The True Tragedy of Oedipus

This short story is my first ever attempt at literature of any kind (minus some middle school assignments I'd rather pretend I never inflicted on the world). Hopefully its moral is more apparent than felt, but I suspect far too many of us can empathize with some part of it.

 

 

The boy lay in the recliner. His stare focused on no particular point on the ceiling. His mind was blank, his body limp, his soul listless.

 

Not so very long ago he had completed a freshmen literature class and been enraptured by Remarque's masterpiece of war fiction. He had read other veterans' books and other war stories, but the true tragedy of such a literally national war as that which had engulfed Europe and destroyed the pinnacle of Prussian triumph, the tragedy which could invoke such simple and absolute nomenclature as "the great war" and "the lost generation," was lost on his young mind before that book. "Kantorek would say that we stood on the threshold of life. And so it would seem. The war swept us away. For the others, the older men, it is but an interruption. They are able to think beyond it....we were eighteen and had begun to love life and the world; and we had to shoot it to pieces. The first bomb, the first explosion, burst in our hearts. We are cut off from activity, from striving, from progress. We believe in such things no longer, we believe in the war....It is strange that all the memories that come have these two qualities. They are always completely calm, that is predominant in them; and even if they are not really calm, they become so. They are soundless apparitions that speak to me, with looks and gestures silently, without any word...Once we had such desires--but they return not. They are past, they belong to another world that is gone from us....an apparition, that haunts us, that we fear and love without hope. They are strong and our desire is strong--but they are unattainable, and we know it." 

 

These passages came unbidden to the boy's mind. He had, before the German's conversation with him, despised the young Ukrainian men that had recently come to the nearby university campus to wallow in Western luxury while their country was torn apart by the 21st century czarists. He had been unable to conceive what could possess their elders to send their men to the slaughter while letting these unskilled, uncultivated, unlived boys, whose only assets relative to their fathers' were their fresh and unused bodies and minds, who could not hope to even begin to fill the nation's leadership deficit that the destruction of the previous generation of men, who ought to be the nation's shepherds and guides in the dark days that would surely follow the carnage of Ukraine, would bring. But then Remarque had begun, at the time only dimly, to show him the hedging of bets that the state's decision in this might represent. A broken father and husband, who had had, before the war, twenty years of marriage, family, sex, sins, redemptions, resignations, family life, farming, financial worries, vestry meetings, disappointments, surprises, and all the other components of manhood of which the boy supposed he did not know, would be a real character, who could suffer this interruption in his life and still retain something of the man into which he had spend decades forming himself, his brokenness only being in his postbellum inability to return to being that man from playing the soldier, but he would have little choice in his quest to affect that return, if only because he had lived too long to quest for anything else. A broken young man, however, would have no character to which to return, and, with the enemy's brutal exorcision of it from his soul, no longer any desire to create the man he once wished to be, nor any ability for such creation in any case, for battle would have forcibly molded him already into a warrior before all else, made the martial character not the interruption, but the substance. The boy's father had often told him that crisis did not form character, but revealed it, which might well be true, but what did crisis do if it afflicted one too young to have anything beyond the confusion of childhood to reveal? Surely, the boy reasoned, for such a one, the crisis must become the character. A man broken in this way was dangerous to a nation as one broken in the other manner could never be. Masses of warriors whose souls lack a war. A generation of women whose husbands who cannot see marriage as anything but an interruption. A generation of children whose fathers find parenthood accidental to their lives. This, Remarque had whispered to the boy, the horror the Allies had levied on his land over a century ago, was the horror the Ukrainians were seeking to escape by sending their men to die while their boys grew fat off of Western opulence: a generation whose virility the Russians would have sentenced to be characterized by permanent listlessness.

