Within the relationship he had not even been tempted to wander in the labyrinths of dark hallways of bathhouses in the hope of stumbling across that perfect form. There had been less discontent even if the passionate response had been the same. The suicidal risk-taker drawn to darkness, that relinquishing to the self-consumption of shadows, had been somewhat tamed. But now with this partner gone Sang Huin's mind was slipping back into decadence. Meandering and not feeling that the ground one walked on was the least bit stable, desperate yearnings prompted him to find pleasure and hope in appetites that swelled as obsessions, burst, and were quickly gone no different than the instinctual promptings that were within the dumbest of animals. He hadn't yet gone back to his desperate habits of bathhouses and the R- rated petting in the gay movie theatres of conservative Soul but he could still sense himself slipping away.
To have the monogamous prototype of a gay couple for others to emulate there needed to be something giving it at least the suggestion or illusion of stable ground. And yet there was no higher entity to suggest such a bonding. There were no symbolic marriage certificates suggesting that society and the creator of the universe gave their implicit endorsement of such mergers to which logic would say that they would be no more preoccupied with than a man the mating habits of a rat in a city park. Also, within this alternative channel of one's sexual energy there were no children to rear, not that children remained such forever. Instead, for one who was gay there were only appetites and one's erratic but less illusionary emotional responses as the substance of a relationship. These were one's only sense of being in a gay relationship and as such they were the only compasses to find one's way around. In some ways it was worse than a bathhouse labyrinth of complete darkness for being in a relationship of this nature was not walking around lost and trying to find the perfect form. It was being disgorged in passionate love for another human being and only this—this spray of molecules, which lasted as long as the spray. That is not to say that heterosexual couples did not experience the sense that these foundations of relationships, family, and reality could never be shaken. They too were sentient beings. They too knew that they were constructing homes in the San Andreas Fault Line. The shaking was quite palpable but what could they do other than pretend that what they were creating was forever? They too felt the rumblings of the separating earth that they stood on. Had it not been signatures on tenuous pieces of paper and the responsibilities of children who again would not be such forever more of them, thought Sang Huin, would feel as he did. What he was experiencing, he told himself, was the exemplification of the human condition itself and so he comforted himself that he was not strange.
One evening on his free day when the cello would not play for him anything other than just notes and Gabriele was nothing but words of clutter like the dirty socks he seemed to strew across his room, he tried to avoid the callings of desperation and the wish to escape his lonely malaise by changing a few florescent light bulbs that had been flickering in the convenience store. He was changing the second bulb on the ladder, absconding from his temptations to go to a sauna, when he heard a flurry of tapping as if the limbs of a tree were knocking against a window. It was a tapping or a light knocking. He got down from the ladder and followed it into his room. He opened the door and there was Saeng Seob. Sang Huin's bereaved mind had already buried him as one more corpse of friendship that had amassed in a huge burial hill since early childhood. He did not know what to say.
"Can I come in?" asked Seong Seob.
"You came all the way here by yourself?" asked Sang Huin.
"I'm blind but I'm not ignorant of how to tell a taxi driver an address," saidSaeng Seob.
"Sure, come in," said Sang Huin indifferently. He paused. "Where have you been? I didn't know what happened to you. I didn't know if you were hurt. I didn't have a telephone number to call anyone and ask about you. I didn't-"
"I was busy," said Saeng Seob.
Sang Huin thought about leaving this idea alone. He thought about just letting such a topic of discourse die there without comment. The wisp of air and the positioning of the tongue to begin, "So, what do you want with me" was at the roof of his mouth.
"Maybe we should move in together," said Saeng Seob.
"Here?" asked Sang Huin.
"I don't know. Somewhere."
"My job here means that I have to live here alone."
"You have a college education from America. You shouldn't be wasting yourself working at a convenience store. Go back to what you were doing before. I can get you private lessons. It is Seoul. There is gold in them there hills."
Sang Huin laughed. He felt at home within this American Hillbilly colloquialism. "All right," he said; and so this was what they did. They stayed together that night and then looked for an apartment the next morning. And then a year passed in living together: Seong Seob finding jobs for him as one might find errands for schoolboys. There wasn't gold in the hills but there was plenty of silver and paper to come into such wealthy homes bringing to families and sometimes their businesses pure American English in the mouth of a Korean. And each morning, exuded from the little time not consumed in a personal life, a quasi-professional life, sleep, and various bodily mandates, he worked on Gabriele. He found it interesting that their two worlds were now converging in the respect that she was taking care of a baby at the time of the first Gulf War with Iraq and he seemed to be living at the inception of the second one that had even more of a chance of exploding into something quite large and horrid within the presence or ghost of Osama Bin Laden.
One day they went to visit a boy of one of those families, who also had the name of Seong Seob. He was suffering at Soul's Yonsei University Hospital. The boy's mother, who was in the hallway, grabbed Sang Huin's hand and enthusiastically took him into the room. The boy's legs and feet were in casts and elevated. His face, bored and withdrawn, brightened slightly as he said his first English word of the visit: "Toy." Sang Huin laughed as he walked further into the room presenting the board game to the boy. The hospital room looked almost the same as an American hospital room except that there were four beds; no curtain partitions; and cushioned benches next to each bed.
There were not many differences between American and Korean lifestyles from what he could see. Korea was like living in the Ozarks with high hills everywhere. He had lived in both Missouri and Texas depending on the needs of his father's work. They had homes in both places. Both countries seemed to be arrogant and fortified within their cultural expressions. One certainly could never part a Korean from his kimchee. Here women strapped babies behind their backs but even in a rural town like Umsong many carried cellular telephones in their purses. Pagers were only slowly becoming obsolete. Koreans' love of making their country into a high tech Mecca was only secondary to their continued devotion to their obsolete pagers. When a college student's pager vibrated with activity he or she would still run into a coffee shop to call his or her friend on the table phones and wait for that person there. There were video pangs (VCR rooms); table tennis rooms; noripangs (Karaoke singing rooms); outdoor vendors and restaurants; crippled singing beggars and vendors who crawled down pedestrian streets like worms as they pushed their carts that blared traditional music from small speakers, and sang into microphones; more mom and pop stores on each block than one could count; and tight department stores with small supermarkets underneath.
One could find in Chongju a McDonalds with an Internet caf? underneath, Pizza Hut, and Baskin-Robbins Ice cream shops. One could always find M&M chocolate candies and shirts displaying American university logos. One could find American and Hong Kong movies, which intrigued Koreans with their violence. Koreans lived under the insecurities of North Korea and their students always found a subject for protest but the country did not foment and fray in violence.
Sang Huin did not know why he was thinking this. He had always hated Chongju and Umsong in particular. And yet rural scenes (like the traveling markets in Umsong) were sort of sweet and real. The only vestige rural traditions in Seoul were the traditional weddings at the Korean Folk Village and traditional dancers no longer on the street corners but contained in a theatre.
He thought about once when he and Yang Kwam were shopping for clothes in Itaewan Dong of Seoul on that same street where he worked at a convenience store. It was raining and cold and his sickness was getting worse. Yang Kwam was wearing a shirt with the American flag on it. Dizzy and disoriented, Sang Huin had followed that American flag in subways, underground transfer corridors, exits, and sidewalks. He was acting the same way now only he wasn't sick. He was following Seong Seob into a relationship blindly to have concrete experiences and happiness that could only be obtained in shared experiences.
