Chapter Twenty-Three
Absent of Christ, this Easter morning began like many of those secular Easters of earlier years: getting up to fix some scrambled eggs in her bosky bath robe only to find her attempts at providing a substance of animal protein/vitamin B12 rejected for the chocolate effigy of a rabbit in the refrigerator, feeding him more chocolate than he typically got on a given day, and fixing dye in bowls so that he could color his eggs. She fixed some breakfast for herself. It was a self-made Eucharist of thickly burnt whole wheat toast, some beer, and a grapefruit. When he finished dabbing eggs in various dyes and giving to each a distinct design, she poured out some cereal for him.
He sat down with his usual fidgetiness at having to sit at all and let his cornflakes get soggy as he picked at them with his spoon. Easters were for him like walking about mesmerized in a choclatey mist. He was preoccupied with catching the ethereal on his tongue; and Gabriele's bottle of beer looked more ethereal than the rabbit. His incessant whining for some of her beer caused her to doctor a bit of his orange juice in the hope that he would be satisfied if not happy in the last vestige of pure childhood.
As they consumed the putrid and execrable half-baked scramble of her macabre sense of a meal they heard church bells ringing superfluously at a distance in downtown Ithaca. Church bells were the metallic clanging for the assembly of superstitious tribes. Still, because she always heard more of them each Easter, they seemed melodious the way simple Christmas music fused with the happiness of being with family members while decorating a tree. And yet she knew that once he disregarded eggs, chocolate rabbits, and store-bought sugar cookies for more selfish pleasures, her Easters would entirely vanish. A child grew out of pleasures the way he grew out of his britches; and once this happened such clanging church bells would no longer have anything musical within them. They would only be noise. She sighed, thinking that all benevolent myths washed away like the sandcastle he had made for the sun long ago.
It was just a little over a year ago, while pinning damp clothes onto the clothes line, that he wanted to know the truth as to why his friends were repudiating Santa Claus. She explained that they were right in what they said; and that in a world such as this, what one saw was pretty much what one got. It was a testament in favor of empirical evidence. It was a statement that ideas were sometimes the copies instead of physical reality being copies of ideas. She told him, "Reindeer flying from house to house in a population of 6 billion people in 6 habitable continents just doesn't cut the mustard." Now she regretted that she had said it.
When they finished eating, she sent him out to play in the streets while she fornicated with a couple newly arrived clients. Following such extroverted activities that required all her acting abilities and social skills to be on target, she sank back into her hallowed, private domain. She drew a few freelance sketches for a local card company, cleaned the trailer hurriedly, and then began preparing lunch. It would be little bits of beef in gravy to be put on toast, which she so aptly and succinctly labeled as "shit on a shingle;" but for now it was butter in a skillet spewing anew in streams of orangish yellow sizzlings and sputterings like early components of galaxies swirling out into open space.
"Over here, Miss Gabriele. Howdy and top of the morning to you!" She looked toward this strange Southern and Irish sound and saw her son walking back and forth on stilts before the kitchen window. She looked at this freakishly elongated creature of ostentatious movements doing its dance. In ways she was envious of his sense of celebration in the moments, hours, and days of being but she couldn't help asking herself if this gyrating form had actually come from her although indeed it had.
"Howdy, over there," she said with the amicable indifference of cordiality.
"When's that shit on a shingle stuff gonna be done?"
"Don't know." She poured in her milk and flour. "What do you want with it?"
"Lasagna."
"Lasagna—always lasagna if not goulash. Well, we tried that last night." She thought of that mildly humiliating moment when his face had wrinkled and cringed. The face had crinkled like an old newspaper in the muscles of a palm. She, his heroine of all these years, had been regarded with disapproval. Sure, the pasta had been overcooked and the starch had dripped from it but she couldn't see that this was any more repugnant than a juicy hamburger. His repugnance had surprised her and his exaggerated expressions had not seemed a commensurate reaction.
