When lacking that introspection which might conjure bits of a "real" destination and purpose little related to the external factors surrounding a life, a self can only seem to be such in its incessant spinning and preoccupation with movement. And so it is for him, glutton that he is for movement in his Fiat Coupe with its turbo engine, vibrating phallus of a gearshift, maximum legal carbon emissions spat into the chaotic world, the bruit of rap music (his reflection) blaring from the CD player, and the motor's cacophony flooding him with the sexual rhythms that cascade in his veins. Together the man and the machine are Descarte's concept of dualism. Together they are an expenditure of energy and only this.
That is not to say that Nathaniel has been without any contrived sense of destination and purpose in all these months of itinerant wandering. With the need to concoct reasons to justify one's movements as a condition of consciousness, he has feigned his share of plans, purposes, and agendas. The easiest contrived sense of destination compelled him to travel to San Antonio. There, for five months, he easily imposed himself into the bed in Hispanic Betty's one room efficiency since the need for enflaming pleasure and extension was so pivotal in both the callow man and the older woman. With Betty perfecting the role of sycophant, being there could have remained exciting to him for a few more months and tolerable for a great many more had she not absconded into the battered women's shelter leaving him to face the landlady and the unpaid rent on that emptied efficiency.
Now there is the long drive to Kansas, but it is only in having come so close to its borders that the idea of destination seems to be the spurious murmurings of a self-needing to aver its existence. It is in going so far, so close, that his mother's relative seems so unrelated to his life. He has no one. He feels that it has always been this way and that it has been good.
He turns off the engine and places the nozzle in the aperture of the gas tank triggering certain sexual associations that are part of his adolescent susceptibilities. Vague impressions of the violence he has imagined himself capable of perpetrating amalgamate loosely with others he has in fact perpetrated, making the distinctions less obvious than they should be. In his naps in the car earlier this day (naps on the side of the road the result of mesmerizing taps of rain on the car's face and chaise as well as the monotonous drag of the windshield wipers) both what happened and what could have happened connected together fully and strangely. Then what might have been was no different than what was. Each time waking up in his car he was startled by a fiendish nightmare of himself that was worse than he was; and he wondered if he could be a less deleterious force if he were to channel his misogyny in small actions against a woman, any marginally attractive woman, who would think of an occasional slap as a chastening tool and an aphrodisiac. To subtly ooze out caustic contempt on a tolerant loving woman instead of allowing it to be repressed and to foment underground like molten rock ready to disgorge seemed the kindest thing to do.
There in the rain he stares at a Laundromat, which is adjacent to the convenience store and the filling station. As he removes the nozzle the nerves in his neck begin to twitch like the bodies of crawdads when he used to snap off their heads. He remembers being in such a Laundromat as a young boy: there with his mother, both eating the French Cream sandwiches that she would order, and riding around in a cart. Having made the simile of his nerves being as decapitated crawdads, he remembers scoffing at Rick's horrified and demurred expressions to the point where the boy, who also had been cornered by circumstance into a cobbled family structured from two lone adults with their sexual urgencies and agendas, began to immolate Nathaniel's actions. He remembers his mother witnessing this snapping of the crawdad heads, and this, his corruptive influence on the favored one. He recalls how she attempted to embrace this lachrymose Rick in as much as she was capable of embracing anything in her hardened hubris walls, the merciless beatings of him alone with those bear paws of hers, and then taking that favored one shopping without him. He tries to stop himself from thinking of her, which is difficult for him since all his years are in some respect intertwined around her.
Gabriele sat at the computer in the bedroom of her house writing email. She had been in that house for nearly two months and had rarely communicated with anyone until the change that took place two weeks earlier. As laid back as she was in her lazy-boy recliner of solitude she was like any couch potato who had too much of a good thing and it had been like that for a score of days. She needed to stretch. She needed to extend outward.
Dear Hilda:
Hmm, blisters, cold sores and the like. Gee god. I'm no nurse so what would I know? Iodine for the former and staying off your feet would be my only recommendation. Yes, I espouse the same anti-work themes intractably. Work less and contemplate more and then you can say that you actually lived some moments of each day instead of this unreal incessant moving, futuresque planning, and, akin to slavery, catering to the wishes of others to have a few pesos in one's pockets. All of it thwarts the present moment
Regarding this guy who asked you to the bullfight at the stadium a las playas you don't need my permission. You are my moon but I'm not Alan Shepherd staking my flag into your heart. I'm glad the pendulum swing to the same sex is now over and a more subtle and neutral momentum is beginning. Still if you are going to give up women why stop there? What's more revolting than a man? And not to deliberately make you happy, which it will, I am jealous albeit on a nominal scale as anchored as I am in reason. I must tell you that my happy month and a half of self-containment in my home, following my politely rude expulsion of the tenants, ended in a sojourn through hell as one might expect. This sister in law, Sharon is—well, I don't want to say anything negative. She has bona fide reasons to hate me so who am I to stop her? Needless to say I didn't score any points on the phone asking that she give me Rick too. She was justifiably irate and although the door did not slam in my face when I finally did go there (unlike the phone fiasco with the receiver slammed into my ear) being there was unpleasant. When I came there I didn't know whether I should play the disoriented ex-wife and the contrite transgressor as an expedient so I just stayed me throughout my time there opting for being true to myself and to let the dominoes fall all around me. It seems to me that all noble people project an image of a given thing to a listening recipient which shows it to be the way the thing really is regardless of the consequences. A cat can pretend to be stealth and invisible, but does that mean it is smart? How clever are disingenuous actions really? Aren't most problems on this planet due to this animalistic self-preserving cleverness? I think so.
The last thing I wanted to do was to score points with that snobbish hag ("My family often goes to art auctions to buy real modern European art") or to pull the kid into the car with sympathy. The idea of being contrite and ingratiating myself to a child for adult choices that are never ideal is not my way of spending a day.
Sharon was half way entertaining when it came to talking about Michael —parents pushing him into a marriage so he ran off to marry this old hag, yours truly. She thought it would disconcert me but I can't think of anything more intriguing—nay, not life on Mars or cosmology—nay, nay, nay, nay, but knowing an ex husband's petty psychological profile and dirty laundry. I asked her if Michael was always running around with his male friends a lot prior to my marriage. This shut her up.
She seems to take on and off men like her panties—now with a black candyman. They are the best sexually. I'd know. Seems to be searching for that man who will help her define herself and needing the consistency of 2 boys not her own in the meantime. Now as then I feel sorry for her. She was so lugubrious the whole time like taking Nathaniel would devastate her world. I told her that we would often arrange get-togethers with the two boys but this worsened things by making her despondent.
About Nathaniel, in this room of his with all its rebellious musical noise and pop culture clutter in accordance with Maslow's hierarchy for adjusted and less well adjusted children alike, he just stared at me with dead eyes like a Jew about ready to be gassed. Then, he said, "One bitch is about the same as another." I had to laugh at first and then I grimaced. When I removed the arrow from my heart (pardon the clichZ) I almost felt relieved to not be declared a "f— bitch" although he is quite young and surely with time this will no doubt be a forthcoming utterance of his lexicon. After all, boys are known for their ingenuity. I told him he could choose and once chosen he needed to own up to his choice like a man and make the best out of it. He said he hated Rick and for this reason he would go back with me. So this is my fate granted unto me for wanting a connection, my version of family, and yet not wanting its obligations to domineer over me. —Always, your friend, Gabriele.
