Chapter Thirty-Three
Spinning as she was in her own head with important short term memories that should have been for survival in her environment seeming so elusive, she questioned if she were now in Ithaca; but for the most part believing that she was, she wasn't sure whether she had driven or had flown there. She was not only spinning within her own head with facts about petty events which happened to her recently scurrying and absconding every time she tried to corner them (what she did yesterday and what she was doing now a mystery), but instinctual drives and fantasies of her subconscious were rife. They were at one moment spinning strobe lights and at another time like twirling maelstroms of dirt and trash flicking clockwise or counter-clockwise according to the caprice of winds. Each time she tried to ground herself within an idea, a thought, a memory of her life, it was futile. The winds would not allow it. If this spinning of a fragmented self were to stop she might be able to sense herself more fully. If only there was certain knowledge of where she was at she would have a sense of a numb self existing someplace. But feelings and desires were amuck like a dust storm and so who she was and where she was at were unfathomable at certain moments. The drugs she was now beginning to believe Candyman had slipped into her drink were allowing her wanton subconscious to blow everywhere and nowhere now that they could escape from a fragmented container called self.
At one moment many of those inconsequential but darker and subconscious thoughts were of the wraith of Rita/Lily hovering around her with a countenance showing the consternation of being abandoned and forgotten, the yearning to kiss Candyman and founder into the black silk of his body, the virulent idea of rollerblading through the held hands of couples so beautifully and speciously linked together in their little eager walks along shopping areas near Cornell University, and the voracious, hedonistic wish for anything that could feed her with pleasure. In another moment she had an outright hatred of self-centered lovers who would frolic together as if the world were conceived as nothing but the orange glow of a sunset for everyone, an indifference toward others who seemed so atavistic and unworthy of her company, the image of people being breathed in and out of her life with as little conscious regard as one's own breath, fantasies of women passing the romanticism of love to her like an Olympic torch, the fantasies of young men as juicy to look at as the Candyman, and the general hunger to merge with beauty. Still, in the next moment there was this strange hunger for people and company to pour into her vapid life, the wish to launch herself like a rocket, the trail of fire and heat from burning fuel roaring from her vagina sending her to more intellectual realms where the needs of the body wouldn't sap one of mental purpose, and that desire for pleasure and adventure to escape her stagnant intellectualism that was stifling her from feeling alive. She believed that she was in some drug dealer's house in Ithaca and yet was beginning to believe that her beliefs were mad. Her only conclusion was that she couldn't conclude that either of these matters could be conclusive.
"He's spiked your drink with Ecstasy," said the higher authority. Gabriele formulated her question to Candyman in deference to her higher authority's promptings. "No, I didn't spike you drink none so relax there, Snowflake. I just prepared my special." "What is in this special of yours?" she demanded as she unbuttoned part of her shirt. "Hmm…my own little recipe." "What is in this shit? I'm fucking hot." "You sure are. Nobody'd say that a husky ain't sexy if he has any sense at all. Anybody does, he don't know the type of mama I got in here with me. Not much of a snowflake, are you? That's fine; so fine! No worry about that, Mamma. I like older chicks and husky women are better bed tackles."
Was Candyman a hallucination like Rita/Lily a few minutes ago? If not, wouldn't that mean that she was back in Ithaca? For what she knew she could be ill from a migraine and resting there on a bed in her home in Albany with her son bringing to her wet washcloths to counter the fever that burnt under the surface of her forehead. However, a hallucination was made up myriad transient images, and the sight of Candyman had constancy. Either by plane or by car she had gone there. That she knew. The Candyman was there before her face to face. She couldn't imagine or hallucinate anything so clearly. And he was the landmark for her knowing that she was at Cornell University in Ithaca, with its eternally young and often drug addicted specimens, as much as the World Trade Center towers, the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty were landmarks of New York City. She anxiously tried to isolate what had happened to her ten minutes earlier for to be without some facts about this self would be like blocking the apertures of the senses with gauze and drifting in and out of consciousness with no self at all — a mutiny against the higher authority and the first mate by those with no navigable skills whatsoever; and as a bad omen from tossing the corpses off the stern, the ship being tossed around in toilet waters.
