A CHEERFUL NIHILIST
A RECOLLECTION OF EVENTS LOOSELY BASED ON REALITY
written by @silbersteindiego
FOUNDATIONS
4 of 4
After a few days Alex came bearing good news. He had gotten a night shift at a bar; he was going to be able to get out of my apartment as soon as he received his first paycheck. He, of course, needed a copy of the keys because he would arrive after my bedtime, and he didn’t want to wake us up. I, again, didn’t consult my girlfriend. Surely she’ll understand that this will expedite his leaving. She didn’t.
"So, you just gave him a key," she said. “Do you ever think?” she asked rhetorically, the unequivocal answer being ‘no’. I explained to her the reason why I had to give him the key, but it fell on deaf ears. She told me to get rid of him soon and change the locks or she’d go back to her house. I begged her to give me five days (the time it would take Alex to receive his first paycheck at the bar). She, begrudgingly, accepted.
Five days went by in what felt like a month. My girlfriend and I were barely talking. The tension in the apartment was palpable. I don’t know if Alex noticed, not only because he was usually oblivious to the external world, but also because he was not getting any sleep at all due to his night job. So, whenever he was in the house, he was sleeping. I also caught him sleeping on the job a couple of times that week. I didn’t rat on him, but it was clear that he wasn’t going to be able to keep it up much longer. I felt bad for the guy, I truly did.
I’m always terrible at collecting debt or facing situations where I have to demand something from someone who doesn’t want to or worse, is in no position to satisfy my demand. But the five days were up, and I had no choice, my formerly peaceful life had already been perturbed enough. Compassionately but firmly, I confronted him when our shift ended. “Ok, fifth day man. You’re getting the check today, right?”
He pressed his lips together, raised his eyebrows and crossed his arms. I knew right there and then he wasn’t going to receive the check. The boss, the asshole boss, was going to pay them two days late, “can you believe it?” He acted as if he were furious about it.
I’m one of the most trusting people I know, but even I didn’t believe him. “If I lived alone it would be a different story, but I can’t have you here... My girlfriend's gonna kill me! You see how she doesn’t even talk to me anymore… please man, you’ve got to understand. Two days and that’s it. Please!” I begged as if he were doing me a favor.
“Two days, I promise,” he said.
The same extension I granted to Joker-boy, was granted to me by my girlfriend. She noticed that I was in distress too and decided to show me some mercy. To prove to her that I was serious about the ultimatum, I arranged for the locks to be changed the next day. I was optimistic, “this will go down as a funny anecdote,” I assured her.
With the end of our problem in sight, it was the first time since Alex’s arrival that she and I went back to a semblance of our old selves. It felt so good after many days of mostly silent bickering. We went for a walk on the beach as we used to do every other sunset. Something as simple as that walk washed off, at least temporarily, any residue of resentment, and brought us back to good terms. To celebrate our making up, we went to our favorite ice cream parlor.
A couple of hours after leaving, we came back to a suspiciously silent apartment. We stood still in the middle of the living room.
“Something feels off, doesn’t it?” She said.
“Yeah,” I said. Both of us glanced around but couldn’t put a finger on it. “Alex?” I shouted. No answer. “Maybe he left early,” I said.
She gasped and covered her mouth with her hand. “Diego!” she said, pointing at the wall behind the couch. “The paintings!”
“What the fuck,” I said and sprinted to Alex’s room.
“What happened?” She asked from the other room.
I scratched my head with my two hands and simply let my body deflate. “He’s gone. He’s gone. I can’t believe he’s gone,” I said. He had taken all the paintings, even the shitty ones. My girlfriend came into the room and hugged me. She was kind enough not to say “I told you so.” She didn’t have to, I already knew. “Well, at least he left,” I said.
This misdemeanor perpetrated against my grandpa’s property set in motion a chain of events, the first of them being my losing the rights to usufruct the apartment, making my living in that city borderline counterproductive, leaving me no choice but to search for a job near the city where I used to, and was about to, again, live with my parents. This, evidently, had a major effect on my relationship, which, as stated before, wasn’t meant to interact with the real world, and didn’t survive long in it.
While going through our stuff to see if more things were missing, we found a jacket he had left behind. We checked the pockets and found a little bag of cocaine and a bunch of receipts from the casino that was a few blocks from our apartment. It wasn’t enough to put the pieces of the puzzle together, but it was enough to imagine that there was never any night shift at a bar.
I sometimes think about what I’ll tell him if I ever run into him again. Dude. I’m not mad at you. I don’t care that you betrayed me when I was trying to help you. I don’t care that you lied about getting a second job. I don’t care that you stole my grandpa’s paintings causing me to lose the apartment. I don’t care about any of that. But did you really have to take my girlfriend’s short white leggings?