She deleted "always." It was a ludicrous word when probably the universe itself was temporary as all things within it that were unequivocally temporary. She changed it to " —your friend, Gabriele." But were they friends, more than friends, or less than friends? She couldn't decide so she made another deletion in favor of "—yours intractably, Gabriele."
P. S. Cold sores be dammed should a person keep his/her own tongue in the happy domicile of his/her own mouth
P.S.S. (not piss even if it pisses you off, and I hope it doesn't) Do you remember me mentioning the man with an unmemorable name who wired me that money for my plane ticket? Well, of course I paid him back on the first day with interest (a 50 percent Gabriele gratuity), but a funny thing happened. I married him. Don't worry though. It means little beyond spilled ink. So, what then does it mean? It means what? It means that a child needs the specious illusion of permanency in family and an adult needs a friendship on paper that states a committed level of consistency beyond casual friendship. If women could sign an equivalent document I'd sign one with you, my beloved Hilda. Both of you are important to me in your own distinct ways.
She remembered an incident from a few days ago:
"Why should this be any different: this Unmemorable Russian guy, Michael, me, and even the favored one. You push us aside like crumbs on a table."
She laughed. "Crumbs you are not; and there has never been what you claim as the favored one unless it is you."
"That's a lie."
"No, it isn't. You've always said he is nicer than you so sometimes it is more pleasant to be with those who aren't so temperamental. But you are my son, and you are the favored one."
"'Have always.' You haven't seen me for two years so how would you know?"
"At least you used to admit that he was nicer than you are."
"You often took the favored one places."
"To the grocery store to pick out cereal and pop tarts. Unlike you he would never grab an item of canned food that was stacked like a pyramid. He would never cause an avalanche in a grocery store. I never had to worry about taking him anyplace."
"And Rita/Lily Lily/Rita?"
"Was that a question? What about her?"
"Yes, what about her?"
She could have said, "She was too crazy" or "She was too far way" but she opted for the largest acknowledgement of what seemed to her to be true. "I did care about her but I guess I did sweep her under her welcome mat."
You are the favored one: this was what she had told her son. But the mendacity, now reverberating in memory, seemed more spurious than it had two weeks earlier when she had articulated it sotto voce within the wisps of her breath. Still it was true in the sense that most things were true in a sense, for in her malaise on that cold Christmas morning, shuddering before a vapid wall of canvas, she guessed that multifarious and antithetical points to propositions of truth were all there was.
A child, even this one, was a sensitive creature whom she, an adult, needed to emphasize certain points to while tiptoeing away from others. But, she argued in solitary inward dialogues within herself, which she found to be the most engaging form of companionship, that did not necessarily mean that her quiet tiptoeing prevarications were lies.
With words as the most viable means of projecting a given concept of one mind onto another and with them having to permeate the dense grey matter, unchanged, through the hard surface of experience and preference, it was a wonder that misunderstandings did not rule fully in all human concerns. A small lie here and there in place of misunderstood truth, she argued, was the expedient of presidents and kings. Even this Texan hick, George Jr., who seemed to her as abhorrent as a president was likely to become, was marginally justified in misleading the American populace the way she had been forced to deviate from truth for the sake of her son. The apocryphal president could not have averred his wish to contrive a war against any rogue state for any random reason even though that was his intention. He could not have declared that North Korea, the desired bombing target for setting this example of what hegemony could do, had been spared from war by Seoul's proximity to the DMZ and that Iraq had been chosen to be the favored ersatz. He needed an imminent threat to sell his war: these elusive weapons of mass destruction, which could always be argued as "out there," present but obscure.
Just as she could not have admitted to Nathaniel that Rick had been the favored one all along, now she was still reluctant to admit to herself that on that night when she brought him home she had fallen into such a deep depression. Only in her sleep were fictional distortions of this mortification sometimes coerced onto her memory. And every time that this happened she would wake up, get out of bed, and immediately engage herself in sundry activities which busy people devised to fortify themselves from wild, disturbing thoughts that they were not able to successfully corral (of course always going to the bathroom first but you don't really need to know those specifics, do you?) Among them would be attempting to bake edible cookies and cakes which still had the hope of ingratiating herself to her son without making the obdurate Gabriele look repentant. Unorthodox she might be, the former whore, witch, and child deserter with her cookie stained hands, but she was not a propitiatory type. After considering the pros and cons of a given issue in its probable impact on others she executed her decisions as she should and never revisited them repentantly.
No one had witnessed her behavior at the blighted homecoming and yet she was mortified by her conduct all the same: the quick turning off of the engine; the turning of the house key to barricade herself from the lugubrious stillness of the car so that she might depart into the intimacy of ideas in a book read under the sheets; watching Nathaniel, an icy stranger to her, turn on lights in his descent into the pit of his bedroom; sensing an effete adumbration of herself, detached from her body, as it ascended the staircase to her bedroom pulling along a body that was as weak as an old woman; and then lifelessly collapsing onto her bed still in this out-of-body sensation.
Inanimate being that she was, for a minute she found peace. But then the next moment she was a petrous rural landscape shaking from a tremor and then there was this inexplicable tsunami of tears slapping against the rubble of her cheeks. She weltered her face in a pillow on her bed in the hope of suffocating her sobs and burying her tears that were shed for the loss of the favored son who had not come from her womb and from being hated by the other one who was supposed to be her and yet wasn't.
The melancholy that had overtaken her, replicated itself in the cracks of her rocks, and for a time fed off her tears, lived even when the water was exhausted. For a couple hours after her tears were all used up the thought that she hadn't even been allowed to see Rick for a few minutes continued to torture her as she lay immobile on her bed. But at last she was able to summon her strength: she was able to repudiate the nadir by attaching herself to objective philosophic wisdom that rejected any attachment to earthly ephemeral creatures in this mixing and diluting of herself.
Was the Earth a good place? For the species, man, who suffered the least it was for a good many and for most others it was not. Whether or not it was an efficacious use of stardust was both unknown and irrelevant when any assessment was stuck in the confines of changing perspectives influenced by innumerable combinations of travail and felicity in each moment of life. Was she right to have traveled the world, sought enlightenment, and shunned being in the confines of an ongoing maternal role and its ensuing responsibilities? It too was hard to measure. Her peregrinations were done quickly but with proper consideration so it never seemed to her that she should be apologetic.
