[Memory] What: Memory Will characters be viewing the memory or experiencing it?: Experiencing. Warning, this memory contains: Some violence.
Well, what did you expect?
It is a statement that has followed you your entire life, like a streamer stapled in the aftermath to your most momentous fuck ups. All of those times that you can affectionately refer to as your Greatest Hits. When you return to dirt and dust, you suppose that they will engrave that on the door of your mausoleum tomb: What Did He Expect? All things succumb to crumbling eventually, and kids in the distant future can learn about you through class project grave rubbing excursions where they might turn your tragedy into some London Bridge-esque nursery rhyme. Only instead of being about the plague, mad queens, or some catastrophic fire, it can be about syphilis. Or something equally romantic. ♪ Well ♪ What ♪ Did ♪ He ♪ Expect? ♪
Your stepmother says that you are as arrogant as the Devil in new shoes, and rude when it pleases you. She's probably onto something, but you're only sixteen, and it hasn't occurred to you to try and be anything different. You might be the coked up dauphin of this tarnished enterprise, but you're not the one sinking the family stock with yet another sex scandal. You say as much one night, breezy and humored in between sips of Beaujolais. But your father isn't in the mood for your off-color jokes, not tonight with the Board of Investors breathing threats of sulfur down the back of his neck. Even knowing this, even saying it anyway, you're surprised when he hits you. It is full contact, back of the hand, rings and all. The stemmed glass you were sipping from goes sailing, wine arcing, across the room. He roars, you're stunned. He goes to hit you again, but seems to think better of it after watching you cower and wipe the blood off of your face with your sleeve. He seethes and leaves the room while your stepmother rushes up to play nursemaid. She shushes your cursing as you spit out a broken shard of a tooth. She tsks, wrapping ice in a napkin when she asks, "Well, what did you expect?"
It is years and years later when you hear it again. You're back from business in the big city, back to the honeymoon suite you've been missing, back to your hellcat bride. You could really go for a night on the town, a night of high rolling at blackjack tables, betting on bum fights, and slow dancing through opium parlors, but the girl is nowhere to be found. The honeymoon suite is a little ransacked, but that is nothing new, so you wait around. You call around to numbers disconnected and clueless bellhops. The general consensus is that she packed up and hitched out days ago. So you go down to the hotel bar and drink yourself blind, You're still there at 8 AM, when the family lawyer, some greasy fuck your father has known for years, sits down beside you. He orders a plain tomato juice, and you want to fight him on principle. Gravity, along with the rapidly oscillating axis of the Earth has other ideas, so you stay put while he produces paperwork from his suitcase. In bold letters at the top, it specifies marriage annulment, and you gawk, confused at the bottom where a feminine hand has already signed her name. They're just waiting on yours. You stare, you keep staring, wondering why, wondering when. The lawyer pats you on the back, overly supportive when he says, Well, son, what did you expect?
A stretch of time later finds you in a hospital bed where they've stitched you up and pumped you so full of pain killers that reality has shifted inward on itself and altogether ceased in making sense. Your father, the huge and shadowy figure of him in a dark suit, looms in the corner and barking orders that you can't understand. You're cross-eyed from whatever drugs they are pumping into you via the tubes. Darkness descends, lingers, then fades, giving way to the light again. Your father is gone. The doctors and surgeons say it was a close call, that you nearly bled to death. Your chauffeur walks in then, dressed in a dark suit, the same that you thought that your father had been. But the memory had only been ghosts and outlines, and even though you're pretty sure you know the truth, you ask anyway. You ask if your father was here, if he came to see you. "Not yet. He's a busy man, had some meetings at the stock exchange. But," like pointing out a merit, "he did secure your stay at this hospital. He wants you to have the best care." Right, what did you expect?