*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12733 ***

      Tokyo To Tijuana: Gabriele Departing America By Steven Sills



             Book One: Sang Huin

  "It is probable, then, that if a man should arrive in our city, so clever as
  to be able to assume any character and imitate any object, and should propose
  to make a public display of his talents and his productions, we shall pay him
  reverence as a sacred, admirable, and charming personage, but we shall tell
  him that in our state there is no one like him, and that our law excludes
  such characters, and we shall send him away to another city after pouring
  perfumed oil upon his head and crowning him with woolen fillets; but for
  ourselves, we shall employ, for the sake of our real good, that more austere
  and less fascinating poet and legend-writer, who will imitate for us the
  style of the virtuous man." Plato (Republic)




Chapter One


At Toksugum Palace in Chongno of Seoul Sang Huin (known by his friends in the
states as Shawn) felt an empathy as deep as the gods; and the reconstructed
walls of ancient buildings that he could see into and imagine long deceased
emperors in coronation ceremonies or reading their mandates became irrelevant.
Yang Lin, parting from their movement toward the steps that led toward the
Royal Museum, began to walk to a distant place where a woman in a western
wedding dress stood at a pond posing for a picture with her groom. Near earlier
buildings Sang Huin had noticed him looking at them questioningly. He had seen
a sad and innocent yearning in Yang Lin as if, after a long search, that
creature had found his alter ego in the woman and would not let it go.

After five minutes of waiting alone, sitting on those steps and letting a
cigarette dangle limp in a frown, Sang Huin realized that this new friend of
his was not just straying off briefly, so he gradually went over there in a
circuitous and jaunty stroll as if other things had gained his attention and
only by accident was he moving there. Yang Lin told Sang Huin that he longed
for her: longed for himself within her beautiful clothes, within her
commitment, and within her sex. He had been so sincere. Sang Huin felt a worse
form of compassion for him. It was sorrow, the enlightening, sweet venom, and
it sank into him. It was deep empathy. It was God. It was definitely something
that was not wanted. It stayed with him on the bus.

On a ride from the Nambu Bus Terminal to Chongju, Sang Huin's sleep was spastic
like a nervous twitch that would every now and then startle him into
wakefulness and he would wonder where he was: Muguk, Chongju, Seoul, or
"Miguk." Sometimes at the primary school in Muguk he would ask, "Where are you
from?" Then once, in a coaching effort for the pitch of a complete sentence, he
had made the mistake of "Miguk...Miguk" ("America...America") and the class was
in an uproar. He thought of this in one of his startled awakenings. He looked
from the window to flat patches of skimpy forest that most Koreans thought of
as so beautiful. The way was straight, south and barren and made him almost
yearn for the tortuous roads that appeared near Umsong to be rid of scenery so
bland. Although the bus traveled down the highway as a solid, jitterless mass,
he jittered into more drowsiness. The contents of his head shook and his
mother's voice cried out to him like locusts from the branches of trees. There
was a hot sticky childish oozing within him. Within dreams his fortitude was
like marshmallows when pulled off of sticks after roasting in a bonfire. He
heard voices of he and his sister counting 7 o'clock, 8 o'clock, 9 o'clock
rock. 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock, twelve o'clock rock - Ghosts won't find me. Ready
or not we'll find you.

Then there were those macabre photographs, at the trial in Houston, of his
grown sister's skeleton. The police had looked for his sister's body in the
park but obviously not thoroughly in the ravine. In one year they had only
searched that park once and in the meantime her body had decomposed. He dreamed
of those photographs of skeletal remains and the other photographs of more than
a few bones that had gone off from the rest. They were marred too but by the
fangs of dogs or other beasts dragging them around before dumping them away
from the rest of the remains. He dreamt of these photographs exactly as they
appeared from the slide projector and in that sequence as one of those most
godless days of that long trial when one's whole body trembled in continuum
through bits of the hours with stolid, cadaverous expressions throughout the
ordeal. He assumed his parents had also behaved the same. Before the real
confirmation of her death, all three had been functioning with such dead but
hopeful words and perfunctory gestures which were then ripped out of them as
the program, memory, and energy cells can be pulled out of robots and soon they
were thrust in their own personal black abyss with none of the three able to
see outside of blackness and pain as much as they might have wanted to offer
solace to each other.

Who could offer solace when the conclusion of life as an evil and godless place
had solidified into consciousness like Death etching her name in wet cement?
Back then, it had been obvious that the trial, a pantomime of the mute for
justice, could never be allocated to the dead under the best circumstances, and
this particular trial was going nowhere. The conclusiveness of the evidence and
motive had been defaced with time that had entirely decomposed her form. There
had been theories. Plenty of circumstantial evidence had been presented. Her
employer had done it to her as conclusively as a feeling could testify. Then
and now there was plenty of indication that she had been pregnant with his
child. Twenty years ago Sang Huin (Shawn then) had swung a golf club into her
eye and the blood had splattered everywhere. On that day, as a boy, he had
thought nothing could happen worse than that; but back then there was blood and
back then there was composition. He woke up and once again knew that even in
sleep there wasn't always repose. Sometimes, without finding a way of sealing
memories in tidy body bags, one's inner voice was as active in sleep. He said
to himself that he shouldn't be surprised by such restlessness when life's
conundrums were so horrific. The passage of a few years, and the passage
through a thousand times of falling asleep could not even restore one's
equilibrium in something so horrific. He shook off his sleep like a dog its
wetness. He tried to think of Yang Lin whom he had left: that mild voice so
slow and deliberate in its intensity, the morbid and thoughtful eyes like an
ocean containing its ecosystem, the muscular young body that had an orange hue
like a Chinamen who had sucked up too much sun.

After the revelation he had listened to him repeatedly talk about wishing that
he had been born a woman; and except for once of saying, "Well...I understand,
but" (and stopping not knowing what to throw in as the "but"), he had been
silent with eyes of empathy. It was painful to see a perspective; and Sang Huin
broke out of his skin like a reluctant and tortured snake but accepting the
inevitability. He just stared at the fountain for many uncomfortable minutes
hoping that the mouth of the fountain could articulate a statement that would
solve the situation as well as ease his discomfort.

At the fountain, in silence, he had thought of rigid Texan horses and the lazy
meditative cows of his home state in warm fields at mid- afternoon--creatures
of the gods with no sense of the vile practicalities behind their domesticated
state. During his times of stress long ago they had often seemed to Sang Huin
as so aesthetic that one could wish to slip within them for an hour or a bit of
the day; and surely after having done it one might instantaneously wish for the
freedom of whatever was beyond the fence. Maybe, he had thought to himself,
something like this was how Yang Lin felt.

He had suddenly blurted out, "You commented that the pigeons and the fountain
in the pond are beautiful. Maybe they are." He had hesitated feebly. The coarse
words and tone had surprised both of them. "I hear that doctors can now make a
man half pigeon if he dares to have a mixture of pubic hairs and pubic
feathers; or if you prefer a beautiful fountain-surgery a continual waterfall
can come from your ass." Sang Huin had not known where the words came from. His
gentle imagination had rarely formed such an aggressive flare of thoughts and
yet he had felt that he could not let this stranger--this recent buddy-- this
someone he had slept with--save up money on the assumption that he could be
made into a beautiful woman. Twenty years from now he did not want him to be
made into a hybrid mess from a lifetime of painful surgeries... hormonal
confusion...mutilations.

But had he not mutilated four months earlier? A video "pang" girl [the clerk at
the video room where he had watched a movie with his friend, Yang Kwam] tracked
down the friend's license number, and then the friend's telephone number, and
began to inundate him with a flood of messages. It was quite flattering and
Sang Huin finally returned the calls. He was curious. At that time he wanted a
girlfriend. From an erection, a yearning, an ejaculation, and more than he
wished, knowledge of his own virility by the conception, he proved the very
essence of manhood. She aborted at his request but nature aborted and
mutilated: still-death, genetic defects, and miscarriages. Human beings were
rifted apart from each other by circumstances of separation and death despite
love. The life of a being, itself, was nothing but different transparencies
miscellaneously tossed onto an overhead projector. No, he thought, maybe that
was just his own life. The transparencies of most humans were in order--the
last of which would be old age and decay but what was written on them was
meaningless. His transparency recently had been to prove his manhood by having
sex with a woman and it had all gone awry.

Sang Huin sighed. He took off his shoes in the bus. He stroked his feet, in
short white sports socks, across the vinyl of the back of the chair before him
as if he were giving a massage to the person seated there. He needed sex. He
needed to lose himself in a pleasure that would reduce his headache and release
him from worries even if it was an illogical frenzy far removed from reality
and only lasted for a few minutes.

