WAX AND MARBLE

Ethan Zaborowski

A flaxen Lansing moon leaked through Orin’s window as he began to drift off, cross-legged on his bed. His phone lay screen-side down, buzzing but unattended, as his head dipped into sleep. He strained his eyes, red from the dust of bookshelves that had been undusted for four years and sunken from the late-night necessity of senior course work. He had five hundred more words from the Greek set for himself to do before he could sleep, but this goal was unattainable, and he went asleep frustrated, lying to himself about his progress.

None of the Academics were present in Elysium. Some guessed that they, having abolished a means of judgment, feared Rhadamanthus. Others claimed to have seen them follow those who knew the way, but they (by their sluggishness/ their energy failing/ being constitutionally unable to arrive at anything/ being critically indecisive) turned back in the middle of the road.

None of the commentaries seemed to agree. The verb was familiar enough, meant generally “to lay hold of; to comprehend; to reach,” but, as he should have expected, other minds clouded his translation, which he held to be epitomal of Lucian’s style and which he had spent his undergrad career trying to honor in English. But the notes here called for at least an acknowledgement of double-entendre in the Greek: pr. part. acc. modifying the subject of ἀπολείπεσθαι, “that they were left behind not reaching” (but also not coming to understand). Understand what? They’re quite literally walking on a path. They don’t need to come to conclusions about Rhadamanthus’ judgement—They conclusively fear it.

Still, in his sleep, Orin seemed to take both meanings without trying, somewhere beneath the language. He was with them, all bathed in oil and dragging their feet, seeing the fields at the end of the road but stopping where they stood. He took his beard in his fingers, feared judgement vaguely but refused to believe its validity. He had simpler questions to ask before he could reasonably seat himself with the others. He resolved to parse the questions out in his head instead and turned back for Athens, leaving the heroes and poets and barbarians to take their rewards uncritically. The other Academics turned away with him. He lay snoring on his stomach, unbothered by the books and notes on which he slept.

There were two missed calls on his phone when he woke up. He left his notes and commentaries sprawled on the bed. Both calls were from Griffin, a friend or, more accurately, someone he had spent plenty of time with as a kid. Orin hadn’t seen him since the two were in junior high. Griffin had parents in the military and so constantly moved when they were young, and he only decided to move back to Lansing when he was twenty and Orin was already at Ball State. Orin would only be in Michigan a month, stuck at his father’s house waiting out the purgatory between his final undergraduate semester and the first semester of his PhD program. He gazed around his room before returning the messages and remembered when, in the same house, the two of them would play little language games with each other. The games were simple: Orin would be sitting on his bed, and Griffin would be struggling through a book report. I’ve said realization five times already, give me a synonym. Orin would give him several, ascending in difficulty for a fourteen-year-old to spell. I can’t write epiphany. Everyone will know you wrote this for me, Griffin would say, knowing this would please Orin. Orin would laugh, uncontrollably, at this—a sort of sob of self-contentedness.

He and Griffin meant to meet up casually, though Orin dreaded the inevitable fact of their difference, feared the meeting would be mostly silent, knew that the only semblance of their childhood friendship to persist against all the time away would be their responses to awkward silence: Griffin would exude, make desperate jokes, and Orin would resist the jokes, correct Griffin’s grammar, badger him. This is how they spoke as young men, one of the only shapes through which young men let themselves speak to each other. Orin prepared himself to “catch up,” meaning to conjure up the recent script of plans that he had been relaying to family members and peers for the past few months until the plans lost their meaning and the excitement felt feigned, choreographed, wax veneered.

He had mulled over two rejection letters in his head, metabolized the opening phrases (After carefully reviewing your qualifications/ Based on our findings, we do not find you to be . . .), reciting them in his head and bit his lip, laughing with them, with their judgment, at himself each time. With the laughter came the humiliation, which he would conceal by downplaying his acceptance at Boston College. Social maneuvering with Griffin, too, would be especially doomed since nostalgia and memories of their time here as kids—a common crutch for estranged friends when they reunite—was off the table.

