​Chapter 28. God Bless

The morning was gray and cold, like someone had thrown a wet rag over the sky and left the dying sun to suffocate underneath. Broadway’s asphalt gleamed with last night’s rain, slick with rainbow oil stains, the gutters swallowing dirty water mixed with cigarette butts and shredded newspapers shouting about market crashes.

He walked slowly. His legs carried him of their own accord, each step prewritten in someone else’s algorithm. The bag dragged at his shoulder, the strap biting into his skin, and he thought about how predictable this feeling was — pain, weight, repeat. The air was a mix of gasoline fumes, burnt grease from the hot dog carts, and the city’s faint, rotten breath. A breath that was also part of the script. Somewhere nearby, a manhole cover clanged, a jet of steam shot upward, hung in the air, then settled on coats and jackets as a sticky, wet film.

Everything felt like a scene out of a cheap action movie.

He’d stopped watching films. Not all at once. At first, they just bored him. He’d sit in a theater, chewing popcorn, already knowing what would happen ten minutes in advance. The hero loses everything. Then finds strength. And in the end he wins. If not him — then the people he fights for. Like the girl by the hot dog cart, with a backpack covered in peace-sign pins, believing in the idea of ‘good.’

Then he tried books — classics, pulp, anything. The stories changed, but the skeleton stayed the same. The fall — like the homeless man with the cardboard sign saying ‘God Bless,’ another built-in function of the scenery right under a Coca-Cola billboard — always the same. The journey. The return. Victory or sacrifice. The thousand-faced hero — the same doll in different clothes. Any emotion, any twist — you could spot the template a mile off, as if everything had been copied from one script.

The oily rainbow puddles looked like magazine covers: bright, shimmering — hiding the same thing every time.

Culture wasn’t a mirror of the world, or the voice of humanity, or exploration, or progress. It was a machine stamping out story tropes, wrappers for code. Instruction manuals on how to live right, how to suffer right, how to die right. Living right meant buying a house on a mortgage and having kids. Suffering right meant doing it on a beach, staring at the sunset.

Dying right meant dying with honor, for your country, guts spilled out on the ground. All according to script — the city, his steps, and the bag with an AR-15, converted to full-auto and wrapped in an oil-soaked rag.

Sometimes he’d shut a book halfway down the page — just to break the program. He didn’t want to obey the rule everyone pretends isn’t a rule at all: finish the chapter. Place a bookmark. Go to bed. Repeat.

Even the classics betrayed the same template. He read Dostoevsky and found himself thinking not about Raskolnikov, but about the role assigned to him: how long he was supposed to suffer, how long the misery had to stretch before Sonya appeared — mercy incarnate.

Everything came down to roles. Everything was prewritten.

The weight of the bag on his shoulder, the smell of gasoline, the steam rising from a manhole — all part of the code, scripted for a scene where he wasn’t a hero but a simulation of one.

And that was the real horror. If art was repetition, if imagination was a loop, then what was left? He watched the people passing by, their predictable movements, faces like frames from any movie, and felt: the rifle in his bag was the only thing that didn’t lie. Metal didn’t pretend to be a story and didn’t promise meaning. It just existed. Soon he would enter the subway, descend the piss-slick stairs, and step into a car.

A street vendor strained his throat yelling, “Pretzels! Two for a dollar!” His voice drowned in the morning New York cacophony: the drone of engines, taxi horns stuck in gridlock, the far-off wail of sirens echoing off skyscrapers. The scrape of a soda cart’s metal wheels added rhythm — sharp, insistent, like a ticking clock.

The alarm rings. He wakes up, eats, goes to work, lunch, back home, TV, dinner, sleep.

Day after day — the same loop, like a toy train on rails. The track always closed. He walked, the bag tugging at his shoulder, watching the vendor push the cart forward — another piece of the same cycle.

Rivers of people streamed along the sidewalks. Office clerks in wrinkled suits clutching the fresh Wall Street Journal, headlines screaming about the Asian financial crisis and market losses. Students with backpacks covered in pins — Save the Planet, Fight the Power — wove through the flow. All of them parts of the same eternal circle: study to get a job, then work to feed the ones whining in the booster seat of the car.

Couriers on rollerblades, cigarettes clenched between their teeth, squeezed through the crowd, breathing smoke into the air. It hung there like the city’s own sweat — hot dogs, cigarettes, everything keeping the same tired loop running.

