She wrote a few sentences in her journal. For the first time she jokingly admitted, in its pages, the desire for MF to become a returning client. It wasn't really so much good sex that she craved as the companionship of a male friend or friendship in general. She had not exchanged perspectives of adult realities (such as so and so sending a resume through email on this advent called the Internet) nor had she engaged in racket ball competition since her friendship with Betty at Rice University. She had not had a steady boyfriend since early in her undergraduate education when she decided that men were special creatures who were uniquely loathsome in no lesser degrees than women. She felt a stagnancy of a life with little personal inside of it but her books, paintings, and the child who would be going away to school fairly soon. It was a bizarre version of stagnation in a life that by its prime purposes should not have been stagnating at all: by being a mother, she nurtured; by reading she was nurtured in the profound, and the profound was so unlike the pointless levity of socializing with living creatures; and by painting she rose into Godhood in the realm of ideas. And yet being wholly purposeful was such a solitary domain relegated to gods and not to creatures of movement who needed frivolity and interplay of ideas of the most shallow domain to feel alive. Between the need for a physical feeling that one man had bewitched upon her and that need for frivolity and friendship in the adult domain, she realized that such a recipe could very well be a toxic combination of ingredients. It was the baking of a vulnerability and she was not prone to consume vulnerabilities. Women meandered around as gadabouts while consuming their chocolaty vulnerability like bonbons but, she told herself, she was not a lowly woman.
She opened the bedroom door and walked out. She saw the fern in the living room. That one plant was intact, stagnant and alive in the purpose of its pot as she was in hers. She did not see any dirt anyplace. Even if Nathaniel had cleaned the floor it wouldn't have been done so neatly. Mouse stood there in front of her boldly. "Mouse, did you do something bad?" The cat looked at her dumbfoundedly. "Hmm, I didn't think so," she said. So, the boy had lied to her about the cat defecating in the fern's soil. "How did he learn to lie?" she asked herself and her higher authority said that a boy did not need a model: he would use logic like a sophist. He would display his rationale like fireworks for dazzling and dazing one in darkness. He would dazzle and daze others into believing that such brevity of lights was a firm reality. Her higher authority said that using logic to one's advantage was an instinct no different than sucking and biting. Then she saw that the door was open.
"He didn't!" she said, knowing that he had. She put a bosky robe over her black negligee. In ways she was dressed as a soldier and as a witch and yet neither role seemed too germane. Mother Earth, Father sky, and her own wrath would do nothing to solve this situation. For five minutes she ran out of the trailer park and a block down the road but acting like a lunatic got her nothing but the split soul of a slipper. She swung a fist in the air and, as if she were a female version of Zeus, the lightning pierced the sky. Still, this did nothing for her. Would she act the maternal part of worrying, crying, and feeling angry and betrayed? Such a part was too ludicrous to conceive. "What if he gets lost? What if he gets hit by a car? What if he does?" she thought to herself. "I'm not linked to him forever. Even good mothers can't monitor a child's movements every second of the day. A child obeys his own self-centered little voice despite a guardian's best intentions. The world is a risky place. That's not my fault either. I've done nothing wrong." She locked all doors and windows but the window in her bedroom that she left half open. When he crawled through it like a thief hours later she gave him the spanking of his life. She was not sure if spanking was for the benefit of the child through negative reinforcement or to release the stress of a child's guardian. She couldn't see that it mattered.
Chapter Twenty One
As the first days of the school year came and went, Gabriele still vied for time through the sheer act of forgetting. Whatever apprehensions or misgivings she was experiencing about sending her child to school, they were such that she, nonchalant, would never claim them to be fears nor acknowledge any malaise about the inevitability of external influences on her son. And yet subliminal fears were pulling her away unaware like a sleeping motorist who gets towed away with the vehicle for the impounding. She simply forgot about the date for the school registration even though school buses were roaring about everywhere in the city. Hearing buses from a distance, she should have easily remembered failing to enroll him in kindergarten the previous year when he was five; but her denial was a thick opaque fog and what she didn't do last year slipped from her no differently than enrolling him into school this year. The higher authority of self remained her goddess; and it was keeping her wrapped in swaddling innocence. It was innocence consisting of a belief in the present moment that she had serendipitously fallen into the previous autumn.
