Her ongoing separation from her house, land, and financial resources could have
made her succumb to an emotionally mutable perspective of feeling, for a time,
as if she had lost everything and then to a feeling that she needed to hurry
back to New York State before what little she had was all lost to her. She
didn't even know for sure the name of this lawyer of the ex-in-laws--in-laws
who in their own elusive way were also nebulous figures. This lawyer of these
Bassetes (ex-husband going under the name of Quest) supposedly diverted some of
the interest of her savings to property tax, the maintenance of the house, and
no doubt whatever the legal expenses were. It was property that, by now, could
be razed to the ground and paved with a highway for what she knew of it; and
such neglect at being responsible for herself, an aberration from who she was,
kept disturbing her equanimity.
Her placid state of mind could have easily been ravaged by maudlin brooding,
homesickness, maternal stirrings of instinct, and multifarious emotionally
fueled reasons to return to Albany. And it would have been so without
determined supercilious will that rebounded her back to her stoic, rational,
and insular existence. There in her supercilious brain, amidst the endless
walls of tidy, barren, and ostensibly eternal gray matter, she would soar
within curtailed bounty and the journey within would seem as an ongoing
discovery on the edge of a non-spherical universe. But sometimes without
warning the eternity would become a constricted little room and then she would
be nothing but a claustrophobic black bird that one day years ago got trapped
in the living room of her trailer in Ithaca when she was cleaning a window.
Like that sight-trusting bird ready to window-bang itself into oblivion rather
than accept the conclusion of pain, obsessed with thought she would crash
repeatedly against the walls of her brain. In such migraines she almost felt
locked away in her cold, impersonal thoughts-- locked away behind walls bigger
than any the American government could envisage against Mexico. She would seem
locked away in thoughts and only this, unable to conceptualize a higher and
more unfathomable wall than this. Would not Parmenides have been abhorred to
hear the "nous" so defiled. She didn't care. Heraclitus was now her unsung
hero; and not even Plato or God himself, if there were one (which there
wasn't), understood migraines except those who experienced them. And sicknesses
of all types were exacerbated all the more in foreign countries even if one
were lucky enough to have a native friend like Ms. Quest's Hilda who had held
her head steady and tilted to the toilet on a couple occasions.
Property: she would define it as that claim on a person or thing to seem to
oneself to be. It was like that idiot, Alan Shepard, putting an American flag
on the moon; but it was from that idiot, Shepard, that, in girlhood one of her
more original ideas was reinforced enough to become a calcified decision or at
least a determined perpetual caprice. At the age of eight, seeing those rerun
black and white images of this so- called "groovy" astronaut as he bounced
around the moon with the stars and stripes (these declarative bounces of
ownership and half expectations to encounter a whole host of mooners to pose
his symbol to), and recently having learnt of a place on Earth not rife in
human herds, she decided to stake her flag on Camp Gabriele, Antarctica in that
self-declared city of one. Now, as then, she knew that she had never had
anything but herself to begin with and that this was as she liked it.
Being divorced, she could have clung to these things that were hers, declaring
them as such in her own mind to reiterate that she was a separate being from
what was once her husband or was once believed to be her husband. She could
have felt victimized and vulnerable from this chemical volatility of mixing
with people and men, these two species that she might have enjoyed had she
thought of them as pets. An emotional neediness could have rushed her back to
motherhood and attempts at freshly burnt chocolate chip cookies. With less
intelligence she might have even thought of it as her maternal calling to
nurture him, her ungrateful son, and cater to his selfish whims under the guise
of love and doing good. She could have feigned a contentment within the narrow
parameters of this easily made/easily fumbled role without noting the
hypocritical and selfish neediness that would have been therein especially for
a woman like her, a returning child deserter. It would have been so had she
believed in feeling something about anything and to allow feelings to drag her
around; but for her even succumbing to numbness was a very peculiar state to be
shaken off like a lint-ridden blouse.
She was the one who had been barely able to embrace the favored one, Rick, on
that first severing of Michael and herself. On that day of the first, less
consummated, closure to specious romance she had, in a sense, embraced him
albeit no differently than the fall of a metal bar at a toll road. Parting from
Rick on that day, internally she had been more like the lachrymose stirring of
a statue of Mary, Mother of God, but the boy would not have known that. For
him, who had lost his first mother to breast cancer, he would only have that
memory that her arms came down on him and then raised up like that bar at a
tollbooth.
And if she were to continue in this quest to remove herself from this ownership
mania of this self-proclaimed American brand of the common herd, she would
continue to do so with the same dry, permanent logic. If the means of defining
ownership of property were a mutual claim of ownership by the person to the
land and the land to the person the most recent contracts would have taken
place in the 19th century when the deceased was united in the ultimate act of
consummation: the decay into that plot of land which had sustained him or her.
