Chapter Seventeen: スローモーション

Another week passed. Somehow, Waluigi was still not found, though with the heightened police activity, he had also not gotten away with hurting anyone else.

By this time Bowser had gone into a police station and given a physical description of Waluigi. He had also convinced Wario to tell the police what he could as well— not too difficult a thing, since Wario's conscience was already weighed down.

Unfortunately, Wario could not provide much more information about Waluigi/Wallace than Bowser. Wario had not really interacted with his brother for many years, and could not even give a definite height for Waluigi. All of his information seemed to have an asterisk attached to it, that asterisk being that most of the information Wario gave was related to what he remembered from their childhood, back in the home village, over a decade ago.

Because Waluigi was going to be virtually an unknown personage, the police did not announce his identity to the public. It was also confirmed that no one who went by the name Waluigi or Wallace (with the requisite physical appearance) was working for anyone in the city. Only his physical description was spread— which was not too much more detailed than what had been spreading on the message boards already.

So Bowser contented himself that he had done all he could do. After all, he didn't know where Waluigi was. If anyone was going to find Waluigi, it was going to be a trained police force. And still, even if Waluigi was crazy enough to believe he himself was Luigi, it still wasn't really Bowser's responsibility to deal with him. Waluigi had been made by Wario and Luigi, and most recently spurred on in his madness by Luigi's suicide note. Bowser really, really had nothing to do with it.

With that in mind, he tried to focus on his writing.

Ah, what a paradox! It seemed… that when things were boring, there was plenty of time to write— but not much to write about. When things were happening, there was not as much time to write.

Well you see (Bowser said to himself), writing is for old people. It's for old people who have done a bunch of crap, and now they sit around and have nothing to do, so they have the material and they have the free time. You're not supposed to write as a younger person. It's unnatural.

God, I feel a hundred years old anyway.

So, what to write?

Actually, he did have a new idea. He wanted to try writing an epic poem… something like the Odyssey, or the Aeneid, or Paradise Lost. But more modernized, a modern fantasy, with the feelings of the present age. A great postmodern story… in verse.

But who the heck was he to write some epic story?

Well, after all, who the heck were most epic fantasy writers? All sorts of people tried their hand in writing epic fantasy or sci-fi, and many of them hadn't done much of interest in their lives. Maybe he wasn't being fair. Eh, whatever.

Though, maybe it was true that the more interesting your life, the more interesting your writing— even if you were writing something "childish" (a label made by a voice in his head) like genre fiction. The greatest fantasy story of all time (or, at least, the most influential), the Lord of the Rings, had been written by J.R.R. Tolkien— a person who had been in war and studied in-depth real world linguistics and mythology. No wonder his material was so original and intelligently constructed! He had witnessed the greatest dangers of the world and studied the power of mythology. Bowser was sure there was some quote somewhere about the best fantasy coming from mythology, but he couldn't place it…

What about George R.R. Martin, author of A Game of Thrones— possibly the "best" fantasy series since Lord of the Rings? Well, he didn't go to war, so that wasn't a prerequisite for writing interesting war-related material. What was most of his life? Teaching and writing. Well, after all, that wasn't so exciting, was it?

OK. So maybe if we just read and write enough, we'll eventually find our way to something excellent…? That was a nice thought. Even if you were trapped somewhere, as long as you kept snatching up words and throwing them back out, you too could write some "great" work.

(But neither Tolkien nor Martin nor Bowser were really "trapped". And maybe Martin's life was interesting after all, just in a more limited sense than Tolkien's. Or maybe it wasn't. Actually, Bowser didn't really know anything about these people. After scanning a couple of biographies, he had simply thrown together another theory. It too, like his other hastily created theories, would probably dissipate after a few months. Forgotten. How often thinking is useless.)

(And besides all of that, he had forgotten to even consider the lives of the poets connected to the actual works he had been originally thinking of, like Virgil and John Milton. Oops!)

