"I am a sick man... I am a wicked man."

It isn't obvious to me that life is worth living, nor can it be said that I or anyone will return a rational explanation to the contrary with anything but the most spiteful rebellion. If anything can be said about life or of the history of man, the last thing would be that it is rational. I would not even afford the kings and queens of ages past the meager allowance that their actions were even logical; at the very least I can forgive a man for his irrationality—he cannot help it. But I will not forgive any man for being illogical: that is pure madness.

I hear myself say, too, aren't those two really the same? No, oh, me. Anything which can be said to be 'done' by man is logical—he follows the steps according to his assumptions—but his assumptions before carrying out his ingenious plan can, of course, be wrong. There is really no such thing as bad logic, only bad principals, and so, an irrational man is not an illogical man, for he is simply abusing the good gift of his own spontaneity!

So, something which is rational must be principal at best, and at its very best it is a true principal, but how can such a thing really be? Could man really prove not only a rational principal but also contemplate the rational principal as such—the very thing which allows for anything to be true at all?

Even given that he could, would it matter? Why would this thing not be to us as we are to a fly: indifferent, and, at times, brutally capricious? This I can nor will take any further, but it has been braising the flesh of my mind ever since I threw that ball. That is a mystery which so brazenly irritates my pretensions that I cannot even forgive myself for thinking it.

At most I can distract myself from the thought, but I cannot escape that feeling—that nebulous thing which simply is. Of course, maybe it is a defect in me, and for that I will make no feeble attempt at apology. After all, there are many defects in me—so many, in fact, that I will not venture upon listing them out; my sister could do that herself, but to her I doubt I am even worth exorcising.

Things between her and I have not changed. In fact, we have not spoken in weeks, and on my way out the house this very morning, I swear she did not even look at me, though I did look at her. How pathetic of me! She and I will go on rattling over that sabre forever, I suppose, but this time she had the very last laugh.

Whatever. None of them, neither she nor my parents could comprehend the spoils of pleasure and suffering as I do. You see, I like myself for that, even if it is irrational, because while everyone seems to be getting on and nodding to themselves that they live in a rational world, I am writhing because I know it is not, and yet I act as if I do, and so I writhe. But! But… I enjoy this; I savor it; but not like someone might savor a delicious pastry or a fluffy meringue. I savor suffering for its own sake—for its suffering-ness, for its existence, and for mine.

See, this morning was my first day of high school, and so, aside from my 'bizarre' taste in existence, I had made a conscious choice to avoid anyone from that place of unabashed vapidity (middle school). My sister and I attended different schools, no doubt because my parents did not wish to embarrass her with my presence. But maybe that is why things between she and I have soured to an extent which I can hardly believe. I am not shy about brandishing my superiority (It is my prized sword; I carry it everywhere), and so my departure from that place, perhaps, too, sealed my departure from this family.

I never saw my parents during the day, and at night I saw them increasingly infrequently as they busied themselves with work. Verily, I have not seen my mother's face in three months, and as for my father, I do not even remember. If it were not for that night of utter surprise at everything—that cursed sphere of white—then I might have come to indulge in the proclivities of socially adjusted persons in modern society, but that is not so. Hah! In that other world I might have had a harem like one of those… never mind.

Stepping finally out onto the patio, a foam of warm leaden air coated my skin. Above, the clouds had rolled over the sky and lain stubborn, allowing not a speck of blue to peak through the white marshmallow dome. It was quiet, too. Not even a bird or insect chirped or buzzed, and no eerie random screams of young children doing who-knows-what echoed in the air. Everything was still, yet somehow tense.

I found my bike where I left it the night before, lying perched against the stone fence by the gate with a bit of damp dew on the handlebars. Unchaining it and walking it down the street, I looked both ways at the four-way crossing to make certain that there would be no comic-book shenanigans, and kicked up the stand and rode until the neighborhood maze faded like smoke into suburban commercial estate, where sad, grey people loitered by their empty shops and closed garage doors in the early morning.

At the edge of that commercial zone, a sleek high-speed rail cut an incision right through the whole thing, growing a nasty scab where the old village joined the rest of modern society. This crossing I'd passed many times, going through for a quarter mile and turning right at the first junction where the concrete jungle of Chiba left its toes; however, this time I would turn left and head downtown for four miles to my new school: Sobu High.