In the corner, beside a boarded-up storefront, a homeless man sat wrapped in a filthy red blanket. Pigeons scrambled under his feet, fighting over a crust of bread, and one with a shattered wing wandered behind them, hopeless and slow.

Once he caught himself, realizing he was living like a mechanism. Like the pigeon clawing at the crust. Like the homeless man in the red blanket. Like the clerk with the newspaper, handing over a dollar for a pretzel to quiet his hunger for a little while. People called that life, but he knew better: it was just a program. Live — work — consume — reproduce — die.

People loved to say you had to create something new, leave a mark, bring beauty, make a discovery, contribute something. But it was the same pattern, just a different mask. The dopamine hit in Einstein’s brain was no different from the cup of Death Wish the homeless man bought under the subway stairs. Books? A new set of rules, a new template for the same recycled feelings. Inventions? Nuclear bombs and new methods to watch, control, and squeeze a human being inside his cage. Progress was nothing but fuel for the loop.

A mother pulled her child by the hand—the kid whining for candy, his voice drowning under the drone of engines. In that whining he heard the beginning of the cycle, and in the mother—its exhausted continuation. In twenty years they would trade places. And no one ever asked why. Everything was “for the children.” Children are the flowers of life, they liked to say. Then they sent them to Vietnam.

Reproduction lost meaning if the ending was always the same—decay. Food lost its meaning if hunger returned tomorrow. Everything humans did was just extending the loop. Like the pigeon with the broken wing reaching for a crust it would never touch.

As a kid, he was told: “Study so you can get a job.” Later: “Work so you can live well.” Later still: “Take a vacation—you’ve earned it.” The goals changed, but the step stayed the same. Everything ran on inertia; take it away and movement stops.

A student walked past with a backpack where a little pin read: Believe. For everyone else, it was a sign of hope. For him—it was code: she would reproduce, her child would whine, the loop would spin on.

Everyone chased pleasure — it didn’t matter how they got it. Some shot up heroin by the 125th Street exit, others drank wine against an ocean sunset. Some paid for a prostitute, others to the sound of the wedding march. “Normal people” called it life — house, kids, vacations, hobbies. But it was the same chemistry: a small dose to drown the void. Someone did good deeds for gratitude or a ticket to heaven. Saints tortured their flesh, slept on stones, stayed silent for years. But what changed? What difference did it make how you triggered the chemical dump in the brain — a drug, a kind act, or whipping yourself bloody? Different levers on the same machine.

Artists, scientists, poets bragged about seeking truth or beauty. But their discoveries and books were just new packaging for the same pill: another way to shove endorphins into the brain, a narcotic for consciousness.

Believers did the same thing, just in a more elaborate form. They agreed to wait for their dose as a delayed reward. Their heaven was an eternal syringe. An endless supply of pleasure they didn’t have to buy by the subway stairs. They believed in an infinite orgasm stretched over eternity and called it salvation. They thought they were above everyone else, but in truth they were the greediest of all. They didn’t want pleasure here and now — they wanted absolute bliss forever.

They were all the same, and the thought made him nauseous. He didn’t feel like a person but like a function. Like a stomach with one job — digest. Like a clerk with one job — swallow the news of a crisis. Like a cog that had to keep spinning, even when no one knew why. Like the pigeon with the broken wing hauling itself across the asphalt.

He stopped at the entrance to the 42nd Street subway. Neon glowed overhead — TKTS in bright red letters calling people to shows where the heroes loved with loud speeches and suffered on schedule, from seven to ten. Coca-Cola in white and silver lights, their reflections shivering in puddles with the promise of happiness you could buy for a dollar. Everything around whispered: “Drink this, watch that, feel this way.”

Movies, ads, or the roar of the crowd — all of it was a prescription. Not discovery or exploration, but instructions on how to live. Beside him, the green currency-exchange board blinked numbers: another line of code dictating what should matter — money, status, success. The crowd flowed down the stairs into the subway depths like water running into a storm drain.

The steps were slick, coated in layers of gum, cigarette butts, and grime. They smelled of piss, rusty metal, and old rags. Water trickled down in thin streams, dirty slush squelching underfoot. Someone slipped, grabbed the railing, and snapped, “Watch where you’re going, asshole!” He kept walking, and each step echoed in his skull like a beat: work, suffer, reproduce, die. Repeat.

