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Chuck

As a child of eight or nine, Chuck began fantasizing about being the only person left on Earth. He didn’t think loneliness would be a problem, because he was awfully good at not having friends. Nor did he think he’d miss anyone in particular—least of all his mom, because he did not believe she truly loved him.

Chuck relished the idea of unrestricted access to anything and everything, especially to all the toys he’d coveted that were beyond his family’s means, and all the candies, cakes, donuts, and ice-cream sundaes he did not get to eat on account of Mean Old Mister Tooth Decay. In other words, it wasn’t omnipotence per se that rang Chuck’s chimes within his childish world of make-believe. It was license. And shortly after the onset of puberty, he discovered that the license his reveries found most appealing had become decidedly licentious; which is to say Chuck had evolved from being the only person left on Earth into being the only male person left on Earth, and ooo-la-la, la-laaa.

But not to worry. Chuck rarely ventured beyond First Base in flexing licentious license with the women of his dreams—not even after reaching manhood. In fact, another kind of fantasy had taken root in Chuck’s brain by then and was demanding more than equal time.

In this other more compelling, albeit ultimately distressing, fantasy, Chuck imagined reliving a week or two of his childhood with the discerning mind of an adult at play in his brain pan. He imagined scrutinizing everything and anything—especially the grownups who’d populated his world back then, and extra-especially his mother. 

Did she really not love him? Had he been misreading the signs?

In looking back on those times from the vantage point of his twenties and thirties Chuck never found convincing evidence that his mother’s routine professions of maternal affection had been anything more than spun sugar. He saw himself as the bitterly inconvenient truth of her existence—the avatar of her thwarted ambitions.

And so Chuck found himself fantasizing about again being eight or nine but with his adult powers of observation and evaluation fully operational. He imagined playing under the dining-room table while his mother and her best friend, Mrs. McCann, shared secrets over coffee in the living room; he imagined catching, this time, all the words that had flown over his head. And he imagined studying his mother’s features more closely and peering deeper into her eyes to locate true tenderness when she greeted him after school.

But the distressing part for Chuck was, he knew he hadn’t missed or misinterpreted anything as a child of eight or nine, or six or seven, or four or five. Because love is like a vibrating string that induces vibration in a string close by, and the strings in Chuck’s heart had never known inductive motion.

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