A Long-Lost Mother’s Embrace Is an Obliterative Fate

A Long-Lost Mother’s Embrace Is an Obliterative Fate

Marlena Williams

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“The Ominous Shaft” by Marlena Williams

Cole set out early, when the fishermen of his hometown were just beginning to cast their nets into the sea. Claudia Bernard, the woman that Cole was journeying towards, had no idea that he was on his way. Cole made the drive from Astoria to Fortuna in one white-knuckled shot, terrified that if he lingered anywhere for too long, something awful would happen—a nosy traveler would report him as a teen runaway, or he’d simply lose his nerve and drive back home. At hour five, a massive traffic jam snagged its way down the interstate, delaying Cole’s arrival in California by hours. Night had fallen by the time he reached Fortuna. All around him the shadows of great redwoods loomed. Cole pulled into the parking lot of the Fortuna Inn a little after 7 PM, its blinking red vacancy sign burning like a flare in the dark. 

The Fortuna Inn was a classic low-rise motel in the shape of an L, its rooms accessible by an exterior pathway lit by a single exposed bulb. Cole parked his car and walked inside to a small lobby that smelled overwhelmingly of cigarettes. He couldn’t tell if the smell was emanating from the large woman seated behind the counter or if, over time, smoke had gradually seeped into the very matter of the place, becoming one with it. 

“One room, please,” Cole said. At seventeen, he’d never checked into a motel by himself, but this seemed like the logical thing to say. Still, the woman behind the counter eyed him suspiciously. She wore a green flannel shirt, with a pin that said “Jan” affixed over the formidable mounds of her breasts. Cole, in his exhaustion from the drive, imagined sinking his head into the soft bounty of them, closing his eyes, and falling asleep. 

Jan lit a cigarette and continued to stare. 

“You alone?” she said. 

“Is that relevant?” Cole replied.

“It is if you’re being trafficked,” Jan said. “Or smuggling drugs.”

“I’m here to visit Tracker,” Cole said, which was partly true. 

“Don’t parents usually come along on college visits?” 

“My dad couldn’t get the time off work.”

“And your mom?”

“Not in the picture.” 

It was the kind of statement that usually softened people to him. Over the years, Cole had learned that, if you were a white-skinned teenage boy and you alluded to a dead or absentee mother, you could get away with almost anything. Jan just nodded and turned around to grab a key off the wall behind her. Cole slid his debit card across the Formica counter.

“Kind of quiet here,” he said. He’d only seen one other car in the parking lot—a mint green Ford truck that presumably belonged to Jan. 

“You’ll be in 6A,” she said, ignoring his comment. “Down the walkway, on your right.”

“Do you have room service?” Cole asked. 

“Do I look like I have fucking room service?” Jan replied.

Cole took the key and stepped back outside. The night was chilly and damp. He could sense but not see the towering redwoods that lined the road opposite the motel, enforcing, like sentinels, an almost frightening stillness. The lightbulb buzzed faintly over the cement walkway as he hurried to 6A. All the other rooms were dark, the curtains drawn tight behind their windows. Between the motel and the highway was a patchy stretch of dirt and grass with two pink plastic lawn chairs set up in the middle of it, like Jan was trying to make things nice. The look of them made Cole feel mournful—though for Jan or for the empty chairs or for himself, he wasn’t sure. 

Inside the surprisingly clean room, Cole stretched across the bed and pulled out his phone. A few hours earlier, he’d sent his father a text letting him know that he’d safely landed in Palm Springs. Mr. Hansen was under the impression that Cole had driven to his friend Austin Whittaker’s house that morning, left his car in their driveway, and joined the family on their annual spring break trip to Palm Springs. Cole’s father was a simple man, a former minor league pitcher who now ran a sporting goods store in Astoria. He’d responded Aloha! to Cole’s text and sent emojis of a pineapple and crashing wave.

There was also a text from Cole’s girlfriend, Mikayla—the only other person on the planet who knew where he actually was. Let me know when you make it in., she’d written, her intentional use of punctuation artfully signaling her lingering bitterness. She’d wanted to come on the trip, but Cole had told her that this was something he had to do on his own. 

Cole had been dating Mikayla since middle school. She had fire-engine red hair, skin as white as milk, and glorious red nipples that reminded Cole of oversized pepperonis, though he knew better than to share this observation with her, even if to him it was a compliment. Cole ignored Mikayla’s text. Already, her flushed complexion and frenzied moods were starting to feel distant and unreal. Or maybe it was the version of Cole that Mikayla knew that was starting to feel unreal, the Cole who had not yet left on his journey to meet Claudia Bernard. 

Cole pulled his fraying copy of The Ominous Shaft out of the backpack he’d dumped by the bed. On the cover, Claudia Bernard stood in a column of white light, her knees bent, her wide shoulders and lank arms almost vampiric as they crooked towards the glow, either conjuring it or succumbing to it, Cole wasn’t sure. She had short, dark hair, thick eyebrows, and a mole flecking the tip of her pointed, almost feline chin. She looked, Cole realized the first time he’d seen the book’s cover, just like him. Cole stared at the cover again now with a kind of longing recognition. He’d always felt gangly and out of place in his paternal line, stocked as it was by stout, pale Nordic types. Looking at Claudia Bernard, Cole’s olive skin, long limbs, and angular features finally made a certain kind of sense. 

