When I saw her in the lobby of the administration block, my first reaction was to retreat. Her body had become slightly stooped in the four years that had passed. She still looked more like a quarterback than a housewife, but she was wearing new glasses, which meant she now had a touch of the businesswoman about her. She had certainly aged, but I’d never looked at her enough to remember how she used to look. She still scared me as much as ever. The lack of affection in her eyes made me feel like a piece of plasma dragging behind her. She didn’t even say hello, just started looking through my release papers. She read and reread the clauses that mentioned her, and asked for tons of explanations about certain paragraphs. All this took about three quarters of an hour, and I spent the whole time holding my breath. The outside world made me dizzy and my mother made me nauseous. My senses were going haywire. I had a strong desire to go back to my room. But she signed the last sheet of paper and turned to see if everything was there. We left, she in front, me behind. The light outside dazzled me even more than the day I was born. I looked around and saw the fields. They looked as curved as the earth. The clear blue sky was reflected on the asphalt. I felt like a little boy and was seized with a sudden desire to just take off. I thought I could grab her car keys and leave without her, but they would have immediately taken me back to the hospital and now that I had tasted a few seconds in the open air of the coast, I wanted to take advantage of it.
I sat down next to her. She reversed without saying a word. It wasn’t until we reached the road that she exploded.
“What did you tell them?”
I didn’t let her faze me. “That’s a meaningless question. We talked about lots of things in four years.”
She was tapping her fingers on the wheel as she drove but that wasn’t enough, she thumped it with her closed fist like a hammer.
“Stop fucking with me, Al, what did you tell them that they should demand you keep your distance from me, huh? What is it, have I got the plague or something? What the hell did you tell them? You’re worth no more than a lump of birdshit, you hear me?” She was as red as the velvet seat covers. “You gave the speech all criminals do, putting all the blame on their parents for what they did. That someone as manipulative as you could have come out of my womb makes me feel nauseous. You can’t even take responsibility for your own dumb actions. Maybe I was the one who put the rifle in your hands and pulled the trigger!”
She braked abruptly, and the smoke from the tires could probably have been seen from the prison. She took a deep breath then seemed to calm down.
“Listen to me, Al. You may be my son, but there’s nothing forcing me to love you, just as there’s nothing forcing you to love me. I have an important job at the university, I’m the personal assistant to a dean. I don’t want you to keep ruining my reputation. The reason they let you go is because they think you’re cured. Now you’re going to look for a job and get out of here. I’ll let you stay here for three days, okay, three days and then you get out. When you killed your grandparents, you left this world, if you want to come back into it, it’ll be without me.”
She calmly started the car again.
“What are you planning to do?” she said, putting on a honeyed voice.
Quite honestly, I hadn’t yet thought about it. I wanted to do something connected with motorcycles, or else a job in the open air, but my ambitions were no more specific than that.
“I’m planning to enlist in the army and go to Vietnam.”
She found that an interesting idea, I guess because it was so drastic. “They really changed you in there. I remember you were always chicken, always pissing in your pants if there was the slightest physical threat. But can you do something like that within the terms of your parole?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’d better find out. Now.”
We did a U-turn and went back to the office. The woman there was surprised to see us again. She didn’t know much about the subject of enlisting. There were lots of guys who went from Vietnam to that hospital, but I’d be the first to do the reverse. Just then, one of her superiors put his head in through the door and she asked him. He answered in the affirmative. As long as I was in the army, I’d be considered supervised, so that didn’t compromise my parole. He left me his details in case the army wanted to contact him, and he promised to reach out to the Justice Department. Before I’d even really thought about it, I’d committed myself to the war. I’d gone to a lot of trouble over the past few months to understand my reactions, my unconscious so to speak. Now I’d leaped at an opportunity that would take me, all expenses paid, as far as possible from my mother.