That being true, she reasoned, she owned nothing. It seemed to her that if it
were true of the land the mutuality of the contract would be even more of an
imperative condition in human relations.
On weekends in Japan such an enormous exodus of people would come out to do
their shopping; whereas for her, having had no firmly set schedule that
enslaved her and not needing to release an enslaved being in the unbound
weekend freedoms of malls, she had found a more internal brooding in the
Hokkaido cold. She had feasted on poets and philosophers. She had learnt of
Japanese history, art, and traditional mask carvings.
Here in TJ, impecunious as she was, she couldn't have bought anything major had
she wanted to. A portable black and white television, which she aptly called
the "noise box" or "noise companion," had been her most expensive purchase. But
this matching of circumstances to a repudiation of ownership, far from being a
grievance against fate, was liberation like that felt at being naked and under
a hot shower. It was an ablution from soiled things sticking onto her and she
was glad it was that way.
She found great creative energy from being here transposing the new environment
to the permanency of color and theme that man's impermanent and mundane
movements seemed to lack; and she almost believed that creativity lay within
this country and culture instead of the omnipotent Self. It seemed to be there
in this defiant city that despite being conjoined to San Ysidro, California,
nonetheless maintained its distinct character: brains as blank slates to
English, pinatas dangling from store awnings, and children wearing Indian
feathers in celebrations of Juarez Day or running around in scanty rags in
celebration of the day itself. But really TJ was not the cause of her
creativity. It was just a reminder of her own defiance of stale, patterned
existence--a defiance that expected and demanded novelty in Tijuana's warm sun
and cool, piercing shadows. But it was more than the connection of land,
artist, and paint. Here, within, was a tame volcanic oozing, frothy as waves,
reshaping her clay landscape apposite to her liking. To wake up each morning
anew in being exhilarated her: now an artist of a new land; recently a
Spanish-babbling pseudo-lesbian consummated once via Hilda if sex were a
consummation of anything; immediately upon arriving in TJ she had been a
remover of old bourgeois skin and a student of Spanish; and before that, she
had been a ripped rag doll in such consternation about the "Kato thing"--that
"kato thing" tearing out the seams of the fabric enclosing her stuffing in such
apposite serendipity.
There on the city bus, her seated stiffness jiggling like jello no differently
than the tacky homemade sign of " La Playa/Calle Linda Vista" dangling from its
windshield, Gabriele again recalled the delusionary socialized will that had
possessed her. She reassessed her time in Japan with the same results. She
surmised once more that the doll that she had been or had pretended to be
deserved to be unthreaded, destuffed, and remade. With her detached eyes
ensconced in sunglasses, she glanced at the rear of the bus where Hilda sat.
They had been separated at the time of stepping into it by a sparse
availability of seats so now she could not see her very well in the throngs of
those who were standing. Still there a corner of her was, a conspicuous being
with quasi-blonde hair and an aloofness no less "unfriendly," as Michael spoke
of her own "bitchiness," than herself.
Seated alone, she discerned that the separation at present was good for both of
them. Earlier, when on the beach that they were now returning from, Gabriele
had smote her friend with a cold stare. Considering that Hilda had repeatedly
served the volleyball on the beach as if she were trying to make a slam dunk
with it, of course this desperate attempt to win the game had annoyed and
amused Gabriele. She would have laughed at the quasi-volley morality that
defied the spirit of the game and she would have congratulated her, more or
less, had a larger issue not preceded it.
"Fuck, don't tell me that little swim has pooped you out already, Hilda."
"No," said Hilda as if she were not sure whether to make her monosyllable into
a statement or a question; nor if it should be positive or negative.
"We've just put up the net. Serve the fucking ball! "
"Gabriela, I was just thinking that -- "
" A positive thought or something quite negative?"
"My own brilliance. I can't see that it is either one."
"But, unlike you I foresee storm clouds ahead -- clouds of my friend's own
making." Gabriele chortled but Hilda smiled malevolently, moved a few feet
back, and sat on the sand to tie her loose shoelaces.
Hilda was feeling too loose (either too dissolute or too unwed and so not
dissolute enough in the apparent absence of romance and absence of belonging
that was part of a couple's merry-making), and this manifested itself to
Gabriele's sagacious discernment. "You know, you should not laugh at your own
jokes," Hilda criticized her. "You can be amused by yourself -- God knows you
are so good at that anyhow, playing alone in your sterile ideas -- but that is
as far as it should go."
"What is your problem?"
"I don't have any--just yours--what you don't concern yourself with."