Sang Huin (Shawn most of the time to Seong Seob) grabbed his blind friend by the arm and awkwardly yanked him nudgingly to the child's bed. It was a cocky American gesture with the sotto voce of one insinuating by touch an inhibition to touch at all. The tepid force of this gesture was, in part, of someone who had been abandoned inexplicably before. Seong Seob had felt Shawn's awkward half-hearted attachment and reticence for a year now. He couldn't blame him since he realized his part in bringing it about. He had thought that living together would smooth over everything and felt dismayed that a year later Sang Huin still touched and spoke to him with the uncertainty of the two belonging to each other. And yet in bed it was compensated by desperate and passionate thumping which was the best kind of love making there was. Seong Seob needed to feel that another person hungered for him for this was the contract. This was the binding of love. It was a covenant with this relationship-being that virtually all people deemed as higher than themselves. It was a belonging that all humans sought.
Sang Huin's mind questioned the legitimacy of human feelings and the meaning of others' presence in his life, which without exception seemed so fleeting. His mind was in a torture chamber of its own making. He yearned for harder realities outside of one's experiences and yet finding none he did not retreat to the limits of his feelings and the input he got from his senses. Headstrong, he believed that there had to be something that he was missing and so he went on searching like a madman batted about in erratic thoughts.
"I wonder when he will leave again," he thought. "I wonder what little thing will be too much for him and cause him to hide like a coward never to return again. Will I get a hateful text message on my cellular telephone? Will this be how it will go awry? It's bound to go bad. Everything changes. How can a relationship change to be closer than what it started out initially?" Although the present often stood free without a guard, within the infliction of memory it roamed no further than the prison gate that its imagination conjured up from past ruins.
And yet the ruminator that this "Shawn" was, he was still the product of his culture that was not too keen on ruminations. One's culture was prevalent in every thought even within an introvert like himself. Culture was a cookie cutter pressing out shape in the amorphous dough of one's thoughts. It was the re-legitimization of Marx. It was as Aristotle stated ambiguously as form shaping matter. It was the American in him that had cajoled and coerced Seong Seob to the hospital against his will according to the characteristics of his nationality even if it had been done diffidently.
"I sarem i irum Seong Seob imnida. I sarem i Seong Seob imnida." He paused and turned to the older Seong Seob. "Go ahead. You've been introduced. You both are each other. Ask him how he is. I can't speak Korean as you well know every minute of everyday." The older Seong Seob laughed and then began to flutter within the native language that animated him most. Sang Huin watched as the three creatures (his friend, the mother, and her son who was also named Seong Seob) expressed their color and movement in Hanguk-mal. He felt as if he were in a flower market instead of a hospital. Flowers encompassed the boy in all directions. Sang Huin remembered being sick himself and hearing the cryptic language that his mother and sister spoken around him. That cryptic language was now there in the confines of the walls of this hospital room and unable to escape it he felt as if he were a minority within it. It was the ethereal language that had soared his family above and away from his terrestrial boundaries.
Sang Huin thought about that time at the English winter camp when he first met this now hospitalized boy, Seong Seob. Everything proceeded fine for a few days and then one night Seong Seob scathed his knees in play and suddenly pulled off his pants in front of the school children and staff. The boy exposed his vulnerabilities. He showed the flimsy mortal creature of man for what he was. Horror and tempestuous hatred toward the mincing of one's boyhood innocence was in his animated eyes and it mixed into his cries of despair. Five seconds earlier he had been running and wrestling with the other boys and then with a little pain and the rolling of a small stream of blood came the memories of being run over by a truck and all of its ensuing surgeries.
Saeng Seob had not wanted to come; and even in the hospital room he and the dog wanted to stay aloof. Despite his more gregarious tendencies and his smile so wide to compensate for the lack of expression in his sunglass-confined orbs, Seong Seob and his dog stood away from the railing of the bed. The dog perceived its master's nasocomial fears but instead of looking at the atmosphere as something that might alert its senses, its face, every few moments, made movements toward the door not much different than the master. It had led the way through outpatient units of hospitals before. It knew its master's aversion to places of suffering and could sense the gloom that pervaded all rooms and corridors in a hospital. The surgeries on Seong Seob's eyes had been performed when he was a boy to no avail. The dog had escorted the master from the ages of 12 to 15 on subsequent visits that procured nothing but the dread of hospitals.
The fear of hospitals seemed to be a fear of death. Even a cockroach was afraid of death and so to be afraid of such a thing, thought Sang Huin, was natural. And yet death itself was natural. It might well be liberation instead of annihilation. It seemed absurd to prejudge such a natural occurrence that living creatures knew nothing about. It might be as beautiful as all the flowers that surrounded the bed of the boy, Seong Seob, who was playing with the board game that he had unwrapped and opened from the box. What did a cockroach know? For it perceived nothing outside of its own physical survival. What did a dog know? For it perceived hospitals as containers of human suffering instead of deliverance from illness?
Sang Huin understood that Seong Seob was pursing a relationship that was more than a bit at odds with the world in even the most libertine culture. He also acknowledged that Saeng Seob was visiting a suffering boy whom he wanted to run away from. Sang Huin could not do much of anything to fill in the crevices of time and in awkward moments of not knowing what to say he just stood there uncomfortably but with a degree of appreciation for Seong Seob. Sang Huin had empathy as deep as the gods.
Had it not been for her youth that allowed her to engage in prostitution, she would have been at the welfare office every month. Each month she would have spent a day slowly making her way through the queue to that ultimate goal of staring through a translucent partition and into the faces of intake workers. Necessity would have compelled her, each time, to submit her documentation of a driver's license, social security card, and statement of approval through a hole within the glassy wall. As a reticent and less than proud potential recipient of food stamps and Aid for Dependent Children, she would have silently deposited her artifacts depicting the reality of her existence and watched these worker bees document her documentation and re-scrutinize what had already been scrutinized and approved.
Monthly she would have been in a situation of needing to minimize her imperturbable haughtiness so as to give cordial answers to questions without being a formidable foe. She would have been in a situation of needing to be sociable enough to give gentle but feigned smiles that might have a hope of expediting the process of gaining benefits. In front of the intake personnel her eye contact would have needed to be constant but not so much so that it would have intimidated them. Poised and courteous, but with the intelligence of her eyes aimed like lasers for the incineration of the layers of their hearts, she would have wanted them to quail without realizing that she was the culpable one causing them to quail.
Had she gone into the welfare office each month she would have needed to check her haughty disposition above all else since the uneducated chattering clients, the wait, and the lowly workers abounded and it all was such an indignity. Her tacit repugnance of the apparatchik would not have been something that she could have restrained fully. She would have needed to let bits of it ooze out gradually and undetectably or the intake workers could have forced her to go back to the IM worker's office and explain why she hadn't gone on very many job interviews and why someone with a Master's degree from Rice University would need assistance at all. She would have hated them not for any petty personal grievance (she didn't "give a flying f—" what they thought of her) but for reasons totally outside herself: if it weren't for derelicts and freeloaders, these welfare workers would have been unemployed so it was outrageous of them to be condescending if not outright hateful to the monthly recipients; and if it were not for such do-nothings, breeders of illegitimate children, iconoclasts, and antisocialites (all which summarized her in such a unique blend) these client-intake workers would not have known the difference between being indolent and being industrious. Not having anyone to compare themselves to, they might have lived their lives in ignorance as to the meaning of such concepts, or worse, found their own paper producing jobs as the lowest tier of the caste.