It was three in the afternoon by the time we got to Santa Cruz. My mother dropped me downtown. After some hesitation, she gave me a copy of her house keys, then set off for the university. I rushed and bought myself a hamburger with the few dollars she’d agreed to leave me. I ate it quickly then went straight to the army recruitment office. It was a small, cramped office and the guy on duty had a crew cut, a spotless shirt, and a grim look on his face. He jerked his head back when he saw the size of me and asked me what I wanted. Once I’d filled out a little form, he pointed me in the direction of a sergeant who was reading a comic book in an even smaller office behind his. The sergeant put on an air of self-importance mixed with a kind of calculated simplicity, and we got down to brass tacks. I didn’t lie about anything. I mentioned the murder of my grandparents and that took him aback a little. He quickly changed the subject. My size, he said, would limit what I could do. He looked at my feet—the symbol of how difficult my case was. From the face he pulled, he seemed to be saying that they couldn’t find shoes my size in the army. The guy looked harassed. There weren’t a whole lot of people volunteering for Vietnam. At the same time, if they put a guy like me in a helicopter the damn thing would never get off the ground. He could have handled a small guy who had killed his grandparents or a giant without a criminal record. But a criminal giant was too much for him. He took my details and promised to call me if I was needed.
My mother was renting a house that looked like all the other houses on the same street. It wasn’t very old, about fifteen years maybe. There wasn’t much light inside. A garden about sixty feet long separated it from the neighbors. The neighborhood was so clean and respectable it felt sterile. There was a back garden, completely enclosed by a low white wall, but the door leading to it was locked. Through the window I could see she’d made it a paradise for her prize cats, who were all out there, lazing in the sun. The shaded rooms depressed me. My mother had given me a room right next to the front door. My things had to stay in my bag in case there was an unexpected visit from the probation officer. While waiting for dinner, I went for a walk around town. I couldn’t believe my eyes. In four years the world had changed more than it must have done between the beginning and the end of the war. Hundreds of young people were walking around, looking unwashed, and dressed like hoboes, in shirts, long flowery dresses and sandals. The guys wore their hair long and thick like girls and had let their beards grow. They staggered about with bloodshot eyes and all kinds of charms and things on their necks and wrists. You’ve never seen such a bunch of raggedy people, painted from head to foot, and I thought there must be a really bad depression for there to be so many homeless young people wandering around aimlessly. They seemed to have made a decision to look ugly, and there must have been a reason for it. I was even approached a few times by girls who wanted to talk to me about all kinds of weird things, a mixture of Jesus Christ, peace in Vietnam, reincarnation and a whole heap of other bullshit all jumbled together in their drug-addled brains. There was even one who stopped in front of me with her arms folded and called me a white totem, an exterminator of Indians. I didn’t need to push her to get her out of my way, she fell by herself, laughing like a half-witted little girl. I wasn’t in a mood to get friendly with this bunch. All I wanted was to be left alone. There was a strong desire to bump myself off growing in my mind and I was trying to resist it. I sat down in a park where about fifty of these degenerates were bumming around on some weird kind of inner journey. I was proud of the fact that, unlike them, I was wearing a clean blue short-sleeved shirt. I was too big and impressive for anyone to try sitting down next to me. I sat there for about an hour, looking at these people and telling myself that life was meaningless. Not one of the people walking there had the slightest chance of surviving the next hundred years. The history of our species, it seemed to me, was a kind of genocide by time. Each generation struggled with its own little affairs before it filled the cemeteries. I had a real fit of the blues, I don’t deny that. I could have blown my brains out, or opened fire on all those freaks or those old guys walking in the park, driven by obscure motives known only to themselves. Santa Cruz wasn’t having a very good effect on me. I was furious that the fucking hospital had handed me back to my mother, and that I was as dependent on her as if I was a baby, with no money or plans. I felt hatred rising in me, hatred for all those guys who had supposedly been treating me for four years and had now abandoned me. I wanted to go back to the hospital to regain my dignity. Why the hell had they done a thing like that? They didn’t know what I was capable of when I blew my top! I would have liked to see the faces of all those shrinks if they found out the next morning that I had shot twenty people walking in this park and then two or three cops before their buddies showed up and shot me down. Before they let me out, they should have found me a job. Anything, anywhere, even a job nobody wants to do, wash dead bodies in the morgue or something like that, but at least ensure my independence. Sitting there on that bench, I wept with rage.