Zanthic Lazarus :: D3 :: FIN

And I am one of your people
But the cars don't stop
And it's been a long time since before I've been touched
Now I'm getting touched all the time

Ladies and gentlemen, perhaps you have seen an album describe a person, but have you ever seen a person described by an album? And that, my friends, is why this is such crazy rubbish. Excuse me, but not really because this was fun to write.

And it’s only a matter of whom – Zanthic Lazarus
And it’s only a matter of when - 18
There’s a meat market down the street – D3
Where boys and girls watch each other eat - Male
An addiction to hands and feet –

[/i] Alex Arnold
You are so sweet - [/i] Odair[/center][/b]



Some people think they’re being watched over by a guardian angel. Others count their lucky stars, gather randomly placed stars into patterns in which they swear they can read the future. They’re wrong though. Sometimes I sit, looking at the faces of these strangers, envying them. Their foolish, childish hope. They think that the beating of their heart is to do with emotion, with a connection. A combined surge of dopamine and adrenaline, that’s all it is. Ever since I was little, I knew them mathematically. Knew that these feelings aren’t worth listening too, because they’re only drugs, only evolutionary processes to help us further our gene pools, to become even more the superior species, as if we weren’t good enough already.

When we were little, mum used to say she loved my sister and I with All Of Her Heart. This was a stupid metaphor, as of course, it was not her heart feeling, but her brain, but a patter of connected neurons. But our ‘hearts’ were little stones, cold and hard and unforgiving, mine especially. I truly believed that in some way, she had caused the accident that had killed my father. But I wasn’t being rational at the time, to young to devise formulas1 and work out what was logically right. I had counted up our feelings and divided them up even and I called that calculation perfect love, even though supposed ‘perfect love’ was just a hypothesis with no applicable evidence to support it. I guess I just didn’t know better, but now I do.


¹ The applicable formula for my father being the person crushed by that particular piece of machinery would be P(A) = No. outcomes favourable to event A / Total number of outcomes.



My mother always was a religious woman, and I always used to scoff at her when she’d sit down and pray before dinner, or before bed. But I discovered no one laughs at God in a hospital, holding my father’s hand while he took his dying breaths - not even me. I was twelve at the time, and Clara was eleven. We were old enough to know what was going on, and I was old enough to know that God is just some foolish delusion thought up by stupid people to help them make sense of the world when they can’t fathom scientific equations, and yet somehow I still found myself praying. Praying that he was out of his pain, that where he was going he’d be free, that he’d be happy. He was a good man, my dad, and although I didn’t believe I was having an effect by just thinking, I was willing to give it a shot anyway. No one laughs at God when they’re saying their good-byes. It’s strange, I usually find that God can be so hilarious but when our family was starving and freezing and so very poor because dad was no longer around to bring in money, and mum couldn’t find work, and I was too young and stupid to offer to work, I wasn’t laughing at God, but instead bowing to my knees and trying desperately to pray the right way. Of course, it’s nothing to do with God, the fact that I’m still here talking and that I have food in my belly. I worked hard, and once I was no longer hungry I went back to my longstanding belief that religion is just a last desperate cry for help.



Bussing tables, wiping clean ketchup bottle labels is how I spend most of my days. I work at a café, and have done since I was fourteen. It’s a drag, a metaphorical weight on my back, but we sorely need the money, and it really is the only thing keeping our little family alive. I’m so much better than a table boy, skilled with things other than a mangy cloth. I’m brilliant with technology, quite literally brilliant; I can hack into any computer system, and make hardware out of just a power board and a screen. I’m sort of a genius next door, brilliant and also quite unremarkable. I’m still such a foolish child, with so much yet to learn, and yet I’m brighter than most people will ever be.



It’s like forgetting the words to your favourite song. When did I grow up? When did is stop being so easy, and the words so sweet? Not that I’m no longer innocent- hell, I’ve never been kissed – but ever since Father died it’s as if my maturity hormone has gone into overdrive2, and suddenly I understand just how cruel this world really is. Inside, I’m a small boy just starting to cry, but the funny thing is that I don’t feel sad. Not anymore, not for years now. I want to miss him, really, but every time I feel something remotely similar, I’m reminded that it’s the way of the ecological world, that all things have their time and then must die. It’s only scientific, only another combination of processes that just happen. I’ve spent half of my life trying to fall behind, trying to feel what other normal people feel, but it’s only now that I realise that I just don’t feel that way.
² Of course, I know this is impossible. My body’s production of testosterone has nothing to do with my maturity, nor has my father’s death speeded it up.