She more or less remembered knocking on his door and the ensuing conversation thirty or forty minutes earlier in a rather generalized impression. "Whadaya want, Snowflake," he said through the crack of the chained door. "I need some weed," she said. "Whydaya think we got somethin' like that in here?" "Because you're the Candyman," she said. "Is that a fact?" he said indifferently. "You a cop?" he asked. "No, of course not. I've been here before even if it was a couple years back. Don't you remember me?" "No, I don't." "Gabriele, the whore." "I don't have a thing for you." "Tunafish sent me the first time I came. He was your client and that of my own." "Whatzure job? How doya' know Tunafish?" "I gave massages." "German massage?" "Yeah." "Oh, I remember. Almost went to you myself. You gave Tunafish blowjobs." "I serviced him upon occasion." "Come in Mama and get your weed." He unlocked the door and let her pass into his living room. Then he locked himself in again. He fixed her a drink and she drank it as one tends to do with drinks. "Master Card and Visa machines ain't workin' today so I'll assume you to have cash and you assume me to ask for it." "Any discount for me, Candyman? I—" She felt embarrassed that she had forgotten her ATM card and only had $50.00 in her purse. She had come so far and now there was the fear that the lack of these bits of paper called currency had the possibility of being an obstacle to the procurement of her stash. He did not say anything for a while but just smiled and let her sip the lemonade. She felt a metamorphosis as if she were cracking out of the icy teddy bear with the stiff arms that the factory of the human race mutantly created and were now whimsical winds. At last he spoke. "'Cause I know you are a professional and be all the more serviceable with large and handsome black men like me so I'll make my body there in full 'vailability for you taste buds. I'll let you tongue and lips give me a bath the way you did Tunafish and maybe there will be a discount for you." He chuckled. His teeth glittered green as the walls of nude centerfolds seemed to be turning around and the floor seemed a soggy mire. She was a game to him and so with all games he, the player, savored the moments, not wanting to delve into pleasures at full thrust lest they end too soon.
Now, when she concentrated as fully as she was capable of she remembered the drink and an imprecise replica of this initial conversation but there were some minutes (she wasn't sure how many) that she couldn't account for as if she had slipped and fallen into some vacuous abyss unawares and then had mysteriously gotten to the other side of the chasm, slapping off the mud that besmirched her clothing without being much more cognizant than this. Maybe she had serviced him during this period or maybe she had just fallen into a vacuous state of one who knew the state of the world: the multitudes who were calculative and disingenuous users; life as the frivolous extroverted game of using others to rack up points; a smile as an artifice; society as billiard balls slapping against each other and rebounding; they who were customers of that which was deleterious to them and were ready to use or be used to get it; and the few higher ones linked to compassion and empathy, whose intellect saw the world and yet had to give a cheerful rendering of it as "life" because one did have to live in this world and celebrate it the best one was able to do. For the empathic ones, hidden beneath hardened facades, their sensitivities were under the scabs of hardened smiles.
"Can't figure out why you'd come all the way to Ithaca for some weed if you are living in Albany like there ain't drugs in other cities." "Don't know anybody else," she said. "Just the Candyman." Her fingers paused in this unbuttoning of the blouse as if a wave of sensibility had momentarily washed upon her. Obviously she hadn't serviced him yet but she could see that she was ready to do so. She detoured his eyes from staring at her breasts by asking him to show her his different brands of marijuana. She thought of Nathaniel to clog her urging to be intimate with Candyman but she couldn't remember many specifics about yesterday no matter how hard she tried. Still she unsuccessfully concentrated in the hope that her ponderings would pull back the memory. It was the following: Yesterday Nathaniel stepped off the school bus and went inside. She was seated on her white colonial chair as superciliously cold, hard, and beyond human frailties as the statue of Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial seen on a winter day. She was the throned Antarctic queen.
