"…No," she thought, "those disconcerting eyes would not leave…will not
leave…wouldn't want them to leave….He is here a part of my fate….Spots over my
eyes, hypersensitivity to sound as well as light…ideas so painful, and yet I
drag them about…pounding thoughts of raw sensitivity and I drag these sickly
bodies to have something to do…and to clog the empty space of the hours. Before
this I was thinking of my son and now I am thinking about my thoughts…a
concentration on anything to forefend this unreality of everything… every item
in this dark tomb, and the air and light within it are so distant like trying
to remember the details of a dream weeks earlier…brain insurrection, and
stomach like when I was carsick with Michael in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, sick
as when I was pregnant with Nathaniel Adagio Sangfroid…inert as if dead…dead as
the owl plopping onto the ground…lack of energy…enervation not of being drained
but like it just suddenly packed up its bags and went, leaving behind the
barren house, now looking like a dilapidating hut…Need to think of something
placid, pellucid, permanent." She meant that she needed to imagine a tranquil
and permanent entity, God, by which to ease her pain, and yet being an atheist
there was none. For atheists like her there were just ideas to be posited as if
raising these walls, these labyrinths of logic, and then running in them, would
lead her to some advanced destination. And so she posited that man, being such
a dodger of pain, would inevitably become religious within sickness. She
posited that even the most intransigent atheist was susceptible to the god of
his own making. But thinking about thoughts was making the migraine even worse.
Ideas were making the bulimic sick and she felt like she was ready to vomit
them up. She again tried to find a benign image exempt of painful words that
she could rest in while in these vapid hours.
And she could only think of her grandmother who, with Peggy, arrived that one
time at the Emporia Kansas bus terminal to pick her up. Those eyes were so
empathic to her, the young girl who was just beginning to recuperate from
having been run over by lieutenants Mom and Dad as they went off into the
sunset on their tank; and this grandmotherly empath could transmute pain and
make it her own better than any mood ring. She thought of the feel of her
grandmother's pantyhose when sitting in her lap and the appearance of that
ceramic cookie jar in the form of a piggy with a chipped ear and a vest. When
her grandmother removed his head all of those chocolate chip cookies that she
baked were there. Still, this sole, loving and loveable relative was not
permanent. She too was fleetingly mortal. Gabriele thought of a more permanent
entity, a tree, but its leaves were deciduous and it had no power to alter its
environment or to love selflessly. Then she thought of the sky: it was
permanently sky; but it was rarely placid and only pellucid to meteorologists,
and of empathy it had none. Men died in hurricanes, typhoons, lightning
strikes, floods, and heat strokes. She wondered if she was going mad. "Need to
go to the shop… I need to get off this sofa," she thought, but the thought was
barely pressed together under the butcher knife of the Migraine. Still she
thought it nonetheless, and others as well, to fill the stillness of the hours
of pain.
Alone: When not having a father or any type of a male role model the
"differentiation" of a boy in his stages of disengagement from his mother have
no other course but through these addictions to titillations which compel him
to climb each and every pleasure until at last falling into the crevasse of
family himself and all of its falling debris of obligations. This being such,
she knew that her time within her own crevasse would not last; and that to be
inextricably attached to these selfish and impermanent beings who had fallen in
with her would merely be a form of weak clinging. It was bad enough in
stability searching herds but for a goddess like herself it would be a
particular debasement.
Family: Her aunt had believed in it enough to take her into her home despite
the objections of her husband; but then she had also believed that Heaven was a
better place than the Earth without having gone to the former and rarely
getting out into the latter with Wal-Mart shopping centers so nearby, that
openly communicating one's filthy mind about misinterpreted gestures like
avuncular touch would be conclusive proof that one was a hateful girl indeed,
and that only within muteness locked in immeasurable and inconclusive memories
was one showing love toward all members of this sacrosanct organization. This,
the incommunicable utterance, was the only means to exist successfully for they
who, to acclimate, were ensconced in safe perfunctory movements within the
crevasse.
The mutability of family: Wasn't it apparent that her man had snagged himself
on his tree of recently ripened campus fruit and that this adulterous delay in
the Big Apple might go into a third week and beyond? And last week what had
been her role of chauffeuring Nathaniel and his giddy date to an amusement park
unless it were the beginning to that end? Evidence for both came in the form of
flinging more and more TV dinners into the oven and eating them saliently alone
in her dining room. Not that she felt uncomfortable uncovering the aluminum
foil and eating her food all alone. She loved her ruminations more than any
other earthling she encountered. So wondering what her man was uncovering and
putting into his mouth and what bimbo her son was chewing on like a chicken
bone as she removed the foil of the TV dinner was a very enjoyable activity. It
was enjoyable for she was intrigued with all of life's curiosities.
These stodgy thoughts: They encompassed the hours and moved at a dinosaur's
reptilian pace for they weren't fully the refinement of thought either but
callow half ideas shaped more of superfluous raw feelings than thought and
being newborn with eyes shut they staggered around..
Feeling: it came about from chemicals that surrounded an impression made in the
gel of memory, and if the impression was a good one, they tried to prompt a
being toward more of them, and if it was bad with less of such engagements.
Staggering, her stodgy physical being also had trouble moving. She went to the
bathroom with a belief that she would take a shower so that she could go to the
shop. She had opened a store that sold landscape paintings and posters from
various sources, picture frames, and in her partitioned backroom that she
called her gallery, paintings that she picked up from recent trips to Southeast
Asia. It was there, as the business was beginning to do well financially that
within her migraines she began to founder there in mundane numbers of dollars
and cents, abstractions that bored her beyond belief. The frequency of her
migraines augmented for, buoyant as she was, she was nonetheless tossed in the
undulations of the ennui. Sick at times like she was now, she did not feel like
a deity any longer but an effete, forlorn bastardess in this world.
