Rodney was a timid and easily intimidated nobody. He wore his plaid shirt one morning to school and came back to watch television on his television in the afternoon. He hadn’t gone back to school since. To be honest, last Saturday he got involved with a chain-smoking con man who took his watch and then gave it back in the mail three weeks later with five crumpled dollar bills. He didn’t really make any sense of it.
Was the con man really a con man? If he conned Rodney’s watch out for a couple days and then returned it with the promised investment, was it a fake and no-good deal just because his friends said it was? No? Yes? Who were his friends anyways? The dog? He didn’t have a dog, so he went to the marble countertop and got some filtered tap water out of the filter that didn’t really work. He drank his half-filtered tap water in the comfort of his dilapidated living space and then spilled it on the floor, by accident. He was angry at himself but mostly just tired, so he decided to skip school again and go out for a walk.

He had read something really interesting on the internet the night before last and he struggled to remember it. He unconsciously shivered, looking more and more ragged as he fought his way down the pavement with a thin cashmere cardigan barely keeping in a pathetic body heat. The wind blew in newspapers and crumpled sheets of nonsense, throwing them around in a breeze and tantrum. It whipped around signs and notices that nobody had noticed until they were blown in to unsuspecting faces. The wind stripped Rodney down and beat him in to a submissive pulp with a penchant for curry. He sat down on the grass, which was muddy for some godforsaken reason. He then walked around some more and ended up back at his apartment. He searched his fridge’s nooks and crannies for the curry that he knew he had already forgotten to remember that there wasn’t anything there in the first place.
He thought that he should stop skipping school, even though it served him no benefit to go there anyways. He knew that he sounded pretentious when he tried to explain his reasoning, and he knew that he didn’t know himself what his reasoning really was. No muse to project his insecurities on. He was on fire, and didn’t want to go ask his parents for money again for rent and such because he wasn’t even going to school. Rodney the compulsive, Rodney the inscrutable. What was it to a biology degree and economics? Could economics explain why he had lost all his money? Clearly not, and while physics could finagle its way in to how he spilled his water, he really didn’t understand that either. Couldn’t the molecules of the world follow some easier rules, have a convention or something? Easier that way, he mumbled.

The cleaning lady hadn’t cleaned his apartment in the time he had left. He hated the cleaning lady, even though he had never seen her before and doubted that she existed. He really was the cleaning lady, he insisted while watching Japanese cartoons. No subtitles in the real world. He slept on the floor that night, doubting everything that had already happened and would ever happen. When he woke up with feverish tremor, he groped tenderly for the dollars that he had earned by lending the con man his watch, and discovered that the wind had blown them out of the thin wires of his cardigan. He had already lost his watch, so he supposed the whole affair was pointless anyways, and carefully picked out the leaves out of the pocket where his money and his mouth were supposed to be.

He decided to go out stepping on the pavement again. Maybe he would make someone else director of doing nothing. When he went out, the sky was grey and the wind was blowing again. He wished he could go on vacation to an island where the weather was equally terrible, and discover that there was a scheduled diplomatic thermonuclear exchange that he had somehow been unaware of as ruler of the world. He wanted to rush back to his concrete college prepatory block and feel defeat as a blinding flash of light crushed a billion million thousand hundred ten one souls into burnt shadows. I could have changed things! Too late for that anyways. He didn’t believe in apathy anymore.

He believed one should become a person like other people. The weather made it so that you couldn’t tell if it was if it was night or day. Something like the primordial soup of things, with dust and debris flying everywhere like dismembered chickens. There might have been a risk of rain -- it was hard to say. It was still possible to see, even in his weak condition, just difficult. So he saw a woman outside pushing a shopping cart filled with junk in it. Her past was written on her face. He offered to help push the cart and rattled it across the floor as he walked with her. After a while, he asked if she would take something for him. She looked at it without much concern, scrutinizing the object in her hand.

“Everyone’s dead or gone. It’s like that movie.”
“Yes,” he said. His throat hurt. “Sometimes the hardest thing and the right thing are the same.”
“Do something.”
“Yes,” he coughed, “you are.”
“Die,” she said.
He walked off. A soft, gentle, humming noise faded in as the white sky bled in to horizon.