He tried to rest comfortably in his seat, absorbing himself in Time and
Newsweek. Then someone yelped at him in Korean, pushing him out of his
sympathies toward the bondage of the Afghan population under the theocracy of
the Taleban and the tattered infrastructure of the country. There was no way to
catch even a word or two of it and this balding and middle aged man gave Sang
Huin a look as if he had wasted his time talking to the world's biggest dummy.
Sang Huin gave his typical defense of "Miguk sarem" ("American") which would
bring on a confused and critical look--in this case, it was a closer
examination of Sang Huin and a slanting of the man's face as if he were ready
to give Sang Huin a big fat kiss. Sang Huin picked up his book bag on the spare
seat near the window and sat there.

It was complicated, in a sense. If he had been less temerarious perhaps to not
have the support system of this whole chain--family, city, state, nation, and
racial identification-- might have posed a problem. To have lived all but the
first few years in America, and so existing as a Korean only by birth and race
definitely made him American in every way but a legal one. Most persons under
such a scenario would have clung to the country that had made up nearly all of
his experience. At least that was what he told himself. Effrontery and
cowardice were two sides of the same coin. He loved his mother and she was
alone on the American continent as he was in Asia. They were indeed alone in
the world.

Even though he cared about family (what was left of it with both his father and
sister now dead) it did not deter him from leaving America. To be on a
traveler's visa with his own Korean passport did, however, seem to be a bit
strange but he could not think of a situation in life that was not confusing.
Relationships were confusing although he had never possessed one for very long.
When he had the ineluctable sympathy for another person, it deflated all the
romance. He didn't mind that so much. To embark on a deep friendship with
strong personal commitment and devoid of the bouts of infatuation and frenzy
like seasickness seemed the right course; but all partners of the past seemed
to him to have wanted only to cast a romantic aura around him as if scared to
see the real person inside, and scared to look at beings that were also banal
and in continual suffering. Reflexively jumping into pleasure like a lifebuoy,
as a human did, what could one expect? One thing was sure: he had experienced a
deep pain that his fellow humans wouldn't even give the briefest of stares if
they could avoid it. Besides, no one wanted his enlightenment that the world
was a bad place when each was trying as best as he could to find an entrance
into Disneyland to which there where no security guards to force a departure.

He searched though his billfold for a calling card. He went to the front of
this high-tech bus and made a call.

"Yoboseyo."

"Yoboseyo. Yang Lin bakwa chuseyo."

Silence.

"Yang Lin or Antonio. Ku nun manhi irum ul cajigo isumnita. I sarem i
wanhamnita." He threw in both names that the little guy went by and the
telephone clicked off.

He called again.

"Yoboseyo."

"Yoboseyo. Yang--"

"What do you want with him?"

"I'd like to talk with your son. I am an acquaintance of his. He helped me to
get to Toksugum Palace. I want to thank him. I'd like to talk to him again."
Yang Lin had told him that his father suspected all male callers and that Sang
Huin would have to give a defense of his acquaintanceship but Sang Huin felt
awkward in his misrepresentation. Here he was playing with a man's reality
concerning his son. He did not feel good about himself.

"Well, he isn't here. He's never here!"

The telephone clicked off. Sang Huin felt hurt. He felt a morbid clarity behind
how people always left his life. He thought about what he "knew" of this
Chinese friend, Yang Lin, if he knew anything at all: he was adopted and lived
in America; that those parents died-- his mother first and then the father in a
drunk driving accident; that he was readopted by Korean parents; that his
father despised him and suspected his son was gay; and that Yang Lin felt that
his English level was the same as his Korean. Abstract ideas must not have
existed in his head at all. In short, he "knew " very little and the scanty but
pathetic information he received might, for what he knew, have been nothing but
a mendacity. Sang Huin had a great empathy; but now another friendship had just
bit the dust.

Had it been a month ago that Sung Ki had left him. Sung Ki: even now the name
sounded musical. After the video pang girl's attempt at marital entrapment,
this neighbor boy had been most alluring in their nightly rendezvous of two
months. The sister who fed him rice and Korean pizza and the father who wanted
to introduce him to his native country by teaching him the sounds of Korean
letters were glad to get the youngest child an English teacher. Little did they
know of the pleasurable respites from pain Sang Huin was getting in the back
bedroom. Homosexuality was so taboo there that nobody believed in its
existence. In that respect, free of discrimination, one was free to be gay in
Korea. Then the18 year-old boy was told to meet the masculine and the vicious
just as his country dictated. Right after getting his letter from the military,
Sung Ki laid out Sang Huin's blanket in a different room. He talked of needing
a girlfriend. It hurt; but, Sang Huin rationalized it was what Sung Ki needed
so why shouldn't he talk about it? Superiors in the military often beat a man
if they felt that he didn't have a girlfriend evidenced when no letters and
photographs were forthcoming. Then one day he was gone and soon thereafter Sang
Huin lost the address book and key chain from the souvenir shop at the history
museum Sung Ki had given to him. He lost both by leaving them in the locker at
the mokotang (bathhouse ). "We lose our friends," thought Sang Huin, "and then
we lose the things that our friends give to us." It felt less harsh to make the
idea applicable for all mankind.

There had been no real reason for him to go to Seoul this time. There were no
private lessons there. His reactions toward Umsong also did not have much of a
rationale. Occasionally, even when there were no private lessons in that area
he sometimes got up around 4 a.m nonetheless; took an hour long bus ride to
that small town he had once lived in; walked near bowing rice and corn; crossed
the bridge around a thin circular lake at a small park; and stared at the
Korean moon bolted tightly against the Korean sky. He wanted for the night to
capture him somehow--for a drunk motorcyclist or a lazy trucker to whisk a wild
adventure and physical intimacies upon him and yet, in full wistful innocence,
he equally wanted what he would always go there for: to hear nothing but birds
and a whisk of wind in the tranquility of that sleepy town in one of its most
tranquil hours. Nothing of the former ever happened and he would always come
from the impulse to a feeling of loss. His impetus to go to Seoul this week had
come from a dominant feeling of disconnection experienced by one who knew the
extreme violence of the world, who knew the madness of hope for anyone, and
felt being buried alive in that one perspective that the world was an evil
place-a perspective that was not ethereal but solid as a coffin even if it did
spill over into other things. A further disconnection of any significance would
cause such an individual to let a numbness and deadening of the concept of self
to take place. The day before his fleeing to Seoul, his platonic friendship
with Kim Yang Kwam had gone awry and he found himself floundering in
suffocating despair as that time years earlier at the trial. Yang Kwam was
asleep with his hand in his underwear when Sang Huin awakened. Sang Huin
touched him. It was the end of the closest Korean friendship that had been his
life support in the six months he resided in this foreign country, South Korea,
which was his birth home and the source of his nationality.

Now it was Kim Yang Kwam he kept thinking about in the bus. Sang Huin was
labeled as dirty a few nights ago: the way he walked on the floor with his
shoes instead of taking them off at the door; the half open window that allowed
any insect an easy passage; the fact that he didn't have any rubbing alcohol to
cleanse the mosquito bites that his friend gained while sleeping in Sang Huin's
room; the fattening mess of pancakes with half burnt ridges in place of rice
which Sang Huin prepared for him despite the criticism; and then came questions
about the nature of his relationship with Sung Ki.

Glancing out of the window, he pulled out a pint of "ooyoo" (milk) from his
sack. His throat was not dry or hurting but for some reason he felt the need to
caress it with what he drank as well as with his fingertips. He drank his milk,
attempted memorizing a few words of Korean, and then went back to sleep. He had
a strange dream of some inconsequential happening in Seoul. The dream was not
much different than reality. In the dream the subway (Orange Line, number
three) stopped and he noticed a young blind man with a dog getting into one of
the cars. Sang Huin quickly moved toward that door. Then he found himself
walking through one car after another since the blind man and the dog passed
through the inside doors. He woke up and thought of the dream in the context of
himself. He was drawn to beauty and carnal activity but also to those captive
in some imperfection for within them sensitivity, existential and knowledgeable
of suffering, would be complete. He yearned for the deep intelligence that knew
such things. His imagination swelled with the thought of this individual just
as it had when he actually encountered him in Soul. Sang Huin was always
traveling--especially when he was in the States. He was discontent and was
seeing himself falling further and further away from the normal path. He had
nothing but a college degree, no specialty, no ambition for money, he couldn't
really think of a field or discipline for himself, family was a deep life
altering wound that made the thought of gravitating himself around a wife and
children unbearable, and even his hobby of playing a cello was as a musical
dilettante. He looked out of the window and smoothed out his hair. The bus was
becoming full now. Still, no one was standing.

