Casual Heroing

Chapter 249: Dad

“Your mother told me you made a problem,” my dad enters the room, flour still hiding below his nails and in a few spots in his short beard. My dad is tall and built like an athlete, someone who always despised the soft forms of the middle-class. He speaks with a slight Arabic accent, not yet accustomed to speaking French all day and to the fact that his daughter never learned fully learned his own language.

I look at him with tears still in my eyes. Today was the first day at the new school, the one I got a scholarship for. I had always thought of myself as a great genius, but today my world had come crashing down on me.

“I had an episode, daddy,” I say, hugging the pillow.

My family was poorly equipped to deal with mental health. My mother didn’t even want to acknowledge that something was wrong with me; my dad, instead, simply didn’t have the time to.

“You have a scholarship,” he says as if that’s something that means anything to me. “Not common… they are not common.”

I can feel what he’s saying. Private scholarship at the middle school level are almost unheard of. Especially among kids who should be in an earlier grade. This is not an American tv show. The school hierarchies are much harder to navigate. It takes a massive genius, larger than life, to skip a grade.

But that’s what I always felt I was.

Felt.

Was.

I don’t want to stare at my father’s brown eyes. I don’t want to know what he thinks about this. I couldn’t take the disappointment. I know my family is poor, I know that every month is a struggle, and I know that he tried everything in his power to bring me up as someone not mean.

My dad always says that not having money makes it easier to be a crook. He says that if you don’t have money, it’s easy to be mean. And if you have money, it’s easy to be kind. So, we have to be particularly careful about not being mean just because there’s not much money going around the house. And, unlike my mother, he tries hard not to make everything about having, or not having, money.

I feel my dad tentative hug as he puts his strong arms around my thin and emaciated body.

“What happen?” he asks, softly, keeping my head against his shoulder.

I feel some pressure building up in my heart. I need to see. I need to know if my father is disappointed in me, if he doesn’t want a daughter who wastes her gift just like that.

“I saw a group of girls bullying a black girl,” I tell him, “I punched one right on the nose and I got suspended. They also want to talk with you tomorrow and they said I risk being expelled.”josei

“Like Clint Eastwood,” my father says. He loves westerns.

“Like Clint Eastwood,” I smile.

“Good,” he nods. “Tell you mother… I spank you, ok?”

I nod, a bit relieved.

“Daddy, they said they are going to sue me,” I tell him.

“I take care of it,” he says over his shoulder.

…

When I look at the remnants of the fire that consumed my father’s bakery and his life, I wonder what was going on in his head at the time. And like lightning, I also wonder on the spot if I will ever be as good as him. It turns out that he had to take a loan all those years ago to pay back the family who sued me.

And I lied, I didn’t punch the girl because she was bullying someone, I punched her teeth out because she looked like a bitch. That, as a butterfly gently shaking its wings can create a hurricane, created the fire inside my father’s bakery. Business had gone down in the last few years, and I got the privilege of seeing his entire business and his life go charred because of me.

How bad does that feel?

I don’t know.

What I know is that they were moving the burned body inside a sack and that I caught a glimpse of my father’s face. He’s not a black husk, but simply died of asphyxiation. His wrinkles are still visible, with a few spots burned off his face. His hair, still black, goes well with the dark plastic bag they are carrying him in.

Loan sharks.

My father went to loan sharks to get money and they killed him when he refused to pay. I would discover some of this later, after investigating my father’s death. But what happened was pretty clear: my father had given his life to me. He only had one daughter left and he had never thought for one second that this sacrifice would be too much for her.

I smile for a stupid reason. Why? Well, if this had happened a little earlier, I could have used it as my origin story for becoming a cold-blooded criminal. Instead, I’ve already made the first money with my illegal trades even before graduating. Nothing major like what I’ve planned for on the long term, but I’m already in. And no, I wouldn’t have stopped just because of my father’s words or anything else.

I didn’t start this because my family was dysfunctional or because I had a weird childhood. I was more loved than many kids who grew in Porte de la Chapelle and had more money than many other immigrants’ children. I had a brain that could have made the fortunes of my entire family. I have a normal job and I could have paid for my family’s ticket out of poverty. I could have probably paid off my father’s debts in time as well.

The truth, however, is that I didn’t really care.

I think I loved my father, but I’m not sure how much I have ever respected him. It’s hard to explain. I commend his hard work and all he tried to give me, but I simply don’t understand how he could have done it. My father and I… we are different. He tried as hard as he could to fit in this world, so hard he broke himself. He died while looking for a shred of normalcy.

