Post by NATHANIEL ISAAC HOLLOWAY on Aug 1, 2013 19:59:10 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] NATHANIEL I. HOLLOWAY 45 | HETEROSEXUAL | PROFESSOR | LOCAL | ROBERT DOWNEY JR THE INTERVIEW HELLO. THANKS FOR COMING IN TODAY. SHALL WE START WITH YOUR NAME? Nate raises his eyebrows pointedly. “Well, you’re welcome, sweetheart, but did I have much of a choice?” Rhetorical, of course. The answer is ‘no’. Nate seems to be drafted in for these college board of administrator mandated, casual ‘tell us about your life’ psych evaluations more often than any single one of his colleagues. Probably because he is the faculty member with the single largest number of student complaints. At least two, three times a semester he’ll be dragged in for a performance review and find that this student or that student has accused him of being batshit crazy and demanded a transfer to a class with a ‘reasonable professor’. Nate doesn’t mind. He’s not offended. For every student who calls him insane, there are two who find him compelling, entertaining or at the very least educational. It’s not his fault some of the little bastards aren’t up to dealing with him. “My name? I assume that’s on your little clipboard, unless that’s decorative. Is it?” She doesn’t answer, so he heaves a long suffering sigh. “Nathaniel Isaac Holloway. Fucking mouthful, but it’s the only name I got.” A very brief pause, while he glances up and to one side, swiftly marshalling his thoughts enough to add, “Nathaniel, that’s Hebrew. Means “God has given”. God has given me what, I could not tell you. A high IQ, perhaps. An unfair amount of charm, maybe. Or potentially a narcissistic personality disorder. It depends on who you ask. Isaac, that’s Hebrew, too. Lot of Jewish in my name. Means “laughter” that one. And Holloway, that is English. Ango-saxon root. Nothing special about it.” These observations are made with detached boredom, as if people ask him for the etymological roots of his name all the time. They don’t, but that doesn’t mean the knowledge isn’t right there in his head, just waiting to be called on. He’s an academic, and etymology is his field. Of course he knows this stuff. “Most people call me Nate. Nathan. Whatever the fuck. You got a pretty face, sweetheart, I’ll let you call me whatever you want.” He grins. It’s difficult to tell from the smile whether he means this or whether it’s just an attempt to make her uncomfortable. Certainly the expression is not meant to put her at ease. It’s just an inevitable consequence of his own self-amusement. THAT'S A NICE NAME. WHAT DO YOU DO FOR A LIVING? Nate snorts a low huff of laughter at her response. ‘That’s a nice name’? Oh dear. Clearly the woman is a simpleton if that is the only reply she can muster. Doesn’t she know how to hold a conversation? He shakes his head slowly, replying with a thick layer of sarcastic derision. “Thanks.” Hell, she probably won’t pick up on the fact that he’s being ironic, right? Especially if she has to ask him what he does for a living. Christ. Her clipboard really must be decorative. Probably it contains instructions on how to blink or reminders that she needs to inhale and exhale or she’ll die. Certainly it’s nothing relevant to this interview, that he is only sitting through because of his job. His job that she literally just fucking asked him about. Good God. He has a brief internal debate about whether or not he ought to go back to the board and demand a competent evaluation, but decides against it. The thicker his interrogator is, the likelier he is to pass, right? He’ll power through her inanity and just say whatever the fuck he likes. Just like most conversations he finds himself trapped in. “I am, first and foremost, an etymologist.” He starts, frowning slightly with affected gravitas. “A lexicographer. A linguist – a sociolinguist.” There is a part of him that really just enjoys using these pretentious sounding titles. “Man, myth, legend – y’know, in my field. In my field, I’m a legend. Unfortunately, my field is less a field and more of a back fucking yard. Ask the department, they’ll tell you that no one gives two shits about etymology. Which is why I branched out into sociolinguistics.” He doesn’t know who decided the study of lexical origin and semantic change wasn’t an expansive enough topic to devote any real resource to here at Bowdoin, but he’d like to hurt them for invalidating his decades of study on the matter. Still, sociolinguistics is interesting too, and he is more than qualified to teach courses in the discipline. “What I do for a living is I’m a full time academic. I never left college –” A tight, self-deprecating smile twists at his mouth. “– and eventually they told me if I was gonna hang around and do research forever, I’d have to start pulling my weight. That’s how I got into teaching.” The verb ‘teaching’ is expressed with the sort of weighty scornful emphasis one might usually reserve for the very worst of expletives. “It’s a necessary evil. I’ve got no love for the spoilt, wannabe intellectual shitheads that sit in on my