Effortless

“You know when you play those stupid ‘Would You Rather X or Y’ games, but you don’t want to choose either, so your friend forces you on with some stupid line like, ‘No, but gun to your head — which one?’”

He paused for dramatic effect. As if there wasn’t enough tension in the air already.

“This is the gun to your head. So decide.”

The force of the nozzle pushed the skin on my left temple into a little clump. I could feel my heartbeat thumping inside it like a heavy bassline. Sweat caked my armpits and dripped along the zipties that held my hands together in front of me.

I usually just tell my friend to shove the game up his ass because he’s being an immature little shit, but somehow I don’t think mister man here would appreciate that answer. The scent of dirty steel and acrid gun powder was beginning to singe the insides of my nostrils.

Besides, I actually like one of the choices, it’s just that it comes at a very high cost I’m not yet prepared to pay. I had to buy time — which, when you have a gun to your head, is also very expensive.

“I choose… mm-ff-g-bleuh — “ I stammered out, deliberately letting gibberish gargle out as if the blood-soaked snot from my nose had flowed over into my mouth.

The silence of his apparent confusion dared me to raise my head slightly. The three doors ahead of me still stood quietly closed, their gaunt steel frames giving off the same cold glare.

Seconds later, I felt the gun loosen from my left temple. The absence of that cold chrome tip allowed my jaw to loosen and I began to feel warm blood coursing through my cheeks. I gave a sniff and blinked some sweat away. The leftover salt burned along the almond-shaped tips of my eyes.

“You can’t choose can you? ‘Which door is the escape? Which door will kill me?’ ‘Which one will lead to success?’. Hahaha — oh, I do quite love this part.”

His industrial-size boots came into view as he laughed off his words and abandoned his position behind me. The air was putrid and reminded me of the stale dampness one finds in an unkempt barnhouse. I raised my head slightly to find him finally standing near the leftmost door ahead of me.

“You’re a man of probability, aren’t you? That must be why you’re here, Yuri. I can see it in how you think. All your adult life you must have been playing out the probabilities in your head. Guessing everything out like little games of poker; If I do X then Y might happen, or maybe I could wriggle Z, I don’t like this, but the odds are — and so on and on. Ad infinitum. Isn’t it?”

I remained quiet and followed him with my eyes. His boots padded heavily past the middle door and over to the rightmost one as he continued to recite this monologue he was so obviously enjoying.

“But what you really want is control — am I right? And more than that, you have fooled yourself into thinking you can always have it.”

Objectively, I couldn’t disagree with the man. I am a control freak; inside my head, probabilities run riot like a stock market that never rings the closing bell. It’s a product of my nature. Or rather, my experience with nature. I try to create sureness and predictability for myself — but surely everyone wants these things?

“So. Let’s play it like a game show instead. Your life, if you so want it, is behind one of these doors. Behind the other two… well, some form of death. Now am I clear? Good. Go on then, make your first choice.”

What difference did any door make? I don’t even remember how I got here. One minute I’m on a train, and now this guy tells me to choose a door in some industrial barnhouse or I get shot. Now what?

A situation where nothing makes sense. Where nothing is controllable and everything relies on the smallest of choices. My brain hates these. Too many possibilities, too high a probability of things going wrong — of making the wrong choice. Again.

There was nothing to anchor to, so my brain went drastic. I motioned with my forehead toward door number one. I read once that the only thing more dangerous than making the wrong choice is not making a choice at all, so here goes.

He walked towards it and began to meander while he talked. “Door number one. The practical man’s choice. Fair enough. A bit simple, though…”

Suddenly, he made an about face and walked straight for door number three. With one good thud on the controller, he reached down and pulled it open with a raucous heave.

Behind the door, only a rope hanging with a noose.

“Why will you look at that! Door number three would have led to death for you! Oh my, oh my. Well, that really changes the data, doesn’t it?”

His mannerisms followed that of a game show host who’s caught in the action with you, as if all this was someone else’s doing. As if all this were someone else’s game and he was just carrying out his role. If so, I believed with a subtle certainty that he would indeed do whatever was required of him. He would do so because then this is someone’s setup, and he’s the guard and I’m the prisoner. We all know how that experiment goes.

Then again, I’m tied up and semi-soaked in what is definitely real urine, so my judgment may be on the panic-y side.

He made his way closer to me and stood tall, almost like a butler coming to take my order.

“Let’s see how smart you really are,” he said, pointing his finger at me like one would do to a toddler. “Tell me, Yuri… now would you still like to choose door number one?”

What the fuck kind of game show was this meant to be?

1 HOUR EARLIER.

Yuri left the building bleary-eyed, hugging his coat to his chest as he shivered down the building’s main steps and onto the frigid London streets. He plugged his earphones in and put on his usual playlist of melancholic favourites crafted for dark depressive nights like this one: The Midnight Express.

