“Are you confused?”
My head perks up so fast my neck pops. I’m not sure how long I was out this time. “What?”
“You look even more lost than when we started. Also, you—” Vale grabs at the big bowl of fruit I’d been keeping to myself while we study, taking it away from me and sliding it to the far end of the table while I let out a whiney “My brain food.”
Damn this kitchen island being so big that I can’t reach back for it.
“You’re, like, stress eating right now.”
“I’m not, I just … This shit’s the worst. No offense. Proud of you for being good at it, but me and this class are still not on good terms.”
He laughs, and I can’t help but smile at his smile. Watch as he hops off his stool and walks around to the fridge. Watch more as he bends over to get the jug of sweet tea out. I try my best not to spend these seconds staring at his ass (and I fail almost immediately), thinking about how, even in my imagination, it felt so good to be in—
“Well, start talking to me. Tell me all the things,” Vale says, making me jump on my stool. Thankfully he’s too busy putting ice into his cup to have seen me. “What makes you hatethiscave?”
“I, uh …oh. I mean, first of all—” I clear my throat, giving myself a chance to kick out the horny thoughts and get my head out of my ass (or, more so, Vale’s ass). “How are they eating?”
“I—” Vale stares at me for entire seconds, frozen holding on to that jug of tea. “What?”
“No, really. This was something theSpunk-asscave story made sure to cover, so I feel like it has to be important here. If they can’t move, they’ve got to be getting fed somehow, right? Especially because it sounds like they’ve been there for a while, unless they’re still kids, which I’m assuming isn’t the case. That’d be weirder for a lot of different reasons than this story already is. But this guy never considered how everyone’s supposed to eat. Which, honestly, shatters this whole idea immediately.”
“Does it, though?”
“Also, what about going to the bathroom? Does it just smell like fuckingwildlevels of shit down there? And, if so, those people carrying the stuff and talking at them don’t care about the violent piles of shit? Was someone assigned to feed them and then clean their poop? Doesn’t that person get noticed?”
Vale takes another few seconds of silence with his lips sucked in now, trying his best not to laugh. Even though I’m so serious about this.
“You spent a lot of time thinking about how they poop, didn’t you?”
“Well, yeah!This guy, Socrates—”
“Plato, but continue.”
“Is the person everyone sees as one of the inventors of philosophy but couldn’t even remember that people take dumps. Also, you can’t tell me that these guys who can’t turn their heads but can use their hands and arms haven’t circle jerked. Or, like, line jerked. They’ve jacked off to some of those shadows. They had a favorite. A couple that really do it for them.”
Vale is looking at me like I’ve just broken him. But this is what he’s asked for. He’s the one who’s volunteering to help me survive this class. Not that I don’t appreciate that, but this is part of it. Deep discussions on Ancient Greeks and the ancient art of beating meat and pooping.
“Is that important to know?”
“No, but, like, it’s an obvious thing. Because they’re all naked.”
“Howdo you knowthat, Caca Head?”
“Otherwise, they’re constantly shitting their pants, and I think you’d rather just believe they’re naked instead of carrying around all the poop they’ve ever pooped.”
He lets out a defeated sigh as he sits back down. “Okay. Sure. I’ll give you that.” And then he reaches for a couple grapes in the bowl, putting them both in his mouth before looking at his laptop. “But now that we’ve got those thoughts out, I think, when you actually take some time with it, you might realize this one could have a lot of meaning for you. Not that what you’ve said doesn’t have meaning. I promise, somewhere out there, someone’s like, ‘Yes, he gets it.’ But maybe we move on to the real ideas Coolidge wants us to consider.”
“Okay, háblame. What am I missing?”
“It’s all about being prisoners to our own social incapability to accept new information.”
“And nothing to do with pooping?” I tease, laughing when a grape hits my nose, catching it and quickly putting it in my mouth.
“You’re not allowed to mention anything poop-related for the next half hour. Think, okay? Knowledge, things like justice, science, equity, these didn’t always exist. And, when you consider the whole history of humanity, we’ve rarely been the type to see these and say, ‘Yeah, this looks great actually; I will embrace them and not gaslight anyone about them.’ Think about how much math wouldn’t exist if a few people hadn’t broken out of their chains, left their caves, and realized they could think and add and multiply and all that. Or how much further we’d be if ninety-nine percent of people, and by that I mean the Catholic Church, didn’t see someone explain algebra or science and say, ‘Oh, no thanks, that’s witchcraft and you need to die.’ ”
“So the point is that learning hurts and people would rather be assholes than be educated or open-minded?”
“Hurts, is scary, sometimes asks us to believe truths that make us uncomfortable.” Vale puts up a finger for each, stressing his points. “And so a lot of times we just ignore it and prefer to focus only on what’s right in front of us. On what’s easiest and, a lot of times, on what keeps powerful people in power.”
