts it down. "I had a dream that I died," she says, "and there was a magnificent light, and the planet was destroyed. Did anyone else have this dream?"
A room full of hands float up, including Videl's and Gohan's, reluctantly. Their teacher inhales and exhales sharply, her eyes unfocused.
"History's not about things that happened, it's about the people it happened to." She pulls out a stool and sinks into it. "If the planet really was destroyed, how are we all still here today? Are we butterflies, dreaming we're in high school?" (She earns some sniggers for that.) "You were all alive during the Cell Games - you remember what happened afterwards, when the dead suddenly all came back to life. Perhaps - perhaps…"
She gives them all a fun little assignment for homework, asks them to imagine they were writing a new chapter in their textbook on the Majin Buu campaigns. The sound of pen on paper is matched with the muted sounds of people cribbing together details about the World Martial Arts Tournament; everyone seems to know a guy who knows a guy who was killed in the explosion caused by the gold fighter in blue. ("Not Gohan," someone whispers. "Definitely not Gohan." And their eyes slip to him.)
Gohan stares at a blank sheet of paper, trying to articulate the strange dreams he'd had inside Buu. His father had come unfused - no doubt strange laws governed that creature's belly, if even the Kais' rules were not welcome in there. He'd dreamt of a world where his father was no-one special, just a particularly tough orphan raised in the woods, and Gohan had been raised studious and unremarkable. Where does he belong in the history of the world? Sure, he killed Cell, but what miseries have gone on without his knowledge or consent? If they dig deep enough, would they find traces of past civilizations, or did Porunga forget to put those back in the ground?
He writes a poem and dedicates it to his mother.
Last period's English and their teacher fails to show. Gohan hops down to the lectern and pulls out the book as his classmates get out theirs.
He opens the book to the wrong page. There, in his teacher's patient handwriting, is the Thoreau quote Videl had responded to so long ago: the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. Perhaps it was poignant after seven years in the woods with his mother, but he'd been distracted that day, by a girl and a secret.
"The, uh." Gohan tries to find the words he's been looking for. "Thoreau, yeah? Goes off into the woods for two years trying to figure out how to be happy, writes Walden. He writes, 'the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation'. We talked about how he's trying to say that most people are unhappy with their lives, but don't show it. He goes on to say, 'what is called resignation is confirmed desperation'." Gohan narrows his eyes. "He attributes this to misplaced value - people resign themselves to the life they feel they're forced to lead, suffering on the inside but unable to show it, and buy things, like clothes, or cars, to fill the void. Thoreau went into the woods to leave this all behind and find out if, at its very core, the world is cruel or kind." He clears his throat. "Is it?"
There's a long, shocked silence. People stare at him as though he's grown a tail, or his hair has changed colour. He repeats himself: "When we take away all our stuff - our cities, houses, civilization - and get right down to the core of it, is the world cruel, or kind?"
Soft, murmured words turn to conversation; conversation turns into a spirited argument. Two kids get into a heated debate in the back row. Someone's yelling that the mere presence of good people - he uses Mister Satan as an example, but whatever, Gohan will take it - means that the world is kind. Someone else demands to know how Majin Buu fits in that outrageously naive worldview. Gohan considers forcing a little order into the room, but watching them go at it, so vibrant and excitable and alive, makes everything he's suffered through worth it.
After the final bell rings the debate spills into the hallway and to after school sports, and Gohan and Videl climb to the roof. They hop into her helicopter and she guides it gently towards his home.
"Something's different about you," she says. "I can't put my finger on it, but you seem - calm. At ease. I like it. I mean, I like you, all of you, but I like that you're happy."
"Do I?" Does he? Yes, he'd felt this strange sense of peace all day, the likes of which he hadn't felt in a while. "I do feel a little different."
Perhaps it's because his father is waiting back home, and tomorrow morning they'll go back to school. First period gym. He has chem homework, but he can finish it in the morning. It's exactly the kind of routine Thoreau threw away.
