As I look out tonight, there are no Roman soldiers…but there are empty chairs to mock me. And some sort of…some sort of, at least virtual martyrdom impends; I can feel that in my bones. And my mom is right here, and I appreciate that tremendously. And so, I’m very proud tonight to be here at the Nonfiction at the Food Court Reading Series. And as I look out at my mother right now, eating pork fried rice out of a Styrofoam shell from Panda Express, I can’t help but be reminded of when that teacher at James F. Murray No. 38 Elementary School in Jersey City used to hold me up to the window to show me that my mom was waiting for me outside in the schoolyard, to reassure me, to demonstrate to me that she hadn’t “abandoned” me again, as I apparently felt she had during her second pregnancy. I guess like a lot of kids that age, I’d occasionally fabricate the vocations of my parents, and I remember once telling that particular teacher that my father, an attorney in Jersey City, was — and I’m paraphrasing here, I don’t remember my exact words — that he was actually a tropical agronomist who specialized in diseases of the banana, perhaps a sly Oedipal dig at his virility. I remember the teacher smiling at that. She was a very smiley, very accommodating woman. But I always suspected that her smile was a mask. To me, even at that tender age — I think I was six — it suggested a latent misery, hidden by a great labor of repression and dissimulation. But as I look out at my mom tonight…Y’know, Heraclitus said, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.” But I also think that no son sees the same mother twice, for it’s not the same mother and he’s not the same son. So as I look out at my mom tonight, I see not only a woman with a unique sociocultural history as a daughter, as a mother, as a grandmother, a woman with an autobiography of her own, but I also see a techno-organic aggregate body that is bacterial, fungal, mineral, metal, electrochemical, digitally informational, etc., and then, if I put on these reading glasses, which help me a lot with close-range vision, but pretty seriously degrade my ability to focus on anything in the distance, I see a sort of flat, two-dimensional, distorted female figure composed of splintered planes, and then the more I squint through the reading glasses, the more she now seems reduced to a purely geometric abstraction, a vertical element perpendicular to a horizontal element, and she’s achieved an object’s phenomenological status as a thing prior to any meaning…and if I look through them like this — backwards — she seems to disaggregate completely. She becomes an exploded diagram of herself. Like the instructions you get with furniture from Ikea. And here the intelligible dimensions of the mother are extended into infinite space — the macroscopic realm of celestial bodies and the vast distances between them, and the intimate realm of microscopic organisms and cells. And the image of the mother as exploded diagram is, of course, the image of the mother as suicide bomber.
On May 28, 2013, I tweeted: Spent the weekend just wandering around outside, caramelizing things with my crème brûlée torch.
And then on August 28, 2014, I tweeted: Just learned this morning that my Imaginary Intern is an ethnic Chechen. I was being facetious, of course, and I wasn’t sure if the Imaginary Intern had even seen the tweet, because we were both very busy that morning, off doing our separate things. I think he was reviewing and archiving childhood crayon drawings and digitized 8-millimeter birthday-party footage that my dad had shot in the early sixties, and I was, uh…you know what?…I think this was a period of time when I’d become, like, mildly obsessed with Spaten lager beer…so I’m pretty sure that that day I was out looking for a place that sold it by the case. But it turned out that he had indeed seen the tweet, because once the two of us reconvened later that evening, he asked me, “What ethnicity do you actually think I am?” And I don’t remember exactly what I said, probably something like, “Oh, you’re a paracosm.” Or “Oh, you’re a quasi-autonomous notional entity.” Or “You’re an apparition from Figmentistan.” Or something like that. Just kidding around with him. And I remember he said, very seriously, “I think I’m a teratoma.” And it took me a minute before I realized he was alluding to an incident that had occurred, I don’t know, some fifteen years ago when my mom had an ovarian cystic teratoma removed. I didn’t know what a teratoma was at the time, so I did some research and I discovered that it’s a kind of tumor that can contain hair and teeth and, in rare cases, eyes and feet, but much more commonly the hair and teeth, so I went out and bought a tiny comb and a tiny toothbrush (I think they were from a set of toiletries for one of those Troll dolls that I found at a Toys “R” Us) and I gave them to my mom at the hospital. And I immediately regretted the “gift”—I’d originally thought it was sort of cute and clever in a completely innocuous way, but then it just seemed like a creepy morbid attempt at humor at her expense, and I was really apprehensive that she’d be hurt and angry. And she so easily could have hobbled me with a glare or a pained aversion of her eyes if she’d wanted to…because I don’t think it was funny to her at all…I mean, she had two huge heliotrope bruises — one from a tourniquet they’d used to start the IV drip in her arm and one from a catheter she’d had on the dorsum of her hand — that made me wince when I looked at them, she was still nauseous from the anesthesia, and she was still in a considerable amount of pain from the surgery itself. But she just smiled at me, in that beautiful, gracious, indulgent way she has of smiling at me, the way she’s always smiled at me. This is the Noh mask of her immutable benevolence.
I said a little while ago when I was talking about how my mom drove me to the mall tonight that I don’t really like to talk to her when she’s been drinking and she’s driving over ninety miles an hour, because I don’t want to distract her. And I was just being facetious. And it was a glib, thoughtless thing to say. Just for cheap laughs at her expense. And I just want to say that my mom does not drink and drive. And as soon as I said what I said, I regretted it completely. And, Mom, I looked over at you and you could have just glowered at me, which would have ruined the whole reading for me, the whole night…but you didn’t. You just took it in stride. You just looked up at me, and smiled that beautiful, indulgent, luminous smile of yours, and went right back to your pork fried rice.
One stands up here, on a table in the middle of a food court, as one would upon a balcony overlooking a piazza thronged with swooning Fascists. And one becomes heedless, one becomes disinhibited, indiscreet…and one says all sorts of things one shouldn’t say— (MARK’S MOM, as if on cue, reaches furtively across the table to snare MARK’S egg roll.)
MARK
Don’t eat mine, Mom. (MARK and his MOM exchange a conspiratorial wink, as if this whole little pas de deux about the drunk driving, the ovarian tumor, and the egg roll had been predesigned to finally coax a reaction — any reaction — from the PANDA EXPRESS WORKER, who simply shrugs indifferently…whatever.)
MARK