The shop: It was a room by which bland lives from colorless walls could choose
from her insipid goods; and from it her monetary concerns were eased as she
prostituted the hours of her days.
The days: Already a year had passed away since the point where she wanted to
sell the house. It passed away as if it were a mere hour. It passed away as the
owl, the ball games of her two boys that had disturbed the bird, youthful
naivety that a child's bliss in the simple pleasures of the day (the only
happiness there was by her reckoning of the years of her life) would go on
forever, and that confidence that the unquestioning love of a child would never
alter into the adult judgment against an errant parent. It passed away as youth
itself no matter how many doses of Vitamin E and C, growth hormones, estrogen
and testosterone replacement, vegetarian meals of choices rich in antioxidants,
low fat foods high in carbohydrates, botox injections, wrinkle reducer creams,
and morning racket ball sessions with her employees that she implemented into
each day.
The house: They were still living there because less than a year ago no one
seemed likely to buy it to be of immediate help to her financially.
The boy: And she kept the boy, irate as he was about having a real estate
agent's sign in the front yard, since there was no other place for him to go.
She would have gone into the "gallery" to perform her perfunctory duties were
in not for the bathroom mirror reflecting a paler and more haggard visage than
what she cared to accept; and so, unable to let determination belie reality,
she returned to the cold embrace of her silk bed linen. She just lay there with
the hours until, puffing on some marijuana and dozing for a few minutes, she
awakened to her higher authority accosting her like a mosquito. Gabriele tried
to shoo her away with her hand.
"You can't get rid of me that easily," laughed the Higher Authority.
"Athena, sorry. I thought you were an insect."
The Higher Authority guffawed. "It is Athena, the insect, is it? I thought the
last time we were together I was Aten and you were Akhenaten, or was it the
other way around?"
"I've made you Athena this time. You have a body and garments that I would
ascribe as being Ancient Greek and godessesque. So, what is it?"
"So haughty and so cold. And I am your higher authority! You can freeze people
even in the most innocuous situations, Gabriele. It is pitiful; as your eyes
did to that Pizza Hut delivery creature who brought you a cheese instead of a
Bella Garden and with the extra thick crust instead of a thin crust in
violation of your strict adherence to a youth fulfillment diet. You can freeze
them all you like, but don't make the mistake that you have that impact on me."
"The pizza was too hot. I turned the delivery guy cold. It kept the world in an
equilibrium that way."
"And on that train trip from Bangkok to Changmai to acquire those Nawin
Biadklang paintings—"
"Not only those but others in Southeast Asia. What about it? You can't surely
scold me for my response to that jackass on the train. Well, Athena, I was
sketching that verdant green landscape and a train stop in a small town with
all of its myriad figures when this old jackass seated next to his wife said in
English, 'I would like to go to sleep now.' I said 'You are over there with
your wife so sleep there next to her. I don't want to be the instigator of
divorce proceedings. No need to cross the aisle and come over into these
seats.' He said, 'I have a ticket. I am over there. I have a lower.' I checked
my ticket. 'I sleep in the lower cot,' I said. 'It is marked on my ticket.'
'How much was your ticket?' asked the old gizzard, snatching my ticket out of
my hands. '1400 baht round trip,' I told the old gizzard. 'I paid 1600 baht for
mine and so I get the lower no matter what it says on your ticket. You get the
upper!' he told me. 'Listen, fuck head, I'm busy now,' I said as I took back my
ticket. 'Upper/lower — who gives a flying fuck. I suppose I can climb the bars
like a monkey and into this upper monkey coffin but it won't happen right away.
I'm busy, you see. I wasn't put on this planet to serve your whims. If you are
so tired take a nap in your present seat.' By this time he had uniformed
security guards and God knows who telling me I needed to go out with them as if
I were being arrested and he was gossiping full force to every Tom, Dick, and
Harry on the train making an embarrassing scene. Was I supposed to stop my work
because Old Gizzard wanted to go to sleep at 6 p.m. I am not that big of a
whore that I exist to please the whims of all old gizzards. So, he and his
brown suited thugs got the cold stare from beginning to the end when I sealed
myself up in my monkey coffin. I know I have a hard faade but that doesn't
mean I don't concern myself with others. If Old Gizzard were choking to death,
of course I would give him the Heimlich maneuver. If he were having a nervous
breakdown I would talk sweet logic to him to appease him throughout the hours
of illogical and troubled emotions. As it turned out, I think that he is lucky
I didn't climb down from the metallic limbs and clog his snoring with my dirty
socks choking off mouth and nostrils."
"You sound like a real bitch."
"People have had that impression of me. They have since I was a little girl. I
don't mind at all. Matter of fact I think of the word as a real compliment.
Your impression of me is all your own. Do what you will with it, and then bug
off."
The Higher authority guffawed once again. When she gained composure she asked,
"So then, should I say that you need no one?"
"Yes, you've got it—no one." Gabriele smiled complacently.
"Hmm…Maybe Antarctica would be the best choice for someone like you. I did come
here for a purpose but it seems that it would be futile in the present
attitude. You have gotten more cynical with the years, haven't you, Gabriele?"
"Perhaps. I don't paint any longer, you know. I just run a shop to keep my
family going. His tuition is rather expensive."
"That's love. It is nothing to be cynical about."
"And what is this grand purpose of yours?"
" I just wanted you to consider whether or not, at this point, you have been an
effective mother. You've done some things with good enough intentions, I know,
but overall Americans judge accomplishments in a very pragmatic perspective:
has it worked?"
"You've already reached your conclusion that it has not, so there isn't a lot
of purpose in the question unless you just like wasting my time. He's a
teenager now. It's a little late to go back in time, wouldn't you say? I doubt
that there is anything that needs to be undone, anyhow. Just as siblings
compete fiercely to get mamma bird's affections so that she will feed them the
biggest worms, an only child also uses his parents."
