Mother 1 had not been heard from again. Her fate, like the fates of many others, was sealed by the state. Her whereabouts could be neither confirmed nor denied. When asked, the generals said they had never heard of her. No one from the press would press them further.  While millions had watched Mother 1 on television, had seen the Mothers maintain their vigil in the plaza, the public learned that Mother 1 “had never happened.” There had never been any Mothers.  The Mothers, while they had existed in the memory of the nation, had been a false memory. Memory was like a word processor screen: it could be effaced but it also could hallucinate. The Mothers were a hallucination.  Mother 1 had had a son and that son, like his mother, was said to have never existed. And the son’s wife remarried, had children, and said she’d always lived at the same address with the same husband. She was very happy. Had anyone wanted to visit her, to see her face, they could have found her address quite easily. She went to the same shops regularly and was a good paying customer.  But as Pasolini said once,  ‘Death lies not  in being unable to communicate,  but in the failure to continue being understood.’  For years, the generals appeared on television every week, each one sporting a steely mustache and slightly tinted eyeglasses. They reported on rising prosperity, falling crime, and increased foreign investment. They praised their soldiers who maintained public order in every city and that the cities, slowly, were learning from the towns and villages how to behave. They called the soldiers “country boys,” even though boys from the country were never more than a plurality of the military force.  The generals rode about town in long, sleek, and imported black limousines. Each limo bore two flags on either end of their front fenders. One flag was of the nation, the other bore the insignia (what some soldiers called the ‘Sigil’) of the consolidated military forces. Citizens, seeing the limos, learned to stop on the street and salute. And the plaza across from the presidential palace, once the site of the Mothers’ vigils, was always occupied by troops. Every square in the cities had become a place where soldiers stood and smoked, eyeing passersby and calling to the women and girls they found seductive.  And what was seduction? To those who managed to watch the soldiers clandestinely, it seemed that a face below the age of thirty (perhaps thirty-five) was seductive. Soldiers liked youthful legs that showed below the state-mandated long skirts. They also preferred lean faces, free of blemishes and age lines. No solider was ever reprimanded for whistling or catcalling the women and girls they liked. They could make lude remarks and invite women to meet them in secret places as much as they liked.  But what was a secret place in a city where klieg lights lit each and every alley: residential, industrial, or business. As soon as a person crossed the boundary from suburb into city, light towers spied on every “roach or rat” when the sun set. And with curfews set by an ongoing state of siege, no one save men in uniform could be seen in the streets after dark.  To ‘invite’ a woman or girl to a clandestine encounter was a rhetorical perk of military power. How often actual rendezvous happened appeared in no official statistics. But informal counts were kept in the barracks while among women, no word was ever spoken.  So it was that Mother 1’s reemergence proved especially unexpected.  Someone who looked and moved and sounded precisely like the first Mother appeared in the presidential palace plaza one autumn morning. Dressed in the proper clothes and wearing the same hair style and an identical hat, Mother 1 crossed a crowd of soldiers who couldn’t see her between their cigarettes and catcalls. Nor did they notice when she removed her hat, something old women never did in public. She was merely a “crone” in their midst.  It was when Mother 1 reached the gates of the presidential palace that one soldier approached her, his pistol drawn.  ‘What are you doing, grandma?’  Mother 1, working to make her voice sound light, replied, ‘I’ve come to admire the people’s palace.’  ‘Why don’t you admire your grandsons in the plaza?’  ‘I’ve admired them my whole life,’ Mother 1 replied.  ‘Have you.’ The soldier holstered his pistol. Then he removed a pack of cigarettes from his pocket and lit one. ‘My grandmother admires me, but I don’t think she spends time thinking about the others,’ he gestured with his cigarette hand.  ‘Grandmothers love all the children of the country.’  ‘Do they.’  ‘Yes,’ Mother 1 said.  The soldier studied her for a moment, then came closer. She watched him watching her and asked, ‘Have we met?’  ‘That’s what I’m trying to figure out.’  ‘You don’t look familiar to me, but you will forgive the faulty memory of the old.’  The soldier called to another man to come over. This second soldier walked slowly toward Mother 1 and stood very close. He lifted his chin to his fellow.  ‘This grandmother is familiar to me.’  ‘All grandmothers look the same,’ the second soldier said.  ‘No. She’s too familiar.’  The second soldier laughed. ‘Put your hat back on, grandma’ he said. ‘Don’t be a flirt.’ When she did, the second solider said, ‘Now, there it is. All grandmothers wear hats. She looks like your grandmother, no? Case closed.’ He began walking away.  The first soldier shook his head. ‘ID,’ he ordered.  When Mother 1 reached into her dress to find the small purse carrying her papers, the first soldier drew his pistol. He kept it pointed at the pavement. The second soldier turned to watch.  Inspecting the papers, the first solider said ‘You look younger in person. Why’s that?’  Mother 1 smiled. ‘Are you paying an old woman a compliment?’  ‘No.’  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Maybe I look better in natural light.’  The second soldier walked over and grabbed the papers. He looked closely at her photo. ‘She seems the same to me. Old and old.’ He handed Mother 1 the ID and looked at his fellow. ‘Old,’ he said again. ‘Give me one of your cigarettes.’  The first soldier didn’t hear him. He remained fixated on Mother 1’s face. ‘The palace is closed,’ he stated.  ‘What? Grandma wants a tour?’ the second soldier said. ‘Skedaddle, granny. We’re smoking.’  Mother 1 smiled at the two soldiers and turned away. But she had only gone a few steps before the first soldier shouted for her arrest. Mother 1 stopped and turned to look back. She could hear other boots approaching her from behind.  ‘What have I done?’ she asked.  ‘You are too familiar,’ the second soldier said.  It was in the interrogation room that Mother 1 lost her wig. The inspector looked at it a moment before licking his fingers and dragging them across her face, smearing her makeup.  ‘You are a man,’ he said.  Mother 1 said nothing.  ‘You are dressed like one of those fucking grandmothers. Why?’  ‘I admire older women,’ Mother 1 said.  ‘You will speak in your natural voice,’ the inspector said.  ‘I admire older women,’ Mother 1 repeated in a voice several octaves lower.  ‘You know perversion is illegal in this country.’  ‘Perversion?’  ‘Yes. You are dressed as a woman. And you are dressed like one of the fucking grandmothers. Two crimes, you realize.’ He held up two fingers. The inspector’s partner, who had remained silent, poured himself a glass of water. He drank it and then spat the water in Mother 1’s face.  ‘I would like a towel, please,’ she said. The inspector smirked and ran a finger over his mustache.  ‘And I would like a younger wife. Healthy men want younger women because as women age, they start to look like you. So many of them have mustaches because they admire the generals.’ Under the table, he removed his right shoe with his left foot then raised his right foot to lift Mother 1’s dress. He stroked her ankle and shin. ‘You are wearing stockings. You spared no expense, did you? How much did this Halloween costume cost you?’  Mother 1 felt the inspector’s foot cross her knee onto her thigh. She forced herself not to flinch.  ‘I said, how much?’  ‘Not much. The cost of clothes is reasonable.’  ‘Of course it is,’ the inspector said. ‘This country is very reasonable. Some would say too reasonable.’ He dropped his foot back into his shoe. ‘Which is why we have laws like we do for perverts.’  Two soldiers entered the room and promptly stripped the clothes from Mother 1. ‘What I want to know,’ the inspector said, ‘was how some dumb grunt recognized you.’  Mother 1 stood naked in front of the inspector, his partner, and the soldiers. She didn’t dare move her hands to cover her private areas. She felt the eyes of the soldiers cross her body.
 ‘But I don’t suppose you know, do you, grandma?’  The inspector stood and lit a cigarette. He looked at the ceiling for a moment and said, ‘I have my own theory. I think you found work someplace he might have seen you. Isn’t that right?’ He stretched his arms, lit cigarette rising toward the overhead fluorescent lighting. You are a performer, that much is clear. Soldiers, if they’ve had enough to drink, don’t know what’s what. I knew a young fuck, new to national service, who swore a woman took him to bed. He swore it even after we tracked ‘her’ down and showed him who she was. We can forgive much of people who serve our country. I’ve forgiven that little homo already and I can forgive another. But you? Making a career out of being a homo. What of that?’  Mother 1 did not answer. The truth was, she woke one morning feeling like the great matron who had tried to save her country. She decided that the time had come to try and live as Mother 1 had. But she’d only just begun. She had found the right clothes, read the appropriate books, even tracked down some old mimeographs of Mother 1’s words. It had taken nearly a year to do all of that. Her prior life was one of office work with a wife and children. But she couldn’t tell the inspector any of this so she said, ‘I am not a homo.’  ‘Oh. You are just a man who likes wearing what women wear. Old women particularly. I believe I’ve heard of this. Doctors have theories about everything.’ He shook his head and stubbed out his cigarette. ‘But the law is more practical. Do you know what I would do if my son started acting the way you do?’  He turned and looked at the soldiers.  ‘I would beat his ass and send him to military school.’ Then he turned back to Mother 1. ‘I would beat him to within an inch of his life so that when he woke up, he’d forget himself.’ He sat back down at the table. ‘Of course, you forget yourself. Memory. Such a fickle bitch. The soldier says he remembers you. I don’t know if that’s a good thing. We do our work from observing deviants not remembering them with fondness. Did you know he secretly wants to kiss you? You. A man who wants to be his own grandmother. And to think some people say our work is nearly done. When can it ever be done?’  The inspector’s partner left the room but the soldiers remained.  Mother 1 looked at the inspector and took a deep breath. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I’m my own grandmother.’  ‘And do I know this woman you’ve become?’  ‘You do,’ Mother 1 said. ‘She was the most famous grandmother in the country. She had many grandchildren. She still does. I’m her grandchild and I have many siblings and many cousins.’  ‘And do they all dress like you?’ the inspector smirked. ‘I admit, this makes my job interesting for the first time in a long while. Normally, deviants are just dull perverts who have but one idea: to feel good. But you don’t look like you feel so good. Do you need a drink? Do you miss your grandmother so much you must wear her clothes because narcotics and booze aren’t enough and she’s dead and you want to feel close to her? You want to feel her on your nuts? Have you no mommy with a shoulder to cry on?’  ‘I missed my grandmother. But I don’t anymore.’  ‘That’s good,’ the inspector said. ‘You are ready to forget.’