Chapter 5 The Beginning of the Affair

To dream the impossible dream,
To fight the unbeatable foe,
To bear with unbearable sorrow,
To run where the brave dare not go...
(Don Quixote/Cervantes, "The Impossible Dream", Man of la Mancha)

For everything that has a beginning has an end. And, vice versa.
My affair, with cigarette, started in a dark, shadowy room, and I was surrounded by a group of dreamers.

"Why is it all youngsters wish to save the world?" Jesus Christ, in The Last Temptation of Christ, asked desperately. Kevin, of course, was no exception. Yet little did he know, at one's youth, no one actually know what the world one sets out to save is like. When ignorance find sincerity, you get a bewitched knight.

It was the end of the century, a century when millions got killed systematically, when humanitarian writers commited suicide, and those that dare not questions the justification of such act, when Dream Work turned into a giant enterprise.
However, it was also a century dreams were actually given possibility to be fulfilled. People were encouraged to persue it.
Kevin (ah, long time no see) was lying on the porch reading The Unbearable Body, whilst waiting for his friends late for their secret meeting. What's the meeting for? Well, you see, in the gospels, Judah went to the Pharisees and Priests to be bribed, to betray. Kevin and his friends were holding the meeting to fight back the disciple group, for they know they were excluded from the heavenly gift. The gift of being entitled rebels, with or without a cause.

It's something about Kevin, that he always, or at least for severaly times, saw the thing to come unnecessary, not really significant. First time stepping on the street, chanting slogans among at least ten thousands Taiwanese, he realised right in the middle of the protest that it was meaning-less. Such thing happened many times. Enthusiasm got blocked even before the actually action. Kevin himself didn't even know why he still stayed with those that didn't share the same view. Was it fear? Maybe. You see, as an orphan, company, at that time, was important to him. He listened, nodding to opinions he disagreed, smiling when he didn't care. (Lucky that he didn't sleep around when he didn't want to.) Fear ate the soul.

That night, Kevin was happy that he was called to the meeting, even though he could not actually relate to others' emotion. He was considered the most compliant one in the NGO to which they were offering their services. Only once the leader of the organisation singled him out in a meeting, asking provokingly that "having documented so many meetings, you really have nothing to contribute?" To contribute what? That all these were crap? That you were a bunch of wankers? Well, so he said, since she asked. To Kevin's surprise that he was applaused. How sick, thought he.
Anyway, this time, the meeting of the youngsters of the organisation, was a secretly held to overthrow the elders, those in power. "Idealism lives not in human organisation," Pianist used to tell him, only that he wasn't sophisticated enough to understand that. None of them were.

The meeting went as a gathering of wankers in fact. Kevin remained silent, speechless, but he didn't expect himself like that among these youngsters. With nothing to contribute, he took the cigarrette of his friends, started smoking. For the first time in his life he consumed a fag to its end. He kept the same act, all night, only to keep his mouth not totally empty before the end of the long long night.

That was six years ago, and only one in that youngsters' group is still in the business of saving the world. All the others are leading lives as orphans. Things go back to how they originally were. One of them got married. Happily, I think. Two of them started travelling, Kevin be one of them. And that, was the real beginning of our little tale, my beloved reader.

The quotation at the beginning was from an off-Broadway show, again made into a film, Man of la Mancha, one of the rare films that drove Kevin crying. He hid his whole body under the table where the projecter was located, while the professor was hosting the discussion after the screening in class, weeping silently. Should Don Quixote even face the real? Should he be cured from his insanity? While spared of punishment from his fellow prisoners for the encouraging show, did Cervantes reconcile with himself?

Yet it was long ago. It was the story of one of the Kevins. Just one.