Chapter 37
Her ongoing separation from her house, land, and financial resources could have made her succumb to an emotionally mutable perspective of feeling, for a time, as if she had lost everything and then to a feeling that she needed to hurry back to New York State before what little she had was all lost to her. She didn't even know for sure the name of this lawyer of the ex-in-laws—in-laws who in their own elusive way were also nebulous figures. This lawyer of these Bassetes (ex-husband going under the name of Quest) supposedly diverted some of the interest of her savings to property tax, the maintenance of the house, and no doubt whatever the legal expenses were. It was property that, by now, could be razed to the ground and paved with a highway for what she knew of it; and such neglect at being responsible for herself, an aberration from who she was, kept disturbing her equanimity.
Her placid state of mind could have easily been ravaged by maudlin brooding, homesickness, maternal stirrings of instinct, and multifarious emotionally fueled reasons to return to Albany. And it would have been so without determined supercilious will that rebounded her back to her stoic, rational, and insular existence. There in her supercilious brain, amidst the endless walls of tidy, barren, and ostensibly eternal gray matter, she would soar within curtailed bounty and the journey within would seem as an ongoing discovery on the edge of a non-spherical universe. But sometimes without warning the eternity would become a constricted little room and then she would be nothing but a claustrophobic black bird that one day years ago got trapped in the living room of her trailer in Ithaca when she was cleaning a window. Like that sight-trusting bird ready to window-bang itself into oblivion rather than accept the conclusion of pain, obsessed with thought she would crash repeatedly against the walls of her brain. In such migraines she almost felt locked away in her cold, impersonal thoughts— locked away behind walls bigger than any the American government could envisage against Mexico. She would seem locked away in thoughts and only this, unable to conceptualize a higher and more unfathomable wall than this. Would not Parmenides have been abhorred to hear the "nous" so defiled. She didn't care. Heraclitus was now her unsung hero; and not even Plato or God himself, if there were one (which there wasn't), understood migraines except those who experienced them. And sicknesses of all types were exacerbated all the more in foreign countries even if one were lucky enough to have a native friend like Ms. Quest's Hilda who had held her head steady and tilted to the toilet on a couple occasions.
Property: she would define it as that claim on a person or thing to seem to oneself to be. It was like that idiot, Alan Shepard, putting an American flag on the moon; but it was from that idiot, Shepard, that, in girlhood one of her more original ideas was reinforced enough to become a calcified decision or at least a determined perpetual caprice. At the age of eight, seeing those rerun black and white images of this so- called "groovy" astronaut as he bounced around the moon with the stars and stripes (these declarative bounces of ownership and half expectations to encounter a whole host of mooners to pose his symbol to), and recently having learnt of a place on Earth not rife in human herds, she decided to stake her flag on Camp Gabriele, Antarctica in that self-declared city of one. Now, as then, she knew that she had never had anything but herself to begin with and that this was as she liked it.
Being divorced, she could have clung to these things that were hers, declaring them as such in her own mind to reiterate that she was a separate being from what was once her husband or was once believed to be her husband. She could have felt victimized and vulnerable from this chemical volatility of mixing with people and men, these two species that she might have enjoyed had she thought of them as pets. An emotional neediness could have rushed her back to motherhood and attempts at freshly burnt chocolate chip cookies. With less intelligence she might have even thought of it as her maternal calling to nurture him, her ungrateful son, and cater to his selfish whims under the guise of love and doing good. She could have feigned a contentment within the narrow parameters of this easily made/easily fumbled role without noting the hypocritical and selfish neediness that would have been therein especially for a woman like her, a returning child deserter. It would have been so had she believed in feeling something about anything and to allow feelings to drag her around; but for her even succumbing to numbness was a very peculiar state to be shaken off like a lint-ridden blouse.
She was the one who had been barely able to embrace the favored one, Rick, on that first severing of Michael and herself. On that day of the first, less consummated, closure to specious romance she had, in a sense, embraced him albeit no differently than the fall of a metal bar at a toll road. Parting from Rick on that day, internally she had been more like the lachrymose stirring of a statue of Mary, Mother of God, but the boy would not have known that. For him, who had lost his first mother to breast cancer, he would only have that memory that her arms came down on him and then raised up like that bar at a tollbooth.