Yesterday the behavior struck her with its impudence. Even more, she was struck that just by living together as they did, she could feel a twinge of pain so easily and so preposterously. She was worried then that she was becoming as ridiculous a human being as everyone else. It was just a twinge of pain lasting a moment but it was too much. The whole foray into obeying a cookbook was an unsuccessful attempt at imitating school cuisine which she dumped in the trash in a choleric gesture lasting no longer than his facial grimace. She took the plate from him, removed her own as well, and scraped the contents away in five seconds. It had been a little thing but it was hard for her to forget it now that she was cooking another meal for him.
"Rick's gonna come."
"Who's that?" she asked as she stirred her concoction while picking at the meat the way one might kick away dead bodies littering the street." She turned back to the window but he was no longer in that frame. Already the stilts were forsaken action and he was going off somewhere else on a bicycle. She could only see this diminishing figure from behind. She was irritated that so much of the time he went off without permission and yet she did not feel that she could chastise him for what she had done when she was his age. Even now she was doing it: she was dragging him into a shiftless domain of a trailer-whore hoping that something extraordinarily advante garde would happen to him here. Maybe she had a moral obligation to take care of one whom she had brought into the world but his coming from her womb did not mean a claim to him. At least, this was what she told herself. She could guide him the best that she was able but if he wanted to jump fifty feet from a top branch of a tree or ride on a bicycle head first into a bus it was his choice. If he wanted to run off without permission, she told herself, why should she feel any pang from it; and yet, like a ridiculous human being, she did.
Phallicly shaking out some Worchestershire sauce into a big black tempest, she wondered how the sanctity of monogamy existed with the tenet to be fruitful and multiply. If promiscuity were the natural order, monogamy had to be the unnatural one: and yet, paradoxically, monogamy had become a revered moral code of conduct. It was no wonder, she thought to herself, that people were frustrated and confused. She told herself that there had to be a reason for monogamy to be such a sacrosanct striving although she was having trouble figuring out what that reason could be. The tenet existed but within it most men were given the wink for indiscretions while some women were stoned to death for them. They were stoned, she theorized, for making other men question whether or not the children within their own homes contained someone else's peculiar genetic codes. They were stoned for implanting anxieties in the piece of mind that man had. They were stoned because of this competitive need engrained in the human psyche to survive as long as one could and to pass one's genetic codes to the next generation. The tendentious rationalist further theorized that if one were to live in a remote rural town he or she would not make compatability an issue. Knowing that there was no chance of finding anyone better than the person one was with, such a couple would grow apart, stay together, and plant trees. She couldn't prove it; and if she could it would be just one more empty fact. And yet now it was an empty theory. Sometimes it struck her how this dance with ideas was like awakening to the fact that one was all alone dancing in an empty room of a lunatic asylum.
The quantum theory of her life — the forces that drove her away from humanity (perhaps some inherent German characteristics, although she was but half German) and the circumstances that drove her back to humanity, the inherent need to be a social creature and the need for self-preservation within her own cloistered domain— were the making of a dilemma; and being in a dilemma (a soap opera of one's making) was like finding oneself in a beautiful garden of undiscovered geysers. A dilemma was the air of Thales, the water of Anaximenes, and the fire of Heraclitus.
These forces of withdrawing and shunning but needing people were like the peculiar components of atoms. They bounced off each other and made her. At times the atoms pushed away from society: and then they oscillated back, compacting her to the world of selfish people with their insatiable movements…cats with their insatiable movements…insatiable cries.
The cat had once again dragged its prey to the metal steps that went up to the door of the trailer. She could hear that specific songish whine that it repeated for the acknowledgement of having made its capture. She looked out the window and saw her son and another boy standing there listening to these cries. The cat was wanting their praise for its work. From the cat she realized what work was: it was feeling self-worth from believing that one had gained something special in one's movements and demanding that other's acknowledge these captures for to not do so would relegate them back to the insignificance of just movement.
