Training Max: Chapter 13

 

Unlike Max, she quit working out, and unlike Max yet again (who consistently does this,) she can write a rare inspired piece.

The only reason for this gaping difference between them is because, as she explained to Max when they had moved to a different messenger in what seemed like ages ago, “Boredom is at the once the greatest invention of the human mind and the most painful insult of humanity to the majestic fuckery of the universe. So no, I may not get bored. I may write, yes, but I respect what things are. Unlike you, I have to draw the line of my ego somewhere. Even if it takes me a thousand-mile radius to do it. You are at the limit of that thousand miles. I can, however, draw that line. I am afraid you can’t; you do not know – and, as a writer, should not know - when you as a writer stops. I, on the other hand, have to stop somewhere: otherwise I would write you a love sonnet every day and not even like you. It goes against what poverty-stricken moral compass I have.” It was easily one of the longest and most profound messages she had ever written, to him, or to anyone.  

In contrast to her verbal diarrhea, he said a mere three words: “I can stop.”

And, in a teleological universe, this led to the inevitability of the brute fact that he was indeed a warrior-poet, and she, an editor. She edits the world as she sees it, forcing her will to change the fundamental wrongness of people, thus resulting to idealized chimeras that she had stupidly loved when she was younger. She would have sent him a (pirated) copy of Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse, if only for this sublime lines: Someone tells me: this kind of love is not viable. But how can you evaluate viability? Why is the viable a Good Thing? Why is it better to last than to burn? She knew, however, that he will never read it: the book will be too much of a mirror for him, and thus, ultimately unnecessary.

If she were a work of art, then, she would be one of the Greek Riace Warrior statues, whose naturalistic poses, conveying a sense of movement, captures the impossibly fleeting moment before a preparatory pause and the consequence: the inevitably excellent execution of force. In complete opposite, in her case, this execution was a behemoth, yet ending with fucked-up results just the same. It was force and forcing alone that she was good at.

This force that fuels her, and only this force, was inherited by her nephew, Tres. Having reached the heights he can in playing DoTA and ending up nowhere near the top players in the country, he turned to PUBG, where, coming as a rather small surprise to himself, he ended up in 120^th place in the national ranks (composed of three million daily players) and hence proceeded to decimate regional championships.

Chris watched him play the battle royale-type game once, and ended up both jealous and proud of a talent honed to a perfection that she can only force, and thus miss, every single time. After garnering nineteen solo kills, he was left with one other opponent and finally saw him from an elevated position three hundred meters away from the sight of his Mosin-Nagant, known formally as the 3-line rifle M1891 (customized, of course, with the Ashek weapon skin). Keeping the moving target within sight, and briefly considering the rifle’s in-game recoil, his mouse set to its most sensitive, he fired, with the effortless, specially-attained boredom of the perfect. He hit his opponent square in the head. Winner winner, chicken dinner.

She sat there, mouth agape. And then, “Damn, son. What the fuck.” Tres smiled then, gave her a thumbs-up, and proceeded to join yet another scrim. At the end of his amateur career before turning serious in his college studies (where he was taking up IT), he had played a total of nearly seven thousand hours.

Max would have loved Tres. Max, after all, was the second-best shot in his regimen. It goes farther than marksmanship, real or virtual, though: he would have loved Tres’ dedication. It came from force, yes, but it is its sustenance that is admirable to Max, at bottom. Any idiot, after all, can be naturally talented by a dice roll – as any idiot can take his clothes off and twerk on Twitch. Only geniuses appreciate and thus put upon themselves the perfection of practice, or the constant regimentation of thought.

Chris had considered adopting Tres at eighteen years old, to the subsequent horror of Tim, her now-ex husband: “You can’t just adopt someone whose family is intact, both of whose parents are alive, and who lives happily at home!” Tres laughed then, half-considering the offer; half-worried that his aunt had finally lost what to him had always been a brilliant mind.

This was typical of her, to desperately want things fully formed, immediate, complete. She thus suffers from perfectionism with neither talent nor sustained effort: she gets bored when not immediately good at something. This is how, therefore, she is the antithesis of Max: everything he does always seems like it required no effort, having mastered the constant battle within himself of fearing reality for what it is and for what it could be. He, however, does not have the will, much less the desire, to tell Chris that he wanted children of his own. 

For he dreamed of his children was like he admires the men that he does: cavemen, almost savages, ending that particular conversation they had with a description that subsequently blew her away and made her fear: “I just want to live in another person’s head for 25 years.”