The Vibrant Red Psalms

We walked side-by-side down the pavement of downtown Nechaero. Théo mu Akassiogi, and I. Théo, who stood tall, with dark hair falling to the base of his neck. Théo, who walked onwards, silver earrings swaying with his stride. Théo, who looked forth with a glint of conviction in his eyes. His conviction, quiescent, waiting to emerge from its slumber within him.

Cars streamed by on the busy roads to our left. People hurried past us on the pavement to our right. People in beige trench coats, and people toting big briefcases. People with dark bags under their eyes, and people whose eyebrows were knitted in stress. Young people with sharp jawlines and high cheekbones, and ageing people whose faces were beginning to wrinkle and sag.

We waited at an intersection, cars driving by before us. A man was tapping his foot against the street, impatient. Another kept checking his wristwatch. The cars to our left had slowed to a halt, with five or six cars stagnant in either lane. I looked to the sky as a flock of pidgeons flew by above us. The traffic light turned yellow, stifling the flow of oncoming cars, and then it turned red, and the cars to our left began to move again. Then we crossed the road.

I smelled a slight stench of smoke in the air as we walked past a tobacco shop, and then I smelled an aroma of bread and cream and berries as we walked past a bakery. Théo and I had soon arrived at another intersection. The numbers of the pedestrian crowd had about halved, with most of them having taken a right either just then or a while ago when we last crossed. A nippy wind blew by, making my face feel a little flush.

It wasn’t long after then, another block down and across the street to the left, that Théo and I arrived at Namé’s bistro. By now, all the other pedestrians had continued on elsewhere. Théo gazed upwards.

“There’s got to be more bricks in this building than there were in the whole of my hometown!”

He pushed open the door and we walked in.

Namé, the host and current owner of the restaurant, had injured his hip a few months back. He was entering his later ages and could no longer be bothered to walk his guests to their tables, nor did he really care to get one of the waiters or waitresses to do it. When I walked in, Namé, without looking up from the novel he was reading, directed me and Théo to the sixth story of the building, the rooftop, under the assumption that it would be decently clear. So we ascended the stairwell.

It wasn’t a very risky assumption at all, given the average amount of customers dining at a time, especially at this time of the day when most people were at work. Even if everybody presently in the building were to go to the rooftop, there’d be enough seats with room for change. We continued up past the second story.

The most traffic Namé’s bistro would typically see was at around six or seven in the evening, on a Friday or Saturday. Even then, with a six-story building, I’d believe that the restaurant would be at three-quarters of its capacity at most, although the wait times would be an entirely different matter to speak of. We continued up past the third story.

Come to think of it, Namé had recently laid off almost half of his employees, seemingly due to the restaurant’s declining patronage in recent times. Some parts of the building were already beginning to fall into disrepair, like the black paint on the railings beginning to flake and peel, or, for that matter, the railings themselves were unstable and let out grating creaks if you dared to put any kind of weight on them. Was that anything but the natural aging of all things? We continued up past the fourth story.

Just as I was running out of things to think about, Théo asked me a question.

“Why do people flounder about in search for happiness if they’ll just fall back into despair come the next day? Isn’t it all a bit irrational?”

Ah, I knew the answer to this one!

“That’s simple. People are always in pursuit of happiness because they want to see the real world, and live in the real world, because the real world is beautiful. It’s not the pursuit of happiness that is irrational, it’s the state of despair. Not that it’s wrong to let your unhappiness influence your thoughts. Nobody can know everything and do everything right, but the world is forgiving, and God is forgiving.”

We continued up past the fifth story.

“I believe you.”

We stepped up the last stairs, reaching the sixth story. Théo hesitated, faltering for a short second, before pushing open the door to the rooftop, and then the dark stairwell was filled with the sun’s bright light.

Théo sat around the table from me, and I sat around the table from Théo. He ran his fingers through his soft hair, while he was looking through the menu. Rows of potted bamboo lined the railings on the rooftop. He looked nice with the green background.

The noise of cars on the roads six stories down permeated the air, and there were a few people at other tables talking away. I heard the sound of a glass being set down, therein the clink of ice cubes hitting the glass, and I heard the clink of a fork scraping a plate. I heard the gentle breeze in my ear, and I heard the gentle breaths of Théo.

“This is all very expensively priced, is it not? Did quinoa become such a scarce delicacy overnight?”