"Oh? Sorry. Like what? What don't I concern myself with? You?"
"No, not me. I don't need anyone. Forget it. None of it is my business."
Gabriele stuffed some snuff into her pallet and then scratched her head for a
few seconds. "It's a beautiful late Monday morn, Hilda," she said in the hope
that from placating words and prevarications the noxious mood would disperse
and vanish into air like smoke. " I for one want to seize the day. All the
mental prostitutes are being exploited, except for you and I who have some
sense about such things and will probably live to be 120 years old as a
consequence, God forbid! " She pulled out two cans of beer from a cooler and
spit out the dark tactile saliva that had been littering her mouth in senseless
mass and clutter no differently than planets in the void of space. As
perspectives were always dictated by the demands of the body in those who were
not in full control of their minds, Gabriele had a hunch that Hilda was
experiencing menstruation and feeling resentful that their physical encounter
was not followed by redundant ones. If so, she surmised, Hilda's mood was a
combination of hormonal imbalances and withdrawal symptoms from dopamine not
arriving in the pleasure receptors of her brain in quantities commensurate with
that earlier experience.
Hilda feigned a more pleasant smile despite herself. "Engaged as we are in
contemplative leisure." These were words she often heard from Gabriele and her
bantering mocked them good-naturedly.
"Well said, and in English to boot." They had departed from the world of
stress-ridden fools shifting their needs for pretty escape art and aerobic
therapy onto them. They had departed from the imaginary world of believing
oneself to have importance catering to others' wishes and had submitted
themselves over to the salt inundations of the Pacific Ocean. They had
submitted themselves over to the entity as much as tepid will allowed. For at
present neither of them would drown themselves to be fully and foolishly part
of the entity.
Seated beside her friend, Gabriele incrementally shaped a harder replica of her
from the mold of the subject and the plaster of the dampened sand. In part it
no longer looked like Hilda but an effigy of Akhenaten.
"So, what about me don't I take responsibility for? What is the source of this
anxiety for my sake?"
"How am I to tell if you suffocate me?"
"I'll be extraordinarily careful when I get up to the face. Don't worry."
"I've rested enough. Let the games begin," Hilda giggled.
"Not right yet. Give me the answer to my query and this stiff mummy will rise
again."
"I was thinking at the time that you shouldn't be with me. It isn't like we are
a couple. I was thinking to myself that you should be playing volleyball with
your son. I worry about him not having a mother."
"Do you want me to leave you, Hilda?" Despite the withdrawn and impassive eyes
her lips were compressed into a smile and she was ready for any answer. Any
answer would have amused her, but she was betting on a particular muddled
response. Having a keen enough discernment of human behavior that she could be
flawlessly "scientific" in predictions remained Gabriele's goal, and she wanted
it to be ongoing unlike all other forms of epiphany.
"I don't own you. Come, go, or stay for life. It's all the same to me. Well,
all right not fully. Maybe I care some but to tell you the truth, I don't know
what you think of me or what you want; and the reality is that you are a mother
-- I'm not -- so do what you have to do."
Gabriele had predicted each meandering and sinuous thought with accuracy. Still
she said, "No prevarications. Frankness, feeling comfortable to be such, doing
it in respect, and measuring in other realities in as objective manner as
possible -- a relationship is relating and we do it with the perfection that
only goddesses can do in such matters." She knew that her positive summary was
from the overall relationship rather than this moment in time. A more myopic
perspective would not have produced a full rendering of truth. Reality in any
sense was more than any conscious registering of it. It was more convoluted.
Although perhaps no different than the jealous remarks of Hera to Zeus, Hilda's
acrimonious tone seemed boringly uncelestial. She was to some degree saying
that if it were the ending of their intimacy then she, Gabriele, might as well
head across the border back to the wealthy of San Diego. One aspect of their
relationship had been an appreciation of self-containment, but here Hilda was
jealous of it. "About my son, I don't know where he is."
"That's never made any sense to me."
"Either he's still with my aunt and she doesn't want to admit this fact or he's
with my untraceable sister-in-law in the domain of her maternal possessiveness;
but he is okay wherever he is at, and by now not so keen to play games with
me."
Gabriele had not been able to concentrate on the volleyball game with Hilda
from thinking of her son; and exploiting this weakness through unscrupulous
serves, Hilda had won the game. Now, riding on the bus, she was no less
irritated than before. It was an irritation at being reminded of her own
negligence. By bringing a being into the world one was contractually obligated
to nature to care for him and to see that his life came to good. Such a woman
was obligated to forfeit her own growth to grow offspring. This was her own
moral code gained from contemplative reason and she had violated it.
Gabriele stared at a couple of college students dressed in their uniforms. The
male was comparing his large dark hand to the female's smaller and lighter one.
