She trashed her television set into the back of a closet and in his bedroom she began daily puppet shows of a simplified self-made Hamlet or King Lear adaptation and she would have him dance to the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven in unique movements she called the sangfroid. She grew pumpkin gardens and allowed him to feel the weight of the largest ones against his small frame just as she had done for the past two years. Now, for him, they had become gigantic balls that he couldn't pick up to bounce or the wheels of tanks. They were no longer the objects of wonder they had been a year earlier. She knew this inevitable truth but she didn't mind it terribly. Losing the wonder of small things in ones adventure to know bigger truths was the act of growing up and there was nothing she could do to stop it. She knew: the loss of wonder came upon a child's innocence like a Turkish beheading. She hoed around the 10 feet patch of garden and imagined the texture of one pumpkin she had detached for him recording itself onto his psyche as he rolled on it and scooted it around. She grew flowers so that molecules of smell and sight could make sketchy replicas of flowers in his brain. She wanted benign if not benevolent influences to make him special. "There will be no battery operated cars for this boy," she often told herself, for they would lead to a preoccupation with movement, and from movement to targets. She did not want to nurture the hunter within him. Instead she wanted to make him into a god for being alone in the celestial realm was lonely business. The materialistic, hedonistic, shallow specimen of movement had to go.

And yet they were not sedentary Buddha statuettes sitting on shelves and so she often took him to an outdoor pool or a heated indoor pool depending on the season. In earlier years, splashing in a baby pool large enough that he could not easily see an end to its greatness achieved the same aim as the oceans her father had taken her to. Within a large body of water one could always find Parmenides' entity and Aristotle's Prime Mover as one pursued that innate human need for physical movement. The realization that he was distressed about older boys going into the large pool when he wasn't permitted to do so caused her to lead him into deeper waters. He floated on a swimming board and sometimes on her palm under his chest as she treaded water beside him and allowed him to experience the tide when the whales of human bodies plunged in toward them

They also found mother and son bonding activities when lugging plastic containers into an environmentally friendly grocery store. From her example she wanted to nudge onto him a respect of Mother Earth, or at least a reluctance to be reckless with her. She wanted him to gain the habit of being the least environmentally destructive that was humanly possible. One of the bins had animal crackers and she would fill a small plastic container with these dead carcasses. She abhorred the drug of sugar and its impact on him but then she did not like enduring the choleric displays of a drug addict who was being blocked from getting his fix. He always craved for them like oxygen and there was little one could do with cookie or animal cracker cravings but succumb to them in the hope of getting some peace of mind. Always following the grocery expedition she would take him to the zoo and feed him the cracker carcasses only after he matched the animal cracker replicas to the beasts they were approaching and could say the names of the zoo animals in English, German, and Spanish. He couldn't sputter out the Latin so she had to give up on pushing that language into his head since she couldn't pull it out of his mouth. They spent Sunday mornings listening to church bells chime from their seats in a Laundromat. Around 10:30 the adjacent diner opened for business and from a window in one of the walls they would place orders for French Cream Cheese sandwiches. They were the oddest creatures in the Laundromat, dancing the sangfroid to a cassette recording of Evard Grieg's Peer Gynt with bread and cream cheese gushing in their mouths as they waited for their laundry to dry.

One day they went downtown to pay utility bills and afterwards they walked around the campus of Cornell University. At a bookstore she became intrigued by a biography of Alfred Adler and for a couple minutes she became fully immersed in the reading. During this time he bypassed her despite the fact that she had been trying to keep him tracked in the corners of her eyes. Imagining ethereal voices calling to him, he veered out the door and went to follow the Sun god that was descending into the crevices of buildings. The display was, for him, an obvious invitation of hide and seek. Pursuing the joy of the present moment, his imagination interwove him in the tangle of one's sense of direction and the deception of nature whose beauty belied its true disinterest in man since it had no intention of obeying any mortal calls. Each building became a whole forest, which overwhelmed him in vastness and darkness.

For over an hour she ran around like a mad woman frantically asking strangers if they had seen a child. She felt like Achilles chasing the tortoise and she scolded herself for not having put him on an arm leash the way she had when he was three. When at last she saw him staring down at a gas lamp god reflected into the waters of a lifeless fountain she at first wanted to pull down his pants and give him a beating with her hard, powerful palm but she was taken off guard by his emotional embrace and by her own unusual reactionary embrace of him. She held onto him tightly even though she had never wanted to hold onto anything. A lucid and excoriating speech was in her parched mouth but she could not say it. She only said the idea in her mind:" A bad man could have taken you. Don't you know that you can't run away from me?" A tear even slid down a cheek. She was a needy creature enmeshed in another being, vulnerable and susceptible to his actions. It was an uncomfortable state that she had never wanted.

At last she said, "You little scoundrel."

"Yes," he said. "I am your little scoundrel," and she laughed. It was as if he had read Nathaniel Hawthorne and he had cast himself into the part of Pearl.

That night she had dreams of Achilles chasing a tortoise and of different geometric shapes that were before her soon eluding her. She woke up the next morning in a cranky mood. Everything seemed to be aloof and impalpable. She burnt the pancakes like Rita Lily and called him to breakfast indifferently. His wishes that the orange juice be put into his new Mickey Mouse mug were fulfilled. It was just the dumping of one liquid content into another container. She did this without saying a word. She ate with him but she was hardened to his complaints about the taste of the meal. She was frowning and despondent the whole time.

Chapter Twenty

There was a triangular pack or trinity of stray dogs listlessly wiping snouts in whatever might possibly be edible as they interweaved around pedestrians' feet. Even the sniffing of its members was listless. A foot kicked one dog and there was a high-pitched breathless squeal that was scarcely audible. The dog pushed its weight and movement toward its right side the way a boy might sink into genuflection when the wind is knocked out of him and then it slunk off the sidewalk. Motionless for a moment while still standing, it then opted for movement although it could only stagger. It was not alone. A smaller dog from the trinity followed disconcertedly. It too veered in a right curve to the mirage of a refuge on the edge of the road as if it were the mean between two risky states. One hobbling and trying to yelp from a bit of a second wind and the other accustomed to follow that which had secured its sustenance at previous times, they walked together for a minute before being flattened by a truck and swallowed into the pot hole mouth of the pavement. The road, from its swallow, bloated and curved up like a hill before its true form materialized. Ostensibly, it was a road on an emerging hill but really it was the mutant growth of a head and a face. Out of nowhere it inexplicably gained animation and being. It was with life and without purpose. It was naked existence. The road would swallow much more again and again, get bigger, replicate more of itself, and die. "Mutations of the carbon of the planet are everywhere! I see it now: species are cells mutating over time; planets are clusters of cells; the galaxies are mere organs; and the universe is an organism. Individuals play their parts, thinking themselves autonomous as does any nucleus of a cell, but it isn't true." These were her thoughts as she opened her eyes.