 

As he recalled the passages, the murmurings of the Weltkrieg veteran forged themselves into this coherent exposition in the boy's mind for the first time, and with it a wave of self-loathing such as he had never felt before in his young life assaulted his soul. He had once despised those foreign students for their cowardice in choosing to spare their countrymen this scourge into which Putin's subjects would surely have turned them, but now, at an even younger age than they, he had allowed such a scourge to be made of himself without even a part to play in a national struggle for survival as compensation. The enemy who he had allowed to do this was not an old adversary of immense power who considered it his sovereign right to meddle in the "near abroad" of his country. The situation in which he had chosen to embrace it was not one of an imperious schoolmaster, aided by scores of adults and girls calling him coward, demanding that he take his place among the iron youth against the frogs in a conflict of his elders' creation of which he knew nothing. Here, in the most secure country in the world, in a quiet, unthreatened suburban home, surrounded by historically unparalleled wealth, with loving siblings that adored him and with the guidance of stable, virtuous, Christian parents, he had destroyed his youth by his sin, and with it his opportunity to be the man he had only just begun to dimly desire as his self. And for what? Pleasure, entertainment, rebellion for the sake of rebellion, something else? It hardly mattered. Whatever the desire had been it had been purely selfish, and whatever he had succeeded in gaining had been gone almost immediately. Now his boyhood was finished, and with it his boyish desires for his character. By his own reasoning, the boy reflected, the character of this crisis must be his character now. Pure selfishness was to be the substance, all else the interruption.

 

Gradually, the thoughts faded, and the listlessness returned. The shadows grew longer and the light dimmer, as the sun faded from the unlit house. His siblings were at friends' houses, and his parents would not be back until tomorrow. Until his family returned and put in motion the physical consequences of his actions, there was no reason to do anything.

 

Night fell. His wandering eyes fell on the clock's luminous numerals, and the boy mechanically rose and made his way to his bedroom. Mechanically, he undressed, walked from his room to the linen closet, retrieved a towel, and made his way to the bathroom. Catching sight of his naked visage in the mirror, he stopped and stared in wonder. He took in his short, slight frame of barely a hundred pounds and his still boyish face. In a trance, he felt his barely extant muscles, his smooth chin, his unhaired torso and lower body, and his throat devoid of an Adam's apple. He was the smallest and weakest male in his class, indeed, was smaller than many of the girls, and had a voice higher than either of his sisters'. Before he had annihilated his child's desires today, one of the greatest and most totalitarian of those desires was for this vessel he was trapped in to catch up to his mind and soul, which he had already discovered were far older than any of his classmates', and one of his greatest resentments was how much closer to being men the other boys constantly seemed, even when the imbecilic was flowing freely from their mouths. Yet today, he had brought himself closer to manhood than any of them would be in ten years, with mature muscles, full beards, ape-like coverings of hair, and virile voices. He thought this with a fleeting sense of pleasure, followed by a greater feeling of revulsion, to be succeeded finally by mere curiosity that the creature in the mirror should have been capable of such definitive, adult action--it was bizarre.

 

The boy washed and dried himself, hung up the towel, combed his hair, brushed his teeth, and made his way to his room. He pulled on a pair of underwear and crawled into bed. He was tired, but sleep did not find him. The alternate feelings of defensive pride, revulsion, and abstract wonder at the events of the day washed over him in an unending cycle, the latter two feelings increasing in intensity each time, each iteration separated from the next by a time of nihilistic listlessness.

 

During one such interlude in the emotional revolutions, the thought came unbidden to the boy's mind that he should pray. Fear and disgust of the highest degree immediately greeted this thought. He had thought to pray immediately after doing the deed, but it had never been so clear to him as at that moment what the ancient Hebrews meant when they called a man who had broken the law unclean. The same fear and disgust he felt now had immediately assailed him then: fear of the wrath a perfect being must feel on being presented with naked filth such as he, and disgust at the sheer depths of that filth's depravity--he had no desire to intercede for such a thing, even if it were not the highest order of disrespect and irreverence to do so.

 

Yet, even as these facts reflexively presented themselves to the boy again, so too did a new fact. Had not our Lord said that he who loved Him should follow His commands? And was not one of those commands relayed by an Apostle to cast your cares upon him? Would not a truly reverent one render love to a perfect being? Would it not, then, be the height of irreverence, not to beg the Son to be his intercessor? True, there were unforgivable sins, but he was still alive and breathing, not struck down as Herod or Ananias and Sapphira. If mercy was possible here, as the rise and fall of his chest seemed to indicated, it might very well be blasphemous not to beg for it.

