Nicholas
Chapter 1
It wasn’t that he’d been born into sorrow or poverty or any of that mess. It wasn’t even that he was an accident, for his parents had copulated lovingly one cool winter evening in their modest Oakland bungalow. “My mother was very popular and ambitious in the party and with her pen, and she observed a strict practice of what I would call benign neglect when it came to her children.”
Nicholas Card’s mother had been a famous writer and a traitor to her class. She’d grown up in the Devonshire countryside in a mansion frequented for centuries by the day’s artists and politicians and aristocrats. “In her own lifetime though, thanks to wildly hermetic parents, the charismatic visits from heads of state and culture had slowed and had finally come to a complete stop by her fifth birthday. Her childhood was cloistered and undisturbed by the world around, so she and her sisters grew in eccentric ways that over time led to belief systems set in the stone of a stiff and stoic British upper-lippery.”
When we discussed his mother, he said, “Her path is one I find interesting, but don’t like to think about much anymore. My focus was so often bent upon winning her affections. At this point, and even though she is long dead, I’m resolved in my boycott of her ridicule.”
Nicholas is not saddened by the decay of his relationship with his mother before her death. On the contrary, he thinks himself the most interesting person in the world and appreciates her role in the unfolding drama of his life. Nicholas is sometimes unhinged with an ardent fascination in his own history. “How could anyone as interesting as me, be interested in much more than myself? In my story, and in the stories from which my full story derives, there are countless universal truths and ubiquitous lessons about character. It is my job now to tell these stories. I’m writing a truly great novel.”
Nicholas spent the majority of his childhood in the suburbs of Berkeley. As a child, he enjoyed fishing and riding his bike, but he’d turned to reading when, at age 10, his brother perished in a sherbet green hospital room following a prolonged battle with Leukemia. “I’m one of society’s most interesting mongrels,” he said. My mother was British nobility, and my father came from Irish potato farmers that intermarried sometime back with American Indians, Appaches, to be clear. When I tell people this, I know what they think. They’re intimidated, because I’m such a wild card. In one mood, I may cater to people’s feelings with all the natural, careless charm in the world, and at others, I may just decide that I’m bored and act like a crazed bitch wolf. By the way, just so we’re clear, the bitch wolf in me doesn’t come from my Apache forefathers. The American Indian is truly the most noble of any of the world’s peoples. The bitch wolf comes from my English side. 800 years of constipated emotion. I’m making up for lost time.”
Nicholas is of slight build. He never weighs more than 130 pounds and stands 5 feet 6 inches. He has the low-defintion musculature and the bloodshot eyes of an academic, and sallow skin, the color of butter. “I never saw the use in exercise. The brain burns more calories than any muscle.” His face is gaunt. He appears older than he is. “I’m 65, but most people think I’m 80. The woman down the hall from me even thought I was approaching 90.” Nicholas is not dismayed by this though. “I can’t be concerned with looks. They go when you’re living the examined life, which I’ve found an absolute delight.” He lives on a variety Campbell’s soups, eggs, and beer. “I used to smoke cigarettes too, but it’s a filthy habit, and I’m happy to report that I’ve not smoked a cigarette in 4 days.”
Nicholas lives in Patten Towers, the high-rise tenement building on Market Street and East 11th in Chattanooga, TN, but he wasn’t born here, and considers no one place his home. “My home is the Arizona desert and the Thames Valley, the golden hills of Berkeley and the stretching gray of Dublin.”
Nicholas’ life is not without suffering. He has terrible gout, and he says that if someone opened his bowels they’d find some meaty, bready mass, resembling a rubber band ball. “My insides have betrayed me in ghastly ways for years.”
Most days Nicholas rises at 10. I’m an owl, not a lark,” he says. “The whole work system favors the larks, and it’s having nightmarish effects on our ability to make good decisions. I’ve got my own work to do, and so I can’t be bothered with holding down a job. You really need very little money to get along.” There is a dumpster behind the coffee house across the street from his building, and on Saturday nights, one of the pretty baristas meets him at the dumpster after closing with a trash bag full of stale bagels and dried muffins. When he wakes each morning, he pulls some glutenous loaf from the bag and chews slowly, staring from his window at the gentle bustling of southern urbana. He turns to me. “Breakfast delivered by a beautiful young woman every day of the week.” He smiles wryly.
After he eats, he gets to work. He walks three blocks to the public library, where he spends 3 hours reading over various history books in no discernable order. There is a pile of books that he hides on the library’s un-used fourth floor. The librarian tells me she knows that Nicholas hides them, but feels sorry for him, and so doesn’t interfere. His books are all about history. Most concern the industrial revolution and the World Wars. “I haven’t read a book cover to cover in ages, but since I’m reading about 20 at a time, I can’t be accused of flippancy. The mind must follow its tributaries. That is the mark of an honored curiosity and an appreciation of the enormous condescension of posterity.”