But anyway, Bowser would try to write an epic story. They say write what you know, but despite not living a very interesting life (from his perspective), he found he had ideas after all for an epic tale. Where did these ideas come from? Pieces of this story and that, so it would seem— things he altogether forgot reading, flashes of images from movies. Nothing was perfectly original, except for the accidental combination of two old elements resulting in a stunning new form. No, the most original works were those that could collect ideas from the most disparate sources, and through repetitive knowledge of the laws of the art form, find the loopholes that allowed for the portrayal of new angles. New angles of that wobbly vision called "life". To paint a new picture on top of the underlying, unchanging real existence that never changed, but was always seen anew.

So another story, another poem, unraveled from the heart. Fantasy it may have been, and yet the conditions of sentient (human) nature it described were after all the same dance, the same theater stage with the same actors. The cloud atlas described by Mitchell. The collective unconscious…

Was Bowser even aware of all of this as he wrote? No, probably not. The creator shouldn't be, it's only distracting. And it's only a theory, right?

Maybe it's all wrong, and after all, we still don't know anything…

{Somewhere in this circle, it is written: Who is the audience? After all, if "we" are the actors…}

Bowser's reveries floated along…

...And then one day, it was Saturday again. A rainy Saturday. And Bowser was outside of the entrance to Dark Land, beside the stairs trailing down into the earth, and getting the faint sense (even if he had not thought the rest, in living memory) that he was standing on some stage, and in this underground bar, this cave, there was an old film reel being put in the machine, the lights turned off and the flickering lights (wait, what kind of theater is this?) clicking on…

He had some strange expectation about this encounter, one he couldn't articulate. The rain pattered his uncovered head. His stomach was turning, tickling a bit with nervousness.

When he had made his way down the steps, he was relieved to find that the older bartender was behind the counter. Sitting at the counter was a person wearing a raincoat, so large that it completely covered their body.

"Ah, you made it, sir." The bartender nodded.

Bowser couldn't keep from looking at the raincoat-person with a sense of expectation.

"Sir," The bartender, smiling, cleared his throat, "I have a very good guess what you are thinking, and if my guess is correct, I would have to say that you, in your guess, are incorrect."

The person in the raincoat was just finishing their drink. They pushed their glass back and stood up from the counter. Bowser was still staring at them with a strange and greedy expectation, with all sorts of weird ideas in his head: Is it really the bar owner? Is it Waluigi? (Though this person was too short to be the latter.)

"This way, sir," The bartender bowed slightly and extended his left hand out, towards the swinging flap doors in the back. "The owner is waiting for you."

The person in the raincoat was moving now, towards the stairway out, about to pass Bowser by.

Bowser stood still, feeling increasingly confused. He wasn't even sure why. Suddenly dawning on him was one fact, one fact alone. One fact blooming into consciousness. The fact was— that he didn't understand what was going on anymore.

Not just in this bar. The current situation was enough to trigger the sensation— the situation of the old Koopa Kingdom style bar and the two weird bartenders and this guest wearing a raincoat that completely covered them and the odd expectation of meeting the owner, the owner of this pub, who could only be contacted by special phone and traveled often…

This heap of events, getting heavier and heavier since Bowser had returned to the bar a week ago, seemed to break through the roof of his mind and come crashing down into his head, scattering debris and dust.

It was the realization...the conclusion...that Bowser didn't understand anything anymore. All of his thoughts for years had been useless, and nothing he had learned had really seemed to help him at all. And if he really believed that his thoughts were useless, that all of his words could not help him, then what was there? If there were no words there were no definitions, and if there were no definitions, then there was nothing. One meaningless event after another.

One attempt at happiness after another. One defeat after another. One victory… quickly flipped over, after another. And some defeats themselves flipping over to victory later. The events stack up and up, and time brings about changes...

Everything was constantly changing. This was obvious on paper. Everyone knows it: everything is changing. But Bowser, now, was beginning to grasp how this meant that, in one sense, nothing was real. He felt it most painfully in the way that despite everything he did, he never really seemed to get any happier. As he had concluded some time ago, no matter what he did, no matter what he believed, whether he focused on it, or ignored it, he could not actually find love… and let that idea be expanded to "real contentment" and "happiness in general".

