"Sounds good to me," said Gabriele. "You can do that while I set up house." She got up and pulled him toward the area where Mouse was pacing in parched emptiness nervously. She laid out a large rug near the staked cat, erected an umbrella, and took out suntan lotion, a book, Coka Cola, a CD player, and chewing tobacco from her large bag. She put on a hat that made her look like an Asian rice farmer. Then she began to listen to Paganini's Caprices. Meanwhile her son chose an area for the construction site. She wondered why he had chosen one plot of sand over another plot. Sure, he was on a leash and so he did not have a wide area to choose from; but a bigger question was why anyone would choose to sit in one chair over another one in an audience where the seats were not assigned. When one wasn't mandated to a table by one of those restaurant hosts, why would a given customer choose one table over that of another? That was a mystery. Did the mind fool a person into believing one spot was better than another one so that action could be implemented without lots of hesitation? She hadn't ever thought about this point before. Her son brought to her many thoughts. "That is one good reason to keep him around," she kidded to herself.
"The sand won't stick."
"Well put enough water on it to make it sticky and not so much to make it runny. Same as cement. You really should begin the foundation of your castle closer to the water-only not so close that the waves get to it. That way you don't have to use so much bottled water."
"Well, then I need more rope," he said.
"Okay." She unraveled some of the rope from the leash that was wound on her arm. She allotted to him more freedom for his imaginary worlds.
"I want a house. Not a castle. I want it to have a bed and its own room. The closet will be in—"
He droned on and on. In some respects his little ideas were charming but she had to turn off a great deal that he said to stay sane. "Castle, house, house, castle—who gives a flying f—" permeated through her brain tissue. She loved this egocentric being that had pulled out of her body and she did not consider him too boring. She watched him work against the odds of crumbling sand and an avalanche of shoddy construction, sculpting out some edifice that he attributed as having meaning and a link to a civilized creator. She watched this little individual who was a microcosm of all the worker ants sculpting their tunnels of dirt that would ultimately collapse. None of them thought of the ultimate corollary that human life and endeavors would go back to nothingness and the entity that brought it all about. She felt compassion for him, for all of them, like a goddess looking on her pathetic children. To some degree, she was pleased that he emulated her myth of the sun. Within moderation it was a good and humane fabrication. The creation of her version of the creator was a meaningful and benevolent lie of universal brotherhood and it seemed to her that the ultimate goal of motherhood was to nurture humane behavior even if one had to lie upon occasion.
To escape a violent world daydreams, liquor, and hallucinogens were always warranted. To counter innate violent inclinations there needed to be a benevolent god to emulate-one that was palpable and touched everyone and one to whom there weren't stories or rules to be brainwashed in to gain membership. She did not know. There were no guidebooks for rearing children. One ad-libbed the best that one could do. It was a daily chore and one where there weren't any vacations that would allow objective contemplation of past mistakes.
She put away her book, Why I am not a Christian, by Bertrand Russell. The book needed to be perused deeply but she couldn't do that because she needed to keep a part of one eye on the boy and a part of the other eye on the cat. She went over to help him with his futile task. Within an hour they had constructed an elaborate castle. Fulfilling his intentions, this peeping Tom became fixated on looking through the windows of the Sun house in the hope of seeing an anthropomorphic sun god shrinking himself into its corridors. Finding nothing but prolonged darkness, he returned to staring up at the clouds and the bright intensity that was the sun.
She wanted to kick the sun castle. She wanted to destroy it, to blast it away, and to bring it back to its initial matter. She even contemplated a more debase act. She thought about unleashing Mouse and tossing it onto the roof of the castle when Nathaniel was not looking— however, she rationalized that a mother who blamed her actions on a cat would be more despicable than a worm. This idea of framing culpability on the cat swiftly left her consciousness to decompose back into whatever neurotransmitter combinations and neurological circuitry had come together to formulate it. She felt irritated at herself for ever reinventing Aten and for being Akhenaten forcing one more damnable myth into the world. After all, this one, for its merits, could ruin a boy's eyesight.