Chapter 42

You are the favored one: this was what she had told her son. But the mendacity, now reverberating in memory, seemed more spurious than it had two weeks earlier when she had articulated it sotto voce within the wisps of her breath. Still it was true in the sense that most things were true in a sense, for in her malaise on that cold Christmas morning, shuddering before a vapid wall of canvas, she guessed that multifarious and antithetical points to propositions of truth were all there was.

A child, even this one, was a sensitive creature whom she, an adult, needed to emphasize certain points to while tiptoeing away from others. But, she argued in solitary inward dialogues within herself, which she found to be the most engaging form of companionship, that did not necessarily mean that her quiet tiptoeing prevarications were lies.

With words as the most viable means of projecting a given concept of one mind onto another and with them having to permeate the dense grey matter, unchanged, through the hard surface of experience and preference, it was a wonder that misunderstandings did not rule fully in all human concerns. A small lie here and there in place of misunderstood truth, she argued, was the expedient of presidents and kings. Even this Texan hick, George Jr., who seemed to her as abhorrent as a president was likely to become, was marginally justified in misleading the American populace the way she had been forced to deviate from truth for the sake of her son. The apocryphal president could not have averred his wish to contrive a war against any rogue state for any random reason even though that was his intention. He could not have declared that North Korea, the desired bombing target for setting this example of what hegemony could do, had been spared from war by Seoul's proximity to the DMZ and that Iraq had been chosen to be the favored ersatz. He needed an imminent threat to sell his war: these elusive weapons of mass destruction, which could always be argued as "out there," present but obscure.

Just as she could not have admitted to Nathaniel that Rick had been the favored one all along, now she was still reluctant to admit to herself that on that night when she brought him home she had fallen into such a deep depression. Only in her sleep were fictional distortions of this mortification sometimes coerced onto her memory. And every time that this happened she would wake up, get out of bed, and immediately engage herself in sundry activities which busy people devised to fortify themselves from wild, disturbing thoughts that they were not able to successfully corral (of course always going to the bathroom first but you don't really need to know those specifics, do you?) Among them would be attempting to bake edible cookies and cakes which still had the hope of ingratiating herself to her son without making the obdurate Gabriele look repentant. Unorthodox she might be, the former whore, witch, and child deserter with her cookie stained hands, but she was not a propitiatory type. After considering the pros and cons of a given issue in its probable impact on others she executed her decisions as she should and never revisited them repentantly.

No one had witnessed her behavior at the blighted homecoming and yet she was mortified by her conduct all the same: the quick turning off of the engine; the turning of the house key to barricade herself from the lugubrious stillness of the car so that she might depart into the intimacy of ideas in a book read under the sheets; watching Nathaniel, an icy stranger to her, turn on lights in his descent into the pit of his bedroom; sensing an effete adumbration of herself, detached from her body, as it ascended the staircase to her bedroom pulling along a body that was as weak as an old woman; and then lifelessly collapsing onto her bed still in this out-of-body sensation.

Inanimate being that she was, for a minute she found peace. But then the next moment she was a petrous rural landscape shaking from a tremor and then there was this inexplicable tsunami of tears slapping against the rubble of her cheeks. She weltered her face in a pillow on her bed in the hope of suffocating her sobs and burying her tears that were shed for the loss of the favored son who had not come from her womb and from being hated by the other one who was supposed to be her and yet wasn't.

The melancholy that had overtaken her, replicated itself in the cracks of her rocks, and for a time fed off her tears, lived even when the water was exhausted. For a couple hours after her tears were all used up the thought that she hadn't even been allowed to see Rick for a few minutes continued to torture her as she lay immobile on her bed. But at last she was able to summon her strength: she was able to repudiate the nadir by attaching herself to objective philosophic wisdom that rejected any attachment to earthly ephemeral creatures in this mixing and diluting of herself.

Was the Earth a good place? For the species, man, who suffered the least it was for a good many and for most others it was not. Whether or not it was an efficacious use of stardust was both unknown and irrelevant when any assessment was stuck in the confines of changing perspectives influenced by innumerable combinations of travail and felicity in each moment of life. Was she right to have traveled the world, sought enlightenment, and shunned being in the confines of an ongoing maternal role and its ensuing responsibilities? It too was hard to measure. Her peregrinations were done quickly but with proper consideration so it never seemed to her that she should be apologetic.

