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Rational Conduct

By Kevin Tatro (US)

Chapter Two

Fearing Reality

Chapter 2 – Fearing Reality

“Daddy.  Wake up the phone is for you.”  Ashley called from the doorway.  She was now almost ten years old.  A little peanut she was.  Smaller than his five year old nephew.  But man was she cute.  And smart.  She was a computer wizard and a half.  Daddy had to send her to summer school at the local university because she couldn’t get enough.  Boy she was wonderful.  Full smile and a killer attitude.  He felt guilty he didn’t give her all the attention she deserved.

David had been taking a well-deserved snooze in the summer sunshine while she was inside on the computer.  She would much rather have been playing any kind of a game with dad, or even just sitting on his lap talking, but he was so tired he couldn’t focus for more than a few seconds conversation.  It wasn’t really that he was so tired.  It was the tension.  He was thinking of so many things that needed to be done.  How to get the home fixed, the addition done, and college tuitions.  He knew he should be with her right now, but he wasn’t, and he felt bad about it.  Maybe after he took this call he could go for a bike ride with her, or play monopoly.  She loved that game.  Never really cared for the finer points of the game like rules and such, she just loved the railroads, and moving the pieces all around so he had to keep putting them back in the right places and get her back to playing the game as it should be played.  She never cared if the play was accurate or who won.  Though she always seemed to win.

“Daddy.  Telephone.”

“Sorry Ash.  I’m coming.  Whatcha doing hun?” 

“I’m on-line right now daddy.  Gotta go.” 

“Wanna play soccer when I’m done with the phone?”

“No thanks. Bye.”

He walked to the phone in total disgust.  Depressed at what he had become.  The phone would be one of the nuts at work, working on Saturday because they had nothing better to do.  John or Dave wouldn’t even be trying to justify why they were in on Saturday or why this conversation was so important.  It was just a fact that they had nothing better to do.  David had been there himself.  As a matter of fact he was there last weekend.  He had said, Honey, I’m really busy and have to get this out before Monday.  Which was true, but not completely.  Nothing horrible would happen if he didn’t get it done.  By Monday evening a client would have called complaining his money wasn’t ready, but David knew that same client was doing nothing all weekend but playing golf or entertaining people he didn’t really like, on a boat he hardly ever used and resented because he should like it but didn’t, and had to pay the bills on it anyway.  That guy would rather have been at work.

The stroll to the phone was slow, like a prisoner in shackles chained to some other slob in a chain gang movie.  Tense, but depressed. The heart was starting to beat a little faster.  The tension that was constantly there, just cranked up another notch.  Nothing quite like the full-blown craziness that seemed to settle in by the end of every typical day at the office, but still, a bit of tension on a Saturday afternoon.  What was it now?  Another complaint?  Another calculation off by a few hundred thousand or maybe a million dollars? 

Bazaar business he was in.  An average punk like himself, pretending to be an investment banker, giving money to tax cheats and losers who had wasted their entire lives collecting wealth like the money was what was important.   They never enjoyed the homes in St. Thomas or the vacations with their wives whom they had no real relationships with.  What they all really wanted was to be at work.

The conversation took fifteen minutes.  It was nothing important, but John knew David would take the call, and it didn’t hurt to get the answers he needed a couple of minutes faster by making the call.  “The maps are under my desk, and the financial statements are in the boxes marked Chicago.  …  Yeah that’s it.  OK.  Yes...Yeah the floor plans are in with the leases.”

David thought the whole business was kind of silly.  He made loans on big real estate projects and then bundled them all together in these huge bond offerings, sold by the traders that made the huge money.  He never thought that what he did was very special or that he was particularly bright, he just happened to get into the network, and so he got paid twice as much as guy who did the same thing at a local bank.  Another of life’s weird twists.

David had missed yet another opportunity with Ashley, who had gotten off the computer with high hopes that dad would have time to play with her.  He had signaled to her that he would just be a minute, but he knew the, “that’s alright” meant she was now back on the Internet.

“Yeah not a problem John.  Don’t worry about it.  I was here.  Happy to help.” 

David wouldn’t have felt so guilty if he had been at work.

David’s wife walked by and noticed he was off the phone.  “I’m off to the grocery store.  What did John want this time?”

In a disgusting, sunken, drawling voice he replied… “Nothing, just the usual.”