And if she were to continue in this quest to remove herself from this ownership mania of this self-proclaimed American brand of the common herd, she would continue to do so with the same dry, permanent logic. If the means of defining ownership of property were a mutual claim of ownership by the person to the land and the land to the person the most recent contracts would have taken place in the 19th century when the deceased was united in the ultimate act of consummation: the decay into that plot of land which had sustained him or her. That being true, she reasoned, she owned nothing. It seemed to her that if it were true of the land the mutuality of the contract would be even more of an imperative condition in human relations.
On weekends in Japan such an enormous exodus of people would come out to do their shopping; whereas for her, having had no firmly set schedule that enslaved her and not needing to release an enslaved being in the unbound weekend freedoms of malls, she had found a more internal brooding in the Hokkaido cold. She had feasted on poets and philosophers. She had learnt of Japanese history, art, and traditional mask carvings.
Here in TJ, impecunious as she was, she couldn't have bought anything major had she wanted to. A portable black and white television, which she aptly called the "noise box" or "noise companion," had been her most expensive purchase. But this matching of circumstances to a repudiation of ownership, far from being a grievance against fate, was liberation like that felt at being naked and under a hot shower. It was an ablution from soiled things sticking onto her and she was glad it was that way.
She found great creative energy from being here transposing the new environment to the permanency of color and theme that man's impermanent and mundane movements seemed to lack; and she almost believed that creativity lay within this country and culture instead of the omnipotent Self. It seemed to be there in this defiant city that despite being conjoined to San Ysidro, California, nonetheless maintained its distinct character: brains as blank slates to English, pinatas dangling from store awnings, and children wearing Indian feathers in celebrations of Juarez Day or running around in scanty rags in celebration of the day itself. But really TJ was not the cause of her creativity. It was just a reminder of her own defiance of stale, patterned existence—a defiance that expected and demanded novelty in Tijuana's warm sun and cool, piercing shadows. But it was more than the connection of land, artist, and paint. Here, within, was a tame volcanic oozing, frothy as waves, reshaping her clay landscape apposite to her liking. To wake up each morning anew in being exhilarated her: now an artist of a new land; recently a Spanish-babbling pseudo-lesbian consummated once via Hilda if sex were a consummation of anything; immediately upon arriving in TJ she had been a remover of old bourgeois skin and a student of Spanish; and before that, she had been a ripped rag doll in such consternation about the "Kato thing"—that "kato thing" tearing out the seams of the fabric enclosing her stuffing in such apposite serendipity.
There on the city bus, her seated stiffness jiggling like jello no differently than the tacky homemade sign of " La Playa/Calle Linda Vista" dangling from its windshield, Gabriele again recalled the delusionary socialized will that had possessed her. She reassessed her time in Japan with the same results. She surmised once more that the doll that she had been or had pretended to be deserved to be unthreaded, destuffed, and remade. With her detached eyes ensconced in sunglasses, she glanced at the rear of the bus where Hilda sat. They had been separated at the time of stepping into it by a sparse availability of seats so now she could not see her very well in the throngs of those who were standing. Still there a corner of her was, a conspicuous being with quasi-blonde hair and an aloofness no less "unfriendly," as Michael spoke of her own "bitchiness," than herself.
Seated alone, she discerned that the separation at present was good for both of them. Earlier, when on the beach that they were now returning from, Gabriele had smote her friend with a cold stare. Considering that Hilda had repeatedly served the volleyball on the beach as if she were trying to make a slam dunk with it, of course this desperate attempt to win the game had annoyed and amused Gabriele. She would have laughed at the quasi-volley morality that defied the spirit of the game and she would have congratulated her, more or less, had a larger issue not preceded it.
"Fuck, don't tell me that little swim has pooped you out already, Hilda."
"No," said Hilda as if she were not sure whether to make her monosyllable into a statement or a question; nor if it should be positive or negative.
"We've just put up the net. Serve the fucking ball! "
"Gabriela, I was just thinking that — "
" A positive thought or something quite negative?"
"My own brilliance. I can't see that it is either one."
"But, unlike you I foresee storm clouds ahead — clouds of my friend's own making." Gabriele chortled but Hilda smiled malevolently, moved a few feet back, and sat on the sand to tie her loose shoelaces.
Hilda was feeling too loose (either too dissolute or too unwed and so not dissolute enough in the apparent absence of romance and absence of belonging that was part of a couple's merry-making), and this manifested itself to Gabriele's sagacious discernment. "You know, you should not laugh at your own jokes," Hilda criticized her. "You can be amused by yourself — God knows you are so good at that anyhow, playing alone in your sterile ideas — but that is as far as it should go."
"What is your problem?"
"I don't have any—just yours—what you don't concern yourself with."
