The Nix(15)

APPEAL TO EMOTION


It goes without saying that Laura Pottsdam is now crying.





FALSE DILEMMA


“I’m gonna have to drop out of school!” Laura howls. Her words are coming out in a weeping monotone all smashed together. “If I get an F I’m going to lose my financial aid and won’t be able to afford college and I’ll have to drop out!”

The problem here is that whenever Samuel sees someone else crying, he needs to cry too. He’s been this way as long as he can remember. He’s like a baby in a nursery crying out of sympathy for the other babies. He feels like crying is such an exposed and vulnerable thing to do in front of other people that he’s ashamed and embarrassed for the person doing it, and this triggers his own feelings of shame and embarrassment, all the layers of childhood self-loathing that accumulated while growing up as a huge crybaby. All the sessions with counselors, all the childhood mortifications, they come rushing back at Samuel when he sees someone crying. It’s like his body becomes a big open wound that even a slight breeze would physically hurt.

Laura’s crying is not restrained. She does not fight the crying but instead seems to wrap herself up in it. It is a full-on eye-and-nose-discharge cry accompanied by the typical sniffles and hiccupy breathing and facial contractions that tighten her cheeks and lips into a grotesque frown. Her eyes are red and her cheeks shining and wet and there’s one small pellet of snot that has crawled terribly out of her left nostril. Her shoulders are hunched and she’s slouching and looking at the floor. Samuel feels like he’s about ten seconds away from doing the same thing. He cannot bear to see someone else crying. This is why the weddings of work colleagues or distant relatives are a disaster for him, because he weeps totally out of proportion to his closeness level with the bride and groom. Sad films at movie theaters present a similar problem, where even if he can’t see people crying he can hear their little sniffles and blown noses and fitful breathing and can then extrapolate their particular kind of crying from his vast inner archive of crying episodes and sort of “try it on” for himself, a problem magnified if he happens to be on a date and is thus hyperalert and aware of his date’s emotional tenor and mortified that she might lean in for some kind of crying comfort only to discover that he is weeping like ten times worse than she is.

“And I’ll have to pay back all my scholarships!” Laura half shouts. “If I fail I’ll have to pay them all back and my family will be broke and we’ll be out in the streets and going hungry!”

Samuel senses this is a lie because scholarships don’t really work that way, but he can’t open his mouth because he’s trying to stuff back his own crying. It’s in his throat now and tightening around his Adam’s apple and all of those devastating childhood weeping fits start rushing back at him now, the birthday parties he ruined, the family dinners stopped halfway through, the classrooms sitting in stunned silence watching him run out the door, the loud exasperated sighs from teachers and principals and most especially his mother—oh how his mother wanted him to stop crying, standing there trying to soothe him and rubbing his shoulders during one of his fits and saying “It’s okay, it’s all okay” in her gentlest voice, not understanding that it was exactly her attention to the crying and acknowledgment of the crying that made the crying worse. And he can feel it pushing up on his larynx now and so he’s holding his breath and repeating in his head “I am in control, I am in control,” and this is for the most part effective until his lungs start burning for oxygen and his eyes feel like pressed olives and so his two choices are either to burst out with a naked weeping sob right here in front of Laura Pottsdam—which is just unthinkably awful and embarrassing and exposed—or perform the laughing trick, which was taught to him by a junior-high counselor who said “The opposite of crying is laughing, so when you feel like crying try to laugh instead and they’ll cancel each other out,” a technique that sounded really stupid at the time but proved weirdly effective in last-ditch situations. It is, he knows, the only way to avoid a devastating blubber-fest right now. He’s not really thinking about what it would mean to laugh at this moment, simply that anything else would be a million percent better than crying, and so when poor Laura—all hunched over and weeping and vulnerable and broken—says through her wet gurgles “I won’t be able to come back to school next year and I won’t have any money and no place to go and I don’t know what I’ll do with my life,” Samuel’s response is “Hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-hah-haaaaah!”





AD HOMINEM


This was, perhaps, a miscalculation.

He can see already the effect of his laugh registering on Laura’s face, first as a ripple of amazement and surprise, but then quickly hardening into anger and maybe disgust. The way he laughed—so aggressively and insincerely, like a mad evil genius in an action movie—was, he could see now, cruel. Laura’s posture has become rigid and on guard and erect, her face cold, any hint of her crying erased. It cannot be emphasized enough how quickly this happens. Samuel thinks of a phrase he’s seen on bags of vegetables in the grocery store: flash frozen.

“Why did you do that?” she says, her voice now unnaturally calm and even. It is an eerie, barely contained composure with a dangerous edge, like a mob hit man.