After Death(75)
Their conversation has brought them closer to the personal issue that is most important to Michael. He won’t press her further at this point. Until the Internal Security Agency and gangbangers have for certain been put behind them forever, the future is too fluid to be making plans.
He says, “I’ve thought about it a lot—the impact. How do you bring about major change without causing major destruction. Most of those who want to change the world also mean first to destroy it as it currently is and build back on the rubble. They’re narcissists and lunatics. I like to think I’m not.”
WITH SPIDERS I HAD FRIENDSHIP MADE
By the time Michael was nine years old, his mother seldom left their house, and when she did, it was always to make a spectacle of herself. She ranted at a helpless grocery-store clerk about the price of tomatoes, reaching such a peak of indignation that she threw the fruit on the floor and crushed it underfoot. She rose to her feet in a city council meeting and complained about the increase in parking-meter fees, which incensed her in spite of the fact that she had developed a fear of driving and had sold her car; refusing to adhere to a time limit for testimony, she raged at the council members, no epithets too crude for her use, until the sergeant at arms had to forcefully escort her from the chamber. A neighbor had to endure periodic tongue-lashings—as well as answer complaints to animal control—about a pit bull that did not exist.
In the summer before Michael entered fourth grade, his mother developed a terror of spiders. She had never been afraid of them before. Without apparent reason, she insisted that she’d become so allergic to arachnid bites that, if nipped, she would fall at once into anaphylactic shock, be unable to breathe, and die. It mattered not whether the species was poisonous. Years earlier, when Beth had secured their home against Lionel’s animated corpse, which she said wanted to get into the house at night, the credulousness of extreme youth had left Michael vulnerable to her dark fantasies, and he had succumbed to that irrational fear. At nine, he better understood his mother, but initially he couldn’t tell whether her dread of spiders was real or pretense. If she faked it, maybe she wanted to add drama to her life—for she loved drama—or maybe she was psychologically bent to such an extent that she took pleasure in tormenting a child. Eventually, he came to believe both things were true.
When she woke Michael in the night to hurry to her bedroom to kill a spider that had appeared while she was reading to overcome insomnia, or near dinnertime when she fled the kitchen in fear of a scurrying invader, the eight-legged threat would not always be where she’d seen it. An urgent spider hunt would ensue. Find it, Mickey. Find it and kill it. Damn you, Mouse, you little shit, find it, kill it! If the creature were found and squashed to her satisfaction, life could go on after a suitable period of lamentation regarding the death she would have suffered if she had been bitten. On those occasions when the spider couldn’t be found––or never existed in the first place—the failed search was an excuse to attempt to settle her nerves with glass after glass of chardonnay or morbid talk about how suicide by pills would be a better way to go than by suffocating when her airway shut down from arachnid poison. You’ll miss me then. You’ll miss me when you’re alone, boything. Alone because you were too stupid to find it and kill it.
He had done nothing to earn her animosity, with the possible exception of having been born. Even after he became convinced that she enjoyed manipulating him into conceding that her silly fears were legitimate, Michael was frequently exasperated with her, often impatient, indignant that she toyed with him—but he was never able to hate her. Whatever else Beth might be, she was his mother. He could no more love her than despise her, but pity came easily. He wondered if in her childhood she endured something that shaped her into what she was. If she could not strike back at whoever had been cruel to her, she might feel the need to pay her misery forward to her son, as wrong as that might be. Even if by nature Mother was a disturbed person, she was a pathetic rather than an evil figure. Watching her in near perpetual distress, some faked but much of it real, Michael was at times overcome by a tenderness toward her, and by a desire to fix whatever was broken in the woman, though he knew he hadn’t the power to make her right. However, day by day, week by week, year by year, he came to see how he could console her with no risk of becoming like her; he could be amused by her, find sanctuary in his amusement, without disrespecting her. That was not an easy path to take, but he found a satisfaction in it that he could not name until he was much older—compassion, mercy, forgiveness.
The year of spider terror came to a quiet end. Having reason to be suspicious, Michael waited till his mother was across the street, berating neighbors for an offense they had not committed, whereupon he went into the attic. That place was forbidden to him, because his mother claimed it harbored hornet’s nests and rats bearing numerous diseases. He found no hornets or rats, but he did find three quart-size mason jars with numerous pinholes in their lids. One was empty. The other two contained dead flies and pill bugs that Mother had provided as larder, a few drops of water, and a variety of spiders that she had somehow gathered and imprisoned, ten in all, clinging to life in ill-spun webs that sagged away from the glass walls. You can’t depend on nature always to supply a spider when you most need one. Michael, Mickey, Mouse, Boything, Little Shit carried the jars downstairs. He took the occupied pair into the backyard and set the prisoners free. They scurried across his hands without biting him. In the kitchen, he washed the jars, dried them with paper towels, and stood them on the counter by the door to the pantry. He went to his room and was soon lost in a book. He heard his mother return home. She slammed the door and cursed the world on her way to the kitchen and the chardonnay. Her sudden silence lasted perhaps two hours, until she’d drunk enough to start softly singing Celtic songs to which she didn’t know all the words. Later, she ordered in dinner from a restaurant on the corner, all his favorite dishes, allowed him to read his book at the table, and did not trouble him with conversation. Such were the limits of her grace and confession. Michael knew even this tacit recognition of the humanity of another was torment for her, and he asked nothing more.