lectures every day. I have to teach them if I want to stay and carry on with my research, and my writing. I write books. Exclusively non-fiction. Etymology based. Text books, studies, analytical essays, that kind of crap. Someone has to write the text books that without fail every single one of my students will lose by the second week of the semester. Go fucking figure.” INTERESTING. WHAT DO YOU DO FOR FUN? Interesting. The adjectival refuge of a moron too simple to know what to say. He exhales through his nose to vent this frustration – is there any actual point talking to someone who will only respond with pleasantries and vagaries? Well, yes. Yes, if that person is going to evaluate your psyche and approve you to continue teaching when the academic year starts up again. He supposes there is a point to this conversation if only because of the circumstances of it, so he ought to play nice. Or at least attempt to respond. Maybe playing nice is a little too optimistic. “You get to my age and there’s only a few pleasures you got left to you. I drink, I smoke, I think, I fuck. I do whatever I can to distract myself from the mind numbing ennui of lonely middle age.” He pauses to gage the expression on her face. Stupidly blank – not a surprise. He pretends to read more into her dull eyes than is actually there. He pretends he sees pity. Perhaps he does. Just a touch of it. “Did I depress you yet? No? We still got time for that.” A slow, slightly smug smile makes its debut on his face now. Again, it’s hard to accurately predict his sincerity. Perhaps even Nate himself does not know whether he’s joking or not. Nate is simultaneously much more concerned and much less concerned about his lifestyle than he appears to be. Sometimes the shocks of helpless loneliness resulting from his wife’s recent death are so sharp and sudden that they cripple him, send him hobbling off to his empty bed with a bottle of scotch and keep him pinned there for days. Other times, he’s glad she’s gone, because being a husband never suited him anyway, and this is the first opportunity he’s been given to actually live in two and a half decades. The drinking, the smoking, the thinking, the fucking… all things he never managed to do as much as he’d have liked while he was bogged down in the numbing domesticity of marriage and kids. His current circumstances are both suicidally depressing and blissfully free. He ricochets back and forth between the two endlessly, exhaustingly, but when it comes time to try and express his unstable state of mind to somebody else, it’s always done with borderline self-deprecating crudeness and that sardonic, half-sincere smile. Nate doesn’t even know what he means half the time. He has no idea anymore. WOULD YOU SAY THOSE ACTIVITIES REFLECT WHO YOU ARE? And so they’ve moved onto the big questions. Miss Mental Vacancy behind her desk there has broken out the big guns, dispensed of the dulled down reactionary comments and asked him to self-analyse. Like all good head doctors, she is basically just there, prodding him to do all the introspection and hard work himself. Someone actually pays her for this bullshit? “I’ve gotta figure that they do. Why the fuck else would I be doing said activities if they weren’t linked intrinsically to who I am in some way? People don’t do things they don’t like. Or at least, I don’t.” He hesitates, shifts deliberately around in his chair a little to make a show of getting comfortable, settling in for the long self-analysis she no doubt means to eek from him. “You wanna know who I am right? That’s what you’re actually fucking asking, here? You want to know who I am and just how insane I am, and you want me to tell you instead of working it out. It’s the height of fucking laziness, sweetheart, I’m not impressed.” His admonishment seems to have little effect on her, so he shifts again, sitting up a little way. “Who I am, who I am… let’s start with the student evaluations, hm? That’s why I’m here, right? According to these evaluations, I’m batshit insane.” He stops to raise his eyebrows, as if daring her to comment. “Interesting tangent, here. The phrase ‘batshit insane’ or ‘batshit crazy’ has been in use for just over sixty years. According to the Oxford English [Dictionary] – not the definitive source on anything, by the way – the earliest use of ‘batshit’ as an intensifier is from 1950 when it was used synonymously with ‘bullshit’. There’s some debate over the evolution of the intensifier into the phrase and it’s hard to say definitively where it came from, but it’s been linked to idioms like ‘bats in the belfry’ and ‘going apeshit’. Still, it’s pretty hard to pin down to the exact origin of that.” He pauses, nodding slightly. “Something to think about, I guess. Where were we?” Another pause where he attempts to nudge his mind back on task. “Right. Am I batshit? Well… debatably, but that’s not the real issue. What these students actually mean when they put in these passive-aggressive little complaints about my sanity is that I’m a hardass. These kids, the ones complaining, they’re