But last night Griffin called again, interrupting Orin’s translating, and Orin hoped he was calling to cancel their meetup. Instead, he called with pretty bad news, dredging up another Lansing name which, to Orin’s discomfort, made it impossible for the two of them to dance around what happened last time they were together.

“Hey you remember Lucas Yunker, right? Well, we’re gonna have to meet up with him, make sure he’s alright.”

“Why?” Orin noticed alarm in his voice, corrected it to seem callous, disinterested.

“Well, he just moved back here. He texted me. I guess he left the military on a general discharge, a medical separation. It sounded like he was getting these horrible panic attacks, but I didn’t pry too much.”

Orin didn’t know that Lucas joined the military. In fact, he made a conscious effort not to think of Lucas at all. The last contact he had with Lucas was online, on Facebook. Lucas hadn’t been too present on the internet when they were young. However, when Orin was a junior in college, Lucas’ posts and direct messages became increasingly confrontational. Most were direct defenses or endorsements of cagily self-described “classical liberal” pundits, the occasional slip of something vile veiled in a brand of plausible deniability about which Lucas himself was doubtlessly unaware—one of the recent types who got a rise out of the projected image of the outraged reader. This discourse wasn’t new to Orin—in fact, he pitied its lack of creativity.

There were messages though, which Lucas wrote and sent specifically to him that made him feel unsafe. He only read the first one. Well congrats for getting published in Vexillum journal. Glad your [sic] making a name of yourself in college. How much is that gonna cost you though? And what are you gonna do with your degree? Hope you have no trouble finding a job. Also mainly writing to let you know I hope I don’t see you back home anytime soon. Four cracked ribs and a broken collarbone and you laugh. Your [sic] still laughing to me, all the way in Indiana. I wish you wouldn’t have laughed. Now I have to find a way to laugh at you like that when I see you again. I need to. Just something in me I guess. You need to be on the ground and hurt and I need to be laughing and we can be even because

What followed was a barrage of mysticism about what men must do to other men when they humiliate each other, why humiliation is a type of social death and why social deaths need to be avenged with interest. These were the least important bits of the messages, though, which all seemed to follow a sort of template. The mock-congratulatory introduction (the messages all came two or three days after an essay of Orin’s was published, and Lucas would know the journal, the topic, and the date with a precision that made Orin feel perplexed, stalked), the dismissal of his academic work, then the same threats.

Then he would dive deeper into his texts, look through ancient grammars to find the words accurate enough to confess his discomfort. If I can memorize the 500 most frequent nouns, verbs, all their declensions, participle forms, I can find the word for what I need to feel, what I need to think hard enough or do to make this stop. There was catharsis and there was irony, both of which failed to get him what he needed. He’d translate vigorously, madly, but the Lucas’ next message would come soon after, and he’d find himself wordless again. The standard contents of the messages unfurled Orin enough, but the final part of the template—the allusion to what happened—made Orin close the app, put down his phone. He felt two urges whenever Lucas mentioned this: to vomit out of fear, out of disgust in himself, in the situation, in the threats of retribution, and to laugh.

He had come to realize that these reactions were governed by the same mechanism in him, were triggered by the same circumstances. He recalled that the approximate verb for vomiting in Classical Greek was ἐξεμέω: to disgorge, to purge, to bring up sound or substance from the stomach. To reject.

He resolved, though, to mention none of this trouble with Lucas when he dialed Griffin back, as to mention the trouble would be to invoke it or to make it somehow more real. He simultaneously choked back a gag and forced down the corners of his mouth as Griffin picked up. “You called?”

“Yeah. That Denny’s on West Saginaw is still open. He said he’d meet us there at seven, maybe you want to meet a few hours earlier?”

“Uh, sure. I have some translating to do but I should be free around four or five.” Orin found his own tone too sincere, too eager. “What, am I in trouble or something?”

