Victor Marseille was going to be a catalyst.
What was a catalyst? He had no idea.
Victor was driving back to his house, perhaps a bit quicker than necessary and probably breaking a handful of road safety laws along the way in his blue Honda Civic, when he got the idea of becoming a catalyst from the radio, listening (but not really listening) to some old white man talk about politics and the economy in that voice that old white men use when talking about politics and the economy. The next segment, though, piqued his interest. He didn’t catch most of it, really, but one exchange stood out. Catalyst. The woman, some certified psycho-somethingorother had talked about being a catalyst in her life, and how it made her a better person and the host of the old white men talking about politics and the economy show replied with something along the lines of, “woah, that’s great, you can really become a better person to yourself and society by being a catalyst for change.”
It was precisely at this point that Victor stopped caring about anything else that was being said afterward and for the first time in about thirty minutes his brain (although slightly diminished in size and intellect than the average human brain, but still functional to a degree sufficient for societal interaction) processed what was being said on the radio. Of course, there were many important things that were being said over the waves that day - such as the fact that at the moment there were around five years or so until the world was going to end due to the enormous amount of cows producing methane-filled flatulence, which was causing a thick layer of greenhouse gas and global warming as a byproduct - but Victor chose to ignore them and race middle-aged women in minivans to the next stoplight instead.
No. Of everything that he could have pondered about on that day’s radio segment, Victor chose to think about being a catalyst. For the longest time, Victor had wanted to make himself a better person. In fact, along with “watch Ayrton Senna race live” and “ride on the Titanic,” becoming a better person was one of Victor’s life goals, although, in reality, it was his only life goal because the other two would be impossible. To be fair, there wasn’t much room to become a worse person in his life - Victor, by the age of 17, had totaled three cars, maintained a solid 0.6 GPA, and managed to repeat eighth grade so many times that the middle school principal succumbed to his infinite frustration and said, “screw this, I’ll let the high school deal with him” (but with slightly more colorful language) and allowed him to advance anyways, which is why Victor was now a freshman.
He parked his car rather haphazardously in the driveway, probably a bit too close for comfort to his father’s Mercedes, and cut the engine. Victor Marseille, catalyst extraordinaire, he thought to himself, still blanking on the exact definition of a catalyst, but that’s ok because it sounds cool. Victor promised himself that he would Google it as soon as he got home. The frosty winter breath of the local weather gods nipped at Victor’s cheeks as he climbed out of his car - was that dent on the fender there earlier today? - and made his way to the front door of his house, forgetting to lock his car, as per the usual, not caring because, by some magic force (also known as the auto-lock mechanism, though Victor didn’t know this), his car always ended up locked and not stolen the next morning anyway.
“Bonjour mère!” said Victor, walking through the doorway into his house. It smelled of fresh baguettes and what seemed to be a bechamel - his mother must be cooking. There was nothing that Victor loved more than sleep, video games, and his mother’s cooking - the Holy Trinity of Victor Marseille’s Life. He raced up the stairs - two at a time before becoming tired and limiting himself to one, no doubt caused by his rather expansive midsection - to his room, where he opened his laptop... and stopped. How do I spell Google again?! he thought. Many eternities passed, and entire civilizations rose and fell in the realm of the scientific enigma that is Victor’s Mind, which would translate to about four seconds in actual time before he recalled and began to type precariously into his browser. Now, it was at this point that Victor had prepared himself because he knew that there was no way he was going to spell catalyst correctly. Instead, using his impossibly large intellect, Victor pushed the voice recognition button in the search bar and in a rare exercise of his short-term memory, recited the life-changing word.
“Catalyst,” he said to the computer, and in about 0.76 seconds, 231 million results appeared, a fact that was displayed on the resulting page, almost as if Google was becoming sentient and wanted to flex its accomplishments. On this rather expansive list of results, Victor clicked the first link, which was a redirect to an online dictionary, where Victor would dive into the far reaches of his mind to exercise his ability to read, which, much like Victor’s body, was not exercised very often.
“Catalyst,” the page read. “noun: a substance that increases the rate of a chemical reaction without itself undergoing any permanent chemical change.” If Victor had continued reading, the second definition would have been “a person or thing that precipitates an event,” which would most definitely fit the usage of the word that Victor had heard on the radio earlier when the psycho-whatever and the host of the old white men talking about politics and the economy show were talking about being a catalyst - but he didn’t keep reading and thus, made it his life goal to improve himself and become a better person by increasing the rate of a chemical reaction.
