the box against the wind even tighter. If he pitched it whole into the water, it might float for hours, and some fool might fish it out. But if he dared open it, the wind would stab at its contents with its draconian fingers and lift out whole sections of loose news clippings, photos, documents and send them off like blind birds in a fit of flapping and squawking.
A true Chicago storm was brewing overhead. A darkness like night had crept like evil itself over the city as if to hold it ransom to darkness, Chicago turning from daylight to midnight within the hour owned now by the power of the storm edge.
It seemed to Giles that all the forces of nature had aligned with him to be in agreement, in sync, chanting in the powerful wind and the threatening lightning streaks out over the water, and in the rolling thunder, all as if to say, Do it! Do it! Do it now, Giles! Fuck the consequences, just rid yourself of Mother's nasty little legacy box, bequeathed from so enormous a hatred as to set your backbone to quivering.
The voice in the wind now pounded his psyche and inner ear. It sounded like his dream father's voice from the far off other side, telling him to go ahead and hurl any and all knowledge locked away in the box into the raging waters to be swallowed whole there in the pounding waves, that it wouldn't float, that no one would ever find the box buried below the lake.
He lifted the box overhead, preparing to do as all of nature and all of his instincts told him; an it was to destroy any vestige of the carefully guarded, carefully accumulated, carefully passed on reams of information detailing the man who had fathered and abandoned him.
“Sonofabitch… son of one motherfucking bitch is what you are!” he shouted at the box as a female jogger hastened her speed to get past the strange figure in black with the box held overhead, talking to himself.
A second jogger along the lake path stopped and stared. The man faintly asked against the wind, “Hey, buddy, you all right? Not thinking of jumping, are you?”
Barely hearing this, Giles turned to the sound, half expecting to see his dead mother or his living father. His mother had told him that his father would live on forever. Somewhere in the box. Also somewhere in the cumbersome box-no doubt-she had left Father's last known address here in Chicago. Mother had said he'd once lived in Chicago, and that he was killed under strange circumstances in New Orleans, but that could all have been fabricated, he imagined. Perhaps Father was as alive as Giles and living right here in the city? Perhaps his address lay just beneath Giles's fingers, in the box. He imagined a large house filled with rooms, his father coming to the door and welcoming him in with open arms.
Subconsciously, he supposed it a reason underlying all others for his coming to the Windy City. To finally face his father. To see if he was the monster Mother portrayed after all, and to ask him why he had left Giles with so vile a creature.
She'd said his father liked hurting people, that he had even killed some people and was thrown into a prison for the mentally insane. “That's why I say, boy, you're just like him, killing my goddamn cat, my innocent cat, and for what? So you could suck out its spinal fluid and its bone marrow! My dear God you are born an evil spawn of Satan, evil incarnate, and I can't stand the thought of your having once occupied space and time in my womb! Like some fucking real-life Rosemary's baby is what you are.”
He reached out to her, trying to calm her in her last moments, but she spat in his face.
“Just like your father,” she repeated the endless mantra of his childhood. “Gives me the dry heaves just to think he had his thing in me even once, much less a dozen times before he could impregnate me. And then he runs off. All because he got a little ill in the head and began to think he had some sort of cancer or disease 'cause some asshole doctor tells him he's losing red blood cells or some such shit, and then in the end, he checks outta reality altogether… becomes a total fucking murderous maniac and winds up in the loony bin in of all places Philadelphia, from where he escaped in a blood bath and-”
“I don't wanna hear no more, Mother!” he'd shouted at her. “Just go die of your own foul disease!”
She didn't miss a beat. “-and you, you know what they say about the acorn not falling far from the tree, and if you want to look up your genetic freak of a father, you only have to look, in the box, boy.”
She finished with another coughing jag, blood coming up. So apropos to her cursing Giles.
That had been years ago, the year of Mother's death that somber November day and night while he kept vigil at her bedside, not to ease her mind or as the obedient son but to be sure she was really dead when she finally took her last breath. He'd so wanted to open her up, remove her spine and feed on it as he'd done her cat, but he never got the chance.