When I say that Chiba is a jungle, I really mean it, though maybe it is more like a forest. The path along the way is always beaten out by the feet of children you never saw or knew, but every so often, one does come reeling at that fork and notice a third, untrodden trail hidden within the bramble, scribbled inexplicably from invisible ink, leading tantalizingly into some dark beyond. That sense of adventure and exploration, that sense that one is treading unknown yet inevitable territory, that sharp line between the novel and the deadly—that was the feeling of turning left at that junction.

It was creepy. There were no cars or even sounds of cars, only the jingle of my bike chain spinning along; and that sterile buzz on the warm air grew hotter and thicker, too, and the odd silence didn't help. It only stretched out further like the road before me, so as to come to an epiphany and snap like a rubber band—that was the only way a pent-up rage like it would cease, anyway: absolute structural failure. It just kept growing and growing, and still it was so quiet I thought a car might somehow creep up and crash into me in the haze of the misty morning. Coming near the last junction before joining the school avenue, that horrible feeling waned ever slightly when the sound of dog barking broke the silence.

At the end of the street there was regular stop sign going three ways including mine, with mine going straight and truncating to a t-shape, where across from that was a green, scarcely wooded park, though in the muddy weather, even that efflorescent scene blended and washed out into a pastel smudge.

Idling on the sidewalk by the stop was a girl and a small brown dog. It looked like she was talking on the phone—at my distance I couldn't tell—but either way, that dog didn't like whatever she was doing, and that park across the street must have looked mighty encouraging, because he was itching to it like gold.

The dog was getting feisty—so much that I'd probably hit him if I wasn't careful; but I was going to walk the bike across the street anyway, so that was no bother, and it all really depended on whether I could avoid a circumstantial conversation with that girl. She was real looker, real cute—not that I'd look at her for too long being the way things are. Though, by the time I came close enough to cross, any threat of creeping her out or slipping fatally into that awkward conversation became an impossibility, because right as I got to stopping before the sign, the poor dog went wild and raced out into the street with the green park in its googly eyes and a frenzied snake of a leash behind.

Now, I do consider myself an intelligent individual, but every man once in his life must allow himself something which defies his own profit, and so a matter of thought became a matter of fact.

My bike was already moving, so I lowered gears, pumped a few pedals in, and right in the middle of the road, leapt forward, wings stretched akimbo with the dachshund in my sights. Soaring down like a cat, I cradled the furry thing in my arms and let the momentum roll me over my shoulder, arriving smoothly on the other side of the street with only a scratch and some unkempt hair in my eyes.

The bike, however, was not where I expected it to be; that is, it wasn't wedged somewhere in that gentle verdant hedge, arrested cruelly by the prickly arms of the bush which I had been aiming, but instead it laid there on the sidewalk broken and moribund, mangled in a dolorous bundle of aluminum.

Gathering to my feet and still mourning, I straightened out my shoulders up and combed a good look at the chaos. Across the street that girl was frozen solid, staring googly-eyed at me like her dog before; and to her left, I saw why she'd been affected with such a terrible paroxysm. Sprawled out on four chrome wheels like a newborn giraffe was a black limo, preceded by a graffiti of skid marks along the pavement behind it. The bumper was smashed, with the front hood bent oddly so that it obtruded up against the windshield, cracking it slightly. The cause was obvious, and of course whoever was inside was fine, but they man did they fuck up my twelve-hundred-dollar road bike.

That's Twelve-hundred dollars. Twelve. Hundred. You could buy two Cambodian children off the dark web for that much.

That limo looked like whoever owned it would throw it in a ditch just for an unenthusiastic hand-job behind a sonic dumpster. What a fuck-head. Now I've got this dog in my arms and a spoiled fortune, all because I thought I'd do something cool. Alright, that bike was my dad's, but I know he's going to be pissed. Actually, you know what? He probably won't care. He'll probably wish the car got me instead so he could finally cash in that life insurance policy. Shit happens.

And inasmuch as this incident was a valid excuse go to home, I still had school, and really, that was better than going back and having a rematch over that weird staring contest with my sister; so, quickly I let the dog fall out of my arms and run over to the girl. She was already starting to cry, but watching her companion stroll over happily, she let out with some excitement, calling his name.

"Sable!"

From over there, I think she tried to get my attention, but I didn't let her. I turned away in a hurry, picking up my ragged satchel off the ground, and jogged down the street toward the school. Everything happened so fast that I don't think any of them saw my face, though with those windows so tinted I couldn't be sure.

