The Person Who Profited from Your Helplessness
Helplessness is not always accidental. Sometimes it is cultivated, rewarded, and given a title. Chapter 45 of TARTARUS brings the narrator to Julian Vale, the man who turned disorganization, exhaustion, and emotional hunger into a business model.
Julian did not simply exploit weakness. He recognized a wound and built a system around it. He told the narrator that chaos was velocity, that sleep was fear wearing pajamas, that people who needed balance lacked ambition, and that needing a team proved importance. He made helplessness feel elite.
That is the chapter’s central mechanism: the narrator’s dependence made him loyal. He was excellent under pressure because Julian kept him under pressure. He wanted to feel indispensable, so Julian gave him systems designed to fail without him. The narrator thought he was being promoted. In reality, the distance between his exhaustion and the people who could see it was increasing.
Julian is honest about what he gained: hours. Attention. Nervous energy. A man willing to accept preventable emergencies as proof the work mattered. The narrator’s need for approval became an extractable resource.
The black phone on Julian’s table becomes the chapter’s central object. It rings with the old promise: only you can solve this. The narrator’s body reacts before his mind. Shoulders tighten. Attention narrows. Emergency takes control. Julian asks him to answer.
When he finally does, the voice on the other end is his younger self: exhausted, afraid, and begging to be told what matters. He admits the deepest fear beneath the work: if they replace me, what am I?
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The answer is not dramatic. A person.
That is the break in Julian’s system. The narrator stops asking the exploiter to define his value. He tells his younger self to sleep, to let the work fail if it must, to accept replaceability without treating it as annihilation.
But the chapter refuses easy innocence. The narrator benefited too. He liked the access, title, money, speed, and identity Julian sold him. Exploitation worked because the reward matched the wound. He was used, and he participated.
The final confrontation turns when he sees Julian’s dependency as well. Julian needed exhausted people who mistook obedience for hunger. He made others helpless so he could remain the person with the answer.
The notebook’s instruction is precise: return his answer.
The narrator gives back every definition Julian used to control him — exceptional when useful, disloyal when bounded, replaceable when questioning the cost. Then he pushes the phone away and says: I am not your emergency.
The notebook writes: helplessness can be cultivated. Never confuse the person who benefits from your dependence with the person who cares for you.
Full chapter on Substack:
https://substack.com/@alexkorneliuk
existential fiction, literary fiction, weird fiction, magical realism, road novel, workplace fiction, exploitation, dependence, burnout, responsibility, power, accountability, psychological fiction, dark literary fiction, serialized fiction