Maybe, he thought, he should have been proud at the restaurant. Instead, when
Yang Kwam said that he never wanted to see him again Sang Huin said, "I
understand," but was thinking "Well, then why are we eating together?" Yang
Kwam's eyes were stern. Indeed, it was the end. He felt stunned at that table:
to lead a person to a restaurant so that he could not talk to him and then at
the inquiry on if he was upset-- Oh, what did it matter? Sang Huin's head hurt
thinking about it. He put his hand on his forehead and looked out of the
window. Sang Huin said nothing to the statement of "Don't ever call me." They
both ate sparsely in thorough silence, Yang Kwam paid the bill, and then he was
gone. Sang Huin's instinct was to follow his former friend to the ends of the
earth on the public bus system and to harass him in the bus by making him feel
miserable for his declaration that he was a dirty person. No, he told himself,
he had handled the situation the best that he could. After sitting at the table
for a while, he had withdrawn to his home passively. On what seemed like an
eternal trip, cramped on a seat in the bus, disconnection was making his mind
jittery, soft, and rolling like a ball away from him. He tried sleeping but his
mind kept trying to imagine what really took place between his sister and her
boss at the park if indeed it had been really him at all. The jury years ago
had not thought of the evidence as being conclusive. In sentencing a man to a
life of imprisonment it couldn't be done on a feeling.

He felt lost and loose. He still felt stunned. He remembered that he had only
touched him by barely stroking his hair and his hand and then touching his
underwear. It only lasted a minute and then he turned on his side away from him
and his own instincts. It was an insignificant minute in one's life and he
could not figure out why it became such evidence of the accuser that he was
dirty-the charge of homosexuality not being directly stated. He asked himself
why, even now, he was staring at moving forest and long stretches of road with
this yearning for love. He opened another pint of milk. He sipped and then
rested its opening to his bottom lip. Why did human beings end in such closure?
Why did they gain worth and awareness of their being only in personal
interactions? Was he nothing but the composite of other people's impressions of
him? These impressions--these judgments-- could not be real. They were based on
brief outward gestures and the judges had nothing but their own usual
experiences of their petty and selfish lives to compare others with. In Japan
women who left their children locked up in hot cars were rarely accused of the
crime of manslaughter; and in Korea the handicapped, he had seen, were left to
crawl like worms, pushing their carts and singing their songs as traditional
music blared forth. He died every time he saw one of them. He yearned for the
love and the language where he could befriend someone who was handicapped and
he chastised himself for only being able to lay money in some of their cans.
Once he put his hand into the hair of such a man. He stroked the hair around
his face. The gesture lasted only a couple seconds. The man screamed out
something and a security guard began moving toward them. Sang Huin placed money
in the can and went away. Then he began to question himself. Maybe it was
loneliness that had compelled him to do that. After all, the action was
undoubtedly bizarre in the sense that no one else did such things. He was not
wearing a monk's robe. Another man's fate was none of his business. This type
of action just was not done; and yet, he was not the same as others. Suffering
the paralysis that would not allow him to make a full smile and finding the
eyes x- rays that could go, for the most part, beyond pleasant countenances to
a suffering innate in other beings, it was no wonder that he was peculiar. It
was no wonder that at Christmas parties or barrooms he sat and drank in silence
feeling like a buffoon for not acting like one. In ways he was a buffoon: his
taciturn ways that thwarted the lighthearted frivolity of a world conceived out
of motion was the substance that often caused contemptuous laughs.

What did it matter? What did any of his actions towards others matter? Everyone
came and left him. He was dizzy on a merry-go-round.

"You must all eat," said Sung Ki as he poured water into the remaining rice in
Sang Huin's bowl. He had heard it so many times. How they had carried on an
affair with the sister staying there and the overnight visits of Sung Ki's
father was a mystery.

They had met in the park in Umsong. Sang Huin was memorizing words in his
textbook entitled Let's Speak Korean. Sung Ki spoke something to him in Korean.
"Miguk Sarem imnidad" responded Sang Huin (I am an American). Sung Ki,
accompanied by a high school friend, took him to eat kimbop (a Korean version
of sushi). He spoke in English the entire time neglecting his school friend
from the conversation. After visiting a couple museums, Sung Ki gave Sang Huin
his beeper number. Sang Huin invited him to a Christmas party held for students
at a language institute but stayed contained to his own students and his new
friend, Sung Ki. That night they slept together; and the boy that had stroked
Sang Huin's leg with his foot when they were eating kimbop wanted to hold hands
while the two of them lay next to each other. Sung Ki, soon afterwards, began
to plan out their time together. Sang Huin did what he requested: touring the
Independence Museum; mountain climbing; free English lessons, and visits to his
Buddhist temple and congregation. Soon Sang Huin was spending every night at
Sung Ki's apartment and a month later their relationship was a sexual one.

Sang Huin thought about how Sung Ki cleaned the apartment by putting a wet
towel under one of his bare feet and sliding across the floor with it; how he
used to go into the bathroom with his newspaper and would not come out for over
an hour; and that sentence he would always say, "you must all eat" meaning that
every speck of rice left in the bowl should be mixed with hot water into a soup
so that nothing was wasted. On the day that he learned that Sung Ki was going
away he came to his apartment and asked if there was anything he could do or
get him. There wasn't. He sat on the sofa, cold and pierced, as Sung Ki ignored
him, cleaning one thing or another and then reading something or another. Sung
Ki lit a cigarette and sat on a balcony that overlooked the mountains and rice
patties of Umsong. After a few more moments of silence, Sang Huin went to him.
His voice was shaky like a faltering foundation. He cried. It wasn't so much in
reference to him as it was his sister. It was his first tears for her. It was
in reference to non-ending perpetual loss. He knew that Sung Ki would construe
it as solely for him. He felt embarrassed and the embarrassment increased as
the two men hugged. Sung Ki began to cry. Sang Huin said, "I want to apologize.
I'm sorry if I did something wrong. You wanted a girlfriend and my friendship
and I made you have a boyfriend."

"It's okay. I liked the feeling then." That friendship had bit the dust.

Right before the bus came to a stop, he fell into a dream where there was a
dust storm in Pyongyang. He ran through one dong (neighborhood) to another
lost, looking for distinguishable signs, shapes in buildings, and widths of
streets. Everything from the thin dust-sheathed roads to the hangul (Korean
language) on the signs, looked as identical as the occasional mom and pop
stores and it was all indistinguishable from what he saw minutes and hours
earlier. He ran into no one since the streets were empty. Then he became
careful of where he stepped. "The dust storm," he argued, "could have slid land
mines up from the thirty eighth parallel." The more he thought about it the
more nervous he became and the more hurried. When he became breathless, he sat
on a rock and drank the last of his bottled water. The taste of sauerkraut and
hot dogs was in his thoughts and the boiling, bubbling surge of his saliva but
he would have eaten kimchee or someone's dog being as hungry as he was. It
became fully dark and he would have known entire blackness were it not for the
speckling of stars, the moon, and a fire at a distance. He walked over to the
fire. He saw four whores seated around a bonfire. He recognized different
buildings, and the curves of the street near a hard dirt tennis court. This was
Ne Doc Dong. "Do you want me," said one, "or do you want another?" Sang Huin's
face turned a bright red like it did with drinking a bottle of beer. He smiled
and looked toward the sidewalk in his embarrassment. He said, "No, I wouldn't;
but would you have a brother?"

When he arrived in Chongju from the desolation of what was in between Seoul and
it, the population and activity of this small city recreated an insatiable
yearning for Seoul, which to him was a storehouse of all extraordinary venues
to the mind (encounters both sexual and cultural). Large buildings were like
the small mountains of Umsong with a topping of cloud on a rainy day--monuments
of beauty welcoming him to its domain that edified and exhilarated his
appetites and his love. The mountains, until recently, transported his
imagination to green blankets of waving rice, and from there to farmers'
markets and rural parades celebrating the farmer, the daily appreciation of the
faces he saw, and the monotonous sounds of "Hello" from children and high
school students who knew of him. Those students always made him seem retarded
when he couldn't communicate to their Korean rambling but when he spoke to them
in English with the same stream of words they became giddy and the outcome was
usually a positive one from his perspective. That was before he decided to sue
his boss for the 10 million won that was owed to him. At that time he lost
faith in the man's decency and began to find the countryside monotonous even
though the continual exposure to greenery and remoteness had been healing to
his soul.

