Fiction: X Amount of Taps

If the sun were sitting on the carpeted grasses waiting for the earth to roll its bloated belly only crushed by the weight of the world and its contents, it would be unnoticed to Tris, who shut his blinds and shut his doors. If a hydrogen bomb landed outside Tris’ home that charred the landscape and scattered ashes across the whole distance, he would still be sitting in his wooden chair, tapping the table with his index and middle finger, simply tapping at varying intervals, the sound making a dull echo in the empty kitchen. Things simply did not matter to Tris now. He was indifferent to all but one thing.     

Tris had been sitting in this one room for a very long time. He stunk of old dried beets and stale cigarette smoke. The smoke stained his skin a tarry yellow the same way it stains teeth. Tris had not bathed, or shaved, or wiped because it was only in his severe apathy that Tris would tap the table in constant anticipation, apprehension, fear and excitement. This was a time in Tris' bloated, gangrenous, burning fat of a seeming life where he could find meaning, however fleeting. In the beginning of tapping he realized that he could not find meaning in work or in sex. He could not find it in love or politeness. Meaning was not in vanity or acceptance of others' faults. He only knew that meaning was in tapping, but still, he had no recollection of what meaning actually was, or what it could be, or if by some unprecedented course of good fortune he could hold it in his hands forever like an object in which he owned. From his first to what he desired to be a prolonged infinite tap, each made him feel as if no discovery was worth the search, unless that discovery was found within tapping.

"I have now been tapping for 10 days and am very hungry."

Tris had no food left but drank as much water his could. He sat close to the sink, where he could at least tap without dying of dehydration. Besides, he knew that he always wondered what it would be like to starve. The thought of real, actual pain outside the realm of emotions intrigued and excited him. Emotional suffering, he thought, was far too superficial and lacked any real credibility. It was in hard, real, continuous physical pain that a person had the chance to break the bonds of the body to let the spirit free.

His wife left him around the fifth day, along with his children. He remembered how he told her before she had gone that she was not all that important and that his children were ultimately doomed in a modern world gone mad. He didn't regret saying any of this, and even prided himself that he did. He wished he had the chance to say it again, but with more conviction and hostility, flare and indignation. His wife surely thought that he was mentally incapacitated, truly insane, when Tris thought for a brief period that he was God himself, except more powerful and far more lucid than any deity or divine entity. Tris thought about God more often than anything else, except the tapping. He recalled all of those questions he had asked as a child that could never be adequately answered or elaborated. Who created God? Where did God come from? Why create paradise and also create greed? These were some of the normal questions, but over time  they grew in complexity and scope. His teachers never knew the answers and each answerless question he asked made him more and more skeptical, until finally downright uninterested. Tris wanted to believe in The Lord and his great divinity and omniscient perfection, God gleaming in the sun’s gooey dew light, casting down on the meek and meager, and the tired suffering, the great source of beauty and freedom no mortal soul has ever witnessed. But he couldn't help noticing the obvious. It was reason versus spirit, and reason was winning by no small margin.

Tris visited a priest in an attempt to learn the mysteries of God and perhaps attain some answers to his questions, but to his amazement, the priest had no answers either. Tris told the priest that he didn't believe in God, how it was a farce and a historical lark that just didn’t add up in his mind which, by then in his old age, was riddled with ideas and philosophies. The priest told him calmly that it is those who begin to lose faith in God who need his presence the most. When the priest said this, Tris felt sick to his stomach and never returned to the church.

Immediately following Tris' memory came the realization of how deceitful and perverse the priest and the Catholic system was. It was an evil thing that a system was able to coax a person into believing in something based purely on one’s initial skepticism and doubt, as if the more you disbelieve the more God exists. Tris, in his angry state, almost interrupted the rhythm of the tapping. He had gotten so used to it that sometimes he forgot he was doing it. Tris felt himself getting closer, that the tapping would soon shine some definitive light, a concluding answer.

The days became like algebraic variables in an unsolvable mathematic equation. It was the equation of time, space, of all that was and was to be; blinks in space-time that Tris could no longer keep track of. His friends stopped visiting. His cats, who had found a way out of his dark house, stopped meowing. He was left with the still, soothing tone of the tapping. He began to focus more and more on the sound and the feeling of the wood against his finger. Tap, tap...tap, tap. The sound engulfed his mind. He made a violent orgasm of bliss and wonder as his tapping fingers suddenly, and without warning, slipped through the molecular and atomic structure of the table in a truly miraculous moment that modern physics had only theorized about.

After a few moments, Tris sat up and opened his shades to catch a glimpse of the sun falling through the grass.