He made off on his usual path to the nearest metro for the last train until morning service. Beat by beat, the music began to carry him away. Yuri was on autopilot now. Muscle memory took over, and as his huddled shadow made its way down the unkempt streets, his mind drifting along its own familiar dark lanes.

Yuri had felt it since morning. Like after every trigger, he could feel his psyche fighting against a whirlpool of negativity. Trying, so desperately to keep from being sucked in. But he was losing this fight.

As he had ruminated so many times before, Yuri’s mind convinced itself that everything he worked to preserve always seemed to fall apart. He would put all his efforts into what he did, and yet somehow it never seemed to amount to anything. In fact, he would see exactly how it would fall apart. Effortlessly, it would start to come down in his mind’s eye, as if it had always been built like a skyscraper that’s designed to collapse in on itself. And the more he thought about what little he had managed to achieve in his life, the more he saw the cracks in how it all stayed together. In his mind’s eye, he would see all its weaknesses appearing like cracks in rubble. And then finally, every column of hope that held his life together would wither and start to crumble. Effortlessly, it would fall as if nothing had held it together in the first place.

Yuri would see it all falling down in his head, and the destruction would make him feel as if it was simply revealing the real truth of his life. The construction of it had always been ramshackled and disjointed, slammed together by the bricks of effort and held only by the sticking power of luck.

Yuri caught the last train to find it empty and dimly lit. He chose to remain standing and laid his head on a railing, his eyes half-closed as he bobbed to the defining hum of deep bass. Something about the low frequencies allowed his brain to calm itself. All the noise and inside chatter came to a soft whisper, while a certain cacophony of base emotions always continued to reverberate within.

The same image continued to plague his head: that the life he’d built is beginning to fray at its joints. As if sitting in his own silent film, he watches the collapse of years worth of hopes and dreams like a building in free-fall after demolition. He watches as story upon story of memories made begin to effortlessly unhinge themselves from their core, toppling to the ground in small clouds of powder. Until finally Yuri sees his whole life reduced to the calm, settled dust of memory.

It was all so effortless; like paper being absorbed by water.

The train began to move, and with it Yuri’s mind began to spiral further downward. Yuri thought about the situation that he found himself in (for what seemed like the umpteenth time in his life). Now, he felt as if there was no such thing as a ‘right’ choice anymore. All the choices were, in fact, poisoned from the beginning. And now without any options left, with most of his talent and time spent, wasted — where to now? Like this train, his mind was just a machine on autopilot carrying nearly-empty containers back and forth through dark tunnels.

Yuri succumbed to hopelessness. The more hopeless he felt, the more he found himself stuck. The more stuck he felt, the more his mind’s hopes and dreams crumbled. And the more they crumbled, the more he saw how they were always made to fall apart. As if they were made of cards, of nothing but paper. His mind finally began to give in.

It all felt so effortless; to give in to the darkness, to be comforted by the pain, to allow yourself to fall without end.

And so Yuri let himself fall, fall calmly into the deep, sludgy darkness that was enveloping everything around him. Effortlessly, he fell into the darkness, like paper being absorbed by water.

And then I realised what he was on about: the Monty Hall Problem. It’s a statistics theory based on some old-school gameshow (likely not as sadistic as my current situation) where there was a prize behind one door and goats behind the other two doors.

The host, Monty, would never reveal the correct door to you, but he would open a door different to the one you first chose — just to fuck with your head. Seemed to be exactly this guy’s style.

He was a bulky motherfucker, no doubt, but he also had a bit of that crazy eye. He seemed unpredictable, off-kilter. A savant likely. Yes, I’d peg him for some kind of math savant. They’re always a bit nutty (at least in the movies).

It fits the bill. See, the thing with the Monty Hall Problem is that it banks on a certain human characteristic: we generally don’t like change.

Changing your strategy here would make it seem as if you’ve given in to the host’s mindfuck, and you would appear weak to your tribe (the people watching the show). Therefore, most contestants would usually avoid changing their choice of doors.

But not a savant — or anyone of enough analytical intellect, for that matter. They would play the odds; specifically, adopting a strategy that maximises your probability of winning.

I unclenched my jaw and pulled my head up as far as it would go.

“No. I’ve changed my mind. I’ll go with door number two instead.”

He smiled. That creepy-uncle-type sinister smile that makes you think that everything toxic in the world must have a gene honed for that particular brand of smile. The smile of unfairness.

“You never were one to stick with your choices.”

The man began to pace near the middle door, seeming irritated that the player was becoming too smart for the game.