But certainly she now had a belligerent child on her hands. Already she was attempting to counter his truancy, smoking habits, his returning home late into the early evenings, and his refusals to offer explanations for any of it. Early into his contempt she assumed that her failure at explaining herself to him had been the source of the problem; and so seeking a bridge of minds she once delineated a biographical profile of herself to him: her soldier-parents' dereliction of duties, the Turkish beheading, the church-going uncle and male cousins who tried "to finger" her in Peggy's home, her untoward will that shunned lies of family, God, and nation, her desire to raise a son who would be better than the herds of men, and her maternal neglect so that she might study, contemplate, and travel so as not to neglect herself. This only intensified his cold stares and these ideas, her profile, sank like an irrelevant stone that he threw into a lake. Eleven days into the reunion with no sign that the contempt would burn out, in her exasperation she began floggings with a belt the way Michael had done; and for this pain to both parent and child all that she got for it was his contrived grinning and her chagrin that she had succumbed to barbaric, frustrated impulses and bullying savagery. Still, she could not be the contrite and effete parent who allowed a child's helter-skelter whims and contempt of the parent to tread victoriously onto the agenda of the day. Lacking the practice of self-discipline such a savage, when grown, would justifiably loathe the parent for not having gained that which would provide him with happiness.

Had she been there for him, fully engaged in motherhood from the beginning, she believed that his personality would not have been so recalcitrant and his behavior would not have been so petulant and flighty. Maybe, she fretted, her past peregrinations would aggravate the rest of her days in an opaque fog and malaise of her own making.

Instinct and social norm prompted her cousin in Kansas to become a statistic in suburbia: to get married immediately after high school; to have her 2.4 kids and a car in the garage; to daily doubt whether the 0.4 kid would "ever amount to anything;" to return from work at the cosmetic counter of Dillards to greet her cat with "Are-U-Hungary" and laugh at the pseudo nation; and to darn her husband's underwear and iron his socks (items that should have been done with reverse actions).

Really Gabriele knew nothing about this cousin of hers. For her own agenda she continually relegated her to a theory. She enjoyed the caprice, which if not true of her cousin (and it probably was), was true of this bored housewifey type. And she wondered if this vaguely remembered woman might right now be opening the refrigerator door and envisaging probable dates of her demise — sometimes right side up and sometimes upside down — printed on milk cartons; who, finding her conversations with her spouse stale was nonetheless considering them an indispensable part of the routine of her perfunctory movements; and who was probably returning from the kitchen to watch most of the Rosanne or Cosby show before collapsing into sleep. Gabriele imagined that each night this cousin would wake up and realize that it was time to go to bed so that she could repeat the day's failure again. The true reality of her cousin's felicity or estranged plight was not anything Gabriele knew or cared to know. It seemed an apposite probability and this was the only thing about her that Gabriele cared to contemplate.

So sitting in her studio (now with the prostitute paintings of the "Women at Work" series of the burgeoning Thai artist, Nawin Biadklang, on her walls — paintings that she had put away and forgotten following her involvement with Michael), she painted her cousin, albeit of a Mexican appearance and something more like a mannequin than a human being, while her thoughts continued to run rampant.

Dream after dream; illusion upon illusion; everyone was forced to play the game of musical chairs in which the people changed as well as the chairs but they all pretended that it was not happening — that everyone was stable and on stable ground. She did not want to rebel against the game. It was the indelible rules of nature thrust on man (this thing called change), and for most it was instrumental to their evolvement. Most people would be worse than the complacent and mostly non-changeable rock of her Aunt Peggy unless shaken up a bit.

"What's 'dead' mean?" Nathaniel had asked on that inauspicious day years ago when Michael had run over the neighbor's child in the trailer park — one of many odd coincidences that had engendered their union. It was a day that was as inauspicious as having given birth to Nathaniel in the first Gulf War and then returning to him in the sequel. Inauspicious events often seemed as a plan to rock the baby out of his cradle and then as now she vaguely sensed that something akin to doom would one day toss her from this bearable normalcy of a new husband and an old son that she seemed to return to like all other lost and clinging females. Was this malevolent rocker of the baby's body and soul God? Well, it certainly was not the gentle parental god devised by religion but there was indeed some coercer of change like Aristotle's concept of god without the god.

"Non-being. We wear our clothes for a time. Then they unravel and are made into something different."

"And heaven?"

"God, no! — a make believe story for reality dodgers. When you play dodge ball you run away from being hit by the ball, don't you? It is the same for heaven believers. The neighbor boy, I am dreadfully sorry to say, is dead as a doornail and his body and brain are unraveling. You don't need to think twice about it. Trust me on this one. But if that is too much reality to swallow, and it is for almost everyone I guess, it is better to live in your own lie than live in someone else's. What if we were to say that he is like a beautiful leaf skidding on the sidewalk because of a breeze; but he is not the leaf anymore but the breeze. You can feel him but you will never see him again…unless — "

"Unless what?"

"A possibility out of science but seeming as magical to us in our primitive time."

"Witches' magic?"