Why, surely, thousands of things happened every day! Bowser took hundreds of actions. He thought millions of thoughts. Choosing to think nothing was still a choice. Choosing to try to take no action, to "BE" and "NOT DO" (and let life guide you, or the Dao, or zen or whatever fuck) hadn't changed things either. Nothing really changed anything. All choices were meaningless and useless. This was a new dimension of the "free will doesn't exist" idea. Determinism, atoms crashing into atoms since the beginning of time, was one aspect. Now, this one more directly sensible: that none of our choices actually make our lives better.

Could he say that by some evil miracle he had only made the wrong choices, only wrong choices, over and over again, for ten years or whatever?

But he wanted to make the right choice. If he wanted to make the right choice, and he always tried to, and yet still here he was making the wrong choices and still nothing ever changed, then he was trapped all the same because he was doing his best and it still made no difference.

And if all of this was true (and it seemed more and more that there was no other choice) then truly nothing mattered. But this was not simply nihilism. This was a new level of thought. Because in basic nihilism (as Bowser had understood it) the actions he took still made a difference in the world and for himself, there was just no real "system" or morality behind everything, to put it one way.

In this new nihilism, it was the so-shocking-it-felt-like-nothing idea that no matter what he did, he would feel just the same. And in that case, there was nothing to be done. There was nothing he could do to save himself.

It should have been obvious already. All he had to do was think about all of the people who, as long as they didn't have some kind of relationship problem, were generally happy without any effort at all. They didn't have to do anything. They had already been given prosperity. And it wasn't a relationship thing. In fact, for the most part, they were just given relationships as well. They didn't have to think about how this and that might work, or make dating into a math problem. They {ABRIDGED ver.} walked outside and collided with a body and 12 hours later were colliding repeatedly in a bed. They were giant particles. There was no real effort to it. There were no books to read, life just coasted along.

/Oh, you sourpuss misanthrope/ a voice said, /You're twisting it up. You're such a snob! An elitist. A "real jerk". Obviously, you're going to be alone forever, because of this attitude./

This was an attitude he had been trying to avoid. And yet as his thoughts tumbled away, and this helpless moment, of nothing mattering and nobody knowing anything and yet everything continuing to move all the same, these conclusions seemed more and more and more the only ones possible.

行けない つらりつらりと行けない

Perhaps he was giving a particularly pessimistic or emotionally charged view of it. And yet, stripped down, the ideas were essentially correct. People lived without effort, and they seemed to get what they wanted. More accurately, they lived unconsciously, so that they never really worried, or they never had to worry about any one problem for longer than a month, before they found it solved before their eyes. And if you asked them how things had worked out, what had they done to save themselves—? Oh so often, they could give no real answer, they could not explain. Because they hadn't done anything. Life had just helped them along.

"Sir? Are you OK?"

But some people "wake up". They become conscious. They begin to live the "examined life", as Plato put it. How fucking nice that sounded! How quaint! The "examined life". Let me examine how exactly infinite my problems are, how they cannot be solved, but because I am conscious now, I have to stare at this tornado of pain and frustration, that spins and spins without end! Yes. Surely, this is worth it.

(These were thoughts Bowser had already had for at least the last few months, but now they seemed to be fast materializing and made definitively conscious in the crash-bang-boom of the moment.)

So we need to return to an unconscious state, and then we won't be aware of our problems anymore. We'll just move along like animals, and we won't even be aware of fate determining whether we get what we want or not. No fear, no fear. We'll let our Id subsume us, as Freud would put it. We'll be like the flowers of the field, that do not work or spin, as Jesus put it. We must… we must lose desire, attain nirodha, as Buddha put it.

But Bowser had already thought about all of this, and though he could know all of this, none of it actually made a difference. With every step he took, he walked back into the very same place he had started.

"Sir?"

"Yes." Bowser heaved a great sigh and tried to find his breath again. "Yes, sorry. Sorry, I…"

He shook his head and smiled apologetically. "Could I have a quick drink?"