Cole closed his eyes, opened to a random page, and pointed.

The psychological chasm between the male and female can be traced to the architecture of their respective forms, namely the genitalia. While the male phallus is a kind of feat of engineering—a straining, skyward skin tower, compulsive in its questing, forever extending towards the unknown, ready to master and transform it—the female vagina is a barbed and swampy abyss that has never seen the sun, a crude and cavernous vestige of the netherworld from which we all came and to which we shall all return—a place of great danger and mystery, offgassing fumes and vengeance, archaically content in its dark and winding depths, the putrid and pulsing center of all life. 

Cole dropped his finger and closed the book. He’d been practicing this form of bibliomancy ever since his father had sat him down at the dinner table the year before and informed him that his mother was the controversial Italian American feminist Claudia Bernard, author of, among other works, The Ominous Shaft: Sex, Art, and Nature from the Dawn of Man to Bill Clinton. This book was Claudia Bernard’s first, published in the mid-1990s, just a year after she’d graduated from Cambridge. It lived up to its name, covering, in an exhaustingly meandering fashion, everything from Stone Age fertility goddesses to Madonna’s fifth studio album Erotica, along with other, more idiosyncratic flourishes, including an inexplicable, twenty-five page passage about the telepathic powers of cats. Claudia Bernard thought Euripides’ The Bacchae and Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus were the greatest works of art ever created. The book’s most famous line—“There will never be a female Beethoven, because there will never be a female Ted Bundy”—continued to incite the ire of feminist critics everywhere. Cole had tried to read the gigantic text linearly at first, but found it so inscrutable and dense he’d put it down in reverent defeat. He found it was far easier and more pleasurable to read The Ominous Shaft like this, in disconnected bits and pieces. 

When Mikayla had attempted Cole’s ritual herself, she’d flipped to a random page, read it aloud, and burst out laughing. 

“Holy shit, that was the worst thing I’ve ever read,” she’d said, tossing the book onto the floor of Cole’s bedroom. 

But Cole didn’t think so. Next fall, Cole was headed to MIT on a full scholarship, while Mikayla said she was “still deciding.” Cole knew this meant she’d eventually enroll at Clatsop Community College just like everyone else from their hometown. So, when Mikayla said that The Ominous Shaft was the stupidest thing she’d ever read, Cole had thought but didn’t say that maybe Mikayla was just stupid.

To be fair, he didn’t understand the book either, but that didn’t mean there was nothing to understand. Cole was convinced that deep within the book’s convoluted, never-ending sentences, its brick after brick of protracted paragraphs, its wandering tangle of words and phrases that began in one place and ended somewhere entirely different (or, more often than not, went nowhere at all, as if even the writer herself had forgotten where she was headed), was a message, a secret code meant just for him. 

This belief had been confirmed late one night when Cole, alone in his room, had waded through a particularly unwieldy paragraph of The Ominous Shaft to find the first simple and somewhat declarative sentence of the entire book:

Every man, which is to say every Son, must sooner or later set out on his great and perilous journey, a journey that will inevitably end where it began: The Mother.

Cole had underlined the sentence and read it again and again, until a plan began to take shape. Though Claudia Bernard had spent most of her career teaching on the East Coast and in the Midwest, she’d recently decamped to Tracker College, after writing a scathing review of a young woman’s otherwise very well-received college sexual assault memoir. Students had revolted, and Claudia Bernard had fled. Now, she was less than a day’s drive away from Astoria and—perhaps to Cole’s advantage—at a personal and professional low. Cole saved up money working weekends at Hansen’s Athletics until he had enough to make this trip. He would go to his mother and she would welcome him, grateful that he, like her psychic cats, had heard her silent call. 

Cole was about to turn to that sentence when there was an abrupt knock at the door. He stood up and peered out of the tiny peephole to the shadowy walkway of the Fortuna Inn, to the barren lot with its yellowed grass and lonely pink table and chairs. Hesitantly, he opened the door. When he looked down, sitting on an oily paper plate was the saddest sandwich he had ever seen: two pieces of thumbprint-dented white bread, rubbery pink lips of baloney sticking out between them. Cole picked it up and sniffed. It reeked of cigarettes. 

Though he was starving from his journey, Cole walked to the bathroom trashcan, opened the lid with his foot, and threw the sandwich away.

The tour the next morning was led by a junior named Evan, who was majoring in Philosophy and French, the most obnoxious and useless combination of majors. Evan was distressingly handsome, with blue eyes and a head of brown hair that was somehow both boyish and urbane. He dressed how Cole imagined an Ivy League grad student would dress—oversized tweed blazer, loose-fitting jeans—rather than how a student of presumably average intellect, at a little-known liberal arts college in Humboldt County, would dress. Cole took this to mean that Evan was out of touch with his station in life. 

Cole had signed up for the tour as a kind of plausible deniability for being on campus, which now felt silly and unnecessary. The group was small, three other visiting families and Cole. Tracker College, which sounded less like an institution for higher learning than a training center for bomb-sniffing dogs, wasn’t overflowing with applicants. It was the kind of school people went to when they couldn’t get in anywhere else. People like Mikayla. As Evan led the group through the heavily forested grounds, Cole felt the immensity of Claudia Bernard’s professional downfall.