"No, superstitions and hocus pocus aren't in our lexicon. We are beyond that. Einstein's idea that time is relative…Anyhow, we will be wind long before a means of traveling or transporting ourselves near the speed of light is devised."

Lost in all these thoughts she added onto the canvas a bit of vermilion, a color that may or may not have been that of the old Soviet flag, now fading from collective memory, but was the color of the bathrobe and lingerie that she was now wearing to appeal to his leftist tendencies. She stuffed some chewing tobacco into her mouth and entertained whimsical ideas of him, her husband. She and the man with the unmemorable name, as she still called him (sometimes Andrew), would in time live in different places. They would not be separated in the traditional sense of indifference or economic necessity but by the two having their own interests (he undoubtedly having a job as a UN official if not assistant to the Secretary General within five or six years). They would live separately because they had been born into the world separately. Their union, their contract, would not be the floundering neediness of two minds who feared standing alone to face mortality in one's thoughts nor would it be like American soldiers guarding Iraqi oil pipelines — the jealous sentinels over the source of a dopamine rush, that lover who gave to many their only defining component of themselves. It would be — she stopped herself not knowing what it would be. She was not sure whether or not to call such a freakish thing a marriage. If she had used this man by marrying him in the hope that he would be a male role model for her son wouldn't she be the same as one of the solipsistic herd. She hoped that her actions were not as calculating as this.

Putting away her paints, she then went into the bathroom to fall like a child through specious mountains and plains of crackling soap bubbles. There she would allow the steam to relax her to minimal consciousness of a self-contained Nirvana that could be gained in virtually no other way than in the bathtub. But as the hot water was falling into the tub filling it into a lake she changed her mind, turned off the tab, and went to him to seek Nirvana down and dirty.

Riveted in the carnal skin friction of sexual gluttony for the meat of human flesh, youth, and beauty, she climaxed with her man; and free — totally free of all gnawing miscellaneous hungers outside of needing to urinate — the couple smoked marijuana on the bed to elongate their brief, ethereal stay. They were silently watching clouds of smoke stretch out like steamers of confetti until silence broke like an old woman's hip.

He said, "I might get this one. It would be on a temporary basis — just the extra sections that don't have teachers — I guess benefits and full time status after probation if someone resigns — little pay now. But maybe I should just stay here until I exhaust my possibilities."

She sensed how the petty and the mundane in the personal domain interfered, if not totally countered, any fulfillment of intimacy. This vexed her conceptualization of life; but for she who was so amused by grave ideas it was just one more intriguing fact to contemplate. "It's all exhausted," she at last responded. "There's nothing much here. You've gone to the first job interview at City College. You might as well see it through the second. Obviously they are interested in you if they want you to be interviewed twice. It's up to you but if it were me I would put my oars in the first wave that comes along."

"Yes, maybe."

"Out of curiosity, I've been wondering why you again made reservations in that hotel where the bellboys are the rats."

"Because hotels aren't cheap anywhere in New York City except exceptional ones"

"Exceptional? I was there, man — one glorious night. Okay, marginally better than back packer guest houses in Bangkok and Jakarta with bare bunk mattresses and table fans without any tables in something less than closets. This one's more of a spacious closet --American style for beggars and Bolsheviks." She knew that her bantering had some snobbishness in it as if she had never lived in a tiny little room with a crock-pot on the floor in Tijuana. She noted how perception was ensconced in one's environment and lifestyle and that an ensconced thing became the thing it was ensconced in. Even now, naked like she was, ostentatious diamond earrings bounced from her earlobes—an extreme pendulum shift from the days of painting caricatures for extra pesos in the pure dirt colonias and the man made waste of downtown "centro" Tijuana (TJ).

"I've offered to give you — lend you, however you care to think of it — any money you need for expenses in the Big Apple."

"Thanks but I really didn't mind that room we stayed in last time."

"Okay," she sighed and threw up her hands. "But I can't see how that is possible."

"A little possible — like the sign in the bathroom. Remember? It said, 'Dear guests, detergent harms the environment by going down the drain and ultimately killing the sea life of our oceans. Use fewer towels.' The message is warm like being with a beautiful woman." His mouth dived into her neck like a toothless vampire.

"God, I have married an imbecile," said Gabriele. She giggled in the sexual giddiness of a woman when intimate with a man; and yet thinking that the body was merely the crucible of feelings, and that thoughts, a refined and distancing appraisal of reality, were nonetheless feelings in origin, and that this was all there was.