"And parents children."
Gabriele felt as if the words had smote her on her face. It stung but after a
gloomy and tacit withdrawal she looked onto her higher authority and smiled
gravely as one beginning to understand. Having failed her son was seeping into
all previous convictions and deep into old memories themselves. She was being
enlightened in a most acerbic way. It was unpleasant; but when anything came
along to make her more aware she did not want to shun it. She stayed silent for
a few minutes until words again bubbled up through the aperture of her mouth.
"Perhaps I did use him. By having a child I gained companionship on my journey
into aloneness—"
"And?"
"And maybe the wish to finish family completely by beginning one of my own. Not
good reasons I know."
"No. Keeping Peggy from seeing him—"
"Okay, it was spiteful. I'll grant you that one."
"Quite unseemly for a goddess."
"Okay…I suppose so. Still, realistically a bad family continues its
stranglehold on the errant child unless she brings closure on it by making her
own family. That is just the way it is. Anyhow, I attempted to fulfill my
duties to the world. I gave birth to a child and put him into an isolated area
of a small town to bring his formative years in harmony with classical music
and non-violent fables. But he was a child of impetus and not reflection. Born
in the Gulf War, the year of truculence, by his seventh year he had beaten up
some red headed girl for kissing him on the merry-go-round and had beaten the
shit out of some little fuck who made a crude comment about me casting spells
on men and eating their piss. School sucked him up to make him a member of
truculent society. Ball competition was preferred over looking at the
uniqueness of every blade of grass. What could I do? I did my best considering
the fact that I prioritized my own continuing evolvement."
"And what did you learn that was so instrumental to your personal development?"
"I learned to play a shokohachi, a Japanese musical instrument." She chuckled
embarrassingly.
"Your mouth always did like to go down on long instruments. Anything else?"
"I became a lesbian briefly."
"That's right. Hilda was her name. When did you last communicate with her?"
"I don't know. Four years ago, maybe."
"Forlorn Hilda. Not all that much different than Rita/Lily Lily/Rita. Das
stimmt, nitch wahr?" [That's so, isn't it?] spoke the Higher Authority, for a
moment changing the conversation into German.
"Oh, please, you got that from Adagio. He doesn't know what he is talking
about."
"Doesn't he? He knows. I know. You know. Dear, silly little Gabriele, you are
hallucinating desertions of mom and dad in all things. So you desert rather
than be deserted. Remember that with kings and paupers, with great and small
creatures, one can have such sweet connections, but you have to leave Fort
Gabriele first."
"This mixing is a diluting of potential. Most people don't know themselves and
have never had an interesting thought all their born days because they are
scared to sit down with themselves for a minute. They flit around as social
butterflies when they are gadflies to me. You make me sound as a nut with a
major behavioral disorder. I guess you would have more grounds to call me
autistic. I just don't have this strong yearning to drive myself into the thick
part of the herd. If one is such a deviant, they think she is crazy. Their
negative judgments are meant to pillory a person to drive him or her back into
the herd.
"Just because someone has gone from a person's life doesn't mean she cannot be
ebullient with that entity. The more beings that are there in the heart the
more alive he or she will be! It is that simple: love and be loved!"
"Oh, you sentimental creature. Heart-- is that the receptacle of these highly
prized human emotions for contemporary man? …th emotions that make humans
slaughter each other. The Egyptians thought this heart was the receptacle of
thought. You make me want to puke using such silly words frivolously to reflect
nothing. You talk abstractions of heart and love like such a sophist."
"Gabriele, dear stupid Gabriele of such wasted intelligence, were you really so
smashed by that tank which your parents drove off in? Has life really been so
flat ever since? Have you never considered that human relationships in
particular are like the beautiful scents of flowers and these scents are the
interaction with other entities."
"Nay, these scents as you call them are manipulative forces—the flower trying
to attract the bee to pollinate its kind, the gentleman wanting to get laid,
the smiling businessman trying to woo in the money. I am sick of this flowery
gunk. Matter of fact I'm damn sick and sick of you! Be gone with you,
Mosquito!" And so she shooed her Higher Authority away.
She thought about that time a year ago when her hubris was so indefatigable.
Hadn't she told herself back then that, should it take place, his return to
Sharon would be a detachment of no more sentimental value than an extracted
tooth? Then, visibly upset one given day, he announced to her that he really
meant it and would be leaving immediately. It was only in her phlegmatic
folding of his clothes, packing his bags, calling a taxi for him, and seeing
him go away in it, that she put consistent direction into the distraught boy's
ambivalent and floundering movements. Back then he couldn't even pack a
suitcase for himself, as discombobulated as his thoughts were. Back then she
was so dangerously obdurate as if she were not mortal at all and had no
connection to these lesser beings. Still she supposed that if he had not been
refused, and had not retreated home in that same taxi, she could not have
maintained her dignified stoicism indefinitely. Losing another boy to Sharon,
she might well have eventually fallen into a nadir or great depression like an
apoplexy felling her into a great sleep. Change, that tempest of discontent,
made deciduous waste of all this impermanence that always left a person long
before she would leave herself at her demise. Maybe it was auspicious that her
will had been thwarted. At the time she even sensed some external force upon
her that was trying to stymie her recalcitrant will. Were these the feelings of
a secondary will or was it the voice of God trying to choke deleterious
determination before she was choked by it? This too was an unknown. And time
went by like a shell-shocked soldier.
