He reached out to her, trying to calm her in her last moments, but she spat in his face.
“Just like your father,” she repeated the endless mantra of his childhood. “Gives me the dry heaves just to think he had his thing in me even once, much less a dozen times before he could impregnate me. And then he runs off. All because he got a little ill in the head and began to think he had some sort of cancer or disease 'cause some asshole doctor tells him he's losing red blood cells or some such shit, and then in the end, he checks outta reality altogether… becomes a total fucking murderous maniac and winds up in the loony bin in of all places Philadelphia, from where he escaped in a blood bath and-”
“I don't wanna hear no more, Mother!” he'd shouted at her. “Just go die of your own foul disease!”
She didn't miss a beat. “-and you, you know what they say about the acorn not falling far from the tree, and if you want to look up your genetic freak of a father, you only have to look, in the box, boy.”
She finished with another coughing jag, blood coming up. So apropos to her cursing Giles.
That had been years ago, the year of Mother's death that somber November day and night while he kept vigil at her bedside, not to ease her mind or as the obedient son but to be sure she was really dead when she finally took her last breath. He'd so wanted to open her up, remove her spine and feed on it as he'd done her cat, but he never got the chance.
Afraid of him, afraid of what he might do to her after death, she had ordered up her own cremation and the funeral home placed in charge, a place called French and Parker's back in Millbrook. The funeral boys rushed in like ghouls on automatic pilot and whisked her off straightaway on the basis of a court order she had made out in the event of her death to be cremated. French and Parker did not disappoint Mother. They did the cremation within hours according to her wishes, no wake, no fanfare, no candle burning, nothing. Mother's lawyer worked in close conjunction with the funeral home, overriding Giles's wishes for an old-fashioned, closed coffin wake, thinking he might get at the body sometime between its being embalmed and put out on the floor, thinking the spinal fluid and bone marrow from the backbone ought rightly to be his.
The thoughts most certainly frightened him, galled him even, but worst of all, the thoughts of doing this to Mother, extracting her essence, her luz, her al abj, her strength and her power to make it his own made him wonder even more deeply than ever about his father's identity, his insanity, his urges and actions. Only hinted at all these years by Mother but now handed over to him all wrapped in ribbon as a fucking nasty awful joke of a gift. Like handing someone a gun used by a suicide victim and calling it a gift that potentially “keeps on giving.” But that was Mother.
How much of his ill thoughts, his satanic and draconian urges had he in fact inherited from her and not Father? Why hadn't she bequeathed two boxes? One filled with dear old invisible Father and one filled with dear old venomous and quite visible Mother?
Giles had been given only a moment with her after she died there at the hospital, and he knew he had no chance given the openness and busyness of the place to take what every fiber in him craved. And the strict record kept of who was in and who was out of the rooms at any given time discouraged the violence he wanted to do. And with security just down the hall, he struggled mightily to restrain him-self, thinking he'd have his chance to break into the crematorium at Frenchy's, as it was called in the neighborhood, and attack the old crone, dead at forty-eight, that night. But the damnable partners at the funeral home acted quickly, paid well to do so.
Even in death she had cheated Giles of all he needed or ever really wanted. No matter now. He had killed Mother many times over now, and even Lucinda, in her way, was more like Mother than she was unlike Mother. And now all of his many Mothers dangled over his sculptures like long sleek egrets at full wing gliding over the mores of a strange sanctuary.
Unlike his other victims, he had only an opportunity to sketch Lucinda in death, never alive like the others. Sketches he had thrown into his own box along with news clippings and stories and materials and journal entries about his own exploits to rival those of dear old Dad.
Mother he had sketched many times over both alive and dead, depositing her into the box many times over, feeding birds in a park, petting a dog, walking a horse.
“Perhaps Father is here someplace in Chicago,” he said aloud to Mother on the wind over the lake. “But so long as I don't know who the fuck he is, I really don't have to know, now do I?”
A voice from behind Giles interrupted his audible thoughts. “Whatcha doing with that box?” asked the nosey male jogger who'd stopped to tie his shoe as if an undercover cop. He was clean cut and bulked up from lifting barbells. He looked like a cop.
Giles lowered the box. “It's my fucking box. I'll do whatever the hell I want with it.”
The jogger nodded successively and rushed off.
“Not a cop after all,” Giles told himself.
He then tucked the box under his arm as the first raindrops fell. He walked across the great expanse of the park, the grass growing wetter and wetter as he passed until his pant cuffs soaked through, even though the drizzle had remained light. The wind at his back pushed him hard as if a pissed off Satan were shoving, angry that he had failed to carry through on what he'd thought was a firm, final decision, one he would act on. The thunder overhead roared again and while his back was turned to Lake Michigan, he saw the flashes of lightning reflected in the thousands of blinking windowpanes ahead of him along Michigan Avenue. Cars whizzed past on the Outer Lake Shore Drive. When he finally arrived at the overhead bypass and the traffic at the terminus of Fullerton Avenue, the mild drizzle had become a steady beat like insistent pellets fired angrily into him. All of nature had agreed with him moments before, but now all of nature disagreed vehemently and the downpour felt like a power pressing in on him, all the divine and all the satanic at once mad with anger at his inability to follow through on a simple decision.
He'd made the decision only after arranging for a debut showing of his artwork at Cafe Avanti, where he had already set up his “unique and ingenious” sculptures-words of praise from the owners of the premiere artist cafe and art gallery across from the Music Box Theater.
He found a bus going west that would take him to Southport where he could exchange for a bus running to the 3000 block and Cafe Avanti. As he rode the bus, his pant legs dripping a puddle where he sat, he thought of Cafe Avanti, how fortunate he was to be showing his work there in the shadow of art history in the city and in the cafe's somewhat cramped and stuffy, dungeonlike rear rooms that formed a kind of myriad labyrinth that art patrons, and the curious numbers floating in and out of Avanti could wander through to Giles's delight. In a sense all of them, Mother, Sarah, Joyce, Louisa, and Lucinda Wellingham as well, must be seeing at this moment the fruition of Giles's work.
The bus arrived at the stop nearest Cafe Avanti, and Giles, his box safely in hand, deboarded the bus and walked proudly into the cafe, wondering if anyone viewing his showing with the brief descript and his photo would recognize him, and if his work would be rewarded with accolades from men and women who mattered, those in a position to help his career along.
Oregon State Penitentiary November 12, 2004