I groaned, exhaustion and pain braiding together into one ugly sound that scraped up my throat like gravel.

  It was not the kind of groan you made because you were bored, or annoyed, or dramatically inconvenienced, it was the kind that happened when your body tried to move and your brain punished you for it, a warning siren that lived behind your eyes.

  My head hurt as if a hammer was hammering inside, not one clean hit but a rhythm, a relentless percussion that made every thought feel like it had to wade through mud to reach the surface. My stomach rolled with it, queasy and sour, and I swallowed hard against the urge to puke, tasting bile that was not there yet but promised itself like a threat.

  I opened my eyes.

  At first there was only light, fluorescent and merciless, the kind that turned skin sallow and made shadows look sickly. Then shapes sharpened, desks, chairs, the pale walls of the classroom, the long blackboard that still had chalk lines like scars. The room was empty except for me, my head laying on a table, my cheek stuck slightly to the varnished wood, and the teacher.

  He was seated at Mr Daneau’s desk like he owned it, one leg crossed over the other, posture too relaxed for anyone who was supposed to be responsible for teenagers. A half open window let winter air leak in, and with it the faint smell of snow and car exhaust and something metallic. His pale hair caught the light, almost silver, and he was looking at me like I was late to my own funeral.

  My throat felt dry, and when I spoke my voice came out small, soft, unbelievably relieved.

  “That was just a fucked up dream,” I said, rubbing my eyes with the heels of my hands like that could erase the images that still clung to my mind, the graveyard, the rain, the other me in the hole with a shovel, the stones with my grandparents’ names carved into certainty. “It was not real. Thanks God.”

  The teacher’s mouth twitched, not quite a smile, more like he was amused by the concept of God being involved in anything happening in this room.

  “Mister Artemis Archambault,” he said, and it was strange hearing my full name in his voice, the syllables too precise, too clean. “It seems you’ve finally woke up. I would have had to wake you in twenty minutes had you not, due to it corresponding to the end of your free period and classes of the day.”

  My tongue felt too big for my mouth. I sat up slowly, the movement making the hammer in my skull swing harder, a fresh flare of pain blooming behind my eyes. My vision pinched at the edges, spots of black swimming like gnats. I pressed my fingertips to my temples, gentle like touching a bruise, and forced myself to look at him.

  “You left me fall asleep in your class,” I said, and my voice tried to be accusatory but came out more hoarse than anything. “I’m sure you saw me do so. Shouldn’t you have woken me up, be angry or do something because I wasn’t following your class?”

  He took a silver engraved lighter from his pocket, a cigarette from another, and lit up with the casual confidence of someone doing something illegal for the joy of it. The flame flared, reflected in those pale eyes that never seemed fully human, then vanished. He inhaled, slow, like he had nowhere to be, like time was his to spend, then exhaled smoke that curled upward and caught the light like a pale ribbon trying to escape.

  “I checked the past grades of this class,” he said, smoke leaving his mouth in lazy spirals, “and there was not any time when you hadn’t scored as perfect, so why not let you sleep. More than likely, you’re still going to continue having those same grades, and well, if you don’t, that’s your supposed future, not mine.”

  I stared at him, then at the cigarette, then at the ash already forming at the tip like a tiny gray flower.

  I snorted, which was a mistake, because the motion made my head throb, a pulse that seemed to radiate through my jaw and into my teeth. “That’s not what a good teacher should say,” I managed, blinking hard. “The dean would have your head if she heard this. That’s without speaking of the smoking before a student in a class, of course.”

  He leaned back in the chair like it was a throne he was bored of sitting on.

  “Firstly,” he said, voice dry, “who said I was a good teacher, that I even wanted to be one. Just here because I got to, but believe me, I would have been in Switzerland skiing if I could.”

  I felt my eyebrows rise despite myself. The motion tugged at my forehead like a bruise being pressed.

  “Our school is one of, if not the most well paying when it comes to staff and salaries,” I said, disbelief slipping into my tone, because even my bitterness toward this place could not deny that they paid their people like they were buying loyalty. “It’s private, partly financed by donations of ancient students like my grandparents, parents of the current students, and the like. They can pay a teacher, what, one hundred and forty thousand dollars a year, sometimes more if you’ve got seniority and a specialty, plus benefits, plus pensions, plus the kind of extras people in public schools can only dream about.”