Sang Huin's interactions at a convenience store that he often frequented were
no different than at any other time. For the people whom he encountered he had,
at one moment, the pugnacious haughtiness of a bull ready to charge, the next
moment a conscientious withdrawal from this arrogant stance by awkward fumbling
glances and gestures, and lastly a shy retreat from human interaction. So as he
was at the 7- eleven at 2:00 in the morning buying some milk the same thing
occurred: bullish glances into the faces of the cashiers, awkwardly attempting
to locate his wallet from one of the pockets of his bag (money always having
been such a dismissed tool until that inevitability of having to use it), and a
hurried look of one wanting to abscond from having his fumbling interactions
with King Sejong notes scrutinized as much as a wish to avoid small talk with
the cashiers (Korean utterances or near utterances to which he would be as
ungrammatical as a pig or therein in his native English where a fuller exchange
and a denuding of himself would have to ensue).
This disorganization with Korean Won and money in general was what he knew to
be a microcosm of wanting to depart from all social situations. It was his
secret of dislike of humanity and feeling that he was wrong to feel this way
embarrassingly disclosed by the fumbling subconscious like the disrobing of
Janet Jackson's breasts. It was no wonder that the gentleman within him often
ran away in the midst of social encounters.
He was even a little annoyed that there was no one behind him waiting in line
and, in so doing, making his time with the cashiers a more professionally
expedited encounter. But this English speaking cashier would not have any more
of this being dismissed the way he had behaved unto her for months. She found
his pugnacious and haughty awkwardness such an eccentric mix against his
handsome backdrop. By her reasoning of things, not being so beautiful herself
his blighted character made him more obtainable.
In one quick gesture she snatched his Pocket PC out of his shirt pocket and
asked, "What is this?" He answered, "It is my pocket PC. Can I have it back?"
He was alarmed. It was no less than a kidnapping of Gabriele and his face
grimaced like an old man, making her chuckle. "No, she said. You will not get
it back. Well, maybe—but only if you send to me an SMS from your mobile phone
asking to have it returned." "Why do I need to do that when you understand what
I'm saying in person?" he asked. "Because I want to have your phone number in
my mobile." She quickly wrote down her phone number on a piece of paper and
handed it to him. There was little else he could do but to fulfill the
instructions of the ransom even though the obtuse man was totally baffled by
these actions. He needed the return of his beloved Gabriele, his image, his
truth. He sent to her this SMS: "I don't like it when people steal my things.
It isn't friendly." She read it and smiled widely for this was their first
substantive dialogue. "Okay," she said, "I will return your toy but I want you
to smile every time you see me from now on, and I want you to mean it." He felt
excited by her storming of the wall he had built around himself and smiled more
meaningfully than his usual genuine contrivances. She handed to him his change
and the plastic bag containing his carton of milk. "My shift ends now. You can
walk me home." She signed out of her cash register, and then winked at her
coworker who giggled as the couple left the convenience store. "What is your
friend amused about?" he asked. "You," she said. "Why do you want me to walk
you home? Seoul is such a safe city," he said. "Safe if you are a man," she
responded. He felt aroused by her. With Seong Seob no longer allowing him to
penetrate, her flesh seemed all the more sumptuous despite the effluvium of
cheap perfume that exuded from it. For he who lived so little in this world it
seemed that he needed the physical immersion, the pierce into another human's
skin, beyond all other creatures. At least it seemed to him as such; and he
would have gone with her into her apartment and its bedroom had she not stopped
him at the gate. This was Korea, and a Korean girl in the mainstream of the
thicket would consummate a relationship only after the marital vows were
declared. She kissed him. "I am free to see a late morning movie. Meet me in
front of the store at ten." "All right," he said.
Three years later another spell more debilitating than this migraine took
place. Whereas the other one, and ones like it, felt like the impact of being
smacked against some type of a wall, this one was a gradual crescendo of being
smashed into the abyss.
It was 6:00 and she was returning from a trip to New York City where she had
attended a symphony with her man when she missed an entrance to a roadside
park. Needing even more to stretch, she veered off the interstate to a small
town.
Although it was wintertime, a new brand of boy keen to play a global sport was
in a baseball diamond practicing a sundry of soccer maneuvers from kicks and
stops to stylized manipulations of balls. She parked outside the diamond and
got out. These male youths were kicking a mist of dust into the air in what at
first seemed like a purposeless expenditure of energy but when she thought
about it seemed more like a male initiation ceremony. All were so uniform in
their uniforms. It seemed to her that young men and boys in particular needed a
typical male activity with which to sense themselves. What they were and what
they were supposed to do with themselves from the events that should bring on
insouciance and imperturbability to appropriate times for masturbation would be
extrapolated in this ensemble of males. As her eyes followed the dust she felt
deep sympathy for these fragile creatures. Boys and their balls began to seem
like such a lugubrious theme and she wondered if it could be transferred to
canvas should she ever paint again. She scanned the field and its outskirts.
She saw some men who were no doubt watching their sons. If a boy were to not
have a father showing some interest in guiding him, if not to a positive
expression of manhood that most did not have a clue about, at least an
innocuous release of youthful energies on a ball, it seemed to her that he
would be lost forever. It seemed to her that he might not ever find a real
vocation for himself and he would not even know if he should look up a skirt or
pull on another man's zipper.
She called her man on her mobile phone. "Hi, it's me. Did you get back to your
apartment okay? Good. No, I'm just taking a break from driving. What? Oh, I
don't know exactly. Some little town. I'm near a ball diamond. Nothing really.
