Rathered the Lie & Other Short Stories

 

OEDIPUS MONKEY

     In the misty past when females ruled the world, was born this little monkey with an enormous head. Now, nature takes random shots through mutation and this little guy would be resistant to a particular brain disease the monkeys had suffered during previous generations. The big head might’ve made the monkey appear clever, smart even, but the extra brain capacity was only expressed to allow spirochetes to nibble away at the gray matter without killing the host prior to reproduction. But this particular survival mechanism had dire, unexpected consequences.
     Named Oedipus, the scrawny monkey with the enormous head was born with a body so shriveled that his mother held onto him very close, protecting him from all the other monkeys. Had they the chance, instinct would have compelled the other monkeys to euthanize him due to the dysmorphism, and this would've been the end of him.
     But his mother, the fat alpha female, held him close and commanded the protection of the little monkey’s father, the troop's robust alpha male. So she held the scrawny little monkey with the enormous head much longer than monkey mothers normally did.
     One day, his mother discovered she had held onto him too long. He had reached adolescence sooner than expected and that morning she found herself engaged in a natural activity unnatural to a mother and child. Even after he was weaned, at every opportunity the little monkey and his mother spent a good deal of time engaged in the behavior.
     This did not settle well with the other monkeys as the tyke wasn’t playing with them as he should have. And since there was a natural resistance to antisocial behavior among these particular primates, they would ridicule the mother and if they caught the little monkey alone, they would attack him and hurl feces at his big head.
     But instead of redirecting him to proper monkey behavior, this only alienated him. Oedipus Monkey soon learned to fight back. He would give his attackers everything he could, and developed underhanded methods that included throwing stones and bludgeoning with tree limbs fashioned into clubs. He learned to kill his own kind, and to steal and hoard, which was unnatural for his type of monkey. And he learned every method of combat, including the forbidden arts of poison.
     As he aged, he fell deeper into deviant monkey social patterns. Avoiding contact with the rest of the troop, all he'd learned was the comfort of his mother and fighting. He fought and fought, conquering all, until the day came that his big alpha father was the last male to conquer. And lately, the father had been keeping him away from his mother, and this added to the drive to destroy him.
     So one night, Oedipus Monkey crept out onto the branch where his father was sleeping. He pricked him with a porcupine quill coated with poison concentrated from the forbidden castor bean. His father died a miserable death and little Oedipus with the big head became the alpha monkey. This gave Oedipus Monkey the opportunity to copulate with his mother again. And it gave him all the other females in the neighborhood as well.
     But this wasn’t good enough for Oedipus Monkey, so with his power of rocks, clubs and poison, he conquered all the monkey troops in the surrounding neighborhoods. He copulated with all the females, but this still wasn’t enough. Soon he was also humping the other males to belittle them and show them who was boss. But still he wanted more.
     Keeping the arts of poison to himself, he controlled knowledge and taught only a few of his trusted subordinates the secrets of rocks and clubs. His cadre of subordinates grew into an army and before he got old, Oedipus Monkey became the alpha male to most of the known monkey world.
     His mother was deeply ashamed of the mess she'd brought to the world and wandered away from the troop, never to be seen again. Monkey rumors had it that she'd been murdered and eaten by her own son.
     But just having his way with all the females and humping all the males in most of the world still wasn’t enough for Oedipus Monkey. No male or female was good enough and he was always left dissatisfied. He wanted ever more.
     It made him feel big and lusty when the subordinate males turned around by their own accord and bent over before he humped them. Such submission gave him a perverse sexual charge, so he required this to be the only acceptable way for any monkey to approach him. So all the lower monkeys had to bow and raise their butts to him from then on. Just their turning around often gave him such a thrill that he hardly had to hump them anymore.
     The monkeys were pleased he'd stopped humping them, so they started bringing him offerings. They all brought him bananas and pretty stones. They lavished him with golden rocks from the riverbeds, which he prized more than anything, because those particular rocks threw well and smashed with a heavy force. Soon he claimed all the golden rocks on earth to be his and ruled they all be brought to him.
