Chapter 10

Hunched over a TV tray, with the baby locked into her lap in one hand and snuff locked into a cheek, she wrote her story. Occasionally she would write while dribbling brown into the open portal of her empty beer can. She needed her portals for they led her, like a child, into animistic realms far from the mundane of soiled diapers or the powdering of a bottom as repulsive, to her, as perfume scented women. She was dressed in nothing but a dark bathrobe of a bosky fabric and like a soldier in military fatigues, she blended in with the subdued light of a tepid morning, which stumbled onto the floor of her trailer like a collapsing drunk. Every few moments while she wrote, her thoughts became distracted by the hail that besieged the roof and walls or by the screams of the baby which made her glower whenever he spat out his pacifier to become the self-centered squealer that she knew to be the base nature propelling human actions and society's disarray. Richard Dawkins' idea that one was born selfish but did not have to stay that way was an adage that, with the energy she had in her glowering eyes, she wanted to etch onto him if only her eyes were lasers where her commandments could cauterize the human brain. It seemed to her that Jehovah, had he existed, would have glowering eyes no different than hers and such lasers would have gone simply into the malleable substance of the human brain instead of searing it into stone. With aversion to reading anything printed on paper let alone etched in stone so acute it would be more sensible. Had Piaget really studied beings such as this, she thought, he would have seen them as the making of Wall Street and the thunder of armies. She listened more intensely to the hail that was like a machine gun with rubber coated pellets. She imagined herself riding on a tank through a desert and into Baghdad half-naked and exposed, waving her red white and blue brassiere from the opened hatch of the tank. Yes, she admitted, she needed portals. She needed her exits. She needed a change, a respite, from the monotony of motherhood that was sinking her into it like a hole. The baby was a gift, and more a choice and for these points a sacred responsibility to which, she told herself, she would rectify past grievances that her parents, and even Aunt Peggy herself, had done to her. She would never engage in the treachery that had flattened her out under its tank when she was so young (although, she had to admit, the demise of early sensitivities had made her, in such early childhood, reconstruct a new and indomitable self). As she thought this she noticed a spider crawling onto her hand, which held the pen. When the hurricane of all the air from her lungs was not enough to release it from her palm, she did not drop the pen. She decided to look on the intruder as a lecturer on persistency and to gain inspiration from it. She knew that once she finished writing her piece, the spider would be smashed, but she believed that the act should be performed with conscience. Gabriele did not subscribe to the idea of civilized man that life was ranked into a hierarchy of importance. A human certainly could not get by without killing, or picking up killed produce from a grocery shelf, but the idea that there should be a real distinction between a can of beans and the entrails of a local senator seemed absurd, although she did not think that being put in an electric chair for having eaten her local senator ranked very high up there in the chances of probability. Yes, she again told herself, the child was a gift and a responsibility but she would not dote him. The world flattered itself that doting mothers carrying their worms to the baby birds exuded such a profound love by this thoughtless emotional instinct of proud and adoring pampering. They thought that pampering the pleasure-seeking savage was the acme of nurturing motherhood and the making of good human beings. She thought to herself that such mindless bitches, doting as Aunt Peggy had done with her children, were an embarrassment to this word love. Love in its purest sense (what little one was humanly capable of) would be a selfless caring of another without such instincts to keep one's genes replicating for all eternity. It was not suffocating one's children in dependency so that one could have the role of mommy to avoid rolelessness and void. It was not needing a child. Being a doting mother was as far from her instinctually as those bizarre apathetic ones who could toss a child on a relative or an ex-husband himself before joining the military. The other day, on page 2 of the Ithaca Times she saw that there was an article on some such oddity although much bigger stories with more bizarre and sadistic ramifications were buried each day on page 1,999 of the New York Times. She would always read voraciously and thereby find their cadavers. "Piaget, Piaget, go away, go away," she mumbled inaudibly to herself slurring and babbling the consonants and vowels as if she were now beginning to imitate the language of her son atavistically.

