Post by OSCAR COHEN WOODALL on Jul 11, 2013 16:27:10 GMT -8
| [atrb=style,width: 420px; background-color: efefef; background-image: url(http://24.media.tumblr.com/0478144b9f16c95a37367d1aca56b45c/tumblr_mkfax8tDxp1s97ldco1_500.png); padding: 5px, bTable] OSCAR C. WOODALL 25 | BISEXUAL | BUSINESSMAN | LOCAL | PENN BADGLEY MOMENT #1 AGE NINE AGE NINE AGE NINE AGE NINE AGE NINE AGE NINE AGE NINE AGE NINE The moment is thus: nine year old Oscar is standing in the doorway to the guest room, watching the diminutive mass of wasting muscle and failing organs in the bed under the window sleep. Fitfully. Every movement is a gentle but uncomfortable flutter. Every tired breath – a struggle, and only facilitated by the unobtrusive whush and whur of the machine that does all the breathing for him. There is a half full IV standing tall by the bedside, the clear saline solution glowing ethereal and pearly in the moonlight falling through the open window. The man in the bed is his father, and he is nearly dead. He will be, two days from now, when he goes into respiratory failure. It will happen mid-morning and Oscar will be at school. No one will call to inform him, and he will come home naively content for the last time, come bounding up the stairs to the guest room-turned-hospice to babble at his beloved dad about his inane day, and he will find the bed empty. The machines and the IV gone. The sheets already starched and made, as if he was never there at all. But right now, his father is still alive, and Oscar is standing quietly in the doorway, watching. Sometimes the sound of the breathing machines and the drip of the IV keep him awake. This is stupid. His bedroom is on the other side of the expansive Woodall estate, and there is no way he can actually physically hear them, but he imagines he can. He lies awake at night, filling his head with the remembered sound of that mechanical whoosh and that clinical drip, until he is stirred restlessly from the comfort of his bed and has to creep across the house to the guest suite, to stand in the doorway and watch his father breathe and remember that – for now, at least – he’s still alive. He’s been dying, of course, for as long as Oscar can remember. He’s had ALS for five years. Oscar literally cannot remember a time before he was sick. His whole life he has been watching him deteriorate. One of his earliest memories is sitting with him at the kitchen table, sorting the wide array of rainbow hued pills into colour order while his father attempted to explain to him what each and every one did. “The pink one is for the pain, the yellow to help me sleep, the blue to keep me awake, and that big white one is one they think might slow down the disease…” Then came the time almost two years ago now where the muscles in his legs atrophied to the point he could no longer walk at all, not even with his canes and sticks and crutches. When he saw him in his wheelchair that first time, his father looking broken and uncomfortable and humiliated, the first thing Oscar had said was, “Does this mean you’re going to be a genius? Like Stephen Hawking?” Because that was the only association he had – the only positive mental leap he could make. The question had drawn a tired smile from him, at least. These days he can no longer smile. Or move. Even the muscles in his eyes have ceased to work, and he can only stare straight at the ceiling unless somebody turns his head. He just lies in the guest bed day after day and waits for death, while Oscar’s mother and the day nurses bustle all around him. It must be as close to Hell as one can get while still alive. And Oscar, he stands in the bedroom doorway for hours at a time. Watching. Contemplating. The long standing strain of his father’s illness has made him into a quiet, introspective boy. He lives much more in his own head than the real world. He is like his father that way – and in many others. Mr Woodall is a chameleon. This is something that Oscar has always known, and been mildly fascinated by. His father is a hundred different people all at once. He is a mirror, reflecting back what other people want to see. At work, he is ruthless and efficient – rising to meet the demands of his business. At home, around his wife, he is passive and irrelevant to cater to her domineering nature. Around Oscar, the wise and oh so supportive patriarch. Around friends, exuberant, the life and soul of the party. He has a knack for seeing what people need him to be and then becoming it. Some would call his changeable nature fake, or superficial. Oscar has always found it remarkable. Admirable. Long after his father is dead and gone and he has forgotten the exact quality of his reassuring smile and the hoarse catch of his voice in his collapsing throat when he laughs, he’ll still remember the chameleonic way that he lived. It will be something Oscar himself will embody, as he grows. But his father is none of these things anymore, and Oscar isn’t any of them yet, and the moment is a quiet one. A still one. A boy in his pajamas in the doorway and a dying man in a bed and the soft whur and whoosh of the medical machines. MOMENT #2 AGE SEVENTEEN AGE SEVENTEEN AGE SEVENTEEN AGE SEVENTEEN AGE SEVENTEEN The moment is thus: seventeen year old Oscar