     He empowered chosen members of his army to impose his rule through violent coercion. Added to this, he organized a giant troop of accountants to collect tributes and keep track of all the golden rocks. And finally, to arbitrate squabbles between members of his army, he appointed his offspring with the biggest heads to become lawyers and judges. This gave Oedipus Monkey the power to impose his rule and make judgments through them in his absence. (Unfortunately, more than one in three big-head monkeys would later become lawyer monkeys, but that’s another story and far too messy to tell here.)
     This was a miracle for Oedipus Monkey, because he could feel powerful and lusty without lifting a finger. So in a frenzy he created more laws. He made the monkeys do silly things like wear skins of dead animals and go to certain places where they would bow down to a stone representation of him under the watchful eyes of his guards. He organized entire secret orders of these watchful guards to make sure the bowing was performed by all.
     But this still wasn’t enough. Soon he started harassing and withholding food from all the monkeys with little heads. This made him feel randy for a time, but the thrill eventually abated. So he started having killed all the baby monkeys who  weren’t born with big heads, because  even if he had sired them, he was certain they weren’t his.
     For a while, this gave him a mild charge, until killing babies just wasn’t enough. So he started killing all the young males with smaller heads. This pleasured him for some time, and when the supply was depleted, he killed all the females with little heads.  
     When old age started setting in and the thrill of copulating waned, Oedipus Monkey ordered his big head monkey army to construct great obelisks from stones, to simulate giant penises—his penis—for their worship. He then had them construct huge pyramids in memory of his mother's breasts to store all his gold.  
     Then Oedipus Monkey decided he wanted to copulate with Mother Earth Herself. With long spears, he had his army dig deep holes in the ground until She gave him magic stones that glowed like the sun. He saw how the magic stones could kill monkeys and other living things with their powerful light, so he kept the sun stones in a golden box with a port that could be opened to shine upon his enemies who wouldn't bow to him.
     His alchemist slaves then discovered that if some of the stones were impacted together, huge explosions could be made to erupt into giant mushroom clouds. He used this power to destroy all the monkey nations who refused pay tributes to him. Soon, all that was left were great deserts, bringing death to many, many living things.
     Raping and murdering until the day he died, ever dissatisfied, a broken old Oedipus Monkey finally expired quietly in his sleep, and they buried him in a golden box deep within the largest pyramid. But his big head offspring and the bureaucracy he'd appointed remained. This left sick and twisted, magnocapite monkeys to rule the planet.
      From all this, the Great Big Head Monkey civilization was born, where carefree monkeys once upon a time frolicked happily in blissful peace, freedom and tranquility. It had been a happy world until the perverted, Oedipus Monkey and his sadistic offspring took over, ruling through intimidation, coercion and murder.
     So because of this one little Oedipus Monkey, no one could live happily again, ever after. Well, at least until the Great Flood came along. 

STEALING AMERICA’S HOPE

    I haven’t had a decent night’s sleep since 9/11. It’s been a couple of years, but I still toss, turn, fret and freak out over a boogeyman insanely angry, a boogeyman so horribly intolerant and numb to reason it clogs all logic.
    I fear him not only because he has transcended all that is human and has lost his wits, but because he is an EXPLOSION!—indiscriminate, with undefined edges and messy, dismembered results.
    I don’t fear him only because he might be a personal threat to us, I fear him because he is dangerous to civilization. Our burgeoning populations make peaceful, productive human endeavor imperative—purely for survival. The food, tools and resources we peaceably share and trade are what allow us to sustain these unprecedented numbers.
    But civilization is not just money and goods. In these times, painstaking learning and hard-won knowledge enable Humankind to produce technical miracles for the multitudes. We have excelled far beyond fanciful dreams of Muhammad’s dusty times—flying-carpet airliners and open-sesame garage doors. Ice water from a tap, fresh fruit year round, the miracle of air conditioning!
