Chapter 39
You are the favored one: this was what she had told her son. But the mendacity, now reverberating in memory, seemed more spurious than it had two weeks earlier when she had articulated it sotto voce within the wisps of her breath. Still it was true in the sense that most things were true in a sense, for in her malaise on that cold Christmas morning, shuddering before a vapid wall of canvas, she guessed that multifarious and antithetical points to propositions of truth were all there was.
A child, even this one, was a sensitive creature whom she, an adult, needed to emphasize certain points to while tiptoeing away from others. But, she argued in solitary inward dialogues within herself, which she found to be the most engaging form of companionship, that did not necessarily mean that her quiet tiptoeing prevarications were lies.
With words as the most viable means of projecting a given concept of one mind onto another and with them having to permeate the dense grey matter, unchanged, through the hard surface of experience and preference, it was a wonder that misunderstandings did not rule fully in all human concerns. A small lie here and there in place of misunderstood truth, she argued, was the expedient of presidents and kings. Even this Texan hick, George Jr., who seemed to her as abhorrent as a president was likely to become, was marginally justified in misleading the American populace the way she had been forced to deviate from truth for the sake of her son. The apocryphal president could not have averred his wish to contrive a war against any rogue state for any random reason even though that was his intention. He could not have declared that North Korea, the desired bombing target for setting this example of what hegemony could do, had been spared from war by Seoul's proximity to the DMZ and that Iraq had been chosen to be the favored ersatz. He needed an imminent threat to sell his war: these elusive weapons of mass destruction, which could always be argued as "out there," present but obscure.
Just as she could not have admitted to Nathaniel that Rick had been the favored one all along, now she was still reluctant to admit to herself that on that night when she brought him home she had fallen into such a deep depression. Only in her sleep were fictional distortions of this mortification sometimes coerced onto her memory. And every time that this happened she would wake up, get out of bed, and immediately engage herself in sundry activities which busy people devised to fortify themselves from wild, disturbing thoughts that they were not able to successfully corral (of course always going to the bathroom first but you don't really need to know those specifics, do you?) Among them would be attempting to bake edible cookies and cakes which still had the hope of ingratiating herself to her son without making the obdurate Gabriele look repentant. Unorthodox she might be, the former whore, witch, and child deserter with her cookie stained hands, but she was not a propitiatory type. After considering the pros and cons of a given issue in its probable impact on others she executed her decisions as she should and never revisited them repentantly.
No one had witnessed her behavior at the blighted homecoming and yet she was mortified by her conduct all the same: the quick turning off of the engine; the turning of the house key to barricade herself from the lugubrious stillness of the car so that she might depart into the intimacy of ideas in a book read under the sheets; watching Nathaniel, an icy stranger to her, turn on lights in his descent into the pit of his bedroom; sensing an effete adumbration of herself, detached from her body, as it ascended the staircase to her bedroom pulling along a body that was as weak as an old woman; and then lifelessly collapsing onto her bed still in this out-of-body sensation.
Inanimate being that she was, for a minute she found peace. But then the next moment she was a petrous rural landscape shaking from a tremor and then there was this inexplicable tsunami of tears slapping against the rubble of her cheeks. She weltered her face in a pillow on her bed in the hope of suffocating her sobs and burying her tears that were shed for the loss of the favored son who had not come from her womb and from being hated by the other one who was supposed to be her and yet wasn't.
The melancholy that had overtaken her, replicated itself in the cracks of her rocks, and for a time fed off her tears, lived even when the water was exhausted. For a couple hours after her tears were all used up the thought that she hadn't even been allowed to see Rick for a few minutes continued to torture her as she lay immobile on her bed. But at last she was able to summon her strength: she was able to repudiate the nadir by attaching herself to objective philosophic wisdom that rejected any attachment to earthly ephemeral creatures in this mixing and diluting of herself.
Was the Earth a good place? For the species, man, who suffered the least it was for a good many and for most others it was not. Whether or not it was an efficacious use of stardust was both unknown and irrelevant when any assessment was stuck in the confines of changing perspectives influenced by innumerable combinations of travail and felicity in each moment of life. Was she right to have traveled the world, sought enlightenment, and shunned being in the confines of an ongoing maternal role and its ensuing responsibilities? It too was hard to measure. Her peregrinations were done quickly but with proper consideration so it never seemed to her that she should be apologetic.
But certainly she now had a belligerent child on her hands. Already she was attempting to counter his truancy, smoking habits, his returning home late into the early evenings, and his refusals to offer explanations for any of it. Early into his contempt she assumed that her failure at explaining herself to him had been the source of the problem; and so seeking a bridge of minds she once delineated a biographical profile of herself to him: her soldier-parents' dereliction of duties, the Turkish beheading, the church-going uncle and male cousins who tried "to finger" her in Peggy's home, her untoward will that shunned lies of family, God, and nation, her desire to raise a son who would be better than the herds of men, and her maternal neglect so that she might study, contemplate, and travel so as not to neglect herself. This only intensified his cold stares and these ideas, her profile, sank like an irrelevant stone that he threw into a lake. Eleven days into the reunion with no sign that the contempt would burn out, in her exasperation she began floggings with a belt the way Michael had done; and for this pain to both parent and child all that she got for it was his contrived grinning and her chagrin that she had succumbed to barbaric, frustrated impulses and bullying savagery. Still, she could not be the contrite and effete parent who allowed a child's helter-skelter whims and contempt of the parent to tread victoriously onto the agenda of the day. Lacking the practice of self-discipline such a savage, when grown, would justifiably loathe the parent for not having gained that which would provide him with happiness.