As I lay in this darkness, cut off from the world around me, I think about the only thing I can: my life. I’d like to say that it was full of adventure and danger, that I proved my manliness to the rest of my species through feats of heroism and daring. I’d like to say that I thwarted foes and foiled evildoers. I’ve always been a fan of super heroes and dashing warriors for God-and-Country. I always wanted to be like them. Alas, I am only a man of modest means and, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, hardly worth a second look. Conrad Atwood, nobody you’d look at and think of as especially powerful or important.
The truth is, though, that the world scarcely notices me because my affluence hides me very well. I am, after all, the inheritor of extreme wealth. I don’t earn the income I’d been raised with, not a penny of it, but I don’t flaunt it, either. Certainly, I used it, but not in a flamboyant manner. I’m not one of those egocentric rich men who gets off by rubbing his wealth in the faces of those who don’t have it. I’m the furthest thing from a show-off that you could imagine. No, truth be told, I’d like to keep as much distance between the world and myself as humanly possible.
Because my manliness is proven in my progeny.
I guess, for me, it all started from the moment I was born in 1973. The family fortune kept my birth a fair secret from the rest of the world. Oh, I have a birth certificate like everyone else, but my family likes to keep prying eyes away from us, so a few salient facts about me were- shall we say?- “fudged.”
From the moment I drew breath, I was showered with love. My mother Rose kept me safe and my father kept US safe. We lived in a secluded but comfortable house outside of town. It wasn’t so far out of town to make things difficult for us, but far enough away and isolated enough that it would take many decades before the town’s growth would overtake us and force the family to move elsewhere. A food delivery service had been arranged, paid for by the family fortune in a roundabout manner, making it unnecessary for us to bother with such things on our own. All we did was fill out an order for what we needed, left it in the post box at the end of our very long driveway every Tuesday, and the items appeared there a day or two later. For as long as I can remember, this happened without fail every week, regardless of weather or circumstances. I never investigated the conditions of the arrangement and simply took it as a given. It wasn’t until I was much older that I learned most other people didn’t have a similar arrangement of their own, that my family was unique.
Growing up as a boy, we had no visitors. Nor did we have any staff. Mother took care of everything around the house while Father worked in seclusion and secrecy in the barn on our property that had been converted into a lab of sorts. Apparently, Father was an inventor of some kind. The family fortune, apparently, came from a series of inventions that his grandfather had made back when Thomas Edison and Nikolai Tesla were causing the US Patents Office to have kittens. My great-grandfather was apparently a very crafty and ingenious fellow indeed whose patents and inventions kept an obscene amount of money pouring into our coffers since the early 1900’s. For the sake of my family’s devotion to secrecy I won’t divulge what those inventions and patents were. Suffice to say that they are still in use more than a century later and some of them are integral parts of every American’s daily life. Don’t trouble yourself about it; it isn’t really germane to my story anyway.
So where was I? Oh, yes. My childhood. It was filled with knowledge and learning and exploration. You’d think that I was kept hidden from the rest of the world, but that isn’t quite accurate. When I was very, very young, yes. I was sequestered from other children until I was old enough to understand that our family had certain boundaries that we didn’t want crossed, that there were rules for how we interfaced with the outside world. It was shortly after I really came to understand these rules and family policies, all of them drilled into my mind by Father and Mother, that Father passed away suddenly. Illness did not take him; an accident of weather and happenstance did. His death was not gruesome or horrific, as far as I can tell (his funeral WAS close-casketed), but Mother insists that its suddenness took her by surprise.
And so it was that my mother, now a heartbroken widow, resolved to ensure that I would receive the education that Father could not supply directly. With his lessons in how to comport myself firmly seated in my young and impressionable mind, Mother saw to it that I attended school in the city. She had warned me that it was a different world out there, a lot more complex than the one I knew at home, but that I would always be safe there and a watchful eye would be kept upon me at all times, unseen but vigilant. While growing up, I was uncertain of how she arranged this, but I can attest to it: not once was I harassed or troubled by bullies or troublemakers, even though, as the archetypal “new kid”, I should have been by all rights. I saw other kids receive their fair share of headaches from such characters, but whenever they caught sight of me, they always mysteriously turned away as though just being in close proximity to me might somehow cause them to melt in agony. The resentment in their eyes when they saw me was obvious and worrisome, but they never acted upon it. I once mentioned it to Mother and she simply nodded approvingly, as though it was exactly as it should be. Having seen what some of those other kids had to endure, I did not rail against the mysterious protection- “never look a gift horse in the mouth”, after all. My early years in school were lonely, sure, but they were also blessedly absent of scars or unwanted fights. I think that if the protection hadn’t been there I might have made more friends and had a more normal experience around other kids, but I didn’t come to that realization until much later in life. Don’t get me wrong- I wasn’t a total pariah; I DID have a few friends growing up, but there was always a sort of distance between us and I sometimes found myself giving them a good bit of misdirection about my family life due to the rules I had to follow. But, all in all, I suppose that it could have been worse. I never outright lied to my friends (Father had taught me that telling only part of the truth or wording the truth in specific ways was always preferable to telling lies whenever possible), but I always felt alone in keeping my family’s identity so secret.
The years went on and I grew older. I grew smarter, too. And stronger. I played soccer in middle school and, when I turned 16, took over Father’s lab, turning it into a workshop of my own rather than seeing it go to disuse. I believe that Mother was initially upset about that, but when she saw that I was spreading my creative and intellectual wings in there, she decided to let it go. While a brilliant woman in her own right and in her own way, she had no use for the lab and allowed me to do as I wished in there as long as I came in for dinner and kept it clean. I never did make anything of note in there, but I had a lot of great fun tinkering with things and learning how they worked. Some things I did make with my own two hands, which worked according to my own designs, but they all amounted to just re-inventing the wheel. I was not destined to follow in my father’s or great-grandfather’s footsteps, it seemed, but I still learned a lot about all manner of things from the time I spent in that workshop. What I couldn’t figure out from empirical knowledge, I gleaned through Father’s library.
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