    I wanted to write a letter to the terrorists: “You idiots, you have attacked Heaven! Do you not understand that America is the Garden with groves of trees and cool rivers? What in the hell were ya thinkin’?”
    I started reading Robin Wright, Claire Sterling, Ahmed Rashid, even Washington Irving, so I could get a remote understanding of this bedlam. I was wishing this lock could be picked without using bullets and bombs, for civilization is a fragile enterprise and doesn’t fare too well getting shot up. Over sixty million hapless souls learned that permanently in less than a decade, mid-last century. Doesn’t anyone remember World War Two?
    Untold sleepless nights later, I was tossing and turning. Finally getting a snatch of rest, I felt an overwhelming sensation of love, pure love. Then I clearly heard the words, “I am God of Light from the Heavens. You will be he who makes everlasting peace in the Middle East, key to peace on earth.” Spoken in a firm, loving manner, those words gave me an odd solace, a reckoning—a sense of hope. Peace was in my hands?
    The next morning, thinking I might have heard the actual Word, like the girl in Lourdes or someone saintly, I went out and bought a lottery ticket. Certainly, if there is a monotheistic, omnipotent deity, such would have the power to tip a few lotto balls my way to help bankroll such an undertaking.
    No dice.
    Pray tell, what was this voice I heard? Was it some prankster with an ultrasonic projector sending words through my walls, trying to add to the tension and drama of my sleepless hours? Was it a biochemical release in my brain, boiling everything down to a secret wish?
    Was it actually God?
    After all my reading, research, and having been given the task, I finally figured out the one and only thing I needed to do. I had to restore the balance of supernatural justice.
    You don’t have to be a believer to conceptualize things unseen or yet unproven. Yes, there is a supernatural justice operating here. But it’s not something you can pray about; it is something linked to actions, has cause-and-effect qualities, like a “what goes around comes around” kind of justice. It requires some real motive force to rebalance the karmic wheel. And on a scale that drives men to fly jetliners into glass skyscrapers, some kind of effort with tremendous mystical qualities would be crucial.
    Now, I have a theory there are objects on this earth embedded with an essence of supernatural justice, especially objects of pure, crystalline element-of-life-carbon cursed through bloodshed. The Hope Diamond is just such an object. A forty-five-and-a-half carat blue diamond fluorescing red, the Hope emanates poison curses like a radioactive isotope emits invisible rays of death.
    Sketchy accounts hint that its original possessor might’ve been an Indian sultan who gave it in peace to a Persian emir. A psychic said that the dark diamond’s curse originated with its bloody capture by renegade Crusaders who smuggled it to Bombay before it got cut and found its way into the crown jewels of the King of France. After becoming the property of Louis XVI (he and Marie Antoinette were guillotined in 1793 by the French National Convention), the large, blue diamond was lost during the chaos of the French Revolution.
    The cursed stone resurfaced, was re-cut and sold to Lord Henry Phillip Hope in 1830. After numerous misfortunes in the Hope family, the Hope Diamond made its way to Eastern Europe and during those turbulent times its path was littered with suicides, assassinations and madness of possessors, including a Russian prince murdered by revolutionists. It then circled down into Byzantium, where it was associated with the ruin of a few more owners until Turkish Sultan Qazi Hamid’s favorite wife was shot while wearing it.
    It came to America through Pierre Cartier in 1911, who sold the Hope to the Edward B McLean, husband of Washington socialite Evalyn Walsh McLean. A moderne, Mrs McLean didn’t believe in the curse, but her husband, owner of the Washington Post, was destroyed by it. He was embroiled in the Teapot Dome scandal, he lost the newspaper to bankruptcy in 1933 and ended up in a mental institution where he died in 1941.
    After Mrs McLean passed away of natural causes, diamond mogul Harry Winston bought the Hope from her estate. A decade later, he gave possession of the Hope Diamond to the People of the United States of America by donating it to the Smithsonian Institute in 1958.