“Fuck off.” Griffin fell back into the faux-combative rhetoric they deemed appropriate when they were younger. “Thought we should catch up alone before we have to deal with any heavy shit. You know, you and me first, because were friends, and then with him, because he’s, you know, Lucas.”

There it is. Orin could avoid the allusion as much as was in his own control, but Griffin was present too, could invoke it whenever he wished, and just did. Orin laughed, brought up sound enough to be heard through the phone. He knew it was inappropriate and braced himself to think up some lie.

“Jesus Christ, dude, are you still fourteen? You still think the baseball kids jumping him was—”

“No, no, no. Calm down. I was just laughing about—did you know that Homer was from Babylon? His name was actually Tigranes and only when the Hellenes took him hostage—took him homeros, literally one bound together, like with shackles—was he known as Homer.” There was a pause on Griffin’s end, but Orin could stomach pauses.

“Well, get your work done and we’ll meet up.” He sounded stern, was known to become stern even as a kid. “Either way, I want us to at least show him that we care enough to listen to—”

“Right, right. Of course. I’ll see you in a few hours.” Orin ended the call laughing again, embarrassed that he couldn’t contain himself for a brief phone call. What would Griffin think of him if he couldn’t drop his guard for one candid talk? No. Griffin threw this all onto him, threw the allusion onto him, threw Lucas onto him. Sure, he couldn’t have known that up until half a year ago Lucas had been trolling and threatening Orin regularly, and perhaps he didn’t appreciate that Orin might be afraid to be in a room with someone so unstable—with someone who, to be sure, had been enrolled into two different corrections programs by age fifteen and who they both witnessed getting into fights with neighborhood kids and smashing garter snakes as a hobby. But Griffin was perfectly safe in Lucas’ abstract masculinity code, was a benefactor to him. He was the one who called the police after what happened. And he had just volunteered Orin’s presence without asking, without even catching up first.

Orin made himself continue his translation but skipped the bit about the Academics on their way to Elysium. He turned, instead, to the first few lines, reworking them as he proofread.

A True Story: Book I

Just as to athletes and to those engaged in exercise, not only is their condition a principal concern, but they also take care to furnish themselves with proper rest. In fact, they consider this the greatest part of their training. So too do I find it fitting for readers of laborious texts to relax their thoughts and prepare for more labor…Each of the things being recorded here has made reference to canonical events, not without comedy, but if I confess to be truthful in one thing, it is that Lucas Yunker, a neighborhood kid, was booted from the junior high baseball team and expelled from junior high for breaking another neighborhood kid’s right shin with an aluminum bat. As I was accustomed at the time to passively viewing him as an ample resource for pre-teen mockery, I, along with a friend, smoked with him at a nearby quarry a week after his expulsion.

There, Griffin and I watched as he regurgitated something his dad had told him about foreign oil, burned his arms with rubber erasers, and “practiced” screaming with his false cords. He was known to park his bike and sit at the quarry, so some other kids from the baseball team, along with their older brothers, showed up, each carrying an aluminum bat, and soon were on him while Griffin took me by the arm. We hid behind a nearby fence. They caught Lucas sitting down, and he looked up at them with childlike stupor: the glasses having slid down his nose, head craned up at them from a fetal squat, the mouth open and expression scrunched. Most of them discarded the bats, meant mainly to intimidate him. There was plenty of touching, though. See one pulling him to his feet by the hair. See another shoving him in the chest, him shoving back. It is here that three of them shove him in the same direction and peering from the fence, I no longer see him.

Time hangs thick over where he stood before he was shoved, and beyond my scope of vision, over the edge of a shallow diving cliff, he falls silently. My stomach falls as I begin to realize this, and sound or substance brews there, threatening to bring itself up. I force it down. First the three shovers regard one another, trying to determine who shoved last—that is, who can be impugned for taking it too far. This exchange can only reasonably happen for seconds, but it hangs there to me for minutes, a silent overture for the fall’s conclusion, in which parroted manhood gives way to sincere fear.