The morning was overcast, a damp coastal fog hanging drearily in the air. Cole had slept poorly the night before. Despite the cool weather, he was sweating beneath the polyethylene-slicked tarp of his rain jacket, jittery with exhaustion and nerves. Evan took them to the bookstore and the dorms, to the chemistry labs and the arts center, before winding towards the squat brutalist structure that was the humanities building. From regularly scouring her faculty page on the Tracker website, Cole knew that Claudia Bernard’s office was located on the fourth floor of this building. 

Cole was pretty sure that he had a memory of his mother. It was dark, either late at night or very early in the morning, and Cole was lying awake in his crib. A shadowy face loomed over him. He was scared at first, too scared to cry out, but he reached for the shape anyway, trusting it. As soon as he did, the shape lurched jerkily out of view, like someone caught staring. Cole knew about infant amnesia, knew that most people could not recall events that occurred before the age of two, but later, when he looked at the picture of Claudia Bernard on the cover of The Ominous Shaft, he was certain the shadow had been her. 

For much of his life, that memory was all he’d known about his mother. “She left,” his dad would say, and leave it at that. Though Cole knew she wasn’t technically dead, he’d always pictured her birthing him in the woods like an injured animal and then slinking off to a cave to die. Asking his father for more details had seemed like an insult. During Cole’s sophomore year, his English class had read “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden, and the poem had made Cole so unspeakably emotional that he’d run out of the classroom and cried in a bathroom stall. The poem affected Cole not because his father physically labored every day in the bitter cold, but because he did things like fold Cole’s laundry and drive him to robotics competitions on the weekends. Other kids’ moms fawned over this young single dad and assumed that Cole’s mother had died tragically, maybe even in childbirth. Their fridge was forever stocked with gifts of lasagna and the ingredients for beef tacos, as if Cole and his father were in a perpetual state of mourning. 

That past December, shortly after Cole had been accepted into MIT through early admission, his father had finally told him about Claudia Bernard. It was late at night, and his dad was still wearing the tight-fitting Hansen’s Athletics polo that showed off his sculpted pitcher’s arm. Cole fixated on that arm as his father spoke, how it was muscular and mighty in a way that Cole’s would never be. Long past were the dreaded summer nights spent in the Hansen backyard, Cole’s father trying to hide his disappointment as Cole’s fastballs spun loosely and limply into the dirt. 

Don’t aim, his father would say. Command. 

Cole found the sentiment compelling, almost poetic, but he could never quite get his body to follow through on what his brain was telling it. 

“Your mother didn’t leave because of you,” Cole’s father explained in the kitchen that night. “She left because she is a selfish woman.”

Mr. Hansen was almost certainly going off script. Surely the guidance was to tell his son that his mother still loved him, in her own way. Instead, his father explained that he’d met Claudia Bernard when he was playing in the minor leagues in Columbus and she was a visiting professor at Ohio State. He was twenty-one. She was forty-three. They’d met at a dive bar, gone on a few dates, fell out of contact. Then, seven months later, she showed up at his apartment door unannounced, her round, straining belly pointed at him like an accusation. In that moment, he’d fallen in love with her. They lived together for a month or so before the birth, shortly after which Claudia Bernard disappeared back to the East Coast in the dead of night without a word, leaving Cole’s father with no choice but to raise his infant son alone. He retired from the Clippers and moved back to his hometown of Astoria, where he opened Hansen’s Athletics and learned the value of a humble life. He hoped Cole, too, might come to appreciate the value of a humble life. That’s why he liked to take Cole to the West Basin Marina on summer evenings, just as the fishermen were docking their boats for the day. To Cole’s father, the fishermen were a living symbol of everything he’d come to cherish: the grounding force of family, the pleasures of physical exertion, the honor of a hard day’s work.

“I don’t want you to feel guilty,” his father said, after finishing his story. “You’re the best thing that has ever happened to me, bud.”

At this, his father had started to cry. 

The next day, Cole and Mikayla went to a used bookstore on Commercial Street and bought all of Claudia Bernard’s books. Cole quickly learned, through reading her work, that Claudia Bernard’s thoughts on motherhood were complex. She’d once written that, the nuclear family is a fiction created to forestall the natural maternal impulse to eat one’s young. For her, the lengthy rearing period for human children was evidence of the human woman’s inferior status in the biological order. Starlings leave the nest just three weeks after birth, Claudia Bernard pointed out. Foals walk just one hour after they are born. And yet human children—those helpless, greedy flesh parasites—were dependent upon their mothers for years, often decades, gradually sucking the great life force out of her until she was left a weak and drooping crone, crying out in pathetic derangement for the thing that had destroyed her. Claudia Bernard thought Eve’s Curse was real, but that it could be overcome through medical intervention and mental fortitude. She was a staunch advocate of abortion and an equally staunch critic of assisted reproduction, which she saw as misguided: women stepping in front of the very bullet they had miraculously dodged. What her ideas implied for the fate of humanity, she never quite clarified. To Claudia Bernard, childbirth was a humiliation and motherhood a trap. 

