“We had some differences,” I said.
“Who won?”
“Only time will tell,” I said. “Good night.” I couldn’t even imagine when I would ever sleep well again.
30
I was up early Sunday. The house was still dark when I left.
Katie called me an hour later.
“Jason! Are you all right?”
“I’m fine. You saw my note?”
“Yes. But I was worried.”
“I want some time to think,” I said.
“Because of last night?”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t worry about him,” she said. “They’re terrible people. Whatever you have to do, they deserve it.”
“I hope not. Someday I might get what I deserve.”
“Don’t do that! You always turn my words against me.”
“No, not against you-against me.”
“Last night you said that you were your father’s son. That’s not bad, Jason. It’s why we are where we are.”
“Getting born into some family is a pretty random thing.”
“But it’s what makes you who you are.”
“Then why don’t I like it?”
“I can’t argue with you, Jason.”
“It’s okay. I can argue with myself just fine. I don’t need someone else to help.”
“I wish I could help.”
How I wish you could. “Just give me time.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Decide.”
There was a long enough pause after that, that I wondered if the connection was breaking up.
“But I have decided,” she said finally. She was breaking up, not the connection. “You’re scaring me. You make me feel like everything’s built on sand.”
“It is. I can’t fix it, Katie. I don’t know what to do.”
“I don’t, either,” she said.
I told her I’d call later.
My father’s son. I leaned back in his old wooden desk chair behind the old wooden desk, among the books that were never read and the globe that was never turned, and the son was the father.
Had he ever asked the questions?
Had he found answers, or had he learned to live without them?
The windows looked out over the gardens and lawn. It was all just starting to fray a little from lack of care. The sky was still clean and tended.
What a beautiful Sunday morning. Five weeks since Katie and Eric and I had sat at our breakfast table in shock at Melvin dying the night before. Now I was the one who had died the night before.
How much longer could I go on like this? I would either accept my fate to be Melvin or kill myself, and they were both the same thing.
But I couldn’t go on. I couldn’t live with this confusion in my soul-it would be only a matter of time before I would drive myself off a cliff to escape the questions.
It was real, that I would kill myself. All the money and power- that was what it was trying to do, however it could. It would kill. That was its real goal. Melvin, Angela, Grainger-it had killed all of them. Katie, Eric, Fred, Bob Forrester, Harry Bright-they were all mortally wounded. And when I looked at it, I knew the answer.
So it was that I made my decision, life or death, and I chose to live if there was any chance left that I could.
I locked the door of the mansion behind me and then I was standing next to my car. I didn’t know what I’d actually decided, only that I had.
Where was I going? I couldn’t go to Katie, not yet. I wanted someone who knew what I meant and could help me.
Nathan was only one man I knew who had somehow escaped the sting and poison. I set my course back toward the city.
I called him once I was on the highway. Always polite, yes, he was home, he would be very pleased to see me. Come right over.
In fifty minutes I was in his neighborhood. It was at the other end of town but identical to my own old neighborhood.
He answered the door himself. There was something confusing about seeing him this way, in slacks and a polo shirt, in a domestic setting. Everything was tasteful, balanced. A few things were expensive. It was all comfortable.
We sat in his study. There were lots of shelves, with lots of binders and reports and scholarly books on them. A study where a person would study. Nathan worked very hard, but not to build his own bank account or influence. A person would need a reason to work this hard. What had seemed meaningless before now enticed me with the lure of meaning.
“Sit down, Jason.” I got the grand stuffed chair, where so many of those reports had been read. Nathan sat in his desk chair, where many of the reports had been written.
“I need help,” I said.
“Whatever I can do,” he said, his brow wrinkled.
“I can’t do this anymore.”
He knew what I meant, immediately. He waited for me to keep going.
“You’ve been right all along,” I said. I was surprised by my own vehemence. “I’m being destroyed. I have to escape.”
“Jason.” He might even have been wondering if he should call the police, or an ambulance. “I didn’t mean it that way. I never meant to imply that you…”
“But it’s happening anyway. Last night… I was just like Melvin.”
“I understand. You were at the Forresters’ last night?” Yes, he certainly understood.
“It was real nasty. I was. I was everything I hate, Nathan. It was like… like it wasn’t me. But it was.”
“I do understand, Jason.”
“It will kill me. I mean that literally. I want to get out.”
“What do you mean, ‘get out’?”
“I don’t know,” I said. This was the real decision, and he waited for me. “I want to go back to the way it was, before he died.”
That answer crumbled swiftly. “Were you satisfied with your life back then?” He knew I wasn’t.
“No. Not really.”
“You can’t go back anyway. Too much has changed in these last weeks, especially you. Let me ask you a different question.” It took him some time to assemble it. “What can you accept of your father’s?”
I knew right away. “I… no. Nothing. I can’t.”
“Is there any line you can draw? Could you accept an income, as you had before, and nothing else?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know where to draw a line. I tried before, but it never worked. There’s no right place to draw it.” And this was the line in my own mind that I could never get past. “What would you do, Nathan?”
He looked away from me, and he was still and silent. It took him a long time. Even after more than a minute, when he looked back up at me and studied me, he didn’t speak.
