Sins of the Fathers

by John Richmond

IN HIS BEDROOM, at his own desk—a multi-tiered construction of teak and chrome—Jeremy tried to focus on his textbook. His class had to read the chapter on the history of calculus and answer the work sheet questions at the end. Jeremy sighed. He already knew the story of how Isaac Newton invented calculus so he could figure out the orbits of the planets around the sun like forever ago. Jeez, Jeremy’d been what, eight when he first read that? He glanced up. 5:01 spread across the ceiling in a digital spray from his projection clock. Jeremy looked down at the book and counted out the remaining pages in the chapter. God, there were like six or seven. He was torn between just flipping to the back of the chapter and answering the questions or taking the time to actually read the material first. The sooner he finished, the sooner he could go see his dad. Jeremy started reading.

  The next moment, Jeremy’s eyes focused on his reflection in the full length mirror hung on the inside of his closet door. He stood, mouth slack, eyes at half mast. His mind was foggy, like he was waking from a dream. Head on gummy ball bearings, he turned to look at the open astronomy text book on his desk at least ten feet away. How’d he get all the way over here? Head clearing a bit at a time, he looked up the ceiling. The digital projection read 5:47. He’d lost almost forty-five minutes.

  Someone giggled.

  Jeremy whipped his head around toward the sound and faced his reflection. A stain was spreading over the crotch of his khakis. Fresh urine ran hot against his right thigh. He looked into the eyes of the reflected boy. The other Jeremy winked.

  Focusing on the floor, Jeremy walked toward the closet door and shut it. For one uprooted second he wondered if the boy in the mirror was still there, locked in the dark and waiting. He let it go and decided to work on the most immediate problem, his wet pants. He kicked off his shoes and squelched into the little adjoining bathroom. He peeled off his slacks and ran them under the hot water faucet in the tub before hanging them over the shower curtain rod. He would throw them in the hamper after they’d had a chance to dry. He took a wet wash cloth and cleaned himself up, then slipped into a pair of jeans and a merino sweater.

  Jeremy felt better as soon as he walked out of the bathroom. He didn’t know what that episode had been about, but he felt fine now. In fact, now that he wasn’t soaking in his own piss, thank you very much, he was kind of intrigued by what had happened. Maybe he’d had a seizure or something. Or perhaps, he’d had a waking dream. He’d read enough about both to know that his behavior might fit with either. He glanced at the sheet of notebook paper next to his astronomy text book and smiled, his eyebrows up. Whatever else had happened during the time he had lost, it seemed Jeremy had managed to do his homework. Writing filled in at least half of the lined notebook paper. He didn’t spare it another look. Time was fleeting and his father expected him.

  By the time Jeremy stood outside the massive door to his father’s inner sanctum, he had forgotten the episode in his room. His mind was clean, untroubled. He didn’t even feel the familiar clench of anxiety that usually asserted itself whenever his father returned from one of his business trips.

  The longer Frank Mason’s dealings kept him from his son, the more he felt he needed to impart some kind of vital lesson to the boy upon his return. Jeremy just figured it was the way his father expressed guilt over being absent so often. He’d read about that too. Just because Jeremy wasn’t enrolled in college was no reason for him not to read at a college level, although he kept his interest in things like literature, the arts, and psychology to himself. His father had made it clear on more than one occasion that Jeremy could waste his time on that crap when he was finished with the hard sciences. Math means money, his father was fond of saying. Jeremy was smart enough never to ask how far his father had advanced in the subject himself. Jeremy shook his head and smiled, and with no thought to the consequences, reached out and turned the knob of his father’s office door.

  Mason gripped the .44 taped under his desk and tensed. He stared hard at his boy for a moment before relinquishing the trigger. “You know better than to come in here without knocking.”