and his mother, sitting on either side of that disproportionately huge desk that takes up most of the study with its ostentatious size. There’s a grandfather clock wedged in between two bookcases behind the desk. The slow tick of the seconds is excruciatingly loud, as Oscar sits and his mother works opposite him. She is doing something or other that she hasn’t bothered to explain with an intimidating stack of papers covered in tiny sprawling typeface. She has not yet done him the service of looking up, but this isn’t a surprise. Seeing how rude she can be to people without them snapping at her is her favourite pastime. Dominance in any way she can assert it is her favourite game. This is the woman who has used silences, selective neglect and implied threats to keep Oscar firmly under thumb ever since the day his father died. The worst part is he can almost empathise. He can almost understand why. He is all she has left. After the wicked helplessness of watching his father’s decline, she needs to feel in control, and Oscar is all she has to control. The older he gets, the more independence he might dare to foster, the tighter she holds on and the colder she treats him. To say his relationship with his mother is difficult is an understatement. Their relationship mostly consists of moments like this one: stillness, the great polished oak sea of the desktop stretching between them, the steady tick of the grandfather clock the only thing daring to break the silence. “I wanted to ask how the college applications are going.” She speaks! Finally. At long last. But still doesn’t deign to look up. Oscar doesn’t know what to say. He brings his hands together in front of him, locking his fingers. Twisting them, absently. “I haven’t really thought about it yet…” She cuts across him, sharp and sudden as a knife. “Well, where do you want to go?” He shifts uncomfortably in his chair, wets his dry lips anxiously with the tip of his tongue, and tries to think of a way to phrase exactly where he wants to go. “I was thinking of maybe… not going.” She looks up politely, raising her mercilessly plucked eyebrows. It’s amazing how much contempt one can put into a single, momentary expression. “I was thinking Yale. I know someone on the admissions board. You’re smart enough. And Yale is plenty prestigious enough, don’t you agree?” “I guess.” He shifts again, sinking a little lower in his chair. He considers slipping right out of it, pooling off the edge of the chair like so much liquid and congealing into the carpet in the shadows of that great big desk. “Mom, I was thinking of not going… Or at least deferring. I mean, I don’t know what I want to do, I was thinking I could maybe see some of the world or… I don’t know, take some time to make up my mind, at least…” He trails off. That god awful desk is almost as wide and dark and obvious as the chasm in this family. “No.” She says measuredly after a brief pause, returning her attention to her shuffling papers. She signs her name on something and turns it over, setting it face down on a pile of other papers. Clearly these contracts are much more interesting than his future. “I think Yale is the way to go.” Oscar watches her shift her work around. Reading. Signing. Scribbling out parts she finds distasteful. A part of him wonders if she enjoys these moments – him sitting across from her, trying to build up the nerve to argue for what he wants – because she lets it linger on for quite some time before she glances up again. Her expression that same maddening one of politeness fused with barely concealed contempt – he cannot remember her looking at him any other way. “Is there a problem, Oscar?” His hesitation, his reluctance, is tangible. It thickens the air between them, hovering over the desk. Another barrier between them. “No.” He says finally. “Well, then. You’re excused.” She smiles. Oscar remains seated for long enough for it to almost be considered rebellious. The desk between them, the great wooden roadblock expanding to push them even further apart. It is only when she lets a little warning huff of air slide out from between her lips that he stands to see himself out. MOMENT #3 AGE NINETEEN AGE NINETEEN AGE NINETEEN AGE NINETEEN AGE NINETEEN AGE NINETEEN The moment is thus: fraught with a kind of tension that Oscar hasn’t really ever experienced before. The moment is him and Sebastian sat side by side at the desk in his dorm room – a strange, heavy eye contact persisting between them. Their hands are on the table next to each other, almost brushing, the promise or threat of skin to skin contact so electrifying and terrifying that the hairs on the back of Oscar’s neck are standing to attention. The moment before this one is possibly more significant, but it will be the strange eye contact and the almost touch of their hands that Oscar will remember most clearly. Oscar is and was and will always be reactionary rather than proactive – it was Seb who cut him off mid-sentence with the kiss, and it will be Oscar in a few seconds time who will clear his throat, smile awkwardly, and turn his attention back to the spread of open textbooks across the desk. It will then be Seb who demands, “Really, Oz? That’s it?” And it will be Oscar who gets terribly confused, and