My mother left him.

His other daughter died.

The one daughter he had left turned out to be a shrewd criminal who has no problem with killing and drawing the blood of innocents and criminals alike. Maybe it’s the pain and the hurt that are below everything else. People try to explain things to themselves, giving different versions of the story each time. We can be incoherent in a good or a bad way. It’s good when we are incoherent because we grow up, because we go beyond what initially defined us and we evolve. It’s bad when we twist reality to serve as a justification for what we do.

So, when I look over my feelings, I wonder if I’ll twist them again the next time I’ll find it convenient. Because, at the current moment, I don’t feel like crying. I don’t feel like what I did wrong is hurting me. I don’t feel like much.

Revenge? Sure, that’s going to come. But that’s a chore. Something you stumble while you are on your way.

My father lived a life that I do not fully respect. I did respect my father, but not what he did. Maybe he wasn’t enough of a man to win at this game, or maybe he was just another victim. It’s a matter of cold perspective.

Sometimes I think about the values that he tried to pass onto me. One of them was family. He always tried to teach me how important it is to look after each other, to think of your family even when you were tired and wanted nothing more than to lay down on your bed and close your eyes. In his mind, family came before everything.

And it begs the question: who’s right?

Was it my mother who abandoned a sinking ship or my father, who stuck with it until the end?

Dying wasn’t assured, but he was on the right track for a bad reckoning soon. And even if my mother eloped, I don’t feel much toward that either. My father was strong and half-smart, my mother, instead, just a bitch. She had no brain. Probably where my sister got being retard from. And so, as a woman of few means, what should she have done? If life is not a book where the main character wins, what should have my mother have done other than run away and hope for a better life?

My father would be the fitting protagonist for a tragedy. In a way, I feel like he deserves to be the protagonist of whatever book would involve his family as well. Among all of us, he was the one who stuck with it when things went south. He was the man who tried so hard to overcome his poor origins and worked to death so that at least one member of his family could have a better life.

Me?

I don’t know if I’d want a book about me, or any story at all. Maybe history books. Now that I think better about it, history books for sure. A movie, though? I’m not so sure. Only if my personality was reported as being different, as they often do with great leaders and historical figures. Something more inspiring, something that could have kids say, ‘I want to become like her,’ and mean the exact opposite of what I am right now. If you ask why, just because I don’t think there’s anything in it for them to be like me.

I am here because I have no other choice.

What I do, I do because I see it as my path in life. I could have stayed put, resting, having a family. Maybe I would have had a nightmare here and there, taken some Xanax or hypnotic drug to sleep. In another life, I’m a willy-nilly person who laughs, jokes, and keeps up the façade that sometimes I put up with to interact with people.

In another life, I’m wearing a mask all the time, I’m being nice to people, I use most of what I can do for good; maybe I help the homeless, and maybe I’m looking after those who need help. In another life, I’m happier, I’m less desensitized to the little things—to the big things as well. In another life, I’m a man who enjoys stupid chit-chat, who can say something stupid with a smile and be happy about it.

In another life, I’m someone who doesn’t judge herself and the others so harshly, who’s blocked by her own mind in a cage; and maybe, just maybe, I just think about finding the right person for me, instead of giving that up upfront.

Sometimes I wish I could know if anywhere in the world there’s a person who feels what I feel. So far, it doesn’t seem like it. Out of all the people I’ve come to know, no one hides the same secrets I hold. No one. But sometimes I wish I could send a letter to the others person in this world who lives like me. But now, it’s too late. The warpath I’m putting my footprints on is only large enough for one person. There’s no space for a family, nor for love.

But still.

If I could do something in my life, I would like to know the one person who’s like me, who could understand. I wish I could meet a person capable of putting a smile on my face, of breaking through the gelatinous mold that encases my soul. It’s inane, but I wish there was a person who could bring me a letter like the owls in Harry Potter, tell me there’s a magical place in this world where I can be different.

Or maybe not. Not anymore. There’s already too much blood on my hands and I would drag that to whatever place I ever put my foot on. At some point in my life, I took a choice. And that choice was to be who I currently am. Unlike many imagine, you can’t come back from every choice. Some of them stick with your soul forever.

And so, I hope I’ll never meet that person who’s like me, the other half of my soul.

I put a hand on my cheek, feeling a lone tear trickling down my eye.

“Goodbye, dad,” I say while walking away.