·△▽△▽△▽△▽△▽△▽△▽△▽△·

Making a guise of my frazzled hair, I slipped somewhat surreptitiously onto the school premises. Past the front yard, a red-brick road ran lazily to a grand staircase, and greeting me like a rampart at the top was a wall of glass, beyond which was an atrium pillared by shiny metal lockers—the eponymously labeled one I found quickly. For with a name like mine, nominal arrays are no trouble in life, though neither are comparisons to fictional heroes; the latter is not so true of me.

Dragging my feet through the noisy halls, I saw hardly anyone, though the people I did see were all the same in that drab vacuousness of spirit—the sort of people that laugh in a conversation because it is conventional or who wrap themselves in the latest textile trends of the era so that they do not appear for a second like a dissonant chord in an isotropic social harmony. Unfortunately, my tardiness, albeit inculpable, would make for a rather uncomfortable and cliché self-introduction in front of a full class of seated students, but such a coincidence I deemed mandatory. Life—whatever it was—found a way to embarrass me everywhere, so maybe such a thing was inseparable from it; necessary, I should say.

My first period was mathematics, which I really had no taste for, though my ability was not lacking (Recall that I hold myself superior to everyone). There is simply something of the mystical in it, which, to the modern person, including myself, excites a kind of purgatory frenzy against the 'heresy' of that inscrutable fact. The phenomena which it describes are, again, in almost blasphemous fashion, not quite as real as the abstraction. And yet it is an indominable mystery which I do not preoccupy myself with, since it does not matter that my consciousness, being the fugitive ghost of purely material causes, appears to lay across a qualitative abyss between that which it supposedly arises from, and that which it actually is: indivisible...

I cannot help myself becoming suicidally contemplative about everything. My vision of the reality always finds its dry, carious roots communing with the ever-giving wellspring which pours out of that cataract of supernatural ambrosia, but I can never clutch those roots or branches, feel them extend logically beyond themselves. Oh, to feel that mountain rock damp would be… it would be…! eh, again, I must excuse myself from the table of the mind. Such burdensome thoughts arouse a kind of anxiety I cannot possibly contend with.

After a while of wandering, I stood before the classroom door. Sliding it left, it yielded easily, clinging as those tiny wheels at its sill weathered against the rail. I thought I heard whispers coming through the façade, and perhaps I was right, because the silence that accompanied my first step into the room felt like it had stifled a raucous theater in the middle of a climactic act. Being the unwanted intruder, however, I made no fuss of it and sauntered over to my chair, again letting my hair fall over my face.

It was a front row seat by the outer wall opposite the window, though poetically, the one pane of glass which would have let the white sunlight shine through had its blinds closed-up, casting an ominous shadow over me. Now, I was not concerned of my appearance, but given that my face alone scares children, and that my now ragged jacket suggested a delinquent caught up in a fight on his way to school, the shadow over my being was appropriate. Yet it would not please them to learn I was involved in a car accident this very morning, or that my appearance had incited brutality on the behalf of my peers since my birth; but such is the nature of people. They are really more cynical than I am.

The teacher, whose absence I did not notice, suddenly speed-walked through the open door followed by a gust of wind and slammed a pile of binders on her desk, causing the whole class to stir shaken. After taking a deep, contemplative breath of simmering frustration, she announced to the class that there would be no further delays, and that she now, having left behind a great weight, felt like a complete woman.

I thought someone might joke about what that 'weight' was, but no one seemed keen on poking what appeared to be a fierce woman. And what a woman she was—beautiful, young, teeming with intelligence. The only thing she was missing was a husband, so it seemed. At least, that to me was the weight she left behind which she so clearly brought into the room with her, despite the haste she enjoyed coming in.

"Before we start, I'd like to—"

The door broke open again, this time with humble timidity, cutting the teacher off while everyone looked curiously at the one peeking shyly through the crack. There was a pair of eyes blue and clear as ice, becoming a pearlescent silver around the edges, and draped by elegant curtains of black hair set by a delicate red ribbon. No part of her was garish or outstandingly vibrant, yet all the faded colors came together in a perfect union of beauty, charming like a quiet, pale winter wind sweeping over a mountain peak. She was cool, for sure.

"My apologies," she said in a soft voice, bowing as she came in.

A storm of whispers boomed, whispers you'd expect a guy like me to garner after his hair parts to reveal a set of menacing eyes, but they were all for her. I tried keeping my eyes off her, I really did, but a man like me who can appreciate a beauty like that cannot forsake the search and subsequent consciousness of it. Then she caught my stare in a snare, blinking twice before dashing away, but out of the corner of my eye it felt like some of that look stuck to my jacket like the warm sunshine through a tarp, only it was cold.

