He wanted to scream, "No!" and to whine that he wanted to go home. He was hurting and feeling diminished in years and he wanted to cry. He was scared despite his interest in how this freakish penis augmentation was linked to sex. He wished that he had never been so foolish as to come here or even gone to the movie theatre with this stranger. And yet he tried to hold onto his senses. He realized that to oppose a man trying to get his fix of exhilaration might be risky. He tried to figure out the most innocuous or least deleterious path that his childish mind could concoct. It was mostly a feeling since he was not all that logical. He remembered that mesmerized and fixated look of yearning for absolute pleasure on the face of this stranger. It was proof that although sex was linked to another person, it was mostly an internal function. To disengage himself and yet fulfill his curiosity, he returned one of the stranger's hands on his buttocks and placed the other long hand onto the stranger himself. Then he watched the stroking and pumping that lead to a whitish disgorging. With its passing the stranger went into the bathroom to urinate. A few seconds later, Nathaniel quietly exited the apartment for the first city bus he was able to descry. He kept wistfully hoping for his mother's return. He missed her.
With all windows open and at top legal speed, the wind dishevels his hair .His sunglasses are so dark that they make the day into dusk. His car is strewn with myriad CDs but he repeats the same song from one that belongs to his mother. He sings along with Led Zepplin.
"I've made up my mind to make a new start./ I'm going to California with an aching in my heart./ Someone told me there is a girl out there/ with love in her eyes and flowers in her ha-ir./ La la la la/ I took my chances on a big jet plane./ Never let them tell you that they are a-l-l the same."
He beats the steering wheel to the remainder of the tune until he glances at the gauge and decides to pull into the next gas station that he encounters . He has to laugh and that laugh comes out in a bitter and cyical drool. He wipes his mouth with his sleeve. His California girl lives in Sante Fe, New Mexico where her husband recently divorced her. She isn't a girl but a woman who last week, after recuperating from her face lift, emailed a photograph of her new face. She is just Hispanic Betty but he doesn't mind. Older women are more appealing to him and this one has always cared about him. He will use whatever she has to give to him. He has no compunction.
Chapter Thirty
And for those who never had epileptic seizures or other afflictions as young children and never witnessed their weaknesses mocked by cousins or other "family," their blessings were to be content to emulate others in their society and to follow the desires that were innate in human instincts.
But for outsiders like Gabriele, who when very young survived their mothers and fathers running over them in tanks and their forging of mutinous lives in the distant east only to then briefly succumb to spells of seizures following the witnessing of state sanctioned and individual applauded barbarity (in her case a couple weeks after the Turkish man's decapitation), their only blessing was a key to the discontent of their days.
Abhorring the cold and cruel functioning of Turkey's legal system and the world at large, this little Kansas girl, Gabriele, became sick upon her return to the States. When her sickness and flaccid sensitivities were vehemently ridiculed by "family," it was through the determination of her will that she willed herself well; and the seizures that mysteriously came mysteriously vanished.
Realizing that she had gone from one group of belligerents to another, and that this particular family was no less akin to war than the other one, she tried to think how best to survive being in her aunt and uncle's domain. This family's attempts to hurt her could not be controlled but being hurt resided in her domain. The latter was her choice. She told herself (it was really more of a feeling since, as precocious as she was she could not reason so well) that she would not allow herself to be destroyed in deliberately planted psychological landmines in this temporary coming together of family. In her own way, despite her young age, she felt the equivalent of "Why should I be a casualty in a make-believe war when the real landmines are real indeed and wide-spread in far reaches of the planet." And so she walked through back corridors of herself until at last she was in the outside world staring back at a gigantic cage. All alone in the outside domain she read her books like a good scholar, and watched some of the six billion spider monkeys within that cage. She saw how they obeyed their hungers to eat and so they did some tricks to get their food, hungers for sex and so they stole monkey mates which looked similar to themselves (monkeys were notorious xenophobes who only desired non- threatening monkey mates from nearby trees), hungers for stability so they clung to the same sets of branches and ate the same brands of bananas, made sacrosanct rules for themselves like never defecating on a tree, and developed little routines for themselves as to when one must eat (the arbitrary concoction of breakfast, lunch, and supper given appointed times) and when to swing to a new branch. So, it was with true chagrin that despite her obdurate snobbery at having to live beside such opprobrious creatures that she should find herself as one of the myriad monkeys.
The four of them had just returned from an American football game and she was still numb all over like someone who had been kidnapped, blindfolded, and finally freed with no explanation. She would have been less discontent to sit in a world football game (this thing Americans referred to as soccer). When young, she liked playing the game herself so sitting through continual action, even if it were continually boring, would not have been so bad. Better, she would have eagerly challenged Michael to a racket ball or tennis competition or played badminton or croquet with the whole family. Instead, like Patty Hearst taken from relaxation in front of her TV at gunpoint, she had been carried off and put on bleachers at an American football game. The boys, whom she nicknamed Mr. Placid and Mr. Petulant (Michael, formerly MF, being Mr. Phlegmatic), had willed this to happen. She couldn't have opposed them. It was her son's tenth birthday. It was one of her presents to Adagio that she should sit there on the bleachers stuffing these frankfurters or weenies into her mouth and staring onto this little sea of intermittent tackle and throw action (the object being thrown like an irregular, phallic weenie). There were crueler fates than the desire to jump out of one's skull. She had to continually remind herself that it was her son's tenth birthday and that she was doing this for him. These reminders helped her to construct a florid and baroque facade of smiles and chatter. Her chatter was a repetition of their ideas about the players and the plays. Since she hadn't really observed a thing and they seemed to like womanly creatures who would parrot their ideas, parrot them she did. The game being one and then two hours relegated to the past, it still seemed to go on incessantly in their imaginations.