either lazy or stupid, and I don’t let them get away with that. I don’t want laziness or stupidity in my classroom. I don’t like entitlement, either. That’s the issue, here, right? College kids, entitled as fuck. They think they know everything. Just ‘cos Daddy’s bought their way into four years of big boy school, they think they’re fucking Aristotle, and that every shitty paper they churn out or ill-thought out comment they make in my class is pure profound brilliance. Well, fuck that. I call them out when they’re being pricks, and I don’t care to be gentle while doing it. What they’re really saying in these student evaluations where they question my mental capacity is that I didn’t take their shit and they’re annoyed about that.” This little rant has seen his voice rise slightly in volume, quicken with irritated fervour, but then he abruptly changes gear and switches the subject, returning to a light and measured tone that suggests his rage was at least slightly put on for effect. “What else? You know what? Let’s talk about reviews. I mean, we already kind of are, but students they don’t know shit. Let’s talk about actually valid reviews. Like the one on my last book, right? They called me a genius.” He sits back a little way, giving an expansive and deliberately pompous shrug. “Excuse my ego, I don’t wanna rub it in, but they’re probably right. You know, little phrases like ‘ground breaking intellect’ were thrown around. Yeah. The one thing they did say, though… the single potent criticism of my essay collection was that I was too forceful. Apparently, I ‘lack the unbiased voice of typical high academia’. Too aggressive with my views, even if I know for fucking positive that I’m right. Apparently, you’ve gotta pussy foot around these days. Make tentative suggestions, draw hesitant conclusions, never just come right out and say what you know for a fact to be true, because some asshole out there is gonna turn around and try and discredit you for it. That’s the thing with the whole studying as a career bit. A lot of it is arguing with everybody else about who’s had the best fucking thoughts, and it’s easier to get along with everyone else in your field if you’re a little bitch about it and theorise rather than tell. ‘Suggest, not say’ is the unspoken rule of high academia – and this rule and I, we don’t see eye to eye, we don’t mesh. It’s a wonder I’ve lasted so long as I have in this job, I tell you that. I’m too much of an aggressive, dominant asshole for this whole thing.” He seems almost bizarrely pleased by the descriptor, despite the fact that it’s supremely unflattering. To Nate, it doesn’t really matter what people say or what they think, so long as he occupies some conscious thought. All publicity is good publicity, or so they say. He would rather be hated than ignored. There is nothing worse than indifference. Famous or infamous, either way it’s immortality… and doesn’t everyone want to just not be forgotten? Isn’t that a universal component of the human condition? The fear of insignificance. At least Nate can be honest about it. He does not want to be nobody. A short pause occurs, while he thinks a little more about this whole self-analysis thing, and then he abruptly announces, “I’m still thinking about reviews. You know, what other people say about me… that’s probably gonna be more accurate than what I would say about myself, right? I’m thinking about the marriage counsellor.” He laughs suddenly, shaking his head. “Fucking marriage counsellor. She had a lot to say about me. I think she was a misandrist, to tell you the truth. Few years back, the kids... they were like, fucking ten and seven, I think. Anyway, ‘bout then, Becca and I had some difficulties, and she twisted my arm into seeing this counsellor. You married?” He asks suddenly, and when she responds with a shake of her head, he rolls his eyes. “Then you don’t know. It gets to a point where it’s like ‘fucking anything to keep the peace’. Marital bliss? Fuck that. It’s just anything to keep from killing each other. Counsellor was a last ditch attempt to stop us from getting to the point where she poisoned my breakfast or I smashed her skull in and buried her under the patio. It was really only a matter of seeing who was gonna crack first, her or me. Anyway… right, the counsellor, she was mouthy, you know? She had a lot to say. Blamed all our problems on me. Called me impulsive and distractable. You fucking believe that? You know for one thing, I prefer the term spontaneous. For another, I do not think it is at all my fault if things or people do not hold my attention. I lose interest in shit all the time, but that’s not my problem. If you can’t maintain my attention, then there’s nothing more to say. I don’t know. Apparently, according to the counsellor, it was my fault that the kids bored the shit out of me and Becca herself wasn’t much more interesting after a decade of passive-aggressive bickering. Like I said, counsellor was a misandrist. Man hater. Of course she was gonna blame it all on me.” He gives an indifferent shrug, then trails