by Penny Copper
Just a Dream
A Short Story
By Penny Copper
© Penny Copper 2012
All Rights Reserved
Nathan Hart stumbled erratically down the hall from his bedroom to the drippy bathroom sink. He lived alone in this place, this old cracker box house in an old suburb at the edge of the San Gabriel Mountains that had barely been looked at, let alone painted or worked on, in several decades. It was one of those neighborhoods that bordered on being urban, but was mostly comprised of retirees with deadbeat children and a few younger families, although, his actual house was surrounded by clear lots filled with bushes and trees, with the nearest neighbors a hundred yards away. He trudged past all the neglected furnishings of the hallway as he made his way to the sink. The walls were chipped, nails jutted out from their surface, begging for a framed piece of artwork to cling to. It was better than having to deal with his mother, Sandra “Sandy” Hart and his two prissy younger sisters who occupied the house he grew up in. Three grown people all fighting for control over one another’s lives was not his idea of a happy arrangement.
It was half passed one and there was no sign of sleep that night or any night in the near future. He stared at himself in the mirror for a moment, taking in the exhaustion that had marked his young visage. It was mid September and the hot summer weather was having one last swing. He splashed water over his sweaty face, in the vain hope of cooling his stifling thoughts. That day had been particularly difficult for him, he worked at an accounting firm and in an effort to keep his clients’ finances in order, had all but lost his mind. He was not the most confident person, yet he was expected to assert authority over hysterical people with crumbling resources. He truly felt sorry for a lot of his clients. Most of them were lower middle class, uneducated people, terrified of being audited and not really knowing what that meant, but that did not make them any less obnoxious. In addition to the incompetent cliental, he played confidant to the most bizarre and needy of coworkers. He had spent far too much time listening to other people’s problems, allowing them to treat him like a token sidekick whilst he kept his life’s troubles stuffed deep inside, incapable of getting a word in edgewise.
“Look at you, you’re total a mess,” he hissed at himself, as though that would help the situation. Then again, self deprecation was a staple of his.
Not only was his career of the most draining variety, but after twenty-nine years of avoiding the subject all together, he had just last spring come out to his family as gay. This was especially hard on his mother, even more so than his father who had divorced his mother several years ago and was more or less detached from his children. Nathan’s mother had him when she was just seventeen, and had all the tell-tale signs of a parent who wanted to make up for past behavior. She did this chiefly by marrying a stock broker and buying everyone useless gifts. Recently she had come to be the most dominant of personalities in Nathan’s life, simply by being the person most frequently seen, and she did not understand the ‘point’ of being homosexual at all. Everyone in his circle seemed shocked by his orientation, which in turn surprised him, since he drove a truck, watched too much basketball, knew nothing about fashion trends and had a whole list of traits that were traditionally considered to be masculine. If he could change his preferences he certainly would have, but he had reached a point in his life where there was no reason to lie about dating girls, and bringing willing friends around their house. It wasn’t as though he was never attracted to women, in fact, he had taken quite a great liking to them physically, but his life thus far had been made significant by his bonds with a few very special men.
“A queer accountant, every man’s dream,” He toweled off the excess moisture from under his chin and his narrow blue eyes, touching the skin that hung loosely just beneath their lower lids, and then, forced his tired body back to bed, nearly tripping on the various bedside tables he had staggered across the hall. He collected furniture almost compulsively.
It wouldn’t take him much longer to find sleep, but the feelings of anxiety nagged so persistently at his inner gut that every waking moment was agony. He had been plagued by nightmares in the past month, though he could never remember their detail once he awoke, he only knew that something very stressful was happening in the context of those dreams.
“You will get over it, old man, just give it time” The ‘it’ he was referring to wasn’t separation from his family, nor the torture of being alone in his community, but the mounting disaster that was the recently finished tax season. All of his clients filed for extensions, and he managed to deal with them well before the October cutoff, though it was no easy feat. He clung onto stressful events in his professional life and went over every detail of their passing, as though he had to prove to himself how competent he actually was.
“Just get up tomorrow and go for a run, it will all just melt away. That’s what you need, some damn exercise, fat boy.” He patted his stomach. He was getting kind of fat, there was no denying that. But of all the things that cursed him late at night, his weight was the least of them. He had been one of those unfortunates who could never seem to escape the awkwardness and angst that came with adolescence. One thing he had was his intelligence. He may not have known how to deal with people or their needs, but he had awesomely sharp mathematical skills, which would have gotten him into a much more lucrative career had he allowed them to. He was sort of shy and unassuming, and so he chose what he had been told shy people should: accounting.
He recognized all these problems in his life, and he recognized that they could be annoying. He did not see the connection between these problems and his overwhelming depression, for as logical as he was, he could not shake the idea that things were happening to him and that his choices were only a small part of the equation. He would never describe himself as superstitious, and he would probably laugh at any person who did, but by any definition he was in a very real sense, superstitious. This was not characterized by the avoidance of black cats, or pouring salt over his shoulder, but by the gullibility that was Nathan. He so believed the things he wanted to, whatever that might mean. He totally shed the responsibility of a life wasted and placed it on the universe. This was not the absolute worst, or even the most uncommon of traits, but it happened to manifest in such a way that all causes for problems were deflected away to an unknown place in his consciousness, and had fed a quickly growing paranoia against various members of his family. Everyone was either grace incarnate or a total leech at any given time, there was never any gray area. Needless to say this made for tempestuous relationships.
Luckily, he had begun seeing a therapist and so all of this was in the past, this ridiculous pity party that he frequently threw for himself needed to come to a close, he was getting far too old for that.
His therapist was a handsome family friend named Daniel Carr, who was about twenty years older than he, and who insisted on being called by either his first name or ‘Doc’. Daniel was the kind of man who was so good-looking he could completely reroute someone’s philosophy after an hour of conversation based on their not wanting to disappoint him, which was exactly what had happened to Nathan. Daniel was of course straight, but seemed to flirt with him anyway, for unknown reasons. Nathan had taken such a liking to Daniel that he had begun fantasizing about him. It wasn’t just that he was good-looking, he represented all things adult to him, how to take responsibility and effectively make changes. The two had learned to maintain a kind of tense friendship, wherein certain topics of discussion were limited depending on the forum. Mutual friends were not spoken about in the office and Nathan’s inability to cope with stress was off limits outside of it. It was working surprisingly well, and they found that they both needed it
, since their circle of friends was dwindling. They would meet for coffee once every week, just to have something to do on a lunch break.
Just as sleep had begun to tug on his heavy eyelids, Nathan heard a single sharp knock that reverberated from his front door all the way down his hall to his eardrums.
This made him extremely angry. The only person he thought it could be was his mother, and she would not be welcome in broad daylight, let alone two o’clock in the morning. He emerged from his pile of wadded-up flannel sheets and stomped towards the front of his house, he did not bother looking out the peephole, as that would take too much effort. He figured his mother would be driving home from some vacation with her girlfriends and wanted to stop in and say hello, show off some magnets and shot glasses she’d picked up at a gift shop in some seedy casino. She was always driving back from places at strange hours to avoid traffic. He did
