Progress Update: The Human Bomb

It is 5:30 am, and yet I am done. It seems impossible, but I accomplished my impossible goal half an hour before the deadline. I wrote two full chapters in one day. I am very nearly dead. Anyhow, Chapter 5 is 4600 words and 15 pages. (And because I didn't say earlier, Chaper 4 was 4500 words and 15 pages.) My consistency in terms of length is shocking.

But what I find very interesting is the direction in which my subconscious has taken this book. Ralph is a human bomb, apparently, and he is doing more than self-destructing. Everyone and everything dear to him... dies, it seems. Jane makes an impassioned plea that Ralph ignores in Chapter 5, and she makes a choice that could easily kill her. I don't know if it will yet. God doesn't always make decisions in advance. Some things are just chaos:

Because as a human being, Ralph was fundamentally a conservative. He did not act. He did not take initiative. He did nothing new, nothing more than he felt he had to do. All he did was react. He did what was asked of him. He did the tried and the true. He did not take risks because he was a conformist. He liked rules and order above all else. He chose the cosmos above the chaos.
That, he realized as he wept into his kneecaps, was why he clung to the memories to which he clung. Whenever even a hint chaos had entered into his perfectly, obsessive-compulsively ordered life, he broke down. Chaos upset his worldview, and he could not get past that.
His first experience with chaos had been his father’s death. His father had been a good man—a great man—and he had deserved better than an incompetent team of doctors who mistook an infection for cancer. They had destroyed his immune system, and he had died despite his overwhelming right to live.
Then there was Mark. Ralph had never expected to develop any sort of friendship or dependency on the President when he took the oath of the Vice President. He had expected life to go on as usual. Yet, a month after he took that oath, chaos gave them a terrorist attack over which to bond. The series of events that followed was something akin to the medical disaster that befell his father. Mark had stripped Ralph of so much of who he was—of logic and reason and right—that he left him raw and susceptible for grief. Mark had broken Ralph and had forced Ralph to become dependent on him. Then, before he could put the pieces back together, chaos had taken his life.
Those instances of cruel, unbridled chaos were more than he could take. He wanted, nay needed, so desperately to believe that the universe had a rulebook—that there were some things that people did, and others they didn’t. That there was right, and that there was wrong. He had never truly gotten over his father’s death; it was the fear of becoming an agent of chaos that had prevented him from becoming a doctor. It was why he became a lawyer, and thus why he was sitting here now. However, there had been plenty of stretches of time, months even, when he could function normally.
The results of Mark’s death were infinitely more catastrophic because Mark’s murder clashed all the more violently with his precious worldview. He believed that people were good, or just at the very least. He had seen murderers as Baltimore’s DA, true, but it had always seemed that there was some sort of order to human behavior and limits—extremes which no decent being would cross. Mark’s death denied logic, reason, and right. Mark was a good man who had done no wrong, and his death served no purpose but to land the incompetent Ralph Myers in office.
The severity of the chaos had as good as destroyed Ralph’s worldview of a good cosmos. People no longer seemed reasonable. People no longer seemed worth the benefit of the doubt. People no longer seemed generally good. They either fit into one’s boxes of acceptable beliefs and behavior or they did not. If they did not, then they did not belong in one’s life. Life was too chaotically short for one to suffer people who compromised. The world was so full of compromisers that one had to search for the few genuine, real good and true gems and cling to them. Their standards were the only ones that mattered. No ordinary, compromising second-rater was worth the trouble, and their standards did not matter.
This was the philosophy that Ralph found himself slowly adopting. It was the reason why he had betrayed Jane, who didn’t believe that California, Oregon, Washington, and Nevada were lost causes worth fighting for. He viewed that as a fundamental compromise, and that was why it had bothered him so deeply these past few months. She had compromised, just like Navarro, just like Erikson, and just like the rest of the God-damned chaotic world. For all of the good in her, she had compromised, and the new and disillusioned Ralph found that unbearable. He had thought she was better than that, but he was wrong.
By these standards that he was only beginning to understand now, Felicity Adams was not a compromising second-rater, and thus, her standards mattered infinitely more than those of Jane. Felicity fit into all of his boxes, not just most of them. She never settled, and thus when he was with her, he did not feel like he was settling. The trouble was, he did not know if he was introducing chaos or order into the universe by being with her. It depended on the standards. If he followed the standards of chaos, Felicity’s standards ruled, and he was introducing order into chaos. If, however, he followed his old standards of order, Jane’s standards ruled, and he was introducing chaos into order. The latter possibility broke his heart. The former merely twisted it, but had the semblance of acceptability.
But it truly did not matter. Either set of standards hurt. By following one set, he betrayed another. No matter what was true, he still lost.