Had it not been for prostitution, she would have been leeching onto public assistance as a menace to herself and society at large. Each month Gabriele Sangfroid's hard expressions would have probably intimidated the intake workers more than the useful amount and she might have found herself forced to wait all morning and afternoon on an income maintenance worker whose only wish would be to avoid dealing with such a mad woman. Then in late afternoon a supervisor might have called her name and she would have needed to encounter hateful stares for being a flagrant mutineer of the American work ethic. There might have been the undulating of the tongue reminding her that she was a Master's degree holder. Such a supervisor, or a brave IM worker, would have shot missiles of time consuming bureaucracy and lack of kindness at her and Gabriele's laser eyes would have needed to shoot them down gently, cordially, and politely. "I understand that someone with a Master's Degree from Rice University could be gainfully employed. I realize that there are professional jobs available to me. Right now I'm poor and I have a baby. I'm searching for the right job that will allow me to continue to devote as much care for him that I can do. You know the way it is with mothers. It is hard to find that employer who is sensitive to the fact that one is a mother." Something like that might have been what she would have communicated. It would have been coordinated with the usual amount of artful guile and smiles to get her through life.
She knew a little about the Department of Social Services from firsthand experience with them when she first moved to Ithaca. It was in a day in December as cold and merciless as February when she went there. Nathaniel or Adagio was a newborn at that time. Back then, resigned to the fact that she needed assistance so that she might continue with her contemplation of life, she went into the New York Department of Social Services with him in a bassinet. She discovered how her laser beams went through bullet proof glass separating the intake workers from the waiting area and seemed to set fire to the cubicles housing the IM workers.
In her first hour there she considered this agency a demeaning place in all respects and that she shouldn't be partaking of services here; and yet her feelings were muted by logic. and Gabriele was, after all, a very logical person. She told herself that being here with illiterate, drug dependent, and lethargic characters was not all that different than her work as a staff psychologist in parole assessment at the state prison. Encountering client abuse or being in the thickets as one of the worms were just two equally uncomfortable situations. It was really nothing more than a substitution of one form of abhorrence for that of another. Examined further, she couldn't see any difference between being a freeloader and a worker apart from the worker's obsession to think that his manner of wasting time was respectable. Since they were the same apart from the means by which they chose to fritter away their existence-the bums wanting to spend their time getting something and the workers in producing it—she couldn't see any sense in feeling more abhorrence from being behind the glass than in front of it. Besides, this experience here also provided her with a new perspective of what life was like to be one of the besmirched masses on the opposite side of the fort. Knowing multiple perspectives made her contemplate the entity like Parmenides and contemplating the entity brought her more in the realm of truth.
Looking onto it now, she did not think that these clients of hers were any more or less degrading than collecting food stamps or in having worked as a counselor in social services. It had only been the need for money that made her deign to any of this prostitution.
She owed a lot to the male need to be touched, to dive into the high of an orgasm, and to have innate aggression exorcised by thrusts within a subservient woman. It was a good profession that took little time and no mental prostitution thereby allowing her to contemplate God when the kid wasn't crying for bottles, changed diapers, and swift rides in her arms. It was also useful for society since men needed to be exorcised of aggression. After all, an excess of testosterone had kept the planet in a type of marginal nightmare. It certainly did not need to be plunged into it further by a lack of prostitutes. Before she ever worked again as a psychologist avowing the criminality of criminals or giving nice little labels on Lilys, she would go back to the bad girl group home. Before she returned to the click-of-the-heels logic of girls, she would become a janitor, a supermarket cashier, or a digger for bottles in trashcans. And to keep away from all of it she would continue with the present line of work as long as Adagio wasn't traumatized by strange men drifting in and out of a trailer. A child needed the illusion of stability more than anyone else; but bills also had to be paid.
And so time ran on like a shell-shocked soldier. Already the boy was four years old and precocious regarding one thing: the emotional state of perplexity. Strangers continued to come into his mother's domain and like always he watched these unknown men come in and mysteriously pat him on the head in passing. Many of her men felt a twinge of awkwardness as if they had to go through a premature and impotent little sentinel to get to her. He was not sagacious enough to understand that. He just wanted them to stay to talk with him instead of always passing on to her. Ostensibly she looked more pleased to see them than she did him. He noticed this, but little did he know that after having changed diapers for three years and having given him baths, she was as disinterested in the male anatomy as a female could be; and so not wanting sex, love, or godly companionship from them, all they had to give her was money.
He was her human subject: and she wanted to keep all primitive and barbaric impulses of pop-culture and unoriginal dogmatic religious premises from influencing his brain. She did this partly from the wish to make him into a good person and partly from a scientific curiosity about what would happen if she mixed strange chemicals together. She was very curious about the outcome of child rearing; but more, there was fun in the manipulation and fun in the unknown of what he would become each year.
She trashed her television set into the back of a closet and in his bedroom she began daily puppet shows of a simplified self-made Hamlet or King Lear adaptation and she would have him dance to the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven in unique movements she called the sangfroid. She grew pumpkin gardens and allowed him to feel the weight of the largest ones against his small frame just as she had done for the past two years. Now, for him, they had become gigantic balls that he couldn't pick up to bounce or the wheels of tanks. They were no longer the objects of wonder they had been a year earlier. She knew this inevitable truth but she didn't mind it terribly. Losing the wonder of small things in ones adventure to know bigger truths was the act of growing up and there was nothing she could do to stop it. She knew: the loss of wonder came upon a child's innocence like a Turkish beheading. She hoed around the 10 feet patch of garden and imagined the texture of one pumpkin she had detached for him recording itself onto his psyche as he rolled on it and scooted it around. She grew flowers so that molecules of smell and sight could make sketchy replicas of flowers in his brain. She wanted benign if not benevolent influences to make him special. "There will be no battery operated cars for this boy," she often told herself, for they would lead to a preoccupation with movement, and from movement to targets. She did not want to nurture the hunter within him. Instead she wanted to make him into a god for being alone in the celestial realm was lonely business. The materialistic, hedonistic, shallow specimen of movement had to go.