So, like I’ve said, I’m not normal. I don’t feel like other people do, I don’t get emotions that pool and ripple and sometimes come like a tidal wave.2 I know what I’m meant to be feeling, most of the time, I just don’t feel it. I wish I could at the least blend in with the pattern that other people leave, at least understand their feeling enough for me to act like a chameleon against them. Good is better than perfect, morally good, to know how to react to situations in a way that is considered right. I know I’m perfect in the way that my mind works, with far higher intelligence than is average, but I cannot which way is north on my moral compass.3 Because of this, too I manage to ruin those around me, degrade their self-worth and drag down their reputation. I’m like a boy would go to his favourite books stores and rip out his favourite pages – because although the story may still be enjoyable, it’ll never again be as beautiful as it could be.

³ Biologically, emotions don’t really act like liquid, but this is a metaphor for how I perceive other peoples emotions to act, as they change very rapidly, much like the ocean.
⁴ Another metaphor.
⁵ Yet another metaphor.



When my sister and I were little, we always were close. Each other’s best friend, we’d play games together for as long as our bodies would hold out for. She was the creative one, the one who’d invent things and be different people and I would just be me, just her Zan. I couldn’t think of anything else, and if I were to be challenged in the same way today I wouldn’t be able to invent myself as a different character, either.

I wasn’t able to do it when father died. When he died, she and mum both changed, but I couldn’t. I was still me – unable to be effected by even the most grievous injuries. I said that I was but I’m a liar. And now we’ve grown apart, Clara and I, and I miss her greatly. It would be nice if we could share things like we used to. Life would be so brilliant if we still lived in our own little world.

To my dear little sister,
I won’t let go of your hand. Whatever happens, it will always have to be you that lets go. You’ll have to be the one who tries to fly away. You can come to me, if you like, if you want to talk. I wish that I could say that there’s nothing I won’t understand, and indeed, if they’re science or maths questions then there won’t be, but if they’re about feelings then the previous statement would render me just a liar. But I’ll believe it all, because I believe in you. I have too, because you are the only fact in this world that is completely proven. If there is one thing in this world that is mathematical, it is you.

But from this point in, I’m sorry. One more or one less, nobody’s worried about me. And you know that I don’t care about me either, but I do worry about you. If anything happens, I’m sorry. I’m a thousand times sorry. Don’t believe it all, sister, as will you. Just listen to the facts. You won’t regret me being your brother, I promise.

Yours,
Your Zanny.



You know, I remember the day that I realised that I wasn’t normal. I was fifteen, and I’d been working at the café for about a year by then. It had never occurred to me before then that other people got hurt by their feelings. The fact that my eyes were dry at my father’s funeral, while those around me were brimming with tears never struck me as strange. But, anyway, this particular day was in the depths of winter, and I was making my way back from work as usual, when on the footpath I found a wallet. It was nothing special, a worn leather pouch, but I picked it up and took it home regardless. I was so tired as I walked through my door, but Clara spotted it immediately. She asked me what she was doing with the little bag, and asked whether I’d taken it off someone. I told her the truth, that I’d found it. I always try to tell the truth. ”In that case, you’d better find out who it belongs to.” she said. ”It’s the right thing to do, after all.”

That really spurred me. I lay all the contents of the wallet on the floor. and started sorting through them, searching for a clue as to who the owner might be. It was like a mathematical equation, or a holy relic, something that could hold so much, if only I would work it out right. I ended up finding a number stamped on a card, and handing in the pouch through that, but there was one thing in there that struck me hard. Inside were pictures of their small family, smiling and happy but with this glow in their eyes. I realised I’d seen the glow before, but never quite worked it out. This time, I got it. Understanding. That connection due to recognition of body language and changes in linguistics that meant people could read others like they were a book. And I realised I really, really wanted that glow, and that I was smarter than anyone I knew – so how come I couldn’t do the understanding thing that everyone else could?