  He looked at me like I had just explained the concept of pocket change to a man who used diamonds as paperweights.

  “Trust me, kid,” he said, smoke curling out between his lips, “what they pay here a year is what I can spend in two days.”

  Normally I would have laughed. Normally I would have assumed it was arrogance, a performance, another rich asshole pretending to be richer than the next rich asshole. But something in the way he spoke, not bragging, not posturing, just stating it like the weather, made a cold little knot form in my stomach.

  I swallowed, and the movement made my nausea stir again, like something inside me was searching for an exit.

  He continued, voice still careless, still sharp.

  “Second, about the dean and the administration of your school, let’s just say that we got an understanding, so even if all of you went to your parents, I would not be able to be fired unfortunately. If it was possible, I would have done the most possible so that I was already gone. Third point, even then, let’s say this,” he pointed at the cigarette, the ember glowing like a tiny red eye, “is going to put me into hot water if you tell, I still would not worry.”

  I blinked slowly, because the room felt too bright, the light too loud.

  “Why,” I asked, and my voice came out flatter than I meant.

  He paused like he was enjoying the build up of his own stupid joke, then snapped his fingers as if Eureka had just struck.

  “How do the kids say it these days,” he said, then tilted his head, mock thoughtful, “because you’re not a punk ass bitch.”

  He pointed the burning tip of his cigarette at me, and for a second the motion looked like a priest lifting a candle in a dark church, except this priest’s altar was a school desk, and his incense smelled like tobacco and contempt.

  “Am I wrong,” he asked.

  I snorted again, then regretted it instantly as pain lanced behind my left eye, sharp enough that my vision briefly doubled.

  “Just because you’re funny,” I said through clenched teeth, forcing a breath in slow so I did not puke on the table, “and made me forget for a moment about this headache I have, I am not going to tattle.”

  His gaze held mine, and something in it shifted, like the surface of a lake when something moves underneath. For a second his expression carried a mix of pity and knowing that made my skin prickle, like he was reading a page of me I had never shown anyone.

  “A headache, huh,” he said quietly. “Hopefully it’s just that.”

  The way he said hopefully was wrong, like the word had sharp edges.

  He took another drag, exhaled, smoke drifting toward the ceiling, spreading into the fluorescent light until it looked like thin fog trapped indoors.

  “Anyways,” he said, as if we were discussing the weather, “we still got like ten minutes before the end of the school day, and because it is your free period, you can do whatever you want, like maybe try to sleep again, even if I doubt you’d be able to get a smidgeon of rest, or I guess I can play teacher and ask you what you thought of the reading on The Myth of Sisyphus I asked from your class yesterday, and that you slept through today. It should make time pass more quickly.”

  I stared at him, tried to swallow past the sourness in my throat, tried to shift in my chair without the room tilting again.

  I sighed, and the breath felt too hot in my chest. “Why not,” I said, because if I sat in silence the hammering in my skull became all I could hear. “So what do you want us to discuss about.”

  He leaned forward, elbows on the desk, cigarette still between his fingers.

  “Let’s do thesis, antithesis,” he said, “you on good old rock pushing Sisyphus side, and me on the other.”

  “Then, in other words,” I said, rubbing my temple with two fingers like I could press the pain into submission, “argue for Sisyphus.”

  “Bingo,” he replied, tone almost cheerful in the laziest way.

  I tried to gather thoughts, but each one felt like it had to be pulled out of the headache like a thread out of cloth, slow and uncomfortable.

  “Hm,” I said, and it came out like I was thinking when really I was just trying not to throw up. “I can not say that the methods he chose were the best, but the goal behind it, the idea behind it, wanting to live even when the world tells you you should not, I think that’s beautiful.”

  He nodded once, like he was humoring me.

  “Indeed, beautiful as a sentiment,” he said, “but in the end, Sisyphus would have made things much more easier for him if he hadn’t defied the world, the gods.”

  I shifted in my chair, and the movement made my neck crack slightly, sending another ripple of pain across the back of my skull.