Her calligraphy was composed of letters that were large, circular, and loosely connected. The sentences contained at least one or two words scratched out with others sustained above them. She considered herself a scholar when it came to writing and so imaginative works, in such a medium, did not come easily. Still she could not fathom in herself such a shallow stream of sentiments that would actually cause her to repeat the words of the lullaby, "Rock a by, baby, in a tree top" nor hum even the notes of the lullaby symphony of Brahms. For this reason, she allowed her back to ache and a slow-moving spider to climb along her hand to finish an alternative lullaby--a truth beyond a myth although she did not delude herself by thinking it other than her own personal concoction at a different mythology the way Psalm 104 might have seemed original long after the Great Hymn of Aten was written in Ancient Egypt. In constructing another paragraph she began to ask herself whether or not she had ended the story. She wasn't sure how one would know about such things that were so lacking of scientific or mathematic certainties. Then she began to wonder if she should have written it with a zoomorphic emphasis (maybe a bovine God standing there in its pasture cognizant of nothing, wholly holy in the innocence of stupidity and lack of aggressive tendencies--great virtues to which no other gods comported). She stretched her large muscular framed back; heard a thump on the bookshelf but, in her state of concentration, she dismissed it; dropped the baby back into its crib, and took the top of a TV tray off its legs. In place of the baby, she sat the tray upon her lap providing a close-up foundation for her manuscript.

The hailstorm that was once like artillery against her flimsy enclave now seemed a milder sleet tapping and scraping the ceiling and walls. This type of weather was a bit like the tapping and scraping of her cat, Mouse, clinging and banging its body on the screen of the door in the hope of getting in during the times she threw him out, and she imagined that it would go on this way 1990 times. She listened intensely to some of its 1990 scraping taps, tapings of "the year of our lord" which also happened to be the year of the American war against Mesopotamia. The sleet was mixed in the wind; and for those who resided in warmth and even those who ran through it in the hope of finding shelter such falling crystal, that was once an ethereal gas, couldn't have been anything other than splendor. At least, in a diminished way, it was for her who could only hear and imagine it within the ruminations of her cynicism and maternal gloom.

For a couple of distracted seconds she contemplated her isolated existence in an obscure trailer park in Ithaca, New York within the middle of winter in contrast to the crowds of Iraqi and American soldiers ready to ignite the deserts the way crowded rats, too overpopulated, too irascible, and too conscious of the movements of other rats, kill each other off. The whole thing should have made her feel leery: a single woman near the outskirts of the city limits all alone with a baby, hearing banging against her home and listening intermittingly to the news on her radio about the Persian Gulf War. She did have knowledge of Judo and fully believed that any violent intruders would regret trespassing on her space but she knew that it did not protect her from the fact that she was a tenuous mortal, a woman with a baby in a flimsy trailer, and that this trailer was in an inauspicious location in one of the more violent countries on the planet. To compound matters, she didn't have any friends or much society except for her bovine-thinking neighbor, Rita. That woman, who called herself Lily, was like a lackadaisical grass-snacking cow right before slaughter time. She had been a former group-home girl at a home for schizophrenics and manic-depressives although she recently graduated to semi-independent living. For Gabriele, her intrusive presence often cut through the black gauze of isolation that could cover every aperture of one's senses prompting her to feel an extreme numbness. But, apart from this mental sustenance, isolation was something that she thrived on like a light hating moss deep in damp and obscure crevices. The walls seemed to shudder in the winds but she did not mind the cold. She felt that it was comforting and when it crept in it seemed to be tangible and come through the cracks around the windows and the door like waves. The baby, however, was another matter. It sneezed out into the cold.