How come I still can’t?



Until last year, the year of the 61st, I’d never really watched the Games before. I mean, I’d attended viewing when necessary, but I’d never focused on them. But last year, the maths and science involved really blew me away. The chance of getting ones names reaped, the amount of muscle one could gain in a week of training, the trajectories and geometry used to get a good shot, the chemical combinations used in poisons and the combustion reactions used in fire making- to be a Victor, you had to be a genius. Smarter than me, too, not only a mathematician and a chemist and a physicist, but you had to be a psychologist, able to read into your enemies next move. But they win, and no one cares, not really. I knew Klaus Goravich, vaguely. My father had known his. And when I watched the Capitolites place a gaudy crown on his head, I saluted him.

Dear Klaus,
Victor. Congratulations. Oh, what an honor. You’re now human, just like the rest of us. A sinner, that’s what you are - Human of the Year. The very best/worst one of us, perhaps. And now, all mankind are now your brothers, because even you, our idol, are now dirtied like we are. No word uttered for the fallen, who with a psalm grew silent, until next years big human winners. Outside, the cars are beeping out a song just in your honor, but you know what? They’d beep anyway. It is a victory, in the fact that I understand how much skill you needed to get to that point, but, hallelujah, you’re just like the rest of us. Perhaps you fell from holiness, but there are a lot of geniuses that never achieved grace in the first place, after all.
Yours,
Someone who understands.



I am part of a composite, I understand this. I am a little thing, not important. But the truth is, you only need a small amount of catalyst to speed up an enzyme reaction, and even an electron can spark a massive electron. Little things are important, and I think that I can help.

I’m sick of being hooked into a machine, sick of being part of the Capitol and part of the way the squash us all. They treat me as a fly, where as really I’m a manuscript with a thousand important things written across my mind. The thing is, I don’t have friends in high places, no way for my intelligence to be given away. The Captiol won’t use any of my ideas, but perhaps the Resistance can. Perhaps this flat is soon to be my post-war apartment, after my ideas have helped halt the Capitol and put in place some greater idea, that gives greater accessibility and ways to contribute to all. The thing is, if I am to live in the future, I think the resistance is where my loyalty lies.

They started off beneath an olive tree
And they chopped it down to make a picket fence
And marching along the railroad tracks
They smiled real wide for the camera lens
As they made it past the enemy lines
Just to become enslaved in the assembly lines

Resistance ≠ enemy
√Captiol ≠ freedom
√Capitol = Power hunger
Ideas > Oppression
The dark days ≈ now, = seemingly ∞

It’s all mathematical.



Dear future girlfriend,
If you would be so kind as to come and open up your folding chair next to me, that would be great. I’ve been sitting on this abandoned beach for years (both points metaphorical,) and I think it’s high time you walked into my life and loved me, despite the fact I cannot love you back. I’ve tried, I’ve tried, but my emotion just does not get that strong. I’ve got a perfect body, because my eyelashes catch my sweat, I work biologically quite alright, so if you were interested in reproduction I could be your man. I don’t want nothing from you but to sweetly hold your hand and more importantly have you hold mine. All I want is for you to look after me. Nothing more, I promise.
I’m sitting here alone.
Yours, Zanthic.




Breathing’s just a rhythm. A mathematical pattern that could, for the most part be graphed. It would show an even pattern, a constant, an average. I’ve tried to do it before, too. A mathematical graph and an equation to show how we breathe.



And when you’ve formulated that your zeros intercept ∞ and -∞, you know you’re going to be ok in the end.

But you know what I realised, just today, that I forgot to factor in? The moments that took our breath away.

So I’m starting again. One more time with feeling! I can do it, I know I can. Everything in this world can be fitted into an equation, we just have to find the right sums. It’s completely and utterly predictable, even emotion, and if I can work out the square root of emotion then I can surely times it by itself and apply it to my self.

Perhaps I’ll graph feeling next. Maybe I’ll understand it when it’s written mathematically. [/blockquote][/size][/color]