Mirthlessly

“Ta gueule.” He pushed off the door frame and took one step closer to me. I winced involuntarily, believing he was going to strike me. Instead, he dropped a backpack on the ground — the same one I had taken with me to Old Port that morning. “T’es vraiment salaud.”

“Mon Dieu. Pas toi aussi, Hortus.” Mr. Tremblay sighed, then looked back at me. “She didn’t mean what she said. You know that, right?

I did not. Did I really know anything at all, in the wake of my world’s destruction? Did the chaos beyond the end of order have any truths left for me to keep and hold as my own? Did I even exist anymore, when everything that once tethered me to reality had now dissipated into noise and heat? When nothing could now stop the inevitability of entropy’s erosion of my vacuous existence? I nodded anyway, despite the philosophical wrongness of that act. But maybe all right and wrong was meaningless, anyway. Maybe good and evil no longer existed, never existed in the first place. In their absence, doing whatever it took to ease the concern of the man before me was simply a convenient act, devoid of any real significance.