The previous day he was crying in part from the cold and the need to be suckled. And she did suckle him occasionally although, less euphemistically, she saw it as him being allowed to devour her. She did this to pass on her nutrients and antibodies, although giving milk and having a child use her for her tit repulsed and stiffened her posture at times like a soldier at a machine gun in a trench and at other times like a soldier in a queue waiting for inspection. This act more than any other was a reminder of the fact that she was a bit like all other women: a female animal there to be bred and to nurture the continuum of her breed. She fed him and dressed him even more warmly, then, but it was to no avail. Lacking options, she repelled her repulsion toward the rock-a-by song by telling herself that it was the collective culture in the earliest of all primitive American, if not western minds, and so inescapable in a sense. On that day she brought herself to hum a few bars while rocking him according to the melody of the song; but he frowned and looked at her skeptically if babies were capable of skepticism, and so she had to speed up the movement. The faster and harder she rocked him the more he seemed to enjoy it, baby-laughing that one monotone squeal and slobbering all over her. At that time of such Pavlovian drooling she wondered to herself belatedly if having him there to seize her day was worthwhile but the squealing gave her a sense that it was. This roller-rocking of her arms was at first enjoyable because his squeals of euphoria were delightful to listen to but soon she found them to be a tiring repetition and so she gently tossed him back into the crib which inadvertently caused him to cry once again.

This was a new approach following a few minutes of having him "swig [his] bottle." "Unlike present day Ithaca, in the land of Ancient Atlantis," she read after raising the baby up to the tray like a cold piece of meat and then squashing the insect into her composition, "there was harmony;" and even when he "puked"-she would never say 'spit-up' because it was not so--she recited a few paragraphs of what she had written while the vomit seeped into her bathrobe. Her bold attempt to be indifferent to such an inauspicious start to the morning was becoming a poorly constructed fa?ade for her determination was crumbling like a desiccating sand castle. The smell of the vomit and all of the baby smells bothered her. As her body fidgeted, which in turn caused the cat to bury itself behind the lowest area of the bookshelf (although this time avoiding the tripping on a ceramic dish) she contemplated this euphemism, "spit-up." The term didn't matter in public, she argued; but to oneself, she thought, one had to be honest. Puke was puke, and she had a tale to tell, and her child needed to listen and she needed to resist shoving her child back into the crib to change out of her bathrobe.

As one of her long arms stretched and she grabbed one of his baby bibs that was folded on an end table, dabbing herself with it, she thought about how the two of them were family because of a sexual indiscretion. Fate had backed into her earlier thinking that family was nothing but war games. At one time she believed that husband and wife soldiers of the same side often acted as if they were enemies; and as they played with each other they often forgot about the children, inadvertently or deliberately rolled their tanks over them, or abandoned them entirely to pursue a second honeymoon. At one time she believed that all good soldiers (all military families) did the same thing as this. Her pregnancy (fate) had flattened her notion that an individual only had herself in this world. It had rolled over her idea that a collective unit was a neurotic delusion like the concept of God. She had been rolled on by a tank a second time and had been forced to reassess earlier conclusions. Motherhood was beginning to make her fully aware of the extent by which there was an interdependence of the social members of society and she was beginning to think of her son as a gift from God since the birth of a baby was such a miracle. And here they were tucked away in their home in a scantily lit morning. The trailer was the fortress from artillery shells, taps, and scrapes. For a moment she listened to its splendor with her usual intensity: the taping of it, the refrigerator mysteriously clicking into life with a hum slightly like a ticking heart of a great body in hibernation, and the heater that didn't work so well exhaling in dreaming snores through the mouths of floor vents. She listened until it all abruptly ended by his cries. She then thought that she was becoming overly sentimental if not completely and loathsomely maudlin in the scramble of impressions that spewed out from her subconscious. She wondered if she could shut him up in time to perform aerobics with the television instructor.

