Crimson Bouquets

The ice in Tim’s glass didn’t melt; it shattered under the weight of his stare. To Tim, a man who had carved a career out of market volatility and brutal corporate takedowns, life was a series of conquests. Achievement was measured in the volume of your voice, the size of your bonus, and the compliant, interchangeable blonde girls he and his fraternity brothers had passed around like trophies from Newport Beach to Malibu. Then there was Howy. Howy was a genetic clerical error. Instead of inheriting Tim’s predatory instinct, Howy possessed a soft, maddening gentleness. Where Tim demanded submission and dominant machismo, Howy offered soft music, deep affection, and flowers—bouquets he regularly brought home not just for his devoted girlfriend, Lynn, but also out of protective tenderness for his mother, Elisa, who had spent decades shrinking under Tim's verbal tyranny. To make matters worse, Howy hadn’t chosen a country-club trophy. He was completely devoted to Lynn, a thin Chinese-American woman whose quiet intelligence completely bypassed the superficial aesthetic Tim’s peers traded in. The humiliation burned hot in Tim’s chest at the annual club dinners. He could see the smirk in the eyes of his old frat brothers. Your boy's a bit soft, isn't he, Tim? Still buying flowers for his mommy and that girl? The breaking point arrived over a tense dinner when the conversation drifted toward the latest foreign intervention. Howy, now an idealistic young holistic physician, looked his father dead in the eye and stated that if a draft ever came, he would pack his bags for Canada. Tim’s face turned an ugly, mottled crimson. He had bankrolled it all—the Ivy League undergrad, the elite medical school, the scuba trips to Bimini, the European sports cars. He had funded an empire, expecting to build a successor, and instead, he had financed a dissident who coddled women with roses. A dark, clinical resolve took root in Tim’s mind. If he couldn't force his son to be a man, he would ensure the world saw Howy’s defiance not as idealism, but as madness. He would strip the advantages, break the engagement with Lynn, isolate him from Elisa, and erase the embarrassment entirely. "Look, Howy," Tim said the next week, his voice uncharacteristically warm as he slid two corporate credit cards across the mahogany desk. "Interns don't make a dime, and you’re working eighty hours a week. Use my Visa and AmEx. Enjoy your life with Lynn while you’re getting started. Consider it a gift." Howy, unsuspecting and deeply relieved by his father's sudden generosity, accepted. Over the next few months, the cards funded medical equipment, weekend retreats, and beautiful, frequent floral arrangements for Lynn's apartment and Elisa’s bedside table. When the statements hit $75,000, Tim didn't pay them. Instead, he printed them out and walked them into the private offices of the city's most prominent, highly compensated psychiatrists—men who owed their portfolios to Tim’s financial stewardship. "He's out of control," Tim told them, his voice a manufactured tremor of parental grief. "Look at the erratic spending. Look at the apparent hyper-sexuality, living with this girl, buying constant romantic gifts and flowers for everyone, ignoring all family traditions. It's a textbook manic episode. Bipolar disorder with psychotic features." The narrative was spun with financial precision. Combined with a swift, heavily lobbied judicial order for an emergency evaluation, the trap snapped shut. Howy was intercepted outside his clinic, bewildered and protesting, and escorted directly to the high-security wing of a private psychiatric facility. Lynn and Elisa were completely locked out by administrative decree. Howy’s medical license was suspended pending review. Every protest Howy made was logged by staff as further evidence of paranoia and resistance to treatment. On a humid Saturday night, three weeks into the confinement, the ward was quiet. Howy, exhausted and chemically altered by a rotating cocktail of heavy neuroleptics, agitatedly demanded to speak to his attorney. The floor staff, eager for an easy shift, called the on-duty physician for a chemical restraint. The injection was swift. Alone in the isolation unit, bound in a canvas straitjacket, Howy’s compromised nervous system began to misfire. The severe drug interaction triggered a sudden, violent grand mal seizure. When the morning shift turned the key to his cell, they found him face down on the vinyl mattress, the room perfectly silent. Three days later, Tim sat in the back of a black town car, leaving the cemetery. He poured two fingers of scotch from the crystal decanter, his hand perfectly steady. The ledger was clear. The embarrassment was gone, replaced by the tragic, respectable grief of a father who had done everything he could for a sick son. He took a sip, looking out at the passing skyline, completely untroubled by the silence, while back at the house, a vase of Howy's last flowers slowly withered on Elisa's desk. Speculative Fiction by Dr Harold Mandel