    It could be said that our nation took on the curse of the Hope. After taking possession of the blue diamond, the warm afterglow of World War Two cooled and America took a really bad turn: Castro, Kennedy, Martin, Vietnam, Nixon, the Energy Crisis, Beirut, Khomeini—and now this. Much of our bad luck was emanating from the East, the direction of the cursed stone’s origin.
    I heard the Voice and knew there was only one thing I had to do. To restore the balance of supernatural justice, I had to steal the Hope Diamond and give it to our own worst enemy.
    I schemed and plotted. I studied details of the Smithsonian, its alarm network and guards. After making three trips to Washington, DC, jotting notes, taking surveillance photos, collecting blueprints from the Library of Congress and dating a homely curator, I was ready to make my move.
    The only problem was, I couldn’t persuade, convince or cajole any of my friends to assist in the quest. They are as old as or older than I, so even begging was of no use. Social Security, despite threats from maniac terrorists, was far more attractive than risking an attempt on the Hope. So, like almost everything else in this life, I had to go it alone.
    Shy of needed help, all I could come up with was a crude, smash-and-grab plan. So I placed a hairspray label on a canister of liquid nitrogen, put it in my luggage with a policeman’s expandable baton disguised as a large felt marker, and took a flight to Dulles International. The whole way over, all I could do to calm myself was carry the notion that I was saving the world. I was beyond nervous, driven into a trance-like condition.
    I entered the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History a little before closing time. It was raining. Like a soggy zombie, I made my way directly to the Mineral Sciences exhibit.
    I saw my hands unhook the brass spring-bolt from the baluster and my legs carry me past the velvet ropes. In an iridescent tunnel, I spilled the liquid nitrogen over the thick glass of the display case. It groaned and crackled with the shock.
    With a powerful, bases-loaded swing, I smashed the frosty glass with the baton, then spun around, “Hey, wha’chu think yer doin’?!” and smashed a security guard’s jaw, knocking him cold.
    Turning back to the case, momentarily mystified by the glass shards mixed with the gems, I tore the cursed stone from the necklace, pried it from its setting. Smaller diamonds and shards of glass scattered like chaff. I wrapped the Hope in my fist.
    With a jolt to my palm, the magnificent, dark crystal energized me. I ran down the hallway, swung around first, second, third, as gunshots rang out like Fourth of July fireworks, my planned route took me and the Hope toward an unmarked exit.
    Flashing lights blazed triumph. Alarm sirens trumpeted America’s rebirth! Lightning flashed freedom just outside the door. Headed for home plate, I held the Hope and Peace on Earth in my hand!
    Reaching the exit, the door was locked. Tagged out, knocked to the ground. I was caught.
    So now I sit imprisoned in an unmarked, United States of America detention center god-knows-where. I am being held with terrorists and vermin, without due process or an attorney, mainly because I was honest during my interrogation.
    When asked why I tried stealing the Hope Diamond, I replied, “It wasn’t for me. I only wanted to give it away. I was going to give it away!”
    “That’s a lie. Now ’fess up—tell us the name of the buyer!” demanded a thug brandishing a rubber hose, who happened to be wearing a Superman Halloween mask, incongruous as it was with his black tuxedo and pot belly.
    “Bam!” I took a blow to the face. Nothing like getting smashed in the face. A huge flash due to compression of the eyeballs, a cracking sound of impact on bone, accompanied by acute tinnitus due to intracranial shock waves. You know you’re getting hurt, but don’t feel the pain right away, nor the swelling and internal bleeding. That comes later
    “Tell us! Tell us!”
He whacked me again and again, “Bam, bam, bam!”
Thinking I might be getting seriously injured, I finally declared, “Okay, okay! To America’s worst enemy!”
    “What?” he said, stopping.
    “But I promise I wasn’t gonna sell it,” I said. “Honest, I was going to give it away!” I spat a tooth, warm blood spilled down my chin from nose and mouth.
    “What?” I’m not sure if he was dumbfounded or just needed to catch his breath.