“E.B. Thompson?” I ask.
“No. Nicholas Treuhaft.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I can’t help, and I don’t wish that I could,” he says. I can’t tell if this is a joke.
After he reads, he walks outside. Even if it is dirty weather, he will sit for an hour on the bench with an umbrella blocking whatever elements are at play. “One does well with an hour of fresh air each day.” Then he rises and walks to the cafeteria where he eats soup and saltine crackers. If there is salad, he eats that too, but says he does not prefer vegetables. “My mother made more fuss about me eating carrots than she did about my being a spectacular mind, and so I have a cringe-script when it comes to raw food from the earth.”
When he’s eaten, he will stay in the cafeteria for another two hours, talking to the other people. He says he loves the cafeteria, because “it’s an ongoing celebration of human variety and bewilderment.” He loves parties, but he can’t stand the stilted parties of the bourgeois. “I grew up in them, you see. My father was a lawyer. My mother, as you know, was a well-regarded writer and party member, and of course she couldn’t completely eradicate the noblesse coursing through her. She needed exposure to society, but…” He trailed off.
“What?” I ask.
“She never fully appreciated just how little society there was amongst the pedantic manicured. If she’d really been a lover of humans, as I am, she would have wondered and wandered, as I did. I sought out the intellectual underworld. The fringes. Places that the cultivated would describe as moral wildernesses. The hearts of darkness. And here, and there, I’ve found light. Extraordinary light.”
The people in the cafeteria are white, black, or a combination of the two. There are no Asians or Hispanics. Obesity is rampant. Skin is sallow and lacerated by varicose veins, acne, and rosacea. Teeth are yellowish, sometimes brownish. Breath is foul. The sharp stench of body odor intermingles with the smell of shit, and on warm days, it can be overpowering and nauseating. The food is the nutritional equivalent of cardboard. The clothing is cheap and laced with chemicals. Some of the people never say a word. They stare blankly at whatever catches their attention for long periods and eat slowly, but without noticing their food or motions.
Others are great outputters. They can jabber at each other with the intensity of the possessed for hours and never hear a word uttered by their counterparts. Two people, in particular stand out. A man named Fred, who has something of the street preacher in him. His voice will rise to great heights in varied proclamations of society’s abandonment of God. And a woman named O’Kitta, who is the cafeteria’s enormous matriarch. Each bosom the size of a summer watermelon. Her mouth, too, has more circumference than any I’ve seen, and she opens it often to berate those lost in their silences.
The talkers here speak about a wide variety of subjects, but never in any real depth, and they return quickly to the stories of their lives, which they are intent upon telling day in and day out. Very typical are recounts of once upon promise and past deeds of remarkable heroism or genius. “None of it’s true, unfortunately,” says Nicholas. “None of them have ever been great, in the sense that their stories suggest. They are mostly addicts. Many are manic.” Most of the people in the cafeteria think Nicholas is a genius and don’t know why he is not famous.
Nicholas spends most days navigating a few blocks in Chattanooga. “I never like to go too far from home. In the particular is found the universal.” He smiles with mischief etched in his face when he says this and tells me that Joyce might have written something enduring had he grown up with the Apaches. “The Irish think they’ve suffered for humanity, and they have, to an extent. But all that weepiness is rather tiresome now. If you want to know the truth, the Apaches should be running this country, with the Irish just below them, followed by the Serbs. God, how the Serbs, a truly heroic people if you’ve studied history, were made pariahs by the queer engineering of the great nations. Then the Mandarins, and somewhere far below are the British who have had their day, thank God. If you really want to know, they were mercenaries of cruel capitalism and their vile imperialism built this nasty societal superstructure. You see the problem with it all is that the desire for things perverts human ingenuity. Now we are left reeling from the hangover of binge consumption, and we aren’t even afforded the luxury of darkness. The electric light bulb made sure of that. When darkness became optional, established and ordinary behavior, like sleeping, transformed into conduct requiring medication. Well think about it, the whole damn society is medicated, if not on anxiolytics, then on advertising.”
Nicholas’ speech wavers from distinctly stilted, almost academic, to something twangy and residual of the American hinterland, and he has an impressive capacity to jump and shift between tangents with which one might not readily associate. He will sometimes dive into long, articulate soliloquies, and then seem to fatigue and shorten his sentences with grunts and guffaws. When he does this, his blue eyes disengage, and he stares out across the street, but in a way, seems drawn deeply inward.
When I comment on this fluctuating, he tells me that he spent time all over. “I imagine you’re quite curious about what it took to get me to where I am today. Let me tell you, it’s a remarkable story.”
