imitation

In the morning Robert announced that later he would go down to the lake and drown himself, if he wasn't too tired, or if he wasn't feeling too lazy.

He took comfort and joy in the thought, and the announcement of the thought - he knew, indeed everyone knew, that he would always feel lazy and thus, his proposed suicide was a simple, warm, thought that justified his sadness and made other people uncomfortable and therefore was almost as good as the real thing.

There were three other people in the room that morning. Rosie, his wife, a crumpled ball of a woman. Edna, his mother, whose skin was now the colour of cold breakfast tea with a few drops of condensed milk in it. And Leo, Robert's imaginary friend, who stood in the doorframe of Robert's bedroom with his arms folded across his chest and a rather slow, easy smile that sharply molded his sour-cream face into a study of lines and angles.

Robert, who in that moment lay in a bed wearing a black bathrobe and stained underwear, was a man that had done much in doing very little. He had tried his hand at poetry in college, but struggled terribly in thinking up a rhyme for "when love is lost," and so put down his leather bound notebook somewhere and hadn't looked upon the thing since. In his youth he had read many books, and saw many movies, and scrutinized many paintings, and in all of them he had offered a sort of cold admiration that weighed the banalities and immensities art as "just about the same."

It was with this same cold admiration that he looked at the reality of his family, all stood around the perimeter of his small twin bed, each possessing, in his eyes, a certain bright, cheerful ugliness that both fascinated and disgusted him to such a degree that he found in fact he didn't actually feel anything at all.

Robert gazed at Rosie, with her soft rolls and bulges, the wiry hairs on her chin that looked like a family of flies had drowned in a vat of milk before the cheese was made, the small beads of eyes that should have been hazel but looked almost piss-yellow in the morning light, and he wondered not if he had ever loved her but rather if he had ever liked her. She was lovable in her grotesqueness, her unspeakable devotion to him, her very good pork pies that came to him every Thursday or Friday afternoon on a plastic tray with a gradually peeling photo of their wedding day on it. She was worthy of a very matter-of-fact version of his love that manifested itself in either ambivalence or complete obliviousness. But she was not likable - she was too plain, too good, too simple to be liked and that, Robert thought, was probably the reason Leo was so keen about killing her.