Stretching and thinking my weird thoughts. Yeah, I went through a Chinese fast
food drive-thru, thanks. What about you? Huh? You are breaking up a bit…. I
see…. Okay, I guess if you are with someone I should call you later…. Girl or
guy friend? Uh huh. No, I'm not jealous. That is an antediluvian instinct of
troglodytes…. Cavemen, my Russian friend. You learn so many new words from me
on a daily basis that I ought to charge you for the service. Antediluvian? —
old, out of date, ancient, prehistoric. Well, I guess you should get back to
your date. Better to ball a chick than play ball with a boy. No, nothing. Just
me and my weird thoughts… .Purpose? Well, again, thanks for the ticket to the
concert. I decided to call 'cause I wanted you to know that I was thinking of
you, although my timing seems to be all so wrong. What?… Why do I make jealousy
equated to primal drives of cavemen and cave mice, of mice and men? I think
that is what you are asking. Think of it, my love, it is just a way for a man
to make sure that he doesn't have to take care of babies that aren't his and
for a woman not to lose her hunter. Okay, so I can't prove it. I'm a bit like
Descartes that way despite my belief in scientific inquiry and methodology. But
still one can know lots that can't be proven. It is simple and base selfishness
that prompts humans to respond as they do. That is why I scorn the herds. One
of my other reasons for calling is thinking about both of you, you and
Nathaniel, and each of you needing each other no matter if you believe it or
not…. Of course. I'm not scolding you. No lectures. I agree. Yes, I know you
have been kind to him, but you haven't been close. A man needs to guide a boy
and a boy needs to be guided by a man. I know he is not your son, and he isn't
exactly the easiest person to deal with, but he has no other father….Yeah, I
know. You don't exactly live with us now. Forget it. I shouldn't have asked
that I suppose. What?… No. Okay, in part when I married you I thought that you
would be a positive influence on him. Is that so bad? Marriages are contracts
and people have expectations when they go into them. What did you expect?
(Laugh). Pussy, you say? You seem to be getting that without me. Is your friend
at the table with you? Oh, gone to the bathroom. That's good…. God, I don't
even know if you want to stay together. I know you think that friends should
marry and we did. What?… No, I don't want a divorce but we need to do more than
once a month of seeing each other….Yes, I know. It was my crazy idea. I'm full
of them. As an artist I need time alone but I'm not an artist now but a
businesswoman…. Yes, I'm sure I'm not jealous, as much as you might want me to
be. I'm beyond that. I'm beyond instinct, beyond societal influences, beyond
religion, beyond, beyond! Free to be a loose canon. Yes, I know I amuse you.
So, to better amuse you I think we should meet at least twice a month or our
signatures on a piece of paper will begin to seem like a distant dream…. Okay,
good. And could you call Nathaniel later this week just to ask him how he is?
Do you still have his mobile number? Good. Everybody needs to think that
someone cares for him a little no matter if he does or not (laugh)... I'm
joking. Of course I am…Yes, I know you do in your own way as me in my own ways.
We all have our ways."
A half hour later she got back into her car and drove into the embrace of
darkness. It was 3:34 in the morning when she first saw the roof of her
quasi-hermitage from a distance. At the first glimpse of it she released a long
exhalation as if, after a long exhausting journey, she needed to rest from
breathing itself within the comfort of her solitary bedroom. But then seeing
cars strewn on the edge of the road, she felt disconcerted as if she had driven
into the wrong place while knowing that she was back home.
She felt alarmed and her mind tried to conjure up scenarios that might explain
this emergency, if it were such. But upon advancing closer, she saw that there
were no emergency vehicles and merely more of these emptied shells of unwanted
strangers littering her drive. Unable to park there, she was forced into a
backward retreat.
She parked halfway into a ditch behind most of the others and turned off her
engine. There, she was stunned by loud music vibrating the windows, piercing
her ears with its pollutants of action usurping meditation, and weltering in
the hollows of her brain. She entered her hermitage whence all the noise
originated. Inside all was being barraged in the cacophony of rap, hip hop, or
some other artillery that she had neither knowledge of nor empty labels to
place on that which she was adverse to know anything about. She looked on her
surroundings with the consternation of one returning to charred and smoke
filled ruins still in the grip of war.
Then her mood changed into something entirely different: moralistic loathing.
She felt as an unwitting heterosexual man innocently defecating in a cubicle of
a restroom in a shopping mall who is startled and appalled to see from that
crevice interconnecting the adjacent cubicle to his own a hand one moment, a
face the next, and then that hand again as it trespasses with fingers wiggling
a "come to my stool and service me" gesture. For when the consternation had
worn off the former whore and Victorian adulteress was repulsed by the world
around her: repulsed by the nebulous clouds of smoke, the inebriating smells of
beer so potent as to be tactile and viscous enough to be a liquid pouring into
her lungs, this scene of teenage couples smooching and almost smooching as they
got stoned in her living room, and how this generation was caught up in the
same hungers making it no different from those which preceded it.
All compunction of her own interestingly varied if no more lascivious life than
other earthlings vanished from all conscious thought. Even if she had latent
ideas that Puritanical prudishness would be hypocritical, and even if she
doubted having the moral authority to be the guardian of youth since, according
to her there were no morals to guard, she intended to crash the party
nonetheless.
The indignation she, an American homeowner, experienced at such intruders
occupying and thereby desecrating "her" hallowed domain amalgamated with her
Puritanical eagerness to excoriate all moral unregenerates. For she too was an
American, that autocratic hybrid of conservative and liberal property owners,
espousers, and defenders of ownership who wanted to dictate moral rules
sententiously in accord with ownership agendas. As nature only had evolvement
from viable elements, energy, accident, and chance into its structure a person
with some financial means wanted to own and possess to be, and wanted the
trespassers of her property arrested. She thought of this peculiar sense of
ownership that flared within her; and although she would be amused by
ruminations of its senselessness in the immediate future, now she judged it was
time to be irate. It was time to act.
Disheveled angel on a loveseat: "Hello, you must be Mom." Beer bottle quaffer
on a newly upholstered chair (repeating mockingly):"Hi Mom." Androgynous purple
haired creature (disingenuous as a child waving at Mickey Mouse in Disneyland
but directed at her, this polar bear with the stiff arms who had been
mutilation at her inception, who trudged through the party): Merely waving.
