On the future and past of madness
Chapter 2
On the future and past of madness
The drive to collect his co-driver was tedious and lacking in the enjoyment that his morning had featured. Thanks to a recent hurricane, Texas had closed most of the rest areas, making it far harder to meet the demands of nature and a shaking truck. He could not concentrate on the biography of Lyndon Johnson that his phone was playing and found himself mentally drifting. After a few hours he began to enter the traffic stream that was I-35 heading into Dallas Texas. His phone now played him the collected symphonies of Mozart in an effort to ensure he did not disintegrate it for the crimes of the Google app four days before.
Keeping people alive was not entertaining work. Crushing them into the bloody pulp that they seemed to be asking for would have been far too much paperwork and hassle to deal with. Dodging a sub-compact silver Chevy Spark, he pondered just what would have been left of that tin can. It had entered the freeway, refused to get up to speed on the entrance ramp, as protocol and etiquette demanded, and then cut him off. Normally, the vehicle in a lane has the right of way: apparently the driver of the Spark assumed that he, by default, had it. Rather than yielding to eighty thousand pounds of crushing death, the driver decided to simply cruse at forty-five miles an hour in a fifty-five zone, expecting the truck to slam on its breaks to make way for his evidently pressing business, forty-five miles an hour business.
Despite wishing the wiry man driving the Spark a nonrefundable trip to the deity of his choice, Nom decided to not kill the man. He pulled the handle on his Jake break to the third position, pressed the foot break, and prayed to the non-existent god that the truck in the middle lane would let him in… It was over... The shitty driver was alive. Nom was in the middle lane, contemplating the nature of stupidity. Not a wave. Not a shrug of apology in the front window of the Spark as Nom passed him. Nothing to indicate that this moron knew that he had come within a few seconds of a rather gruesome death.
"Damn you! Learn how to drive! What? Are you too busy screwing the goats on your ranch to learn the rules of the road!... Just fucking die!" Nom shouted into the ether.
At that moment it happened. The man slumped in his seat, the Chevy spark swerved to the right and bounced off the guard rail. It slid behind Nom's truck spinning like a dervish, causing a dozen car pile-up.
The mass of traffic pressed Nom forward making it impossible for him to stop without making the pile up worse. Besides he was not an EMT or fire fighter. What aid could he possibly offer? With one eye on the road in front of him, and the other in his driver's side mirror, Nom watched the piles of twisted metal recede behind him.
"What just happened?" Nom asked himself. Nom prided himself on being a rational being. All things had rational explanations, and the concept of fate, or some kind of supernatural influence was hokum at best. Since there was no coherent reason to assume that he had miraculously acquired telekinesis or some other power that would have enabled him to influence that crash, he had to assume that it was nothing more than a coincidence. Still it was somehow satisfying to see the Spark driver get his just desserts. From the looks of the car, the probability of the driver being alive was insignificant. The driver's side had taken a broadside impact from a black Ford F-150. The truck's bumper would have come in just at the level of the Spark driver's head, the axles at the level of his chest. The truck rested at an angle, half in, and half on top of the compacted sub compact.
This was not the first time that Nom had seemed to mysteriously summon the Grim Reaper. Years before he had been asked by his father to visit his maternal grandfather in the nursing home. The man had been a swine of the lowest order. Racist, religious zealot, sociopath, there was nothing about him that did not scream good ol' southern' boy. One of Nom's most vivid memories was when the bastard rose to object at his granddaughter's wedding, she had the audacity to marry a Jew.
Nom first ran a personal errand to the administrator's office, then checked up on his grandmother. She was refusing to leave her ailing husband's side. He had less affection for her than he did for his grandfather. If his parents had not lived across the country, and personally asked him to go there, he would have as soon set the place on fire as visit it.
As Nom looked at the decrepit crap pile that was his grandfather, he came to a decision. When the nursing staff left, and his grandmother went into the bathroom, Nom bent down and whispered in his grandfather's ear.