He left the bus in Chongju (where he was more or less residing) and walked to
the bathhouse called a mokotong. The day was fiercely hot and he wondered if it
would be better to jump on a city bus since he had experienced heat exhaustion
a week earlier and had to be put on an IV to replenish his system. He pulled
out some bottled water and crackers for countering any remaining potassium
deficiency. He needed a walk and was not willing to be impeded by a weakly
cowardice in broken manhood that was contrary to his muscular form. He passed
coffee shops, Samsung stores, a convenience store called Lawsons, and one
called Best Store. Even though he could read some of the signs in Hangul he did
not know what he was reading for the most part. He wished that his family had
taught him his native language. Here he often felt like a handicapped moron. If
he were an Anglo-Saxon, a blue-eyed Miguk sarem English teacher, spending 6
months in the host country without learning much of anything about the Korean
language, it wouldn't have been even a minor offense. To most he was a retarded
Hanguk sarem. He chuckled and then smiled at the faces he took in.

He waited at a red light with other pedestrians. He sifted out bodies and
faces. For a few seconds he appreciated the old and the young whom he saw. It
was an unselfish sensation. It was spiritual and he liked it. Then he lusted
after the young men. He had hardly looked at them lustfully while in America.
Occasionally Korean women also got his attention but not as much as American
women. He had trouble believing that such predilections were a summary of a
man. In fact they seemed to him a cathartic release of energy that blocked
manhood if manhood was gaining equilibrium when coming up from the punches or
finding a positive expression of himself and the world, and even a pride in
both, within adversities. Since he quit his job following the suit and the loss
of Sung Ki from his life he went to Seoul often more for sex than anything
else. How easy it was. All he had to do was put his eyes on someone at a bar
called "Trance," around Pagoda Park, or at the movie theatre behind it and off
they went to his hotel room. What was it? A strong yearning for his native land
and the man he might have been had he not been replanted in America, an
over-identification with his own sex, or fragmentation from violence that had
disgorged a close family and made him distrustful of those bindings and
obligations that could go awry. He did not know. He did not know that it
mattered. Anyhow, here his lusts were pursued cathartically in part and
lovingly in that addictive clinging in part but always he was falling free and
naked into their pools of sensation.

He did not think that he was all that bored. He had around fifteen hours of
classes a week and was able, with that, to gain a salary commensurate to what
he should have received monthly from his former employer. It turned out to be
perfectly legal. After all, he was a Korean citizen, albeit one on a traveler's
visa, and so he did not have to work for anyone but himself. He didn't have to
do all that much but be able to speak English. He went to museums in Seoul on
his free time even though the experience was a bit redundant since there
weren't enough temporary exhibitions to entertain and enlighten him for long.
The period after sex cloyed empty into the night like a finished game of
solitaire. He knew that reality whenever he chose to engage in it and yet he
did it nonetheless. He wanted an exchange of higher and lower energies (or at
least thought he did), but men throughout the world were afraid of anything but
the latter. Reality was as it dictated: and for the most part he did not want
to make a seedy experience into something transformational by exchanging names
and telephone numbers, and making subsequent calls although that was what he
secretly wished-the tattered man that he was.

He entered the mokotong. He picked up a key, a toothbrush, and a razor at the
counter. He took off his shoes and left them with the worker who deposited them
into a small shoe locker; and then he went to his clothes locker. He took off
all of his clothes except for his underwear. He locked them in. Then he went to
the toilet. He put on the typical bathroom slippers made of plastic that were
used in toilets because they were often wet and dirty. He went back, after
urinating, and reopened his locker. He took off his underwear and deposited it
there. He had become so socialized to the need of a beeper (not that he ever
got any calls apart from students needing to re-change their hours of study)
that he hated to keep it there suffocating under his socks. It was an inanimate
object but, instrument that it was, it was a source for possible connectedness.
Like a child, in his more subconscious thoughts, it was his friend. Still,
Koreans, as addicted as they were to pagers and the new popularity of cellular
telephones, could not easily dangle them from their penises at a mokotong. He
locked the locker and felt "Honja" ("alone). Even among large groups of people
he was alone. When he went to restaurants he was usually "honja," and had to
declare it. When he studied Korean, read great literature, went to a museum,
saw a video at the video pang, or went to a mokotang he was alone and often
questioning how anything could be enjoyable in such remoteness. There was pain
in it but like any adaptive mammal choosing one lesser pain to the greater one
(in his case choosing the aloneness of his thoughts to the sociability of the
masses) there were times when he wasn't even aware of how alone he really was.
Everything was measured by its impact on others but the pre-adolescent, found
buried deep in the man, could always play alone. When violence was really known
and the world was conclusively bad in one's perspective one could go at it
alone.

In the shower he used a type of dual washcloth connected together like a
mitten. He put his hand inside of it and used its abrasive side to scour his
body. He tried not to stare at all of the bodies doing the same. He spent just
a few minutes in a whirlpool because of the intensity of the heat and then
dived into the extremely cold waters of the pool. His heart raced and coldness
tingled through his body. Koreans believed in the salubrious qualities of
ginseng, dog meat, and sudden exposure to extreme heat and cold. Besides him,
there were only two boys and a young man with a rubber ball within the cold
pool, but only he swam circularly enjoying the solitude as much as one could.
Every now and then, by his lack of focus, he swallowed water in his lust for a
man or two lying on the edge of the pool where the heat of the whirlpools in
the adjacent room entered and hypnotized them dozingly. He concentrated on the
steam that rose above his head, exhausted itself on the mirrors, the waves that
he had created which massaged his psyche in sight, feel and sound, and the
three figures that enjoyed the water with him at a distance.

It had been disconnection that had brought him here to the mokotong, as it had
to Seoul or even to South Korea itself. People had come and gone out of his
life in such a storm, and he was in an existence floundering on something
without a stable foundation. It was a miracle, to him, that he had been able to
finish his studies at the University of Houston following his sister's death.
Back then while students paraded themselves in the insouciance of sociable
gestures reflecting their sexual rhythms he had dangled alone like a skeleton
in a neurosurgeon's office. He liked the flexibility of his schedule here in
Korea. He needed plenty of free time to think his weird thoughts and
reconstruct himself as long as his thoughts did not collapse onto him, burying
him alive.

At the least provocation, in late August, he began to come to her, his favorite
city, lost and uncertain with eyes somewhat wild and fearful but yearning and
believing in Seoul's power to provide him with experiences that would thrust
him into a better knowledge of himself and the world. She would reflect onto
him a more refined and loving being (or, at a lower stage, a loved one since he
knew that it might be true that he was one of those tattered souls who weren't
needing to learn how to be loving at this point but just needing to feel
loved).

Four or five times around the pool were enough to tire him to a respite of ten
minutes sitting on its edge and contemplating the movements of the people
around him. Their forms transcribed into ideas concerning what he thought their
lives might be like; and from there, feeling and the musical notes encroached
from distant spaces within his imagination.

There had been a time when the whole world seemed to him full of connections.
Perhaps that is what made his childhood memories so special: as a child he
believed that their meaning would go on forever. The temporary nature of family
marshmallow roasts and monopoly games with his father; tire swings and
neighbor's tree houses; bicycle radios fastened to handlebars; selling snow
cones to passing cars; bicycle routes; meatloaves, potatoes, and onion rings;
bi bi bop and kimchi chige; that trip to Arkansas at a distant relative's house
and how he and his sister had played in the snow with a "cousin" the whole day;
his sister....

Oh, how painful! He didn't want to think of that ever. He wanted to find the
beauty of the present moment. How good it was to stretch out into motion; to
feel the power of his arms; and the embrace of water.

He thought about how on his walk here an ordinary happening had touched him
without even then being aware of it. A young boy standing at a curb with other
pedestrians waiting for the light to change rocked a metal, rectangular trash
container, which swung back and forth on a hinge. Sang Huin put his hand on his
head in passing; and the world could not have seemed more rich and connected by
this impersonal incident than if Sung Ki's Buddha had manifested himself
supplying answers to every question that Sang Huin had ever had in his head.
This contentment and absorption in the poetic qualities of the present moment
lasted only that long: a moment. He told himself that he continually wanted to
be in the present moment as fully as this no matter how banal or what lonely
patterns it consisted of. It was better than searching through memories of
people long gone who had no capability of returning to him again.