"Hey there. How was school?" she asked coldly
"Same."
"We need to talk!," she said.
"What's wrong?" he asked. He looked petrified as if she had discovered his secret relationship with the man who had made going into R-rated movies so easy for him (just the cost of showing his behind and letting those fingers graze on his two hills and this payment deferred until after a movie or movies were finished).
"Nothing she said. She smiled her haughty smile and spoke in her typical phlegmatic tone. "I'm wondering about taking another trip abroad."
"With or without me?"
"Hmm…I love your subtlety. Maybe with you if you care to be a vagabond and don't get in the way of me painting."
"What is a vagabond?"
"No Four Star hotels — living in little dumps that look like closets with no air conditioning and a shared shower. Kind of like Boy Scouts, but no camping out in the forest and bad ventilation in the rooms. Hotels for back packers that are worthy of demolition."
"What's demolition?"
"Anyhow, ugly old buildings that if you were to look at them you would puke on sight."
"You can count me out of staying in slave rooms 'specially if there are shared bathrooms. That's nasty. I 'd scratch my toes and feet every minute morning, day, and night. I scratch my toes and feet for an hour every time I shower in the locker room after gym classes. I like four star hotels."
"You've never been to four star hotels—just seen photographs of Rick staying in one while in Rome."
"I want to go. You need to let me go! But there will be no vagabombing."
"Aren't you the little male dictator. You sound like Michael. Do you like that guy?"
"Better than nothing, I guess."
"'Better than nothing, I guess,'" she mocked. "Glad to know that perspective. It makes it easier to know that you won't be upset when I tell you something. Well, how do I say this? There are 6 billion people on the planet each with his own personality, routine, and dreams to acquire this or that. Even lovers can't get along. It's an absolute miracle that we don't go around plucking each other's eyes out. It is good that we are smart enough to know that there would be ramifications for actions like that. Okay, here it is: better than nothing BEFORE, and NOW you have nothing. I've kicked out that rigid giraffe, Michael. At this house he is no more. Michael won't be living here any longer; and this trip to Euro-Asia, if I decide to do it, will be to celebrate not having that guy silently pull my strings any longer."
"And Rick?"
"And Rick." She sighed. "I guess he won't be here."
"You gonna kick me out next?"
"Don't be ridiculous. You are my son."
"If I was to burn down the house would you keep me then."
"If you were to burn down the house your butt would be as hot as the house but you would still be my son and no, I wouldn't throw you out of the house because there wouldn't be a house for either of us since you would have burnt it down."
He laughed hysterically. His mother's clever sallies enthralled him. Then he smirked hatefully. "Men don't like you very well."
She smiled widely. "It is a reciprocal thing—goes both ways. I don't care what these self-centered little beasts like or don't like. Three cheers for men not liking me and going their merry ways. Hip hip hurray! Hip hip hurray! Hip hip hurray!"
"I think you are strange. You aren't like other moms at all, you know."
"What are they like?"
"I don't know. When I go over to my friends' parents' houses and stuff they don't say weird shit all the time."
"But weird shit is what it is all about. How can you be interesting without saying weird shit continually. It is impossible."
"Do I have to take care of both of those dogs out there?"
"I don't know. I guess someone will have to. We'll make it a joint chore. We'll share the burden and make the dogs feel loved and happy here. What do you say?"
"I say that is a crock of bull shit."
Her mind was preoccupied with this declaration of being called weird. "I'm not weird. I'm just clever. What is weird are moms whose brains change into rocks — probably from too many years of marriage."
"When I was in the second grade kids would say that you catch men outside your trailer, put spells on them, and then you drink their pee."
She looked at his earnest face. "Really? Is that what they said."
"Yeah."
"Why didn't you tell me that then."
"I didn't want to hurt your feelings."
"Oh, how sweet." She felt visibly touched that he should have thought of her feelings over those of his own. She felt more optimistic about him growing up into a decent individual. "Anyhow, I will be going someplace — maybe back to Bangkok…who knows… anywhere really from Tokyo to Tijuana."