"Oh? Sorry. Like what? What don't I concern myself with? You?"
"No, not me. I don't need anyone. Forget it. None of it is my business."
Gabriele stuffed some snuff into her pallet and then scratched her head for a few seconds. "It's a beautiful late Monday morn, Hilda," she said in the hope that from placating words and prevarications the noxious mood would disperse and vanish into air like smoke. " I for one want to seize the day. All the mental prostitutes are being exploited, except for you and I who have some sense about such things and will probably live to be 120 years old as a consequence, God forbid! " She pulled out two cans of beer from a cooler and spit out the dark tactile saliva that had been littering her mouth in senseless mass and clutter no differently than planets in the void of space. As perspectives were always dictated by the demands of the body in those who were not in full control of their minds, Gabriele had a hunch that Hilda was experiencing menstruation and feeling resentful that their physical encounter was not followed by redundant ones. If so, she surmised, Hilda's mood was a combination of hormonal imbalances and withdrawal symptoms from dopamine not arriving in the pleasure receptors of her brain in quantities commensurate with that earlier experience.
Hilda feigned a more pleasant smile despite herself. "Engaged as we are in contemplative leisure." These were words she often heard from Gabriele and her bantering mocked them good-naturedly.
"Well said, and in English to boot." They had departed from the world of stress-ridden fools shifting their needs for pretty escape art and aerobic therapy onto them. They had departed from the imaginary world of believing oneself to have importance catering to others' wishes and had submitted themselves over to the salt inundations of the Pacific Ocean. They had submitted themselves over to the entity as much as tepid will allowed. For at present neither of them would drown themselves to be fully and foolishly part of the entity.
Seated beside her friend, Gabriele incrementally shaped a harder replica of her from the mold of the subject and the plaster of the dampened sand. In part it no longer looked like Hilda but an effigy of Akhenaten.
"So, what about me don't I take responsibility for? What is the source of this anxiety for my sake?"
"How am I to tell if you suffocate me?"
"I'll be extraordinarily careful when I get up to the face. Don't worry."
"I've rested enough. Let the games begin," Hilda giggled.
"Not right yet. Give me the answer to my query and this stiff mummy will rise again."
"I was thinking at the time that you shouldn't be with me. It isn't like we are a couple. I was thinking to myself that you should be playing volleyball with your son. I worry about him not having a mother."
"Do you want me to leave you, Hilda?" Despite the withdrawn and impassive eyes her lips were compressed into a smile and she was ready for any answer. Any answer would have amused her, but she was betting on a particular muddled response. Having a keen enough discernment of human behavior that she could be flawlessly "scientific" in predictions remained Gabriele's goal, and she wanted it to be ongoing unlike all other forms of epiphany.
"I don't own you. Come, go, or stay for life. It's all the same to me. Well, all right not fully. Maybe I care some but to tell you the truth, I don't know what you think of me or what you want; and the reality is that you are a mother — I'm not — so do what you have to do."
Gabriele had predicted each meandering and sinuous thought with accuracy. Still she said, "No prevarications. Frankness, feeling comfortable to be such, doing it in respect, and measuring in other realities in as objective manner as possible — a relationship is relating and we do it with the perfection that only goddesses can do in such matters." She knew that her positive summary was from the overall relationship rather than this moment in time. A more myopic perspective would not have produced a full rendering of truth. Reality in any sense was more than any conscious registering of it. It was more convoluted. Although perhaps no different than the jealous remarks of Hera to Zeus, Hilda's acrimonious tone seemed boringly uncelestial. She was to some degree saying that if it were the ending of their intimacy then she, Gabriele, might as well head across the border back to the wealthy of San Diego. One aspect of their relationship had been an appreciation of self-containment, but here Hilda was jealous of it. "About my son, I don't know where he is."
"That's never made any sense to me."
"Either he's still with my aunt and she doesn't want to admit this fact or he's with my untraceable sister-in-law in the domain of her maternal possessiveness; but he is okay wherever he is at, and by now not so keen to play games with me."
Gabriele had not been able to concentrate on the volleyball game with Hilda from thinking of her son; and exploiting this weakness through unscrupulous serves, Hilda had won the game. Now, riding on the bus, she was no less irritated than before. It was an irritation at being reminded of her own negligence. By bringing a being into the world one was contractually obligated to nature to care for him and to see that his life came to good. Such a woman was obligated to forfeit her own growth to grow offspring. This was her own moral code gained from contemplative reason and she had violated it.
