Maldo Fam

The Empty Man

I hated the new version I came up with for this story if I'm being honest. So, I'm going back the original. Here are the first chapters. I think originally there was three chapters to start with on this version. Here are five chapters.

Bruce Maldo cared about very few things enough to give them more than a few minutes of thought. He had always been that way, for as long as he could remember. He had been called things such as indifferent, uncaring, and stoic. There had even been a few times people had called him an empty shell of a person.

As suggested, Bruce did not care about the names or observations others made about him. He was self-aware enough to realize that the things others said about him weren't exactly false. It took him until about the age of five to realize he did not feel emotions the way others did and that very few things moved him to feel anything too strongly.

Why?

He hadn't the faintest idea nor did he care enough to give it much thought. There had been doctors he had gone to as a young child that had tried to diagnose him. One had said a severe mental illness more commonly seen in adults while the others had simply chalked it up to some spectrum of Autism.

His mother hadn't accepted either of those findings. She had actually vehemently denied them, going as far as to get a couple of those doctors who had given out the diagnosis's licenses removed. His mother had always been especially protective of him, he was her youngest child and only boy after all. She often told him when she retold the story of that time in their lives that she knew, just knew that no child of hers could be 'crazy' or 'mentally disabled'.

She bragged often about her impeccable pedigree. She had come from a long line of high-class western Europeans, so nothing like that could be in her genes. She also trusted that her father, who had chosen a husband for her, had chosen someone with good genes as well.

His mother eventually decided that his 'eccentricities' were just who he was. She accepted it about him and decided nothing was wrong with him. Instead, he was special. The youngest child of John and Maggie Maldo, the only boy, would be special. There was also that Bruce without a doubt was a genius, the smartest child by leaps and bounds in any school he attended. Bruce simply excelled at everything he ever tried, despite what some would call a handicap.

His mother's acceptance of who he was, without the uncertainty and almost fearfulness that came with the interactions between him and his sisters and father was likely the reason the one thing Bruce seemed to be able to care about earnestly was his mother. His mother didn't seem to think he and his blank expressions were odd or unsettling. She also didn't flinch at the monotone of his voice as his sisters and others did.

Brue maybe didn't understand what to care meant exactly, but he knew his mother's opinions and feelings somehow mattered to him. He deemed that he liked when she was happy and did not like when she was not.

So, with the absence of truly caring about anything else, including himself and his future. Bruce lived for his mother and lived all of his twenty-five years of life so far according to her will. She wanted him to be the best at schooling, so he did. She wanted him to play football and score the most goals on the team, so he did every year he played. She wanted him to go to a good college, but one in America because they all would be moving there the summer he graduated, so he did. She wanted him to start his own business, though both she and her husband were owners of multi-billion international dollar companies. His sister already worked for those companies but she wanted him to start another because he was special. He did as he was told. It was easy to do with his family name, intelligence, and a loan from the family behind him. His tech company was successful and worth billions in no time.