The circumstances behind the slingshot were a peculiar thing: apprehension about knocking on their bedroom door for fear that his knocking would become pounding which might cause them to withhold his gifts; still early and no movement from above, the discarded black sheep, the piqued shadow, the cast away reunited with she who cast him out, leaving the clock and going into the yard to waste some time; the hunting of birds with a bb gun, feeling bored, and in places stomping out the obscene whiteness of the snow by grating it black, ever so often, with the heel of a boot; the return to the kitchen to again watch the incessantly slow turn of the second hand of the clock; still no sounds from above so deciding to burn bacon and to turn down the furnace in the hope of smoking or freezing them out; the pacing around a gigantic Christmas tree barren of gifts underneath; and then going into one of the bathrooms. Frustrated while "taking a leak" it was there that the brassier hanging on the wall had seemed like an unpatented snow boomerang there to show his misogyny.
"Comrade Sangfroid?" yelled the man into the tree. "What do you want?"
The boy put his hands around his mouth like a megaphone to facilitate the sound. "The queen of Antarctica, Comrade," he said. "Her gifts."
"Comrade of crude weapons," yelled the man. His voice was indistinct and garbled by the cough of saliva having rushed down his throat in his laughter. "Why shoot they who give freely?"
Gabriele nudged herself between the man and the window, dangling hers as the man did his. She saw the boy and the bra there at a bit of a distance. "Yes?" she yelled. She was amused, puzzled, and a little annoyed by the sight. She waited for words from a specimen unwilling to give them. Obviously, she noted to herself, smirking and laughter at the absurdity of talking to one's nude parents one Christmas morning from a tree would have been a natural proclivity for such a refreshingly or embarrassingly peculiar situation; but this smirking seemed a calm sadistic enjoyment of what she believed to seem to him as perverse. An enjoyment of the perverse seemed to drool in all orifices and he stared at them with virulent intensity. Didn't those eyes say, "What are you doing with that whore?" Didn't it bang around his mouth and peek loosely from his lips? She did not know. No, she told herself, this idea was perverse. Her imagination was a viral infection on her sound judgments and she told herself that she should be ashamed of her thoughts.
On this branch he once sat to gain a reprieve from Sharon and Rick and to make the former tenants of the house uncomfortable his composure was unperturbed. Having lived in Gabriele's experiment once before, it was not new to him now. To be the specimen of her scrutinizing gaze was once an ossified aspect of his daily existence. Once the specifics of what it was like to be her son had been forgotten for a generalized feeling of revulsion; but now that he was here the forgetting was being forgotten and the revulsion was replaced by the need to adapt and thrive within his circumstances. Not wishing to provoke her to hate him, he put the brazier in his coat pocket and then descended from the tree.
And like any goddess from Hera to Athena she knew the sweet venom of empathy, could see the corroding batteries of Her specimen's heart without wincing, and would have stared that way indefatigably until he at last fell from the tree. But once he absconded she just returned to her side of the bed. She wanted to cry mutely into the pillow but her man was there so she stoically absconded into a book on Asian owls.
Chapter 40
Without much regard as to where he should sit, he just sat. It was a more remote spot in Seoul Grand Park that seemed to be directly under a kite slapped by distant winds. For he who sought to circumvent the scrutiny of others to pursue his strange stern ruminations his only wish was to be seated in solitude; and not having it, he accepted a more remote variation. Frustrated by his writing and unable to believe that he was doing anything but spinning around in his head, he tried to relax in the sunlight and within a Valium of smells such as the very dirt and weeds beneath him. He stared at the kite and the peculiar shaped clouds emerging into the sky until becoming bored with both, he turned to the ground. Withdrawn into nature and himself, he felt his energy and peace of mind begin to replenish. It fluttered weakly as the gray moth that he was watching; and it seemed to him that this spasm of optimism was as lithe as a soul was capable of being were one to have such a thing instead of damnable memories and words like walls in a maze of the mind which deluded one into thinking that he was advancing to someplace or another.
He imagined himself at a convocation of words in which he designated where each word should sit within the weeds and clumps of dirt. He imagined that when he did not like their arrangement, or their bickering amongst themselves, each obsequious word eagerly got up and changed to a different seat of his choosing with the snap of his fingers unlike their real obstinate and disgruntled nature; and when he said their names numerically according to their rows an invocation of truth would ensue. The guidebook, written by the subconscious, would have enough veracity to be a prototype for they who also squatted on the outskirts of normal existence, or at least a means for him to lose himself —if not find himself—there, within his prose.