"Lying, never! Fibbing, maybe or maybe not. How do you, Mr. Petulant, know what
I know?"
"How do you know that I don't know what you know?" he countered. It was an old argument that she had excavated from one of the many miscellaneous parables in the thickets of pages that comprised a Chinese literature anthology; however, she had never radiated the enlightenment of her findings onto him. Such was the brilliance of an original thought; and so her hope for him was restored. Strangely, this argument seemed like a means to a new dimension albeit a golden key to the nihilistic abyss; and she was a radiating mommy for the fact that he had coughed up such an instrument out of the static charge of one thought banging against another one—the being incessantly comparing, contrasting, and categorizing various thoughts silently inside itself. "To think that Benjamin Franklin brought down lightning with a key and Nathaniel has made a key out of lightening!" she thought facetiously. She smiled and reprimanded him banteringly. "Well, Adagio, you didn't tell me what you wanted to be or I would have bought a costume."
"I don't want to BE anything. Trick or treating is for kids and I don't want any of that stuff anymore."
"So, because you didn't make your request, all we have for you is a tacky sheet. You will be a ghost; and you see that I'm a witch—always have been and always will be." She ignored his complaint. She knew that a ten year old stood on the back of his nine year old carcass and that a being's development involved using all former selves of earlier ages as steps toward these adult pleasures of lust, greed, movement, and conquest. She knew that condemning the innate discontent within her son, society, or to some degree within herself seemed as mad and railing ramblings of a madwoman and so she chose to have no reaction whatsoever. As an artist she believed that her mission was to thread a new logical relationship of old ideas or facts if not formulate new ideas themselves, and to add some flash and color to the ordinary. Whether or not she was marginally successful at altering perspectives, one thing was certainly not within her power at all. She could never adjust the base instincts of one's physiognomy. All she could do with the latter would be to accept it as if it were the third, dragging leg. Cutting off this limb, with its major artery, would be certain death if done to another or society at large. Base instincts were the guardians of the species. Selfishness to suck out the bone marrow of life, survive, and fulfill one's pleasures were the means by which this species perpetuated.
"I just want to finish my video game."
"Your brain will do some serious rotting with much more of that shoot and kill stuff. With this outing only your teeth will rot."
She was reminded of a few weeks ago when she had taken him to a professional baseball game which Michael had promised to him before this dissolution of family. She barely managed to acquire tickets by offering to pay exorbitant sums if the ticket office were able to get them into a couple seats; and yet this Adagio, Nathaniel, this Mr. Petulant, was saturnine the whole time. "What's your problem?" she asked as they were leaving the parking lot following the game. "You shouldn't be the one I go with. You don't even like these games," he said; and, true as it was, there was nothing for her to do but stuff the remainder of the hot dog into her mouth and drive home.
She drove him into more affluent areas and took him from door to door as if he were five years old, and as if she were trying to make herself that age in the process. She too had a plastic jack-o-lantern pail. She too got chocolate thrust into the pile within her pail. Experiences accompanying him in a childhood that had been robbed from her, for whatever embarrassment they caused him, were a million times better than being a mother waiting on the sidelines with vicarious yearnings. The quest of a chocolate mendicant, a ghoulish monk seeking alms, was leading her into the simple pleasures that were the foundation for appreciating life, from disengaging out of one's limited perspectives and hopeful adult futuristic conquests, and to be in awe of the entity. And yet with each new house his aversion to say, "Trick or treat?" increased as with his tacit animadversion of his mother. House after house there were chocolate benefactors and benefactresses with similar wisecracks: "You are a little big and old to be trick or treating, aren't you — I can't see how old your ghost friend is but he seems a bit tall too." As much as he tried to suppress it, his loathing of her was ready to disgorge from his mouth like vomit.
An hour into this childish foray, she still did not have any Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and so she told him that with ten or fifteen more houses there would be a probability of acquiring her favorite brand of candy. Somewhere after the fifth extra house he felt a full abhorrence for the witch who put spells on men, drank their pee, had men, lost men, made a family by abandoning him when she went off to Europe, lost a family, found him an irritant when she was acting the part of the artist, suffocated him in embarrassments like this when she was trying to act the part of a mother, who never connected him to outside relatives like his real father or Peggy, and when he finally had some semblance of a father she caused his departure.
"I'm sick of you," he said. I want to go someplace else but I don't have an aunt, an uncle, or anybody to go to. Nobody cares about me."