  “They literally tried to kill him because he told a father,” I said, words coming faster as indignation sparked something in me, “the river god Asopus, where his kidnapped daughter was, daughter kidnapped by Zeus by the way, and more than that, in return he asked from the river god something that would benefit his city, his subjects, and Zeus being Zeus saw all of this and sent Thanatos to drag him to the underworld.”

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  The teacher hummed, unimpressed.

  “You forget to mention the part where Sisyphus succeeds in chaining Thanatos,” he said, and his tone sharpened like a knife being drawn, “which is embarrassing by the way, if I was supposedly Death itself it would not be, and in the end, this action resulted in the world going out of order, nothing dying while suffering still existed.”

  He leaned back, cigarette smoke drifting toward me, and I fought the urge to gag at the smell, because nausea and tobacco were enemies.

  “Zeus sending Thanatos to him wasn’t fair,” the teacher continued, “but Sisyphus by his action created the beginning of what could only be called hell on Earth. Do you truly realize what nothing dying would mean.”

  His eyes stayed on me while he spoke, and there was something cold in his voice now, like he was peeling back skin to show bone.

  I did realize, and as he spoke my mind supplied images that I did not want.

  A world where the hospital corridors never emptied, beds lined wall to wall, bodies that should have been released from pain kept breathing anyway, lungs filling and emptying like broken bellows. People with cancer whose cells multiplied without end, tumors growing, pressing against organs, stealing breath, stealing space, stealing function, but never stealing life. Parents holding children whose fevers never broke, whose skin burned hot while their eyes stayed open, pleading, because nothing killed them, and nothing saved them either.

  Car crashes still happened, metal still crumpled, glass still shattered, bodies still snapped wrong, but there was no merciful ending. There were people trapped in twisted vehicles, their legs crushed under dashboards, their ribs broken, blood pooling, and they did not die, they only stayed there, conscious or half conscious, pain screaming through every nerve, until someone cut them out, and even then, what then. A body can live without legs, without an arm, without an eye, but what about without a jaw, without skin, without a functioning spine. What about the people who fell into fires, whose flesh burned and peeled, who inhaled smoke and screamed until their throats were raw, and they did not die, they just continued existing as agony.

  The elderly in nursing homes, their minds already dissolving, dementia eating memory like moths eat fabric, would remain trapped in confusion, not dying, just slowly losing themselves until there was nothing left but fear and noise and the inability to recognize the hands trying to help. People with infections, gangrene creeping up limbs, flesh blackening, the smell of rot filling rooms, doctors cutting away what they could, but the infection kept spreading, and still the person breathed, still the heart beat, still consciousness flickered behind eyes that begged for it to stop.

  Suicides would fail by definition, wrists slit, pills swallowed, bodies hanging, but life would cling anyway, leaving people broken and furious and trapped in bodies that refused to release them. Wars would be endless slaughter without the release of death, soldiers blown apart by bombs, limbs torn off, organs exposed, but they would remain, screaming, crawling, living. The battlefield would become a landscape of eternal suffering, men and women who should have been dead lying in mud and blood that never stopped seeping, because their bodies continued producing it, continued functioning in the most cruel parody of life imaginable.

  Even animals, deer hit by cars, dogs left to starve, birds with broken wings in the cold, would not die, they would just linger, hunger gnawing, pain constant, bodies failing but never fully stopping. The world would fill with the sound of suffering that had no endpoint, no punctuation, just an endless sentence of agony.

  And over time, humanity would not become immortal in any glorious sense, it would become a population of the living damned, everyone accumulating injury, disease, damage, until existence itself became unbearable. Cities would rot under the weight of people who could not be buried because they could not die, hospitals would collapse, resources would vanish, and yet consciousness would remain, trapped in pain, in hunger, in decay, because Thanatos was chained somewhere and the world could not complete its natural cycle.

  It was hell, not because there were demons or fire, but because there was no end.

  I swallowed, hard, and my stomach lurched, bile rising, then settling again like it had reconsidered.

  I forced air into my lungs, slow.

  “Again,” I said, voice rough, “in such case the one who should be blamed should be Zeus, and if not him, the gods, the world and the way it functions in those Greek myths, because if something right creates wrong, disorder, then it means that the origin, the root was never right itself.”