Then a hollow thud, a distant crack, the same sound a boy makes when another one punches him in the solar plexus, but amplified, projected. The group of kids are soon on their bikes, receding from the scene, and Griffin quits the fence and runs where the fall concluded, my arm somehow still in his hand. I take liberty here to withhold Lucas’ state after the fall, which was perhaps only seven or eight feet long. But there was a dilapidated bridge where he landed, and he landed on his side, was unable to breathe deeply or raise his right arm. I heard murmurs of reassurance and the dialing of a phone, but I was somehow subtracted from what happened, was midway on an ancient path, having taken my beard in my fingers, being constitutionally unable to arrive. Not reaching (but also not coming to understand). I was young and could only speak this situation to myself in English, which failed me. The agony in his face was without synonym, the judgement of his condition was suspended, and I could not make out what the nakedness, the emergency of this still scene meant.

And so I laughed. And so my stomach lurched and what came up was a deep, offensive noise, and it stained the scene permanently, brought silence to the groans of pain, to the panicked exchange Griffin was having either with his parents or Lucas’ parents or the police. And the laugh continued without any conscious effort to stop it or to laugh harder, issued forth like it would reverse the fall, heal the bones. I could not comprehend how, but it was necessary. I looked, still laughing, at Griffin, whose face had dropped both panic and boyish veneer, who was asking me with his eyes what the fuck is wrong with you. He was not telling me to stop, but to leave, and I did. I ran home, giving no thought to how the scene would conclude, not understanding that police and paramedics would come soon. The bridge’s rail there now sports a deep dent, not as a mark of where Lucas landed, but rather of my rejection, of the sound or substance I brought up.

Orin smirked involuntarily when he saw his mistake but deleted the pages without reading them over. He would never revisit what happened willingly or candidly, but the event seemed to creep up on him often lately, and he’d force himself to think of something else. He supposed he had gotten it out now, did as much atoning as he should. He felt safe enough drenching the confession in irony, embedding it in a text that acknowledged its own pretense in its introduction. He could be lying—the text anticipates lies. He had already lied to Griffin earlier, about Homer being Babylonian, which he pulled directly from Lucian.

There were some things, he learned once he began to grow as a translator, that one could lie about without being challenged, and this reality gave him a sort of rise that he recognized as vaguely manipulative. If, for instance, one’s family in Michigan—Orin was a first-generation college student—regarded them as an authority over a narrow set of texts and fields, one could simply make up details about certain things within those fields, deliberately misinform their interlocutor, who would go about their life with spurious lines in their head because who would suspect a supposedly learned and responsible person of lying? What’s more, one could be consistently wrong for decades and thrive off the pretense of authority and the reality that what they say sounds right. Orin used this fact to put a wall between his speech—his perceived, public voice and countenance—and the inner bits of himself he wanted to keep concealed, the weak bits, the sincere bits. Moreover, he came to view it as a sort of game, which only he could win. Try to catch me lying. Try to charge me for my falsehood. I dare you.

An often-repeated false etymology proposes that the word sincere is derived from a Latin construction meaning “without wax,” since dishonest sculptors in Ancient Greece and Rome covered marble flaws in their work with wax to deceive their patrons. However, the OED claims that there is no validity to this explanation. However, if Orin neglects to mention the OED’s correction, this etymology remains canon. If he neglects to mention his laughter, neglects to mention Lucas’ threats, who else but he himself can invoke them?

Griffin’s appearance hadn’t changed much since they were teenagers. As he and Orin walked together through the neighborhood, the sameness of his speech was also notable.

“How many grad programs did you apply to?”

“Five.”

“Any rejections?”

“Nope. I braced myself for rejections though. My statement of purpose was hot garbage.” Orin found no use in revealing that there had been rejections. Griffin might not know that rejections were common, might also think Orin had wasted the past four years. “And you—what were you doing last time we talked? Welding?”

“Yeah. I mean I spent last year at a technical college. I told you.” Griffin’s tone wasn’t wounded, appealed more to Orin’s aloofness, which he had teased Orin for as a kid but didn’t despise.