off for a moment, apparently deep in thought. The interviewer is showing signs of being ready to move on to another question when he speaks up again, interrupting her just as she’d opened her mouth to speak. “Becca, though.” He says, then stops again. Pauses momentarily, looking up and to the right again while he regathers his scattered thoughts. “What she always said about me was that I was ‘colourful’.” He smiles wryly. It is the most genuine form of the expression that has graced his face so far. “She was sweet like that, even if she was boring as sin. Nice girl. Whenever she used to describe me to somebody else, she’d call me a ‘colourful character’. Or ‘eccentric’. That was one of her favourite words for me. Eccentric. Fucking joke, right? Like I’m some whimsical Seussian shit. The Nate in the Hat. Horton hears a fucking Holloway. God damn. Like I go round spouting off nonsense words and talking in iambic pentameter all day long. Anyway. Becca, she always saw the best in me. Even when we went through that homicidal rough patch I just told you about. To her, I was always the creative eccentric. Maybe I was just something Seussian. Maybe that’s what she did see me as. She always did say that she didn’t understand half the things that came out my mouth.” He shrugs pointedly, then exhales thoughtfully. He has lost some of his earlier agitation. The talk of his late wife is practically a sedative, a mood stabiliser. It’s almost enough to catch a glimpse of the person he might have been while she was still alive and he was caught in the calming glow of her company. Almost. That person doesn’t really exist anymore. It’s just a strange echo of Nate the husband, rather than an accurate embodiment. “Maybe I am. We’re all ridiculous, right? I can acknowledge that. I’m not gonna take myself too seriously. Life’s too short for that shit. Do what you want and fuck what it looks like to the rest of the world. I’m fucking ridiculous, I know, but I really, genuinely, do not fucking care.” A COOL CAT LIKE YOU MUST HAVE A TON OF SUITORS FLOCKING TO YOU, HUH? The phrasing of the question is enough to stun him into silence for a moment. Not only is it unprofessional – which he’d be fine with, Nate is nothing but unprofessional himself – but it is just horrendous. A cool cat. Is that even a thing that people say anymore? Or… in fact, ever? He’ll have to look into that when he’s next in a researching mood. Has the noun phrase ‘cool cat’ ever been used with unironic intent? He realises he has drifted somewhat into these thoughts, and pulls himself back with a quick shake of his head. “What? Suitors? What fucking century is this?” He answers with a short burst of laughter. “Anyway, no suitors. Recently widowed… so plenty of women, but no suitors. I’m done with courting.” He never really got started with courting. It was always Becca. He’d known her for most of his life, so he’d got something of a pass when it came to ‘wooing’ her. Now that she’s dead his romantic horizons have expanded… or, well, not the romantic ones. The sexual ones, perhaps. He’s not fussy these days. He has no type, very few preferences, little to no moral compunctions. If there is a girl and she is interested and consenting, he will gladly welcome her into his bed. That’s really all there is to it. He has no interest in women beyond what is between their legs. Does that make him chauvinistic scum? Or just honest? COOL BEANS. THEY SAY YOUR FAMILY SHAPES WHO YOU ARE. WHAT DO YOU THINK OF YOURS? “Cool beans.” He repeats. He considers going on another etymological tangent, but doing so would be effort and he’s suddenly quite tired. The mere mention of family is enough to exhaust him. “Cool fucking beans, right. Uh, my family. Right.” It takes him a moment to find his stride, to try and organise the confused jumble of familial resentment and grief into some kind of order. He inhales, and then starts speaking, rapidly, speedily, barely a pause for breath and certainly no breaks in his tone for things like emotion. He is allowed to agitate himself about the state of the educational system, but he is not allowed to do so about his gene pool. He’ll waste no feeling on them. “Two parents, one brother. My mom, her name was Yara. That’s Brazilian and Arabic in origin, though she herself was from the Ukraine. First generation immigrant. In Brazilian mythology, Iara was a goddess renowned for her beauty. My mom did not have the rather notable green hair of her legendary namesake, but she was a very lovely woman. Call it sentiment if you will, but I see a lot of her in my youngest daughter. They have the same smile.” He rolls his eyes at himself. “That’s what Becca always said, anyway. So my mom was sweet. Pushover. Never really said much, and you couldn’t really understand what she did say because her English wasn’t great and her accent was pretty thick, but she was sweet. My dad, Abraham. Very biblical name, Hebrew in origin, and meaning ‘father of multitude’, though as far as I know he only fathered myself and my older brother. He was a second generation immigrant. His