  I pressed my fingertips to my brow, tried to keep my eyes from watering, because the fluorescent light felt like it was drilling into my skull.

  “I know how that could be horrifying,” I continued, and the words came out more deliberate now, “but there is something I think a lot of people miss and seemingly never think or talk about.”

  The teacher lifted an eyebrow, inviting, mocking, interested, it was hard to tell.

  “Go on,” he said.

  “If death can be chained,” I said, and I heard how my voice sharpened, how something in me leaned toward the argument like it was a lifeline, “if the rules of the world could be altered once, why couldn’t it be done once more. Why stop at death. Why not continue with Ares or war, pestilence or Nosoi, misery or Akhlys.”

  The teacher looked at the cigarette like it was offering him an answer, then spoke as if thinking out loud.

  “Changing the world,” he said slowly, “no matter what may happen in between, in a goal of one that could be a better one, instead of one not perfect, flawed, but sure and functional.”

  He took another drag, inhaled, exhaled.

  “Tell me, would be savior,” he said, and his tone made savior sound like an insult, “do you think that it would truly be a good thing. Tell me, when does it stop. When do you deem the world perfect enough. How many people would be hurt, affected, just so that what you,” he put emphasis on the you, like he was pointing a finger directly into my chest, “think is best happens.”

  I blinked, the motion slow, my eyelids heavy, and the hammering behind my eyes surged again, as if my brain resented being used.

  “Many were and still are against women having rights,” I said, and my voice gained heat, anger, something righteous that made my stomach twist, “many were and still are against slaves being freed, many were against recognizing Eastern Europeans, Irish people, Italian people, and Asian and African people as people.”

  I swallowed again, tasted bitterness, whether from the argument or the nausea I could not tell.

  “Sometimes,” I continued, “it doesn’t matter what people, what the world wants, sometimes things need to be done no matter what people feel or think.”

  The teacher stared at me for a second like he was weighing me, then let out a small sound that might have been laughter if it had bothered to be warm.

  “That’s tyranny, you know,” he said. “When you become the leader of a sanctioned country with nuclear armaments, don’t forget about this poor sinner and try to not bomb Switzerland please. I don’t think I could live without my favorite skiing spot.”

  Despite myself, a smile tugged at my mouth.

  “Just for that,” I said, and my smile felt dry on my face, “this is the first thing I’d bomb.”

  He lifted his shoulders in an I tried gesture, as if my moral decay was inevitable.

  “It is what it is, I guess,” he said. “Anyways, let’s go back to old Sisyphus. So, to recapitulate, you unlike most think that he should have done more instead of less, that he should not have been a pussy, and while this is interesting and all, and I don’t think I’ll ever forget this opinion, I think that he should have allowed Thanatos’ touch the first time, that he should not have tricked Hades and Persephone to go back.”

  He tapped ash into the empty metal tray on the desk, like he was tapping punctuation into the air.

  “Because unlike many who would say that this is because it is right,” he continued, “I think that it’s because responsibility, acceptance, whatever you want to call it, it’s the mature thing to do.”

  “Mature,” I repeated, and the word scraped. My head throbbed harder, as if the syllables offended it.

  “Yes,” he said, “mature.”

  He leaned forward slightly, and his pale eyes fixed on mine. For the first time since I woke up, his voice dropped the joking edge. It became steady, direct, and the shift made my skin prickle.

  “I think I see this story more as a lesson in sometimes knowing it is better to let go,” he said, “that sometimes no matter how unfair, unjust things are, we have to bear the brunt of them, accept them and go forward, and doing the contrary, being like Sisyphus, not letting go, sometimes would only result in you not only making things worse for yourself, but also for the people you love, for the people who didn’t deserve the suffering your actions would bring them.”

  I sat very still.

  The classroom felt too quiet, too empty, as if the rest of the building had been evacuated and forgotten. Outside the window, snow fell in thin sheets, pale against the gray afternoon.

  Letting go.

  The thought landed in my chest like a stone.

  I thought of my grandparents, of my grandmother’s hands in my hair, of my grandfather’s brisk stride, of the warmth of their kitchen in the morning, the smell of coffee, the way their voices filled a room and made it feel safe. The idea of letting go of them did not feel like maturity, it felt like betrayal, like blasphemy, like asking a starving person to be polite about hunger.