And yet they were not sedentary Buddha statuettes sitting on shelves and so she often took him to an outdoor pool or a heated indoor pool depending on the season. In earlier years, splashing in a baby pool large enough that he could not easily see an end to its greatness achieved the same aim as the oceans her father had taken her to. Within a large body of water one could always find Parmenides' entity and Aristotle's Prime Mover as one pursued that innate human need for physical movement. The realization that he was distressed about older boys going into the large pool when he wasn't permitted to do so caused her to lead him into deeper waters. He floated on a swimming board and sometimes on her palm under his chest as she treaded water beside him and allowed him to experience the tide when the whales of human bodies plunged in toward them
They also found mother and son bonding activities when lugging plastic containers into an environmentally friendly grocery store. From her example she wanted to nudge onto him a respect of Mother Earth, or at least a reluctance to be reckless with her. She wanted him to gain the habit of being the least environmentally destructive that was humanly possible. One of the bins had animal crackers and she would fill a small plastic container with these dead carcasses. She abhorred the drug of sugar and its impact on him but then she did not like enduring the choleric displays of a drug addict who was being blocked from getting his fix. He always craved for them like oxygen and there was little one could do with cookie or animal cracker cravings but succumb to them in the hope of getting some peace of mind. Always following the grocery expedition she would take him to the zoo and feed him the cracker carcasses only after he matched the animal cracker replicas to the beasts they were approaching and could say the names of the zoo animals in English, German, and Spanish. He couldn't sputter out the Latin so she had to give up on pushing that language into his head since she couldn't pull it out of his mouth. They spent Sunday mornings listening to church bells chime from their seats in a Laundromat. Around 10:30 the adjacent diner opened for business and from a window in one of the walls they would place orders for French Cream Cheese sandwiches. They were the oddest creatures in the Laundromat, dancing the sangfroid to a cassette recording of Evard Grieg's Peer Gynt with bread and cream cheese gushing in their mouths as they waited for their laundry to dry.
One day they went downtown to pay utility bills and afterwards they walked around the campus of Cornell University. At a bookstore she became intrigued by a biography of Alfred Adler and for a couple minutes she became fully immersed in the reading. During this time he bypassed her despite the fact that she had been trying to keep him tracked in the corners of her eyes. Imagining ethereal voices calling to him, he veered out the door and went to follow the Sun god that was descending into the crevices of buildings. The display was, for him, an obvious invitation of hide and seek. Pursuing the joy of the present moment, his imagination interwove him in the tangle of one's sense of direction and the deception of nature whose beauty belied its true disinterest in man since it had no intention of obeying any mortal calls. Each building became a whole forest, which overwhelmed him in vastness and darkness.
For over an hour she ran around like a mad woman frantically asking strangers if they had seen a child. She felt like Achilles chasing the tortoise and she scolded herself for not having put him on an arm leash the way she had when he was three. When at last she saw him staring down at a gas lamp god reflected into the waters of a lifeless fountain she at first wanted to pull down his pants and give him a beating with her hard, powerful palm but she was taken off guard by his emotional embrace and by her own unusual reactionary embrace of him. She held onto him tightly even though she had never wanted to hold onto anything. A lucid and excoriating speech was in her parched mouth but she could not say it. She only said the idea in her mind:" A bad man could have taken you. Don't you know that you can't run away from me?" A tear even slid down a cheek. She was a needy creature enmeshed in another being, vulnerable and susceptible to his actions. It was an uncomfortable state that she had never wanted.
At last she said, "You little scoundrel."
"Yes," he said. "I am your little scoundrel," and she laughed. It was as if he had read Nathaniel Hawthorne and he had cast himself into the part of Pearl.
That night she had dreams of Achilles chasing a tortoise and of different geometric shapes that were before her soon eluding her. She woke up the next morning in a cranky mood. Everything seemed to be aloof and impalpable. She burnt the pancakes like Rita Lily and called him to breakfast indifferently. His wishes that the orange juice be put into his new Mickey Mouse mug were fulfilled. It was just the dumping of one liquid content into another container. She did this without saying a word. She ate with him but she was hardened to his complaints about the taste of the meal. She was frowning and despondent the whole time.
There was a triangular pack or trinity of stray dogs listlessly wiping snouts in whatever might possibly be edible as they interweaved around pedestrians' feet. Even the sniffing of its members was listless. A foot kicked one dog and there was a high-pitched breathless squeal that was scarcely audible. The dog pushed its weight and movement toward its right side the way a boy might sink into genuflection when the wind is knocked out of him and then it slunk off the sidewalk. Motionless for a moment while still standing, it then opted for movement although it could only stagger. It was not alone. A smaller dog from the trinity followed disconcertedly. It too veered in a right curve to the mirage of a refuge on the edge of the road as if it were the mean between two risky states. One hobbling and trying to yelp from a bit of a second wind and the other accustomed to follow that which had secured its sustenance at previous times, they walked together for a minute before being flattened by a truck and swallowed into the pot hole mouth of the pavement. The road, from its swallow, bloated and curved up like a hill before its true form materialized. Ostensibly, it was a road on an emerging hill but really it was the mutant growth of a head and a face. Out of nowhere it inexplicably gained animation and being. It was with life and without purpose. It was naked existence. The road would swallow much more again and again, get bigger, replicate more of itself, and die. "Mutations of the carbon of the planet are everywhere! I see it now: species are cells mutating over time; planets are clusters of cells; the galaxies are mere organs; and the universe is an organism. Individuals play their parts, thinking themselves autonomous as does any nucleus of a cell, but it isn't true." These were her thoughts as she opened her eyes.
Gabriele woke up from a startled Heraclitus-flux of a nightmare the way she had the previous night. Like then, the only pressing logic contained within such a strange dream was a geometric leitmotif that was an insensible riddle. It occurred to her how the subconscious was composed exclusively of chaotic winds and not what she had at one time thought of as a cryptic but sensible Nubian code for the astute transcriber. It was nothing but vehement typhoon spirals with all sensory input and significant long and short-term memories blowing erratically inside of them. It was a wonder that civilization existed at all. Humans were great wonders unto themselves to be able to carry such a stir with a degree of poise. It was amazing that over so many millenniums Homo sapiens found some degree of cooperation to exist. It was a wonder that Homo sapiens were able to develop dimensions of themselves outside the frenzy that was trying to suck them back into it. Rational ideas and decisions might well be influenced by the stir, but still to get through the day thinking one's benign little ideas, evaluating and rejecting most truculent impulses, and trying to make sense of issues beyond ones instincts, hungers, fears, and anxieties was an absolute miracle. It was the greatest poise and magnanimity to forfeit the compulsions of one's stir of night and to develop some semblance of civilized society, benign and sensible. How strange, she thought, that the subconscious was not universally declared as empirical as a fingerprint, DNA evidence, or a signature on a sheet of paper showing one's intent. Any startled awakening from a dream was the tangible proof of her claim that the subconscious was not merely theoretical.
On her pillow she leaned toward the end table with the idea of picking up an alarm clock to look at the time when she saw a handkerchief belonging to one of her anonymous clients laying beside it. He had dropped it out of a pocket when putting on his pants hours earlier and she remembered that she had found it after he had gone away. She could see the large initials embroidered on it. It was no doubt the embroidery of his special little lady. The initials were MF. Was M for Michael? she asked unto herself, that high authority that answered all of her questions. "Maybe it is," her higher authority said, "But I wouldn't be able to decipher what F means unless the first initial stands for Mother." She laughed out loud but she put the end of the pillow up to her mouth to keep it muted. She did not want to wake up the boy. So content within herself like a child, she could entertain herself so easily.
