SWIM Book 1 (Complete three-hundred pages)

DAY 6 (MORNING BEFORE THE CRASH)

Friday, November 24, 2017

C

raig Ferguson didn't celebrate such a fun Thanksgiving. In fact, he didn't have one at all. He would tell me later that he spent it wrapped in a blanket by the foot of his bed, watching the shadows of the trees outside sway across the blank white walls of his bedroom. He would scribble his finger through the carpet (his fingernail chewed up to the core from his nervousness about his parents' divorce) and draw out the words Kill Me beside his face.

His room was half empty and full of boxes. If you were to walk in now and know nothing about his circumstances, you'd wonder if he was moving in or moving out. The boxes were stacked all around the almost empty room (replete of any decoration or furniture besides his bed, desk, chair and MacBook Air) and the boxes made his room look like an underground fortress in preparation to withstand the Germans dropping bombs.

But this was 2017 and World War II was long past, and the only destruction penetrable to Craig Ferguson's life was the cheating his mother did on his father, and the loss of money due to the loss of job his CFO father suffered when the IRS finally discovered he had been evading his taxes and was partially to blame for the unannounced replication of member accounts at the Wells Fargo Bank. Craig Ferguson hardly understood the concept or what it meant to replicate people's bank accounts without telling them, or why it was so bad, but it cost his father his job, and brought about the realization that his mother was only ever in this family for the money, and never for the love.

The man with whom Craig Ferguson's mother elicited her affair was none other than the COO of the same Wells Fargo branch in which his father was CFO, and was also Mr. Ferguson's best friend of thirty years—but saddest of all, the best man at Craig's parents' wedding. That fucker brought Craig butterscotch candies every year for bring-your-child-to-work-day. Craig looked up to him sometimes like he was a second father. Now Craig knew why his father's best friend and work mate was so nice to him. And that COO wasn't doing it for his father. The COO liked Craig's mother, and saw Craig's mother in Craig's eyes.

Craig could go out and kill the guy if he didn't put so much blame on his mother, and if he wasn't so damned depressed on the floor, where he could hardly move-- he would go kill that traitor COO if only he wasn't planning to kill himself first.

It had been a while since his father lost his job, since the IRS took all his money (except the loads of cash locked up in Switzerland), since his mother and the COO's affair, and since the divorce, but the war between his parents rages on. And Craig wasn't looking forward to moving back and forth every week between here and his dad's house in Malibu. He just wanted to be with friends, if he felt he had any. Sure, Craig would return my texts now and again when I would try to reminisce with him about the good old days back in after-school daycare when we were seven, but his misery had morphed him into such a recluse he hardly answers his phone at all.

He told me all his troubles only recently, and I stopped by his house when he was home to try to soothe his pain. Seeing me, his old friend, really did help him forget momentarily that his world was turning over on its side, but I told Craig that once college starts he'll finally be able to get away from it all.

But he shook his head as I lay next to him on that carpet in his dark room, watching the shadows of the tree branches shake in the wind over his empty white walls. The sounds of the leaves which scratched against the roof and window were merely echoes Craig's heartbeat.

"My father may not be able to afford my going away to college on the east coast," said Craig. "I don't think I'll have the option of attending any IV leagues like you, Jack, Travis, Brett, or that political prick George."

"Stop it. You like George," I said.

Craig sighed. "Yeah, you're right, I do like George. He's hilarious."

I then thought about how Craig's mother was newly engaged to the COO of the closest Wells Fargo branch, and I tried to put some light on Craig's future by saying, "Maybe your mother's new husband will offer to pay for your studies at Georgetown." It was a mistake to propose such a thing, because once I said the damning words, Craig for the first time since I arrived to his house, shot up into a sitting position and turned his ferocious pair of bloodshot eyes at me like he was a caged tiger and I had just wounded him with a stick.

"I'll be damned if that ever happens," Craig said, "that backstabbing friend of my father did offer to pay for my Ivy college education wherever I decided to go and I said no to that sneaky, lying sonuvabitch!"

He broke up into tears and hunched his back into a miserable roll, and I awkwardly waddled over to him on my knees and gave him a big hug. The human contact I gave him did surely help his body to expand and build a soothing calmness. Craig must have been feeling unbearably lonely over the past few months. I kept my long-time childhood friend in my embrace for a couple minutes as the silence rocked him into submission to all that is changing in the universe. "I think you need to leave your room for once and surround yourself with the people who love you," I said.

"My mother and her new fiancé don't love me and I surely don't love them," Craig said, quietly. It was just a fact in his mind.

"I didn't mean them, hon'," I said, petting his brown, curly hair like I was his mother. I called him hon' sometimes and I'm not sure when or why I started using that name. But it sounded right and it stuck. After today, I will never call him "hon'" again.

"If you mean my father," and his words trailed off for a second as he braced himself for an overwhelming swell of tears to come, but they didn't, so he managed to say, "I don't know where my father is right now, probably meeting with connections all over the country to try to secure a new job. But even if he was in Malibu, I don't think I could go see him. I think he's been drinking. And I wouldn't want to find some slutty girls my age strutting naked about his place if I stopped by..."

But I stopped Craig there. "I think your imagination is getting ahead of you... I wasn't talking about your mother or your father. I was talking about your friends. Me, Jack, Travis, Brett, George--"

"George is hilarious," Craig said, again.

"Yes, I know he is," I said. (And such a prick though, let's not forget that.) "Come with me, let's go to the harbor like we always did when we were kids. Let all your worries go away for one afternoon. Let me show you a good time."

Craig finally looked up at me with a little twinkle of gratitude in his green eyes. "Do you think I could ever find happiness without a good example from my parents?" It was a good question, and I was truly considering how difficult trusting in the sanctity of marriage was going to be for Craig when he got older, but I blew his negative speculations off like the positive good friend I was, and exclaimed:

"Sure, you will. And I'll make sure you find the right girl in the future and none of this family business ever affects you." It was a stretch goal, a hefty responsibility I so loosely placed on my shoulders, but the smile Craig gave me for the first time in months was worth all the exaggeration, and he followed me onto our feet, out of his room, down the stairs and into our cars, where he followed me to the harbor, and we took a delightful tour through the canals and to the beach, and talked until the day grew dark, and the breeze turned cold.

Spotting dark black clouds over the gray horizon, he mentioned that if I weren't with him to impose my positivity, he surely would have thought a dangerous storm was coming.