“Haha. Your hometown must have been quite rural. Namé’s bistro is considered to be decently far on the budget-friendly end of restaurants in downtown Nechaero. Or, could it be that your wallet is developmentally challenged?”

“I elect to abstain from answering that. Instead, after a long pondering of this menu, I ask. Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer the slings and arrows of an outrageous amount of salad, or to take arms against a sea of sweets and by opposing end them.”

I thought about his words for a second.

“‘Tis surely nobler to suffer. However, I do believe there exists a certain quota for an individual’s indulgence in the pleasures offered by life, as one does sleep every night, but does not die every night. Unless you intended to kill yourself on the spot out of sheer remorse after eating a strawberry shortcake.”

“Say, at the end of the menu, for children’s birthdays, they offer free cake and balloons. I haven’t yet reached the age of majority, and although today is not my real date of birth, that isn’t something that the staff of this establishment are aware of. I am somewhat morally conflicted over this, but aren’t free balloons rather conducive to a fun time?”

Theo thought on this, resting his chin on his clasped hands.

“If I were to take this offer, that is, to give false witness to an unassuming establishment for the sake of material gain, I would be overcome with guilt. After eating the free cake, I would kill myself on the spot out of sheer remorse. By tying a bundle of balloons around my neck. As my soul would leave the world, my body would leave the ground. I’d make tomorrow’s headlines. The whole town would go crazy.”

“That is indeed a crazy concept to consider, but, Théo, what would happen when you inevitably rise to the altitude at which the atmosphere becomes too thin, and the balloons pop? You’d plummet right down.”

“That’s right, I’ll plummet straight through the roof of the hospital, landing smack-dab in the middle of the midwifery ward. The newborn babies will sense my presence and lend me their energy, and I’ll rise from the ashes. The doctors will call it a virgin birth to rival the likes of the Christ. And all the delivering mothers will kneel down in reverence of my holiness.”

We both broke out in hysterical laughter, drawing the eyes of various people around us.

I gingerly sunk my fork into the strawberry shortcake, through a layer of dark red jam, clotted cream, crumbly cake, another layer of cream, another layer of cake, more jam, passing the final layer of cake and colliding with porcelain. Lifting up the fork, the jam gleamed in the sunlight. I had a bite, and it was sweet, and it was sour, and it was soft, and it was delicious.

Théo held in his hand a gooseberry fool in a cocktail glass, spooning whipped cream and pureed fruit past his lips. I wondered how it tasted to him, but he was the kind of person to enjoy any and all foods indiscriminately.

After a while, Théo asked me a question.

“Earlier, you mentioned that the real world was beautiful. That despair was irrational. But, I’m a bit curious- in what way exactly is it irrational, and what makes the pursuit of happiness nothing but rational?”

I pierced a halved strawberry with my fork.

“Hm… Forgive me for answering your question with another question, but do you consider the nature of the world to be rational, that is, not exceptionally remarkable and calculable to some extent, or do you consider the world to be irrational, that is, chaotic, mysterious, and perhaps absurd?”

Théo pondered for a while, chewing on gooseberries while he chewed on my question. He swallowed, and then he spoke.

“Although I have my doubts, I have to advocate that the world is fundamentally rational, and that there exist objective truths, even though they might never be found.”

I popped the strawberry into my mouth. Théo’s answer more or less aligned with the general ideas that I held, but it certainly lacked a strong sense of definition. I swallowed, and I spoke.

“What about God, and the divine? How do they fit into this?”

“Hm. I think, perhaps, that that which is divine is only that which lies outside of the human’s capability of rationalisation, but I don’t believe that truly irrational things can occur in reality.”

“If this world that we live in is fully rational, then what is happiness worth? For that matter, what is anything worth, if nothing beyond what is material has any true meaning– If happiness is no exception from the mundaneness of this world?”

Théo closed his eyes, deep in thought.

“Then, happiness is worth nothing. And yet, even knowing that, I still wish to be happy. To live every day happily, to have a happy end. Tell me, why is that so?”

I smiled.

“The God who watches over us and gives us reason is a God of Mechanisms. Humans desire happiness because humans desire to exist, and humans desire to exist because that is the only thing keeping us here. It’s something of a tautology– Things exist only because they exist, and the fact that things cannot exist without reason is itself reason enough to know that everything that does exist is rational. For that, despair, the desire to cease to exist, is irrational, and happiness, the desire to exist, is nothing but rational. That is the mechanism of life, and that is the mechanism of God.”