"Without me?"
"Probably."
"I don't care where you go. Betty's here to take care of me. She's a better mother, really."
"Even if she takes up all the toilet paper you want to use on your precious butt?"
"Even then," he said. They heard the dog barking, an opening of the door, and a rush of footsteps.
"It's the favored one," said Nathaniel.
Rick rushed against Gabriele's body and this physical presence made her feel a sense of aversion to the boy. As much as she cared for him his grip was like a monkey upon her bark. Her niveous limbs just stood out awkwardly and she did not know what to do. But where thawing caused snow and ice to crack and fall to the ground, her thawing was a cold chill that caused her legs to begin to shake. Her arms embraced him in the desperate clinging of love and she began to cry. It was the first time she had cried since she was a little girl. It was the first time she had ever cried according to her memory.
"So the darker reefer is richer?," she asked. "You got it, Mama." "I don't know the difference really. Maybe you just better mix it all together and we'll hope for the best." "Sounds sensible. All right, I can do but with a bunch of the cheap stuff since you are getting a discount." "I want to know what is in this drink." "That's abita' mountain dew with some lemon juice, abita' water, tad bit of urine, and some truth serum. You feel that you want to tell the truth?" She was picked up and lifted off by a wind and it took him several minutes to call her back. "Gabriele? Gabriele? Gabriele?" "Who?" "You. I was wantin' to know if you are wantin' to be truthful and tell me your dark secrets. "Okay," she said. "Okay, start talking." "Okay, she said. "He slapped her cheeks with his fingertips. "Do you want to tell me all your secrets and be truthful with me?" His hands were now in her shirt unbuttoning the remaining buttons. "I am so inclined but have found the necessity of a facade." "Keep your dictionary closed, sister, and talk straight talk." "I like being honest even when it gets me into trouble unless I think it might be too disadvantageous. When I was a little girl I witnessed a beheading of a Turk in Istanbul." "Turk?" "In Turkey—the country…not the bird. Everyone was clapping and my parents were glad that justice had happened. I knew that justice was savagery and that crying about it wouldn't accomplish anything but just get people to loathe me. Loathe meaning hate and not love. I decided that if I asked questions and looked like I wasn't bothered by it all I would be left alone with my sensitivities intact. I did my consummate performance to look like an adult and appear as if I did not need them." "What would they have done to you if you cried?" "As I've said, they would have looked on it as weakness and they would have despised it. I didn't want to be hated or loved. I wanted to be a graduate from childhood that could only come from an adult action of pompous stoicism. You don't understand?" "Why did you become a whore with such fancy- dancy words?" "I wanted to know fancy-dancy words but I didn't want to get a job using fancy-dancy words. I didn't want to be one of those professional bureaucratic slaves. I decided that everything was a form of prostitution and that bodily prostitution was quicker than mental prostitution and with bodily prostitution I would never have to relinquish my thoughts. Does that make sense?" "Weird, Sister, but go on." " I didn't want to be there behind a desk working for an agency that represented societal interests. If all of society's institutions were a refined form of atavistic savagery I didn't want to be there contributing to any bit of it: writing documentation, red tape, bureaucracy of this and that sucking up my ideas." "You are one heavy, twisted sister." "You've got that right Candyman." The two began to kiss to et cetera.
Candyman, to his own astonishment and hers, got a second erection a minute after their intimacies were completed; and so Gabriele went to the car for her sketchbook, and drew him nude. A few minutes after she was done she was again in a confused state of not knowing if she had flown to Ithaca or had driven there. She was fading fast. All earlier utterances that she had to make to Candyman, where she had to pull down some ethereal sense of self in order to have some coherent conversation and some degree of rationality behind her situation, had exhausted her more than the sex act itself. She fell asleep. And when she woke up she smelled cooking and went into the kitchen. Candyman was frying bacon in the skillet and she knew that he was thinking about their experience together as he watched the hardening bacon shrink on a paper towel bedding.. "Well, I guess I need to pay you, Candyman." "Yeah, what'd we say—forty so that you could have ten bucks for gas money." "That's what was said." "I'm wondering something there, Husky. Why'd you come all this ways when you could get drugs anyplace." "Didn't know where to go there, Candyman, and I needed to get out and think about things, you know."