The occupiers seemed to be everywhere. Some were rising from below or
descending from above to stare at her from a staircase while a good many of the
others were in the same room with her or waiting in the hall. As her house had
myriad rooms, so she assumed, would be the amount of trespassers
Gabriele (to all): "Who or what the hell are you?" Angel (as if the question
were directed to her alone): "I am an angel." Angel's partner on the loveseat:
"Angel of the streets. That would be more like it."
He was using his fingers to comb through her disheveled hair— hair that combed
or not was comely in youth— youths who were insouciant and free of financial
worries, nonchalant to the shadow of their adulthood of entrapment that they
were stepping into like a snare— shadows of ineluctable errors in the making of
one's own family that for now were not their own. She imagined the angel"
dirtying up" the back of her sofa with the hair fibers of her mop. Then she
surmised the dirty invaders as a whole. They were getting high on more than the
present moment. If they were still floating on a dispersed cloud of smoke they
would soon be seeking to inhale more to keep themselves high until the
inevitability of sleep would make them founder. If they had not already burnt a
whole or spilled beer onto any of her furniture they would have surely done so
had she kept her original plan of staying in New York City for the night. She
loathed them for being the dirty ravagers of her home that they were but, wise
to herself and the tricks therein, she knew that she loathed the occupiers more
from the envy of their youth than for any carnal carnival that they had imposed
upon her hermitage schemed together in the expectation of her absence.
Angel: "Okay, I'm a street angel." Laughter in the room to which Gabriele also
laughed albeit begrudgingly. Thick lips: "Call me Mr. P. How do you do, Mother?
Would you allow me to kiss your cheek?" More hysterical laughter. Was her role
as the mommy storming the party something so farcical? Was she such a farce as
a mother? If she were it was from the fact that her intelligence was greater
than the role. This was what she told herself. She grabbed thick lips by one of
his long ears and forced him to kneel. "Do you think I'd let an ugly dog like
you slobber on me?" she blared. There was more hysterical laughter. The room
itself seemed to scoff her pretension to motherhood within the sheer volume of
its cacophonous and sneering laughter. Her obdurate eyes fell as solid boulders
into his retina pools. Then suddenly, her cold eyes dismissed him as of having
no more importance than any insect, and she brushed him aside.
Weren't they impertinent? If it had been directed toward anyone else she would
have approved, but their impertinence to her was a contemptible act mocking the
authority she had to dismiss them with. Their sedentary refusal to leave her
immediately as she entered her domicile was a criminal action. "Party's over,
party's over!" she screamed six times into random faces that were seated in a
semicircle. But this only increased their laughter at the redundancies of the
mad mommy. For a year now there had been her own repudiation of the residual
smells of cocaine; briefly returning from the shop to find him lounging around
in the house in his underwear; music slaughtering her contemplations; sitting
languidly in meetings at the school to discuss his truancy and feeling as a
broken drum, a defunct instrument that could not obtain change; his running
away for days without her being able to fathom where he went; talks where,
without propitiating, she admitted having not been there as much as the
domestic sort, but cautioning him to secure his future by attending classes and
studying as diligently as he was able to do; scoldings and beatings that were
also to no avail; watching small but expensive items disappear from the home
and telling herself that she meant to get rid of them anyhow; and now this.
"Where is he!" she demanded to know from the sundry people who had risen from
the pit of the house to the parlor.
"Up!" said someone; and she found him in her bed copulating with his girl
beneath him. She grabbed him by the neck, dragging the naked body through the
frenetic crowds. With a burly frame kept muscular by her ritual of weekly if
not daily racket ball sessions, she was able to pull him around no differently
than she had when he was five years old. Enjoying his ride and his naked
exhibition beyond any pleasure he had ever felt before, he squealed with
laughter even unto being hurled into the snow.
"I love you Mom," he guffawed.
"I'll bring your bitch out next and you can do that in the streets." As she
turned to do just that someone brought out Nathaniel's clothes and the crowd
began to disperse from the house.
When he returned late in the afternoon she was on her deck. Like her migraine,
an unpredictable storm was coming upon her. Trees hurled their limbs at the
dusk because they themselves were being hurled. They were angered because they
were being angrily smote. It seemed to her that everything was smote in jilts
of unpredictable existence, and love itself was no guarantee of anything. It
was selfishly using a child and being used and merely this. Bland philistine
lives devoid of color and galleries in a marriage where two conventional
parents were always present could produce Klu Klux Klan members, Timothy
McVeighs, serial killers, snipers, child molesters, unibombers, or bigoted
bible thumpers blowing up abortion clinics. Weakened and in pain, she half way
yearned for a priest to hand her a round piece of unleavened bread to melt in
her mouth for a reduction of tension in her life, the melting of her
quandaries, and the belief that crucifixions and violence and those who were
born in the wrong socioeconomic state and whose short and painful lives were
consumed by hard labor and drudgery for survival in the injustices and
truculence that abound were all part of God's plan. She wistfully thought of
the statues of saints and patron saints that had their home warming
familiarity. Then he approached her.
"Hi. Sorry about everything. Teenagers, right? We like parties. I didn't have
permission and things got out of control. Are you angry?"
She noticed how muscular he now was. For the first time she felt intimidated by
it, seated there as weakened as she was. She cleared her throat and looked on
him like an object such as a wall that she would see and her hubris would
bypass as immaterial. He had felt it before and hated that look of hers beyond
all others. Her treatment of the dog, he assessed, was sometimes better than
this. "I think I'll try something," she mumbled aloud contemplatively. "When do
you think you'll be paid from that burger joint you work for?"
"Why?"
"Do you have money?"
"Some."
"I don't think I'll have you as a son any longer. Still, it's a little hard—not
impossible though —to throw you out. Stay as a tenant if you want. You can give
me half what you get. That way you can stay. We'll do this for a time and see
how it goes. And if it doesn't go then you can go. I'll ask you to leave if it
doesn't work. I'll force you out."
