Adultescence: a novella

Death and Taxes

2.

Returning home from an early-evening run, Nathe was, with two fingers pressed to his carotid artery, taking his pulse as it came down from a high of 120 beats per minute, only to shoot up again at the sight of an unfamiliar car, something ugly and utilitarian enough to be a public vehicle, parked in front of his home. Worse, the driver was approaching his front door.

He considered turning around and running—or, better yet, walking casually—back in the opposite direction. The other alternative was to wait at a distance until the lack of any response at the door sent the unwanted visitor away.

But there was no way to avoid the man pressing the doorbell, which played the first four bars of Pachelbel's Canon in D major. Escape was an option conceived in senseless denial of the very design function of a cul-de-sac—to save residents from encountering strangers by discouraging those who didn't belong from coming in and corralling in its embrace those who did.

So as Nathe loped up to his own front porch, a chevron of sweat darkening the centre of his t-shirt, he hoped his body odour might rob the man of his senses and shorten their interaction. It was a vain hope.

"Good evening, sir," the official said, ignoring the large gap in their ages. "Are you the owner of this residence?"

The question was an absurdity—how on earth could a callow 26-year-old own a home worth just shy of a million dollars at present market value?

"Well, I'm... I mean, actually my mother..."

Alas, he was the owner, with a few qualifications. His own cleverness had damned him to this fate. But lying to anyone suspicious who appeared at his door was a hard-wired reflex.

"What seems to be the problem?"

"It's between the city and the owner. Am I to take it that's your mother?" The man's narrow eyes bore down on him, buried like bullets in so much razor-burned pig flesh.

Nathe thought of wriggling around him to get at the door, but the man's considerable girth prevented both ingress and egress. This man had missed his calling. He should have been a collector of mob debts.

"I'm the owner," Nathe confessed, "or one of them, anyway. It was my mother's house, but now we own it jointly. So you can deliver whatever documents you've got to me." He extended his hand to receive them.

The face that greeted this admission was even more sceptical, more hostile than it had been before.

"Sorry, I'm not falling for that," the man said. The earlier reflexive lie was more persuasive than this absurd truth. "I may not have been doing this job long but I know a thing or two—"

"I've got the paperwork inside." Despite his apprehension about what was in that envelope—a letter from the city condemning the house? or from Rajna's lawyer threatening a lawsuit?—Nathe was tiring of this. He also needed to go to the bathroom. "If you'll give me two minutes, I can get it for you."

"All right," the man relented. "I wish you had said so in the first place. I'd have taken you at your word. But now I have to insist on seeing your documents."

A blast of chilled air taunted him as Nathe disappeared inside. The man felt doubly a chump. This sleek, sweating, good-looking kid ('Probably a corporate lawyer, or some newly-minted Internet millionaire,' he thought), young enough to be his son, was the owner of a home twice the size of his own. Two minutes of standing on the porch was plenty for the depth of this insult to sink in. 'Punk kid,' he thought. 'Doesn't even have the manners to invite me in.' He needed to go to the bathroom too.