This was as far as they could signal interest in each other’s lives. Soon the conversation gave way to its ordinary form. Griffin described a crash he had gotten into earlier that week, talked about the bearded dragon his girlfriend had bought, and Orin nodded, made brief comments, conjured up the word brumation in reference to the bearded dragon when Griffin made a show of struggling to recall it. They talked around the Lucas situation, and Orin would have continued to talk around it if Griffin hadn’t turned to face him suddenly.

“So we’ll have to make our way over to Denny’s soon.”

“Yeah, we will.”

“Lucas’ll be there about thirty minutes after us.”

“Yes.”

Griffin looked at his shoes, poked out one of his cheeks with his tongue, staggered a bit the way men do when they need to be serious.

“Alright. So we should probably talk about the last time we saw him, yeah?”

“Uh, no—”

“No, seriously.” Griffin brought his hand out and touched Orin’s shoulder to stop him, which engendered another gag. “I don’t think I need to tell you that, somehow, that fall kinda kept him from leaving Lansing. Like he’s tried to get jobs away from home and he obviously tried the military, but when I talk to him, he still acts like a fourteen-year-old.”

“I wouldn’t know. Why would I?”

“It’s odd how he carries himself now.” Griffin wasn’t looking at him anymore, was talking despite his clear rejections of the subject. “Like how a kid behaves after they’ve been horribly embarrassed. You know, like you used to hate being seen when you were about to cry. Or maybe more like the way you acted after everyone had seen you cry. Like oddly tender, sort of comically smiley and deferential. Like you were trying, without saying it, to apologize for having emotions.”

“I really don’t want to talk about this.” He tightened his lips, approximating Griffin’s tendency to touch people’s shoulders when he wanted them to become more earnest. He recognized that to stop Griffin now would be pointless, since he’d soon be facing Lucas, who may do worse than simply bring up what happened. The risk for Orin was heightened now. Griffin had known him to laugh in unnecessary situations before what happened. He laughed uncontrollably when Griffin noticed his picture on the local news when he won a junior championship in debate and oratory. He even understood Orin’s laughter to be different than embarrassment or dismissal, but an involuntary expulsion of pride. When Griffin said goodbye before moving across the country for high school, Orin laughed again, and Griffin knew then that his laughter was out of an attempt not to admit he’d miss him, hugged him through the cackling.

But Orin knew if he laughed now, Griffin would be appalled, would ask him again what was wrong with him, and Orin would have to either lie or leave and leaving in the middle of this would make it difficult to save face with Griffin, whose opinion of him, Orin admitted, somehow still meant something.

“Alright,” Griffin said. “I guess that happened nearly ten years ago. Maybe it doesn’t matter as much as I think it does. I suppose the general discharge is more important now. Will you say anything about that at least?”

“What do you want me to say? You have more information than I do.”

“No, I don’t care if you understand the details. I want to make sure you don’t just shut down when he shows up.” The hand on the shoulder again, the sincerity. “Because you know you do that a lot, right?”

“Okay, then you lead the conversation and I’ll try to discern what you want me to say as you go.” This was pointed. Orin had had his speech patterns scrutinized too many times by people he respected much more than he respected Griffin.

“No, Jesus, do you hear yourself? I don’t want you to say anything. I want you to act like you care enough for an old friend in crisis.” Griffin was visibly looking for something pointed to say back, found it. “I want you to keep yourself from laughing in his face this time.”

“This shit again? I was fourteen. You know I had never seen a single broken bone in my life until that day, wasn’t instructed on how to react like you must have—” He put his face in his sleeve, forced himself to cough dryly and audibly into it.

Once he forced the corners of his mouth back down, Orin looked up at Griffin, who bought his lie, his appeal to immaturity. His face suggested that he dropped the subject, left off trying to parent Orin. The wax veneer returned to his language.

“Or maybe he’ll have to be escorted out of the place. Maybe he’ll attack us or something, who can say?” This was a joke, Orin understood. Griffin could still make cruel jokes, and Orin could still accept them. “Let’s go.”

