Prince Valerian and the Scorpions

“I think I bombed that,” Ray said as they exited the lecture hall. His blue eyes looked wild. 

“But you studied, right?” Gerald asked him.

“Of course. But I couldn’t figure out so many of the questions. It felt as if the right answer was always just kind of wrong or what I thought was the wrong answer was maybe a little bit right.”

“I'm sure you’re overthinking.” Gerald wasn’t used to Ray this way. Ray was a confident guy. He made a t-shirt and jeans look like GQ material. His hair was always casually rumpled. His easy smile was like catnip for co-eds. But now he seemed off his game. He leaned against the building and fumbled in his pocket for a cigarette. 

"So you didn’t think it was insane?” he asked as he lit up. Gerald had never seem him smoke in the day. Smoking was something Ray did when they played poker or went to a bonfire at the beach.

Gerald shook his head. He tried to remember the order of the questions. Was there any that had stood out to him as particularly difficult? No. He didn’t want to make Ray feel bad, though. He knew the sensation of walking out of a math exam and knowing for 100% sure that he hadn’t even made a C.

But this was Philosophy. Philosophy was easy if you read the texts. Easy to him, anyway. He was surprised that Ray was so unsure. Ray’s brand of confidence generally emanated from him. He was often the first person to speak up in class, and he’d often have his classmates nodding in agreement with him before he even reached his point.

“Like which ones hung you up?” Gerald asked.

Ray shook his head miserably. “How do I know if the woman on the beach was feeling serene, man? Maybe she’d just offed her husband. Maybe sand gives her hives. Maybe she hates the beach.”

Gerald didn’t respond right away. There had been no beach question on his test. Was Ray playing a joke on him? He was the type to do so. Maybe he knew he’d aced the thing and now was going to mess with Gerald for fun.

“Are you high?” Gerald asked, because aside from Marlboros, Ray was often smoking something else.

“Well, yeah.”

“How high.”

“Enough.”

Ray seemed to move through life like a dancer at a Grateful Dead show. Easily dipping and swirling. Walking as if to an inner beat. He crushed out his cigarette now and looked helplessly at the sky.

“Want to get a coffee?” Gerald asked, and Ray nodded. “So what other questions hung you up?” he asked as they started down the hill to the main quad.

“Well, there was that first paragraph to decipher, the one that was about a man in a closed room with a knife and blood on his hands but there was no way out and no way in and the police couldn’t find a body… and he hadn’t harmed himself.”

The question also hadn’t been on Gerald’s test, nothing even close to that. And now Gerald had to be honest with himself. He didn’t think Jay would make up something so, well, bloody.

He practically snapped his fingers when he had a Eureka moment. Maybe the professor had done one of those tricks where every other student was given a different exam, so that there was less likelihood of cheating!

Jay was still talking: “Or the one about the guy on the ladder who was thinking of jumping and the cop who came up on the cherry picker who told him to go ahead. And you were supposed to use the Socratic method to…”

“We didn’t get the same test, man.”

“Seriously?”

“Seriously.”

“I don’t want coffee,” Jay said.

“So let’s go to the bar and you can tell me the rest.”

They were off campus now, and they headed to the corner pub where all the students went on Friday nights. But it was nearly empty now. They found a booth off in the back away from the pool tables. Gerald bought them each a beer, and he brought them dripping over the side to the table. Jay was still sweating the problems. He looked almost unwell.

“What other questions do you remember?”

“How about the one where the farmer wasn’t making enough money so he started poisoning his own vegetables in order to sue the fertilizer company?”

Gerald shook his head.

“The one about the scorpions?”

“Go on.”

“If you had the choice to carry four scorpions in your pockets or two wasps in your fists, which would you choose?”

Gerald thought about the questions on his test. There were quotes from different philosophers, and you had to match fairly easy sentiments from Plato or Socrates or even Alan Watts to their names. There’d been short essay on the back that he was sure was just to prove you had learned something and were not using Chat GPT instead of your own human brain.

Jay sipped his beer, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand. “What about the one with the twelve dancing princesses?”

“The ones who stay out all night?”

“No, man. They stayed in. Why would 12 dancing princesses who have magic powers stay in instead of escaping? What could keep them in their beds?”

“Valerian?”

“This isn’t funny. I had no idea how to respond.”

Gerald gave him a sympathetic smile. “None of those were problems on the test, dude. I don’t know what to tell you.”

###

The TA separated 29 tests into a pile, and looked at Ray’s. He had watched this student land all the ladies… watched as everything seemed to come easy to this particular senior. Handsome, oh, man. Dark haired. Blue eyed. Captivating when he spoke. The TA had decided to do a little social experiment of his own, see if he could rattle the cage a little. 

He began to “grade” the test. And that was when things took a turn. The answers—the answers to these nonsensical questions, queries he’d made up while doing mushrooms, made sense. How was that possible?

Every answer was logical, well-thought out, deeply moving.

He got up and paced.

Was the student messing with him? He’d done his best to create a test to take this boy down a notch or eight, and now he wasn’t sure which way was up.

He read the answer to the final question.

“If it was your last day on earth, and you had the ability to do one kindness to one person, a kindness that would resonate throughout eternity, dazzling the cosmos, lighting up the black holes, what would you do?”

He read Ray’s perfect answer, then put his head down on his desk and wept.