But certainly she now had a belligerent child on her hands. Already she was attempting to counter his truancy, smoking habits, his returning home late into the early evenings, and his refusals to offer explanations for any of it. Early into his contempt she assumed that her failure at explaining herself to him had been the source of the problem; and so seeking a bridge of minds she once delineated a biographical profile of herself to him: her soldier-parents' dereliction of duties, the Turkish beheading, the church-going uncle and male cousins who tried "to finger" her in Peggy's home, her untoward will that shunned lies of family, God, and nation, her desire to raise a son who would be better than the herds of men, and her maternal neglect so that she might study, contemplate, and travel so as not to neglect herself. This only intensified his cold stares and these ideas, her profile, sank like an irrelevant stone that he threw into a lake. Eleven days into the reunion with no sign that the contempt would burn out, in her exasperation she began floggings with a belt the way Michael had done; and for this pain to both parent and child all that she got for it was his contrived grinning and her chagrin that she had succumbed to barbaric, frustrated impulses and bullying savagery. Still, she could not be the contrite and effete parent who allowed a child's helter-skelter whims and contempt of the parent to tread victoriously onto the agenda of the day. Lacking the practice of self-discipline such a savage, when grown, would justifiably loathe the parent for not having gained that which would provide him with happiness.
Had she been there for him, fully engaged in motherhood from the beginning, she believed that his personality would not have been so recalcitrant and his behavior would not have been so petulant and flighty. Maybe, she fretted, her past peregrinations would aggravate the rest of her days in an opaque fog and malaise of her own making.
Instinct and social norm prompted her cousin in Kansas to become a statistic in suburbia: to get married immediately after high school; to have her 2.4 kids and a car in the garage; to daily doubt whether the 0.4 kid would "ever amount to anything;" to return from work at the cosmetic counter of Dillards to greet her cat with "Are-U-Hungary" and laugh at the pseudo nation; and to darn her husband's underwear and iron his socks (items that should have been done with reverse actions).
Really Gabriele knew nothing about this cousin of hers. For her own agenda she continually relegated her to a theory. She enjoyed the caprice, which if not true of her cousin (and it probably was), was true of this bored housewifey type. And she wondered if this vaguely remembered woman might right now be opening the refrigerator door and envisaging probable dates of her demise — sometimes right side up and sometimes upside down — printed on milk cartons; who, finding her conversations with her spouse stale was nonetheless considering them an indispensable part of the routine of her perfunctory movements; and who was probably returning from the kitchen to watch most of the Rosanne or Cosby show before collapsing into sleep. Gabriele imagined that each night this cousin would wake up and realize that it was time to go to bed so that she could repeat the day's failure again. The true reality of her cousin's felicity or estranged plight was not anything Gabriele knew or cared to know. It seemed an apposite probability and this was the only thing about her that Gabriele cared to contemplate.
So sitting in her studio (now with the prostitute paintings of the "Women at Work" series of the burgeoning Thai artist, Nawin Biadklang, on her walls — paintings that she had put away and forgotten following her involvement with Michael), she painted her cousin, albeit of a Mexican appearance and something more like a mannequin than a human being, while her thoughts continued to run rampant.
Dream after dream; illusion upon illusion; everyone was forced to play the game of musical chairs in which the people changed as well as the chairs but they all pretended that it was not happening — that everyone was stable and on stable ground. She did not want to rebel against the game. It was the indelible rules of nature thrust on man (this thing called change), and for most it was instrumental to their evolvement. Most people would be worse than the complacent and mostly non-changeable rock of her Aunt Peggy unless shaken up a bit.
"What's 'dead' mean?" Nathaniel had asked on that inauspicious day years ago when Michael had run over the neighbor's child in the trailer park — one of many odd coincidences that had engendered their union. It was a day that was as inauspicious as having given birth to Nathaniel in the first Gulf War and then returning to him in the sequel. Inauspicious events often seemed as a plan to rock the baby out of his cradle and then as now she vaguely sensed that something akin to doom would one day toss her from this bearable normalcy of a new husband and an old son that she seemed to return to like all other lost and clinging females. Was this malevolent rocker of the baby's body and soul God? Well, it certainly was not the gentle parental god devised by religion but there was indeed some coercer of change like Aristotle's concept of god without the god.
"Non-being. We wear our clothes for a time. Then they unravel and are made into something different."
"And heaven?"
"God, no! — a make believe story for reality dodgers. When you play dodge ball you run away from being hit by the ball, don't you? It is the same for heaven believers. The neighbor boy, I am dreadfully sorry to say, is dead as a doornail and his body and brain are unraveling. You don't need to think twice about it. Trust me on this one. But if that is too much reality to swallow, and it is for almost everyone I guess, it is better to live in your own lie than live in someone else's. What if we were to say that he is like a beautiful leaf skidding on the sidewalk because of a breeze; but he is not the leaf anymore but the breeze. You can feel him but you will never see him again…unless — "
"Unless what?"
"A possibility out of science but seeming as magical to us in our primitive time."
"Witches' magic?"
"No, superstitions and hocus pocus aren't in our lexicon. We are beyond that. Einstein's idea that time is relative…Anyhow, we will be wind long before a means of traveling or transporting ourselves near the speed of light is devised."
Lost in all these thoughts she added onto the canvas a bit of vermilion, a color that may or may not have been that of the old Soviet flag, now fading from collective memory, but was the color of the bathrobe and lingerie that she was now wearing to appeal to his leftist tendencies. She stuffed some chewing tobacco into her mouth and entertained whimsical ideas of him, her husband. She and the man with the unmemorable name, as she still called him (sometimes Andrew), would in time live in different places. They would not be separated in the traditional sense of indifference or economic necessity but by the two having their own interests (he undoubtedly having a job as a UN official if not assistant to the Secretary General within five or six years). They would live separately because they had been born into the world separately. Their union, their contract, would not be the floundering neediness of two minds who feared standing alone to face mortality in one's thoughts nor would it be like American soldiers guarding Iraqi oil pipelines — the jealous sentinels over the source of a dopamine rush, that lover who gave to many their only defining component of themselves. It would be — she stopped herself not knowing what it would be. She was not sure whether or not to call such a freakish thing a marriage. If she had used this man by marrying him in the hope that he would be a male role model for her son wouldn't she be the same as one of the solipsistic herd. She hoped that her actions were not as calculating as this.
Putting away her paints, she then went into the bathroom to fall like a child through specious mountains and plains of crackling soap bubbles. There she would allow the steam to relax her to minimal consciousness of a self-contained Nirvana that could be gained in virtually no other way than in the bathtub. But as the hot water was falling into the tub filling it into a lake she changed her mind, turned off the tab, and went to him to seek Nirvana down and dirty.
Riveted in the carnal skin friction of sexual gluttony for the meat of human flesh, youth, and beauty, she climaxed with her man; and free — totally free of all gnawing miscellaneous hungers outside of needing to urinate — the couple smoked marijuana on the bed to elongate their brief, ethereal stay. They were silently watching clouds of smoke stretch out like steamers of confetti until silence broke like an old woman's hip.
He said, "I might get this one. It would be on a temporary basis — just the extra sections that don't have teachers — I guess benefits and full time status after probation if someone resigns — little pay now. But maybe I should just stay here until I exhaust my possibilities."
She sensed how the petty and the mundane in the personal domain interfered, if not totally countered, any fulfillment of intimacy. This vexed her conceptualization of life; but for she who was so amused by grave ideas it was just one more intriguing fact to contemplate. "It's all exhausted," she at last responded. "There's nothing much here. You've gone to the first job interview at City College. You might as well see it through the second. Obviously they are interested in you if they want you to be interviewed twice. It's up to you but if it were me I would put my oars in the first wave that comes along."
