"Into leaves"
"Okay, into leaves; but now I have decided. There will be no school for this boy. I'll keep him here with me."
"You silly bitch!" yelled her higher authority vehemently. "I have better things to do than argue with you about things so boring and irrelevant to the scheme of things. The boy's already one year behind his peers. Being led to the entity is well and good but if the kid's your crutch you've got serious mental problems."
As if not hearing a word the higher authority was saying, Gabriele mumbled to herself, "Maybe I could avoid putting him into kindergarten again this year. Matter of fact, I'll teach him everything he needs to know throughout grade school and then he can go to school with his peers when he is 13. He wouldn't like being in kindergarten as the oldest one in the class anyway. I can't imagine it to be a kinder garden than what I have here in this home. Likewise, he wouldn't like first grade a year later because he'd be older than the other kids, or second grade, or the third—" The higher authority did not answer. She had vanished with the inhaling, coughing, and exhaling of a big puff of smoke; and meanwhile Gabriele was high and smiling widely. She was vertiginous with so much life running through her veins that she did not want to waste. It, like the atoms of the cosmos, was pouring, clotting, recycling, breaking up, and then flushing out into something new within her.
The marijuana had relaxed her and she was taking a piggy back ride on the shoulders of a Heraclitus shaped cloud. Opaque questions seemed interlinked and mysteriously solved: of motion versus contemplation; Parmenides versus Heraclitus; being the warm, soft, cuddly mother depicted in Harlow's monkey experiments so as to not have a traumatized monkey on her hands versus finding more purpose to life than reering one's young; attachment versus independence; and the containment of her son versus the release of him. What solved these questions was the analogy that just as solar systems in the spilling universe rarely have planets capable of sustaining life, few are the contemplatives in the movements of sociable and voracious man. She told herself that she had only one life and she would not dilute it for any "kid ." She thought, "I'll do my thing and let him do his" but what she really meant was that she doubted that she was capable of making him into a better person if she isolated him. With the exception of creative goddesses like herself, a mind was a photocopy machine and a file cabinet. Her son needed to go to school and copy external forces for good or for bad and she needed to pull away from motherhood to contemplate and create even if it meant going back to her lonely solitary ways.
He felt as if he were extirpated and then without roots replanted in foreign soil; but at the same time as if he were something less than a boy and shrinking exponentially every moment he was in school. Like any kindergartner, daily he yearned for the mother he departed from and could not understand why he was ushered so much of the week into a bus that took him away from her. He didn't protest despite being tearful. He went like any semi-cognizant lamb and camouflaged himself shyly in the thickets and brambles of himself. Mrs. Graham told them to drink their pints of milk and eat their graham crackers, pledge allegiance to the flag, skip around her desk happily or not, draw the lines that were the parameters of form and create form by means of color, bang sticks and rattles rhythmically like African Pygmies, lace and tie shoes neatly, say their ABCs and the sounds they symbolized, listen to stories and articulate questions about them, obey calls for mandated naps on mats where one could never sleep, and try not to interrupt these activities with requests to go to the bathroom while at the same time not wetting one's pants. Two years went by. He was in his second year.
Touch football, soccer, gymnastics, and all realms of movement in PE class helped to compensate for this institutionalized life. The discomforts of confinement were also assuaged with the help of homeroom mothers like his who brought in treats. Gabriele's cheese and cracker concoctions once each month were woefully inadequate in comparison to preceding days of cupcakes; and cognizant of this she all the more emoted a self-confident poise in the distribution of her crackers. She was certain that no one yearned for things but experiences; and by believing in the pleasures he and his classmates would get from her little efforts, she made it so. Her presence was a lesson on the quintessence of reality where successful emulation in superficial ways could be bypassed if done confidently. He was glad for anything that would stifle the unpleasant but pervading shadow of Mrs. Dinosaur who often forced him to stand under a coat rack with his nose against the wall as coats and the shortage of breathable air encased him. These episodes happened for letting his imagination stow away on passing vehicles he could see from the window. She alone was not the gravamen of his long list of grievances. He hated having to keep track of paper and pens, Little Orphan Annie with her preponderance of fat who aimed dodge balls toward boys' balls, and Shirley and her hitgirls who, during recesses, would often pin him down on the merry-go-round for the smothering of kisses.
