She said it despite these urges within her continually to just nod to whatever he said and to cling to him as if family were the most concrete of life's illusions. It was only from being run over by a tank or two and having known the temporary nature of an insufferable family that she was saved from that illusion. She smiled. It was wry with a general look of confusion. As he walked away she found it mildly amusing that girlhood tragedies were delivering her from feminine predilections.
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