Motherhood isn’t creation, she wrote. It is nature taking control. 

And yet Claudia Bernard had also written that it was the fate of every Son to journey towards his Mother. As Cole gazed up at her office in the Tracker College humanities building, he found these words beating in his chest. He balled his hands into tight fists to keep them from trembling. He’d envisioned their meeting more times than he liked to admit, and it always went more or less the same: Claudia Bernard would take one look at him and instantly recognize him as her own. If he didn’t set things into motion soon, he knew it would be too tempting to continue on with the tour, like he was just another aimless high school student with depression and a 2.2 GPA, rather than what he really was: a person chasing his destiny.

He broke for the door to the humanities building.

“Hey!” Evan called out, as Cole ducked inside. “You have to stay with the group!” 

But Cole was already halfway up the building’s back stairwell, taking the steps two at a time. Everything felt inevitable and preordained. 

Claudia Bernard’s office was located in the far corner of a drab U-shaped suite papered with flyers for open mic poetry nights, asexual affinity groups, and support services for survivors of emotional abuse, all things Cole had read enough by and about his mother to know she actively despised. 

Her door was shut. Cole hesitated before knocking. 

“It’s open,” a voice called from within. 

Cole recognized its clipped nasality immediately. After the publication of The Ominous Shaft in the ’90s, Claudia Bernard had been an occasional presence on a certain subset of quasi-intellectual evening talk shows, where she was brought on to critique or defend whatever cultural flashpoint touched upon the amorphous concept of “contemporary feminism.” In videos of these appearances, which Cole had unearthed on YouTube and watched obsessively, she would stride onto the stage in black tights and a leather jacket, wearing no makeup except for a swipe of red lipstick, and talk rapaciously at the host for fifteen minutes, not ceding a second of her airtime. Claudia Bernard wasn’t beautiful, so to speak, but the sheer force of her presence on the stage made beauty irrelevant. Cole admired her utter self-containment, her ability, through the power of her intellect alone, to turn ideas into something real, an object—in her case, a book—you could touch. She spoke with the frenetic speed and intensity of a person whose thoughts were forever outpacing her ability to verbalize them, giving her the slightly crazed affect of a greyhound chasing a mechanical rabbit around a track, her prize forever a snout’s length out of reach. 

Cole’s hand shook as he opened the door. Claudia Bernard sat behind a desk, pen in hand as she stared angrily at a piece of paper laid out before her, her dark eyebrows almost comically aslant. She wore a white linen shirt, left unbuttoned over a black tank top. The skin on her chest had turned leathery and dark, in the way that the skin on all white women’s chests seems to turn leathery and dark sooner or later. Her short brown hair was shot through with wiry strands of gray. She seemed older, more tired, than Cole had expected, but with the taut, sinewy frame of someone who ate very little and swam laps every day. She looked like a woman who had fought valiantly against the urge to buy chunky turquoise jewelry and won.

“Seminar’s full,” she said, without looking up. 

“What?” Cole said. 

“The 401 seminar is full and I’m not taking any more applications,” she said. “You’ll have to apply again in the fall.”

Claudia Bernard’s office was airless and hot. Cole scanned the room, hoping to find something to comment upon, but it looked how he assumed every other professor’s office looked: dim lighting, book-lined shelves, a wilted fern in the corner. To the right of her desk sat a tower of what Cole recognized as her latest book, You’re Overthinking It, a 700-page critique of the left’s gender politics. It had sold poorly and received almost universally negative reviews.

“I’m not a student here,” Cole said. “My name is Cole Hansen.”

At this, Claudia Bernard put down her pen and looked up, her expression difficult to read. 

After a long pause, she stood and walked out from behind her desk. For a flash, Cole thought it was happening, that she was opening her arms and coming to him. Instead, she stopped at her bookshelf and pulled off an ancient-looking hardcover.

“I thought you’d applied to the seminar,” she said, flipping through the book’s yellowing pages before returning it to the shelf. “It’s one of the most popular in the department. Students pick a feminist from history and role play as them during our discussions for the rest of the semester. They like it because it’s basically theater. I like it because I don’t have to listen to any of their actual opinions.” 

Claudia Bernard pulled a second book off the shelf and returned to her desk. She did not invite Cole into her office or offer him a seat. He leaned his weight against her doorframe. Claudia Bernard looked down at her paper and drew what appeared to be a very large X across it. 

“I’m actually having the students over for a party tonight,” she continued. “This generation is very strange. None of them drink. None of them have sex. I buy bottles of wine for these things, but all they want is flavored seltzer. I’m so sick of looking at those fucking cans.” 

Cole wasn’t sure why his mother was going on to him about flavored seltzer—if her aimless chattering was a sign of anxiety, or if she really was as she seemed: completely unmoved by his arrival. 

“I hate flavored seltzer,” Cole found himself saying. “And I have sex.” 

Claudia Bernard looked up from the paper and stared at him placidly.

“Sorry. I don’t know why I’m telling you that,” Cole said. “But I do. I have a girlfriend.”

Claudia Bernard turned and stared out her window for several minutes, as if lost in thought. 

“I always thought my son would be gay,” she finally said. She turned back to him and shook her head. “Are you touring Tracker?” 