Movies taught people how to love—beautifully, with confessions in the rain, like on that “Titanic” poster on the wall. Faded, with Leo and Kate promising tragedy and catharsis. Novels taught how to suffer—slowly, but with an ending where everything makes sense. Ads dictated what to call beautiful: smoke in your lungs, winning the lottery, the perfect body. Even the torn Gateway 2000 poster with a cow scribbled over in black marker was part of the code: buy a computer, work faster. Layered on top of it all, Zephyr and Crash tags in black and red—signatures of those trying to scream—but their scream had been turned into instructions: paint by template, rebel by example.

People crowded around the turnstiles: a guy in an oversized jacket glancing at a girl in tight jeans digging for her token—one-fifty, a worn little disk of metal like a promise of love, the kind that’s supposed to change everything. He watched them and thought: not people—functions. The guy—desire. The girl—searching. Another one, in a torn hoodie, jamming a match into the turnstile—a system glitch, but still by the system’s own rules. The old woman with the grocery bag blocking the way—consumption. The teenager in the Yankees cap fidgeting behind her—loyalty: cheer for the team, suffer, repeat.

Culture didn’t reflect reality and didn’t grant freedom: it was firmware, a narrow hallway with no exit, where every step—from the gum stuck to the stairs to the token in someone’s hand, from the graffiti shrieks to the neon signs—was prewritten. Even the stray conversations drifting out of the crowd—“Buy a new phone, it’ll be easier,” “Don’t stress, it’ll work out”—sounded like commands: consume, obey, accept. Culture didn’t just create reality; it devoured it in return, like an ouroboros.

He slid the token into the turnstile slot. A click—like the bolt of the rifle inside his bag. Everything around him was code keeping people on their rails. Newspapers explained what to consider important: elections, stocks, crises. Magazines reminded you what to feel: get a job, fall in love, don’t lose your mind.

He walked toward the platform, and every step, every smell — piss, rust — confirmed it: culture wasn’t reflection, it was command. And in this corridor there was no exit except the one he carried in his bag.

The platform hummed, a low vibration of voices bouncing off the concrete walls where cracks spread like veins toward the ceiling. The smell of the tracks—metallic, sharp—mixed with sweat, garbage stench from the corners, and something acrid and chemical. In the corners—cigarette butts, Snickers wrappers, crushed Marlboro packs, puddles of urine—another line of instruction drilled in since childhood: dirt = bad, cleanliness = good.

The rails trembled from the approaching train, the vibration pulsing through the soles of his shoes. Somewhere water dripped from the ceiling into a bucket left by maintenance workers—drip-drip, a rhythm like a ticking clock, like the school axiom: one plus one = two.

Everyone waited. A woman dragged a child by the hand. He clung to her coat but still whined, “Mom, I wanna go home!” She hissed, “Be patient, almost there.” That was the entire cycle. Tired = bad, home = good, mother = salvation. Firmware, deeper than culture or morality.

You could throw away movies and ads, but what do you do with what they call truth? “Thing.” “Good.” “One plus one.” That was what they taught a newborn, hammered into him in school, repeated in books, the basis of the world’s logic. But even some French guy wrote that logic wasn’t a law, but a habit a child develops while stacking blocks. And what if I don’t want your logic to work? What if the law you call natural is just a forced frame, like this water dripping into a bucket because drop = water, bucket = collect water? There could be another logic—chaos, puddle, decay. There could. Nothing is true, everything is permitted.

A man in a suit buried his face in a newspaper with the headline “Asian Crisis Threatens Wall Street”—bold letters screaming about the Thai baht collapsing, the South Korean won cut in half, Indonesia sinking into recession—thirteen percent of GDP gone, speculators ripping the skin off Asia and leaving bare bones of debt—but even here truth was just firmware: crisis = threat, Wall Street = center, save the system because order = safety, chaos = doom, and the man frowned, flipping pages, not realizing the headline was a label programming his mind to nod: “Yes, this is bad, let’s fix it, let’s make it right.”

A teenager in headphones bobbed his head to unheard Nirvana, his fingers drumming on his thigh: rhythm = pleasure, wired into the script. Even sensations were hard-coded: pain = bad, joy = good—an axiom drilled in since childhood. Who decided that? Why can’t someone want pain, or prefer chaos to order? Punks with multicolored mohawks—green, pink, glued hair and hairspray—laughed and slammed their chains against the railing. Mohawk, chain on metal—but gravity still pulls down and trains still run on schedule.

