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005 - Rosalind and Robert Lutece - Hüzün
It is the twenty-third. Not merely the twenty-third of the month, but the anniversary of our first game of psychosomatic chess: again, our king has been taken. Again we find ourselves in checkmate, and we abandon one reality for the next.
My brother retains his stubborn dedication to the Plan (spelled out with the capital intact as it looms large on the stage of our lives) which he has concocted, with my half-unwilling input – as in all things we stand at opposite faces, and as in all things we do what must be done to meet in the middle again. I feel myself an electron in orbit, knowing neither where I am nor where I am going, rising to the limit of my own tether and crashing back down again to meet him where he rests, nuclear. There is at times so much empty space between us that I fear it impassable, but pass I do, and as in the atom's dance of excitation, when we do collide we do so in the most brilliant flashes of light: we attempt again, learned. Things change. The cycle remains the same. I fear we shall live these years through and through until their meaning has dissipated as surely as we have become dissipated across all things.
An oddity: this marks our twenty-third attempt, and yet Robert seems to find himself disappointed. He is quiet. Booker DeWitt is a charred corpse, and I suppose the both of us mourn his passing after our own fashions. We have learned, and the next attempt will be changed, though I do not feel it will be likely improved – my brother is inclined to simplify to streamline his theory, but I cannot escape the pages of variables he leaves for the footnotes, or worse, omits between the lines. His science is no more lazy than mine, but it is far more optimistic.
What is to be done? He is my flesh and blood. All that I have, all that I have chosen to have, all I choose, all I will choose. That is the great problem with the incomparable - one cannot return from it unharmed. An unscientific conclusion, stated so, but one I must posit all the same.
Even less scientific is my calm. We do not speak. There is nearly always a need for it; we are defined in the ways we are different, and yet we are prone to assume. We are, and are not. He demands my attention; at times I demand freedom from his. We wander our paths. Tonight we share a wordless understanding of the immensity of our task. In our failure we stand and watch ourselves watching one another, and we are stilled. Suspended, as an atom, as a city.
The world goes mad around us. Men kill and die and the city begins to burn. It seems if we do not perform our orbital dance, the universe begins to object. And yet: I am calm. I have no theory, but all the same I do know the cause. Tonight, we truly are the same. What I know most profoundly of all is the fleeting but great irony: that is all that I have ever wanted.
My brother retains his stubborn dedication to the Plan (spelled out with the capital intact as it looms large on the stage of our lives) which he has concocted, with my half-unwilling input – as in all things we stand at opposite faces, and as in all things we do what must be done to meet in the middle again. I feel myself an electron in orbit, knowing neither where I am nor where I am going, rising to the limit of my own tether and crashing back down again to meet him where he rests, nuclear. There is at times so much empty space between us that I fear it impassable, but pass I do, and as in the atom's dance of excitation, when we do collide we do so in the most brilliant flashes of light: we attempt again, learned. Things change. The cycle remains the same. I fear we shall live these years through and through until their meaning has dissipated as surely as we have become dissipated across all things.
An oddity: this marks our twenty-third attempt, and yet Robert seems to find himself disappointed. He is quiet. Booker DeWitt is a charred corpse, and I suppose the both of us mourn his passing after our own fashions. We have learned, and the next attempt will be changed, though I do not feel it will be likely improved – my brother is inclined to simplify to streamline his theory, but I cannot escape the pages of variables he leaves for the footnotes, or worse, omits between the lines. His science is no more lazy than mine, but it is far more optimistic.
What is to be done? He is my flesh and blood. All that I have, all that I have chosen to have, all I choose, all I will choose. That is the great problem with the incomparable - one cannot return from it unharmed. An unscientific conclusion, stated so, but one I must posit all the same.
Even less scientific is my calm. We do not speak. There is nearly always a need for it; we are defined in the ways we are different, and yet we are prone to assume. We are, and are not. He demands my attention; at times I demand freedom from his. We wander our paths. Tonight we share a wordless understanding of the immensity of our task. In our failure we stand and watch ourselves watching one another, and we are stilled. Suspended, as an atom, as a city.
The world goes mad around us. Men kill and die and the city begins to burn. It seems if we do not perform our orbital dance, the universe begins to object. And yet: I am calm. I have no theory, but all the same I do know the cause. Tonight, we truly are the same. What I know most profoundly of all is the fleeting but great irony: that is all that I have ever wanted.