Anger

"I'm not saying that."

"How are you not saying that?"

"Because I'm not smarter than everyone else."

"Then what are you saying?"

"That for the present, vast majority of the interactions in my life, said interactants are so god damn stupid that they would probably choke to death trying to eat applesauce."

Anna rested her face against her palms. Don't smile. Her voice was muffled when she finally spoke, "Henry, you can't tell jokes when you're saying stuff like that."

"Who's joking?"

A snort escaped her lips and she raised her head, failing her self-imposed edict. "Alright, alright, tell me about this girl then."

Henry turned his neck with a violent popping sound, which sounded a bit like snicker-snack to Anna. "So like I said, I'm in class, and we watch an episode of The Twilight Zone (first interesting piece of material the whole fucking semester, thank you very much), and as it turns out the utopia is really..." He paused dramatically, "EEEEEEEEVIL! I know, you're shocked, right?"

She gasped, "No."

For the span of exactly two words, his voice slipped to a Valley girl accent, sunny-bright smile included, "I know!" And back to the scowl he went, "But it's a poignant commentary on the beauty and necessity of individuality, made in the political context of the Cold War and explicitly speaking against those who would censor the vast tapestry of human experience in order to provide a cheap sense of false fulfillment. A child could understand this. A concussed child could understand this! He'd be all, 'Mommy, I know my head's bleeding but I still got the fucking point, be yourself, now can I go to the hospital?'" He squeezed a fistful of air as though it had wronged him somehow, and Anna had been with him long enough to see the pressure build behind his eyes from anger. "So naturally, the class begins its discussion, and we get the typical bullshit responses where people say the exact same things every time."

Henry stood up, hand on his hip, head tilted, mouth open snottily, which Anna thought was more an impression of a twelve year old girl than a college age student... which is probably exactly as mocking as what Henry was going for anyway, considering the falsetto in his voice. "Like, oh my God, I couldn't believe it when they said that Shakespeare was banned! I mean, who would do that!?" He puffed out his chest, swaggering across the bedroom, putting on a voice you could  only describe as what every comedian wished every Californian sounded like, "Dude, I couldn't BELIEVE that they managed to get triplets who were all actors! We never even saw like, more than one of them in the same scene but they were so freakin' good!"

He paced in a compulsive line, shaking his fist, looking to Anna rather like a villain from some really bad cartoons she saw from the 50s. "John, you ignorant slut! Of course we never saw more than one of them in the same scene! It was one man! One actor! Triplets, you contemptible asshat..."

Like a flash his mannerisms changed again, "Y'all notice haow ehvr'one a'theyum hayd thum thar namestags on thar chesticulars?" The dopey, hayseed grin was gone in an instant and he turned to Anna. "I couldn't believe he knew how to read, I really couldn't."

Anna let out an undignified snort, looking at her red faced boyfriend, "Chesticulars, really? We're in Minnesota! Who has that accent in your class? It's not even a real word."

Henry had the decency to look a little abashed, despite his increasing irritation. "I ran out of stupid sounding voices."

One snort is undignified, two makes one look like they've got something caught in their throat. "Continue, don't mind me..."

"So we're sitting there, and I'm considering that the legality of carrying on campus could be justified by the fact that if I had had a gun, I could have shot myself rather than listen to their insipid drivel, even if they managed to keep it to a comfortable trickle rather than their usual output which floods the lands, destroys crops and drowns livestock..."

"Considerate of them."

"Hmph, I assure you that it was no matter of conscious thought, not that anything ever IS with them..." He didn't even bother differentiating the naked insults with what might be an impolite aside one muttered under their breath to assuage their own irritation in a difficult situation, at least not while he was talking with her. He smacked the side of his fist in to his palm as he spoke, hair whipping when turned to look at Anna, "Anyway, the girl."

"There was a girl in this story? I'd forgotten."

Henry was about as undignified as Anna was for a second. "For the sake of clarity, we'll call her Dipshit, because I don't remember her real name and her parents would have named her Dipshit if they had known that she would turn out to be such a colossal fucking idiot."

"It's very considerate of you to work so hard for accuracy in your blatant insults."

"I thought so." He pinched the bridge of his nose, "So. Dipshit."

She nodded. "Right, Dipshit, go on."

"So Dipshit raises her hand, and I hate when she does that."

"Why? It seems respectful."

"It is respectful, but with all due respect to her," a term which, when uttered, has never been followed by something respectful, "Whenever she does I know I'll hear the stupidest fucking thing I could imagine come out of her mouth, slithering in my ears like a brain-eating slug that proceeds, as such creatures are wont to do, to eat my fucking brain."

"The cads."

Ignoring her little tease completely, he resumed his furious pacing, arms folded behind his back, hunched over like Donald Duck. Which was at this point the least of their similarities. "She says if she could push a button that obliterated everyone's free will, she would do it, if it meant everyone was happy all the time, even though that destroys the fucking totality of the human experience! Has she never seen any science fiction story ever?! You stupid bitch! I hope you catch fire!"

"I get the feeling she phrased it differently."