She paid Candy Man his forty dollars — a discount price for the sexual services she rendered unto him, and the two shook hands. "Going back to your son?" "Oh, did I tell you about him?" "Sure — you were tellin' to me lots you don't know nothin' about. One time you were spacing out and talkin' 'bout your son and a Russian boy, packing and coming here." She remembered: shortly before she went to bed last night, Nathaniel came into her room. She was packing at the time. He looked at her maliciously.
"You bored?" she asked.
"Maybe," he said.
"Do you miss Rick?" she asked. He didn't answer. "Will you sleep with Cat tonight?"
"I hate the smell of that dog."
"Hmm…maybe you should give a friend a call."
"I don't have any. I don't like people and they don't like me."
"I can't believe that. Is there no one at St. Michaels whom you play with?"
"It isn't called St. Michaels."
"Whatever. Answer my question."
"There is a Russian kid who pesters me."
"Well, don't look at it as pestering. I'd say that since his language is different than yours and the nuance of the meanings of words would be different he might make a good friend. I don't know him but as nerdy as he might be, his perspective of life would be slightly different than an American and so you might learn about the world anew through exchanging ideas with him. Do the two of you do anything together?"
"He plays in the same baseball team."
"What's his name?"
"Don't know. It is too hard to remember."
"A Russian boy with an unmemorable name?"
"Yes."
"Do you have his telephone number?"
"No. I want to know were you are going.."
"Don't know. I won't leave for anyplace far away. I think I'll go to Ithaca for a day or two and see a friend."
"Rita/Lily?"
"No, not her."
"Who?"
"You don't know him. Candyman is his nickname."
"A boyfriend?"
"No. He is a potential customer — maybe he will buy a painting." She threw in some lies. "I'll be back in a few days. Don't worry."
"I'm not worried about you," he said in an indifferent tone with a sotto voce of disgust.
"When is your game?"
"Tomorrow"
"What time?"
"6:30."
"You and Betty can take a taxi there; but you'll see me on the bleachers when the balls start flying."
She remembered her promise because of the serendipitous ramblings of Candyman; and vomiting once on the edge of the road, she journeyed back to Albany. Sick to her stomach and dazed when she arrived back at her home, she went to sleep on the nearest couch for a half hour before going out to buy some groceries. She spent an hour or two of the afternoon interminably lost in aisles of food. She kept thinking about Rick and how the two of them used to bump their carts into each other as they raced through the aisles. It depressed her to think that this would never happen again, and yet she didn't see why relationships should end in such an all or nothing cessation as if differences in outlook among changing beings meant a broken contract of quid pro quo. Had their relationship been nothing but a bartering of services the whole time. She supposed that this was the concept of a relationship to most people.
At this moment her life was a foolish quandary of being unable to figure out if there was more salience in trying to reestablish family ties or independent strivings at all cost. She filled her cart, took out items, and then replaced them with others of different labels and equivalent prices. She couldn't figure out how many people she should be shopping for even though she had each person's tastes in mind in making selections. The closer she got to the cash register the more exacerbated were her doubts about buying most of her products, so before she purchased anything she abandoned most of it in a vacant cart and shoved it off once into the oblivion. When she got to the trunk of her car she had only one meager bag of groceries. She thrust it into the trunk, slammed down the lid of the trunk in vexation, and then buckled herself into the coolness of the vinyl seat. She passed a bridal boutique many times in the car and then spontaneously parked in front of the building that she had been rotating around. The saleswomen there could not find happiness in dressing the strangely sullen woman with monosyllabic mendacities of date and place for this celebratory solemnization. Under the lattice inside the store, staring at herself in a tripartite mirror, she didn't like the trains of the wedding dresses she was trying on. They were too short, florid to the point of gaudy, or not as ornate as she thought they should be. When she drove down to the end of the drive at the junction of the house she noticed that Nathaniel's dog was the only one that was chained up on the side of the house and that Michael's sailboat and motorcycle were conspicuously missing. She wasn't sure how she felt. In her room she took off some expensive, gaudy earrings and slipped out of her dress. The closet was now hers. His clothes were missing. Only the toes of her myriad shoes were within this capsule confronting her naked feet. Gracefully, with the highest poise, she swaggered from room to room to counter an inclination to stagger. Rick's room was vacuous space making her life unbearably vapid. She mourned the loss of her other son before going to the ball game.