parents got the fuck outta Europe while the getting was good, missed the whole Nazi thing, and my dad was the first in his family to be born on US soil. Good for him. Dad, he fought in Vietnam. He was there when I was born. In some rainforest fighting Charlie or some shit, y’know. He was pretty sweet too, you wanna know the truth. Nice guy. Dead now. Mom, too. Both of them went pretty early, actually. One after the other. Fuck, I wasn’t even thirty when that happened. So, I guess it’s just me and my brother. Joe. Josiah – Hebrew, meaning ‘Jehovah helps’, with his namesake being the infamous biblical king of Judah. He’s older than me by five, six years. Lives in Phoenix with a fat wife and six kids. He’s balding, the poor bastard. We don’t really talk much. Not got a lot to talk about. His wife sends us Christmas cards. Becca’s dead now, so she doesn’t send them back. Go fucking figure.” The great toneless rush of information halts for a moment so that Nate can takes a moment to take a breath and refuel, then he launches straight back in to the factual, emotionless discourse. “Becca, she was my wife. Full name Rebecca, obviously. Hebrew in origin – there’s a lot of that around – meaning, ironically, considering the restricting dynamic of our marriage, it means ‘to bind’. I met her when I was very young and I knew her for most of my life. We got married at twenty years old, had twenty five years of matrimony and then she died a few months ago. Three months next week, actually. I mean, she was pretty considerate about it, though. She waited until the kids were all grown up and out of the house. I couldn’t have been dealing with any single father bullshit. Good of her, to wait until they were adults before she shuffled off this mortal coil. The kids, there’s three of them. My oldest two are twins, twenty three years old now.” A short pause, wherein he waves his hand dismissively, indicating he has little interest in talking about them in any further detail. “And my youngest daughter is nineteen. She’s a sweetheart.” Another short pause, but this time no hand wave. Even the short, simple descriptive sentence that ‘she is a sweetheart’ is an indicator of favouritism. He has nothing at all to say about his eldest two, but his youngest will always occupy a slightly softer spot in his consciousness. The sudden blip of warmth in his tone is illustrative of thus, especially as when he speaks again his voice is back to flat, tonelessness. Even Nate can recognise the imbalance in open affection he has for his children, so he makes a half-hearted attempt to level it out. “They’re all good kids, I guess. Fine. I don’t know. Whatever the fuck you want in a kid, I guess they’ve got. They’re don’t piss me off too much, and since they moved out, I only see them a couple of times a month, so we’re all fine.” A slight delusion, perhaps. His relationship with his oldest two in particular is rocky and a little unpleasant. The fact of the matter, though, is that Nate doesn’t really care. He was never meant for fatherhood and was never very good at it and maintaining a close or even healthy relationship with his children is not high on his list of priorities. The only reason he even attempts to pretend there is something warm and healthy there is because it’s what Becca wanted. It’s what she demanded, really. He supposes he owes her that much – to be nice to the kids, no matter how much they piss him off. AND YOUR LIFE? TELL ME ABOUT YOUR PAST. I'M EAGER TO HEAR. “Eager to hear? Do I detect a note of sarcasm?” He looks into her blank face, and sighs again. “No, thought not. Never mind.” He sighs, and sinks down slightly in his chair. His attention is beginning to wander. Boredom settling into his bones. There is only so much talking about oneself that even a narcissist like Nate can do before he begins to lose interest. “All right.” He says after a short pause spent marshalling his thoughts. “My life, then. Let’s keep it brief. Stop me if I start to go off on tangents.” She blinks owlishly at him, and he resists the temptation to get up and grab her and try and shake some sense into her. “Okay, never mind. Don’t. Fuck. I was born in Brooklyn in 1968. My dad was a ‘Nam vet. My mom didn’t speak English. We were working class for a good long time, but things were all right. Then when I was about ten-ish, I guess, my dad accidentally stumbled into a good job. Total fucking accident – my dad had less ambition in his entire body that I have in my little finger. Yeah, he’d accidentally made some connection with some up and coming young go-getting financier while he was in Vietnam, and back in civilian life, said go-getting financier ran into him and ended up fixing him with this sweet little job on Wall Street. Dad was good at that shit. Pretty clever guy, though he was too modest to admit it. That kind of thing bothers me. Always has. My dad, he was smart and he was the hardest working fucker you ever met in your life, but he was too fucking nice and polite and modest. He would have kept his head down his whole life and got nowhere