  Jeremy reacted as if he’d been lightly smacked on the forehead. He did know better, really knew better. When Jeremy was still only a very small child, four or five, he had trundled into his father’s office when Mason and another man (not Horton, but another of Mason’s hired men) were having a talk with a business partner. Jeremy could never conjure a clear recollection of what he saw that day, but remembered the flavor of his father’s reaction well enough. Mason had exploded down at his son in a pyroclastic torrent, and Jeremy had never made the same mistake again. What could he have been thinking?

  “Jeez, dad,” he said, his brow wrinkled. “I’m sorry.” Jeremy looked around the room, and not finding an explanation for his sin in the bookshelves or carpet, gave up and faced his father. “I don’t know what—”

  “That’ll cost you if you ever do it again, son.”

  Jeremy looked at his father, those eyes, and marked him. “I understand, sir. It won’t happen again.”

  “Good.” Something far back in Mason’s gaze seemed to click. “Sit down, I want to talk for a while.”

  Jeremy did as he was told, sliding into the leather seat on the other side of his father’s dragon desk. Jeremy had once awoken from a nightmare, covered in sweat, wherein the desk had been chasing him through a dark forest. The desk had galloped after him, each of its severed-head feet wheezing the boy’s name. Caught in panicked flight, Jeremy had looked over his shoulder to make certain the monstrous furniture wasn’t right on top of him when he crashed into a tree. He’d looked up and saw that it wasn’t a tree at all, but the blue-suited leg of a giant. His father, a hundred feet tall, had looked down and shook his head. You deserve this, he had thundered. Jeremy had sat up in bed, tears flowing down his cheeks.

  He waited for his father to talk first.

  Intent on some papers, Mason said nothing for almost a full minute. Jeremy wondered if his father did things like this—let the silence stretch out and engulf—just to make him squirm. Whatever the reason, it always worked.

  “Finish your homework?” Mason asked without looking up.

  Jeremy’s sphincter contracted so fast it almost hurt. “Yes.”

  Mason caught the blankness there and looked up. “Oh yeah? What was the assignment?”

  “We had to read about the history of calculus,” Jeremy said. “And answer some questions.”

  “You do a good job?”

  Jeremy couldn’t remember a word of what he’d written down. He had a memory flash of walking by a half a sheet of inked notebook paper on the way out of the door, but nothing specific came to him. “I guess.”

  “What?”

  “I mean, I guess I won’t know until it gets graded tomorrow.”

  Mason scanned his boy for a second and let it go. He didn’t give a shit what the little brainiac was studying anyway. It was irrelevant. When it came to pure intelligence, Jeremy could probably out think everyone at that snobby school Mason paid so much for, including the teachers. It was more a high-class day care than anything else. The kid was way beyond the work they sent him home with, but that was all right. As long as they kept exercising the boy’s mind so he would be ready when it was time to take over the family business.

  Mason was no intellectual slouch himself. He’d read and understood most of the books lining the walls of this office, but he didn’t have the kind of brain his son possessed. Maybe if his own father had allowed him to explore his mental abilities as he did with Jeremy, Mason would be even smarter than he was now. Francis Mason Sr. hadn’t believed in formal edification past high school, preferring his name sake get more of a real world education. Mason the elder had little Frankie on the street running numbers by the time he was Jeremy’s age. By eighteen, Frank Jr. had already been in charge of the low-end gambling and book-making operations for over a year. When his old man died
of a massive coronary, Frank took over the entire family business. As luck would have it, the day of his coronation had also been his twenty-first birthday.

  Jeremy was lucky, luckier than Mason in any event. The kid didn’t have the faintest idea what his father was into, what he was slated to inherit. Mason worked hard keeping the business a secret from the kid. Jeremy was brilliant and naturally inquisitive, so Mason did his best to stymie that curiosity when it came a little too close. Jeremy was smart, but he wasn’t ready to deal with what his legacy meant. Mason had ordered his first hit when he was only five years older than Jeremy was now, and had supervised the event personally. He could scarcely conceive of his delicate, genius son participating in anything more violent than the dissection of a embalmed frog.