"Yes, maybe."
"Out of curiosity, I've been wondering why you again made reservations in that hotel where the bellboys are the rats."
"Because hotels aren't cheap anywhere in New York City except exceptional ones"
"Exceptional? I was there, man — one glorious night. Okay, marginally better than back packer guest houses in Bangkok and Jakarta with bare bunk mattresses and table fans without any tables in something less than closets. This one's more of a spacious closet —American style for beggars and Bolsheviks." She knew that her bantering had some snobbishness in it as if she had never lived in a tiny little room with a crock-pot on the floor in Tijuana. She noted how perception was ensconced in one's environment and lifestyle and that an ensconced thing became the thing it was ensconced in. Even now, naked like she was, ostentatious diamond earrings bounced from her earlobes—an extreme pendulum shift from the days of painting caricatures for extra pesos in the pure dirt colonias and the man made waste of downtown "centro" Tijuana (TJ).
"I've offered to give you — lend you, however you care to think of it — any money you need for expenses in the Big Apple."
"Thanks but I really didn't mind that room we stayed in last time."
"Okay," she sighed and threw up her hands. "But I can't see how that is possible."
"A little possible — like the sign in the bathroom. Remember? It said, 'Dear guests, detergent harms the environment by going down the drain and ultimately killing the sea life of our oceans. Use fewer towels.' The message is warm like being with a beautiful woman." His mouth dived into her neck like a toothless vampire.
"God, I have married an imbecile," said Gabriele. She giggled in the sexual giddiness of a woman when intimate with a man; and yet thinking that the body was merely the crucible of feelings, and that thoughts, a refined and distancing appraisal of reality, were nonetheless feelings in origin, and that this was all there was.
"None of that baloney would work with me. I would only scoff at it — capitalists caring about the fishies of the sea. Give me a break! Give me brutal honesty anytime rather than tactics like this. If a business is honest, I might continue my patronage regardless of the type of service they provide or, in this case, the type of rat hole it is—honesty being in such short supply in the world that when someone gives it to me—even in rude doses—I am grateful for it. They would just need to say, "You wasteful fucks, we are niggardly corporate bastards eager to hoard any red cent we can get our hands on. Please note that we have a one shower a day policy here. Extra showers will incur extra charges should we see dripping from the shower nozzle. That being said, you will see that there are fewer towels on the rack. Don't make phone calls to the front desk demanding more towels and do not bribe cleaning ladies or make any sexual advances toward them. If you slyly take an extra shower at 2 a.m. or such ungodly times you will have to dry your wet butts by hanging them out the window.' Now if they conveyed this maybe—"
They heard two shells of petrous, ice-glazed snow simultaneously strike into a lower part of the faade of the house unlike a one-time thud of a bird or the distinct sounds of thawing ice when falling from the roof and gutter. The man with the unmemorable name got up, drew the curtain, and opened the window. Then he, the nude, dangled there staring at his stepson who sat on a limb in a tree that was a hundred yards from the house. The boy was holding a brassiere as his slingshot.
As more of a recurrent feeling rather than a philosophic framework, which he had constructed for himself on that silent car ride from Sharon's home to his own, he believed that subtle inconclusive looks could help him extort that which he knew could never be gained in compensation, and that by it being something that could never be compensated and extorting it all the same, he had found the means to achieve power. Without really thinking so much as feeling it, for the past two weeks there was this notion that subtle looks without hostile words would make the hated propitiate to him with expensive gifts or at least a willingness to please him whereas to hate a person with the more conclusive medium of words would make the anathema hate him, and hate was a weapon that he did not care to hand over to his enemies. He cared to keep it in his domain.
The circumstances behind the slingshot were a peculiar thing: apprehension about knocking on their bedroom door for fear that his knocking would become pounding which might cause them to withhold his gifts; still early and no movement from above, the discarded black sheep, the piqued shadow, the cast away reunited with she who cast him out, leaving the clock and going into the yard to waste some time; the hunting of birds with a bb gun, feeling bored, and in places stomping out the obscene whiteness of the snow by grating it black, ever so often, with the heel of a boot; the return to the kitchen to again watch the incessantly slow turn of the second hand of the clock; still no sounds from above so deciding to burn bacon and to turn down the furnace in the hope of smoking or freezing them out; the pacing around a gigantic Christmas tree barren of gifts underneath; and then going into one of the bathrooms. Frustrated while "taking a leak" it was there that the brassier hanging on the wall had seemed like an unpatented snow boomerang there to show his misogyny.
"Comrade Sangfroid?" yelled the man into the tree. "What do you want?"
The boy put his hands around his mouth like a megaphone to facilitate the sound. "The queen of Antarctica, Comrade," he said. "Her gifts."
"Comrade of crude weapons," yelled the man. His voice was indistinct and garbled by the cough of saliva having rushed down his throat in his laughter. "Why shoot they who give freely?"
Gabriele nudged herself between the man and the window, dangling hers as the man did his. She saw the boy and the bra there at a bit of a distance. "Yes?" she yelled. She was amused, puzzled, and a little annoyed by the sight. She waited for words from a specimen unwilling to give them. Obviously, she noted to herself, smirking and laughter at the absurdity of talking to one's nude parents one Christmas morning from a tree would have been a natural proclivity for such a refreshingly or embarrassingly peculiar situation; but this smirking seemed a calm sadistic enjoyment of what she believed to seem to him as perverse. An enjoyment of the perverse seemed to drool in all orifices and he stared at them with virulent intensity. Didn't those eyes say, "What are you doing with that whore?" Didn't it bang around his mouth and peek loosely from his lips? She did not know. No, she told herself, this idea was perverse. Her imagination was a viral infection on her sound judgments and she told herself that she should be ashamed of her thoughts.
On this branch he once sat to gain a reprieve from Sharon and Rick and to make the former tenants of the house uncomfortable his composure was unperturbed. Having lived in Gabriele's experiment once before, it was not new to him now. To be the specimen of her scrutinizing gaze was once an ossified aspect of his daily existence. Once the specifics of what it was like to be her son had been forgotten for a generalized feeling of revulsion; but now that he was here the forgetting was being forgotten and the revulsion was replaced by the need to adapt and thrive within his circumstances. Not wishing to provoke her to hate him, he put the brazier in his coat pocket and then descended from the tree.
And like any goddess from Hera to Athena she knew the sweet venom of empathy, could see the corroding batteries of Her specimen's heart without wincing, and would have stared that way indefatigably until he at last fell from the tree. But once he absconded she just returned to her side of the bed. She wanted to cry mutely into the pillow but her man was there so she stoically absconded into a book on Asian owls.
