be like me?”
Although it was probably a waste of his own time, Charles would later think back and try to recall at what point his stepfather had started seeing white elephants in addition to his otherwise just plain obnoxious behavior toward his mother and himself. The episodes of toxic insanity seemed to have simply started at some random point and then gained in frequency.
He could remember Niklas sternly lecturing his mother on his plans.
There were the seemingly endless–and often hopelessly convoluted–arguments with her, as well as with anyone else who had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, over who was at fault for the steady decline in what he saw as the decent, common values that were brought to this country by, among others, his own God-fearing ancestors, willing to take hardship and deprivation upon themselves if it helped them find their promised land. To hear it from him, the values embodied so faithfully by him were today heartily cherished by only a small and dwindling number of forthright men in these discouraging times.
There was no need to be subtle about this either: when Niklas was talking about real and true men, he always meant men like himself.
At the time the family’s–or actually Niklas’–decision to emigrate began to crystallize, Charles could recall, his stepfather continually justified his intentions over and over again by arguing that life was going to be ultimately better for all of them because things would finally become so much simpler again. One particularly idiotic early morning encounter was forever branded into his memory. Charles was perhaps ten years old at the time.
“Whatever it is that the good life brings us in our new home,” Niklas announced loudly and rather abruptly one fine morning as he brandished a mug of steaming hot black tea in his hand, “… it’s sure gotta be a helluva lot less complicated than this here place. Even breakfast has so gotten goddamn complicated in this country.”
“Not that I’d disagree with you entirely about things often times being more complicated than they truly need be, but, frankly, I think you’re finally going nuts on us,” ventured Jacqueline in an amused response, nodding to no one in particular without looking up from a website that she was engrossed in. She was sitting at the far end of the table, facing sideways toward the window as she surfed on the tablet formatted machine which she was balancing on her lap. She scrolled onward to the next page and half-chuckled to herself as she asked: “So what is it that you’re trying to tell us with that last observation?”
Niklas stopped dead in his tracks and his eyes narrowed, looking as though he were a Napoleonic field marshal focusing on a point somewhere on the faraway horizon behind which the next battlefield awaited his unbridled heroism.
“Well, you know, just sit back and imagine for just a minute. It’s like really early in the morning. And you get up and you’re already hungry,” he now began to explain as a wide-eyed expression grew on his face. His accent, always discernible, tended to become much more prominent when he had been drinking. Despite the fairly early hour, this seemed to definitely be the case now.
Niklas barely moved as he began describing the vision that was wafting through the neurons composing his pickled grey matter. It was an eerie sensation, a bit like a séance or speaking long distance with the spirit of a ventriloquist holed up in the Caucasus somewhere.
Jacqueline glanced up at him and furrowed her brow. Up to now, she hadn’t paid much attention to what Niklas was up to on that morning.
“Well, maybe it’s some kinda special day today, you know? Or maybe you just already on your goddamn way to work. Maybe you just gotta have some peace and quiet for a change,” he continued. “So you, you know, you decide to go eat breakfast. Instead of makin’ it yourself, you know?”
Charles rolled his eyes in silent disbelief at what he was hearing. Niklas Vladimir was incapable of as much as even knocking over a pail of water without someone helping him. The notion of Niklas making his own breakfast was without the least bit of exaggeration completely and utterly out of the question.
Niklas continued his explanation stoically: “So you just wanna sit down in the goddamn diner and before you know it, up strolls some middle-age housewife workin’ there, right? Bleached hair tied in a bun and oversized boobs, lace and doilies. You know, some babushka bitch who’s gotta go at it breaking her ass from five to nine every damn day. And you know why? Because she needs the goddamn money to feed all her brats at home. You know? Why? I’ll tell ya. ’Cause her old man just hopped on, knocked her up and then just kicked out of there. That kinda stuff. No goddamn common sense, some people just got no culture. They’re like goddamn rabbits. You know what I mean ...”
He ran his hand through his graying hair at the back of his neck for a moment and cast a mildly contemptuous glance, his dark eyes darting not at but straight through Charles, before continuing.
“Anyhow, so, before you know it, here she come rollin’ up to ya. And she’s dressed up, you know she’s like wearin’ some kinda Baby Doll outfit they stuff bitches like her into before sending her out to get orders, wearin’ some damned pink rag decorated with a frilly doily hardly big enough to cover a fat ass big enough to hide the goddamn Titanic. And ya know what? She even says Sweetheart to me. Can you believe that kind of bullshit? Good morning, Sweetheart! So, well listen up anyhow. I tell ya. I’m not done yet …”
He rotated the mug nervously a few times in his hands, looking at it but not really capable of registering the tea stains adorning it. Then he put it down and stood, leaning forward ominously on the kitchen table, his feet spread far apart as he half-stood, supporting his weight with his elbows. His gaze wandered around the kitchen momentarily and he swallowed hard a few times. Then he cleared his throat loudly before letting himself drop with a thud onto one of the wooden chairs.
“So then she gets out her pad, some TouchBoard thing of hers and starts tapping and typing. And without even looking up at you anymore, she starts asking all kinds of crap.scheiss: Hey Sweetheart! Smoking or nonsmoking? Gonna be tea or coffee this morning? Regular or decaf? Whole milk or two percent or cream? How about the daily special or menu? Scrambled, over-easy or sunny-side up? Ham, bacon or sausage? Fries, potatoes or maybe some hash browns with that? Plain or toasted? White, whole-wheat or sourdough? Buttered or plain?”
An incredulous, nervous quiet hovered in the air in the kitchen for what seemed like a very long moment.
Although everything he had said in the course of his exegesis thus far could be understood as a farce, Jacqueline didn’t dare to be amused any longer at this madcap sermon. It dawned on her that Niklas was dead serious about what he was telling them.
And she now quickly deduced that he had already not only been drinking, which was perhaps not that surprising, but doing so heavily. More aptly, she surmised, it was quite possible that he hadn’t stopped after last night. She regretted that she had underestimated this and thus not tried to defuse the situation beforehand.
“She was probably only asking you about the ham and the bacon because she maybe thought you looked kinda Jewish,” remarked Charles wryly from his side of the table without looking up.
“Didn’t ya see what I meant, what I was tryin’ to tell ya?” he suddenly bellowed at them, deeming this to be an utterly unsatisfactory reply to the point he was trying to communicate.
At this very instant, the dishwasher behind them clicked onto the next program and began pumping out the waste water with a soft but audible burp.
A broad band of withered, yellowed teeth, looking like long, weather-bleached marble tombstones against the early morning light shining through the kitchen window, arched across the lower half of his unshaven face. His breathing suddenly turned labored as he sat there with a grin as wide as that of a hyena thanking the heavens for dead meat, inwardly triumphant at his own perceived success at once again pouring a pound of salt into the wound of his recently acquired wife’s insecurity.
Jacqueline sat in stunned silence on her chair, the computer still resting on her lap, dumbfounded as she considered how to best de-escalate the situation. While she was sometimes able to interpret a kind of morbid humor