I suppose I guessed correctly. In the mind of a math savant, it would be clear that if you compare the calculated probabilities for switching doors versus not switching after the host had already opened one door, switching doors is the mathematically “correct” option. While the probability of what’s behind each door stays the same, the probability of choosing the correct door increases. Sounds ridiculous, I know, but pure theoretical math like that isn’t exactly meant to conform to life — it’s a model, not a muse.

“Fine, Yuri, fine. Door number two it is. But first: tell me something. You have indeed chosen correctly, but if you’re so smart — how come you find yourself such a miserable failure in life?”

His fat face crinkled up as he asked the question so he looked as if he was negotiating out the very tip of a wet fart.

“You sound like my dad,” I retorted back.

He remained expressionless, thinking while he paced in front of door number two. And then that stupid smile again.

“I’m a physicist, a philosopher, a nutcase yes, a lot of things — but one thing I most certainly would not tolerate is being a father.”

A physicist and a philosopher in one, now there’s something new. I read a biography of Bertrand Russell once, a man so analytical he’s considered the founding father of logic as a discipline. While the book poses an impressive display of the man’s intellect, the key point was this: those with a highly analytical mind are more prone to madness because they keep trying to fit the world into the rational models in their head. And when life breaks their models to shit over and over again, they… well, they lose their shit. Because life, as we experience it, is rarely rational. If anything, it’s mostly emotional.

“I want an answer, Yuri. Use that brain of yours. Think: why is it that you keep failing to make anything of your damn self?”

A number of factoids began rushing to my head, as if we were in some great court of law and I was ushering up arguments from every perspective to justify my point. I read a study once about the “ask gap” — the difference in salaries between those who had the balls to ask for more money and those who didn’t. And another that showed the importance of luck in determining fortune. Then there were any number of demographic factors like my passport, age, lack of stable employment, skin colour. My introverted personality and low self-esteem levels were also competing for first place on my list of shitsticks.

What can I say, I’ve always been my own best (prosecution) lawyer.

Sometimes this is what happens when you try to pinpoint some problem about yourself — instead of boiling things down to their basics, all the thoughts and doubts you have about your life just bubble up like one big frothy mess. I struggled to find any sense among it all.

I cleared some snot away with the edge of my shoulder and made a little cough. So now what do I tell the guy?

“Well… everything I build seems to break. I suppose I’ve just been unlucky.”

Yuri, like many others in his generation, constantly found himself lost, unable to gain sure footing on an overcrowded patch of ground. The generations before his seemed to have caught the final remnants of an economic boom that now seems entirely out of sync with the generations living through its consequences. Nowadays jobs aren’t considered safe, cities never seem secure, everyone is a potential terrorist, and even breathing in the air will eventually kill you. To Yuri, the world (and his own experience of it) really is a big rock hurtling through space trying not to get smashed to bits by the non-stop thoroughfare of planetary masses careening in all directions.

When he was younger, the world had seemed a place of plentiful yet limited possibilities, and even those were well-defined and clearly marked. People much smarter who came before him seemed to have constructed it all hunky-dory; a world ready to receive lost youthful souls at some reception centre in Jobsville right after graduation. He was sold on a set of paths, a set of key choices with definable outcomes. Most of them involved increasing education, income, and responsibility. Yuri wanted these things. Who doesn’t want those things? And so he tried, he did what he could to achieve these stepping stones while making choices along the way that seemed, at the time, more or less correct.

But life, as always, had other plans. A multitude of small and large choices had led Yuri through a whirlwind of experiences and careers. All the while the world around him changed faster or slower than him. At times people and places opened his mind. At times those very same things closed him off. And yet the whole way through, he always assumed there would be some great plateau. Some future where he was settled, things were sorted, and worries were generally trivial (in some pre-arranged grand scheme of things).

As Yuri grew older, he learned more. And the more he learned, the more he realised he didn’t know — the more he realised that no one knew. We were all just wingin’ it. In fact, it was only change that remained constant throughout. Good things changed to bad, bad things sometimes changed to worse. But change was the only guarantee.

With so much change, so much unpredictability, so much riding on each and every choice no matter how small — how the hell was someone to face the challenge of always trying to make the right choices?

Yuri never could reconcile that one.

Mister man brought his crooked little smile back, appearing to have been somehow awoken by the truth in my answer.

“Unlucky. I like that answer. It’s one of the more honest ones — almost Socratic. Yes, don’t look at me like that — there have of course been others I’ve asked before you. But I like you Yuri. I like you, and so I’m going to let you in on the secret. The secret to why you’re actually here.”

I held my breath, hoping the secret was that there was a lavatory in this place and I just came here for a wee. I was dying for a wee, almost literally at this point.

“But first. Door number two— shall we?”

Oh, groan.