She places a hand on his shoulder, the other hand still on the throttle. "Everyone's gonna process this differently. You were a little more involved than the rest of us, and maybe you think that because you've survived something like this before it'll be easy, but these things take time."
Thoreau went into the woods to find some kind of inherent truth about all things. Gohan's lived his whole life in the woods and he still doesn't know.
Videl stays for dinner. You'd think it would be weird sharing a dinner table with a father who has been dead for seven years, but Gohan's father has always made things easy; over steamed fish and snow peas and a mountain of rice he describes, in unnecessary detail, a fight he'd had with a man named Pikkon. Goten asks ridiculous questions ("What kinda music does the Grand Kai listen to? Is Pikkon the same guy as Piccolo?") and Chi-Chi says nothing, just smiles with tears in her eyes.
After dinner Videl helps Chi-Chi clean up and Goten goes off to play with his toys and Gohan and Goku are alone in the living room. Gohan's sipping a mug of green tea and Goku's finishing off a plate of dumplings, and there's peace in Grandpa Gohan's old home.
"She's nice," Goku says.
"I'm glad you're back, Dad," Gohan says.
They talk about the week leading up to the Cell Games and the seven years that followed: studying and standardized tests and raising a little brother; tournaments and training and travelling to Hell to meet their Saiyan ancestors. Goku attempts and fails to explain the taste of the Kai's cuisine. Instead he describes the training he did to reach Super Saiyan 3.
"Not that I ever thought I'd use it, but I thought it was there, so I went for it. And after all that training - one day I was meditating and it just kinda happened! But look at you, Gohan." He grins, leans forward and pats Gohan on the head. "We weren't kidding when we said you had a lot of potential, huh?"
"The Old Kai said he was unlocking my potential," Gohan says, "and at the time I thought he meant making me strong. Maybe it was more than that."
"You think he made you smarter, too?"
"No, I…"
Not smarter, but not just stronger: his eyesight's better, and his sense of smell is sharper, and when he'd fought Buu time had moved at a snail's pace - his perception of time is a little warped, at least when it counts. But beneath that something has turned over in him, like a season, or a year.
"...Maybe that wasn't him," Gohan acquiesces. "Maybe all this hidden potential in me had nothing to do with English class. Maybe that was all me."
When Guru had put his hand on Gohan's head, he hadn't gotten any smarter. That had come later, with what Gohan now understands as the bitter wisdom of experience.
Maybe he's just getting older.
(But always, no matter how long it takes, his father comes home.)
After dishes are done there's coffee and biscuits, chemistry homework, things to clear up for Videl: she wants to know who the blonde woman was who fought against her father in the World Tournament finals, and that's a story that goes right back to Goku's childhood. These things are all connected, and now she's a part of it all.
By the time the conversation winds down it's late. Chi-Chi insists Videl stays for the night, Gohan fishes out an old t-shirt. Hey, it's a little awkward having your girlfriend (girlfriend?) invited to stay over by your mom, but here they are all alive.
"After the Cell Games I said, this is the beginning of the rest of our lives," he says, as the two of them climb into bed. "Maybe I was wrong. Maybe life is always happening, one day at a time."
She snuggles into his arms. "Still think the world is cruel?"
"I'll write you an essay in the morning."
(She laughs, yawns, and falls asleep soon after. He lies awake in the light of the moon through his window for a while, thinking about the way the light looks on her face. In his room one door over Goten's ki flares; he's out of bed and no doubt playing with his cars. Just beyond that there's the warm pressure of his father's energy like a blanket, or like the ocean.
He had been there, astride the Sacred World of the Kais, at the centre of the universe where space is thick as soup. It is a lush planet but empty, stoic but lonely. For millions of years Shin had lived there in quiet desperation, waiting for something to change. Would Gohan be the person he is without the things that had happened to him? Would he have gone to the grave with an unsung song in him, a battle waiting to be fought - or is happiness nothing but a full belly, people whom you love, and a long-awaited conversation with one's father?
Maybe the world isn't cruel or kind at all. Maybe it's the people that live in it who ultimately decide.)