Afraid of him, afraid of what he might do to her after death, she had ordered up her own cremation and the funeral home placed in charge, a place called French and Parker's back in Millbrook. The funeral boys rushed in like ghouls on automatic pilot and whisked her off straightaway on the basis of a court order she had made out in the event of her death to be cremated. French and Parker did not disappoint Mother. They did the cremation within hours according to her wishes, no wake, no fanfare, no candle burning, nothing. Mother's lawyer worked in close conjunction with the funeral home, overriding Giles's wishes for an old-fashioned, closed coffin wake, thinking he might get at the body sometime between its being embalmed and put out on the floor, thinking the spinal fluid and bone marrow from the backbone ought rightly to be his.
The thoughts most certainly frightened him, galled him even, but worst of all, the thoughts of doing this to Mother, extracting her essence, her luz, her al abj, her strength and her power to make it his own made him wonder even more deeply than ever about his father's identity, his insanity, his urges and actions. Only hinted at all these years by Mother but now handed over to him all wrapped in ribbon as a fucking nasty awful joke of a gift. Like handing someone a gun used by a suicide victim and calling it a gift that potentially “keeps on giving.” But that was Mother.
How much of his ill thoughts, his satanic and draconian urges had he in fact inherited from her and not Father? Why hadn't she bequeathed two boxes? One filled with dear old invisible Father and one filled with dear old venomous and quite visible Mother?
Giles had been given only a moment with her after she died there at the hospital, and he knew he had no chance given the openness and busyness of the place to take what every fiber in him craved. And the strict record kept of who was in and who was out of the rooms at any given time discouraged the violence he wanted to do. And with security just down the hall, he struggled mightily to restrain him-self, thinking he'd have his chance to break into the crematorium at Frenchy's, as it was called in the neighborhood, and attack the old crone, dead at forty- eight, that night. But the damnable partners at the funeral home acted quickly, paid well to do so.
Even in death she had cheated Giles of all he needed or ever really wanted. No matter now. He had killed Mother many times over now, and even Lucinda, in her way, was more like Mother than she was unlike Mother. And now all of his many Mothers dangled over his sculptures like long sleek egrets at full wing gliding over the mores of a strange sanctuary.
Unlike his other victims, he had only an opportunity to sketch Lucinda in death, never alive like the others. Sketches he had thrown into his own box along with news clippings and stories and materials and journal entries about his own exploits to rival those of dear old Dad.
Mother he had sketched many times over both alive and dead, depositing her into the box many times over, feeding birds in a park, petting a dog, walking a horse.
“Perhaps Father is here someplace in Chicago,” he said aloud to Mother on the wind over the lake. “But so long as I don't know who the fuck he is, I really don't have to know, now do I?”
A voice from behind Giles interrupted his audible thoughts. “Whatcha doing with that box?” asked the nosey male jogger who'd stopped to tie his shoe as if an undercover cop. He was clean cut and bulked up from lifting barbells. He looked like a cop.
Giles lowered the box. “It's my fucking box. I'll do whatever the hell I want with it.”
The jogger nodded successively and rushed off.
“Not a cop after all,” Giles told himself.
He then tucked the box under his arm as the first raindrops fell. He walked across the great expanse of the park, the grass growing wetter and wetter as he passed until his pant cuffs soaked through, even though the drizzle had remained light. The wind at his back pushed him hard as if a pissed off Satan were shoving, angry that he had failed to carry through on what he'd thought was a firm, final decision, one he would act on. The thunder overhead roared again and while his back was turned to Lake Michigan, he saw the flashes of lightning reflected in the thousands of blinking windowpanes ahead of him along Michigan Avenue. Cars whizzed past on the Outer Lake Shore Drive. When he finally arrived at the overhead bypass and the traffic at the terminus of Fullerton Avenue, the