All creatures needed some type of work and yet she had none and she wanted none. Outside of the obligation of motherhood, all that she engaged in were art and prostitution. Neither one of them were movement in the strictest sense and so as such they were not work: the former was not action but contemplation and the latter one involved lying on a bed. In both art and prostitution she did not need or want praise from others for she had nothing to capture in movement since she was not moving. Even in motherhood, she was not trying to obtain some being to fill a void in her life. There was no void. She had been accepted as an FBI profiler prior to finding herself pregnant. She could have gone to that or to nothingness; and with the obligations of motherhood she had slowly chartered a path into nothingness. She did not need anyone telling her that she was beautiful or that her art work was worthwhile. Matter of fact, she did not need them at all. Others could come and go from her life through the revolving door in her castle if anyone had the power to budge it after crossing her moat. They could come and go and she would inhale and exhale them like respiration so long as they made no claim on her as she made no claim on them. Breaking definitions of work, how to make a living, and sociability, she told herself that she was a macro- human living with mere earthlings she could not fully identify with. Her mind was a bit scrambled in what she was thinking. Maybe she was saying that she was pure contemplation—someting like that. She wasn't a hundred percent sure of any of her ideas. They changed with the moment even though ideas should be permanent and immutable when the physical world was neither. Being profound was like driving one's car through potholes for the hell of it and hoping to not get a flat. Maybe contemplation was movement.
If the cat wanted to follow its instincts, contribute to her pathetic meals, and gain a bit of praise, she did not mind. She or Nathaniel could praise it; but this sport of playing with one's eventual meal, however, was loathsome. It was hard to revere Mother Earth and Father Sky, or nature as a whole, when it was essentially barbaric. She hated Mouse when it allowed its half dead prey to escape so that it could recapture it again and slap it around with the stiff rackets of its paws. She opened the window.
"Who are you?," she asked.
"I'm Rick," said the other boy.
"Do you have a last name?"
"Quest," said Rick.
"Quest as in Mr. Quest at the school?"
"One and the same," said Nathaniel.
"What's with the cat?" she asked
"It got a black bird."
"Not the owl?" She was anxious that it not be the owl that had nested itself in a wooden flower pot that hung beneath her window.
"No, your owl is okay I guess."
"Good." She turned to Rick. "Are you staying for lunch?" asked Gabriele.
"We will if your cooking doesn't make anybody sick," said Nathaniel.
"I'm sorry. What did you say?"
For a few seconds he hesitated fearfully but he pushed himself and let his temerity ooze out. "I don't want anybody to get sick eating it!" Her eyes became hard and haughty. She smiled a hateful smile for that son of hers "had balls." Gabriele shut the window on the opinions and personality formulating within this son of hers. With the window fully closed, she could still hear that whining of the cat wanting the payment of praise for having made its capture. "God," she thought. "Why does it have to play with its prey? If society is barbaric, the nature of an individual is worse." She wondered where she could move under the sun without projecting a shadow. She wondered if by finding a mission in life for the benefit of herself and others in the hope of making the world a less obscene place she would become more indecent than what she was. She wondered if she could even learn anything from a world where the nature of things wasn't exactly evil but was definitely cold, crude, self-centered, and merciless. She supposed that this question was the predominant experiment of her life, and it incorporated Nathaniel into it. The redundancy of the cat's disharmonious songish cries grated her gray matter. She filled up a bucket with water and threw it onto the steps to cause Mouse to abscond to happier fields.