    “I was going to give the Hope Diamond to Usama bin Mohammed bin Awad bin Laden, you know, Osama bin Laden. Isn’t that a great idea? Don’t you think he deserves it?”
    The resumption of his savage, brutal response communicated that he didn’t agree with my plan one iota.
    I reckon I’ll probably be detained here for awhile, a really long while.  

 

THE ANT WOMAN

    We lived in a rental shack when we were first married. Although we kept it in immaculate condition, the shack was so poorly constructed we could feel the wind blow through the floorboards, around all the windows, and through some of the walls. Such a place should have been a disgrace to its owner, but he was just a money-grubbing fellow, didn’t care or know better.
    Anyway, my wife is such an immaculate person, she wouldn’t leave a crumb on the counter more than five minutes, and couldn’t live in a place if it was too rundown. She suggested we fix up and paint the place. “So what if it isn’t our place?” she said. “We’ll be living here, so let’s make it as good as we are.” 
    As good as we made it, we were surprised when we got ants. Now, these were no ordinary ants. They were so huge, they could have carted off the refrigerator had the passages to their colony been large enough. Big, ugly, red, ants. In our house.
    They were so brazen, they’d just set up their freeways across the kitchen counter, foraging for whatever traces a recent meal may have left for them. But they were slow, and made easy kills. Just thumb them out, wipe off the counter, no more ants for a while. At first. Neither of us wanted to use insecticide where we prepared or meals and ate, so we just chased the anthropoids around the kitchen, and mechanically eliminate them as they reappeared, thoroughly cleaning up afterwards.
    But this process became increasingly difficult. Initially, a person needed only to reach over, and thumb-crunch ’em. But then they got hip, and as we reached over, they’d skedaddle faster, and you had to lean over to crunch ’em. Later on, you’d have to take a step, because their countermoves were becoming increasingly fast. After a couple days of this, they’d scatter and skedaddle as soon as you appeared in the kitchen.
    That was starting to puzzle me. Like how the hell did these critters know how to run away from us? Ok, we were killing them, so how were they reporting back to the colony, “Run away from the human beings as they come into the kitchen.” Like, I didn’t get it. Even if they were leaving pheromone trails, how could such identify the dimension and actions of the threat?
    Well, it got to the point that when just the kitchen light would go on, the ants would dodge into the cracks and crevasses of the poorly constructed kitchen. I couldn’t even sneak in barefoot. “To hell with the hows and whys,” I thought, “it’s time to go after the colony.”
    So I bought some deadly spray poison, went into the crawl space under the pier-and-beam house, among all the rats and spiders and godknowswhat else, and chased down the route to where the ants were carrying the spoils from my kitchen. I looked at the pile of loose dirt under there, and said, “Sorry, but my wife doesn’t like having you all in her kitchen.” And I soaked the ant hill, hosed down their interstate highway, and backed out, before the poison got me and godknowswhat down there decided to colonize my carcass.
    I cleaned up, went back into the house, still wondering about the ants’ communication system. Suddenly very tired, I spread out on the couch, and copped some heavy zees.
    As I slept, I had this dream. In it was a beautiful woman, the color of dark copper, under my house. She was trying to say something to me. I crawled over to her and when I got next to her, I realized she was covered with ants. I tried to brush the ants off her, and there were more underneath, because the entire person was made out of solid ants. Dying, she gasped, “Why—why did you do this to me?”
    I tried to reply, holding her crumbling body, shaking my head in sorrow for what I’d done. “If only I’d known it was you—“
    Then I awoke and understood, sorta. For starters, the “person” of the ants is the entire colony, not the individual ants, which are more like cells. They possess a sort of collective consciousness. You kill a few of her numbers, and the colony sees you and feels it. Maybe the queen’s the brains of the outfit. She learns to pull her hands back faster when you approach and turn on the light, that's all.
    Anyway, maybe it’s not all that, but I did find new love and respect for ants, though I still try to keep them out of the house.

RATHERED THE LIE

    “After fifty years of marriage,” she said, clicking her tongue in pity.