"None of that baloney would work with me. I would only scoff at it — capitalists caring about the fishies of the sea. Give me a break! Give me brutal honesty anytime rather than tactics like this. If a business is honest, I might continue my patronage regardless of the type of service they provide or, in this case, the type of rat hole it is—honesty being in such short supply in the world that when someone gives it to me—even in rude doses—I am grateful for it. They would just need to say, "You wasteful fucks, we are niggardly corporate bastards eager to hoard any red cent we can get our hands on. Please note that we have a one shower a day policy here. Extra showers will incur extra charges should we see dripping from the shower nozzle. That being said, you will see that there are fewer towels on the rack. Don't make phone calls to the front desk demanding more towels and do not bribe cleaning ladies or make any sexual advances toward them. If you slyly take an extra shower at 2 a.m. or such ungodly times you will have to dry your wet butts by hanging them out the window.' Now if they conveyed this maybe—"

They heard two shells of petrous, ice-glazed snow simultaneously strike into a lower part of the faade of the house unlike a one-time thud of a bird or the distinct sounds of thawing ice when falling from the roof and gutter. The man with the unmemorable name got up, drew the curtain, and opened the window. Then he, the nude, dangled there staring at his stepson who sat on a limb in a tree that was a hundred yards from the house. The boy was holding a brassiere as his slingshot.

As more of a recurrent feeling rather than a philosophic framework, which he had constructed for himself on that silent car ride from Sharon's home to his own, he believed that subtle inconclusive looks could help him extort that which he knew could never be gained in compensation, and that by it being something that could never be compensated and extorting it all the same, he had found the means to achieve power. Without really thinking so much as feeling it, for the past two weeks there was this notion that subtle looks without hostile words would make the hated propitiate to him with expensive gifts or at least a willingness to please him whereas to hate a person with the more conclusive medium of words would make the anathema hate him, and hate was a weapon that he did not care to hand over to his enemies. He cared to keep it in his domain.

The circumstances behind the slingshot were a peculiar thing: apprehension about knocking on their bedroom door for fear that his knocking would become pounding which might cause them to withhold his gifts; still early and no movement from above, the discarded black sheep, the piqued shadow, the cast away reunited with she who cast him out, leaving the clock and going into the yard to waste some time; the hunting of birds with a bb gun, feeling bored, and in places stomping out the obscene whiteness of the snow by grating it black, ever so often, with the heel of a boot; the return to the kitchen to again watch the incessantly slow turn of the second hand of the clock; still no sounds from above so deciding to burn bacon and to turn down the furnace in the hope of smoking or freezing them out; the pacing around a gigantic Christmas tree barren of gifts underneath; and then going into one of the bathrooms. Frustrated while "taking a leak" it was there that the brassier hanging on the wall had seemed like an unpatented snow boomerang there to show his misogyny.

"Comrade Sangfroid?" yelled the man into the tree. "What do you want?"

The boy put his hands around his mouth like a megaphone to facilitate the sound. "The queen of Antarctica, Comrade," he said. "Her gifts."

"Comrade of crude weapons," yelled the man. His voice was indistinct and garbled by the cough of saliva having rushed down his throat in his laughter. "Why shoot they who give freely?"

Gabriele nudged herself between the man and the window, dangling hers as the man did his. She saw the boy and the bra there at a bit of a distance. "Yes?" she yelled. She was amused, puzzled, and a little annoyed by the sight. She waited for words from a specimen unwilling to give them. Obviously, she noted to herself, smirking and laughter at the absurdity of talking to one's nude parents one Christmas morning from a tree would have been a natural proclivity for such a refreshingly or embarrassingly peculiar situation; but this smirking seemed a calm sadistic enjoyment of what she believed to seem to him as perverse. An enjoyment of the perverse seemed to drool in all orifices and he stared at them with virulent intensity. Didn't those eyes say, "What are you doing with that whore?" Didn't it bang around his mouth and peek loosely from his lips? She did not know. No, she told herself, this idea was perverse. Her imagination was a viral infection on her sound judgments and she told herself that she should be ashamed of her thoughts.

On this branch he once sat to gain a reprieve from Sharon and Rick and to make the former tenants of the house uncomfortable his composure was unperturbed. Having lived in Gabriele's experiment once before, it was not new to him now. To be the specimen of her scrutinizing gaze was once an ossified aspect of his daily existence. Once the specifics of what it was like to be her son had been forgotten for a generalized feeling of revulsion; but now that he was here the forgetting was being forgotten and the revulsion was replaced by the need to adapt and thrive within his circumstances. Not wishing to provoke her to hate him, he put the brazier in his coat pocket and then descended from the tree.

And like any goddess from Hera to Athena she knew the sweet venom of empathy, could see the corroding batteries of Her specimen's heart without wincing, and would have stared that way indefatigably until he at last fell from the tree. But once he absconded she just returned to her side of the bed. She wanted to cry mutely into the pillow but her man was there so she stoically absconded into a book on Asian owls.