During last autumn, Adagio was particularly insistent on getting her to do what Chuck's parents had done. Restive, she had to bite her lip and say nothing. Emulating or just imitating someone else, even if it were done for her son, made her feel awkward and look disconcerted if not gauche; and yet, thinking about it for a moment, she had to admit that raking leaves into piles was not a big request. She knew that it would take some scavenging to pull together a pile or two of leaves but she decided that she could do this in her own unique way. She didn't mind simple challenges like this as long as she did not have to rake someone else's yard. She didn't want to meet neighbors for their small talk would be too unbearable. Those she had met before never used small talk as a step in the ladder toward more engaging topics. Each conversation was as if the previous ones never happened. Also these neighbors would pose personal questions to her and ask why she had so many male friends coming to the trailer at all hours. They would be pure hypocrites as if they weren't having sexual relations in their own trailers; and she would be there smiling at them but looking totally baffled as to why these superficial matters of what one did (action) instead of who one was (entity) were all that germane. She knew her relations were more innocent than theirs. Hers were for that needed substance called money but theirs were for the sleaze and pleasure of the moment; and if they were monogamous that showed an unnatural behavior indicative of psychological dependency. She could state boldly, "I think you are trying to ask what I do with these men who come to the trailer. Right? Of course, it is what you think. I'm a prostitute. Be sure to tell all your buddies." She could look them in the eyes and smile during the ensuing discussions. She would be able to declare such things and then talk affably about one neighbor's burgeoning tomatoes with superb poise but such frankness might wind up with a policeman on her doorstep, a short jail term, and a fine. She told herself that she would rake only in her own confined space clearly demarcated by a wooden fence and that such action would involve just a little imitation. She told herself that a little imitation was fine. After all, she could not claim herself to be 100 percent original. Even she imitated other people in myriad actions she never even considered from buying fashionable shoes to not running butt-naked in the streets.
The action of raking was at first a begrudging fulfillment of a simple request. Then it became merely using the scanty resources of the tiny plot surrounding the trailer to indifferently concoct what Chuck's father had done easily in the yard of that new double-wide trailer with its many and varied trees. A half-hour into the raking it refreshingly became an eagerly anticipated foray into childhood, which so many years ago had been smashed under the metal belt wheels of a metaphorical tank. With her son, she dived into piles, which she had raked for him in tandem. Inferior to the mellifluous smelling orange piles at Chuck's home (so she was told), these smaller, much greener, and dirtier mounds were a scanty mixture of dried leaves with freshly mowed weeds, sparse grass, and a couple bags of mulch. The piles were concocted but the experience of falling into them was anything but concocted. Her son, and the summons of fulfilling her role as a mother, inadvertently led her to the feel, taste, and smell of the present moment. During those times of last autumn, not yet experiencing the anxiety about necessarily having to send him off to school, she fell into the entity; and surprisingly, it wasn't something that one stared at from a beach. Mouth half open while plunging head first into the itching and asphyxiating pile of elements as dark as death, this ostensible foray into childhood belied the fact that the dive was really into the main artery of the heart of the entity. In that moment of seeing, feeling, smelling, and accidentally tasting the present moment other aspects of it were equally enlightening. She was surprised that for all her walks on various beaches, trying to make sophisticated judgments about life to match the thickets of her adult neurological connections, by comparison these had been wasted hours. Such attempts at staring at the ocean had never brought her as close to the entity as this. They didn't give her much peace of mind. The oceans might have untangled some of her twisted logic but they always tangled her in a new set like seaweed adrift. Surprised that the entity had not been in the string of sacrosanct words one concatenated silently in the corners of the mind to catch truth the way a spider makes a web to catch its prey, she had found it to be in simple experiences gained from one's senses. What was even more surprising was that the entity could be sensed, for this empirical experience refuted the theories of Parmenides and Plato. Also, she was surprised that it was her son who, by this leaves-jumping, was leading her into a Gabrielish discovery and yet she told herself that being so surprised was rather foolish in a way. After all, how surprised should one be that the entity was grounded in simple pleasures? To be any merit at all to a life, truth had to be more than mere abstraction. And considering that insatiable and avaricious desires of adulthood for higher and more intense pleasures was a loose debris of discontentment only in the realm of the child (only of running to the feel of the wind, grass poking through the toes of the feet, the fascination of changes of division in light and shadow, and all considered in the pejorative as childish and foolish) was one on a solid form of happiness.
"Is it as simple as jumping in a bunch of leaves?" she posed to herself incredulously. But it was inevitable that with having had craven parental defectors and deserters march in and out of her nativity, having been run over by a tank, and having seen a Turkish beheading, the simple pleasures had eluded her. Violence had caused her to build her fort and look onto the world as a sentinel and sentinels were not equated with childish sentiments." She laughed in that strange Gabrielish mixture of profound and morbid levity after rising up from her second plunge into the pile and brushing off the leaf, grass, and weed concoction.
Now, with four days into the school year already passed, she was still avoiding the purchasing of groceries in the afternoons. She told herself that her artwork was more poignant when the sun was at its fullest; but really it had been from an avoidance of the yellow school buses that she would have encountered. Subconsciously she wanted to spend as much time with him as she could so she began to disregard the policy of him going to bed at 9:00. She would allow him to play games until he fell asleep on the sofa forcing her to carry him off to his bedroom. Since that autumn of a year ago she was living in the present moment through most of each day and disregarding the future as entirely as a mortal could. She repudiated any reality that went contrary to the motif of finding the entity through simple pleasures of the senses experienced in the present moment. She told herself that simple pleasures were the real and the true foundation of happiness but from them arrogant and greedy man made preposterous edifices—complete skyscrapers of selfishness and avarice that would fall down from any jet being slammed into them (any life crisis that tenuous carbon creatures of mortality were always bound to have).
[Sang Huin was seated on his bed with a laptop computer burning his skin. He realized that the World Trade Center metaphor was an anachronism for the story of Gabriele and yet it seemed to him that an omniscient and omnipresent narrator might well be 6 or 7 years ahead of the time.]