He pulled his dangling legs from the pool. So much came and went. It was
hideous in a way: he could not determine who or what was important. He wasn't
even sure how much people were supposed to mean to him, if anything at all. Of
his friend, Yang Kwam, what importance to the long- term aspect of his life did
this man make? Disconnection ran amuck looting the benign corpses of good
memories. After sitting himself on a bench in front of the pool, a sadness at
the loss of his friendship with Yang Kwam made him feel age that he did not
possess.

He watched a couple young men stretch out in motion. He watched their
splashing, their excitement, and their frenzying limbs with the awareness that
this tousling around had no higher significance. He got a vision in his mind.
It was a feeling with musical notes. He got his underwear and his book bag from
the locker and dressed himself marginally. In the dark sleeping room of the
mokotang, where many businessmen got their only bit of relaxation from the
week, he sat in a reclining chair near the window and began writing down notes
but he felt that he was dabbling. He deluded himself that an ability to record
notes on a staff would tranform him from an amateur cello performer and general
musical dilettante to a composer. it was a dream for dreams meant that he was
more than amarginally educated professionless clod kicked by circumstances to
job, residence, and sexual orientation. Dreams meant that he was more than a
mere carbon organism jilted around by electrical activity in the circuitry
within the result of hornomal activity and the results of genetics. Dreams
deluded him with a sense of purpose that would be mroe pleasant than reality.

One man's long and thick penis throbbed up and down on its own volition by the
impetus of dreams. Sang Huin tried not to stare but he could not help it. His
eyes, still getting over an eye virus, began to hurt and he felt tired. He put
away his composition and then put his hands over his eyelids.

He went to sleep. He dreamed of a woman named Gabriele driving down a country
road in Arkansas. She reached for a can of snuff that was on her dashboard. The
roads she chose were random and she kept yearning to move southwest until she
was out of America to that neighboring country of Mexico so different than the
homogonous American model that was rife the world over. He saw into her mind
and her hopes to cross over the Mexican border and veer off the main road
through adobe hamlets, and cacti and past Mexican Indians.

When he woke from his epiphany he wasn't sure what to do with it so he returned
to the pool only to find it had been drained. Seven streams of water gushed
from spouts at the bottom of the pool and three young boys were running around
in the collecting waters--one kicking water up to the lower parts of the mirror
that covered the walls. It all reminded him of his mother blowing up a plastic
pool for he and his sister and how she ran the hose over to the pool to fill it
with water. He could remember how the two of them had splashed freely inside it
for hours but were so prudishly careful that neighbors hosed off their grassy
feet before entering with them. He remembered telling one neighbor boy to get
out after he had disregarded the rule, soiling their clean waters, and when he,
"Shawn," wouldn't leave he got out to tell his mother only to gain the
enflaming sting of Texan fire ants on the souls of his feet. He could remember
his screams more than the sting. He looked toward his reflection on the nearest
part of the mirrored wall, but still steamed, it wasn't there.

His thoughts crumbled like Graham crackers and spilled like pints of milk that
Mrs. Ghrame, the kindergarten teacher, had given to each class member as they
watched Winnie the Pooh and Piglet on television before being made to sleep on
mats for a nap. He felt lost childhood with so many forgotten memories sucking
him into an invisible vortex of dust. He was running around with a cowboy hat,
a play gun, and a holster. He was running around in his own wayward thoughts
before adolescence created a hunger for beautiful bodies and a neediness that
he would never be able to shake.

He jolted up and went where there was more light. He seated himself on a bench
near a row of lockers believing that what he had was some story unrestrained by
notes but when he put the pen to paper notes exuded there. He sensed the
brilliance that came to him and felt awe toward the paper that could magically
reflect the mood and full realm of his mind. He yearned to embrace his cello
and to practice the notes of a Gabriele symphony that he was composing.




Chapter Two


He dressed himself. As he put on his socks, he did it with the mentality of a
small child who still felt newness in the sensation. Sexual glutton of adult
games, introvert, a man perpetually weakened and wary in ways unbecoming to a
man, he still was a little wiser than most on a couple issues. He was cognizant
that as an effect of adolescent awakenings an adult often was so obsessed with
being in the company of others that finding any degree of happiness could not
occur without them. He was a lot different in that respect: influences by
hormones to sociability were thwarted by his wariness that gave him back his
childhood innocence. Although he was an adult he could still play alone albeit
uneasily. Also they, the unwary ones, were so fixated on gaining bigger and
more complex pleasures in their gross gluttony to have everything before death
that the marvel of air rushing into one's lungs or the feel of a spring breeze
brushing against one's face was lost to them entirely. He wanted the remnant of
early childhood--the memories of strong aromas, sights, and sounds as his
senses depicted them-- to live in him and not be the cause of mourning. He
wanted to find the traces of deceased family in those early days and be able to
glance back onto those tenuous decaying remnants of memory with a sense of
happiness at what was once there. Still, even with the earliest and most benign
memories furthest removed from the tragic end, such a feat was difficult to
master. Everything in the mind of a 5-year-old from the smells of greased
telephone polls to the sounds of the school bus that picked up his older
7-year-old sister, and everything in the mind of a 10-year-old from getting his
first b-b gun to spending his first time away from family at a summer camp was
like walking barefoot on sharp gravel. This, however, was better than having
his entrails hacked out of him in that shock of finding his father dangling
from a noose in the workroom of his basement. Thinking that early memories were
even more benign than the present, he knew that it was only his thinking that
made them painful. He judged that he was the source of his misery and with
application he would find a way to plant himself in their fecund topsoil and
burgeon into the future. His childhood memories were mostly American in origin
although it was difficult to isolate the Korean episodes from that of the
latter. After the school bus would rush in front of a road near the trailer
park and whisk his sister away, his mother would pursue her early morning
exercises in front of the television and he would emulate her movements. He
remembered loving the thought of catching lightning bugs like his sister and
the neighbor children and his repulsion towards it when his mother stated that
they were "God's little creatures." He remembered getting lost in a store,
feeling tiny among lady mannequins, and being nearly hit by a car as he played
in the street. A man yelled at his mother for letting her child run around
unrestrained in the streets. Humiliated, she sent him to the bedroom of the
trailer. The radio on the mantle of the bed was playing "Raindrops keep falling
on my head" and other lugubrious folk melodies. He listened. He cried on her
white blanket as if she had banished him forever. He remembered that his father
came home on that occasion and took him to the Orbit Inn for a coca cola. He
twirled around on a stool restored to his euphoria as his father strutted his
work talk to men his age seated on other stools.

Walking from the mokotong he thought of a story that he often read to the
children in Kwang Sook's kindergarten in Chongju, a place where he often worked
for a few hours each week. But his mind distorted it as the benign and
innocuous innocence of childhood is mutilated and the mutilation calcified by
experience. Seoul Tiger gets on a plane. He waves goodbye to his mother and
father from the window. He feels the plane move and rise in the air. He shuts
his eyes briefly. Then he opens them widely in amazement. Seoul Tiger looks
through the window. He sees a valley of clouds below him. Then he looks down
further and he sees Sri Lanka. The plane lands. Seoul Tiger gets out of the
plane. He gives the deferential slight bow and says hello to Tamil Tiger. Tamil
Tiger picks up his suitcase and takes it to a car. Tamil Tiger's mother is in
the car. She says, 'Hello' to Seoul Tiger. They all go to the home of Tamil
Tiger's family. Tamil Tiger's mother slaughters a pig and boils it in her stew
while her husband brandishes a machete playfully. Then they all eat at the
table. 'Do you eat rice?' asks Seoul Tiger. 'No, I eat unleavened bread,' says
Tamil Tiger. 'Here are some Rotis.' Tamil Tiger passes him the plate. The plate
has rotis on it. Seoul Tiger holds the unleavened bread in his palm wondering
how to eat it. Then a stew, called a curry, is put upon his plate. 'Do you eat
kimchee?' asks Tamil Tiger. 'What is kimchee?" asks Tamil Tiger.

Again he was bouncing around in a bus without time to rush back to the yangwam,
the room he rented outside of an old woman's home. He questioned himself on why
he had agreed to give private lessons in various places outside of Chongju. He
answered to himself that the strung out schedule and the long rides matched his
disorganized, wayward thoughts. It felt comfortable to bounce around in the
similar movements of his circumambulatory personal life. He hoped that the bus
would arrive in time so that he could eat a meal before going into those
lessons. People in these small towns would not acknowledge his handicap of
linguistic ignorance. They demanded more than his short, concrete, and
ungrammatical utterances. If he had been an Anglo-Saxon he would have been
served in restaurants with simple statements like "Chop che bop, chushipshio"
(chop che bop, please). But in small towns even a waitress who had experienced
him before would come forth with entire paragraphs to serve onto him and then
would stand there bewildered that paragraphs of reciprocal eloquence would not
be returned by someone clearly of her nationality. At last she would go away
and the dinner would come for the retard. This time, as always, he ate quickly
and then waited for some woman's children to get him at the bus terminal. He
did not know the woman's name even though he taught there and she gave him
money and he did not know her children's names even though he taught them. They
were just his "little tongmuls" (little animals). Sang Huin did not like the
difficulty of memorizing Korean names so he did it seldom.