She was sure that this internal voice was most illuminating in intellectual luminaries but it was not unlike what Rita Lily had. It existed even in the most idiotic of people. Was a split personality a real concept? She had her doubts. There were many erratic whims in any human being. It was only by divorcing oneself from certain whims that one might assimilate two or more spurious personalities, which would only come about from being abused in extreme torturous cruelty. What was thought as split personalities existed, she theorized, to reduce one's interaction with others whom have brought him or her horrific trauma.
She thought about this MF. He had been polite to her and there weren't too many like this. He had been the one massaging her. He had wanted her own pleasure as much as his own. There weren't many like this either. He had even succeeded in making her tingle and have orgasms. Even now, so many hours later, just the thought of him made her tingle. She sniped at herself for entertaining this absurd tingle that women often have long after the sexual stimulation is over. "I am a female," she told herself, "but I'm no lowly woman." She picked up the clock. It was 3:00 in the morning. She told herself that if a client was giving her spurious romantic notions she needed to distance herself. She needed a break from physical prostitution.
Before Hallmark removed her from their list of freelance artists for accidentally mailing in one of her profane sketches, she had had this as another form of income. Now the clients were all there was. The income was sufficient to pay the bills and, more importantly, she was able to afford canvas and a wide array of paints each month. This type of prostitution was in many ways treating her well. It was instrumental in giving a burgeoning artist canvas and contemplation but she had to admit that the boy was becoming jealous of her time with these men and she was losing professional objectivity. She decided that she should not go into work for a day or two. She needed to not work in her bed but instead to go on vacation outside of it.
In the morning as she was burning French toast for the boy she told him that they would go to the beach. After breakfast they made a straw hat and wire and tissue paper sunglasses for Mouse to match the ones she had once crafted for the boy months earlier. Then she put leashes around both of them. They got into her old brown Ford and drove to the Entity.
"Why's Rita/Lily not coming?"
"Well, I didn't invite her."
"How come?"
"Well, with the two of you and the two of her that would be two too many.Wouldn't you agree?"
He giggled as the jawbreaker moved from one part of his cheek to the other.
"Do you really think that thing in your mouth tastes good?"
"Same as a sucker," he said. "Do you want?" He pulled it out of his mouth. The jawbreaker was coruscating with saliva. It was like a gleaming moon.
"Gee, thanks, but I'm on a diet. That is just too lovely but it would be all the more so back in your mouth."
"Okay."
When they arrived she attached mouse to a stick stake that she wedged deep into the sand. Anywhere her boy wanted to roam he took her with him because the two were shackled to each other. Running around with the feel of wet sand plastering into the crevices of his toes in its grounded rock and mud texture she could again see that sense of awe and wonder that he had had when he was three. They began to twirl each other around and the two of them fell down like dizzy drunks. As she sat up she noticed that her son was staring directly at the sun.
"Adagio, don't look at the sun like that."
"Why?" He turned to her. He was still wearing his tissue paper and wire sunglasses just like the cat.
"Why? Because you don't want to be blind!"
"How can it blind me. It is the sun."
"Does it feel good to look at it directly?"
"No, not really"
"Well, gee, the proof is in the pudding. If it hurts to look up at it directly that is a prime indication to not do it."
"Huh?" he asked.
"Don't be so asinine. Don't look at it directly," she scolded.
"It wants us to see it," he responded.
"Not directly! Maybe metaphorically," she said. "Why do you think that God put stupid animals like Mouse on four legs? Have you ever thought about this issue? Well, I have and let me tell you the reason. If God hadn't forced dumb creatures like that to keep their front limbs as feet they would be looking up at the sun and all of them would be blind. Put simply, Mouse can't look up at the sun because God forced him to stand on four legs; and with a person, he is usually brighter than a mouse. He is usually a little smarter than an animal so God encourages him to buy sunglasses, suntan lotion, and to look down toward one's own business: earthly matters like what you need to wear, the food you need to fill your belly with, the story you are going to read, so on and so forth." Each dour day of having to give the reasons behind things to keep this little guy in one piece was exasperating and she felt that she was falling into the mire of a never-ending story.
She wondered whether, in part, the religious stories (later to be cut down into the book sized collections of scripture) had happened for the same reason.
"Ambulatory two legged individuals need to have less of an ethereal concentration. That's my take on it."
"Huh?" he asked. He looked down at the sand, pulled up his glasses onto his head, and said, "Let's make a house for the sun. Maybe it will get little and stay in there and we can stare at it through the windows."
"Sounds good to me," said Gabriele. "You can do that while I set up house." She got up and pulled him toward the area where Mouse was pacing in parched emptiness nervously. She laid out a large rug near the staked cat, erected an umbrella, and took out suntan lotion, a book, Coka Cola, a CD player, and chewing tobacco from her large bag. She put on a hat that made her look like an Asian rice farmer. Then she began to listen to Paganini's Caprices. Meanwhile her son chose an area for the construction site. She wondered why he had chosen one plot of sand over another plot. Sure, he was on a leash and so he did not have a wide area to choose from; but a bigger question was why anyone would choose to sit in one chair over another one in an audience where the seats were not assigned. When one wasn't mandated to a table by one of those restaurant hosts, why would a given customer choose one table over that of another? That was a mystery. Did the mind fool a person into believing one spot was better than another one so that action could be implemented without lots of hesitation? She hadn't ever thought about this point before. Her son brought to her many thoughts. "That is one good reason to keep him around," she kidded to herself.
"The sand won't stick."
"Well put enough water on it to make it sticky and not so much to make it runny. Same as cement. You really should begin the foundation of your castle closer to the water-only not so close that the waves get to it. That way you don't have to use so much bottled water."
"Well, then I need more rope," he said.
"Okay." She unraveled some of the rope from the leash that was wound on her arm. She allotted to him more freedom for his imaginary worlds.
"I want a house. Not a castle. I want it to have a bed and its own room. The closet will be in—"
He droned on and on. In some respects his little ideas were charming but she had to turn off a great deal that he said to stay sane. "Castle, house, house, castle—who gives a flying f—" permeated through her brain tissue. She loved this egocentric being that had pulled out of her body and she did not consider him too boring. She watched him work against the odds of crumbling sand and an avalanche of shoddy construction, sculpting out some edifice that he attributed as having meaning and a link to a civilized creator. She watched this little individual who was a microcosm of all the worker ants sculpting their tunnels of dirt that would ultimately collapse. None of them thought of the ultimate corollary that human life and endeavors would go back to nothingness and the entity that brought it all about. She felt compassion for him, for all of them, like a goddess looking on her pathetic children. To some degree, she was pleased that he emulated her myth of the sun. Within moderation it was a good and humane fabrication. The creation of her version of the creator was a meaningful and benevolent lie of universal brotherhood and it seemed to her that the ultimate goal of motherhood was to nurture humane behavior even if one had to lie upon occasion.
To escape a violent world daydreams, liquor, and hallucinogens were always warranted. To counter innate violent inclinations there needed to be a benevolent god to emulate-one that was palpable and touched everyone and one to whom there weren't stories or rules to be brainwashed in to gain membership. She did not know. There were no guidebooks for rearing children. One ad-libbed the best that one could do. It was a daily chore and one where there weren't any vacations that would allow objective contemplation of past mistakes.