As if both were very young boys, she wanted to make playdough for her son and this other little entity that he had dragged back with him. She yearned to foster in a small way those who could still mingle within the solitary wanderings of the mind. From this malleable substance of flour children could be encouraged to continue as solitary units of the present moment where just the peculiar aspect of being alive would be enough to totally enthrall them. And yet she realized that she would be fostering that which was tepid in all of them for boys grew older and more sociable by the day and she, a maimed and hurting soul, was sour to the world. This sour quality ricocheted its dour force on her inner harmony forcing cynical ruminations and recondite perspectives. The railing, in her own head, about "the prostitution of work" was merely an excuse for not being more contemplative and productive. The reality was that she could not reside comfortably in the inner world even if she had all the time in the world. All that she could do would be to conjure oil paints and malleable pottery clay if not playdough in the hope of retaining an inner depth in a child capable of perceiving the entity in a unique way. Maybe the wish to make him once again interested in playdough was from the yearning to retain the earliest aspects of him. Through him she could have a childhood vicariously. After all, with Mother and Father riding off into the sunset in a tank, the beheading, and the disparaging comments by the Peggyites in the bootcamp of Peggy's Kansas home, she still needed innocence vicariously. She rejected the idea of making playdough. "I don't want to confuse the playdough with the meal," she told herself but really she didn't want to feel that malaise of one foolish enough to have a 7 and 8 year old do activities that they had outgrown. Her grandmother still thought that Peggy's thirty year old children collected coins and she still sent commemorative coins from every new state that she visited. After so many years Gabriele still felt blessed to be out of that fray because nothing was worse than trying to feel close to a bunch of hostile strangers whose only closeness was proximity and blood.
Glancing from the window at these boys competing with each other in a game of soccer, she was reminded even more of the way things were. Her son was a social animal now and all meaning would be in others. She tossed a salad. Unfortunately, as she was reaching for the burning toast she set the bowl on the bar with a bit too much thrust of the wrist, tossing it everywhere. She cleaned up her mess, raised the window, and tried to avoid being controlled by the roaring negative irascibility that strummed discordantly within her. Restraining herself, she said mildly, "Okay fellows, better put the game aside and eat this stuff or I'll feed it to the Mouse." Nathaniel picked up his ball and raced his friend to the door. The meal might have made him procrastinate were it not for hungers and thoughts of a chocolatey allure.
"Do you have mice inside there?" asked Rick as the two boys entered the kitchen.
"No, that's just her name for that old cat."
Gabriele interjected, "I take it that the 'her' might be in reference to me, your mother. And as for Mouse, what other name has it ever had? I wouldn't call it old either if it is still able to hunt." She disliked her son's disparaging tone towards a member of her family that had been with her longer than he had. She thought that the words were rather treacherous and scowled; and yet she was cognizant that gender neutral pronouns akin to a chair and having thrown water at her furry child weren't outward symbols of love although they might be equivalent to how she was treated in Peggy's home as one of their family. "Are you hungry, Rick?" she asked.
"Yes, please."
"Good." She scooped up some lettuce, apple sauce, and cottage cheese and put them on a plate for him next to the shit on a shingle. "Here, Rick. This'll put some hair on your chest. "Tell me, with Easter and all, don't you and your family go to church?"
"It's just me and my dad. He likes Saturday Mass better."
"I see. No mom?"
"Dead."
"Oh." Her interjection was lucid but sympathetic. She thought it the right combination for matters like this. She admired his strong and unambiguous declaration. He knew that death was death and for one so young not to fudge when saying it gave her newly found respect for this widower, Mr. Quest, as well as his son. Was there really a realm where ideas were the true form? She was certain that Plato was right in thinking that there was. We were all imitations of ideas. But she was equally certain that no one returned to the realm of ideas once they were dead. Death was death. It sometimes occurred to her that if humans weren't honest about the tenants for the parameters of birth and death (sex and closure) they would lie about everything else within those parameters. If she could only get through the factory of life without becoming a defective misanthrope she knew this to be the highest measurement of success.
She listened to their kid talk for half an hour: some other kid who couldn't catch baseballs and whom they attributed as the culprit in losing a game; those who were successes and failures in a broad jump; teachers who reprimanded them; wretched gossip about poor Little Orphan Annie and her continual penchant for launching her cannon balls at male genitalia; action packed television movies they had seen; popular cartoons on lunch boxes; and sardonic complaints from the deprived Adagio for only getting to watch TV three days per week. She did find the food jolting around their mouths as they spoke rather amusing; but on whole it was dreary conversation and it began to give her a headache.
