There were so many things about it that depressed him, but reading that people of color were at a greater risk, and suffered to a greater extent than his supposed own people just took everything out of him. And he just lay in bed, in a kind of paralyzed conscious coma.
Maybe it was just because he wanted to complain, wanted to feel justification for his complaining, because he often felt so miserable about everything. But he hoped it was something more meaningful than that, something that would lift him out of the wretchedness he felt himself to be — maybe, possibly, somewhere down below all the cringe-worthy narcissistic malaise was something like empathy.
He recognized that there was this heroic drive in everyone, something like a continuum stretched between honest desire to do good, even great things, and a mere selfish desire to feel one’s greatness, and have the recognition of others. Any hard-core Star Wars fan knew that.
Dan felt that within the confusing heap of muck he knew of himself there was no way to pick through it all, every fragment of fantasy, and figure out which way he leaned, though he feared it was toward a fealty to some glorified sense of self. Still, he thought, even that it may be possible to put this ugly underbelly to work and reap some good of it.
But it was hopeless, because even if he could believe in the most selfless possible self he might imagine, there wasn’t really anything he could do besides follow the directives: stay at home, wear a mask when you go out in public, and don’t interfere with the people who are in roles that really can do some good.
These non-whites, the people who, because of the grotesquery of history, neglect, and even present day hate and fear, end up filling more of the least desirable service jobs — the caretakers, store clerks, and delivery people — are really just like him. They are the same race, but not, the same but not, the same but not. There are too many things alive in the air, the social fabric to keep them from being the same, and yet, they are. He had none of their noble struggle to form an outline around himself, to create a sense of resolve, and a desire to better oneself.
That he also had white friends, close friends, in those jobs just confused things more for him, since it drove home that it wasn’t such an easy and hard-defined line, but a statistical trend, a matter of numbers, and it was the math that always gave him the most difficulty. It was too perplexing to think through. And it just drove him deeper into what, something they called moral poverty in the one philosophy class he had before he dropped out of the physics program and took a job as a coder.
He had no right to complain, he realized that. But everything hurt. He was lonely, and he didn’t like being on the wrong side of anything, yet what could he do? By asking this question he maintained the same tendency he hated about his people, himself, but he couldn’t find a way around it.
He didn’t want to be himself anymore, not this thing, this advantaged human who appreciated none of it, who turned down every opportunity to better himself because it seemed shallow and unfair to use it to make life simpler and more pleasurable for himself.
Yet there was nothing heroic about any of his choices and he knew it. He would never get to the other side, turn the particle into wave. For this is what he must do, though he knew it was impossible.
He took a breath, shut down his thinking for a moment, and felt that heat of his frustration rise from his skin. Yes, he really did have to become something else, something unknown and unheard of, something beyond just this or that race. Someone who can do and not do, who can override that ugly binary between, that either/or of doing for me or doing for other.
And it would not be human. Not anymore. It would need to be something unimaginable, yet it would need to be imagined, if not by the mind, by the bodiless of the body occupying space. It would have to be like music.