The child she had given birth to had been like a dragon of the womb, pushing its young being of fiery hell out of her. This was an image that Gabriele conjured up in her imagination as the bathrobe, that was the only thing separating her from complete nakedness, began to have such an acrid and fetid stench. She changed his diaper and lodged a pacifier into his mouth. "Unlike present day Ithaca, in the land of Ancient Atlantis, which the residents of this small island called Antinomy, there was harmony." She again recited and adlibbed the beginning of her story as a wild idea of cracking her inattentive child's head like a nut crazily passed through her consciousness, quickly diffusing and departing like a bad smell. "Once upon a time they were the happiest of people glowing from ear to ear almost as cute as you do, Adagio, on those rare times that you actually do smile. Their smiles were not inane and senseless as giddy American teenagers…no,no-Americans as a whole really before they have their heart attacks from the stress of competing for more and more or the greasy food they clog into their blood vessels or from fright at possibly being blown away when some stressed out nut comes into a fast food joint with a semi-automatic. Their kindness was genuine because valuing their link to the energy that radiated into them, competing for conveniences and pleasures was not their priority. And they weren't just happy and nice but these residents of Atlantis or Antinomy (I give you, Mr. Adagio, permission to use either word---either word depending on Adagio's silly whims). And they weren't just happy and nice but they were also resourceful. The Antinomians when they took a crap did not have diapers to catch it. They preferred the natural way of letting it drop, and dry out a bit under the sun god, so that they could make bowls and pitchers from the dung heap. When they climbed coconut trees for the fruit, they could get up the trees in three seconds. Likewise when they hunted their wild boars they didn't need spears, little man. They just ran and pounced on the animals. Now you may ask how they did such things so well so let me answer the query of your inquisitive mind. These superhuman people were everything good: kind and gentle, strong and smart because they weren't arrogant. They had no civilization that told them to flush dung down the toilet, and no amicable smiles that are part of business transactions. They were natural, ingenuous people who meditated on the energy emanated by the sun and this link of themselves to natural forces prompted them to be more than ordinary men. The sun god liked those who meditated on the energy he supplied them so he gave them a boost-a bit of caffeine if you will. That's the way it was, Little Man, in maybe the 8th century B.C." She knew that if he were to squeal during the story this behavior would be most inhospitable to the story telling host, and so as a preemptive move she used crazed gestures that would get his attention. By getting his attention she could lure him into a story that had the potential of putting him to sleep. The name on his birth certificate was Nathaniel, a name she liked but regretted having given to him. It was her hope that the nickname, "Adagio," would, like magic, get him to be calm if not elicit from the child a rather scholastic attentiveness within his infantile limitations. She often played for him the classical music, "Scaramouche-modere" by Darius Milhaud. It was her favorite adagio if indeed it was an adagio at all. It was adagio enough for her and she believed that was all that mattered.

She was seated on a director's chair looking at the slight movements of her child's body and wondering why its mouth could not be equally delicate. She silently called it the Spanish word of "criatura." Her extended family had been a mixture of Germans and German-Argentineans, a passionate and passionless crowd who often did not know if they should call her Gabriela or Gabriele and so they had been reluctant to say anything at all to her. She kissed her son on the forehead but this action provoked vehement cries of cacophony. Assessing that her son had reactions no different than any hard Visigoth, she ignored his bellowing voice and continued the story. "Listen to this, little man. Concentrate. Scream as you will, but concentrate! They, the Antinomians of Atlantis, considered themselves a loose conglomeration of a tribe and did not have any inclination for a central government for governments are only needed to control malevolent men. When the scattered men unified for monthly reproductive sessions with their estranged spouses to ravage their fluids on their--quote- unquote 'their'--women, they were not protected under roofs from the elements but did the banging on the backs of horses. Uncomfortable, you say. I'd agree: uncomfortable but quick and quick ejaculations were what they wanted. This doing it in the open was a rather brave act, wouldn't you say, considering that they could be struck down by lightning should the sun god deem them as gaining more hedonistic pleasure, or spending too much of their thoughts in activities not suited to gentle, uncivilized men. They did not marry in the auspices of a sacrament-oriented fiend from the heavens but acknowledged the vulgarity of their intersections not in affected guilt but by cleansing and anointing their horses afterward. They weren't selfish creatures apart from those 15-minute rides and so they didn't have this wish to hide themselves in the affectation of matrimony and love like modern men and they did not need to hide themselves in clothes. The land of Antinomy was warm, you know. There would have been a different reality if Antinomy had been a little island off of our beloved motherland of Antarctica. Anyhow, in the land of Atlantis or Antinomy a child was born in this manner and grew up not with Mother or Father but in independence and its relationship with the Earth and the sun. She, the Earth, would find him. She would tell him that he was hers. He would know that there was no purpose to being alive other than living and being grateful for life. Of course, in modern societies like Ithaca, Adagio, you have no merit at all-you aren't even thought as worthy of the respect of an insect-unless you have a job and are in one way or another part of the Great Factory but not in Atlantis, my little buddy. No, not there. There, to be without aim was accepted since the meaning of life was in life itself: vibrant energy for no reason bursting forth for no reason as fireworks in a desert."