“Yes,” Cole replied. “Well, no. I start at MIT next fall.”

“MIT,” Claudia Bernard repeated, nodding in what Cole hoped was approval. “I know an Egyptologist in the archeology department there. Carl Freir. You should look him up.”

“I’ll be in the School of Engineering,” Cole said, “but yeah, maybe.” 

Claudia Bernard again put down her pen. 

“Why are you here, Cole?” she asked. “Your father isn’t dying, is he?”

“No,” Cole said, the tops of his ears burning. “Of course not. It’s my spring break.”

Cole knew this explained nothing, but he couldn’t think of anything else to say. He felt dizzy and short of breath, as if there was something tightening around his neck like a vise. He tried to inhale, but the breath caught in his throat. Claudia Bernard blurred before him. 

“Are you alright?” she said.

Cole nodded and turned away, bracing himself against the doorframe. His mother let out a belabored sigh. 

“Party starts at 7 PM,” Claudia Bernard said. “1422 Rose Hill Road. There’ll be food.”

She returned to her grading with a level of concentration that Cole understood to be her version of a goodbye. He turned and walked back down the hallway towards the stairwell, only realizing when he exited the building moments later that he was shaking. 

That morning, he’d parked his car behind the library, in the far corner of a quiet lot canopied by weeping fir trees. He staggered back there now, pawing at his neck and heaving the damp coastal air into his lungs. 

Once safely inside the steel womb of his car, Cole rested his skull against the headrest and tried to steady his shuddering breaths. The persistent gray of Fortuna’s skies was just familiar enough to calm him. Rain pattered lightly on the car’s roof. Slowly, the invisible grip around his neck began to weaken, and Cole, succumbing to the heaviness in his lids, let his eyes drift closed. 

Cole dreamt he was in freefall, tumbling down some long and narrow passageway—an elevator shaft, maybe, or a well. Images flashed as he fell. Great cats prowling in deserts. Gold stone edifices breaching and rising up from the sand. Flowing red hair and scallop shells. Old hands crooked with cold. 

Eventually, he hit the passage’s bottom and found himself in a dark and dripping cave, its damp tunnels twisting and disappearing into endless black. Cole began crawling through the cave on his stomach, dragging his limp body over rubble and slime. The atmosphere around him was sulfuric and thick, devoid of all oxygen. In the distance, he saw a blinking brightness, but couldn’t tell if it was fading or growing brighter. 

Like some limbless creature, apodous and belly-bound, Cole inched towards it, straining for the light.

Cole awoke to a ding from his phone. It was 5:45 PM. Outside the car, darkness was descending slowly. Mikayla had texted him steadily elongating strings of question marks. ??? ???? ???????? Once again, Cole did not respond. Instead, he typed Claudia Bernard’s address into his phone. It was a fifteen minute walk from campus. If he left now, he would arrive at his mother’s house an hour before her party. 

To steady himself, Cole pulled The Ominous Shaft out of his backpack.

Every man, which is to say every Son, must sooner or later set out on his great and perilous journey, he read. A journey that will inevitably end where it all began: the Mother. 

Cole closed the book, tucked it into his backpack, and set out on foot towards his mother.

Claudia Bernard lived in a squat, ranch-style house that sat alone at the top of a steep hill. Its front windows glowed amber from within, beckoning as Cole approached. When she answered the door, Claudia Bernard was holding a fat-faced gray cat with gigantic jade-green eyes. In her other hand, she clutched an alarmingly full glass of red wine. 

“You’re early,” she said. 

Claudia Bernard did not attempt to hide her annoyance, but she ushered Cole inside. The entryway opened up into a pleasant, warmly-lit living room. It was furnished with a burgundy and gold rug, an overstuffed sofa, several arm chairs, and a dark wood coffee table, topped with a stack of oversized art books, arranged at tasteful angles. Claudia Bernard let the cat drop to the floor. It scampered to a chair by the fireplace. 

“I’m cooking dinner,” Claudia Bernard said, already turning and walking down a short hallway towards what Cole assumed was the kitchen. “Make yourself at home.”

His mother disappeared through the doorway without inviting him to follow. Unsure of what to do, Cole took a seat on the sofa, his backpack still on. He crossed his hands politely in his lap. The cat watched him from the armchair with the same placid stare as Claudia Bernard. Cole stared back, wondering what it knew. 

After a few minutes, Cole stood up and examined the collection of objects lining the mantle of his mother’s fireplace. He hoped he might find displayed there some evidence of her enduring love for him: an ultrasound photo, his first-ever baby shoe. Instead, Cole’s gaze caught on a small replica statuette of the Venus of Willendorf, a Paleolithic limestone idol that Claudia Bernard had written about in The Ominous Shaft. Cole remembered the passage because of its strangeness. Claudia Bernard had described the Venus as a primitive art object, from a time before beauty, before identity, before the fierce Apollonian line arrived to shape and contain the unwieldy and ugly proliference of nature. Cole picked up the statuette and held her stone weight in his palm. She was bulging and bulbous, swollen with herself. Her breasts were poorly-formed mounds, her stomach rising up over her hips and pouring down over her pubic bone like dough, the stubs of her legs footless and fat. Cole stared at her. She had no face or eyes with which to stare back. 

