Chapter Two
Lyle Stanley Kubrick was born into a family of Absurdist Monks. These Absurdist Monks held the ardent belief that the world, the universe, and everything in between were sensical entities made out of nonsensical parts.
Now, when Lyle Stanley Kubrick was only a baby, his scalp was lightly seeded with sprouts and (carefully watered with plenty of sunshine) came to have his hair grow in combination with the plants. His hair therefore was jet black with streaks of green, red, and blue.
This caused his parents no end of joy as they realized that this too made little sense. But Lyle, being now a rebellious teenager wanted only to escape the upper Manhattan loft his parents called “The Convent” and live an ordinary (and in his dreams) quite stupid life.
Then, one day, a rainy day, Lyle was staring out his room window. Putting on a cap (New York Yankees), he declared in his own mind this would be the day. His escape. His liberation.
That morning he said goodbye to his parents as he did every morning and set off for school. But instead of sitting through another day of lessons taught by Professors from on high, and trying to fit in with other privileged young adults with eccentric parents who wanted only the best for their spawn, he just kept walking past the school.
Lyle Stanley Kubrick, whose parents were Ingrid Bergman Kubrick and Sofia Coppola Kubrick never knew just what this sensical universe with nonsensical parts had in store for him. Maybe this is putting it incorrectly. The universe from a literal standpoint has nothing for no one specifically. It just exists as a grand and empty stage, with an ever growing ever dieing cast of characters. Lyle had the barest idea of this. His parents had none, opting instead for a belief that colored their world a romantic rose red.
Lyle had, the previous night, packed all the sensical supplies he figured he would need on the road. Of course, being the child of Absurdists despite his mundane leanings made Lyle quite unsure as what to bring. In the end his backpack was stuffed with a serrated knife, a BB-Gun, and a spare hooded sweat shirt. In terms of food, Lyle brought as much money as he could smuggle to support himself and realized (with measured delight) that he’d have to get a boring job possibly doing menial labor in order to keep himself fed.
Though the rains over New York had stopped, the gray clouds still hung heavily over the city. Bloated and engorged, ready to burst with torrential fervor. Lyle walked under this among the crowds feeling like an ant among other ants in a giant underground sand castle.
Walking over the wet cement byways of the city, Lyle wondered idly where it was he was actually going. Was there some kind of etiquette to running away? What was recommended destination distance? Not that any of this actually mattered to Lyle if it even existed. He was just lusting for distance, that beautiful creature that separated (or rather could separate) him from his old life.
Lyle found his way to the subway. The rains began again as he pulled his cap down low and put his hood up. Never having gone this far away from his school, or his home for that matter, he took a deep breath, inhaling the various scents and aromas that populated the city air. He suppressed a coughing fit.
On the subway, Lyle took a seat next to a sleeping homeless person. The only other passengers were a businessman, a different kind of businessman, and a woman with a cat in a cage on her lap.
The other business man, the one with the ring on his pinky finger, looked towards Lyle. And for some reason he smirked. Lyle looked away out of the window at the passing cityscape. Lyle imagined that there was something significant about all this. That his grand escape from his life had begun in earnest and that any and every feeling he was experiencing right now, right at this very second, was an orgasmic be-all and end-all statement about what a grand adventure he was beginning.
But really, he was just hungry.
If he had been at home this would’ve been the time for the evening prayer, led of course by his father Ingrid who would dictate his favorite passages as gospel. They would praise the Absurd, wanting only the rest of the sensical world to be reduced to its nonsensical roots. A pleasant chaos. A warm anarchy.
Lyle was raised with these beliefs. And up until now he didn’t know how to feel about them.
“Hey,” a voice startled Lyle out of his reverie.
“Hm, what?” Lyle said to the other businessman, the one with the pinky ring.
“Sorry to disturb you, if I did that is, but I was just wondering…” he began.
“Yes?” Lyle asked.
“Your name wouldn’t happen to be Angelo Montoya, would it?” he asked.
“…no?” Lyle responded in a questioning manner. His back facing the window, Lyle imagined that by this time the sun was coming down and the rains were intensifying. “Do you know someone named Angelo?” Lyle asked.
“No, you just looked like an Angelo,” pinky ring said as he bent over to glance, more like leer, at Lyle. Lyle spied a black hand grip jutting out from his pants, a gun. “How’d you like to do me a favor?” pinky ring asked.
“Uh…” Lyle stammered, this being one of the few (and first) social interactions that he couldn’t just ignore. At school he would go through the day without speaking to anyone, professors, fellow students, anyone really. It’s not that he was antisocial, he just didn’t care.