For a couple seconds she thought about how any common criminal or intruder to her domain would be immediately repelled from trespassing by her strange oral dissertations. Perhaps he or she would find himself discomfited to find logic and honesty in such an eccentric array and wouldn't know what to make of it: Mother Teresa of Calcutta or Marquis de Sade of Paris. Such a person would assume that she had been dropped on her head as an infant in a most dramatic way not knowing the reality that, in early girlhood, she had been flattened by a tank.

"The skies clothed the babies of these ingenuous savages just as it did their naked mothers and fathers. As I said before, no clothes and no shame for them for they were kind and their consciences were pure. They spoke the truth as they perceived it at the moment they spoke it and no- one resented each other because they understood that each was just trying to assemble ideas together the way prisoners in a dungeon used anything as platforms that would edge them closer to the window." At this point she did not understand her own writing so she adlibbed entirely. "A given baby had the world as his own. He did not cry in the night like a baby in need of a night light since all the books created from previous centuries…all those mysterious words in all the pages from the books created from previous centuries and shipped to Atlantis…all those mysterious words in all the pages from the books of 'truth' since the beginning of time (books seen as irrelevantly reverent, and maliciously deceiving fables) were burnt each night in his world; and this did add a small twinkle in his eyes. Yet it was Mother Earth who cradled him, after his abandonment at birth and nourished him- -" Composed pell-mell and visibly entangled in nonsense, she felt that the latter part of her myth was ruined in sententiousness and knew that she was no longer believing that their words had any truth whatsoever. That being the case, she stopped babbling. When she saw that the baby was asleep she put him in the crib, disrobed, took a shower, and got dressed. She turned on the television but realizing it was Sunday and that church programming had usurped her exorcise regimen she felt disappointed. Not knowing what to do with the day, she looked out of the window for a period of minutes that seemed like hours. A car came through the trailer park lot mixing the water with dirt. One nearby puddle looked like chocolate milk. She thought to herself that she needed to warm some baby formula. Instead, she sat down in her director's chair, stared out into nothingness, and listened to tapping that seemed more like rain. Her thoughts rambled on: "800,000 African children die from dysentery each year and yet the news is about the continuing air strikes against Iraq as if American victory were something other than a foregone conclusion." At least, the bully that it was, America was a democracy and Gabriele, as hard as she tried, could not keep herself from feeling a bit fortunate to live there. She found it somewhat comforting that the murky morality of such engagements was debated by senators and talk show hosts. Protecting Kuwait or securing the free flow of oil seemed an easy riddle to figure out. Prior to the war, what American had ever known of the existence of Kuwait outside of geography teachers? Her idea was not so novel. It was the same type of thought of commonplace dissenters but, after examining the idea, it was also that of her own. This was her last thought as she fell asleep.

She dreamed that her son was the neighbor woman, Rita (who thought of herself as Lily), with blonde hair and glasses, and that a nuclear bomb had gone off somewhere nearby Ithaca--maybe Salem for the strangers on the street, bewildered and whispering to themselves, kept mentioning the name of that city. The city of Ithaca was filled with rumors that the event had occurred and the rumors were loud in an atmosphere where everything else was silent and seemed to take on a texture of emptiness. The rumors seemed tactile and to have a visible substance that was ochre but thick as a heavy fog. Although they were no louder than whispers, these whispers were cries of bewilderment albeit softer than agony since they could not be fully articulated for lack of any definite knowledge.

"They have shut us off from knowing," said one young woman desperately.

"Sure," said a man with an Appalachian draw. "The damn people up there higher than God! They don't want us to know what has happened for fear that we'll fear others are comun'... maybe make some phone calls!"

"Are we to believe this craziness we are hearing? We live in civilized times. This can not be," said another female voice. Her accent was of a New Jerseyite.

