John Hadleyburg was by all accounts a good man.
Everything you’d see when you looked at him would
bring you back to that statement. Try it. See the way he teaches both his kids
to ride a bike, one hand in each shoulder, encouraging always. See the way he
kisses his wife at night, it makes you wonder why don’t married couples kiss
more often. Greeting the janitor at his office, you can see they’ve known each
other for years. He asks about the man’s son, who’s in college far away. He’s
doing fine, apparently. And look, look here, once on the bus he saw a man
approach a younger girl, she couldn’t have been older than twenty, and he
confronted the guy. Have you ever witnessed that? Someone confronting someone
who’s approached you? Yeah. Me neither. But look, John Hadleyburg did.
When he was a kid himself, John played football like
you played football (he never really enjoyed it, I mean), he had friends like
the friends you had, he played with his sister’s dolls, sometimes to spite her,
others because they were still toys, and fun ones at that. He’d been a great
kid, like you were a great kid, until he turned 10, or 11, or 12, or God knows
what age. The same age you were when you started becoming who you are now.
And so you have seen John Hadleyburg, seen his life
and his actions, seen his wife and children, seen him being a bus hero for a
30-second stretch, seen him playing with dolls.
What do you know of him?
If you wanted to know more about John Hadleyburg, I
think I could tell you more. Show you more, even. Look: John has been married
these past 13 years, and in that period he’s only had two affairs, Susan and
Julie, both coworkers of his. And even those were some time ago. Things have
been pretty well between his wife and him, but then again she never knew. Did
you know John has three children? He doesn’t know about the other one, Liam,
his first. The mother is this college girlfriend he never really liked. After
they broke up, weeks after, I mean, she tried to call him, talk to him. He
never answered the phone. And she stopped trying a short time after. And there
was this bad period in his life, this dark if short bit, when he thinks he
half-remembers some unpleasantness with this girl at a party, something he’d
done, but also something he didn’t really like to think about and so tried not
to. It was a long time ago, really.
And so you have known John Hadleyburg, known of his
petty sins and moments of weakness, known of the times he’d rather move on,
known of those unpleasant things he really doesn’t like to think about.
What do you think of him?
Say, say, hah, if this John was an apple, and I mean your favorite
kind of apple, an apple whose juiciness you can guess just by looking at it, if
John was an apple, I was saying, how rotten do you think he’d be?
Completely? A monster inside and out, made more of
flies than of actual fruit? That would be unfair, I think. And so would you, if
you’d paid any attention at all to the way he’s teaching those kids how to ride
their bikes. Nothing completely rotten would do it the way he does, persist
like he does, two weeks gone by already since the bikes were bought.
So maybe he’s the apple you look at, lying alone on a
plate, and that you pick up, hungry as you are, but end up not biting, because
look: it’s all rotten on the underside. And let me tell you, maybe he is that
one, I can’t see why not. Shiny pretty thing, greenishly reflecting the
glorious sunlight. But. I see a but. I look at John, y’see, and I can’t help
but think that he’s an apple that you’d definitely, definitely, bite. So how rotten can he
be, yes? Only if all that brown rot was within the apple, hidden beneath layers
of sweet juice suddenly turned bitter. Can an apple rot like that, from the
inside out? I suspect not, but I know little about apples.
And still we don’t know exactly what he is, even after
this dumb exercise with the fruit. He just feels so unclean, right? After you’ve
known his history, it’s like you wish he’d just be gone without much
unpleasantness, just be gone so you can forget about him.
But don’t forget what I told you, right at the
beginning, the only thing you really know about him: John Hadleyburg is a good
man. Repeat it. Again. Like he does, from time to time. And he does it because
he knows, deep down he knows, that he has never done anything wrong; anything
really wrong.
I think… I think it’s just the way things start to get
lopsided after a while, that’s all. You’re young, we’re all young since we’re
all alive, so we may not be fully aware of this fact, but the world, the
universe, after a while it just seems a bit… crooked. The things you tell
yourself change, they stop being promises and they become excuses. You allow
for one excuse, once. And it was one too many.
If you were an apple, your favorite kind of apple, I
mean, how rotten would you be?
Well. Well, you came here for one thing, yes? What
Corrupted Hadleyburg, good man that he was, he is, and nonetheless corrupted,
that’s what you want to know. You have to know, I don’t have a good answer. I
don’t. I look at this that I’ve told you, that I’ve read, I look at it and I
still don’t have a better answer than this, which isn’t a good answer at all:
What corrupted John Hadleyburg was life.
I’m sorry.
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