Without much regard as to where he should sit, he just sat. It was a more remote spot in Seoul Grand Park that seemed to be directly under a kite slapped by distant winds. For he who sought to circumvent the scrutiny of others to pursue his strange stern ruminations his only wish was to be seated in solitude; and not having it, he accepted a more remote variation. Frustrated by his writing and unable to believe that he was doing anything but spinning around in his head, he tried to relax in the sunlight and within a Valium of smells such as the very dirt and weeds beneath him. He stared at the kite and the peculiar shaped clouds emerging into the sky until becoming bored with both, he turned to the ground. Withdrawn into nature and himself, he felt his energy and peace of mind begin to replenish. It fluttered weakly as the gray moth that he was watching; and it seemed to him that this spasm of optimism was as lithe as a soul was capable of being were one to have such a thing instead of damnable memories and words like walls in a maze of the mind which deluded one into thinking that he was advancing to someplace or another.
He imagined himself at a convocation of words in which he designated where each word should sit within the weeds and clumps of dirt. He imagined that when he did not like their arrangement, or their bickering amongst themselves, each obsequious word eagerly got up and changed to a different seat of his choosing with the snap of his fingers unlike their real obstinate and disgruntled nature; and when he said their names numerically according to their rows an invocation of truth would ensue. The guidebook, written by the subconscious, would have enough veracity to be a prototype for they who also squatted on the outskirts of normal existence, or at least a means for him to lose himself —if not find himself—there, within his prose.
Writing granted a purpose, a connection beyond breeding to defy death for he who would never breed, he who would never be enslaved for ephemeral "family" and provide for children who were only a woman's pleasure—he who for not breeding had life and breath relegated to blowing dirt.
The word, "friendship" sat down beside him when the futile meeting was disbanded and all words were sent home; and as it sat there, it transformed itself into human form.
"Are you familiar with Camille Saint-Saens — his Macabre Dance?" said the word. It was Kim Yang Kwam, the friend who had labeled him as dirty and had abandoned him for that one touch, that one weak moment of wanting to celebrate the beauty of the friendship and the beauty of the man to its fruition. The two were in the bedroom of that apartment in Umsong as they had been before, and Yang Kwam was pulling out a CD from its plastic holder.
"Yes, lovely. I don't have any from that composer. Let's hear it. He is one of my favorites, you know. Well, you don't know. That is why it is so special. What are the chances of you liking it, liking the cello above other instruments, favoring your philosophic ponderings above everything, and now telling me that you are okay with me being gay."
"I'm here for you, Shawn."
"I'm living with someone now — maybe not long. He vitiates his mind with a Braille version of comics. They have Braille comics, you know. I mean, that is his business but he is so reticent to talk with anyone and I can't reach him much of the time. He is blind and seems content to cower himself in a corner someplace, pleased to have made it through another day — well, not always. I met him in a concert hall. I thought he liked classical music. I guess he does but not as much. He turns on too much pop music. I don't like it. It gives me headaches."
"It isn't important."
"Strange that I should be here without him."
"We are where we want to be in all things."
"There was another thing I was scared to tell you. I'm not sure how — listen, I killed my sister, my father hung himself, and I was struck down into such a depression like being slapped into a tsunami. Ever since this I've been drifting into the Pacific like a corpse."
"You want to eat salami?"
"No, are you listening to me?"
Yang Kwam chuckled. Then he looked at Sang Huin with intense confidence that refracted into the latter's perceptions as compassion. "I know that you did not do anything like this. You are a good person. You couldn't do something like that."
"They look on me as if I did kill her, as if I don't feel guilty enough without that. Well…I mean Dad is dead now so—anyhow, he looked at me like I murdered her. They both did really…not really like a murderer but guilty of manslaughter, which I guess in a way I am."
"How people look at you is not something that you can control. It resides in them—when not true, it is a need to construct the world a certain way to remove guilt or pain by projecting it on others. Your family did not get the murderer and they blame you. Families often split up under such pressure."
"I took her there."
"You didn't know that he would kill her. Guilty of being too Puritanical or tooKorean, yes, but that is all."
"I want you as my best friend forever." There, the daydream, the word, the connection vanished.
It seemed to him that every few minutes or so there were passersby (usually as couples if not larger groups with civilization, merger, such an acute hunger in these pathetic lonely herds) who were more scrutinizing than all the others. These passersby saw the stationary posture of his body bereft of orders from the brain for substantial movement, and in instantaneous judgment calls, they believed, he supposed, that his mind was seemingly crazy or dysfunctional. They construed him, or he believed that they construed him, as dirty, unintelligible, and untoward. To them he was a homeless eyesore, a madman even if he looked benign from a distance. After all, seated alone in a fetal position as he was on a declivity of a hill sparse of grass, to them, he believed, this proclivity for disoriented stares into the wind-grazed dirt and inanimate purposelessness was an egregious aberration of being human. The fact that no family members were able to keep him restrained in their homes gave credence to the speculation that his intractability from psychosis had caused his transience. Not eating one's kimchee, refusing to pour hot water into a bowl to consume every grain of leftover rice in an insipid soup, or not taking off one's shoes at the door: these were slight infractions of cultural norms. The lone dirt-ridden stranger was prodigiously more repugnant than this for even retards and mild madmen chose to be clean. For one of this ethnicity to wallow his buttocks on a hill of dirt there could be no other rendered judgment than that his behavior was tantamount to a rejection of Hanguk civilization completely, which was indeed, to a Korean, a definite form of madness.
Sang Huin felt their cold Korean scrutiny excoriate him with their looks. The long glances and brief stares seemed to burn through his flesh in thin, cold lasers. And yet this Korean man, this American, continued nonetheless to sit on his hill of dirt all alone and, for the most part, lost in thought. He was pecking on a tiny virtual keyboard in his Pocket PC while reading aloud that which he pecked as if he were not an oddity and all others carried out activities like this.
He read out loud, "He was troubled by that one idea which kept running through his mind days later: he had given to her a nominal token of Christmas (a contemptuous one, perhaps, but a present nonetheless)—a plastic bag full of tea towels, and yet she had not given him anything in return. Still he was pleased that he had not mentioned anything about it and that his attempts at indifference had not degenerated in weak sulking.
A day later, no longer caring to wonder, as he had, whether these entitlements would at last be begrudgingly given to him should the walls of hubris fall from the scaffolding of his eyes, he was tempted to inveigh her with his contempt and be at last free; but throughout, he succeeded in occasional smiles and benign albeit reticent exchanges of ideas when compelled to talk with these parents (parents, or at any rate imposters claiming to be married, and were for all he knew). If only, he told himself, he could continue to control those eyes that he subconsciously wanted to impale into his mother in a long and unequivocal stare of hate, then he would have self-mastery and power.
Without really thinking about all these specifics so much, he felt the need to restrain himself to multi-interpretable stares that would be doors of opaque translucency sealing off the fortress of his ideas while allowing shadows to permeate outward. Still, keeping the door shut was a hard thing to do."
Thoughts of his own mother kept intruding on Sang Huin's work: the mother/daughter sorority of Cathy and June (the American names that his mother and sister gave themselves); cacophonous, cryptic collusion of conversation that the two Korean sorority sisters had aside with each other in that damnable Hanguk-mal; the mother who valued her tree planting and property ownership with her husband as much as these feminine confidences with her daughter while he was supposed to be quiet as a mouse at home and especially in every public place so that she would not be ashamed of him; this woman who incessantly took him to one hospital after another seeking to have more than manageable ailments and who sat him on bleachers while the family went to June's basketball games.
