When the guests are sitting around the table Lucien’s mom asks Lucien “Do you ever think about your dad?”
If the guests weren’t there Lucien would glare bitterly at his mom then turn back to peeling the egg. But when guests are over and Lucien’s mom asks him something like this, he’s obliged to make a thoughtful expression. He says “Sometimes,” as if he’s never considered how much he thinks about his dead dad and this consideration is in itself somehow valuable.
Lucien’s mother when they’re in the presence of guests and eating boiled eggs as an appetizer, chopped celery and cubes of liver, will also take the opportunity to ask things like “What would you do if you got Lacie pregnant?” or: “Is it ever painful to tell people you’re dyslexic?” and Lucien will peel the egg and pretend to think about this question while rage steers his chest. His eyes pass over the tree-topper and antique maze thing on the mantle and these objects are set ablaze with sublimated hate.
The guests are watching the son from across the table, eyes bleary with holiday chyme. So Lucien grates his canines and responds “These things are circumstantial” then smiles politely. Sometimes he thinks he might never feel as close to his dead dad as he does in these seething moments when his mother pries at something personal.
Lucien’s mom works the night shift at the humane zoo. The humane zoo is morally obligated to take in any animal that has a health condition and this includes nocturnal animals. Lucien’s mom is tasked with feeding the nocturnal animals and administering their medicine and this is the case even on Christmas.
After everyone leaves Lucien’s mom does the dishes then pulls on her forest-green cargo pants and kisses Lucien on both cheeks. If she only kisses him on one cheek he feels a supreme imbalance that won’t go away even with sleep. He doesn’t know if this an obsessive compulsion his mother inflicted on him or if it’s his own vestigial compulsion that she continues to submit to, in either case they seem to agree about both cheeks kissed religiously.
When Lucien was younger he used to stand in the doorway yelling GOODBYE as his mom walked to the bus stop in her forest-green get-up. The sun would be buried in asphalt and the day’s passive regrets slipping to irrelevancy. Lucien’s mom would be walking backwards waving frantically and screaming GOODBYE as it became harder for them to hear each other. The effort Lucien exerted trying to scream as his mother got further away would cramp his core in the threshold. In retrospect he doesn’t know how they thought it was appropriate to scream back and forth so late into the night in a residential area or why his mother seemed even to encourage it.
When Lucien’s mom leaves, Lucien is upstairs with the kisses drying on his cheeks listening to his music on his headphones. When he listens to his own music Lucien senses he’s in a desert and the only other thing is a massive lamp without a shade. He has an attraction to this vision of a desert or some other enormously vast landscape where there’s nothing but land and a naked bulb. He can only access this image when he’s listening to the music he makes, which is drone. Why the image he receives is of a desert is like asking why someone sees a mezuzah when they’re having sex. He only knows that this station in the desert emptied of existence is where the music takes its shape. It’s weird, like the vision of wind moved completely, and that’s not the wind itself but the things it shifts in the meanwhile. Lucien takes off his headphones and looks in the full-length mirror and thinks he’s begun to look rather like someone who doesn’t have a dad.
It’s nighttime at the humane zoo. Lucien’s mom has to remind people all the time that she doesn’t work at a zoo, she works at a humane zoo. The regular zoo is for masochism and admiration. The humane zoo is for preservation and healing and respect. At the humane zoo, the implication is that the animals will be restored to their habitats which Lucien’s mom has no doubt will happen for all of them. Still she’s worked at the humane zoo for fifteen years and the only creature they’ve released into the wild was the turtle at the end of his long fight with cancer. He was released to Presque Isle to die in the water. Lucien’s mom says that even if the release has to happen at death that counts the same as restoring them into life. Because if Lucien’s mom believed she worked at a zoo and not the humane zoo, and if the guests thought they were visiting the average zoo and not a humane zoo, everything would be destroyed. People would be seeing colors in place of objects, physical symbols rubbed into a borderless miasma, dogs led by the blurry sense of smell instead of sight.
Lucien’s mom tosses giblets between the grates and the hedgehog flips over, showing her white underbelly like a flashbulb in the night. The hedgehog is gleeful despite chronic pain. The owl’s toes were burnt on exposed wires. The chipped moths flatten themselves against the glass when Lucien’s mom passes with her lantern. She tends to the caged beasts in the nocturnal labyrinth, promising them that one day, when they’re robust enough, they’ll roam free. She throws giblets and the animals wrestle with them hungrily in the night. She thinks of nurture and never considers entrapment. Neither will she hear of natural selection.
Back home Lucien brushes his teeth with the electric toothbrush he shares with his mom, they just switch the heads. Sometimes Lucien’s mom tells him she forgot which head is which and Lucien groans disgustedly and shrugs. Sometimes Lucien’s mom tells him this thing about forgetting which head is which when they have guests over and the guests glance vaguely at Lucien who smiles politely and says “It doesn’t matter, mom.” Lucien frequently forgets himself which head is which and doesn’t mention this to his mother.
Lucien’s pajamas constrict his wrists. Lucien wants to go to college. Lucien gets into bed and when his head meets the pillow he hears the crinkle of a foil wrapper. He reaches under the pillow and finds a chocolate truffle with the note: “Final Christmas, surprise.” He doesn’t understand the punctuation. He doesn’t understand why he should receive the chocolate in bed after his teeth are brushed. He stands up and puts on his headphones and looks out at the empty plain and doesn’t consider his fatherlessness. The whole point and symbolic thing about this vision is that there is nothing, only the land and naked bulb. The crucial thing is that where there should be brush and various robust animals roaming around or animals darting behind trees like leopards and foxes there’s just arid soil. The animals are busy gorging on the dread goddess of night meanwhile Lucien tastes chalky entrails.