who will sit and stare at his books and avoid eye contact because he isn’t sure what to do. The kiss is both a surprise, coming completely out of left field from his ostensibly straight friend and study partner, and then… not a surprise at all, because now that he thinks about it, hasn’t it always felt like it was coming? Since they first met as freshmen a year ago, hasn’t there always been those occasional lingering glances? An almost inappropriate level of tactility between them, especially while drunk when it might be easily explained away. Already Oscar begins to question whether the taste of the other boy in his mouth is something he wants or does not want. He’s never thought about it, and the rightness and the wrongness of it seem almost equal, and he is suddenly very terrified about what that all means – Seb will say again, “Oz? Nothing to say at all, then, huh?” He will touch him. Edge his hand very slightly across the desk top, by just a couple of inches, to brush his pinky finger against the back of Oscar’s palm. Oscar will not move away, but nor will he speak – he won’t get the chance to try and articulate the sudden confused jumble of thoughts that have tangled his brain up in knots, because just seconds later the door will open and his roommate will return from lacrosse practice, and he and Seb will jerk apart very suddenly, as if they’ve been violently electrocuted. It will be a very long time before Oscar can think his way through the moment. Sometimes he still wonders if he hasn’t quite got it all figured out. MOMENT #4 AGE TWENTY ONE AGE TWENTY ONE AGE TWENTY ONE AGE TWENTY ONE AGE TWENTY ONE The moment is thus: a culmination of a hundred other moments that will not let themselves be ignored, that eat away at him like poison. It’s the moment at the desk nearly two years ago where Seb kissed him that first time. It is all the other moments of all the other first times with him. It’s the moment at the frat party over on Greek, where too much to drink lead to too public a display of affection, which in turn lead to dozens of splintered little moments of having frat boys shout “Faggot!” whenever they saw him in the halls between classes, and all the whispers that follow him around like a cloud of hateful homophobic smog. It’s the moment where his mother finds herself unexpectedly in Connecticut for a business merger, and decides to drop in on him unannounced, and instead of discovering her meek, downtrodden, studious son, she finds him laughing in bed with his boyfriend. It’s all the moments after that one where she pointedly cut him off – all the unreturned phone calls, unanswered emails, the persistent void that spread out between them until even silently, even from a distance, her reproach made him hate himself. It’s the moment where Seb says that Oscar is too uncomfortable with this part of himself, and it is destructive, and he cannot be with him until he can want it without the self-loathing and the shame. It is a culmination of all these things, and probably more, that have lead to this moment. Twenty one years old, and dying in a bath tub. Again, it is probably the moment that precedes this one which is the significant one. Even after probably the most proactive gesture he’s ever made in his life, his thoughts will always linger on the reactionary seconds afterward. It is the moment just before this one, wherein Oscar makes the cuts – desperate, clumsy slashes with a straight razor, none of the meticulous precision one might expect from a perfectionist such as himself, but his thoughts are not clear right then. Left, fumble, right. Two swift slashes, two bursts of white hot damn near satisfying pain, and the flesh of his forearms splits like overripe fruit and blood comes tumbling, gushing, burbling out. That moment – gone, already. It is the aftermath that sticks with him. It is the bath water – scalding hot, the steam from it fogging the mirror. It is the strange colour of it – the navy dye seeping from his shirt, mingling with the insistent crimson of his blood and turning the waters of his porcelain coffin a garish mauve. And it’s all brief – these sights, these sensations, the irony metallic tang of blood in the air – because already he is light-headed. The blood loss and the heat are disorientating, and it won’t be long before he loses consciousness. Luckily for Oscar, it also won’t be long before his roommate comes back from lacrosse practice, sees the bloody water seeping out from beneath the en suite door, and calls an ambulance. MOMENT #5 AGE TWENTY TWO AGE TWENTY TWO AGE TWENTY TWO AGE TWENTY TWO AGE TWENTY TWO The moment is thus: the blonde is laughing. She is the moment. The entirety of it. The blonde, laughing. She is half turned away from him, so he can see her only in profile, but he grudgingly must admit it is one of the most beautiful profiles he’s ever seen. He admires from a distance the way the soft evening light glows luminous on her golden hair and the golden champagne in her flute glass and the stack of golden bangles around her delicate wrist. He admires the way she laughs – vivaciously, head tilted back, teeth flashing, her enthusiasm apparently uncontainable. Her name is Elsie Sinclair, and it’s truly unfair that she’s so