Gabriele stared at a couple of college students dressed in their uniforms. The male was comparing his large dark hand to the female's smaller and lighter one. This hand-play caused Gabriele's face to cringe in repulsion. This rapacious need to extend beyond oneself in mergers with other persons violated human decency. To want to know more, be more, in all life's activities was the precept of Aristotle; and certainly this girl wanted to know what it would be like to wear the man, to share his thoughts, and to merge with him. And her body was telling her there was intimacy in this most intense lowly pleasure and pain of him riding within her. Still, the lesser knowledge that it was, it was repugnant by being so void of anything wise. These human beings linked their cars so as to be declared a train as if a car alone really were so small. The linking of a series of defective cars running along on a defective track surely was not a successful attempt at extension; and from now on, she vowed, her caboose would not be banged into such links.
A woman who was standing with her child moved up to the front of the bus and sat the child on a padded hump of the transmission near the bus driver's gear shift. It was obviously difficult for her to keep the girl seated and the mother applied reasoning with admirable patience and self-restraint. Although Gabriele could not hear what the mother was whispering to the fidgeting child, she heard the child's responses of "Si" and this appeal to reason seemed lovely. It was the length of the talk and the delicacy by which the woman addressed the child's sensitivities that saturated Gabriele in beauty. She was beginning to see motherhood in a new light. She was beginning to think that these preconceived notions that housed her were houses of straw and could easily be blown away.
Perhaps, she thought, beyond conveniences, vaccines, and modern gadgets that often reduced "mental prostitution" to a 5 day affair, on rare occasions one stumbled across enlightenment in modern society that heretofore rested in voluminous, rarely read publications of deceased sages. Perhaps "God," this unfathomable entity who reacted indifferently to human affairs including thousands perishing hideously in the World Trade Center, was now sticking his tongue out at her and calling her a "know-it-all" in such an invigorating event; but it defied logic that a deity who would smash entire civilizations in the palms of its hands as if humans were mosquitoes would think her, this lone individual, worthy of the contempt and enlightenment of the tongue gesture. Even more, why should she believe that God sat her on the bus to see this mother and child as if she were the honored guest in the audience of a great symposium. Not being satisfied with her atheistic conclusions in this strange world, she was again left with the conclusion that something did exist out there, that permanent substance that was the entity or the prime mover, and it existed outside human logic.
A couple hours later, still in shorts and sunglasses (bathing suits worn underneath), she and Hilda sat down at an outdoor table of the lesbian pub. They were in the middle of dinner and a fourth shot of undiluted tequila when a woman uneventfully passed by their table and went inside. "Nice ass!" said Hilda.
"Huh? For Heaven's sake it is a padded seat and tool for excrement. Really, Hilda, is there nice and mean, nice and ugly, nice and not useful to such things unless a fluke happens where one was born without an ass." It was then that she decided to return to America.
In her sleep on an American Airlines flight from San Diego to Albany Gabriele dreamed that she was with Hilda once again on the beach. They were in front of a volleyball net witnessing the descending sun when Hilda broke the ineffable silence.
"You say bullshit all the time. The things you say are so true and so false. You are so profound about temporary families, selfish children, marriage as weak people running away from the solitude that is part of inhabiting one's head, that work is prostitution, things as ball and chains to carry around, claiming one's essence, blah blah, but life isn't objective. It is subjective — so you miss your husband, son, and things because being without them would make you naked."
Gabriele then took off her shirt in protest. With icy eyes, and bouncing boobs, she attempted successful counter maneuvers against Hilda' slam dunk serves. Her hardness crackled through the air beyond an impassively proud countenance; but she justified it in her own mind, the only mind that mattered in such petty but necessary judgment calls. She told herself that even if this wariness of social situations were an imperfect instinct of primitive man to quickly assess the danger of a given social situation its having persisted to present to free one of her social instinct was to its merit.
She woke up from a tray of food being passed unto her. She felt a peculiar sense of being unsettled and wanting to know what was real and what was unreal. She wanted to find out how to keep from being swept up into one illusion or another—she who in recreation flitted facts in her imagination from biographical profiles of the cabinet members of Germany and the names of successive presidents of Moldavia to the characteristics of albino frogs, myriad owls, and Henry and William James. Was the present moment best celebrated in thought and contemplation, in action, in study, a shot of tequila and glib, frivolous talk with Hilda at the lesbian pub, a swim, and a movement of limbs? Was it possible to live life without being in its illusions? Hilda began to fade away and Nathaniel ("Adagio") and the Man With the Unmemorable Name became stronger.