After hush conversation with the teacher, she sat down in a seat behind and to the left of me, just far enough away that no dialogue would be possible, but close enough to make me exceedingly uncomfortable as she continued to burn me with that cold laser beam. The teacher began her lecture, and maybe I could've listened to that since she was such a looker, but the whole thing melted into incoherent babble even as I attempted with utmost scrutiny to concentrate on the words; all I could perceive in that whole fifty minutes of class was the feeling of my flesh cauterizing around an open gash.

The very second it was over, the class erupted in chatter and sliding desks, and in the chaos, I made a flight out of the room, going down the first set of stairs and exiting outdoors where a canopy shielded egress to the gym, then walking round to the front entrance, I climbed up the same set of stairs that brought me in, and in a sea of busy people found my next class.

The rest of the day went smoothly—much as it could without that deadly stare—and by the end of my last class, that thick fluffy dome hovering above had dispersed into a thin cotton sheet, right on time for the evening chariot to light up the sky in a dusty yellow streak. In the pink calm of evening now, it was time for a long walk. Following the same route along the way to school, I traveled back, cutting through the metro where all the men and women in suits congregated in their uproarious society, and walked through midtown till I reached that first familiar junction, heading straight past the ultimatum not home, but into the old town.

It was there that the eaves of Chiba's skyline cast their umbral grievance on that run-down neighborhood, where those same torn up people bent over and shuffled their feet through an immemorial village of timber framed cottages and antique stores. At first, the road was kind, running through in asphalt before breaking gradually to cobblestone—that was where the old people lived. And a few more miles down, the cobblestones crumbled into gravel and weeds and rotten-log powerlines, and a little more after, where the moss of the woods grew and crept perniciously, inviting a sense of eldritch dread in that abyssal interstice between man and nature, were the outskirts.

It was not that nocturnal place where I sought to go, though, for not even the old men with their whitened wisdom went there. I sought an old training building nestled snuggly between two businesses, a flower shop to its left, and a family-owned liquor store to its right. It was a beige rectangle, the walls of which were stained with dirty black marks by rain and time. It was a bloody anachronism which the brutalist rage of the sixties had born to break the old order, to exist as a gangrenous wound where its petulant resentment had cleaved the tradition of Chiba apart from the new men without chests—and no hearts, either, for that matter.

When I arrived on that street, the folk picked up my scent. The flower shop was run by a little old woman with a queer smile that age couldn't lay a hand on, and when she saw me, she never spared me the displeasure of not showing it. I'd known her since middle school, ever since I first started coming to the neighborhood; she thought I was a delinquent at first, and she was right, but after a while I like to think that scent wore off. Her husband passed away years ago—I knew because she had a picture of a younger man on the wall through the glass window—and even though she lived alone, her spirit carried on unabated, fueled by a strength we new people seem to have willingly disposed of.

Next door, the liquor store ran an unpretentious racket which I never meddled in. I never saw anyone inside, but for some reason I always had it in my head that they had just one customer, or that they might have had many, but that they were all the same man. Nevertheless, I put it out of my mind to impose upon them. The old folk liked me, and I had no idea why.

As I put my hand on the rusty knob of the old wound, the place I intended to pursue and dwell in, the old woman from the flower shop appeared behind me with a frail whimper, holding out a bouquet of hyacinths.

"April is the cruelest month," she croaked before waddling off.

As usual I made no reply. She never spoke to me with the intent of being spoken back to, anyway, which was essential to the character of the whole neighborhood. There were no transactions here, only gifts; and even if it were a bouquet of hemlock, nobody cared, rather taking pleasure, pride, in the endless march toward oblivion. It was the place where all the human driftwood wound up after breaking their masts against the outrageous tides of life, and not least retaining their indubitable buoyancy, washed up alive but paralyzed.

I turned the knob and entered. There was a small lobby like a control room built around the entrance where, once, some kind of reception desk received a generation of kids long dead and observed them, but now the plywood construction had been plundered by termites, and the cheap white paint had cracked and turned a sickly jaundice which oozed out like an odious sludge. A pair of old fluorescent bulbs were buzzing overhead, coupling their sterile droning with the stagnant air marvelously, but their colorless glow extended only so far as the room they occupied. For cut amateurly into the outer wall, overlooking the interior of the training center, were two windows, and past them a pool of darkness.

In that black blanket, I could see a firefly glowing to the rhyme of torpid breathing, winking in and out of existence with a diminishing allure that suggested an angler fish was somehow staking out, trying something new. It was probably a smoke alarm, but it looked far too much like a smoldering ember for me to excuse my fears for the moment.