Without thinking, Cole shoved the Venus into his backpack and looked towards the door. He considered fleeing, running back down the hill to his car. Instead he forced himself towards the enticing garlic-and-onion smell emanating from the kitchen. The cat followed, surveying the intruder’s movements.

Cole’s mother stood with her back to him at the stove, the glass of red wine to her left, a giant steel pot to her right. The lights were dim. Along the counter sat a neat row of wine bottles and glasses. Cole realized only then that he hadn’t eaten anything since the day before. The smell in the kitchen was so good, and Cole’s hunger so sudden and deep, he thought he might pass out from the sheer proximity to food. He hovered in his mother’s doorway, waiting once again. 

“Um,” he finally said.

Claudia Bernard turned around.

“Oh,” she said, almost like she had forgotten he was in the house. 

Cole stepped towards the stove. Claudia Bernard moved aside so he could peer over the lid of the pot into a deep, bubbling red. 

“My mother’s Bolognese,” she said, giving the pot a gentle stir. 

“Can I have some?” Cole asked. 

“It should really simmer for another hour,” Claudia Bernard said, but she gestured towards the round table at the center of the kitchen. Cole took a seat and dropped his backpack on the floor. After a minute, Claudia Bernard placed a plate of pasta and a glass of red wine in front of him. She picked up the cat and took a seat across the table.

Cole nearly groaned as he took the first bite. It was perhaps the most exquisite thing he had ever tasted—rich and sharp and unexpectedly sweet, the kind of deliciousness that hit like a drug, so intense that it almost reconfigured his sense of self. He twirled the noodles around the tines of the fork and slurped the sauce from each one through pursed lips. Claudia Bernard watched in silence as he ate. The fading light cast long shadows across the room. When he was finished, Cole pushed the plate aside and drank until his glass of wine was empty. The cat purred, its jade eyes trained on Cole. 

“You seem like a smart boy,” Claudia Bernard finally said. “I take it you’ve read my work?”

“Some of it,” Cole replied.

“Then you know where I stand on all of this,” she said, gesturing vaguely.

“All of this?” Cole said. 

“You, me, this whole thing.”

 Cole could only assume that she meant being his mother.

Claudia Bernard picked up the wine bottle and refilled his glass. 

“I was forty-three when I got pregnant,” she continued. “I didn’t even think it was possible to conceive at that stage in my life. I half-convinced myself that it was some kind of miracle, that I had a divine duty to see things through to the end. But as soon as I did, I knew I’d made a horrible mistake. I’d betrayed myself and everything I’ve ever believed in.”

She looked down at the animal on her lap and added, “It wasn’t personal.”

Cole scoffed defensively. He searched his brain for something to say but nothing came.

“Look, Cole, I know you’ve come a long way to see me,” Claudia Bernard said. “What exactly is it that you want?” 

Cole reached into his backpack and pulled out his copy of The Ominous Shaft. Opening to the underlined page, Cole slid the book towards his mother. She widened her eyes and blinked at it, like she was looking at something from her past that she didn’t even know if she remembered. She picked a pair of reading glasses off the table and scanned the text, mouthing the lines under her breath.

“Oh, Cole,” she said, when she was done. Her voice was disappointed, almost pitying. “Did you even finish the paragraph?”

She pushed the book back to him. Cole read on.

And at the end of this long and fruitless venture, this slow march towards fate, the Mother will meet the Son and consume him, devouring him with the obliterative force of her embrace.

Cole placed The Ominous Shaft back on the dinner table. 

“I don’t understand,” he said.

Claudia Bernard stood up and the cat leapt from her lap. She laughed to herself as she walked to the counter and opened another bottle of wine.

“No one seems to, do they?” she said. “But that’s not my problem, is it?” 

The doorbell chimed.

“Shit,” Claudia Bernard said. “The students. Grab some glasses, will you?” 

Claudia Bernard snatched the freshly opened bottle of wine from the counter and hurried out of the kitchen. The cat followed. Cole trailed a few feet behind, clutching wine glass stems between his fingers. He waited in the darkened hallway as his mother rushed towards the door. The first of the seminar students had arrived and were standing in the entryway, cool night air blowing in. Two of them held cases of pink and yellow seltzer in their hands. 

“Close the door!” Claudia Bernard shrieked. “Don’t let Dianna out! And put those fucking cans away. Tonight, we are drinking wine.”

Cole emerged from the hallway with the glasses crowded in his hands. He recognized one of the students as Evan, the handsome tour guide from that morning. He was wearing the same tweed blazer and loose blue jeans as before, except now his blazer was adorned with a nametag that said Simone.

“Bring those here,” Claudia Bernard said to Cole. 

He began handing the students glasses, which Claudia Bernard then promptly filled. 

“Hey, I recognize you,” Evan said. “You’re the kid who bailed on my tour earlier today.”

Claudia Bernard looked back and forth between Evan and Cole, as if put off by the fact that they knew each other. 

“This is Cole,” she said curtly. “He’s visiting Tracker. We’re going to show him a good time.”