    “Huh?” I responded.
    “He left her.”
    “Who?” I asked.
    “Martin’s friend. You should have seen them. Martin, his wife, his friend and his friend’s wife used to go on long walks on Sundays. For years and years. They were the model couple. They had kids and grandkids. But for years, he lied to her.”
    “Who?”
    “Martin’s friend. I don’t know his name. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that he had another woman where he worked. For years and years. And he lied to his wife. Don’t you see? He was living a lie and finally after forty-some years, he left his wife for the other woman.”
    “I think it was damned decent of him.”
    “What? Decent? How can you say that?”
    “Yeah. No, I mean no. Not that he cheated and ditched her, but decent to wait so long before he left. I wish my parents had lied. I would have rathered the lie.”
    “The man was living a lie, don’t you understand? For almost fifty years. How can that be better? His life, a lie?”
    “I’ll tell you. Picture a story-book family. Four boys. Had the biggest tract house in the subdivision. Blue suits on Sundays. Father a physician, Doctor Todd T. Dickens, community leader, sportsman, involved with the boys. Boy Scouts, Soapbox Derby, hunting, watersports, trampoline. He even helped the boys with homework. Built them a huge library, added onto the back of the house.
    “Mother in the kitchen. Smart, attractive, stylish blond woman. Named Barbara. Garden Club, Junior League, wore a mink shopping. Cadillac with the top down. Big bosom, couldn’t get a traffic ticket if she tried. Graduated Phi Beta Kappa in chemistry. Top sorority sister.  
    “Barbie and Todd in the late nineteen fifties. What could be more perfect? Their pictures were in the papers enough on the society pages to have been an inspiration for perfection. As a couple, they always won trophies at everything. Dr and Mrs Most Popular.
    “Oldest brother, Todd Junior, wanted to be a genius. Played the piano, studied all the time. Even had a small business with his own business phone line, before he was out of junior high. Had a hobby of studying law. Immersed in that great library at home. The father buying new books for him all the time.
    “The next brother was a genius. His name was Gil. Biology his bag, went with Father to deliver babies at the hospital. Kept bees, caught insects. His entomological collection won prizes, ended up as part of the university’s. Kept an extracted frog’s heart alive for two days and won the Science Fair. Was very interested in grafts and transplants. Always had something growing. Built things all the time, always drafting plans, knew how to weld before he was ten. Had all the answers. Was planning to cure cancer.
    “The third from the oldest was the athlete of the family. There was no obstacle or challenge Pete couldn’t master. He’d do somersaults on the trampoline with his eyes closed. Could climb a tree upside-down and backwards. Could throw and run and hit a ball like no other. Always the first chosen on any team and honest to a fault. Not only that, he was an excellent artist. Wanted to be the next Leonardo da Vinci.
    “And then there was me, the youngest. I watched my brothers with amazement, and saw that they were loved by everyone around, and how I’d been lucky enough to be born into such a family, to have a rich, intelligent father and an attractive, smart mom.
    “I looked more like Pete, and had an artistic bent, but wasn’t as great at sports. My interests ran more toward physics and astronomy. Really, I had a Newtonian telescope when I was seven, even discovered a comet. Proposed a correlation between sunspots and volcanic activities. Private schools. Kids in my group were talking about communicating over light beams and how to make holograms before lasers were even invented.
    “Things didn’t really turn to shit until my mother started throwing pots and pans around, screaming hysterically, like an insane, attacking barbarian. The ol’ man fending off her hits and scratches, cursing, but never hitting her once.
    “I learned years later that Dr Todd had made a guilt-ridden, repentant admission about his extramarital affairs to Barbara. Her immediate, emotional response was demonstrated by throwing the cookware and then never trusting the man again.
    “After that first night of maternal hysteria, I had trouble in school. The following day, got in a fight with my teacher, sent to the office. Called the teacher names I’d heard my father say to my mom. Third grade. Promising my school principal better behavior, I struggled to keep home and school as separate worlds after that.