She put away her book, Why I am not a Christian, by Bertrand Russell. The book needed to be perused deeply but she couldn't do that because she needed to keep a part of one eye on the boy and a part of the other eye on the cat. She went over to help him with his futile task. Within an hour they had constructed an elaborate castle. Fulfilling his intentions, this peeping Tom became fixated on looking through the windows of the Sun house in the hope of seeing an anthropomorphic sun god shrinking himself into its corridors. Finding nothing but prolonged darkness, he returned to staring up at the clouds and the bright intensity that was the sun.
She wanted to kick the sun castle. She wanted to destroy it, to blast it away, and to bring it back to its initial matter. She even contemplated a more debase act. She thought about unleashing Mouse and tossing it onto the roof of the castle when Nathaniel was not looking— however, she rationalized that a mother who blamed her actions on a cat would be more despicable than a worm. This idea of framing culpability on the cat swiftly left her consciousness to decompose back into whatever neurotransmitter combinations and neurological circuitry had come together to formulate it. She felt irritated at herself for ever reinventing Aten and for being Akhenaten forcing one more damnable myth into the world. After all, this one, for its merits, could ruin a boy's eyesight.
Her desire to kick the sun god house had been, in part, from the very desire to cling to it. She wanted to keep Nathaniel in a state preserved from society's lies, guile, opportunism, greed, and barbarity. She also wanted this private and personal experience with him that no one had shared since Aten's extinction in Egypt many thousands of years earlier.
From her most selfish inclinations she wanted his companionship to avoid a loneliness that was so stagnating on her energies. Common sense told her that he was a separate person and that his young and curious being, enveloped in the freshness of experience that was part of childhood, did not exist to free her from moments when the world just looked old and musty; and yet there were times when feelings did not succumb well to common sense. More altruistically, she wanted to keep him from having to witness Turkish beheadings and other real world models that would vitiate ideals to the realization that it was every man for himself. And yet he would be entering school soon: all innocence in a bubble had to finally break.
She took him and the cat to the area where one could rent out inner tubes. After paying for one, she re-staked the cat and pushed her son onto the waters where both son and mother were assailed by the rays of the sun. "Nathaniel," she said, "No more of that looking up into the sky like a dreamy baboon. Just watch the waves whisking us around." As she felt the undulations, she forgot about the Entity and vaguely recalled that sexual exhilaration with MF. Moments of Frenzy lived with one no longer than any of the passing winds against one's face. They were pleasant sensations, boosts of fuel, giving one a positive outlook toward more tangible encounters. With the exception of the best one, they were never remembered. But, rising up and down with the waves, she was not remembering any encounter, but rather the best one.
In later days and weeks she avoided work and clients more than she should have done and took Nathaniel to Niagara Falls, tiny falls in rural Ithaca, and on little rides in amusement parks in different areas of the state. Except for the local falls, which were free, she just said, "Charge please" and handed out a credit card to venders, ticket salesmen, and hotels. She handed them her bit of plastic although she knew this action would make her, even more, into a slave of her own brothel. She wanted to take him to Lake Placid in the Adirondack Mountains too but common sense prevailed. She had second thoughts about the matter for she knew that she needed to cut back on her spending. She had done these other things with him from a gluttony to celebrate those rare whole days when mother and son were fully together because she knew that they would not be endless. In short it had been a desire to hold onto him. The poet, Lucretius, was in her head. It was he who said, "The generations of living things pass in a short time, and like runners hand on the torch of life."
He was now nearly the age of six and the near emergence of the school year agitated her progressively. The vacations could not last forever and had not lasted forever. One reality after another budged into a human's life pushing the former one into a surreal dream. For an hour, each night, she would lock herself in her room, change into a black negligee, write her fears in a journal by the light of a candle, and often find her thoughts discombobulated by the sound of his voice.
"Gabriele," he whined one night behind the door. She ignored him in the hope he would go away. She was trying to perfect the doggerel she had written in her journal the previous night. "Don't yell/for you can tell/I am myself/ to no one else/ and like an ocean that says I am,/ an ocean by the name of Pam/and an unmarried feminist named Sam,/ I am so large that you can't see all of me even if you are traveling in a Pan AM./I just slap my waves on the shore./ I behave according to my inner nature and don't ask for more./ I am an ocean and so sometimes with my unfathomable depth it seems as if nothing touches me/ but it does you will see./ Water evaporates from me./ Sailors sail in me./ It is my glee/although I'm sometimes saddened by what is me." She rather liked the alliteration and the variations of the feet. She thought that her word choice was rather masterful although she wondered if the rhyme scheme wasn't a bit excessive.
"Gabriele. Will you play checkers with me?" he said through the door
"I'm working," she said mildly
"There's nobody in there with you."
"I'm thinking. Thinking is working."
"There's nobody in there with you. You're not working," he said loudly
"Working can be thinking. It isn't always—" She stopped herself. She was about ready to say, "It isn't always fucking."
"Mouse went to the bathroom in that fern thing and now there is shitty dirt everywhere."
"Good God. Go clean it up."
"I don't know how."
"You know how to use a broom and a dustbin. Can't you sweep it into the dustbin? You remember how!"
"It smells so really badly. If I go near it I'm gonna puke."
"I changed your diapers. It can't be worse than that. Plug your nose and try to do a little. I'm tired of being the maid around here."
"I'm not a maid too."
"It's your cat."
"It's older than me. How come it's my cat?"
"My dear, when it goes to the bathroom in areas it shouldn't it becomes your cat."
"How come?"
"Because I'd—" She stopped herself. She was ready to say, "Because if it did that and I were to own it alone I would stuff it." Instead she said, "Because it likes you better." That was a solid argument. The only thing he could ask would be why the cat liked him better; and to ask such a thing would not have been beneficial to his argument. She was eager to see if he was intelligent enough to say nothing and he was. He just paused.
"I feel lonely."
"I'll be out soon"
He jiggled the knob. "How come you got that thing locked? I wanna play checkers." His egocentric words grated on her nerves no different than barking dogs in the trailer park. "I'm gonna ride my bike over to Chuck's."
"Not this late you're not."
"You gonna play checkers or am I gonna gota Chuck's?" Chuck was a neighbor boy from the trailer park who recently moved into a house three blocks away. At first she got up from her seat in a huff of anger to prune such insolence but she couldn't help feeling amused by it so she sat back down on her chair at the desk and smiled at the door. She wondered what happened to the mild natured child of a month ago—the child that was 5 but seemed like 4. This one seemed much older. She wondered if the formation of his first ultimatum was the emulation of an ultimatum she had given to him and could not remember or if it was from some innate incorrigible tendencies. She spent an additional half hour on the poem. She couldn't see that she was making any improvements. "Maybe it is perfect after all," she thought.
"Are you going to clean up the mess for Mommy?" she yelled. There was no answer.
