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(If you do not know precisely where impossibility begins and ends, then of course it cannot constrain you.)
“Every punishment you’ve ever subjected anyone to? You do it to yourself every day. Every minute. Your pain is chronic. Your existence is pointless. When your consciousness blinks out—which it will,” he added with an irreverent wink and a toast of his empty glass, “it will be as if you never existed at all. There will be no lovers, no family or friends to think fondly of you the moment your hold over them collapses. No memories for anyone to treasure but the ones you manufactured, which will dissolve into
nothing the very moment you come to an end. You’ll be forgotten immediately, and this, the immensity of your power—the magnitude of your abilities,” he clarified with a smirk, as if he took particular pleasure digging in this particular knife, “which is no small thing—it will be eclipsed by the utter fucking enormity of your pointlessness. When you no longer exist, you will have left nothing behind.”
“Everyone who casts a glance at you is witnessing the outcome of a tragedy,” Callum’s projection scoffed. “And yet not a single person will feel sad.”
“Do you think they know
what it really means to love?” his projection-self mused aloud to him. “That it isn’t the simple joy of fondness, I mean. In fact it’s violent, destructive. It means to cut the heart out of your chest and give it to someone else.”
We can’t help clinging to our origins, Callum said. The past always seems more ordered, Rhodes. It always seems clearer, more straightforward, easier to understand. We have a craving for it, that sense of simplicity, but only an idiot would ever chase the past, because our perception of it is false—it was never that the world was simple. Just that in retrospect it could be known, and therefore understood.
The end of days always looked crucially the same, no matter the hand that had written it. All of humanity shared a single, dismal imagination: fires and floods, locusts and plagues. The Earth casting us out from her rotten, despoiled Eden.
He understood his own, that he felt everything because he wanted terribly, with all of his being, to feel nothing. Because to feel nothing would be to finally no longer feel pain.
believed the universe was completely random, and that’s what eluded us. Because we all want to believe we are fundamental in some way. We are our own myths, our own legends. We give things reason. We are reasonable creatures and so everything must have its place, its purpose—but we are also egotistical creatures, and so we give ourselves reasons that don’t exist.”
From somewhere in his mind’s periphery he caught the vestiges of a very Rhodesian sigh—Varona, honestly, like the proverbial chord that David played to annoy the Lord.
And it was grief. It was loss, though untraditional. The surrender of a future self, like parting from a lover he’d never get the chance to meet.
What mattered was the split second of tension. The need to consider how to respond. What a beautiful strain of anguish. Like biting your tongue and then, just for an instant, tasting blood.
There was no end to this world, no beginning, no salvation from on high, nor any need for it. Olympus was empty. The gods were already here.
What did he think love was—pain? Was that all anyone believed love to be? That if it didn’t hurt, if no one pined, then it was as if it did not exist and had never existed—a tree brought down in the forest with no one to hear it fall?
This was just the world. You trusted people, you loved them, you
offered them the dignity of your time and the intimacy of your thoughts and the frailty of your hope and they either accepted it and cared for it or they rejected it and destroyed it and in the end, none of it was up to you. This was just what you got. Heartbreak was inevitable. Disappointment assured.
But I am not such an idiot—I’m not so devoid of feeling,
Tristan spat, “to not be perfectly aware that you and I had something rare and difficult and fucking significant, and in the end it only broke because I broke it.”
No, Nico, I would have lit on fire anyone with even the slightest intention of harming you, and that is the kind of friend I am, when I choose to be a friend. Which I have never dared to dream of doing. Until you.