Rhadamanthus’ first case concerned Ajax, son of Telamon, specifically whether he ought to have a share of the heroes’ reward or not. He was charged with madness and (self-slaughter/breaking of the self). Finally, many things having been said, Rhadamanthus decided that he be given over to Hippocrates for a hellebore treatment. After this, the judgement determined, he would have regained his senses and therefore be fit for a seat in the symposium.

Griffin returned to their table, asked Orin what he was writing on his phone. Orin thought to ask if he was in trouble again but decided against it.

“I’m just working on a translation of Lucian’s True Story.”

“Ah. What’s that about?”

“I’m not quite sure yet. It’s mainly an extended epic that acknowledges its falsehood. It sort of lies the way all epics do, but openly, if that makes sense.”

Ajax entered the Denny’s then. Orin noted a certain shrunkenness in Lucas’ adult form. He had always been exceptionally tall, threatening even as a teenager, but much of his early balefulness seemed to have deflated with age. He wore a windbreaker a size too large, the sleeves of which concealed his hands and the collar of which made his head look like a child’s head. His eyes suggested a beagle’s eyes, mingling a sleepy, vacant gaze, with a sort of disciplined disquiet. He was already sitting beside Griffin before Orin—beard still between his fingers—could make peace with his presence.

“So, who’s gonna say ‘back so soon’ or whatever?” Lucas asked, laughing dryly.

“Well, shit, I thought you were gonna try to go back,” Griffin said.

“I can’t. Letting me go was a long process, with a board assembled and everything. I’m literally unfit for duty they said.”

Griffin allowed a beat of silence after this, but the silence was colored sympathetically. Orin couldn’t determine how his own silence was colored. Lucas seemed unable to look at him, most likely to hold back resentment. Maybe, Orin thought, if Lucas allowed himself to look, he’d also allow himself to materialize, make canon, the things he said he needed to do to Orin for them to be even. Orin reminded himself of the nearest exit’s proximity.

“What school are you going to next?”

It was Lucas who decided to make the threats, the laughter, canon first. He had addressed Orin directly, and Orin suppressed a gag as he floundered for a response. He smirked, but shaped it into neutral, public smile.

“Boston College. Studying Classics.”

“Nice.” Orin sensed that Lucas was feigning interest, but behind the effort to feign seemed to be a sincere attempt to be neutral—kind even—to him. Orin shoved his face into his sleeve and pretended to cough again, wrestled the corners of his mouth down. “Well, good luck, man. Hopefully you can’t be discharged from grad school.” Another dry laugh.

“No, no,” Orin laughed back. “I can’t certainly flunk out, though. That threat still stands.” Neither of the two were self-deprecative as kids but making a joke of himself felt to Orin much more relieving than any accusation of laughing at Lucas.

“I doubt that,” Lucas said. “I’ve seen plenty of your published stuff online. I don’t understand it, but it seems like you understand it well enough.”

This could be a threat, Orin thought. Well congrats for getting published in Vexillum, typed with a sneer. His mouth tightened, and the second muffled sob made its way through his body as he tried to wrestle down his mouth.

“A brain like that had to leave home, though. Seems this place has a knack for gripping less ambitious kids back home,” Lucas said.

The tone began to shift, and Orin wished he hadn’t welcomed laughing into their interface before the wax veneers were thrown off. How could he make himself stop now?

“Well, you know, it isn’t too bad of a thing to take some short breathers, Lucas,” Griffin said. “I’m sure you’ll be back on your feet soon enough.”

“Hm. Seems I’ve never really been on them,” Lucas said.

Lucas’ voice began to break, and Griffin simply looked down, said “you’ll get there.”

“I don’t know. I was a really shitty kid. And a pretty shitty adult too,” Lucas said. “I’ve been hurting people, threatening to hurt people for so long,” Lucas said.