She wrote a few sentences in her journal. For the first time she jokingly admitted, in its pages, the desire for MF to become a returning client. It wasn't really so much good sex that she craved as the companionship of a male friend or friendship in general. She had not exchanged perspectives of adult realities (such as so and so sending a resume through email on this advent called the Internet) nor had she engaged in racket ball competition since her friendship with Betty at Rice University. She had not had a steady boyfriend since early in her undergraduate education when she decided that men were special creatures who were uniquely loathsome in no lesser degrees than women. She felt a stagnancy of a life with little personal inside of it but her books, paintings, and the child who would be going away to school fairly soon. It was a bizarre version of stagnation in a life that by its prime purposes should not have been stagnating at all: by being a mother, she nurtured; by reading she was nurtured in the profound, and the profound was so unlike the pointless levity of socializing with living creatures; and by painting she rose into Godhood in the realm of ideas. And yet being wholly purposeful was such a solitary domain relegated to gods and not to creatures of movement who needed frivolity and interplay of ideas of the most shallow domain to feel alive. Between the need for a physical feeling that one man had bewitched upon her and that need for frivolity and friendship in the adult domain, she realized that such a recipe could very well be a toxic combination of ingredients. It was the baking of a vulnerability and she was not prone to consume vulnerabilities. Women meandered around as gadabouts while consuming their chocolaty vulnerability like bonbons but, she told herself, she was not a lowly woman.
She opened the bedroom door and walked out. She saw the fern in the living room. That one plant was intact, stagnant and alive in the purpose of its pot as she was in hers. She did not see any dirt anyplace. Even if Nathaniel had cleaned the floor it wouldn't have been done so neatly. Mouse stood there in front of her boldly. "Mouse, did you do something bad?" The cat looked at her dumbfoundedly. "Hmm, I didn't think so," she said. So, the boy had lied to her about the cat defecating in the fern's soil. "How did he learn to lie?" she asked herself and her higher authority said that a boy did not need a model: he would use logic like a sophist. He would display his rationale like fireworks for dazzling and dazing one in darkness. He would dazzle and daze others into believing that such brevity of lights was a firm reality. Her higher authority said that using logic to one's advantage was an instinct no different than sucking and biting. Then she saw that the door was open.
"He didn't!" she said, knowing that he had. She put a bosky robe over her black negligee. In ways she was dressed as a soldier and as a witch and yet neither role seemed too germane. Mother Earth, Father sky, and her own wrath would do nothing to solve this situation. For five minutes she ran out of the trailer park and a block down the road but acting like a lunatic got her nothing but the split soul of a slipper. She swung a fist in the air and, as if she were a female version of Zeus, the lightning pierced the sky. Still, this did nothing for her. Would she act the maternal part of worrying, crying, and feeling angry and betrayed? Such a part was too ludicrous to conceive. "What if he gets lost? What if he gets hit by a car? What if he does?" she thought to herself. "I'm not linked to him forever. Even good mothers can't monitor a child's movements every second of the day. A child obeys his own self-centered little voice despite a guardian's best intentions. The world is a risky place. That's not my fault either. I've done nothing wrong." She locked all doors and windows but the window in her bedroom that she left half open. When he crawled through it like a thief hours later she gave him the spanking of his life. She was not sure if spanking was for the benefit of the child through negative reinforcement or to release the stress of a child's guardian. She couldn't see that it mattered.
As the first days of the school year came and went, Gabriele still vied for time through the sheer act of forgetting. Whatever apprehensions or misgivings she was experiencing about sending her child to school, they were such that she, nonchalant, would never claim them to be fears nor acknowledge any malaise about the inevitability of external influences on her son. And yet subliminal fears were pulling her away unaware like a sleeping motorist who gets towed away with the vehicle for the impounding. She simply forgot about the date for the school registration even though school buses were roaring about everywhere in the city. Hearing buses from a distance, she should have easily remembered failing to enroll him in kindergarten the previous year when he was five; but her denial was a thick opaque fog and what she didn't do last year slipped from her no differently than enrolling him into school this year. The higher authority of self remained her goddess; and it was keeping her wrapped in swaddling innocence. It was innocence consisting of a belief in the present moment that she had serendipitously fallen into the previous autumn.
During last autumn, Adagio was particularly insistent on getting her to do what Chuck's parents had done. Restive, she had to bite her lip and say nothing. Emulating or just imitating someone else, even if it were done for her son, made her feel awkward and look disconcerted if not gauche; and yet, thinking about it for a moment, she had to admit that raking leaves into piles was not a big request. She knew that it would take some scavenging to pull together a pile or two of leaves but she decided that she could do this in her own unique way. She didn't mind simple challenges like this as long as she did not have to rake someone else's yard. She didn't want to meet neighbors for their small talk would be too unbearable. Those she had met before never used small talk as a step in the ladder toward more engaging topics. Each conversation was as if the previous ones never happened. Also these neighbors would pose personal questions to her and ask why she had so many male friends coming to the trailer at all hours. They would be pure hypocrites as if they weren't having sexual relations in their own trailers; and she would be there smiling at them but looking totally baffled as to why these superficial matters of what one did (action) instead of who one was (entity) were all that germane. She knew her relations were more innocent than theirs. Hers were for that needed substance called money but theirs were for the sleaze and pleasure of the moment; and if they were monogamous that showed an unnatural behavior indicative of psychological dependency. She could state boldly, "I think you are trying to ask what I do with these men who come to the trailer. Right? Of course, it is what you think. I'm a prostitute. Be sure to tell all your buddies." She could look them in the eyes and smile during the ensuing discussions. She would be able to declare such things and then talk affably about one neighbor's burgeoning tomatoes with superb poise but such frankness might wind up with a policeman on her doorstep, a short jail term, and a fine. She told herself that she would rake only in her own confined space clearly demarcated by a wooden fence and that such action would involve just a little imitation. She told herself that a little imitation was fine. After all, she could not claim herself to be 100 percent original. Even she imitated other people in myriad actions she never even considered from buying fashionable shoes to not running butt-naked in the streets.
The action of raking was at first a begrudging fulfillment of a simple request. Then it became merely using the scanty resources of the tiny plot surrounding the trailer to indifferently concoct what Chuck's father had done easily in the yard of that new double-wide trailer with its many and varied trees. A half-hour into the raking it refreshingly became an eagerly anticipated foray into childhood, which so many years ago had been smashed under the metal belt wheels of a metaphorical tank. With her son, she dived into piles, which she had raked for him in tandem. Inferior to the mellifluous smelling orange piles at Chuck's home (so she was told), these smaller, much greener, and dirtier mounds were a scanty mixture of dried leaves with freshly mowed weeds, sparse grass, and a couple bags of mulch. The piles were concocted but the experience of falling into them was anything but concocted. Her son, and the summons of fulfilling her role as a mother, inadvertently led her to the feel, taste, and smell of the present moment. During those times of last autumn, not yet experiencing the anxiety about necessarily having to send him off to school, she fell into the entity; and surprisingly, it wasn't something that one stared at from a beach. Mouth half open while plunging head first into the itching and asphyxiating pile of elements as dark as death, this ostensible foray into childhood belied the fact that the dive was really into the main artery of the heart of the entity. In that moment of seeing, feeling, smelling, and accidentally tasting the present moment other aspects of it were equally enlightening. She was surprised that for all her walks on various beaches, trying to make sophisticated judgments about life to match the thickets of her adult neurological connections, by comparison these had been wasted hours. Such attempts at staring at the ocean had never brought her as close to the entity as this. They didn't give her much peace of mind. The oceans might have untangled some of her twisted logic but they always tangled her in a new set like seaweed adrift. Surprised that the entity had not been in the string of sacrosanct words one concatenated silently in the corners of the mind to catch truth the way a spider makes a web to catch its prey, she had found it to be in simple experiences gained from one's senses. What was even more surprising was that the entity could be sensed, for this empirical experience refuted the theories of Parmenides and Plato. Also, she was surprised that it was her son who, by this leaves-jumping, was leading her into a Gabrielish discovery and yet she told herself that being so surprised was rather foolish in a way. After all, how surprised should one be that the entity was grounded in simple pleasures? To be any merit at all to a life, truth had to be more than mere abstraction. And considering that insatiable and avaricious desires of adulthood for higher and more intense pleasures was a loose debris of discontentment only in the realm of the child (only of running to the feel of the wind, grass poking through the toes of the feet, the fascination of changes of division in light and shadow, and all considered in the pejorative as childish and foolish) was one on a solid form of happiness.