 

Unbidden, however, another thought came to join these questions in the boy's mind. "How do you know the being you would pray to is perfect? If he is not perfect, you do not owe him such love." That was followed by a stab of anger at himself so severe as to cause the boy to say, out loud, "Stop skulking, you coward!" This was not because he was, or had ever been, at all convinced of God's perfection. Indeed, his parents' strong faith and his own attraction to the Church notwithstanding, he had always found a great deal of evidence in the world against the idea of an omnipotent God of total perfection controlling everything, which no amount of apologetics instruction had ever quite been able to purge. Neither, however, had he ever been wholly able to convince himself that the I Am of the Jews was not true, and so he had persuaded himself to seek salvation and take the Eucharist as an act of faith in what he would like to be true. Still, no matter how often he experienced God, the doubt had never quite left the boy. No, the reason for his anger was that, on his own terms of doubt, he knew this to be among the stupidest excuses he could have conjured.

The boy had no atheistic tendencies; in fact, he found the entire modern tendency towards atheism to be a particularly stupid form of cowardice which was, in fact, highly Christian in its impetus. The intuitive ontology for a rational man, it had always seemed to him, was precisely that which the earliest humans had believed in: the reason the world was evil, vicious, and full of pain was because the gods are evil, vicious creatures that inflict pain, having all the failings and iniquities of men or worse. If he were to ever wholly depart from belief in the Christian God, he would instantly arrive at this belief--this the boy knew beyond all doubt. Yet the fact that that was his alternative made his latest excuse for avoiding prayer shamelessly cowardly, he knew, for there was nothing at all irreverent about bringing pure selfishness before selfish gods. Such entities as these could suffer an unclean man's presence. Only if the God of the Church was true was there anything to fear, but if He was true, then, by the Son's commandments, prayer was mandatory for himself here. "Pascal had the wrong argument against atheism, but he was onto something," the boy thought with a mixture of ruefulness, despair, and terror.

All this passed through the boy's mind in seconds. It was followed by a wave of the revulsion, and in his mind's silence that followed, he decided that, though he might never be free of this self-disgust, that was no reason to compound it. He had already let pure selfishness win his soul, but that was no reason to let its near cousin cowardice become co-king. Steeling himself, the boy threw back the covers and dropped to the floor. He had intended to kneel respectfully, but found himself instead cowering--no matter. He forced himself to begin speaking; he confessed his entire crime to the Son and begged Him to intercede with the Father on his behalf. Then he waited. No still small voice came.

Crawling back into bed, the boy lay, spent, but noticed after a time that the pride-disgust-curiosity revolutions had ceased. God, it seemed, had granted mercy. Perhaps a return to boyhood was possible. Men were said to be born again in Christ. Perhaps he could have a substance that was not selfishness, if God were to loose him from the hold his youth-ending action had on his life. As he thought this, the boy hoped and believed. "Still, Raskolnikov," a voice suddenly pronounced in his mind, "you live in a physical world of other men. Christ said to cast your cares on him, true, but also to take up your cross. Escape from the eternal consequences of your actions does not extricate you from the temporal consequences. You are gifted a boy's character anew, but not a new existence. The actions in your present are bound by those in your past as ever, and the man you become in the future will be shaped by the virtue or vice with which you face the present." Ice descended on the boy's heart. He had also read Crime and Punishment in the freshmen literature class and instantly knew what he was being directed to do. No fate in the world seemed so terrible to him at that moment as Raskolnikov's at the end of the novel. Yet he also saw that, if he was to be free of the selfish character, he must take this selfless act and deal with as much of these consequences himself as possible, rather than simply leaving it to his parents as he had intended to while lying in the recliner.

The boy meditated briefly on how to go about this. He had no Sonia to send him back into the police station if he lost his nerve. That was the first thing to be rectified. He called the sister sleeping only a few houses away, hoping desperately she was asleep; she was not. Haltingly he told her he needed her at home, answering her confused inquiries with, "please, I really need you," and then hanging up. Next, as a hedge against his fear, he wrote down his confession. Then he waited, sweating and chilled with fear. When she opened the front door, he picked up the confession and ran to meet her. Her face changed from annoyance to surprise--the boy was normally incredibly body-shy but had forgotten to dress in his terror--to fear and concern when she saw his tear-stained face and the agonized terror of her in his eyes. As she read his confession, the boy saw shock cross her face, and she gazed on him with incredulity. When he said, defeatedly, "I called you to be my accountability officer, not my sister," her expression broke. She pulled his nude torso to her chest, and he soon found tears rolling down his body as she kissed him and sobbed.

The other confessions, in the days that followed, were easier. The temporal consequences of the boys sin stayed with him the rest of his life, but, as time passed, the man was able to look back with gladness and say that he did not become a man that day.