"June" gave the Korean family a name, and the parents could now talk about their daughter and be part of the Caucasian club. But sick as he sometimes was, he gave them nothing and for it they relegated him to shadows — to shadows.
He thought of his childhood asthma. His father had the perception that the enervating condition of asthma emasculated the son to the point of making him "good for nothing." It was only a perception but no demon was harder to exorcise than perception. Philistines had feelings embedded harder than teeth: prejudices that were both intolerable and inextricable.
But then he checked himself and halted his thoughts about dead people and dead happenings. His thoughts focused on that journalist whom he had met weeks earlier at the sports stadium. "This guy could be the perfect one and yet I have brushed him aside—I don't know why." He pondered some more. "But I am involved with Saeng Seob and one doesn't just use someone until a better prospect arrives." This was his argument to himself made more to excuse his social ineptness than benevolence.
His queer relations were not affable and gay as withdrawn, anti- social, and hell bound in being bedazzled in shadows as he was. Ensconced cleanly from mixing thoughts with the physical realm it was shadows of texture he sought in saunas and the bathroom of the dirty movie theatre near Pagoda Park in Chongno Sam Ga. Clean of words, no hurt would ensue. The dirty movie theatre showed only normal R-rated films and sexual activity was restricted to bathroom stalls. Had it been otherwise it would have even seemed a major aberration to the queer folk there. The queer folk of Korea were Koreans too and no one was more conservative with cultural traditions than a Korean. The theatre people consciously acknowledged sex in the seats as illegal and morally repugnant albeit reprehensibly desired. "I could never do that to him." His thoughts were of course about Saeng Seob. "As long as he wants the relationship it will be there for him. I am many things but —" He was about to think, "but I don't hurt vulnerable people" but he checked his thoughts with the memory of his sister and how he had coerced his girlfriend into having an abortion. He told himself that to claim that he would always be there for the hurting and the vulnerable lacked veracity.
"He began to have a recurrent nightmare of sorts, replete in twisted skeletal boughs; and there he saw something like himself in adult form trying to glean movements of lissome shadows through the crevices around a board that went over one window. Boards were nailed over all windows and entrances in the condemned building that had been his home. Still, despite the sunrays of early morning impaling through the thickets of branches and into his eyes, he could see the copulative interlinking of shadows distinctly even though he could not see the forms projecting the shadows because they had long ago turned into wind. He shot a snowball and a sound of an owl screeching towards the woods flew past him if not the form of the bird itself. He noted how strange it was that the only snow was that on the tree and all other parts of his mother's acreage were part of the verdure of early summer.
'My little comrade,' said the man to the boy although he was not a man any longer but more like the murky translucency of a fog. As he flew near the tree what was left of the old leaves rustled and flattened. 'The Bolsheviks have won. You can go ahead and leave Petrograd and return home to your wives.'
'Comrade,' Nathaniel said, 'I have no wives and I don't want to abandon my platoon.'
'The war is over. Everyone is dead and gone. They have been so for some time — for years. You've done a find job, Comrade. Now go in peace.'
'I know who you are but — ' He swallowed deeply. 'I don't know what you are.'
'The opposite of what I was I suppose. When you figure out what life is go 180 degrees counter to it and there you will be at death. It isn't all that much different — just different corners of the block.'
'Yes, I believe so Comrade Stalin.'
'Comrade Trotsky.'
'Yes, Comrade. Comrade Trotsky. Comrade Trotsky, I fear that the Queen of Antarctica, angered at my conquering abilities of her homeland, will blockade all supplies and let me perish out here with no Christmas.'
'Well, Adagio, at last here the two of us are all alone as you have always wanted it, as you have dreamed it even if it is so late and with a ghost…quality time we should have had more of if I hadn't been so preoccupied with trying to understand this marriage of mine with a woman who did not want to live with me. I think that she wanted me to be closer to you but how she thought that was possible with a husband and wife having separate lives is difficult to understand. She is difficult to understand but that is no excuse for not forgiving her. We all deserve to be forgiven. All humans deserve that, Adagio. Why can't you forgive her?'
'Because I hate her!'
'Hate? Here you are as a grown man and yet you sit in those branches as if nothing has changed. A few sharp movements and you will fall off with the limbs that once cradled the sport of a boy. You spied on us a lot in those branches, if you remember. But now there is nothing to spy on. The house is old and in decay. Boards are nailed over the windows. The naked dance of a man with his wife that you thought was so intriguing has ended. The partners are separated and have withdrawn—one into old age to begin her own descent to the earth and me visiting you on top of a tree because of a Siberian wind happening to settle me here. Nothing is there now so there is nothing to hate. What possibly can you see up there at this point?'
'I see what I've always seen: shadows. Plenty of shadows—yours, hers, all the men she was with.' He was meaning love making in its full-animated obscenity of interlinked private parts and hedonism, the fundamentals of life."
Then in dreams like this he would wake up, think of this all too familiar presence, and doubt if she were his mother at all. As far as he knew she could just be an imposter after the other one's disappearance. And on his pillow he would again think about the flashlight in the cave and the hotdog in the bun jokes that he was beginning to hear in the locker rooms of adolescent and pre-adolescent boys. Precocious as he was in firsthand knowledge of some sexual issues he was still curious about more normal arenas.
Sang Huin told himself that incessantly telling himself things within the contemplation of his creation was a bit strange; that the facile, tangible thrusts of decadent titillation that he gained briefly in the shadows of the dark corridors of saunas instead of more tangible long-term relationships—even with their intangible emotions and invisible bridges of minds—was stranger yet; but strangest of all was how instead of being with a girlfriend on a roller coaster less than a kilometer away, he just stayed on his hill of dirt like any transient, the luftmensch that he was. He looked at his feet, then the dark approach of a mass of clouds and the kite. One chose any spot to sit in based upon comfort and security, and to him remoteness was both. Like his defunct father, who often sat silently in front of the Weather Channel, using this favored television station to facilitate a comatose withdraw after his daughter's death, so he watched the kite which seemed like a piece of himself drifting further and further into the unobtainable. Its erratic movements and the emergence of dark clouds with peculiar shapes seemed like a wordless oracle.
'For six long months she sensed Nathaniel's stares as eerie as a lone plastic cup rolling on an empty pavement in a breeze; and even when she went to sleep it was with her, often setting her forehead into a seat as she slept. For her, sometimes alone in her bed or with her man, it was an absurd and inexplicable feeling. But it was easy to repudiate the indecipherable. It was easy to be obtuse while pursuing her work and the occasional sZances with her higher authority, who often played hide and seek through clouds of the smoke of her burning weed. Furthermore, hostile glances and reticent words seemed of little consequence when awakened daily, despite herself, to dwindled resources dwindling further.