This hand-play caused Gabriele's face to cringe in repulsion. This rapacious
need to extend beyond oneself in mergers with other persons violated human
decency. To want to know more, be more, in all life's activities was the
precept of Aristotle; and certainly this girl wanted to know what it would be
like to wear the man, to share his thoughts, and to merge with him. And her
body was telling her there was intimacy in this most intense lowly pleasure and
pain of him riding within her. Still, the lesser knowledge that it was, it was
repugnant by being so void of anything wise. These human beings linked their
cars so as to be declared a train as if a car alone really were so small. The
linking of a series of defective cars running along on a defective track surely
was not a successful attempt at extension; and from now on, she vowed, her
caboose would not be banged into such links.
A woman who was standing with her child moved up to the front of the bus and
sat the child on a padded hump of the transmission near the bus driver's gear
shift. It was obviously difficult for her to keep the girl seated and the
mother applied reasoning with admirable patience and self-restraint. Although
Gabriele could not hear what the mother was whispering to the fidgeting child,
she heard the child's responses of "Si" and this appeal to reason seemed
lovely. It was the length of the talk and the delicacy by which the woman
addressed the child's sensitivities that saturated Gabriele in beauty. She was
beginning to see motherhood in a new light. She was beginning to think that
these preconceived notions that housed her were houses of straw and could
easily be blown away.
Perhaps, she thought, beyond conveniences, vaccines, and modern gadgets that
often reduced "mental prostitution" to a 5 day affair, on rare occasions one
stumbled across enlightenment in modern society that heretofore rested in
voluminous, rarely read publications of deceased sages. Perhaps "God," this
unfathomable entity who reacted indifferently to human affairs including
thousands perishing hideously in the World Trade Center, was now sticking his
tongue out at her and calling her a "know-it-all" in such an invigorating
event; but it defied logic that a deity who would smash entire civilizations in
the palms of its hands as if humans were mosquitoes would think her, this lone
individual, worthy of the contempt and enlightenment of the tongue gesture.
Even more, why should she believe that God sat her on the bus to see this
mother and child as if she were the honored guest in the audience of a great
symposium. Not being satisfied with her atheistic conclusions in this strange
world, she was again left with the conclusion that something did exist out
there, that permanent substance that was the entity or the prime mover, and it
existed outside human logic.
A couple hours later, still in shorts and sunglasses (bathing suits worn
underneath), she and Hilda sat down at an outdoor table of the lesbian pub.
They were in the middle of dinner and a fourth shot of undiluted tequila when a
woman uneventfully passed by their table and went inside. "Nice ass!" said
Hilda.
"Huh? For Heaven's sake it is a padded seat and tool for excrement. Really,
Hilda, is there nice and mean, nice and ugly, nice and not useful to such
things unless a fluke happens where one was born without an ass." It was then
that she decided to return to America.
In her sleep on an American Airlines flight from San Diego to Albany Gabriele
dreamed that she was with Hilda once again on the beach. They were in front of
a volleyball net witnessing the descending sun when Hilda broke the ineffable
silence.
"You say bullshit all the time. The things you say are so true and so false.
You are so profound about temporary families, selfish children, marriage as
weak people running away from the solitude that is part of inhabiting one's
head, that work is prostitution, things as ball and chains to carry around,
claiming one's essence, blah blah, but life isn't objective. It is subjective
-- so you miss your husband, son, and things because being without them would
make you naked."
Gabriele then took off her shirt in protest. With icy eyes, and bouncing boobs,
she attempted successful counter maneuvers against Hilda' slam dunk serves. Her
hardness crackled through the air beyond an impassively proud countenance; but
she justified it in her own mind, the only mind that mattered in such petty but
necessary judgment calls. She told herself that even if this wariness of social
situations were an imperfect instinct of primitive man to quickly assess the
danger of a given social situation its having persisted to present to free one
of her social instinct was to its merit.
She woke up from a tray of food being passed unto her. She felt a peculiar
sense of being unsettled and wanting to know what was real and what was unreal.
She wanted to find out how to keep from being swept up into one illusion or
another--she who in recreation flitted facts in her imagination from
biographical profiles of the cabinet members of Germany and the names of
successive presidents of Moldavia to the characteristics of albino frogs,
myriad owls, and Henry and William James. Was the present moment best
celebrated in thought and contemplation, in action, in study, a shot of tequila
and glib, frivolous talk with Hilda at the lesbian pub, a swim, and a movement
of limbs? Was it possible to live life without being in its illusions? Hilda
began to fade away and Nathaniel ("Adagio") and the Man With the Unmemorable
Name became stronger.