Chapter 22

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.