Inside the bus station he changed to a different bench. A two or three year old
girl, chastised by her mother, sought refuge between his legs and would not
come out. She closed the legs like an iron gate. The mother did not seem to
demand that she leave the fortress; and he enjoyed the fact that she seemed to
gain comfort from his presence even though his face expressed the awkwardness
of having her there.

He missed childhood. Surely all people did. Was it so awful to admit this? No
one that he had ever known had spoken of his or her loss. Granted, one could
not stay comatose in innocence--the delight of pulling some trivial plastic or
paper objects from cereal boxes; Halloween costumes; or the Christmas
togetherness. The newness of running around trying to beat the clouds or run
barefoot after balls in the ecstasy of just being alive ended quickly to girl
chases, obligations, family, and all of such dead weight. He couldn't have
stayed with his mother forever. If he could have remained steady on the
American continent he would have needed more than just her; and so alone, with
a sense that he would never find family or closeness again, he had ventured
here to another continent that was and wasn't his home, and where he did not
speak a language that was and wasn't his. Still, coming here was not entirely
bereft of positive notions. Being an innocent, a childish perspective
prevailed.

He wanted to once again hold something tenuous and fragile in the palm of his
hand as a child would a tinctured caterpillar, the butterfly. He wanted to be
there with it innocuously in awe of something that really had no use to him. He
loathed this interaction, this anathema of the soul so intertwined in
insatiable and wanton selfishness. He wanted to be Seoul Tiger once again but
such was not in the survivalist impulses of man. Such was not destiny. Hadn't
there been numerous times when as a boy he would sit hours with a stray dog
that was needing to claim a gentle master, scared to take it home and yet, like
a true friend, sensitive most to creatures that could not articulate themselves
in any other way than in the eyes. The eyes, that dilated neediness to be in
the presence of a friend in a hostile world where being born was not a sanction
to live well or live long. One's innocence ran by like a shell-shocked soldier;
circumventing normal sexual drive by being gay would not free him to an
innocence that was forlorn. Now there was just the wistful need for family,
children he helped to say small things, and his strange obsession with empty
physical connections he could depart from easily. He preferred young students
because they did not make him uncomfortable by pressing the issue that a man in
his early twenties should be planning to have a family. His private domain
consisted of a blessed, taciturn instrument called a cello that required no
words to say something deep. He had dragged it on the plane and had paid an
astronomical fee to get it onto the airlines. What a burden it had been to him
lugging the thing around and yet, dilettante that he was, he needed some beauty
to exude out of his hardened mud. He needed reverberating notes to sink into
the plaster cast around his mind, which had the signature of the world as an
evil place upon it , and caress his soft and lonely brain.

Finally, the two or three-year-old parted one of the kneecaps and the mother
pushed candy bribes before her nose to keep her quiet and contained. Soon they
bought a ticket in the Chinchon station and boarded a bus. All bus terminals in
cities under a million people had cement floors and were dark and dirty like a
cellar. Just like he had seen in myriad other terminals, here a man came along
with a plastic watering bucket with a nozzle used for watering plants. He
rinsed the floor with the water contained in it but did not follow that with
either a mop or a broom. A few minutes later, two boys came into the terminal.
One had a basketball in his hands. The other one stood a few feet behind him.
He looked bored and fat.

"Anyong Haseyo" (Peace you do)

"Anyong Hashimnika, Sonsaeng nim," (Peace you do, teacher), said the one with
the basketball.

"Uri-tul nun taxi ul sayang hata?" (We taxi to use?) He knew it was as
ungrammatical as a pig. He knew that again there would be no taxi. Again they
would be walking. Still it was his way of saying something. The one with the
basketball who could figure it out shook his head.

They walked down the sidewalks. The two boys lead the way. Sang Huin felt that
the roles had been inverted and he felt a twinge of resentment that he was a
child or a retard in his own native country and that children were dragging him
about. The three of them moved down sidewalks like window-shopping loiterers
looking into every mom and pop store along the way. "Ilchik tangshin-tul rul
basketball ul hayoshimnita kachi?" (Early you basketball did?) The fat boy
nodded his head silently. The boy knew his genius in interpretive skills. A
sense of pride exuded over his face in a white light but the flush of
expression was extremely ephemeral. It came upon him and vanished in just a few
seconds.

"Who won?" asked Sang Huin in English.

The fat boy pointed to himself with his thumb. He even smiled for a second in a
sort of bored way.

Then they opened a gate and they went into what looked like a house only it was
separated into two apartments.

Sang Huin used his photograph cards like magic tricks to get them to practice
tenses and syntax. He liked seeing their tiny house and thinking how his life
might have been--for better or for worse--within the childhood of his race. He
loved English as he loved music; and sometimes he combined the two in such
classes, but with a small feeling of resentment (to which his smile and gentle
nature gave no indication) as if his time was sodden in musical doggerel that
defiled him like a solecism when he might well be playing Haydn and Boccherini.

He wondered about the girl dressed in the dumpy blue skirt of her school
uniform, and the boys in jeans. Were they content to be Koreans or did they
yearn for bigger and better things seduced by the American culture that came to
them through the cinema and the music and through his presence as well as the
English that they studied. If they weren't content, he thought, it wasn't for
him to say they were wrong. It was a globalized world and America was the power
and the standard that was the impetus for its formation. That was why he was
here with his English. He couldn't have gotten any other job in Korea when he
couldn't master the simplest of sentences in the native language. He didn't
like the sour perceptions that he had of America. It was home. It was still
home.

In Umsong, during those times he had waited in the office of the kindergarten
for his class to begin, the children would always see him through the window.
They knew at that point that he didn't speak Korean and wasn't one of them and
for that reason they were attracted to him. They would bang and climb on the
window in their eagerness to be near him; and some, using a runny nose as an
excuse, would be permitted to go into the hall. To the side of a fish aquarium
hung a roll of toilet tissue. They would wipe their noses and peak into the
office. They would squeal. He liked it. He liked being an American--sometimes.

He looked more intensely at these Chinchon students. Who would they become? As
they begin to feel hormones, the adrenaline of the four-year high called love,
and the frenzy of sex luring them into steady relationships and accompanying
obligations, would they have moments where they too yearned to be in a hammock
under their Grandma Lee's cherry trees? In his case he could recall the image
of a photograph of a neighbor his family had labeled as "Grandma" Vera with her
black dress rustling in the wind carrying him in her arms. Would they think
upon theirs-something similar to Vera frying hamburgers on the grill as the
scents of angel-food cakes came from the windows of her kitchen? He chastised
himself. He told himself that only broken people looked back on childish
irrelevance. The rest looked to the future in their insatiable hungers for
bigger pleasures and their present connections that they might use to secure
their hedonistic whims. But he was a "broken" person and the thought of Vera
returned to him. When he thought of her intensely the image emblazoned in
memory shook him and it was hard to think that it could not make her alive
again. And yet to have had a connection (and the most unfortunate of lives
surely have had many) would justify everything. A personal contact in the past
or when the wind...or the sun...or the rain touched him, that alone would
justify a life of barren prospects.

"Unto us a child is born. Unto us a child is given." He thought of the words of
the composer, Handel. Yes, he thought, he had done a horrible thing by
encouraging his girlfriend to abort their child. It was wrong to have robbed a
being of life and any connections the fetus might have had beyond its own cell
divisions. Secondly, this cynicism that a woman, spellbound in romance, robbed
a man of his sperm to produce a baby by which to devote herself and obtain a
purpose in life while thrusting him into the financial maintenance of this
prize had caused him to abort major connections in his own life. Now, apart
from his mother, there were no connections. There were only phantoms of people
flitting through ethereal consciousness, and by coming here to find his land he
had parted from her. When his sister was murdered, he was just beginning his
studies at the university. When his father committed suicide, Sang Huin's
cadaverous numbness was on fire and he felt that any trace of himself was being
incinerated. Mentally, he was running to and fro in the hope of retarding the
flames that were eating him for their fuel. Back then the thought of his father
dangling from the noose recurred to him every few moments. At that time he
wanted to check himself into a hospital for he felt a loss of sanity. His world
was three dimensional but totally impersonal and wobbling. After months of
virtual silence and the icy stares of his mother through the most enervated and
perfunctory movements of planting flowers and trees no different than what she
had or stripping wallpaper and putting up patterns that were nearly identical
to the old ones, he spent a month in Galveston. A month watching waves dash
against the shore was enough to make him see that being one of a billion waves
dashed into the sands was a pattern engrained into life that he must not take
personally; and so he returned to school. By will and discipline in reigning in
his thoughts he made it through college and a year of graduate school. But he
could not take the stagnation that scholarly pursuits forced him to endure and
became the animated billiard ball being shot from one area of the table to the
next--one part of the country to the next--falling homeless into dark holes.

