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know, Elaine, I’m sorry. Maybe I’m having a nervous breakdown or something. I’ve never felt this way before. I don’t know, but I do know I can’t take it anymore. Maybe I’m freaking out. It’s this place, maybe, the cold and the dark … and no money. And it’s because I’ve had this look at myself, at my life, you know? I’ve looked at it, and all I can see is my father all over again. And his father. And on and on. All the way back to the fucking Dark Ages. Since the beginning of fucking time. I thought … I thought it was going to be different. You know? Not necessarily like the picture of Ave Boone coming ashore with a case of whiskey on his shoulder, I mean. But different. But now, tonight, I saw it all.I saw myself. Clear as crystal. I saw myself, and I realized that it’ll never be any
different
. Never. It’s like all these years I’ve just been waiting around to win the state lottery or something. Like that’s the only way my life, our life, can be different. The only way it can be the way I thought it would be is if I win the goddamned state lottery. You know what that means, Elaine?”
    “No. But it’s not true anyhow. We have a
good
life. We
do
.”
    Ignoring her, he says, “It means we’re dead. That’s what it means. Dead.”
    “No, honey. No, it doesn’t. You’re just depressed, that’s all.”
    “You’re right, I’m depressed. But for Christ’s sake, Elaine, there’s a
reason
! Don’t you think people get depressed for a
reason
sometimes? That’s what I’m trying to get you to understand, for Christ’s sake. Try. Please try to understand. Because you’re dead too. Not just me. You know you are too. Way down deep inside yourself, you know you’re dead. And the girls too. They’re as dead as we are, unless they get lucky. We’re all dead. Like my father and mother, and like your mother too. We only
think
we’re alive. We watch that fucking TV screen, and we think we’re like those people there, fucking Hart and Hart, and that makes us forget that we’re not like those people at all. We’re dead. They’re pretty pictures. We’re dead people.
    “I listen to Fred Turner down at the shop tell me how pretty soon he’ll take me off night call so I don’t have to go out nights and Sundays anymore to fix people’s goddamned broken furnaces, and I think I’m alive. I start to thinking I’m like Fred and someday I’ll be a big guy with my own company, even though I didn’t have a father with a company to hand it to me like Fred did, and pretty soon I’ll be driving around in a white Caddie with my company’s initials on the number plates, DOC, Dubois Oil Company. But Fred went to fucking college, and I can barely balance my own checkbook, and besides, if he takes me off night call I won’t get any more overtime and we won’t be able to handle the mortgage payment next month, so I say, No, Fred, for Christ’s sake, don’t take me off night call, I need the fucking overtime. That’s being dead, Elaine. Dead.
    “And I come home to this house and see how if I don’t paint it this spring the rot’s going to get it by next winter, only I can’t afford to paint the goddamned thing. And I can’t afford to put storm windows on it so we don’t have to burn so much oil, which I can’t afford either anyhow, and then I look out the window at that damned boat I still owe money on and which I wouldn’t have bought and built if my friend Ave Boone hadn’t taken off for the Keys with his boat, and I realize that I can’t afford to take off a week from work in the spring just so I can use the fucking thing anyhow.
    “And every time I drive that car I still owe money on I realize I’ll be lucky to get another month off the damned thing before the fucking transmission goes, which I can’t afford to have fixed if it does go. And that’s being dead, Elaine. Day and night, week after week, year in and year out, it’s the same, until finally my body catches up with the