A red headed woman, next to Gabriele on a street corner, said to a grayish woman that looked like a cat, "If the president is with them on this it is true." The words in the typical New York accent for some reason seemed the most tangible element of the dream, greater than its visionary components, and the most worthy truth. Gabriele backed away from the cat, and wished for death rather than to bear this horror where not even the surety of the death of thousands or millions could be known, whether or not the people of Ithaca would eventually be radiated, or whether or not there was indeed a conspiracy to keep them ignorant that more missiles were coming. "Let others die but not me; let other cities perish but not ours" was a dominant thought in everyone's head. It was so loud and everyone could hear it no matter how hard they pretended otherwise. She loathed that wretched instinct of self-interest that was innate in a being to make it survive, prosper, and propagate dynastically. She thought to herself that survival of the fittest truly played out in all things and selfishness was its impetus. The meek, when not uneducated and famished, were so sensitive to injustice and disparity that they became neurotic and disturbed. The truly meek were too gentle and reticent to muster the selfishness to bring forth offspring, and they inherited nothing outside of their own coffins. She also loathed that small portion of her sociable will, which stooped to what they were saying, now, with complete conviction in the streets. She heard one elderly man in particular. He was like an older version of someone in her past but the dream, which was a reality of its own, did not directly make that correlation. "Come on now. Let's not panic. It's been hot in Salem with no wind. Maybe the radiation will just stay there. What little breeze there is probably is just in the upper stratosphere. My son's a weatherman, you know." The elderly man in thick glasses pointed out Gabriele's Lily shaped son as his own. "He says that not feeling a breeze means no breeze at all except way up there in the stratosphere. The radiation is below that. If it moves slightly it will go to New York City. It will never come this way. You can count on it so let's not panic." It was a hope for self- preservation. It was a hope of the deaths of millions of people rather than themselves who resided in Ithaca. She saw the cat woman crying and a man petting her back. He was comforting her compassionately; but like one who does not wish to spend resources on exploratory surgery to find out whether or not the lymphatic cancer had spread in an aging pet, the man turned away from the woman. Gabriele could see him pursuing his own private minutes of self-pity and rage deep in lost, silent eyes.

Then the cat rubbed itself against her face and she awakened, recalling that the elderly man in the dream was a distorted version of the lover who had made her into this child's mother. She had not been meek when she went to Houston to pursue a graduate degree. She had hungered after the assistant professor because he had been as inaccessible as Antarctica. She had successfully obtained him and this was due to the fact that people loved those of a strong will who seemed immortal in inexhaustible energy, swinging their machetes beyond diffidence and forging paths and realities boldly. This sort of energy being erotic to them, they were attracted, mesmerized, and orphic to the id?e fixe, which was nothing other than everlasting youthful vigor. The assistant professor, yearning for immorality, had coupled with her. It had been a successful wish and a successful coupling because from it she had gotten pregnant. With her sleeve, she wiped her face that sparkled in greasy sweat, and then gently cradled the cat to her face. The cat scratched her and leaped away to where it once again hid itself behind the books.

Gabriele's cheek bled but still she did not kill the cat. She didn't know the reason her hands, pulsating in rushes of vengeful energy, did not catch it and crush it in her fingertips. At that moment she did not know her reasons for anything. She tried to stop the bleeding with the back of her hand, for the bib near her feet was unusable since it was fuming in vomit. As she looked at the swab of blood that was there on her hand she felt a void careen into her (or herself careening into the void), heard a parents' declaration to depart from her, and again felt the impact of being rolled on by a tank. She imagined the cat deliberately paralyzing itself in the actions of the prey it had often witnessed. She imagined it praying to the earth for a delay of its execution and subsequent decomposition by having the earth force compassion on Gabriele, the executioner. She imagined it praying to the earth that magically brought it into life to shrink its size into something so much smaller than a cat in order to be at all. She did not know why it happened. She just did not kill the cat but instead watched it masquerade itself as dead. Gabriele picked up the cat by the neck and the four eyes met. The cat did not swipe. It concentrated on cowardly prayers and of remaining limp. Gabriele tossed this other "criatura." It landed on top of a book on Freud on the lowest part of her bookshelf.