  Letting go.

  Something bitter rose in me, something spiteful, angry, a rage that felt too big for my body. I didn’t understand why it was so immediate, why it felt like someone had hooked their fingers under my ribs and pulled.

  My stomach rolled again, harder this time, and I swallowed fast, breath shallow, because the thought made me want to puke.

  The teacher watched me, and his gaze sharpened, the sarcasm falling away like a mask.

  “Tell me,” he said, and his voice was more serious than it had ever been since the beginning of our conversation, “mister Artemis Archambault, if you were akin to Sisyphus, with the possibility of changing things for the better and the worst, what do you think you would do.”

  What would I do.

  The answer came so fast it scared me.

  I would make them live forever.

  I would carve the concept of death out of my family line like a tumor.

  I would keep my grandmother’s hands warm and steady, keep my grandfather’s lungs strong, keep their hearts beating, keep their laughter in the house, keep the kitchen light on at dawn, keep the world from taking them, because the world had already taken enough.

  I would freeze this moment of my life, because even with school and headaches and nightmares and whatever sickness was creeping through my bones, this moment still had them in it, and that made it worth living.

  I would do so uncaring of the cost.

  But reality was a thing after all, and the thought of saying that out loud felt like exposing a vein.

  So instead, I chose cowardice dressed as logic.

  “There is no point thinking about hypotheticals,” I said, and my voice sounded too thin, too controlled.

  He stared at me for a beat, then tilted his head like he was listening to something I could not hear.

  “What if I told you this was no hypothetical,” he said.

  I blinked at him, and the fluorescent light stabbed again.

  “I would in said case,” I said dryly, because sarcasm felt safer, “tell you to maybe change your dealer.”

  He huffed a laugh, then shook his head, cigarette between his fingers like a small wand that could summon trouble.

  “I could try to convince you right now,” he said, “talk and talk even more, but I honestly have better I could do with my time, so let’s do a simple thing.”

  He leaned forward, elbows on the desk, and the ash at the tip of his cigarette trembled.

  “I am going to ask you to do a simple thing,” he continued, “and if I’m wrong, I promise you that you can consider that you’ve already aced this year’s class of philosophy.”

  “You’re supposed to replace the true teacher just for a week,” I said, squinting slightly, because my eyes felt gritty, like I had sand under the lids. “How could you?”

  He crushed his cigarette against the window frame, grinding it out without caring about the burn mark he left, the gesture casual and rude. A tiny curl of smoke rose from the extinguished tip, then vanished into the cold air leaking in.

  “I have my means,” he said, as if that explained everything. “So are you game.”

  My mouth tasted like metal.

  “What would be that thing,” I asked.

  He smiled, and it was not kind.

  “You’re Sisyphus who doesn’t believe he’s Sisyphus,” he said, “so I guess I am going to ask you one thing, after doing it, come talk to me.”

  And then the clock rang.

  It was not a gentle bell.

  The ringing filled the room, swallowed the air, swallowed his next words.

  He stood, walked around the desk, and leaned down close enough that I could see the faint freckles on his pale skin, the fine lines at the corners of his eyes that did not match his apparent age, and his mouth moved.

  I heard him, I did, the instruction slid into my ear like a secret confession, clear as if the clock had not been screaming at all.

  But the sound of the bell rose and rose, and for anyone outside my skull, for anyone watching this like a scene through glass, the words would have probably disappeared under that electric shriek, replaced by noise.

  His voice became a shape without meaning.

  A sentence without sound.

  A command hidden behind the ring of the clock.

  My eyes stayed on his, and the headache pulsed, and my stomach turned, and when the bell finally stopped, the silence that followed felt like the moment after prayer when you realize you may never an answer.

  He straightened, picked up his bag, and the corner of his mouth lifted as if he already knew what I would do.

  And I sat there, tasting nausea, tasting fear, with the instruction burned into my mind like a brand, clear to me.

  The school day was over.

  The headache was still there.

  And something about him, about this whole moment made me feel as if I was Dante looking at a gate inscribed with the words, abandon all hopes you who enter here.