"If yesterday," He said, stopping suddenly, "I had to leave my home for ever and say good bye to to this place, certainly I would had felt awful. Now I feel I need to leave my home, and I don't know how I feel tomorrow." His heart overflowed with pain.
"Stop it." Tim said. "You're talking like a mad man. Why do you think you may have to leave your home tomorrow? I don't think your marriage is ruined; and besides how do you know that Diana doesn't have a secret or two in her heart that you've never known about it."
"My Diana! Never, impossible- I know everything about her."
"My dear friend the night is not over yet, you may get the surprise of your life before the morning comes." Tim's remark astonished all.
"You're crazy." Jacob threw his fist in the air.
Jacob felt like going away right then, somewhere far; disappearing from this crowd completely. Even a dark, abandoned place, at that moment would appeal to him. He just wanted to be alone with his thoughts, where no one would know him and the only friend would be his thoughts. He appeared talkative and restless. He wanted to enter into feverish argument with everyone in the room. It seemed that he was provoked by these people; yet his discussion loomed to be over the contradictory and instantaneous subjects which made it almost impossible to know what truly he meant at that moment. He had this crazy idea that he was being set up.
"Now, right now is a futile dream." He said with a malicious laughter. "You're calling me crazy." He turned to Tim and then continued:
"You're forgetting that the purpose behind one's action normally and boundlessly are more complex and disparate than we think they are in our ensuing clarification; and they seldom can be explained." He spoke with bitterness and fast, as though there was not enough time to express all the thoughts and feelings that congested his mind.
"Hey, listen," Ed began: "Perfection is just an illusion; virtue is only in books and it is nothing but illusion in our lives, Is it that so?"
"You mean no one is perfect!?" Thui cocked her head; her waves of black hair moved from one side to the other. "I thought you were perfect, dear." She widened her eyes and then sank into her thoughts and became silent again.
Suddenly Jacob realized why Diana never liked Thui. She was just so ordinary. He could not help to speak his mind; otherwise he would not, since the circumstances and drinking had made all of them to show their real soul:
"You know, ordinary people like you," He turned to Thui. "are the essential element in the human business. To forget about them means to ruin validity; therefore, I must ignore what you just said; because you belong to a group that your existence is a necessary link to human affairs, yet your voice doesn't have any sound."
Thui was offended; nonetheless, she stayed speechless. Ed shook his head. It seemed that he wanted to say something in his wife's defense but he decided not to. After all he knew Jacob for over twenty years. He had never seen him like this. However he could not help to say:
"I think you had enough of playing fool for one night, Jacob. May be we just wait and see what happens."
An abstruse and unfaltering discernment of his own mediocrity along with an inexorable longing to persuade himself that he was a man of perfect intellect had aggravated Ed since young age. Education, however, had given him the knowledge and power to play the game among the intellectual people, but internally he had always known that all the circle of his friends, including Jacob, were natural intellectuals. Even now, he saw Jacob would be a lot different than if he was playing fool. He had a great deal of pride and surely stifled vanity.
"What is this party?" Jacob got up again. "What is this endless celebration? Why don't you all go home?" Jacob's speech was impaired and blurred. He was always drawn to entertain or to be entertained from childhood; nonetheless, he could never partake in these parties internally.
"Thui, get up. Let's go." Ed said with a frown.
"No, you all stay. The night has not ended. This is a night of reckoning for all of us." Tim's comment shivered everyone.
Thui sat down automatically.
"What do you mean by that?" Ed asked Tim, Grimacing.
"I don't know, just my intuition. Please stay." Tim spoke as if it was his house with a gentle voice.
"Jacob asked us to leave! How can we stay?" Ed stammered.
"Jacob, did you really mean that?" Tim asked.
"I suppose not. I'm just irritated. You can understand that; and besides I am very tired and at this moment hate everyone. My life has turned upside down in one evening. That may surprise you, merely because we all are the type, the manifestation, the personification and the climax of the most arrogant, the most self- centered, the most incidental and hateful mediocrity." He said with a mean frown and then went on: " We're not foolish, and foolishness here have no consequence. We all deliberately do things and then we can get away with them."
"You're very unhappy and disturbed now, Jacob." Tim said gently.
"Better be unhappy and know it." Jacob answered. "I bet you, that you who pretends happiness, are very unhappy yourself and don't know it. That makes you a fool, too. There are useless people in this world, who in their self- vindication don't have any knowledge that most of their authority is only a thin line; and they don't find themselves responsible for anything. That is why many people nowadays lose their belief." Jacob, finally sat again. He looked exhausted.
"I don't know what to say except that you're right. But it is the tremendous strength of our minds that makes us superior, not our actions. Perfection, that is what you're talking about, can not be reached or found. One can only look at it as perfection, isn't that so?" Tim replied with a very sullen look on his face.
"Can you just forget this, tonight, and pretend that nothing has happened? Besides, what you're saying has nothing to do with tonight!" Ed said after a short silence.
"How can I forget what happened tonight? The more I forget tonight, the more I submit myself to the confusion of life and love. And what I am saying has every relation with tonight! You've always told me that I'm a philosopher. Remember, for everything I look at life as the law of nature, philosophy of mind. I think of people and the depth of their action. Why they do what they do? I don't look at the surface. I hate superficiality." Jacob turned away his face angrily from everyone and lit up his cigar which was dead by now. His gaze was strange. He had a vacant and abject smile on his lips.
Tim and Ed seemed bewildered. They waited apprehensively. Jacob wrung his hands while a sigh broke from his throat. Thui looked bored.
They all suddenly heard the bedroom door opened. Diana and Rosa came to the living room after almost one hour. No one could read anything on their faces.
*
To Be Continued
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