    “At home, things got progressively worse. The woman was a red-faced monster to the man; the man was around less and less. Everyone was on edge, my brothers and I were always punching, hitting each other for stupid stuff; everybody bickering all the time. It was misery. But it would get worse.
    “Finally, my father didn’t come home at all. Said he wanted a divorce. Said it was better for the kids that way. Right. Claimed my mother mentally castrated him. So he ran off to the South Pacific. In search of a happier life and a new set of balls.
    “My mother cried incessantly. In those days, decent, middle-class husbands just didn’t run off like that. It wasn’t a proper thing he had done, especially as popular as we were. My mother was very ashamed and made her predictions: Because of our father’s actions, we would all be total failures. Perhaps my mother made a self-fulfilling prophecy. I promised myself, though, that she was wrong.
    “It seemed to me that if some kind of chain reaction led to the debauchery and social decay of our age, it was precipitated by my father’s desertion. I don’t know how many other fathers decided that if divorce was good enough for the good doctor, it was good enough for them.
    “And my brothers were a high-profile bunch, all had strong personalities, were taught leadership. So when we started sliding, we probably pulled countless others down into the cesspool with us.   
    “The oldest brother started having jerk circles, the next brother started stealing, drinking, the third brother was very quiet. I tried to be different. I swore to myself that I would weather the storm.
    “The older, developed brothers kept trying to punk the younger ones. I told myself that this, too, would pass. I had hopes that maybe our father would return.
    “The divorce was finalized when I was in sixth grade, and after that, my mother was a catatonic lunatic. Stopped taking care of herself, hair grew out to brown with some gray. She couldn’t do anything without throwing a fit. We quietly lived off cereal. I found a temporary mother or two between the neighbors, ate at a lot of different tables. Kindness of strangers.
    “The oldest brother went away to college, flunked out, got drafted into the Army. The next one carried a gun, was doing dope, came home one day with shotgun pellets in his legs. The third was popping pills, had lost his spark. I thought this too, would pass.
    “It didn’t. Today, Todd Junior's shacking up with a sugar-daddy and hasn’t worked in years. The last time I saw him he looked like the walking dead, full of dope, HIV and godknowswhat else. Really. Maybe it was years of doing smack, but seemed like dementia had already set in. So much for wanting to be a genius.
    “Gil, the second one, was found dead of an apparent drug overdose when he was twenty. So much for his dreams of curing cancer.
    “Pete, my third brother, is a vagabond, living under a freeway overpass, lost all his teeth and use of one arm. He’d gone over the edge in Vietnam. They sent him to ’Nam before he’d even finished high school. Tossed away, like a ragged, unwanted coat. So much for the reincarnation of Leonardo da Vinci.
    “Me? I would have just rathered the lie.”
    “It would have been better for your father to live a lie? To be a cheat? Cheating on your mother?”
    “Weren’t you listening? Damned straight. A lie or not, at least he would have been around. Before all hell broke loose, even when he was having his affairs, we had meals as a family, he disciplined us. We could bring our spats to him, he could pass judgments, help us solve our problems. No, I’d rather have had a cheater there at home, than be thrown to the dogs. No shit. Maybe then I wouldn’t have lived the nightmare.”
    “Maybe your father just should not have gone out on your mother, that’s all,” she insisted.
    “Sure. As powerful as sex is? I don’t think we choose who we love. It blooms from such a myriad of swirling factors in our lives. Love chooses us. Love is a biological process after all. And we’re not much more than animals, so why should sex be anything higher? So how can you say it’s a lie Martin’s friend was living? I can only think it was damned decent for him to hang around as long as he did. He was there for his kids. If you ask me, he did right. I would have much rather have had the lie. Martin’s friend did right. He was home, probably more years than he needed to be. If he went out for sex, so what?”
    “Well,” she said, “I’m sorry I dredged up those bad memories. I’m sorry.”
    “I’m sorry, too. That I have such crappy memories. I would have rathered the lie, that’s all.”