"Is it as simple as jumping in a bunch of leaves?" she posed to herself incredulously. But it was inevitable that with having had craven parental defectors and deserters march in and out of her nativity, having been run over by a tank, and having seen a Turkish beheading, the simple pleasures had eluded her. Violence had caused her to build her fort and look onto the world as a sentinel and sentinels were not equated with childish sentiments." She laughed in that strange Gabrielish mixture of profound and morbid levity after rising up from her second plunge into the pile and brushing off the leaf, grass, and weed concoction.
Now, with four days into the school year already passed, she was still avoiding the purchasing of groceries in the afternoons. She told herself that her artwork was more poignant when the sun was at its fullest; but really it had been from an avoidance of the yellow school buses that she would have encountered. Subconsciously she wanted to spend as much time with him as she could so she began to disregard the policy of him going to bed at 9:00. She would allow him to play games until he fell asleep on the sofa forcing her to carry him off to his bedroom. Since that autumn of a year ago she was living in the present moment through most of each day and disregarding the future as entirely as a mortal could. She repudiated any reality that went contrary to the motif of finding the entity through simple pleasures of the senses experienced in the present moment. She told herself that simple pleasures were the real and the true foundation of happiness but from them arrogant and greedy man made preposterous edifices—complete skyscrapers of selfishness and avarice that would fall down from any jet being slammed into them (any life crisis that tenuous carbon creatures of mortality were always bound to have).
[Sang Huin was seated on his bed with a laptop computer burning his skin. He realized that the World Trade Center metaphor was an anachronism for the story of Gabriele and yet it seemed to him that an omniscient and omnipresent narrator might well be 6 or 7 years ahead of the time.]
On this day, as all others, she was mixing various vegetables into a potpourri of soup that required as little culinary sense as an undomesticated female needed to have. With vegetables being dumped in a crock-pot with a bit of water and pepper, it seemed to her that it was impossible for much to go awry. The lunch might have been monotonous but having little else from which to make a negative judgment, her son didn't complain about this point. His only experience was soup, pasta, and scrambled eggs that usually came out all right and pancakes and French toast that had a 50 percent chance of being burnt beyond recognition or going awry in the most unforeseen ways. Outside of giving objections about burnt comestibles, he was a truly ignorant savage; and concerning matters of culinary taste that was how she cared to keep him. When she asked him to wash his hands he went over to the sink and exclaimed, "Oh wow, chocolate."
"Get your hands out of that water! That's nasty looking stuff. Diarrhea looking, it seems to me."
"What's that?"
"The runs, my dear, the runs."
"The sink has the runs? It's sick?" She chuckled at his animistic thinking. Everything was alive in his judgment and, apart from some wild untoward behavior, he was a creature who was sensitive to the feelings of the whole world. She wished that she could keep him like this forever. The water pressure became inconsistent and unevenly went on and off in thrusts. "Diarrhea and constipation at the same time— hard life for the poor sink. Well, until they solve the problem here— whoever the they are—use bottled water. Scrub with soap." As she stirred the soup she saw a yellow school bus drive into the trailer park and a kindergartner leaving it. Her half-day was over. "Do you know that girl?" she asked.
He looked out of the window. "No, she's new; but anyway, I don't play with them girls. They don't know how to play catch. They don't know what to do with balls of all sorts."
"How would you know that?"
"Chuck told me."
"Is that a fact? Well, you haven't seen your mother play racket ball before. It isn't exactly Olympic material but it's close. Hmm…oh, my, we got so carried away with God only knows what and it looks like we've missed the first day of classes once again. Mama Gabriele would teach you herself through all your twelve or thirteen years if she didn't have to make a living. Well, I don't know. Let's ponder this situation a bit longer." She stared at the yellow bus through her little kitchen window. She abhorred it. She stared at it with the intensity of a female version of Zeus wanting to strike it with lightning but the lightning backfired. She felt a migraine headache coming on. "Honey, do me a favor and share some of this soup with Mouse. The two of you can eat outside. Then take mouse for a walk in the trailer park. Go talk to the little Girl and see what she's up to. All alone, not knowing anybody in the trailer park, you should say hello." Her sentences were dangling modifiers; but she did not care about grammar since she had a headache. "Most people if left all alone will come to no good so go talk to her and save civilization." This idea went contrary to her life's model but she didn't care about the contradiction. She just wanted to stop the headache. "Mommy's got to think now. Okay, scoot, scoot. Take the bottle of water with you. It will be like a picnic." She handed him the leash for the cat. When he was outside she locked the door. She felt the migraine intensifying like the footsteps of a wrathful god incrementally approaching her. She went into the bathroom and lit a joint. She watched a cloud of smoke rise into the fan that had been installed in the door. She inhaled her cannabis again and again.
"Miss Sangfroid—yes, you," said the higher authority with a sound and derision of her Aunt Peggy's voice, "look at yourself cowering in a toilet." The form was inconsistent. It subtly wavered between an appearance similar to that of Peggy from long ago and her own ideal form.
"Motherhood was giving me an excruciating headache." Gabriele chuckled at herself like a bashful girl and smiled painfully. "So I took a sabbatical where I could get one—the little girl's room. I'm sorry." She felt as if she were apologizing to her aunt for running away to Ithaca and not letting her see Nathaniel.
"You're sorry. You have your son walk the streets so you can cower in here smoking pot on the pot and you are sorry. Is that the only thing you can say?"
Gabriele chuckled at the dual meaning of the word, pot, but she was finding it more difficult to concentrate and she was beginning to feel guilty for being, or at least being perceived as being, a negligent mother. She, the philosophical dictator of herself, was unlike her hero, President Clinton. She inhaled before Puritanical scrutiny and admitted the inhalation. "Sometimes the pot works better than the pills at stopping the migraines, and sometimes as a mommy, a female needs to get high wherever and whenever she can. Please try to understand. Don't be so critical—not now. If you could speak less loudly, I'd appreciate it. I'm in pain here."
"Gabriele, such a lone soldier and yet so vulnerable," said the form gently. The form had become less blurry. The higher authority was now more distinct and Peggy was fading fast. This goddess or extraterrestrial of some kind had more of a peaceful countenance and a more self-confident temerity than before. Also, there was a halo about her head since sick people needed their mothers, gods, and saints.