"Put your plates in the sink when the two of you finish. I need to think."
She excused herself and retreated into the bedroom while they ran to the refrigerator to put their ravenous fangs into the carcass of the chocolate bunny.
In her bedroom she listened for the door of scurrying boys to open and close. Then she began to smoke her cannabis like Shakespeare and let words in thoughts rise from the ashes of the mundane. As they rose in a cani-beer cloud with the levity of laughing gas, she stayed in the bedroom and began to write. She did not feel sick enough to go to the bathroom this time. She thought that she should really lock the door of the trailer but she knew that the Nathaniel would stay outside busy unto himself or with his friend. Less and less would her company be needed. She wrote: "Dear journal, I've been thinking that the personal life should be banned. This socializing and lovey-doving just slows down society's progress. Everywhere, clogging sidewalks, there are these Cornell University girls holding hands with their guys. Makes me sick. If I go to a waterfall or a park to paint or pick up some milk at the 7-11 I have to wave my hand and shoo them away like pesky flies. And you know that each of them is thinking about what he's thinking about her. So apparent! They are orbiting around their guys at all moments of the hours. They are everywhere subservient to chemicals of love in their heads that make them subservient to his whims; and I want to be the demolition of those ties. I see my vocation as roller blading down sidewalks through those linked hands while I get to my destination. I see myself on sidewalks leading to the grocery store. I'm on roller blades and I'm breaking a few arms and blading a few lovey-dovey hearts. Sometimes I dream of shouting through a megaphone, 'About relationships and needing people I caution everyone to be circumspect. Can another be water or oxygen? Can another one be your sustenance? Stop this delusional MTV thinking! You are letting one simple neurotransmitter banging against a pleasure receptor control you. Females, don't be foolish enough to be women! What are you doing wasting all the minutes of your life trying to get someone to be with you? What on Earth makes you want to block off your own thoughts this way? A man won't stay with you forever. They never do and sooner or later you must confront your own inane foolish selves that have been underdeveloped and unchartered all this time. Find a deeper awareness than the personal life. Find a vocation that will allow you to tap into the entity. Tap, tap to not be the whimsical dictates of a selfish man. Tap and confront one's real aloneness. Be intrepid by aloneness for from it one finds oneself. It is by being gregarious that you lose yourself . Befriend your aloneness. To do otherwise makes men think that your highest duty is to be ridden in like riding on a horse. Tap Tap. Buck the man from vaginal penetration. Watch him run away like a horse slapped on its side. Plug into your special talent that links you to the entity and you will never be lost again. You will be part of the new invincible species.' Still, what can I do? I'm just a mere me. I mailed some photographs of Adagio to Peggy and her gang. Sort of appearance only. Decided it was best to keep up their interest in him. Promised that someday they would not only see him but keep him for a while. Don't know why — True, I don't like them despite that they are his his godparents and all—but sometimes the idea of a hiatus from this Mommy game is a bit tempting. I could dump him on them. Antarctica — Antarctica. It's still in my dreams —"
"What about me? Willya' take me with you when you go off to the seventh continent?" The voice was that of Smokey-The-Bear in the "Don't start forest fires" advertisements.
"Up here, youn' lady."
She looked on the shelf. "Well, fuck. You're not Smokey at all."
"No, youn' lady, I'm not. He's just a distant cousin." Gabriele looked at the foot long stuffed polar bear sitting on a man's handkerchief on a shelf above the dresser. She had bought him one time when she went to Buffalo, New York. "Poor Gabey, nobody loves ya' 'cause ya' don't love 'em. Going to restaurants all alone isn't no fun. Parks alone, waterfalls and painting with your paint brush, even fornicating alone. Even when you are with people you are separate. Poor Gabey." Suddenly the polar bear began to change into the higher authority.