Sadness punched him in the stomach. It was enough--"nomu" (too much). He
frowned. He didn't care. Six or seven minutes early--who would mark the time
especially when he traveled such a distance to give them these lessons. He told
them that the session had ended and they got an envelope of money from their
mother, which they brought to him. The session didn't seem as if it had begun.
It all was a vacuum--a void. He untied the double knots that were contained on
his shoes and put them on. Korean people were so quick at slipping on shoes,
and he assumed that anytime someone waited for him to leave it was a complete
aggravation for them. His mother had spent so much time teaching him to tie and
then double-tie. He had been such an ignorant and inept child. The habit was
deeply engrained in his psyche. The students stared and waited at his childish
wrestling with his shoes. He knew that he needed slip-ons that would foster a
quick exodus after he had taken them off at the door.

He stepped out over the crevice of a yard. A light sprinkling or heavy mist was
falling upon him. Past the gate and into the street the generalized memories of
a hundred such days with a hundred similar rains came to him. Rain was for him
only a baptism of emancipation. From a glance up at the clouds he was compelled
to acknowledge realities outside his own thoughts--and indeed Sang Huin needed
the rain of Noah to get out of his own ruminations. Yet, a foreigner's
experience was indeed like no others' and he was an introverted being
traumatized by the great chasm of the murder of a sibling and finding the blue
dangling body of his father. At 24, any man's boyhood was buried under only a
shallow layer of dirt and for one with maimed manhood the clay was never solid,
was partially washed away, and boyhood often resurfaced. He was a runaway from
the American experience and his thoughts, when not able to do it in deeds,
almost always ran to Seoul. The rural areas where he worked and at one time had
lived gave him the solitude and the meditative power to think his weird
thoughts as he tried to reconstruct his manhood but the problem was that he did
it too much. Seoul was felicity, the exhilarating movements, the museums, the
symphonies, and the sexual bliss. Within it the hurt was diffused and boyhood
was gagged and he was rarely cognizant of its screams. At the bus station it
began to rain heavily. A few years ago, he thought, the sun had droned on with
the days of the trial and the rare rain had been his only comfort.

In an hour's time, during the bus ride, each of these students would be
completely gone from his mind exuded like the entangling conundrums of feeling,
ideas, and senses in sleep. If all people were shadows of this realm in the
flickering of light, what solid entity cast the shadow? Was it God? Was there a
god? If the shadows were more concrete than the light, what would this say
about life? He decided to stop thinking such things. Myriad complex and morbid
thoughts, profound or inane, would not raise him to a wiser man. They would
just get him stuck in their muddy ruts.

Back in a bus, he thought about how much of his life was dragged about in
transportation here and there for a Korean buck. He didn't know anybody in
Chongju but a simple advertisement in the paper would have been enough to solve
his dilemma in providing him with private lessons near his home for needed
South Korean Won. Still, if his whole life was spent in these bus rides, fate
was not bad. He could be a starving North Korean or one of the dead soldiers
who got their submarine trapped on a reef in the South Korean jurisdiction of
the ocean and had been hunted down by the South Korean soldiers. He had a South
Korean passport and an American residency. He was single and free to see the
world. He didn't do that much and had lots of time and some money to spend.

He had little mastery over his thinking. Since he was a creative person it
often went running wild through meadows with the gods. He knew there was genius
to be gained in the company of deities so wild. He had left his mother's home
and his mother country to find manhood- perverse, greedy, manhood with its
insatiable wants, its selfish calculating plans, and its grandiose desire to
find its own unique adventures and habits. She, his mother, would meanwhile be
re-planning and redecorating rooms. He loved her deeply but she was not
everything. He needed more connections to keep himself from rising like a
balloon and going adrift; and lacking them, looking onto his life from the
clouds, he could see the obvious: that this mortal would not be there when he
became much older. For all of his life there was only one claim to be made and
that was upon himself. In this respect he was quite American.




Chapter Three


Traditional homes often had extra guesthouses as an extension to the main unit
and it was within this "yogwam" in Chongju that he more or less had residence.
Luckily for him, during summers these outdoor rooms were not so horrible but in
winters the cold snuffed the residents out of sleep in early mornings as
animals from forest fires and the mostly aged tenants, before finding warmth
elsewhere, would individually go to splash their bodies and faces in a shared
bathroom not much different than the ones bears use in zoos. One low faucet fed
the cement creek, which had a plastic bowl floating in it. No different than
one's paws, the bowl was the means of obtaining a bath.

It was in a bland closet sized room that his cello was in one corner and he, a
laptop computer, a short wave radio, and his stack of clothes were at the other
end. When he arrived there after teaching in Chinchon, the ride made him feel
exhausted; and after an hour of work, his notebook paper with the Gabriele
symphony was under the sweaty socks of his feet, the Voice of America news
broadcast became nothing but static, and he was asleep.

A person remembers his last dream if awakened in a specific stage of dreaming,
if the mind is devising some way to startle the dreamer into going to the
bathroom, or if the examination of present problems in a skit becomes violent
images running amuck. Unrepressed wishes, and rehearsing events before they
actually take place to gain some sense of how to respond before they occur are
the ideas most often given for dreaming but the brain is a revelatory organ not
of future events but of present realities; and so it was with him.

He dreamt it was Buddha's birthday and that Yang Kwam was under a huge canvas
canopy on a university campus where the ground was a hard sandless desert.
Those under the canvas were resting and drinking as the others played soccer;
but Sang Huin was alone on a dry and grassless bluff that overlooked the
activity. He was drifting on and off in sleep; and although a bit conscious of
being alone and feeling reluctant to have Yang Kwam involved in a host of other
lives in his absence, he was unwilling to tamper with fate or reduce his
exposure to the sun, shaped with divine human limbs like Aten himself, that
kept putting him to sleep.

A man came up to him. He first spoke in Hanguk mal (Korean), but upon getting
no acknowledgment of having been understood, he changed to English.

"I thought that you surely knew a little Korean. It is my mistake."

Sang Huin sat up.

"Let me introduce myself. My name is Kim Jin Huan. My major is tourism. I study
here at Chongju University and I'm part of the English club here among other
things. I'm very pleased to meet you. You can teach me lots of things and we
can become friends but I can't learn at this altitude--not even of you. I think
it is best to come down below where the sun is not so hot. You are surely
thirsty."

Sang Huin shook his head and laid it back on the big rock that he used as a
pillow.

"I came up here to ask you if you would like to come down and join everyone
else although it was suggested that it would not be an easy task. Sung Ki [the
dream now made Yang Kwam Sung Ki] was saying that you like dirt. He said--I
don't know why-- that the floor of your apartment was dirty and that there were
lots of mosquitoes there. He said that is why he tells you to stay with him. He
said that I'd have trouble getting you out of the dirt. I don't know that this
is all true but you surely know by now that dirty rooms, dirty plates, and
dirty dogs--Koreans have no tolerance for these things. You really should not
be lying in the dirt like this. I know you don't know me but that is my
advice." Then he smiled ingenuously.

Sang Huin knew the man's snobbishness showed that he was ignorant of suffering
and deliberately ignored the dirt from whence all carbon molecules spring into
life. "Koreans--North Koreans or South Koreans?" asked Sang Huin as he propped
part of his upper body with the use of his elbows.

"South Koreans, of course."

Sang Huin didn't say anything. He was from the greatest and most powerful
nation on the Earth (at least it was at the present date if the European Union
"stayed out of things"-a common idea of his father's that made him smile) and,
in his perceptions, it was being equated with dirt the way Americans envisioned
most all other countries including those in Western Europe.

"Everyone wants to talk to you in English."

"But I don't want to," said Sang Huin kindly. "I'm tired of saying little
things and hearing little things. I don't mean to be rude."

"Are you happy to lie out here like an animal?"

