Happy Thanksgiving!
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This again…
“Perhaps Tolstoy was right,” said Jacques Dubois. He had recently just visited his friends from high school. During this reunion, the primary event in his family, which had been occurring for the past few years, and culminating in the day before the reunion, had clouded his mind, made him unhappy, and therefore he felt like he was unable to connect with his friends, to revel in the same passions and fancies as he did with his friends the years prior. In fact, thoughts of this event were still in his head as he was driving back down to California. These thoughts ranged from despondent to suicidal in nature, and for some reason, these thoughts always seemed to string themselves in such a way that always ended in some sort of death. “How macabre!” he would exclaim after each string of thoughts had passed, and then would feel a rumbling in the car, signifying that he had a lapse of concentration on his driving, and had swerved out of the lane over to the side of the road.
Jacques’ family was, in his father’s words, French expatriates living in America. The family was small; of four people. Jacques had a younger sister of six years old. The father and mother, Marcel Dubois and Marie Le, had been married for over twenty years before the culmination of the event happened. Marie and Marcel were both ardent politicians. Marie often travelled to France and Quebec to partake in the politics during the election season, Marcel was a leading member of the Socialist Party. And so, Marie happened to meet Marcel during the election season that would eventually end in Mitterrand being elected for a second term. Marcel, in Marie’s words, “swept me off the ground so quickly and with such strength and elegance that I remained floating on air.” Before the election results had been announced, they resolved to marry.
The newly-wed couple decided to settle down in Marie’s family home in Eugene, Oregon, seeing as they still lacked the financial means to buy their own home. They had their first child, a boy, Jacques, two years after their marriage. They resolved to love him with all their heart. For those next two years, more than ever, Marie and Marcel loved each other through the common bond of their childhood, perhaps more passionately than during their engagement. Marcel, during those fragile infant years of the child, decided to take a leave from French politics and participated in the much more local Quebec political circuit, in which he could go to Quebec and back within a day, if needed. As a result from his political dabbling, Marcel, and later Marie, ended up being citizens of France, the United States, and Canada.
However, as Jacques became the age in which children normally start attending school, Marcel once again found the allure of French politics irresistible, and once again joined the Socialist Party circuit. He urged Marie to stay with Jacques in the United States, as he ardently held the belief that the American educational system was superior to the French or Canadian educational systems. The family was still happy, nonetheless. Marcel, owning to the lenient nature of the French work calendar, was still at home for slightly less than half of the year. Marie took joy in watching Jacques grow, marking each bit of progress she saw in him a diary.
Marie came from a family of independent-minded individuals. By the time Jacques was in his last year of elementary school, she felt this urge to once again return to the political scene. She had been dabbling in political discussions and meetings all during Jacques’ childhood, but those paltry meetings did not satiate her desire for political involvement. She resolved, by the time Jacques reached adolescence, to once again go abroad for part of the year. Thus, when Jacques entered middle school, Marie began teaching him responsible housekeeping in addition to his supplemental lessons.
In the same time period, a change came over Marcel. He saw that his political career was stagnating. While he eventually rose to become a prominent figure in the Socialist Party, he felt as if his familial responsibilities prevented him from rising further. He resolved to make sure that Jacques entered the business field, ensuring that Jacques would not fall down the same path as he did. He began to formulate a plan for Jacques. He would enter Stanford, do his undergraduate studies in some technical field, and then go on to business school at Stanford. Marcel was particularly enamored with Stanford because it was the best American university in a warm climate. Marcel hated cold climates; he always avoided visiting Jacques and Marie in Eugene during the cold, wet, autumn and winter.
Marcel began to see the change in Marie before she was even consciously aware of it. To prevent Marie from dabbling too much abroad (he believed and fully supported her desire to reenter the politics, but feared that she would become carried away, and therefore compromise Jacques’ education), the family had another child, a girl, whom they named Jasmine. The family did not feel such a strong bond from the birth of the second child. She seemed to foreign to them, as if the perfect mingling of Asian and Caucasian traits that happened in Jacques went awry, and instead created a being so unlike the two ethnicities. They could never seem to love Jasmine as much as Jacques. In fact, merely two months after her birth, Marcel returned back to the French political scene. His party mates just presumed that he had taken an extended vacation in Mexico, or the Bahamas, or some other exotic destination.
So, instead of making a grand return to the political scene, Marie was forced to take care of yet another child. Jacques was no help in taking care of the child; perhaps he also shared the same view that she was almost foreign to the family. Marie quickly became dissatisfied with her life. She felt as if chains were binding her to matrimonial duties. During these years of Jasmine’s early childhood, she started to think of a terrible, forbidden thing. This thing she thought of was such a terrible thing, that it made her reel back in disgust every time she thought of it. Yet this thing was also so alluring, that like a sinner who commits the same sin over and over again, in ever increasing intensity, simply because of the forbidden enjoyment her derives from the sin, Marie kept thinking of said thing more and more. Eventually, during Marcel’s visits back home, she began quarrelling with him over the thing. Marcel realized the change for the worse in Marie’s disposition, yet he knew that he had to keep the thing from happening, at least until Jacques could enter Stanford. Jasmine, he did not care about so much.
And such, the summer after Jacques found out he was not admitted to Stanford, and only to UCLA, the house that the family lived in started to divide in two. The thing was mentioned more and more often, and eventually, both parties agreed, and to the lovely surprise of Jacques, who had just driven for eleven hours to reach home from Los Angeles to celebrate Thanksgiving with his family, the first thing his parents made clear to him was that…
-
“Of course I’m all to blame. It’s my fault that I ended up not where I wanted to be. Of course, my parents say that UCLA is a great school also. Of course, I have this delusion that everything will be okay. But both my parents are politicians, and they have brought me up so that I also have the thought process of a politician. Politicians are masters at concealing what they truly feel. In telling me that it’s okay, both my parents are implying that I’m the chief reason that the event happened.”