One morning at the dining room table, looking through the newly arrived mail half blinded in the dappled sunlight, Gabriele saw the numbers of her worsening fiscal state from a bank statement. The recent payments of her property tax and the school enrollment were just larger costs of myriad that in all, in time, would pillage a life; and her mind felt numb in the mundane. Knowing that she had to do something, she approached the art museum of Albany that afternoon. The director was willing enough to exhibit a retrospective of her work with a few new paintings of Sapporo and Tijuana amalgamated into it all. The isolationist declaring her own frigid country of one, the frigid rationalist watching the movement of instinctual creatures of romance blowing like bits of trash caught in vortexes of wind, the nighttime whore advocate as opposed to the billions of daytime whores who espoused the Puritan work ethic: she was one of their PT Barnum freaks at the circus museum and the director welcomed back that which would spark a bit of public intrigue. The museum did not expedite it. Two months of planning went into the temporary exhibit; and the financial dilemma that seemed as potentially dire now shot within her more as flares of panic. What heretofore lacked immediacy became an uppercase word in bold letters, immediacy, spilling out and hardening as the black ink of the night.
At last it passed. And in the bathroom of a purchaser, at a party in his home, which had been arranged for the celebration of this singular purchase, the brief honeymoon period for the artist climaxed with a salient 15-minute copulation against a wall near the toilet. She needed this release from worries, this demonic sensation of pleasure that was the eddy contrary to what was rational. She hoped that it was that, an eddy, but she knew base instincts were the main force despite all her rational fortifications. From time to time she needed to stop thinking and to run into the storm, allowing any large gust to bang her.
"Can I see you again?" her partner, this black stranger, asked. Even now that their intimacies had come and gone like all specious mad frenzies, like the mating of dodo birds, she did not know his name, his connection to the purchaser, or his purpose at the party unless it were in having mounted and ridden her. Did man have a higher purpose than this? She had her doubts.
"Give me your address. I wanna see you again," he reiterated.
"Maybe in corners like this," she responded coldly. "Beyond that I think my husband would have problems with it, and most importantly I would."
"You're a sassy one," said this other candyman. "Squeeze a man of his juice and leave him dry." She knew that she was a sassy squeezer but she was hesitant to say anything for she wanted him marooned in his own silent realm. This way she could dress herself in peace and quickly abscond from sleazy predilections and proclivities that might have made up the baser components of one's nature but were puny in defining herself. She wanted to return to her paints in the hope of developing a template that if not mass-produced at least could speed up her production. The time of prolific painting from ideas sketched for so long had passed. Now ideas needed to be pinched and coerced to inch forward.
In her ride back home in her Ferrari she postponed the inevitable by driving further on the interstate than she needed to go. The goddess that she was, she liked watching things come and go as well as how she felt superior in this fancy moving shell. She thought of a new argument and she recited it in her mind. 'I have decided to simplify our lives. What type of an example would I set if I were to cling to things, to relationships, never knowing myself? Are all people so at a loss of identity that they grope in front of anything that has a chance of being less perishable than themselves? It is disgusting. Anyhow, we need money and I'm selling everything off of value including the house. We can live in cardboard shacks or tree houses but we don't need this type of shit cluttering up space and time.' This was what she would say, or something more simplified that was along these lines."
Frustrated again from not liking his ideas, he forfeited words. Resting on his hill in the Valium of nature, it was as if he were coming down from all this spinning around in his own head because of a heaviness of words coalescing and jelling onto the walls of his brain. It seemed as though the twirling child were landing dizzy and drunk on life despite his morbid disposition from memories of family that scooted like a plastic cup blowing on an empty pavement—abhorrent memories loving and still as a photograph.
To the ancient Egyptians man died each night in this void absent of the sun god and then each morning was resurrected in daybreak. She thought of this; and it seemed to her as she was driving home at 3 a.m., hair blowing and mind mesmerized in prevailing darkness, that this particular myth was as all religious balderdash that justified one egregious proclivity or another in the natural state. In Christianity this was myriad: everything from man's god-given dominion over animals in any arbitrary whim to the Lord's omnipotent power to part the Nile one moment and turn someone to stone the next (indiscriminate aiding of some and annihilating others). As the deliverer who cared so much about individual man as to intrusively know the amount of hair strands on each head He was the perfect god; and his conspicuous absence or non- involvement on 9-11 and countless other occasions of inhumanity of man to man was merely his allowing free will to command human affairs.
The ancient and relatively forgotten myth of the Egyptians explained man's mysterious absconding from the night in seven or eight hours of sleep as a partial death when apart from the vanquished sun. Its innocence had charmed her for years, but now it just seemed as one more vapid fable with no redeeming qualities. Going home circuitously, the idea of sleeping away one more night seemed as a reprehensible closing of one's eyes to the night's gilded silence. Long hours of atavistic sleep to keep the body still and hidden from barely visible predators had been utile in prehistory but now it was an anachronistic vestige of adaptation. Thwarting nocturnal consciousness of this fragile animal, man, sleep inadvertently obstructed an appreciation for all that was black — and she did want to appreciate all that was black.
Outside of bubbling in champagne and a bit of public relations to secure a sale what had this party been, she asked herself, unless it were to reclaim the night; and what had this bathroom rendezvous been but to cease to abscond from that which was black? She laughed at her joke, which she mumbled aloud to herself. Half drunk, she was inexplicably pleased with herself. She told herself that her adulterous tryst with this twenty minute black friend had been her refutation against the notion of ugly-bodied darkness. She inanely told herself that by brushing naked against his skin this making herself one with what was black had made the intimacy a higher accomplishment than mere banging. She was even amused by how easily amused she was in her self- containment in the car. For her, happiness was not dependent on external playmates although something vaguely similar to happiness was sometimes facilitated by them.
There was nothing like back roads so bare of automobiles. Driving made her feel as if she owned the night with the wide stretch of her headlights that were only deferentially dimmed at the encroachment of other automobiles on her terrain. She loved the peace and the vastness of these strips of road in the heart of unpretentious night; and if she had her way about it the universe would be purely black without the tawdry dappling of stars. It dawned on her that moving through night at sixty miles per hour her very movement was in opposition to what was splendid in the night. If Aristotle were right in saying that happiness was greatest in contemplating this non-changeable entity that had tossed the chemicals of inchoate matter, then cloistered artists, philosophers, and other contemplatives would be the dominant force on the planet. If contemplation were the highest pleasure in life wouldn't her canvas be more eagerly sought than her hedonistic flings or that which she was now pursuing: a sense of freedom by sipping a beer and riding around in a Ferrari. Being blown in all directions from the open windows of her car, she was half tempted to drive all the way into arctic Canada instead of returning to the odious smells of her paint—chemicals that were no doubt carcinogens if the nose were to express its opinion on the matter—paint once vibrant in her perceptions but now the mental strain of attempting to reestablish success.
She again contemplated the night. If only man had not had this fear of being eaten, sleep, if it were needed at all would be merely sporadic naps for the restoration of energy instead of this long withdrawal from the black of night. Then she thought about this twenty minute chocolate candyman, whom she named as Candyman II (Roman numerals giving him a sense of eminence). She told herself that she should have made him withdraw before being allowed to climax within her. He had worn a condom but it was doubtful that condoms were meant to stretch so far or be unbreakable when the long black horn was impaling with such force. How would she know whether or not it had ruptured? She would only know with the advent of symptoms from AIDS, syphilis, gonorrhea, and that whole list of undesirables.