In The Ominous Shaft, Claudia Bernard praised the Dionysian. She believed something vital had been lost in culture when the logical, restrained Apollo prevailed over the ecstatic, primal Dionysus. Cole knew this, and so, it seemed, did her students, because they did as Claudia Bernard demanded that night: they drank. Cole drank, and so did Simone and Gloria and Audre and Emmeline and bell and Susan and Maya and Judith and Angela and Betty, names that belonged not to the students themselves but to their classroom avatars.

Cole stood in a corner with his wine glass in hand. The students had commandeered his mother’s living room with a sense of entitlement he would have found disrespectful if Claudia Bernard hadn’t so clearly welcomed it. They had sprawled out across his mother’s floor and piled themselves on her couch and armchairs, balancing heaping plates of Bolognese on their laps. Claudia Bernard walked proudly amongst them, filling up their glasses and nodding abstractedly as they spoke to her. They all called her by her first name, suggesting a closeness that Cole envied. By the end of the next hour, the students had consumed five bottles of wine and plunged into the liquor cabinet to bring out the gin, which they were now mixing with the lukewarm seltzers. 

Claudia Bernard was the hot and frightening sun around which the entire party revolved. Her work, which Cole guessed most of her students would find distasteful and dated, was beside the point. The point was her. Around her students, Claudia Bernard seemed to simultaneously expand and shrivel. She became louder and brighter, at the same time that something inside of her seemed to sink in on itself, like the very thing that was giving her life was also slowly taking it away. She was drinking just as heavily as the twenty-year-olds in the room, and Cole thought he could see it making her unsteady on her feet. 

As the night went on, the party grew. What had begun as a small gathering of ten seminar students ballooned to a party of fifteen, twenty, thirty. Cole assumed that the students had invited friends, and that Claudia Bernard, in her commitment to hedonism and her lax attitude towards campus decorum, was more than happy to accommodate. Someone turned off the lights and pushed the furniture against the walls. Evan—who, as far as Cole could tell, was the only boy in his mother’s seminar—put on Madonna’s Erotica. 

As the opening club cover of “Fever” pumped through the room, Claudia Bernard pushed her way onto the dance floor. She began writhing slowly, swaying her hips and running her hands up and down her thighs. The room fell silent and still, watching her—in horror or enchantment, Cole couldn’t tell. Claudia Bernard threw back her head and bared her neck to the crowd, who contemplated it, contemplated all that blood coursing towards that brain. 

The song went on and Claudia Bernard’s movements took on a more interpretative approach. She crouched and crooked her long, lanky arms towards the ceiling, towards some invisible light. She remained hunched there, bobbing up and down ever so slightly on her knees, as if energy was coming up through the ground and out through her outstretched fingertips. Cole saw a flash of Claudia Bernard’s former self, posing on the cover of The Ominous Shaft. Madonna sang, What a lovely way to burn.

“She’s so amazing,” a voice next to him whispered. Cole turned. A tall, bony girl was standing by his side. Her brown hair was cut to her chin, and she had the kind of tiny bangs that looked less like an aesthetic choice and more like a hairline issue. She wore a short floral dress, black tights, and a heavy canvas jacket. The corners of her lips were stained red, either from the windsor his mother’s Bolognese.

“I’m Melanie,” she said, then winced. “I mean, Betty.”

“As in Friedan?” Cole asked. He knew Betty Friedan—she was one of the only feminists they’d learned about in his high school history class. 

“I wanted to be Catharine MacKinnon but Claudia threatened to kick me out if I was,” Betty continued. “Do you go to Tracker?”

“No.”

“How do you know Claudia, then?”

“I don’t,” Cole said. 

Betty nodded, as if she didn’t quite hear him, and kept talking. Cole was drunk. It wasn’t his first time drinking alcohol, but Cole always wound up walking Mikayla home when she got too wasted and never drinking much himself. Now, the world was churning beneath his feet. Betty’s words seemed to come at him from a far off place. She was saying something about consent and carceral feminism, and how Claudia Bernard was a true radical because she didn’t care what anyone thought about her, she only cared about the work.

“I mean, what other professor would throw a party like this for her students?” Betty said. “Apparently, last semester, she got so fucked up at one of these that she passed out in the bathroom. I guess she went on some nonsense monologue about how she has a gay son named Sandro who lives in Ohio.” 

“What?” Cole said. 

Betty smiled.

“That’s all I know,” she said. “Do you want to dance?” 

Before Cole could answer, Betty took his hand and pulled him onto the dance floor. Between the end of his mother’s performance and the start of the new song, the floor had filled. The living room was now seething with sweating bodies. Cole’s sense of time squirmed. He scanned the fray for his mother but she was nowhere to be found.

Betty pulled him close and parted his legs slightly with her knee. Cole put his hand on her shoulder, decided that was too high and put it on her hip, and then decided that was too low and settled on her waist, the gentle curve that widened to her hips. Madonna was singing, Go down, where it’s warm inside / Go down, where I cannot hide / Go down, where all life begins. Two students, who had earlier introduced themselves as Judith and Angela, were dancing next to them in a similar way, only slower, sort of out of step with the music, but in tune with something else Cole couldn’t hear and maybe couldn’t even understand, something totally internal to them. Cole tried to copy their rhythm. Betty seemed to like that, because she leaned in closer and started kissing his neck. 

“You look just like her, you know,” Betty whispered into his ear, rubbing the side of her face against his neck. 