"Eh, she might have said something about how if no one realizes it's not an illusion, it's good as real, but that is no god damn excuse and is also BULLSHIT!" He bent down suddenly, opening the mini-fridge and taking out a can of grape pop. He turned to Anna with a polite expression on his face, bizarrely sincere. "You want something to drink?"

"Orange soda." At this point she was laying back on the couch, watching what was only the latest in a series of installments detailing Henry's slow descent towards madness.

"'Soda'... heathen." Henry grabbed a can and stood up, lightly pirouetting and closing the door to the fridge with his free foot. He bent over to hand Anna the pop, foot never leaving the pacing line he'd created.

"Thank you." Klck-tsss. Anna took a sip, closing her eyes and smiling. It was delicious.

Klck-tsss. He took a long pull of his own drink, sighing contentedly. "You're welcome. As I was saying." Gone, gone, gone was the calm, here, here, here was the fury, complete with a bug-eyed stare. "WHY!?"

Anna had to laugh, she invariably did, and Henry knew enough not to take offense. She was just glad she hadn't been taking a drink at the time. "Dude, she had a different opinion than you!"

His voice raised with righteous fury. "She wanted to wipe out free will! Do you know who does that? DO YOU?"

She grinned, "If I say yes..."

"SUPERVILLAINS, THAT'S WHO!" He took an angry gulp of his pop. She was secretly impressed. Henry could probably angrily savor tiramasu. "She is a supervillain! This is the kind of extremist madwoman that Batman would go after!"

"I think Batman has leniency for people who just say things, Henry. There's really no Biff-Pow-Zokko unless she actually, you know, does something." Good Lord, Walt would have given his left leg to have his animators watch Henry having a bad day.

"By then it will be too late! Dipshit is a demon, Anna! A demon! A demon disguised as a woman with her face permanently stuck on lemon-sucking bitch mode, which is why I am sure as the Evil Empress Destructa she wears a full face mask!" The can crinkled a little in his hand and he sighed, sitting on the floor. His head rested against the wall. "Humbug."

"Humbug, really? Are you Scrooge now?"

Henry let out a slow breath, and Anna saw his shoulders slump. His voice was soft, almost quaking. "Christ... just once, I'd like to go a day where I didn't feel like this."

"Like what, Henry?" She frowned a little. Anger, she was used to. Jokes, she was used to. Insults, she was used to. But this was... not new, not exactly, but more naked than what she'd seen of it before.

"I just... I get up, I look forward to meeting people, growing and learning. Then I leave the house and I can't get a word out of people that's cogent. It's either generic twaddle or offensively stupid things from people who don't want to learn. Couldn't we talk about the merits of the utopian society, or the similarities in the society we have now compared to said utopian society? What about the way the society was portrayed compared to the society as it may be? How subjectivity can be manipulated? The nuances of what makes a better world?" He finished off his pop, crunching the can and tossing it in the recycling bin. "You remember when I had that class where we talked about the Milgram experiments?"

She sat down next to him, nodding yes.

"No one said that they wouldn't do it. No one said they wouldn't torture an innocent man just because a man in a lab coat said it was okay to hurt them. Do you know how... how horrifying that is?" He tucked his knees to his chest.

Anna put her hand on his shoulder. "Maybe they just didn't want to speak out."

"But they were asked. The question was so simple. Would you torture a man for an experiment, because a researcher told you it was safe to do, even while he screamed for it to stop? Would you electrocute them until you hit the lethal setting on the machine?" He turned to her, his face tight. "No one said no. Christ, they would have tortured kittens."

She kissed him softly, just for a moment. The orange and grape mixed together on their lips tasted sweet. She could feel some tension drain out of him, but he was starting to go pale. "Henry..."

"Ranting, yelling, it's fun. Make someone laugh... and it makes me feel better to say all these things in front of an audience, even if they're a captive one." He didn't look so cartoonish now, smiling humorlessly. His face was always expressive, open, but there was no put-on angry face to make himself feel better or let her laugh. He just looked miserable. "I get up, tell myself today will be better, today I won't hear something... infuriating. I won't hear someone say that they'd torture kittens. I won't hear someone denigrate the hard work I put in trying to get where I am by pissing away their opportunity to grow. And every day, I..." He raised his finger, as if to begin again, but it simply fell limp by his side. He closed his eyes, growing silent.

It was as if he had simply stopped, as she saw it. She wrapped her arms around him, holding him. What could she say? He wasn't wrong. Most days he came home, gave his little schpiel, and in the end he laughed at her jokes, at his expense or theirs. It was a little ritual he had indulged even when he was alone, if only for the sake of not saying these things to the targets of his frustration. He'd tried stopping, but he just became agitated, so he indulged.

She didn't know what to do. She doubted he knew what she could do, either. So she held him. She held him when he uncurled from his ball. She held him when he tried to ask if he was wrong to expect more out of people, and told him he wasn't. She held him when he cried, because you can't be that angry all the time without eventually having it boil over like that. And she held him when he finally spoke again, looking at her with a splotchy red face and eyes that looked bloodshot. "Every day I come home to you."