She and her husband had an "open" relationship so long as neither one of them fell in love with someone else but she didn't want to die for the periodic cravings of sex and more importantly she did not want to harm her husband with a lethal touch. Like a postulant at a convent, she might well have relinquished such meretricious spells of lust months ago had she not held two opinions in favor of this "open relationship" remaining such. This sauntering away from domestic life always brought newness to marital vows upon one's return; and being shaken up in promiscuous rendezvous made the brain more lithe in generating ideas. Ever so often a woman needed to remove a man like her dirty panties for the required laundering. Ever so often a woman needed to put on some fresh panties when allowing the old ones to spin around in the wash. It was an ablution in a sense—this running barefoot in dirty fields to exorcise her demons of passion. When the exercise or exorcism was completed it allowed for domestic life there in its small space demarcated within drab walls. Sordid nights were a bit like wallpapering anew the old shack. But she did not think about the primary motivations for her adultery: the wish to not cling to this concept of a relationship as if it were an actual reality, the wish to debunk this notion of permanence in a mutable world, and that desperation to repudiate her vulnerability as one who would like to cling to such things, to cling to her man.
Guilt…there was none—not even when arriving at the house. She was, of course, surprised to see her man's car parked in the drive but it was not a catalyst of guilt per se. While the solitary newlywed was getting out of her car she considered a half imagined societal measurement of her actions. It was from it that there was a mordant gnawing within that might be labeled as compunction. She doubted it at first, but then why should she doubt? She was not totally immune to others. As much as she might claim that feelings were her own self-manufactured car that she drove around in, she would be a veritable lunatic were she to have feelings that were little else than her own imagined whims. Also her art would not pertain to anyone if she were not to some degree a product of her world, as repugnant as that thought was to her.
As she stepped into the parlor the compunction exacerbated exponentially. Seeking to be unperturbed by conscience, she told herself that having sex with a hundred men in a hundred days was no different than being loyal to one spouse for a hundred and some odd days. She argued that one behavior was no more or less slutty than the other. It was true in a rational context; but on the other hand sexual loyalty was a way of discerning this feeling-based abstraction of a relationship which otherwise would diffuse as a cloud of smoke. She went into the family room where she saw a light ("family" seeming a misnomer since she doubted that there was such a thing).
"Hey! You are here!" she called as she went through a hallway to this room where her husband and son were standing at different sides of a billiard table. Obviously they were there to play against each other but seemingly it was as if they were together brandishing their cues, their phallic sticks, which would be used for her flagellation. As titillation and inebriation were falling flat with each passing moment, so her smile at imagining her forthcoming beating was momentary.
"What are you smiling at?" the man with the unmemorable name asked.
"Nothing." Acerbic guilt was bubbling within her.
"I decided to come back this weekend," the man said.
"What a surprise. Grading completed?"
"Some of it. I guess you are okay. Why is your hair this way? What's the word?"He said something in Russian that she did not understand.
"Disheveled. In the car— windows down, me blowing in the wind. Guess I look a mess. Don't worry. I wasn't in an accident."
"Okay, I'm not. I wasn't."
"Seems that a late night pool game has stretched into early morning," she said. There was no response so she feigned a beautiful wide smile as she slouched into a vinyl couch —vinyl like that she had withdrawn into when parting from Nathaniel's father with his dividing cells within her—cells that were either cancerous or salubrious divisions although now it was perhaps too early to predict which or the denouement of this dabbled experiment. "Don't you think it is a little bit late for my two boys to be playing billiards like they are at a poker party?"
"No, I don't Gabriele; and do you want me to tell you why?"
"Please. More than anything else on the planet, I live for it."
"Both of us had to do something while we waited and waited for you, didn't we? We couldn't stare at the door all night. Folk dancing to balalaika music seemed out of place and we didn't know the phone numbers of hospital morgues to see if you checked in with your bags."
She chortled. "Uh oh, facetious and angry. Looks like I've been grounded and will have the car keys taken away." But grave memories were flung into her consciousness that sobered her frivolity: she remembered being in Japan waiting for Michael to return from his dates with Kato. Sitting on her futon on the tatami of her living room, she would blow into the shakuhachi, that wailing instrument that was the only thing she could communicate with in a grief so tacit and incommunicable.
"Do you want me to not care?"
"Huh?" She was recovering from damnable memories that were running over her the way swathes of the Earth's hardened vomit, continents, moved, reshaped themselves, and demarcated anew its body of water. Then it occurred to her what he said. "Sorry. I thank you for caring. I really do. You are a good guy."
"You left your son here all alone."
"Are you kidding? Hardly that! After hearing from Peggy about his penchant for arson, I wouldn't be that crazy. Where is the babysitter, Nathaniel?"
"I didn't like her so I got rid of her," said the boy. "I fired her but I paid her off first."
"With what?"
As she waited for him to speak she saw him scratch one of his earlobes. From this she imagined him saying that he paid the babysitter with money he made from selling earrings like the ones she was wearing. Then, in the daydream, she demanded to know whether or not he had been pilfering bits of her jewelry all along and what he did with the money once he sold them; but in the daydream he did not answer either question leaving inconclusive speculation to run rife.
But she told herself that the daydream had no significance. Once in February when not able to find various pairs of earrings and blaming herself for having lost them somewhere between Tokyo to Tijuana she had engaged herself in comic anecdotes of the boy sneaking into her bedroom in leather gloves and pajamas so that he might mail some of her jewelry to Hispanic Betty before Valentine's Day. She told herself that this daydream was merely the rebounding of her dismissed caprices. And yet she couldn't help wondering if this particular daydream was, as Freud would say, a resurfacing of repressed fears, unwanted knowledge, or strong convictions about a given matter of importance.
She thought about how little of a human's mercurial life was grounded in the present moment: an athlete was in the rush of his adrenalin, a conversation consisted of past events and future expectations, and a current event was impinged by pertinent hunches exhumed from the subconscious in daydreams. Even if she were to have conclusive knowledge about her son's actions throughout each and every day, and even if she were to find him as innocent as a babe, the correct way of dealing with him would still be guesswork. Such was the peculiarity of the human condition.
"With Monopoly money," he chuckled
"With what?" she repeated irascibly.
" Twenty bucks out of my allowance money. Are you going to take my head off for that?"
"For twenty bucks, never. Thirty, maybe." She turned to her husband. "Didn't he tell you where I was at?"
"He said that he didn't know."
"I don't know," said the boy.
"I told you."
"I wasn't listening. Was watching a movie. Didn't hear," he spoke with cold indifference. Only his eyes were visceral and they were directed at the billiard balls while he daydreamed phantasms of men and orgasms in which his mother copulated with male partygoers in a back bedroom. Bending toward the table and aiming his cue stick he murmured inaudibly, "I never listen to where anyone is planning to cat around to. It's none of my business." Then he shot the balls. "Your turn, Comrade."