"You stopped the allowance. That is why I'm working there so much on the
weekends with so little pay when I should be studying "
"I didn't want it to go into dope."
"Oh, please. You are the one who smokes joints."
"Different. It is medicine for my migraines, and I don't take it often. Pay
half and then you can stay—in your area below, and only this. Half and you can
stay."
"All right," he said.
The next morning she woke up from a strange dream in which she was driving over
her son the way Michael had run over the Indian boy; and as she woke up
startled from the dream she was again startled in her awakened state. Nathaniel
was there smirking at her in a corner of her bedroom, crunching on a cup of
ice, and the shadow of his burly form was impinging on the edge of her bed. She
was mute in a cold chill. He was there for a few seconds and then he was gone.
She again stayed at home the next day since her headache was now fully a
migraine; but unable to concentrate on reading a book, she soon felt lonely and
bored with so much resting in bed. She brought in a stray cat that she had been
feeding for a month. It strangled her footsteps when she moved, cried if it
wasn't touched, and when she put it on her lap it tried to suck on the buttons
of her shirt as if it had regressed to the unopen-eyed newborn needing to be
nursed and to immerse itself in a mother. The behavior was strange and she was
half-tempted to throw it out had unwanted empathy not infected her thoughts.
Furthermore, it gave her subject for thought, which she liked so well; and
whenever an event or being provided her with a subject for rumination it gave
her a gift that superseded the pleasure or pain of the interaction. If she had
morality it was that of empathy and to measure a thing based upon it giving her
subject for rumination. It was from the cat that she garnered, from her
experience with it, that memories of traumatic events pressed into the actions
of all things. She was watching Star Trek reruns, and drooling chewing tobacco
into an aperture of a Coca Cola can when Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy
were beaming up at the same time as her son. Obviously he didn't go to school.
She told herself that she didn't "give a damn" and this time it was essentially
true.
"Little pig, little pig, will you let me come in?" he asked from the doorway of
her bedroom.
"It all depends," she said stoically. "If you have money you can leave it and
go. If you don't have money you have broken two fundamental clauses in our
contract—one that forbids you from this area of the domicile and a second that
you have to pay what is owed to me." She was angry that even now, for his sake,
she threw away money on tuition and tutors, was living in a house that was
really beyond her means, and was a businesswoman, a lowly merchant, for his
sake. She had sacrificed for him and it had been a waste.
"I'm not paying anything to you," he said.
"Is that so," she asked calmly. "Then really there is no reason to be up here,
is there?"
"All right," he said and went away.
And then, in that evening of the third day of Migraines, her flow of energy was
now a desiccated bed of rock and soot. She merely lay on the sofa near the
billiard table with the cat sleeping on her lap and her eyes staring at the
individual and collective tiles of the ceiling. She too had regressed for like
a child she was afraid to make any movement lest the cat be disturbed; and this
pathos, like a child's, was from discerning the vulnerability of all things
that could only be peered from the scope of one's weakness. He again came to
her. He was grinning complacently. She wondered why he was now moving beyond
his boundary: and yet he was male, and no different than any Ghengis Khan who
conquered new turf and made foreign natures submissive.
She wanted to say, "Hello, honey, could you give me a wet washcloth" but she
did not want to approach him from weakness and so she said, "You've trespassed
the agreed boundaries."
"Uh uh!" he negated. "You're down here in the family room, and down here is
mine, isn't it? Maybe I should get the cops." He laughed. She didn't say
anything. "Whose car is in the drive?" he asked.
"It's your graduation present. I bought it months ago. I had them bring it out
today when I had a clear purpose."
"I'm not graduating."
"You are and I am," she said. "It is time."
"Time for what?"
"Time to leave. Time to end this state we have found ourselves in." Her heart
was beating rapidly and she could barely slur the words from her mouth by
imagining them to come from some source outside herself. "I've been waiting. I
wasn't sure the context of giving it to you: a birthday or Christmas gift, a
banana waved under your nose to get you through school, or to facilitate a
permanent departure."
"You're kicking me out?"
"Yes."
"Where would I go?"
"You just go. Just as I went to Ithaca. You just go, deciding that you will
suffer through anything so as to end it with people who failed you." Tiring,
she stopped and put her hands on her pounding head. Then seconds later she
continued. "Anyway you stop thinking about them. You will them into
non-existence, or as close as you can, because as cold as it is nothing else
works."
"What sort of a person tells her son to leave?" The reality of being cut off
with no one filled him with dread and his voice had a whining undertone for he
was questioning if the end of family had been his aim.
"You will them into non-existence," she murmured in a despondent redundancy,
"because to even take in one nice enough memory would bring in a stampede of
others to trample over you leaving you nothing but bitter in those memories,
never able to reestablish yourself anew. No need for sentimentality: will a
permanent end. Resurrecting yourself anew is only possible with the gates
closed." She was remembering that day she arrived in the airport visibly
pregnant and intent to move to the East Coast to begin family anew. They
inveighed the Rice University graduate school graduate with their artillery of
words: whore, loser, [bastardess] whom they had taken in, and not in [her]
right mind. She had been matched to an old doctor named Jerry, hand-Picked by
Peggy. Marriage to him and living the remainder of the myriad days of her life
in Emporia, Kansas would have been the payment for her indulgence in being
allowed to study abroad in that quasi-nation of Texas. Merging the more
affluent family to hers had been the price for Rice that Peggy had put on her
head. Standing there unwed and pregnant, the bulging belly an ignominy, they
saw her as ungrateful for their charity in taking her in. They believed that
her education had gone to her head, and that she was so unlike that little girl
they trained to be a housekeeper—the one who did her perfunctory duties even if
her eyes were hard and cold toward those who tried to finger her. Without words
those eyes had demanded all these males to get their fingers out of her and put
them into their own rectums but back then she had done it in wordless etiquette
as a respectful family member. But as a graduate she was releasing her latent
honest thoughts in contemptuous words. She was as a madwoman rebelling against
that designated role as a lesser family member by a pregnancy and a declaration
to leave them forever.