for it if it weren’t for blind luck. Take from that what you will, but I guess I learnt a lesson from it when it comes to how to behave to get what you want.” He smiles wryly. “Anyway, he got his Wall Street job and things got pretty good us for pretty quick. We went from this shitty tenement to living in a nice house on Long Island. It was weird. Pretty fucking good, like I said. By the time I was old enough to go to college, we were practically rolling in it. Which was good, ‘cos higher education didn’t come cheap, even then. If dad hadn’t stumbled into finance and started raking it in, it probably wouldn’t have been an option for me. It wasn’t for Joe, and we only had five or so years between us. He ended up going into construction work, so…” Nate shakes his head briefly, barking a short laugh. His brother really drew the short straw in their family. Nate somehow got all the good genes. Joe was the subpar first attempt at a successful son, and immediately pushed aside when Nate came along and began to excel at damn near everything he put his hand to. Perhaps this fostered some resentment, perhaps this is why they no longer actually speak, but it doesn’t bother Nate. “Fuck him. Anyway. I got my bachelors from NYU in the summer of 1990. Summa cum laude. Major in linguistics, minor in sociology. That summer, that was also the summer that we found out Becca was pregnant.” He stops, glancing up and to one side again, backtracking through his rapid-fire history and realising that he has not yet made mention of her. “Oh, right, yeah. Let me backtrack a bit. Um. I met Becca when we were… what? Must have been in 2nd grade. Yeah. Started dating in high school. Got married in our sophomore year of college. She was at Sarah Lawrence, getting her bachelors in history. We thought we were pretty fucking clever, let me tell you, but I guess not as smart as we thought when it came to contraception. Kids hadn’t really been plan for me, and I don’t think for her either, but you gotta roll with the punches sometimes. I mean, we’d been married two years and we were financially stable and our parents were fucking thrilled to be grandparents and all, so there wasn’t really any concrete reason we could think of for getting rid of the inconsiderate bastard. Sorry, bastards, because obviously it turned out to be twins. Fantastic.” He rolls his eyes. “Anyway. I missed the kids being born. That summer, we got Becca all set up in this great little high rise in Manhattan, and then I fucked off to Pennsylvania. I told you, I had ambition. I’d been accepted to UPenn, and like I was gonna fucking that turn down. Best Ivy League linguistics department in the country, you know? So I missed the twins being born that winter, and I wasn’t there for the first couple of years very often. I was kind of focusing on getting my masters, and sorta popped in and out of the family life for a little while. Once I got my degree I came back. Like the twins had even noticed I was fucking gone, right? They were too little to notice. Kids, though…” He trails off momentarily, appearing to lose his train of thought, before finding it again with renewed fervour. “They suck. Massive drain on your time and your resources and your energy. I’d be trying to get things done, work, and every five fucking minutes Becca would be inviting herself into my study with one or the other of them to tell me about what cute and exciting thing they’d done now. I swear, I knew every single either of those kids took a leak. Anyway. I was back at NYU at the time. Research with their sociolinguistics department, and that was good while it lasted, but then Becca got pregnant again and she started giving me all this shit about wanting to move out of the city. A colleague at NYU recommended Bowdoin.” He glances up, deliberately and pointedly taking in the surroundings. They’re tucked away in some insignificant corner of the college campus right now – a room scarcely used, falling into dilapidation. Nate’s expression makes it clear what he thinks about the college, and the surroundings seem to back him up on this point. “Not exactly my prestigious kind of place, but before I knew it, Becca had fallen the fuck in love with Brunswick. Of course she had, right? So we – and by we, I mean she – decided to settle here. She had the baby. My youngest. My daughter.” His expression changes again, from one of contempt to an almost gentle smile. Again, his favouritism is obvious. He didn’t smile like this when addressing the subject of the twins. But it was always different for Nate with his youngest. Perhaps because he was there from the very beginning with her, whereas he missed out on the others’ formative years while he was at UPenn. Perhaps because he’d begun to tolerate the annoying screeching and demanding behaviour of his toddlers, and so was in a better place and knew more so what to expect by the time she came along. All he knows is that it always seemed so much easier with her than the other two. He has always enjoyed her more. “So we fell into this nice, dull as fuck little