"We never got along, now did we?" He asked. His grandfather was paralyzed from his most recent stroke, and could only blink in reply. "Remember the last time I saw you? Yes, I can see it in your eyes. I told you that the next time would be to look down at your pathetic whimpering carcass as your last breath fled you. Well… I guess since I'm here… today must be the day. That hag you call a wife doesn't know…"
Nom looked over his shoulder to ensure that they were still alone. "I'll tell you a secret, but don't tell anyone, ok?" Nom said with a grin. "I spoke with the attending. Your newest stroke, know what caused it? No? Well, I'll tell you. Your fat ass lying in that bed has built a beautiful blood clot in your right leg. That's why it hurts so much."
"Yes, I can see by your wincing that you want to say something. Fortunately for me, I just don't care. Want to know something more? Well, I went over to your place on my way here. My father told me to bring your final documents. Well it seems you signed a living will and, le pièce de résistance, a DNR."
Nom pulled the folded DNR from his jacket pocket, unfurled it and waved it like a banner before the dying man's eyes. "I love this part in the middle."
Nom held it out and read with his finger tracing the text. "In the event I am unable to communicate my wishes, either verbally or in writing, it is my expressed wish that I receive only palliative care."
Nom smiled, folded the document and returned it to his pocket. "You seemed surprised that I found this. Well, too bad. I've already used it. Yes! glare at me!" He chuckled. "On my way in, I gave it to the administrative director of the nursing home. Told her that you want to throw the towel in, and wouldn't you know, she agreed!"
"This is it shit stain. Your last day. The attending says, that unless we get you to a hospital for treatment right away, more and more pieces of that clot will break off. You'll keep stroking and stroking until you die. He seems to think it will only take hours. The admin and I put on quite a show for him, and he's agreed to respect your 'wishes'."
Nom reached out, took his grandfather's hand and patted it comfortingly. "I want to thank you for this. The look of terror, hate, and rage in your eyes is something I am going to treasure for the rest of my days. Before you go, I just wanted to say thanks for all your kind words of "wisdom" over the years. Your speeches on the virtues of racism and anti-Semitism, raising my mother in an evangelical cult which she is still stuck in for, what was it you said? That's right… 'Entertainment.' Then there was all those highly creative means of discipline and wisdom you imparted. I'm proud to say I still have some of the scars from that leather strap across my backside three decades later. Oh, and thanks for raising my mother to be the special blend of mental goulash that she is. Helpless creature that she is, she passed on all your wisdom and teachings to my generation."
Nom turned to take the visitors seat, but paused. Protocol demanded that he ask his grandfather's preferences on his final wishes after all. "Would you prefer that I piss or crap on your grave? What was that? Sorry, I can't quite make out what that clenched jaw and blinking means… Oh, of course… You're right. Taking a crap out in the open is a bit of a production, much easier to just take a piss. Thanks."
Having finished, he sat down to wait for his grandmother and the inevitable. It only took five hours.
Years later Nom found himself looking at his paternal grandmother. Unlike his mother's kin, he felt a great love for her. She had kept a family of angry borderline psychopaths stable and balanced. She was a master juggler. Under her care, the narcissism and sadistic feeding had been curbed to a near nonexistent level.
Five years before, her diabetes had begun taking its final course. Like his maternal grandfather she suffered a series of strokes. She went blind, lost her memory, and much of her motor skills. In the end she was simply a husk. She had once been the most intelligent person Nom had ever known.
His greatest pleasure of childhood, was sitting and discussing the finer points of philosophy with her. She had a wonderful tradition of giving books she felt people should have read by that point in their lives. For Easter in his tenth year, she gave him Plato's Republic. Christmas that year came with Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. His next birthday was met with Dante's Divine Comedy. Nietzsche, Marx, Kierkegaard, Sarteall, and Schopenhauer all came and went before he turned twelve. Every time they met, she expected, no demanded, that he be able to hold an intelligent discussion on the last book given him.
She had led an extraordinary life. Being German and an adult in the nineteen thirties, she had been drafted into Hitler's war machine. Her brothers were forced to serve on the fronts. She ran a local branch of the Bund Deutscher Madel, the female version of the Hitler Youth. Her bureaucratic genius managed to keep countless would-be Hitler zombies in the background, and away from the fronts. After the war she married a refugee who had survived the holocaust. She came to the US with him, and stroked his ego and career. When she was done, he was the most prominent physician in his field.