“Come on, be a friend, huh?” pinky said as he sat down next to Lyle. In response, Lyle shifted his backpack, making room for pinky ring unconsciously.
“I can’t, I’m b-busy-”
“Okay, listen to me,” pinky ring said. “The reason I started this conversation wasn’t because I thought your name was Angelo or Montoya or some bullshit like that. I have something that needs to get done, and you’ve been volunteered. Or, you can hang from this train come morning, what do you think, agreeable, huh?”
Lyle scratched the cap covering his head completely at a loss as to what he should do. His parents had taught him nothing of facing up to mobsters, and his school simply told him that under free speech that criminals should be protected under the First Amendment.
Then, something quite unexpected happened. The businessman, the apparently legitimate one, opened his brief case took out the submachine gun that had been hidden beneath the paper sack that contained his bologna and cheese sandwich and shot at the roof of the subway.
“Alright, now you’ll all listen to me!” the businessman cried out sweeping his gun across the car. Pinky Ring jumped up with a start, a clattering noise alerted Lyle to the fact that the mobster’s gun had fallen out of his pants. Lyle jumped up while he unknowingly elbowed the now quite awake homeless man.
“Damn it kid, sit down, you want to get us all killed?” the homeless man yelled. Lyle’s Absurdist teachings came to mind just then. What was death, his mother would say but the sensical end to a nonsensical cycle?
The businessman pointed his gun at Lyle.
“What are you doing,” he asked “Is death a preference for you?”
“Oh Jesus,” the woman with the cat murmured to herself in a panic. Lyle looked down at the floor of the subway. Pinky ring was on the filthy floor of the subway, among the cigarette butts and beer can lids and ancient wads of gum crossing himself in a rapid succession of prayers and hail marys.
“Death is an absurdism…” Lyle said unconsciously mirroring his father.
“Death is what?” the businessman asked.
“Kid, get the hell down, I’m sorry I asked you anything, Jesus am I sorry…” Pinky ring muttered.
“Listen to me you idiot!” the businessman yelled waving his gun at the frozen Lyle. “This is my day of payback, you hear, do you all hear?!” he yelled at the top of his lungs. “My name is Carl Raymond, okay, get my name right!”
“Okay…okay Carl-” Lyle stuttered.
“You want to know the motive behind this?”
“Motive behind what?” Lyle asked, his mind blanking.
“What…this you moron,” Carl answered. “All of this.”
“All of what?”
“This!”
Lyle slowly snaked a hand behind his back towards one of the zippers on his backpack. Carl didn’t notice.
“I’m doing this…” Carl began. “Because it’s all the same, everyday, it never ends…it never ends until you die, it never ends until you die…”
“I hate it! I hate the wife I didn’t want, the children I didn’t need, the money I don’t have. I was supposed to want all this, be all this, love all this! But what does any of this have to do with actually being someone?” Carl asked.
“It doesn’t,” Lyle said, then clearheaded. “It’s all Absurd.”
Carl was panting now, his screaming having taken a toll.
“What’s all this absurd nonsense? Don’t you understand that none of it matters?”
“No…that’s nihilism…you see, my beliefs are…you have to understand that it’s all kind of weird,” Lyle said while the onlookers were in stunned silence. “It’s not that it’s all meaningless. There’s a grand meaning, but no one, not even that guy named the Lord can understand, you see because it‘s all so…you know, what‘s that term…muddled?” Lyle said, surprisingly calmly. He slowly opened his backpack and fished out something.
“That’s Absurdism?” Carl asked, his gun still level with Lyle.
“Yeah, it’s all…absurd, you get it?” Lyle said to his audience. “It’s not good or bad, it’s just…nonsense.” Lyle said. Carl lowered his gun just a little bit.
“That’s insanity…but it makes about as much sense as anything else I’ve heard.” Carl said, lowering his gun to his waist. “Jesus, what a day what a day,” Carl said, carefully putting his gun back in his briefcase.
Lyle pulled the trigger behind his back. The BB lodged itself in Pinky ring’s forehead.
The subway stopped. Carl looked over his shoulder at Lyle.
“I’m not asking you to learn from me, but don’t let a bad day be your last day?” Carl said as he adjusted his tie and stepped off the subway as calmly as a churchgoer.
Lyle looked down at pinky ring.
“I forgot to tell him, Absurdists don’t do favors.” Lyle said to pinky ring without any malice or venom in his voice.
Just before the subway doors closed, Lyle hopped out of the train, leaving a batch of Absurdist converts in his wake.

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