He went over to the middle door, and with no hooplah again, cranked it wide open as well.

Behind it, a guillotine. Guess I won’t need that wee.

“So that’s it? Chop my head off and just wait for the next participant? Choose a door and a monologue? What is this place? What the fuck, man? Why me?”

I fired a barrage of questions, each one becoming successively shorter and faster to match my pounding heart as the probability of imminent death began to increase.

“Calm down, Yuri. Didn’t I say I wanted to tell you a secret?” He queued in with that god damn smile again.

This guy’s just a bloody masochist. He‘ll get off on seeing me suffer and beg.

“Ok. Well, what’s the secret you’d like me to know?”

Like a child being told they get to give someone a Christmas gift, he hopped over to the only remaining closed door and made to heave it open.

With a gentler crack than the first two, the door opened. I couldn’t tell what it held inside at first.

Then, a gentle hiss. Ah, a gas chamber. Old-school quiet method. So I do know this game. The one where it’s all fucked from the start — just like everything else in my damn life.

Somehow I felt easier with this knowledge, though. That all roads lead to death. Probability is: 100 percent.

I laughed at him. When I get nervous I have this tendency to simply laugh as if the whole ordeal is a huge prank and I had only just realised.

“You see Yuri, I agree with you. It is fucked from the start for some of us. The game is rigged. The system is against you — against us all! All… roads… lead… to… death. Are you happy now?”

He finally tired of his gun and threw it to the ground as he walked back towards me. His smile remained, but his eyes had changed. Somehow they appeared both slightly mad and somewhat desperate now.

“That’s not a fucking secret, mate.”

“Oh Yuri. The secret was never that it was all a rouse just to make you choose something and go off to die. No. If anything, you must see now that it’s not the choices you made that mattered but how you viewed them. You were told that there was some golden door, you were told there was some choice you could make that would lead to your success in this game, some path that would lead you to happiness on the other side. No, Yuri. There is no one choice. There is no nicely laid path for you. All roads lead to death. So what I want you to choose instead is this: how is it that you would prefer to go to your death?”

“Ah. Great, thanks for letting me in on that little nugget, professor. Obviously, zip-tied in some pseudo industrial barn talking to a philosophysicist — or whatever the fuck — about how I’m going to die wasn’t my dream death. But hey, my dreams seem as shitty as my choices these days. Fuck, man.”

I sounded more tired and cranky than I wanted to, but at this point I was shooting the breeze trying to buy time. I looked over at the gun he’d left on the floor and thought more seriously about how I might actually die. Particularly if this would really be it.

He caught my eye.

“Yuri, if I wanted to shoot you, you’d be shot. I don’t sit around philosophising for the fun of it. All right, fine, sometimes I do, but lucky for you this is not one of those times.”

He turned away from me and produced a cigarette. Something else I’d like before I died, but I made no mention of it as he lit up. He seemed to always know what I was thinking anyway.

“You will leave this place alive, Yuri. It’s a matter of timing. The crescendo is coming. The bassline has dropped. The kick is pulling out. Soon you’ll be on your way out of The Midnight Express. But before you go — just tell me one last thing.”

I had no idea what he was on about and didn’t see any other option.

“Anything you like as long as I can have a piss.”

He smiled, this time more genuinely, almost solemnly.

“Why did you build your dreams in concrete that later crumbled? Metaphorically, of course.”

I gathered myself and thought for a moment on the surprisingly deep nature of the question. “I’m not sure — a figment of the imagination filling in details for me, I assume. I must have figured it was a strong material.”

“So you thought you were meant to build something strong. You thought that’s what you needed; strength. And then when it crumbled, you were surprised.”

I found myself surprised in the present. If you do not build something strongly, then how do you build it?

“Well… I thought I built them strong, but they crumbled because their foundations were weak. My belief in them and myself were weak. When the winds of change blew against me, it all crumbled on me like a house of cards. Like everything was built on nothing but paper. But I know all this already, and you seem to — so what is your point?”

He remained patient and puffed his cigarette calmly before responding, “If you find stone crumbles like paper… then why do you not build your dreams with the flexibility of paper in the first place?”

He turned around and stared at me, his eyes glaring with the hope of achieving meaning, drawing me in, holding my gaze.

“Yuri, when one takes a hammer to stone, it crumbles — just as your dreams have. But tell me, Yuri — when one takes a hammer to paper, will it crumble?”

Silence seemed to come upon us, as if there was a white noise this whole time. He remained eye to eye with me as darkness enveloped us and I felt myself falling.

And so Yuri allowed himself to fall, to fall completely into the chair he sat on and the ground below him. To fall deeply, effortlessly. To fall deep into the pure sludgy darkness now enveloping them both. And so he fell, effortlessly; like paper being absorbed by water.