  He looked at Jeremy now, blonde like his mother, that bitch, and with eyes like his. Eyes that went deep and kept going. There was strength in there, he knew it. All it would take was careful planning, and he would mold his boy into a prince worthy of the family throne. What a leader he would one day make; what a powerhouse Jeremy could be with intelligence like that. In the meantime, Mason had to maintain a tight grip on that mind. Jeremy was too smart to just let him think for himself. Well, control was not a problem.

  “Horton tells me you almost got into a fight the other day at school.”

  Jeremy remembered the other boys standing around Seung, ready to pounce. He remembered the anger at the unfairness, the heat that had propelled him across the school yard. His heart began to pound. “Yeah,” he began, speaking quickly. “These other kids were going to—”

  Mason held up a hand, and Jeremy silenced. “How many of them were there?”

  “Three.”

  Mason nodded, and for a shining instant Jeremy thought his father was proud of him, then Mason said, “You were stupid.”

  Jeremy looked at the floor. Out of the corner of his eye, a severed head stared forward, its black tongue lolled. Here came the lesson. “Yes, sir.”

  “What do we do when we’re confronted with superior numbers?”

  Jeremy knew his role in the tired play, and kept his mouth shut.

  “Do we just charge in like some lump of meat? Do we?”

  Jeremy and the head regarded one another.

  “No, we don’t,” Mason said and tented his fingers on the desk blotter. “What have I told you to do when the odds are stacked against you?”

  Now, set up to repeat Mason’s own words, Jeremy took his cue. “Change the odds.”

  Mason sat back. “There were three of them,” he said, constructing the image. “What could you have done?”

  Jeremy saw it himself, that little triangle of cruelty around Seung. He got an image of the Korean boy moving like water, guiding Noah Wright through the air. Jeremy tried not to smile. If Seung had actually needed his help, what could he have done? His father was right. The other boys would’ve stomped him as flat as they had intended to stomp Seung. Jeremy took a stab, “I guess I could’ve called Mr. Horton,” and wished he’d thought of something else the second after it was out of his mouth.

  Mason seemed to consider the option. “You could have, and when you grow up you will delegate assignments to your employees.” He frowned at his son. “But for now, you can’t act like a sissy and call for your bodyguard every time you get a little scared.”

  “Yeah, but I didn’t call—”

  “What else could you have done?”

  Jeremy blanked. He knew his father would see it and waited.

  “You could have waited, Jeremy. You could have waited until there weren’t three of them and taken them on one at a time.” Mason mused for a moment. “Or, once their numbers were down you could have attacked from behind if the opportunity had presented itself.”

  Jeremy wanted to wrinkle up his nose. If a thought could have an odor, then what his father had just said smelled like old trash on a hot day. What Mason wanted him to do was no better than what Noah Wright and his toadies had been up to in the first place.

  “Don’t start in with that unfairness bullshit again, either,” Mason said. “I’ve told you a million times: the world is unfair, so...” he held out his hand, palm up.

  “So I have to be unfair,” Jeremy recited.

  “That’s right,” Mason said, and bent over his papers again. “I’ll see you at dinner.”

  “Yes, sir,” Jeremy said and stood up to leave. Just as he got to the door, his father spoke.

  “Make me proud with those lessons, boy. See if you can’t get a little blood out of Horton next time.”

  Jeremy turned around.

  “Don’t look at me like that. He can take it. He’s paid to take it.”

  “Yes, sir.” Jeremy said. He thought about explaining that Aikido was a means of bloodless self-defense, but stopped himself. It would be wasted on his father. In fact, it would be a good way to lose his lessons. Jeremy closed the door, slowly, carefully behind him. He stood in the hall and checked his watch. Dinner wasn’t until seven and it was only six-fifteen. Jeremy decided to waste some time surfing the internet from the computer in the library and walked down the hall.

  * * *