"Gabriele, it is me" said the higher authority. " Look at yourself, held together by the stitching of hate-the plastic-eyed polar bear with the stiff arms that the factory of the human race mutantly created — it will be you who shall feel the walls of artificial fur ripped from its threads, and your stuffing falling out. For a little beer on top of four joints makes a person see the unsealed human fragments that had been smoothed over in time. Come on Gabriele, the gal who still chews tobacco and spits it into an empty beer can…the gal with the deep dark-ocean eyes…the gal bereft of what the normal means, grip that other beer bottle now. Together with the joints, this is the only medicine devised to rebreak the strangely concocted pieces that have been glued into the broken you. Drink and smoke! Become fragmented again with the hope that you will heal and be normal. A 17 year old girl goes to eat a meal in her boyfriend's home and a wife to her in-laws. How is it that such simple pleasures continually elude you? How is it that you have made such cynical and erroneous views of the world?" No sooner had her higher authority spoken then Gabriele heard a skid of a fast moving car suddenly stop and a child scream. The polar bear and the handkerchief with the initials embroidered on it tumbled from the shelf. Gabriele quickly stabbed the marijuana to its ashtray of death and flew out the door.
"Who is this mother fucker?" she mumbled to herself. Then she knew. Here was MF, the vice principal of her son, her former client, shouted at hysterically by the mother of the dead little girl. Gabriele held the woman who was deranged in bereavement and sunk into gravel and dust of the trailer park. She was her bulwark.
"So, he will be her lover — this MF?" scoffed Saeng Seob in their bed upon hearing his last chapter.
Sang Huin regretted having begrudgingly read him this chapter. He only read parts of the manuscript when asked to do so. Seong Seob could only understand the superficial aspects of the story at best and he only asked to hear those bits of it read out when Sang Huin seemed to preoccupied with writing it. Sang Huin supposed it gave them something in common. "Maybe. I don't know, really," he said evasively. He removed his computer to a table that was adjacent to the bed and picked up a magazine. His eyes began to peruse the photographs of male models in Gentleman's Quarterly who if known and involved in his life would pull him out of his numb abyss of insipid days into the vibrancy of desire in nightly embraces.
"And become pregnant?"
"I don't think so. I don't know at this point." He yawned. "I wouldn't know what to do with that. I need some believable drama in it." And yet he felt that there was no drama within his own life. Giving private lessons to children he didn't particularly care for, his days were missionless clutter that exhausted what little extroverted characteristics were within him; and coming home to Seong Seob with a lack of sexual variety in that domain was flattening him in the malaise of inordinate boredom. He was certain that there was no drama in his life; and yet paradoxically he knew that drama was inherent even in rocks that weathered away in time. Drama was change and it was in all things. If drama were in the rocks, it too was there in a simple life. His was laden in resentment over the idea of returning home to this blind lover who couldn't see that the two of them living together was inhibiting the progress of his manuscript. "Any ideas," he asked.
"She could have a baby and then throw him in a well."
"Why? What well? I don't want to write unbelievable melodrama."
"It's not unbelievable. It happened?"
"Huh?"
"To me. Postpartum depression. I'm told that a few weeks after my brother was born my mother became depressed. She wouldn't eat very much. She wouldn't leave her room except to go to the temple. One day she wanted to go to the temple and she couldn't find my brother's shoes. When the servants couldn't find them either, she dismissed the servants. She told them to not come back. When they were gone she made a bath for my brother and drowned him. My family says that maybe I fought back and it was too much trouble for her in the bathtub. Anyhow, she decided to drive me to an old contaminated well on my grandmother's estate, pried the boards loose that covered what was left of it, and dumped me in. There wasn't much water in it so I didn't drown, but I lost my eyesight. " Sang Huin felt an empathy as deep as the gods while he listened to the wind howling through the crack of the window. It was a barely audible murmuring of ineffable pain. It was palaver but it called to him somehow, pushing him from his malaise to the malaise of it all.