Jacques noticed it was already nearly dark, and he had barely made it to Redding. He would still have to drive eight more hours to return back to Los Angeles, and he had to attend class tomorrow. His whole mind was still in convulsions, trying to piece his family’s history with his own failures and trying to create a whole justification as to why the event happened. But to no avail.
“They never could understand how much pressure was on me to succeed. I had to succeed. All of my extended family viewed me as the prodigy, the sure shot into Stanford. Yet in the last year, all the realities, all the scaffolding of this false glorification that was built around me, crashed upon me as if it were a glass house breaking. The cuts have healed up by now; they healed back in April, but the scars are still there and will always remind me of my failures.”
Jacques had, in the last two, crucial years of high school, had developed a pseudo-addiction to marijuana. He was nonchalantly introduced to it by a friend in high school, back when they were spending spring break in California. Since this innocent introduction, he had developed cravings for the substance, yet he always had enough composure to avoid intoxicating himself in the presence of his parents, or his sister. He always kept some in the car, in the sunglass pouch. He never wore sunglasses anyways, so he felt that the space would be at least put to some use this way.
He smoked whenever the pressures his father and his mother placed on him were surmounting. It had varied effects on him. Sometimes it would make him happy, so happy, as if he were on a cloud. Sometimes it would just throw him into a pensive depression in which, strangely, he could concentrate on his academics better, but also could not bear the presence of others.
Jacques, again, in his current agitated state of mind over the event, touched upon the subject of suicide. He wondered what suicide would feel like. It would be quick and painless, but he was scared to death of the preparations, what his mind would be going through during the actual thing, and in the seconds leading up to it, those seconds when a man has made up his mind, but yet has failed to put any part of the plan into action. To him, suicide seemed like an attractive way to rid him of all his troubles. Perhaps he would float on a cloud into the afterlife.
But to counteract these malicious thoughts, Jacques then wondered at what the aftereffects of the suicide would be. He feared for his father, having already cast off his love of twenty-plus years. He might be driven into suicide. His mother might become unapproachable, fueled by an eternal hate over what will have transpired. And his sister, the greatest tragedy of them all, would be forced to live under her hateful presence. Jacques never really made it known to his parents, but during these past few years of intensifying quarrelling, he found his sister his greatest joy in life, the one respite from life he could always look towards. Seeing his sister again was one of his primary reasons in taking the drive back to Eugene in one day, where should reasonably be done in two.
“Perhaps I shall just try it, just try it to see what it’s like. Just a little try. Then I’ll never do it again.”
Jacques’ hand reached for the sunglasses compartment…
-
The road began to blur. The white reflective strips in the middle of the lane, and the yellow reflective strips at either ends of the highway began to mingle with the red taillights of the truck in front of him, forming combinations of purple, orange, and green. He, all of a sudden, under the strain from having driving for the whole day, and having this terrible event on his mind, felt incomprehensibly tired. He took his foot off the gas pedal and his head dropped on the steering wheel.
-
“Oh my gosh you’re still conscious!”
When Jacques awoke he was staring into the brown eyes of a woman. She had long dark brown hair, and was of quite a tan complexion. He guessed that she was Hispanic.
“You’re lucky that your foot wasn’t on the gas when you dozed off. What were you thinking?”
“Huh?”
“You almost caused a crash between two trucks when you lost consciousness. You were in the left lane, and a truck was right behind you, trying to overtake the truck on the right, when I saw that you suddenly began to decelerate. I had to pass the truck in the shoulder, and knock you over into the grassy median. I think I dented your car a little, but it should still work.”
“Oh.”
“And why were you smoking weed? My gosh, your eyes are so red. Why would you do that to yourself. Do you have a death wish?”
“Mmm… I just wanted to try it.”
“Try what? Smoking or suicide?”
“Maybe a bit of both…? Not sure…”
“First of all, smoking is a sure addiction thing. ‘Trying’ it means that you are consigning yourself to become addicted to it. Second of all, you can’t ‘try’ suicide. You either fail and are scarred for life, or as is the case with most men, you die.”
“How do you know so much?”
“I used to be a CHP officer.” (California Highway Patrol) “You’d be surprised. The kind of thing you do happens quite often. ‘Cept people don’t lose consciousness like you did.”
“Listen, you don’t understand what I’m going through, still. My family and everything just kind of br-”
“I see. Same thing with me. And you wanna know the reason why I quit the CHP? It was the night that that happened to me and my family, and I had to work. My guard down, during a routine pull-over of a speeder, a man jumped out of the car, and hugged me, and began to kiss me. In my state of mind, I just wanted to be as terrible as possible, and I was tired of thinking. I just wanted to think of the present, and the present only, so I let him have me. Kind of like a bribe, if you wish to think of it that way.”
“Well that’s terrible. But I’m glad that somebody knows. My family is so in-”
“Indifferent? I know.”
“So what do I do from now?”
“Listen, your radio is still playing. I turned it on while waiting for you to regain consciousness. Why don’t you do what that song is saying?”
Cause I’m free as a bird now,
And this bird you’ll never change.
And this bird you cannot change.
“Think of it as an opportunity to now do whatever you please in life.” The woman went back into her pickup truck and drove away. Even before the lyrics of the song ended, all Jacques could see was her truck’s taillights in the distance, as small as the stars in the cloudless sky.
-
By the time Jacques entered the Sepulveda pass, it was almost sunrise, and the morning rush hour had already begun. As he waited in the traffic jam, he felt quite a new man, not tired at all despite having essentially not slept last night. He resolved to study finance, and perhaps go to law school someday.