One day he was sitting in the classroom dreading another time of having his energy subjugated to the mat when out of nowhere came a mathematical question aimed and moving toward him as an arrow. He felt the sting, fidgeted worse than ever, perspired heavily, and began to blush. The corollary of looking stupid, he knew, would be his inevitable smothering within the heavy coats of the clothes rack for not being able to give an answer. He would be standing with his nose pressed against a wall while his classmates took their naps. He wanted to answer the question and yet he couldn't see how he could do this if he hadn't heard it. He was at a loss and he resented his predicament. He wanted both to cry and put more holes into the pothole-faced teacher with the aid of his rarely forsaken tools of rubber bands and quickly manufactured spit wads. His ethereal dreaminess, moving and emblazoned with the sun, was an unrecognized form of experience. Experience was knowledge as intangible and ineffable as daydreams probably were; and yet this dreaminess was being indicted by Mrs. Dinosaur and usurped by her mathematical abstractions. "I don't give a flying fuck about numbers" he told her with the honesty Gabriele extolled and espoused as well as her word choice. His two front teeth were missing at the time so as he literally spit out the opinion in a lisped and retarded noise the teacher was stunned to hear profanity of the worse kind not only coming from a boy that was her pupil but in the tone of Daffy Duck. Words, wisps of vibrating air, which should have been as fleetingly unreal as any passing wind, were such indelible things. They couldn't be dropped into one's shoes like doodled parodies of the teacher that he and his classmates often exchanged so that they could be perused later in the toilet and flushed away invisibly with urine and excrement. In ways, an idea in sound permeated another being immediately and non- retractably like a noxious gas.
Before school had started it was as if Gabriele and Nathaniel were completely alone except for the clients. It was as if in her remote choice for a home she had the idea that she could plant a society like a garden, water it nicely, and extirpate it of weedy or symbiotic associations. It was as if she believed that when left to her guidance, allowed to spin around happily in play according to his own benign whims, and following nothing but the occasional orphic music of the ice- cream truck, her son would be a self-contained paradigm of happiness. Back then when he was four and five she had two years of really believing that such bliss would go on perpetually and she half dreamed that if she succeeded with him, she could advocate Gabrieleism everywhere. It would be her movement—a philosophy of self-containment and human empowerment to ward off loneliness, curiosity, and hormones that always stunted intelligent beings from pushing onto the next species. Guarding against these foibles, according to her, would make one less of a sociable and hedonistic monster than he or she would be otherwise.
And yet, despite her conviction that her strange life was the way of truth, she had her misgivings about it. There were times she hated clients who had banged forcefully within her; and that tacit hate shot out like lasers from her eyes. It would be directed toward situations such as loud cellular telephone conversationalists interrupting her contemplative sketches in the park, and bank tellers who closed the counters to go to lunch once she arrived at the head of the queue with her non-taxable, ill-gotten gain. With the bank tellers in particular she wanted to snap off their noses like the ends of green beans. Also, there were times within her migraines when her stalwart ship felt puny and spun around in waves with all abilities to track its coordinates failing to operate. In illness she often wondered if her ideas about life were nothing but rabid madness. She wondered, at times, if denuding a human with her Gabrielism was like picking off the meat of the man or woman to get to the real human; and since she was smart enough to have reservations about her logic, everyday she continued to put her son on the yellow school bus. "Anyhow," she thought many times through these three years, "rightfully, there are laws against keeping children out of schools and breaking laws to live with an ignorant savage is more trouble than its worth." She was just sorry that she couldn't afford the time to home school him herself or send him to a private school.