Cole knew in that moment that he could probably go back to Betty’s place and sleep with her if he wanted to. As exciting as the prospect of having sex with a college girl would have seemed to him mere days ago, he didn’t want to, not now. Cole felt hot and panicky, drained of all desire, that same claustrophobic sensation of something tightening around his windpipe. He pushed Betty away and fumbled down the hallway towards the kitchen, grasping at his neck in an attempt to free it from whatever invisible confine was slowly contracting around it. 

The kitchen was dark. Cole lurched towards the sink in search of water, but a pair of bodies was intertwined against the counter there, lit from behind by the moon’s white glow. Cole recognized the back of Evan’s tweed jacket. A pair of slender hands were wrapped around his head, long fingers digging into the dense curls of his brown hair. The moonlight illuminated the copy of The Ominous Shaft that Cole had left on the table. 

Evan grunted slightly and lifted the body onto the counter. As his partner reangled, Cole saw that it was his mother. Her legs clutched around Evan, securing him closer to her. Evan was working his way down her body, kissing first her mouth and then her neck and then her chest. Cole again struggled to breathe. The invisible hand closed tightly around his neck. 

If he didn’t leave, Cole thought, he would almost certainly die.

Claudia Bernard opened her eyes and her gaze caught Cole’s. She held it through the darkness, her eyes steady and bright, as if daring him to hold on for a moment longer.

Cole knocked into the kitchen chair as he grabbed his backpack off the floor. Heaving for breath that didn’t come, he ran out of the kitchen and through the living room, past the dance floor, and to the front door. 

Dianna, his mother’s cat, sat in the entryway, her tail curled around her soft gray body. When Cole opened the door, she bolted outside, bursting across the lawn and disappearing into the blackness, as if she had never existed at all. 

Cole followed her into the cold night, sucking air into his lungs. When he reached the gravel sidewalk, he turned around to face the house. Through the window, he could see the students dancing. They had ceased to be individual bodies and become one undulating mass. 

Cole reached into his backpack and dug around until his hand hit something solid. He pulled out the Venus of Willendorf and tossed her up and down in his palm a few times, savoring her satisfying stone weight, before pulling his arm back as far as it would go. 

Don’t aim, he thought. Command. 

For the first time, Cole’s body listened to what his brain was telling it. 

Claudia Bernard’s window shattered as he ran.

Cole wasn’t sure where he was going, but he ran until he was too tired to run anymore and then he walked. A light rain fell from the darkened sky, slowly soaking through his shoes to his socks. Cole’s car was still parked on the Tracker campus, but he’d forgotten where that was, and he was too drunk to drive anyway. He had no sense of time and place, but he vaguely understood, somewhere deep in his addled subconscious, that he was stumbling towards the highway, towards home. Not once but twice, Cole bent over and puked into the roadside grass, his vomit as red as blood. His phone was dead, which meant he couldn’t call his father, or Mikayla, or anyone else. 

Night was beginning to lift by the time Cole made it to the highway, the soaring redwoods emerging through the misty shadows. He walked along the road’s shoulder for what seemed like miles. He knew his drunkenness was fading when he became aware of the frigid ache in his feet.

A car slowed down behind him, bathing the road in a white glare. Cole dropped into the ditch lining the road to let it pass. The car slowed further. For a brief moment, Cole thought that it was his mother, coming to find him at last. 

“What the shit are you doing?” a voice called from the front seat of a mint green Ford. 

Cole turned around. It was Jan, the woman from the Fortuna Inn.

“Get in,” she said. “You’re going to get yourself killed.”

Cole didn’t argue. He climbed out of the ditch and into the passenger seat of the car and let Jan take him wherever it was she was going, which, as it turned out, was just five minutes down the road, back to the Fortuna Inn. 

“What happened, son?” she asked, as she parked the car. 

Cole began to cry, big sputtering sobs so overpowering that his entire body shook. When Jan reached out to him, Cole collapsed into the softness of her body, letting the dense smokiness emanating from her engulf and lull him. 

“It’s alright, baby,” she said, rubbing her hands down his back. “It’s alright.” 

Once his weeping had subsided, Jan walked him, like an injured athlete, to the pink plastic chairs sitting on the patchy lawn between the highway and motel. Cole was still sobbing, but his cries were softer now, coming out in little chirps, like a baby bird. The cars driving by sounded like gently crashing ocean waves. Cole shivered in the early morning cold. 

Without a word, Jan disappeared briefly and returned with a blanket, two mugs of coffee, and the same type of dismal sandwich she’d brought him the night before. Cole wrapped himself in the blanket and took the sandwich and steaming mug. The coffee tasted grainy and bitter. 

“Good boy,” Jan said. 

The sky was brightening now, softening into the muted pink of a kitten’s nose. Mist clung to the branches of the trees across the highway. Jan studied them, looking untroubled and at peace. Cole picked up the plate and took a bite of the sandwich. It tasted smoky and stale. He swallowed anyway. It was exactly what he needed. 

As he chewed, Cole remembered the copy of The Ominous Shaft that he’d left on his mother’s table, marooned in that brilliant shaft of moonlight. He had the urge to go back for it. He let the urge pass. This felt like wisdom.