“Did you know that you always cough when you go up the stairs?”
Tuesday evening, just in bed, and already while I was asking I regretted my question. It wasn’t a question, of course, it was a statement, a judgment, with an undercurrent of concern and maybe even a hint of reproach, because that’s how it goes after so many years of marriage. In any case, it was an iron shovel that I had driven into the ground, right in that part where the paranoia grows, to the left of the sourpuss and just behind the plots. That I had now turned up that fertile earth myself, at half past eleven in the evening, in the dark – those 45 minutes of talking about something that is not going to happen and then doing your best not to lose your self-control, I had that now I owe it all to myself.
I have a husband who has been assuming the worst-case scenario all his life, he’s even built a career on it. Examples of his doom-mongering: always being afraid of too little work, and as soon as it comes to you constantly wondering when it will all stop again. Earn nice and then immediately focus on what has to go to tax. Book a holiday and then immediately see what you are missing out on at home.
He has convinced himself that that is something Arnhem, and that that in turn is due to the Battle of Arnhem in 1944, the biggest defeat of the city where he was formed, but that of course makes no sense. Doomsayers think doom because it serves them. It is not constructive and completely pointless, but the doomsayer reasons: as long as I keep my expectations low, it can only be better than expected. Thinking like that is addictive. The true doomsayer is willing to imagine the greatest horrors, not discouraged by self-relativity or common sense, and woe betide you if you take away the doomsayer’s self-imposed suffering with realism or texts such as ‘we’ll see that tomorrow’ or ‘one suffers the most by the suffering one fears,” because that’s what they think of home-garden psychology, and besides, as soon as one problem is solved by patiently considering and weighing all its facets, or simply because the problem has already solved itself, the real doomsayer but just to dig a little or hop, there is already a new problem.
And that includes coughing while walking up the stairs, of course.
I knew what we were going to get now, first the dissection, then the fiction, because yes, now the time had come, now he would pay the price for all those years of heavy shag, you see, he said it anyway, later we would tell each other it started with coughing on the stairs, then we noticed for the first time that it wasn’t right, should he have gone to the doctor but no, he thought it was already too late anyway, are you okay at last this, well, then I might as well start again, you will provide a nice service later, will you see that it’s corona again.
It was quiet next to me. I turned to tell him not to worry, I only noticed it because it’s so quiet in the house at night, that’s all, it was just a routine cough, one coughing and the other scratching on his ass, well, nothing to worry about, go to sleep, hey, old Iezegrim of mine, come over here, but damn, he was asleep already.
He does.