Nom was going to be sad when she died, but to him she had passed years before. In his mind, without sentience, she was no longer human. The strokes left her a non-sentient being. Once she had spoken five languages, been the most well-read person he had ever known, and been an intellectual giant. Now she only knew that she was in pain and little else.
He had been left alone with her in her bedroom. Nom was supposed to watch her, so his grandfather could get some sleep in the guest room. His German was rusty, but it was the only language she understood anymore. He leaned over her bed, and in his barely intelligible German said. "Grandma, it's time. I know that you held on so that you wouldn't have to leave Grandpa alone, but you have to. I promise you, that I will watch him for you. It is time. You have suffered enough. You can go."
That was all it took. An hour later when she was being fed, she inhaled instead of swallowing. She took a piece of peach into her airway, and started choking. A few minutes later, Nom's grandfather honoring her DNR, pronounced her dead. Three weeks later honoring his promise, Nom moved in to care for his grandfather. The family wanted to move the man and a special needs aunt into a nursing home. Nom kept them in their house for an extra five years.
Thinking about the past, and his brushes with death, Nom's baser nature and ego began to dwell on the impossibility that he had actually caused the Spark driver to crash. The deaths of his two grandparents had been events he'd effected, but they had natural explanations. In one, he had used his maternal grandfather's stupidity to seek his revenge. In the other, he told a tired and broken woman that she could go to her eternal rest, knowing that things would be taken care of for her. What possible natural explanation could there be for the accident? It had to simply be a coincidence.
Shortly after the Spark accident passed from sight, Nom spotted a truck stop at the next exit. The second cardinal rule of trucking is to never pass up a chance to take a piss. The first rule, of course, is safety above all else. Nom activated his turn signal and merged over to the right lane. Exiting, he meandered into the diesel island, and pulled forward to the waiting spot.
A few minutes later, having obliged one aspect of nature, he decided to grab lunch. The truck stop had a burger joint, he walked over and placed his order. Sitting in a booth awaiting his food, he was introduced to one of those people who simply cannot help but be social.
The older driver was a classic motor mouth, switching topics like a NASCAR driver switching gears. Unfortunately, he, like Nom's deceased maternal grandfather, was a good ol' southern boy. Each topic he discussed came with a joke. Most were peppered with tasteless slurs. Jokes about altar boys dividing their hair down the middle, because priests needing something to do with their two free hands while "absolving them".
"How is pedophilia funny?" Nom wondered. He could see how a properly demented mind could find un-politically correct jokes funny, but pedophilia? Puzzling.
The trucker seemed to not notice that Nom was mostly looking at his phone, trying to ignore the verbal onslaught. Then the codger decided to offer tax advice. Apparently, everything a driver did was a tax deduction. What the IRS did not know, was to his advantage. Cat Scale tickets, tolls, fuel, anything that his company bought could be claimed as a business expense. The thieving bastard had not paid taxes in years thanks to all of his "business expenses" resulting in a loss.
What would the government waste that money on? Obama Care for some loser? Food stamps for some "c****" too stupid to use birth control? Needle exchanges for "n******" and "f***", to avoid almighty God's "just" wrath? He could spend that money on whores and fun, a far better use.
Nom's mind was desperately seeking a reason not to leap over the table to the next booth and jab a spork into the good ol' boy's carotid artery. It was almost as if his hated grandfather had reincarnated.
Disgusted, Nom finally spoke to his tormenter. "Screw you, Red Neck! Why don't you go screw yourself while being run over by a bus? That way you could still be disgusting, and at least be original at the same time?" Nom left the restaurant without his food. The old driver sputtered retorts at his fading back. Nom full of rage heard not a word of it.
Nom got into his truck and prepared to leave. As he was starting the engine, the red neck trucker emerged Fortunately, he started to walk towards his own truck. This led him right into the path of a different semi exiting the area.
The approaching truck did not take him dead on center, but slightly to the side. The driver tried to hit his breaks and swerve, but only succeeded in making the scenario worse. The ancient racist might have survived going under the middle of the truck, but the passenger steer wheel went right over him. It carried six-thousand-pounds of weight. It was as if Gallagher, had delivered the coup de grâce with one of his fruit mallets.
Twice. Twice in one day, a wish for the death of some swine had been granted. True the old bigot had not been jerking off, nor was he hit by a bus, but this was almost the same. What the hell was going on?
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