beautiful, because he’s already made up his mind to hate her. He’d made that decision right away. The moment in his mother’s study – another one, back to the pair of them sitting either side of the monstrous desk with the air even thicker between them than ever before, heavy now with the unspoken memory of that afternoon she’d walked into his dorm, and heavier still with the suicide attempt that neither of them had ever verbally acknowledged – where she had once again made him sit still and well behaved while she organised yet more details of his life without his consent. She’d made him a match, and he was expected to be oh so pleased about it. She was a respectable girl from a respectable family with a respectable bank account. She was appropriate in all the ways he was appropriate. She was a Sinclair – the daughter of a power couple who had partnered closely with his late father in multiple business ventures, and continued to be amiably associated with the Woodall estate to this day. She was important, in other words. Her parents were looking to find her someone sensible, and his mother had happened to mention how sensible he was, and how even after taking time out from school on account of an “illness” he’d recently managed to acquire his MBA, wasn’t that impressive? Apparently someone somewhere had agreed, and that – as they say – was that. It was arranged that Oscar and Elsie should meet at some upcoming cocktail party or another, and it was heavily implied that they should find some way to get along. He’d not protested, not argued, only made up his mind that he would hate this girl. But that was then, and this, here, was the moment now. Her. The girl. The laughing blonde. Elsie Sinclair. She is somehow magnetic, and Oscar finds himself feeling the faint stirrings of that thing… that strange longing that he has not felt since Seb. People do not really make him feel things, not on the whole, but now and then someone comes along and there is something in their bearing or their manner that inspires in him a curiosity rather than an apathy. She is doing that. He senses somehow that she is worth getting to know, and despite his stubborn decision to hate her, he finds himself wanting to get to know her. It will not be long from that realisation to the moment wherein he accidentally makes eye contact with her. And after that first eye contact, the first breach in the barrier, it won’t be long before Oscar swallows his pride and approaches her. He’ll make a joke – something lame about dowrys and being sold for marriage, in light of the fact that their parents have so pressured them to meet – and awkwardly break the ice, and after five minutes in her company, he’ll already be half in love with her. MOMENT #6 AGE TWENTY FIVE AGE TWENTY FIVE AGE TWENTY FIVE AGE TWENTY FIVE AGE TWENTY FIVE Now, the moment is thus: less a moment and more a slurry of everyday domesticity. He has become an adult all of a sudden and he has no idea how. He has a house that he pays rent on. He has a job – not just a job, but a career. It wasn’t one he ever wanted, but he has more and more weight to throw around every day in the family business. He has a fiancée, who soon enough will be a wife, and then he supposes even more domesticity. Marital bliss. Children, perhaps. Maybe he wants that and maybe he doesn’t. He no longer knows. He has given up on trying to figure out what he wants – Oscar has learnt to go with the flow and try not to let his lack of control in his own life trouble him. The moment is thus: he comes home from work. From a long day of meetings, of endless discussions about mergers and acquisitions. Boring roundabout conversations peppered with that exclusive jargon specifically designed to crush a working man’s soul. He comes home from work to an empty house. He calls out for Elsie, but there’s no answer. There so rarely is these days. She never seems to be around when he comes home anymore – she is always out, with friends, the wedding planner, whoever. She has always been more vivacious and he has always been a little more lively than usual around her because of that, but increasingly it feels she is leaving him behind. Pulling away. He wonders if they will successfully make the leap from engagement to marriage or not, and he wonders whether that thought should perturb him more than it actually does. In truth, very little perturbs Oz. Especially these days. He has reached the blessed point of chameleonic competency that he always admired in his late father. He has become a man of a thousand faces. He has developed and honed the knack of being exactly who a person wants him to be. He is a mirror, reflective, reactive and almost two dimensional. The intense apathy he carries around with him raises some questions. There are things he never thought while admiring this superficial qualities in his father, but wonders frequently about now he lives that way himself. What does a mirror reflect in an empty room? What form does a boggart take when it’s all alone? Who was Mr Woodall when he had no audience to play to? Nothing. No one. Just like Oz is. And the weight of that realisation is not momentary. It is constant. BEHIND THE MASK PUN | 20 | GMT | PSHT I LIVE HERE | MY HORDE OF AWKWARD TURTLES  GLADLY. |
