Tales From Heller

Where The Ducks Go

I:

These days, it always feels like someone is watching you. I should know that—I'm the one doing the watching, or maybe my coworkers; I don't know quite what they do. I'm fortunate enough that my watcher is my lovely wife, who's currently at my side, in bed, writing in her diary like I am in mine. Diaries are a wonderful thing, aren't they? I remember she tried to convince me once that diaries were the absolute epitome of intellectualism—I disagree, really, but they are a place for my private thoughts. We have a mutual agreement, she and I, not to look in each other's diaries, but we do share so much else that this feels like a breath of fresh air, right?

If you're reading this, you probably want to know what happened to good old Frank the Ineffable after his glorious exit from high school, so I may as well indulge you. If we go way back to the beginning, the day after graduation when I was still coming down from my sugar high, Juliet spent brunch stuffing me with dim sum and convincing me that we had a future together not predicated on the bell schedule. I saw no reason to disagree, really, especially as my relative lack of inhibition then pleased her. Many things pleased her then, and the same things please her now—that's why we have such a good relationship still. You could call that the summer of love: we did all the same things we might have done before, except this time holding hands. And that carried us all the way to college, where we were shunted to opposite sides of the country.

Of course, that was no obstacle to our courtship, helped by our remarkably similar trajectories. Wharton was a disappointment, in many ways, most of all socially: somehow, with only a little encouragement on my end, word got out of my high school adventures. And you know what? That made me, dare I say it, popular. That's when I knew that there would be no future for me there. The meetings began again, first as a joke supplanted by a real projector we found in a classroom somewhere, and then turned into a solid club that had shed many of its cult-like attributes, only becoming more predatory. I also remained in touch with the team still at Heller, who despite their distaste for all reminders of what was, came to look at me as a spiritual grandfather of the movement. Like Karl Marx, if you know what I mean. Juliet, or so I am told, had a similar experience in sunny Los Angeles. It was good to know we still had something in common, besides our love of movie nights over video call, visiting each other's cities on breaks, and becoming universal constants on the level of gravity and electromagnetism.

In today's job market, one can't exactly guarantee two fairly capable, if not extraordinary, university students on opposite sides of the world end up all in the same place. Not without making a deal with the devil, you see. I never mentioned this publicly in high school because I thought it both a sick joke and a mark of shame, but some authority figures whom I've grown to dislike promised us jobs at Google. I certainly liked the idea of a homecoming, more than I liked the idea of living in snow, and there was something distinctly comforting in being sucked into the past. So we made some phone calls, found out that it was not a sick joke but the opportunity of a lifetime, and both of us reunited with sobs at the airport before driving to our new condominium, definitely not sponsored by a friendly recluse living in Indonesia who spent his days urging our old money to be fruitful and multiply, and preparing for a bright future.

You may notice that marriage appeared an afterthought here, and it really was: nobody who knew us believed that not to be an inevitability, as after all, weren't we the modern Romeo and Juliet? We spent about a year testing the waters before we discovered that it was a fruitless exercise, and then content with marital bliss, we settled into our daily routine. We don't keep many friends, not as many as we did in high school, and not those same people beyond the occasional message on Facebook. There's something simple in only having to worry about one other person, someone you know intimately enough to know that their happiness is all but guaranteed. It frees up the mind for more exciting pursuits, none of which I pursue. So with that equilibrium in mind, let's wind the clock back a few weeks and learn what episode briefly threatened to disturb our happy family.