routine. You know how it goes. Kids take over. It’s all school plays and dental appointments and soccer games and birthday parties and arguments and demands. Then one day you wake up and realise that it’s been so long since you’ve had an adult conversation with your wife you can’t even remember what her voice sounds like when she isn’t doing that stupid patronising kid voice. Then one day you wake up and realise that you haven’t touched your wife, let alone fucked her, in six months. Then one day you wake up and realise that you’re literally contemplating beating her to death and burying her in the backyard so you don’t have to listen to any more work stories or kid stories or passive-aggressive complaints to take out the fucking garbage and clean out the sink.” He raises his eyebrows briefly, then shrugs and admits mildly. “Then one day your wife finds out that you’re fucking a grad student, and the next minute you’re being emasculated by a misandrist marriage counsellor, and then you’re sleeping on floor of your study, and words like ‘divorce’ are being thrown around with alarmingly casual intention. You’re not married, right, you said?” He asks, and she nods. “Yeah, well, don’t do it. It’s a trap. Though I suppose in my experience I can say that I guess even the worst marriages – like mine – can be fixed. It’s much easier to break them than it is to fix them, but… it can be done. Once you stop fucking your grad student and say you’re sorry and agree to date night, y’know… it’s less of an uphill struggle. We got back on track, so… It was just the kids, threw us off track in the first place. I told you, I didn’t want ‘em and I’m pretty sure she didn’t either, until they actually came along. Kids, sweetheart. I fucking tell you. Don’t have them. They’re nightmares. Thankless little bastards that fuck up all the plans you ever had for your life and suck all the love out of your marriage and then turn round and say, ‘Dad, you were never there. Dad, all my problems are your fault. Dad, I hate you.’ They’re shits. Well, two out of the three of them are. Pretty much as soon as they were born I was looking forward to them growing up and moving out. Don’t get me wrong. I love them. What kind of asshole do you take me for? They piss me off like no tomorrow, but I would take a bullet for my kids. They asked, I would move heaven and earth for them. They’re my flesh and blood and I love them, but fuck, it is not easy putting up with them. Becca never seemed to have any trouble, but I already you, she was sweet. Patient. Bless her heart, she was a fucking saint. I loved her, too, you know. I know it doesn’t sound like it, but I did.” Typically the more he complained about a person or a thing, the higher he held it in his regard. The more bitterness in his tirade, the more he loved it. He could never be so uncomplicated as to simply express his affections. That would have been way too easy. There is a slight hesitation in him, but he knows now is the time to actually talk about Becca’s death rather than just reference it casually in passing. He starts off simple: facts. “She’s dead now. Couple of months. Three months next week, like I said. Some kinda lady cancer…” As if he doesn’t know all the excruciating details. As if he doesn’t know it was ovarian cancer. Originally. Metastatic by the time they caught it. It had already snuck into her lymphatic system by the time the first lot of test results came back. As if he wasn’t there every God damn step of the way, holding her hand through every doctor’s appointment, through all the chemo and the radiotherapy and the last ditch surgeries. As if it wasn’t him waking up to hear her sobbing in the middle of the night, comforting her through the hair falling out and the pain and the awful confrontations of mortality, staying up for all those endless sleepless nights where she was in so much pain she could only writhe around and try and make herself vomit to alleviate some of the agony. Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe that was somebody else. A different Nate. One that only ever existed in the times of Becca’s greatest need. The husband, the carer, it was certainly something nobody else saw. Not even the kids. He could never bear to let them witness the moments of hopeless tenderness between himself and their mother, especially towards the end. He would always make a point of stepping out so that they could visit with her alone, and of responding to any queries about her health with ‘I don’t know, ask her yourself’. As far as they were concerned, he wasn’t there. How many hospital corridor confrontations had they had? How many times had they, especially the twins, tried to shout him down because clearly he was not doing enough? The kids, they loved their mother. He couldn’t fault them for that. But Nate, he loved her, too, and apparently that was something they could find fault in. He realises very abruptly that there is no way he can say any of this. There is no possible way he can talk about it. He can only add: “Was a mercy, in the end.” He rolls his shoulders