In her ride back home in her Ferrari she postponed the inevitable by driving further on the interstate than she needed to go. The goddess that she was, she liked watching things come and go as well as how she felt superior in this fancy moving shell. She thought of a new argument and she recited it in her mind. 'I have decided to simplify our lives. What type of an example would I set if I were to cling to things, to relationships, never knowing myself? Are all people so at a loss of identity that they grope in front of anything that has a chance of being less perishable than themselves? It is disgusting. Anyhow, we need money and I'm selling everything off of value including the house. We can live in cardboard shacks or tree houses but we don't need this type of shit cluttering up space and time.' This was what she would say, or something more simplified that was along these lines."
Frustrated again from not liking his ideas, he forfeited words. Resting on his hill in the Valium of nature, it was as if he were coming down from all this spinning around in his own head because of a heaviness of words coalescing and jelling onto the walls of his brain. It seemed as though the twirling child were landing dizzy and drunk on life despite his morbid disposition from memories of family that scooted like a plastic cup blowing on an empty pavement—abhorrent memories loving and still as a photograph.
Chapter 41
To the ancient Egyptians man died each night in this void absent of the sun god and then each morning was resurrected in daybreak. She thought of this; and it seemed to her as she was driving home at 3 a.m., hair blowing and mind mesmerized in prevailing darkness, that this particular myth was as all religious balderdash that justified one egregious proclivity or another in the natural state. In Christianity this was myriad: everything from man's god-given dominion over animals in any arbitrary whim to the Lord's omnipotent power to part the Nile one moment and turn someone to stone the next (indiscriminate aiding of some and annihilating others). As the deliverer who cared so much about individual man as to intrusively know the amount of hair strands on each head He was the perfect god; and his conspicuous absence or non- involvement on 9-11 and countless other occasions of inhumanity of man to man was merely his allowing free will to command human affairs.
The ancient and relatively forgotten myth of the Egyptians explained man's mysterious absconding from the night in seven or eight hours of sleep as a partial death when apart from the vanquished sun. Its innocence had charmed her for years, but now it just seemed as one more vapid fable with no redeeming qualities. Going home circuitously, the idea of sleeping away one more night seemed as a reprehensible closing of one's eyes to the night's gilded silence. Long hours of atavistic sleep to keep the body still and hidden from barely visible predators had been utile in prehistory but now it was an anachronistic vestige of adaptation. Thwarting nocturnal consciousness of this fragile animal, man, sleep inadvertently obstructed an appreciation for all that was black — and she did want to appreciate all that was black.
Outside of bubbling in champagne and a bit of public relations to secure a sale what had this party been, she asked herself, unless it were to reclaim the night; and what had this bathroom rendezvous been but to cease to abscond from that which was black? She laughed at her joke, which she mumbled aloud to herself. Half drunk, she was inexplicably pleased with herself. She told herself that her adulterous tryst with this twenty minute black friend had been her refutation against the notion of ugly-bodied darkness. She inanely told herself that by brushing naked against his skin this making herself one with what was black had made the intimacy a higher accomplishment than mere banging. She was even amused by how easily amused she was in her self- containment in the car. For her, happiness was not dependent on external playmates although something vaguely similar to happiness was sometimes facilitated by them.
There was nothing like back roads so bare of automobiles. Driving made her feel as if she owned the night with the wide stretch of her headlights that were only deferentially dimmed at the encroachment of other automobiles on her terrain. She loved the peace and the vastness of these strips of road in the heart of unpretentious night; and if she had her way about it the universe would be purely black without the tawdry dappling of stars. It dawned on her that moving through night at sixty miles per hour her very movement was in opposition to what was splendid in the night. If Aristotle were right in saying that happiness was greatest in contemplating this non-changeable entity that had tossed the chemicals of inchoate matter, then cloistered artists, philosophers, and other contemplatives would be the dominant force on the planet. If contemplation were the highest pleasure in life wouldn't her canvas be more eagerly sought than her hedonistic flings or that which she was now pursuing: a sense of freedom by sipping a beer and riding around in a Ferrari. Being blown in all directions from the open windows of her car, she was half tempted to drive all the way into arctic Canada instead of returning to the odious smells of her paint—chemicals that were no doubt carcinogens if the nose were to express its opinion on the matter—paint once vibrant in her perceptions but now the mental strain of attempting to reestablish success.
She again contemplated the night. If only man had not had this fear of being eaten, sleep, if it were needed at all would be merely sporadic naps for the restoration of energy instead of this long withdrawal from the black of night. Then she thought about this twenty minute chocolate candyman, whom she named as Candyman II (Roman numerals giving him a sense of eminence). She told herself that she should have made him withdraw before being allowed to climax within her. He had worn a condom but it was doubtful that condoms were meant to stretch so far or be unbreakable when the long black horn was impaling with such force. How would she know whether or not it had ruptured? She would only know with the advent of symptoms from AIDS, syphilis, gonorrhea, and that whole list of undesirables.
She and her husband had an "open" relationship so long as neither one of them fell in love with someone else but she didn't want to die for the periodic cravings of sex and more importantly she did not want to harm her husband with a lethal touch. Like a postulant at a convent, she might well have relinquished such meretricious spells of lust months ago had she not held two opinions in favor of this "open relationship" remaining such. This sauntering away from domestic life always brought newness to marital vows upon one's return; and being shaken up in promiscuous rendezvous made the brain more lithe in generating ideas. Ever so often a woman needed to remove a man like her dirty panties for the required laundering. Ever so often a woman needed to put on some fresh panties when allowing the old ones to spin around in the wash. It was an ablution in a sense—this running barefoot in dirty fields to exorcise her demons of passion. When the exercise or exorcism was completed it allowed for domestic life there in its small space demarcated within drab walls. Sordid nights were a bit like wallpapering anew the old shack. But she did not think about the primary motivations for her adultery: the wish to not cling to this concept of a relationship as if it were an actual reality, the wish to debunk this notion of permanence in a mutable world, and that desperation to repudiate her vulnerability as one who would like to cling to such things, to cling to her man.
Guilt…there was none—not even when arriving at the house. She was, of course, surprised to see her man's car parked in the drive but it was not a catalyst of guilt per se. While the solitary newlywed was getting out of her car she considered a half imagined societal measurement of her actions. It was from it that there was a mordant gnawing within that might be labeled as compunction. She doubted it at first, but then why should she doubt? She was not totally immune to others. As much as she might claim that feelings were her own self-manufactured car that she drove around in, she would be a veritable lunatic were she to have feelings that were little else than her own imagined whims. Also her art would not pertain to anyone if she were not to some degree a product of her world, as repugnant as that thought was to her.