"Making oneself anew. It can be done if the gates are shut completely and the
herds of memories are kept at bay. Then there is no bitterness to poison the
present. But be forewarned that if one creates family of his own the new self
and the new life might go awry. Then he or she needs to fulfill the
expectations of the new family, needs to sacrifices himself for their sake,
perhaps is in a detestable job, and needs to raise children with only that
defunct model of a bad parent as the example of being a parent for oneself."
She saw his smirking and it aggravated her. "Don't be so amused by what you
don't understand."
"You always say weird shit all the time. What else can I do but laugh at it?
You aren't really kicking me out are you?" He asked this but she did not say
anything. "Are you in a lot of pain?"
"Some," she said. "My medicine is in the kitchen. Could you bring it to me, and
could you bring back a cold washcloth too?"
"You are kicking me out of the house and yet I should help you."
"You don't have to."
"Have to help you or have to leave?"
Either one was at her lips but she could not release that wisp of air and her
bottom lip began to tremble. She suddenly realized that she was not watching
someone else say these things that she thought should not have been said and
not say things that should have been said. "Help me. You don't have to, but you
do have to leave"
"No," he whined as tears weltered in the confines of his confused eyes. "You
can pain me but I wouldn't want to pain you." He said this in such dulcet
ingenuousness. He was like that child he once was-- the child who had taken an
empty tray of a TV dinner, filled it with water, and picked wild flowers to
bring to his beloved mother.
Going into the kitchen he tried to think, as he looked for the pills, what
words he might enchant to propitiate her, his sustenance; but his howling dog,
chained up near the swimming pool, kept destroying his concentration so he went
to the deck to silence it.
"Bitch," he yelled as he looked down from the balustrade, "shut your fucking
snout!" The dog continued to howl and so he repeated himself with a more
angered vehemence. Only after trudging halfway down the steps did the howling
stop. He bent down over the railing and looked at the dog again. His eyes
dropped into the dog's like stones and the animal began to whimper. He glanced
up at the darkening clouds, sighed, and sensed that he and the dog were the
same; and then a visceral malaise about the futility of all things began to
permeate all his thoughts and his vitriol mitigated. "Upset that she brought in
the cat instead of you? I'm sure you are but you're thrown your bones and are
nicely kept here ignored and forgotten. What's wrong with that? You're back
home after two weeks in the kennel. It seems you should be happy with that."
He sat down on one of the lower steps, whittling away an edge near his feet
with his pocketknife. At first he hoped to see answers in his current dilemma,
but then deciding that there were none unless that gained by time and obscurity
he thought, "Maybe she won't think like this in a few days. I'll keep out of
sight and ride it out—not look too anxious for the car. See how it goes. That's
the best thing to do."
He spoke to the dog. "Get back. Such stinking breath, bitch." The dog backed
away a few steps. "So, you were in a cage at the kennel. She knew that I'd
never take care of you when she made that trip to Thailand to buy paintings for
this so called gallery of hers--just a partitioned backroom, more like a
closet, that caused her to rename the store into 'The Gallery.' Me, the
arsonist, was in my own little kennel—a cheap hotel room. But then yours was a
little worse wasn't it? You did not get any money deposited into your bank
account from which to buy booze and a bitch. I never need a whore—just a
willing patron, but you have to take them to expensive restaurants and treat
them like they are the center of the universe, be soft to them. Takes up a lot
of time, so I'm always tempted to get more professional whores that you can buy
outright but sometimes they are too expensive. Not that I haven't had some. If
you pawned off something of hers, all things are possible."
Whittling the wood was more than merely the whittling of the minutes of life
but a wistful hope that time itself would carve a purpose to his days that no
patriarch had done. Expressed in the subliminal connotations of gestures
defacing property it was hope hopelessly rendered as boyhood tagged him and ran
off leaving the stark ogre of manhood overtaking and merging into him. The dog
came to him, ringing the saliva-drenched towel to dry on the rack of his face
like a gift. The unbidden intimate gesture of the dog was so repugnant that he
drove the knife into the bitch. He was startled by how the clay of flesh was so
easily pierced. Not wanting to hear the agonized yelping of the bitch he
re-obtained the knife from its sheath of flesh and cut the throat in one little
action that would end life suddenly.
He hated the bitch and the bitch who had given to him the bitch. By his mother
upsetting him terribly, she had thrust him into this role as slaughterer that
by the blood alone seemed as a vile and malicious rampage against life itself
that the killing of birds and crawdads had not done. Hating the bitch and the
bitch who had made him the breaker of the wine glass, he ascended to the
kitchen, pulled out a glass from the cupboard, and returned to the corpse
before all the blood had bled into the thin layer of snow. Finding when he
returned that it had mostly done so he scooped the reddened snow into his glass
and returned for the Imtrex and Topiramate.
As his mother drank the melted dog with her pills, he hated her even more for
dashing his innocence to pieces. He grabbed the glass out of her hands,
disgorged the contents into her face, raised her in his arms, and razed her
onto the billiard table. There he began to undress her. "No," she said weakly
but no utterance would have stopped it. He took down his pants. Banging and
piercing into her, within were the voices of childhood peers telling him that
his mother was a witch who put spells on men and drank their "pee." It was as
if her head detached itself from the body and was rolling, slamming into
billiard balls, and rebounding against the edges of the table only in reality
it was attached to the debased physical extension of herself that bumped
against a sundry of balls in the tossing of this world.