Drawn Into Darkness(23)

“I figured.”

“Yet I bet you feel something for him, don’t you? You have a big heart. It’s impossible for you to live with somebody and not get attached to him, right?”

Justin’s rigid face contorted. “What are you trying to prove?” he yelled.

“Just that you’re human.”

“And what am I supposed to do about it?”

“If you do anything, it’s completely up to you.”

“Damn it, why aren’t you begging me to cut the ropes off the bedposts or something?”

I took care to speak exact truth. “Because I am a mom and I am starting to love you too, Justin.”

He gawked, gulped, then ran from the room.

• • •

Throughout history, female philosophers are few and far between. It would seem that women generally have had better things to do than ponder how many incorporeal bodies can caper on the head of a pin, or how many existentialists it takes to change a lightbulb. Searching my mind for a feminine Socrates to comfort me (Socrates himself wouldn’t do; he, like Stoat, hated women), I found myself baffled. Raging Ayn Rand, hell no. Simone de Beauvoir, too hung up on Sartre. Mary Wollstonecraft probably wore a corset. Hypatia—

Hypatia might empathize.

In ancient times just as today, women were not supposed to be philosophers, of course, but Hypatia was, so a kind of exemption was made in her case. She was not a woman. She was something more, at one with the divine being she called the One. Her students, all male, were not allowed to fall in love with her. When one of them had the temerity to do so, she showed him a diaper stained with her menstrual blood and reminded him that earthly beauty is an illusion. And that took care of that, I’m sure. Talk about attitude.

Hypatia referred to the One as best discovered by “the Eye buried within us” and urged a return to the teachings of Plato and Aristotle. These tales of her survived; however, most of her thoughts did not, because the fourth-century Bishop of Alexandria put out a hit on her, ordering a group of fanatical monks to haul her from her chariot, divest her of the white cloak of a philosopher, strip her naked, and either beat her to death or, some accounts say, attack her with sharpened seashells. Then her writings were burned along with her body. In history as written by the Christian church, Hypatia never existed.

Whatever Stoat did to me, I reflected, would be mild compared with what had happened to Hypatia.

Nevertheless, dead is dead. Especially if one doesn’t believe in the afterlife.

I doubted whether Hypatia had reached any deep philosophical insights during her last moments.

And I doubted whether I was going to reach any either, but all the rest of the day, lying on that mattress as if waiting to be stretched on a rack, I occupied my mind with a vain attempt. At wisdom. Or consolation. Or at least a worthy quotation upon which to hang my metaphorical shroud.

Death be not proud; carry my shroud.

Do not go gentle unto that good night . . . as if I had a choice?

“Though boys throw stones at frogs in sport, the frogs do not die in sport, but in earnest.” Plutarch. Who the hell was Plutarch? I ought to remember. . . .

Something similar in Shakespeare. King Lear. “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; they kill us for their sport.”

Ashes, ashes, all fall down.

Dust to dust. Dust in the wind; all we are is dust in the wind. . . .

Soughing outside my thoughts and my room I heard plenty of wind, but saw no dust. Just rain, lots of it. Rainsnakes on the windows.

Then came the familiar asthmatic roar of the generic white van. Cough of silence, in front of the house rather than alongside. Slam of doors, first vehicle, then house.

Stoat was home.

But darkness would not come for hours yet.

I hoped Stoat would ignore me until then. But my own hope made me so angry at myself, him, and fractal theory (ridiculously random, how I had gotten into this fix) that I would not go gentle after all. I yelled as loud as I could, “Stoat!”

I heard a thunk as his cowboy-booted feet fell off the coffee table. I heard him swear. I heard, then saw him run into my room. “Where’s your gag?”

“How should I know? You never put it back on me.”

“Phew!” Short attention span; he batted at the urine-scented air with one hand. “You wet the bed!”

“What did you expect? I understand you plan to kill me tonight.”

Thoroughly distracted from the wet mattress, he blinked a few times, but kept the blank look on his face and in his eyes. “That’s none of your business.”

Although painfully aware of the utter absurdity of this statement, I managed to keep a straight face. “Yes, it is, because I’d like to write a letter to my sons first.”