“Well, that’s why all three of us are here now, remember?” Griffin knew something about this meeting that Orin didn’t. Am I in trouble? Orin thought of saying. He didn’t, but the thought and the tension made him throw his face in his sleeve a third time.

“Right,” Lucas was crying now, openly, nakedly. “God, I’ve spent so much time thinking about hurting those kids from the baseball team. But I spoke to some of them earlier this week, and we began to make up,” he said.

“See? Not everyone’s out to get you,” Griffin said, “and things like that can be fixed.”

Lucas continued, “I didn’t realize that I was ruining myself trying to get even with them. And you too—”

Lucas put his arm across the table, grazed Orin, who was not reaching, not coming to understand.

“—Look, I was in a really bad, hateful place two years ago, and I guess I must have blamed you, wanted to hurt you. And I asked Griffin to bring you here so I could say I’m—”

“Uh, no thank you,” Orin said.

“What?”

“I don’t think I can hear this. From either of you,” Orin said. He was completely off guard, and for too long he looked at the table, the other two completely silent.

“Okay,” Lucas began, his voice changing, “please, just tell me—Why are you smirking right now?”

Orin looked up and saw Lucas sucking his lips in, his eyes sharp, fixed on him alone. Griffin had nothing to say.

“I’m not—”

“No, no. This can’t happen,” Lucas said. He was saying it to Griffin though. “You said we’d both be over this. You said what happened was so far in the past that he wouldn’t pull this shit again.”

They were speaking about him in the third person now, as the grad admission boards that rejected him must have. He could have let himself feel humiliated, unwaxed, right now. Instead, a fourth sob issued forth. Orin caught his mouth from raising but giggled loud enough to hear before catching himself.

Lucas was red, without words. He slammed one fist on the table, but buried his head in his arms, weeping. And the weeping only made Orin’s condition worse.

“Orin, stop,” Griffin said, his voice pointed.

“Let him,” Lucas said, “let him do it to me again. Let him find my freak-outs funny.” He looked up, his eyes streaming, at Orin. “Not in a million years would I think you would still—”

No, no. Calm down. I’m only laughing about—did you know that Plato decided not to join the others in Elysium, that he instead lived in his imagined Utopia, obeyed only the laws and constitution that he himself wrote? Did you know that sincerity means “without wax?” Here’s a game: Listen to me speak and try to catch me telling you lies. I dare you. He said none of this, couldn’t make anything out, couldn’t bear judgment or threat or keep sound or substance down any longer.

What issued from him was a wheeze of uncontained laughter, brought up from deep in the stomach. He panicked, still laughing, and had to get up. He had to leave the conclusion of Lucas’ fall just as it was about to be resolved, had to leave the scene permanently dented again, suspended in time for another decade: Lucas with his arm still stretched across the table, reaching toward an empty seat; Griffin with his eyes tracking Orin’s departure, not asking him to stop but to leave, asking him what the fuck is wrong with you. He had to reject, to turn back in the middle of the road.

He stopped in the parking lot as the laughter began to cut off. He recited Lucian’s introduction in his head and allowed himself—after establishing that he could be lying to his mental audience (if I confess to be truthful in one thing)—a brief candid moment, free of wax. For years, he realized, he had feared judgement, feared the charge of earnestness, as earnestness required him to quit his game. He was scared of most things, scared of his former friends, scared of how they’d perceive him now, scared of his intelligence being questioned, and he knew he couldn’t lower himself to admit that he wasn’t as clever as he liked to believe. He began to metabolize the nature of his pretense. He had been lying willfully, knowing that no one would think or dare to correct him, call out his artifice. Yes, only he was able to win his game. But he was the only one playing it.

---

Ethan Zaborowski earned a BA in English Literature from Bowling Green State University in 2022, and has been spending his time since as a poet, peer support specialist, and copywriter in Toledo, Ohio. The art he holds dear frames real and everyday feelings with the care they deserve. He will count himself lucky if his own work manages to do the same. His writing has been published in The Esthetic Apostle and Prometheus Dreaming.