She was spread out on a bleacher resting her eyes into the intricate mosaic of the silhouette of leaves and taking a break from her sketch (myriad tiny nude candymen having sex with various women, the women having candymen babies in their arms, and each copulation and baby scene wrapped in its own circle or monad; these monads making up total planets, and ultimately the planets composing the cellular outline of a long fanged beast that was the lonely universe) when the man with the unmemorable name looked down upon her.
"Hello, Gabriele, do you remember me?"
Startled, she turned to him. "Yes, but I'd never be able to say your name."
He laughed. No one outside of the immediate family would be able to do that.
What an intricate sketch!"
"Do you like art?"
"I love it." He said it so simply with such sincerity that the breath of his idea went up her nostrils titillating her with pleasure. "After you finish your sketch I think you should paint it onto an enormous canvas with a dismal red and black background."
"Yes, I like that idea, even if being so large it is never sold."
"Oh, it would fit over the staircase of a millionaire's old home perfectly.
You'll sell it in time."
"I was sitting here not knowing how to apply this thing really and was becoming annoyed at myself on different levels."
"For what reason?"
"For lots of reasons: a personal life that is shit, an idea I wasn't sure what to do with until you came along, annoyed at being annoyed by this large crowd as if they need to be quiet for me."
Sang Huin had been on the bleachers at a stadium with his new Pocket PC when a foreigner looked down upon him.
"Anyong Haseyo," said the man.
"English, please. I'm an American still getting used to kimchee with every meal."
The man chuckled. "So am I. From what state?"
"The Midwest mostly but I've been all over — born in Missouri but my father had to travel a lot."
"You look a bit agitated."
"I'm trying to write on my book. I guess I am annoyed at feeling annoyed."
"About what?
"The noise, I guess. I was trying to get away from noise. That's why I came here initially."
"To a ball game?"
"Strange, huh? Well the bleachers weren't full when I came."
"It isn't exactly a library. So are you saying that your feelings are mostly agitation or being agitated about being agitated?"
"The latter. Have you ever felt that mood where you just want to slap total strangers on their heads for not being introverts. There are just too many of them and none of them are doing anything constructive with their time. And then you sit there in this crazy mood you begin to blame them for being a bunch of mice breeding in a small cage and causing everybody to walk on top of each other."
He laughed. "Well, nothing exactly like that but we all have weird ideas going through our heads."
"That's exactly right. One minute a guy might see a woman in red pass by and for some reason he doesn't like her because she is wearing red. It is really pathetic. It is like a given guy is built with a primitive impulse to judge people instantly and to dislike someone for not being more like himself lest they be of a different belligerent tribe. I imagine the Lees and the Parks in ancient Korean history hated each other and back then they would be able to distinguish physical traits that were the least little bit different and judge friend or foe instantly."
"Maybe back then there was a use for that type of thinking but now belligerent ideas just come and go if we don't try to catch them. If you just let them pass they won't define you."
"I like that. Thanks. Maybe it is from not knowing the Korean language well enough. I hear their babble and it sometimes sounds like a drill in my eardrums."
The man laughed. "You are cute."
"Thanks. So are you."
"What do you do here?"
"Just teach English."
"What about you."
"Work for the Korean Herald."