in a brief dismissive shrug. As if the topic is of little consequence after all. Isn’t it? Becca is dead. Nate is not. The end. Is there even anything more to say about that? “After she died, I kind of… didn’t know what to do with myself.” He says now, carefully. There are the barest hints of cautious amusement in his voice all of a sudden, as if he’s laughing at himself for his behaviour. Recognising again, non-verbally this time, that he is utterly ridiculous. “I sold my car and bought a new, fucking faster one. Sold the house and moved into an apartment. One fucking bedroom, seeing as how it’s just me and no kids or any of that shit to bother me anymore. Right from the get go – before Becca had even got the chance to get cold, as the twins will gladly point out – I started cramming in all the living I never got to do on account of being married. You know, drink hard. Fuck whatever moves. Have fun.” The amusement has crept out of his tone and into his expression now. He is most definitely mocking himself. Almost deliberately running through a checklist of midlife crisis items. He rolls his eyes. “But you can’t have that much fun when you’re forty five, because you aren’t young enough anymore. Body can’t deal as well as it used to. That’s when you become pathetic. Like me. I freely admit that I’m pathetic. I’m ridiculous. I’m a sad old man stuck in a midlife crisis, but fuck… what else do you think I should be doing with my life?” He laughs – and the sound is equal parts amused and bitter. He leans in towards her, and says in a conspiratorial whisper, “Besides, haven’t you heard? I’m nuts. Batshit, right?” What about a secret? Everyone has a secret. “You want to hear my secrets? Really? Is this a slumber party?” He snorts, sinking back into his chair again. “You already know all my secrets, sweetheart. I’m crazy, I’m awful, I don’t really like my kids, I cheated on my wife, I also thought about killing my wife – didn’t have to, though ‘cos of the cancer, so that worked out pretty well…” He starts to list. Technically all of those are truths, though exaggerated and stated flippantly to make it appear as though these – his greatest traumas – don’t matter to him. Besides, they’re not secrets. If he’ll tell his psych evaluation interviewer, why wouldn’t he tell any other stranger? There is, perhaps, one thing that he keeps to himself. One thing that he certainly won’t tell her, considering she is judging his capacity to return to work and already he’s put on quite a show when it comes to proving he is not an appropriate educator. If he told her this, it would seal the deal and he’d be collecting unemployment by the end of the month. He has tenure, so it wouldn’t be easy to get rid of him, but he suspects they probably could if they knew that he genuinely was insane. Nate has had schizoaffective disorder since he was seventeen – or, at least, that was when it was diagnosed – and has been heavily medicated his entire adult life. This much isn’t the secret – many people could tell you that Nate has some kind of disorder. It’s just that he’s stopped taking his medication. Without his wife to remind him and in some instances, force him to take his pills, he has decided that he’s better off unmedicated. This is the reason behind his increasingly erratic behaviour over the past couple of months, and it’s likely without serious intervention of some kind he will only get worse. He’s stopped recognising this to be true, however. Part of his disorder involves delusions, and Nate is currently very far into one where he believes he can control his own mental health through sheer force of will. But that’s not something she’s going to get out of him. A short laugh passes his lips. “I don’t have secrets. Secrets are a waste of time, and life’s too fucking short as it is.” ALRIGHT. TIME'S ALMOST UP. TELL ME ABOUT YOUR DREAMS. QUICK! Time’s almost up? Halle-fucking-lujah. He’s already out of his seat, shooting upright with sudden enthusiasm. Freedom is so close he can taste it. “Don’t fucking rush me.” He replies in respond to her demand. “Fucking dreams. What am I, six years old? I have expectations. Dying alone, that kinda shit.” A brief hesitation in the agitation of his bearing, and then he adds, “Oh, and I guess I’d like to keep my job. If you can make that dream come true, I’d be grateful.” The remark is light, off hand, mildly sarcastic… he would never sincerely ask anyone for help, and he especially wouldn’t ask this vacant cow for a favour. If she could pass him for this psyche evaluation, that’d be great, but he certainly won’t get down on his knees and beg for it. But there is truth in the comment in so far as yes, he really would like to keep his job. He’s not entirely sure what he’d do without it. AND THAT'S A WRAP. IT WAS NICE GETTING TO KNOW YOU. He laughs – a short but genuine huff of amusement. “Yeah, the pleasure was all fucking mine. Thanks, sweetheart. See you next semester.” BEHIND THE MASK PUN | AGELESS | GMT | I'VE ALWAYS BEEN HERE | ALL OF THEM  Nate is repugnant and also talks too much. Sorry. >.< |