No one looked each other in the eye—everyone was busy with their own role: the woman with the child checking her wallet, the man in the suit neatly folding his newspaper, the punks elbowing each other. When a child is shown an object and told “chair”—that’s firmware; when adults chant “this is right”—that’s algorithm. The world itself doesn’t name things and doesn’t know “good” or “evil.” There is only the primal chaos hidden beneath the shell of definitions.

The train burst out of the tunnel with a deafening roar, its headlights slicing into his eyes—he squinted—wind throwing up dust and torn newspaper scraps. The crowd swayed, squeezed tight near the edge. The woman pulled the child closer, the punks yelled something obscene, but everyone moved along the rails of their logic: station = stop, flashing headlights = step back, wind = hold tight. Metal screeched, sparks spat from under the wheels. The cold metal in his bag was the only thing that didn’t obey the axioms. And when the route number blinked in front of him, memory aligned: “My word is six and fifty.” He was here to divide, not multiply.

The Pact survives only because people blindly accept the axioms shoved down their throats. But what if you don’t? What if you say “no” even to something tiny, refuse to treat as truth what everyone else calls truth? A child learns to add not because the world works that way, but because his brain eventually grows into that pattern. “One plus one = two” isn’t a law of nature — it’s a developmental stage. But what if you stop there, refuse to “grow up” in their sense? Right at that edge, where the simplest rules collapse — one plus one isn’t two, pain = orgasm, chaos = home — that’s where real freedom begins. But the price of that freedom is the void, ruleless, numberless, without categories. Only the unthinkable remains — the unknowable thing the Pact hides.

There’s no other way out.

The doors hissed open, letting the crowd spill in.

He squeezed in last — between two big guys in leather jackets, arguing about basketball. “Jordan tore them apart again last night, carried the whole damn team through the playoffs.” One had a Duane Reade bag with a beer can glinting inside; the other waved his hands, spraying spit on everyone nearby. The doors closed and smacked someone’s backpack — thump, fabric crumpled.

The car was old, paint peeling, rust bleeding through the blue layer. “Fuck NYPD” scratched into the wall with something sharp — a nail or a key, the letters jagged. Metal grab bars stained with gum, fingerprints; seats burned through by cigarettes, yellow plastic turned almost black with age.

Inside, it was hot. The air clung to skin like a wet film. The smells fused into a choking cocktail: body sweat, cheap cologne with that disinfectant bite, spilled coffee, the wet dog smell of old coats. Overhead, the metal tang of overheated lights pressed down, blinking, illuminating faces in stuttering flashes.

None of it was random. It was a system. Layer after layer: morality, culture, numbers, categories. Together they formed the Pact. Sweat and rot became a formula: discomfort everyone tolerates because the Pact whispers — “endure, this is normal, you’ll get off soon.” Even “Fuck NYPD” was rebellion inside the frame: cops = bad, arrest = lesson.

The Pact isn’t a contract — it’s the firmware of reality. It holds everything in place: from simple words — train car = transport — to the death of a loved one, where grief = flowers and speeches. It whispers: candy for a child = good, spilled coffee = bad, Jordan in midair = beautiful, peeling paint = ugly, one plus one = two, and you will not change it. Even the crisis in Asia was explained by formula: baht + speculators = threat, therefore save the system, restore order.

The big guy with the Duane Reade bag popped open the beer — psshhht, foam running down over his fingers. Freedom, but within bounds: drink, relax, don’t break the door. The Pact makes the world understandable, bearable. Without it, only the void remains — air without a smell, lamps flickering without rhythm, bodies brushing for no reason. And that void would turn you inside out.

People call that freedom. But in the Pact, freedom is the freedom of a man on death row. You can rebel: skip work, cheat on your wife, jam a match in a turnstile. Even kill — with a knife or a bullet. The system is built for those failures: cops arrest, court sentences, therapy reabsorbs you into the herd. A person thinks he’s free, but it’s freedom from the window to the bars. Yell, argue about the game, wave your arms, then sit down, hold your bag, endure the heat.

The train jerked, lights flickered, shadows danced across the windows. He unzipped the bag wider, fingers resting on the oily cloth. The Pact tightened around him and whispered: “Don’t do it, it’s evil, one plus one = prison.” But real freedom isn’t in a crack — it’s in a rupture: to do to the Pact what it does to you. And the weight of the bag pulled at his shoulder with that truth heavy in his hands.