The light switch was on the inner wall of the building, and so, after blindly fiddling my hand around the cold aluminum control box, hoping my finger would miraculously flip it, a miracle occurred. In an instant, there was a crack, and a series of over-sized ceiling lamps lit up in succession, rolling down the length of the building and gradually banishing the darkness in equal partitions of space; and at the very end, hugging the furthest wall from me, the last set of lights came on to reveal the source of the will-o-wisp.

On a wooden bench tucked up against the wall sat a dark looking man with eyes split wide open, staring right at me. He gave me a start, but didn't move an inch himself, only letting the smoke from his cigarette climb through the air. I gave a weak wave, but again he didn't move or even acknowledge me, as his eyes stayed placid and brown as they were. Nervously I drew closer, pushing away the netting enclosing the batting cages, treading on the stale felt floor like a furtive raccoon until I came close enough to see that he was asleep—eyes open.

He looked oddly familiar, but I couldn't place it. The broad sides of his face were crawling with a five o'clock shadow—that's five o'clock in the morning, mind you—and the lids of his eyes were shut like blinds, like the aperture porting the vaporous interstice that divided his diurnal shamblings from his dreams at night. Yet, somehow, they still looked pried open by alligator clips and shot toward something so distant that its light could not possibly reach his eyes; and it was something very, very close, too. Closer than even his own self, so it seemed to me.

I kicked one of his legs, which were sprawled out in front of him, and he jumped awake, spitting out his cigarette and hacking up a storm enough to turn his face red. He caught a glimpse of me in that fit, but not seeming to care, returned to coughing his lungs out while I waited for him to explain himself. I'd never, ever, seen anyone walk in or out of this building in all my three years of daily visits, and he looked the sort of shady man looking to strike an unsavory bargain.

He finished coughing but stayed hunched over, eyes glued to the floor. He was about to pull out another cigarette, but I took his arm, and after a protraction of rapturous deliberation, he grinned innocently. It was the saddest face I've ever seen.

"Ain't I seen you before?" he asked in a strange accent.

"First time."

"First time again," he replied, "I think..."

"I don't think so."

He leaned across his side and laid his eyes on the nylon bag next to him. "This yers?"

I nodded, and he picked it up carefully and held it out, but as I motioned toward it with my arm, he reeled it back, striking me with a smoky, ponderous gaze. "Show me what ya got, boy" he uttered, slowly extending the bag again to me. There was no reason for me to oblige him, but I felt a little bit of excitement for some reason. I'd never shown this part of me to anyone; after all, I had no friends, no family, really—nobody to share anything with, not for my whole life. But I always had this feeling that someone or something was watching me, judging me, but not like some robed man presiding didactically over a suit, or a striped man calling a game with ebullient vigor; rather, it was a 'fullness' or 'rightness' by which my actions were truly judged, yet at the same time such a paranormal conscience was also personal—immanent. It was essentially itself—the judge and the law—and so, it arbitrated completely and utterly with no sanctimonious impunity.

I squared up the strike-zone net at the end of the cage. There were three cages in all, side by side, but I preferred the centermost one, since it allowed the world, though divided, to exist while I pitched. Leaning over, I gave a routine stare-down into the imaginary batter's box, spun the ball round to four seams, came to wind-up, strode, and released. The light-up screen behind the 'plate' flashed orange. 93 Mph.

A big gust came out of the ragged man's nose like a flute. That was the fastest pitch I'd thrown in days, but that man just huffed like he'd seen a plastic bag float on through the street. He slowly got up from the bench, bracing his hands against his knees as if it were a struggle, and rummaged through one of his many pockets. After a few seconds, he brought a piece of silver and a white stick to his mouth, but he really struggled to do so. And even as he brought trembling hands to his lips, an invisible force repelled them away until finally, after a deluge of perseverance, he managed a spark and a trail of smoke. Yet, coming short of taking a breath of that poison, he hesitated, eyes transfixed on empty space; then, he turned toward me and shot a harrowing glare for the ages.

"Stay out of trouble now," he said harshly, beginning toward the door, "I'll be around."

In that moment, the riddle of life had been rattled, but what it was that did it I couldn't decipher; instead, I watched him stammer out of the building like a fool, turning left out the door immediately, going exactly where I thought he would, but instead of consummating the great chain of determinism, he staggered, tugging against an unseen rope, and turned east onto the old road.