New Hope For Small Men: Chapter 11

by Grant Bailie

Mr. Carleton had a daughter. He only mentioned her two or three times. She had moved out west — or she had run away, Robert was unclear on the story. She may have been an artist or a heroin addict, though clearly she could have been both. On the two or three times Carleton had mentioned his daughter, his eyes had grown moist, but his eyes had also grown moist over sunsets, a cloud he once pointed out that looked like a tree, and a cup of tea that he proclaimed as perfect, even though it was the same brand of tea (a cheap one,) made in exactly the same way (on a hot plate) as every other cup of tea Robert had ever served him.

Mr. Carleton’s daughter had apparently been “wild,” though sometimes he only said she was “willful,” and other times “a free spirit,” and Robert sometimes wondered, even after Mr. Carleton had gone back to his own apartment, what any of this meant. Was she promiscuous or only ill-mannered?

And it was hard for Robert to imagine a female offspring of Mr. Carleton. A Mrs. Carleton had never been mentioned. Had she too run off to the west or possibly east? Was his entire family spread out in opposite directions like debris from an accident or criminals fleeing a crime?

What would she be like? A fellow teacher, perhaps, who had worked in the same school as Mr. Carleton, or maybe they met in college, when they were both young and moved by their mutual passion for the redemptive powers of Art.

In fact, the lives of other people were a source of some confusion and sadness to Robert. That they — all of them, everyone of them — existed somewhere, in a world completely different or at least seen from a completely different angle than the world Robert inhabited, was an idea that refused to completely realize itself in his head. He would wake with the idea some mornings as if it were the fragments of a nightmare, or be startled by it on the train to or from work. The world was full of people with thoughts he had no access too, with feelings that existed as acutely as his own, but were not his own. They were other people’s.

And he knew, in a world as full as this one with thoughts and feelings, that he was not the first person to think of this and be frightened, or the only person frightened by it now.

This notion was not unlike Raina’s sophomore year take on reality; Robert knew this and it embarrassed him a little to have advanced no farther than that in his vision of the world.

But it was true wasn’t it? The world was a collection of individuals with their own fantasies, concerns and desires, and it was only the sameness of these concerns that made it seem like something more — like one creature struggling in the mud. Hell is other people. The collective unconscious. Maybe he should have stayed in school.

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