  She didn’t get into details this time.  Sometimes she would.  Not that the details mattered, but the conversation fulfilled a couple of purposes.  One, she and her husband actually talked.  Something most wives hope for, but husbands dread because they are just no good at it.  She would try to pretend it was really a conversation, but they both knew it wasn’t.  She sometimes pretended to care what the conversation was about.  Something about this routine almost fulfills the marriage requirement that you pretend to be interested in the other’s particular activity that you care nothing about, making you the better person for trying to care about what you hate, and trying to interact on the others terms.  She was better at this than him.  He rarely even pretended to care, and her efforts were almost a dig because they both knew he really didn’t care about work either.  Pathetic, but many purposes were fulfilled by the conversation, so it was worthwhile.  He never thought such cynical thoughts about his marriage while at work.

Kelly went out the door, Ashley was upstairs alone, and David stood there in the kitchen, alone with nothing to do.  Despair sank in once again when he thought of his little girl upstairs on the Internet.  She’d made friends with a computer because dad was never there.  Even when he was, he really wasn’t.  He liked to think his lack of attention span was because he was so used to rushing and being busy, that he was unable to slow down enough for a simple game.  But he knew this wasn’t the case. He had always been like this.

David had a bad case of attention deficit disorder from the time he was little.  Just in the last year or two, when middle age was setting in, he was actually able to sit down and read a book.  He couldn’t actually read it all at once, but a few pages at a time.  He now did it once in a while rather than just the one or two paragraphs he scanned in each page of the newspaper.  The life of investment banking in Manhattan fit him perfectly.  Crazy hours.  Switching from one task to another in a moment's notice.  Anger, the frenzy of missed deadlines, and cursing psychopaths.  He loved it.  He was still low on the totem pole and would never make it to the top, because he didn’t really care.  He didn’t care about the money or the power.  That wasn’t why he was there.  He loved the insanity.  The craziness interrupted his daydreams and thoughts.

The fantasies, or daydreams as the adults used to call them, happened all the time.  While in high school doing algebra, two or three levels of life were going on in his head.  He could still hear enough of what the teachers were saying, but the dreams were much more fun.  It was sometimes annoying, but he enjoyed the imaginary worlds, and they sometimes appeared more real than the one he could actually touch.  These episodes or events were also more logically sound than what he was ‘supposed’ to be doing.  Sometimes the dreams had the feel of deja-vu, and sometimes they felt like a reality calling to him for a higher purpose.  A call away from this world where menial tasks stopped  from really thinking.

 If he were rich, he would never work again.  He would probably become lost in a world of his own daydreams.  Daydreams in which he had daydreams.  Taking him so far into this imaginary world that he would wake up from a daydream that took place in a daydream, still unsure whether he was awake or not.

He looked through the windows and once again saw another day passing.  One in which he had failed to do anything meaningful at all.  One in which his children went off into their own lives without his help or support, and one in which he was constantly disappointed with himself.  It certainly seemed that he was in a prison, and so much of life was designed to keep him trapped.  Modern civilized life was all wrong.  Farming with cows and horses and such was the way to go.  Connected with the real world, not locked in a box with air conditioning and painted walls.  Sure, the early farmers died young, but they were alive until their time came due.  And they had a rational excuse for ignoring their kids and not really speaking with their wives.  They had a great excuse for being at work.  Back then, if a dad didn’t work, they would all die.  Nobody would blame him for being at work.  He would have no need to feel guilty about missing what is really important.

             Now aimless, senseless artifacts dressed in jogging suits, plopped themselves in casino chairs punching buttons on machines that hold some strange allure, while their social security and retirement money fades away at a calculated pace that coincides with the degeneration of their remaining muscles and brain tissues.

 Something is definitely wrong on this planet.

The crazy thoughts and images faded again, as he now found that another fifteen minutes had passed.  The sun was passing away as he lumbered out on his back yard deck on his way to the lawn chair in the sunlight.  Nothing was ever wrong with sunlight, and he knew that was one place he could be doing something right, even if he was screwing up every other aspect of his life.  No chance of skin cancer, he spent most of his life in air-conditioned boxes which never let in the real light.  Yes, another benefit of work.

He was lost in another fantasy.  A meaningless book in his hands, and another daydream of a twilight zone episode where St Peter is telling the just man that he couldn’t get into heaven as he had not improved much from where God left him on the planet.  A thief was on his way into the pearly gates as St. Peter explained to David that he should have seen how bad this guy started off and how far he had come.  David paused for a moment of reflection in which he recognized he hadn’t changed much and would have to go back to earth again and try once more.  Saint Peter’s logic made sense.  It seemed unfair the thief got in, but the logic made sense.  He worked harder than the just man.