Victor shut his computer lid and went into his bedroom, although it was more of a pigsty than anything else. Clothes were strewn on the floor, intermixed with math worksheets that were due three years ago and various candy wrappers and cans of Red Bull. Fortunately, the walls of Victor’s room were not covered with mud or excrement as those in an actual pigsty would, but instead with many posters of Sebastian Vettel, although technically it was many copies of the same poster because Victor found them cheap on eBay - 100 posters for $10! - due to the fact that they were all misprints, incorrectly proclaiming that “Vebastian Settel” was the star driver for Chevrolet Formula One team, despite the fact that Chevrolet had never competed in F1, which hinted at the idea that perhaps these posters were perhaps some cheap Asian knockoff. Victor spent about five billion years - maybe 10 seconds in actual time - making sure that each poster of his favorite athlete, Vebastian Settel, was intact and in its correct place on his wall, and although there wasn’t much of a rhyme or reason to his placement, this was Victor’s prized collection. On the left side of his room, there was one poster that was out of place; its bottom right corner was ripped off causing it to read “Veba Set,” undoubtedly caused by the stupid family cat pouncing around. A distinct odor of carbonated taurine drink - mind and body vitalizing, according to its Austrian makers - and Hershey’s chocolate permeated the air.
Victor was determined, more so than he had ever been in his life - which was not very often, for sure - which is why he waded through the sea of laundry consisting of various states of cleanliness, partially hoping that he would become Moses and part this particular sea so he could actually walk places in his room, to change into a relatively clean shirt and bounced downstairs to proclaim his new life mission to his mother.
“Mother, I’m going to speed up a chemical reaction!” he said to his mother, who was in the process of not only making sure that her bechamel sauce didn’t scald but also contemplating if the hospital had gotten her child mixed up with another and if she could go back to the hospital and get an abortion at 936 weeks. Marie Marseille was a weary woman, drowning her sorrows and the disappointments in “her” child - if Victor was even hers - in butter and copious amounts of nice French bread. Her eye twitched a little, realizing that Victor had probably searched up the word and gotten the wrong idea, but she forced herself to smile.
“That’s amazing, sweetie. Why don’t you go and do that,” she said, partially hoping that Victor would, in fact, catalyze a chemical reaction of some explosive variety and be rid of from her life - Marie’s car insurance was far too high for someone who stayed at home and baked bread every day anyway. “Perhaps the local chemical plant might have something for you to do.”
“Great idea!” exclaimed Victor. He sprinted back to his car - now locked, due to the aforementioned magic force - and pulled out of the driveway, depositing some bumper paint onto his father’s car, which despite being a rather new model had already absorbed so much damage from Victor’s haphazard parking that it could have passed as a junker car from the late 1980s and be used in a demolition derby. Victor slammed down the accelerator, the puny inline four-cylinder turbo in his car screaming for help as it was pushed past any reasonable measure, already weak from the constant trauma it received by having Victor Marseille as its driver. The chemical plant was just a few miles down the road from Victor’s house, a distance that was covered in a matter of minutes because Victor’s driving was as haphazard as his parking, a fact that the chassis’s VIN could reveal when inputted into various online car history searches.
Practically leaping out of his car due to his excitement from the prospect of making a difference in society and making himself a better person, Victor walked to the front office of the chemical company and requested a tour, chalking down the bewildered look on the receptionist’s face as a hallmark of small-brained subhumans who couldn’t comprehend Victor Marseille’s Master Plan for Saving the World (and Becoming a Better Person), although in reality it was because the chemical plant was very much in fact not up to regulation, which meant that tours were probably not the best idea. However, because the poor receptionist wasn’t aware of the regulatory status of the chemical plant, and also because she was very much afraid she was going to be cannibalized by this odoriferous and possibly insane teenager that bolted through her door, she relented and led him into the back, where the very first thing that Victor saw was a rather large vat of presumably dangerous chemicals, although it contained only dihydrogen monoxide.
For the second time ever, - the first time being last Tuesday when he learned and subsequently completely forgot how to do addition - Victor put two and two together and realized that this was his chance to be a catalyst. Ignoring the receptionist’s strident screams and shouts of warning and surprise from various scientists in full hazmat suits, Victor hurled himself into the vat. Unfortunately for him, it was at this precise moment that a rather large and impressive sample of sodium was being added to the vat of water, and as any chemistry nerd would inform you, sodium combusts very readily when in contact with water, which is exactly what happened. Coincidentally, Victor’s rather large midsection was also filled with combustible material, and because he had never learned how to swim (not that it would be particularly useful in this particular situation), Victor Marseille was tragically roasted as the heat caramelized the lipids in his body and cooked the rest of him to a perfect medium-rare.
Even more unfortunate was the fact that technically, Victor’s body did not catalyze anything at all, as the sodium would have reacted with the water anyway and did not need any input of energy from a catalyzing agent.
However, Victor’s sacrifice was not in vain, as he still had, in fact, been a catalyst, although in different ways. For example, Marie Marseille’s car insurance went down significantly with the death of her child, which also prompted the hospital to confirm that yes, Victor was, in fact, Marie’s child, a revelation that was taken with much sadness. Victor’s death also caused safety inspectors to shut down the chemical plant for many health and safety violations. Victor’s death was not of a catalyzing nature, but in a paradoxical sort of way, Victor was a catalyst and bettered society for the benefit of all, maybe excluding the guy that ran the meth lab underneath the chemical plant, who was sentenced to jail time.
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