"Yes. You know..." he paused. He had trouble getting out words that would
refute the visual evidence of him lying in the dirt. Such words had to be
special if they were to vindicate a nation and its people not to mention
himself and all physical evidence. There were no words that he possessed for
such a feat so he reverted to attitudes fixated in his childhood and thus
became childish in the process. "You know, Americans think that South Korea is
a little third world country composed of nothing but dirty people."

"Is that so? Is that your opinion of your people?"

"No," he said sullenly as he shook his head, not knowing who his people were.
"I have to think out here in the dirt. I know it is strange. You don't know me.
Of course you think I'm strange. I just enjoy seeing insects crawling around in
the dirt and the dirt itself- everything that comes from it is inspirationally
calm." He laughed. "I guess I like playing in the dirt like a child." He knew
that he must be an amusing caricature for them.

"You don't have to do much. It is kind of hard to fail. Just drink a beer and
ask them little things. 'What is your name? Where do you live? How many people
are in your family?' They can't interact with tape recorders. Can't you do
that?" Sang Huin ignored him.

"Don't you have any goals?"

"No, not really." He sat up as if he were taking a defensive posture within the
limits of his personality. He spoke with mild sincerity squeezed in with a bit
of sarcasm, giving the depths and secrets of his being in a laconic paragraph
to this stranger. "No, I have come to the conclusion that doing nothing in a
bad world is improving it so I want to contribute in this way. You know, maybe
there are people out there who do nothing but lie around in the dirt. I don't
know that they are any worse off to be dirty. I don't know that I'm better than
they are by usually preferring not to act that way. I'm just another creature
out there with microorganisms in my body helping to clear out my intestines."
He felt his warm burning face. "I guess I am getting a little sun burnt out
here but so far it has been a good experience." Around him little pieces of
trash were dancing around circuitously. He heard the sound of a vehicle he
could not see since it was at a distance. The world was alive.

"Suit yourself," said the man.

Upon awakening and sitting up in his blanket and futon on the floor, there was
such a clear image erect and tilted in the forefront of his mind that it almost
seemed to be registered in his perceptions as reality and not a part of his
dreams. It was of a German American woman in a Volkswagen driving southwest
through America's heartland to the destination of Mexico but driven insatiably
to an isolated state as if the car could take her straight into Antarctica.
She, Gabriele, spit her snuff into an empty beer can as she drove. This odd and
unusable vision was not, to his knowledge, reflective of any psychological
state of his own, and yet it somehow seized him. She was broad and burly,
isolated and insulated but worldly and perceptive. Sang Huin sensed a story
within her. It was not music. She had too many notes. The stagnation of the
room, however, pushed him into the drone of movement and this movement
flattened this vision and made him the doormat under the weight of the day.

He got dressed. He felt agitation at the idea of having to go all the way out
to Muguk for his doctor's class but at 4:00 A.M. he slipped on his pants,
regardless, and walked outside to the bathroom. He would have to get in a taxi
by 4:30; be on the bus by 5:00; and travel an hour and twenty minutes all for a
class that lasted less than an hour. The class was composed of psychiatrists,
surgeons, and those practicing internal medicine but they were on a soldier's
salary and the payment he got for the class was paltry. Still, he said that he
would do it. They had lost money for classes they did not receive at Shin Se
Gye when he quit there.

Near Muguk, from the bus, he saw farmers of the dawn planting their weedy rice
patties by hand. They were dressed in baggy shirts and rolled up pants and
pointed straw hats covered their heads. Their long boots were entrenched in
mud. According to his romantic perceptions of them, each one was august,
unpretentious, and melting into the morning sun. Those rags they wore were more
patriotic than flags and more majestic than King Sejong the Great's crown. Once
their farms had been irrigated into ponds and frogs croaked within the allure
of their enclave they would have sewn not only rice but the continuation of
civilization. Their footprints in mud were ephemeral, but they had their
eternity in their families. He asked himself what eternity he would have in
such a decadent and disconcerted existence that was obsessed by this mixing of
people in an emotion of love that brought the selfish and altruistic splashing
of the other in one's container and he or she into theirs. Love still was
something that he hadn't really experienced and he hadn't experienced it
because of his greater obsession with carnal devouring.

What made him attack himself so? It was obvious. As a gay man he reshaped
perception in an uncomfortable way (although undoubtedly he was not the first):
his life became an admission that there was no operator's manual for any man's
life; but when he saw couples with their babies he believed, in contrary to
this, that a natural course in a man's life had been severed or abducted from
him and so life became all the more confusing. He could not do otherwise than
to feel sad and insecure. It was a loss in his life and he did not deny that it
was such. He was not really envious when he saw them. It made him pleased to
see them even though in such occurrences he felt empty and stunted at best.

It made him sick to think that--oh, the same old disconcerted thoughts spun
around and around in his head like when a bad tune by its prevalence repeats
itself over and over in the tape recorder of the psyche and the repetition
feels like drudgery. It made him sick to think that he had caused a woman to
conceive and then had not been forceful enough with his will to ensure that the
child would be born--no, that was just a fantasy albeit a partially believed
one. Really he had insisted on the abortion but as time went on the perception
changed with the neurons and the desire to have a good self-image. But this was
the past: immobile, irrelevant, and except for occasional lesions that opened
up the bleeding of memory, forgotten by all. The future was anxiousness where
hopes of happiness were thoughtlessly draped against despair.

In the doctors' class, held at Dr. Lee's breakfast table, he brought up
articles and political cartoons for discussions. Everything from the continuing
menace of Saddam Husein, incursions into the demilitarized zone by North Korea,
the Yonsei University student demonstrations, the convictions of the
ex-presidents, and all of the most newsworthy of the world's unhappy events
were there for the probing. But today, upon leaving, he remembered an article
he had forgotten to bring to them: the Taliban's restraint of war ravaged
widows from work. The doctors liked such things. As Dr. Lee had pointed out,
even happenings in the most remote parts of the world often spread amuck like
an oil spill in a global community. He remembered having forgotten this article
when he was walking out the door and then it slid from and fell off his memory
altogether.

After walking to the Muguk bus depot he had second thoughts about going back to
Chongju. He got in a taxicab. That was the easy part. He said, "Anyong
Hashimnika?" and then probed his mind. "Odie ka?," (where you go?) asked the
taxi driver sharply. The word, "kang," meant river and "mul" meant water. What,
he thought to himself, was the word for lake? "Kun mul? (big water)...no, that
would never work!" Somehow he found it and got out a coherent sentence. The
taxi took him there leaving him on the shoulder of the road. He got out. The
highway that was the main road of the town was sandwiched between a bluff and a
lake reflecting the marginal space of the Korean landscape. There were no
classes for a while and the day was there to celebrate like the disrobing and
denuding of a goddess--or in his case, a god. Sang Huin pulled off his shirt
and rolled up his slacks. He sat down under a small pavilion. Near it weeds
grew. He plucked one and put it into his mouth. He chewed it and sprawled
himself on the bench thinking himself as a more worldly version of Huckleberry
Finn. Looking down at the waters and the small fishing crafts that were tied to
a few docks at a distance, he thought about the Korean landscape in general
images: the croaking of frogs in the irrigated rice fields near the apartment
that he once had in Umsong; the farmers ("nongmin") who would insert each
individual plant as painstakingly as a plastic surgeon grated each item of
hair. In galoshes, they would trudge into the depths of mud to sow, reap, and
thresh the rice. The moon above the empty Umsong stadium was a lambent glow
over the rice and gave a slight visibility to the forest that interconnected a
nearby field to the stadium. None of it was all that spectacular when compared
to the variety and splendor of the vast country, America, that was and wasn't
his country; but still it was new and he sometimes liked it.

Then, in full broadness, he saw Gabriele. There she was in a tight t-shirt and
wholly jeans. Hail beat upon the tin can of a trailer where she lived with an
infant and a cat. The hail seemed to her like the bullets that she imagined
from the distant war that America wedged against Iraq. Then he saw the
antithesis of this: big diamond earrings dangling from her lobes and that she
wore the most expensive fashions of the elite that gave her broad and muscular
German frame elegance as she got ready to take her son to galleries, temporary
exhibits, and then to have him sit alone in a corner at these art parties where
cheques were often signed. He saw him sitting in those strangers' homes as Sang
Huin himself had sat on the bleachers during his sister's basketball games. He
saw him taking umbrage with the gods (the sun god in particular if He existed)
for they had bore him in the suffocation of her gray colors that sprayed out
onto the world like a mist that none of his friends went through. For them it
was sunny picnics of complete families, weenie roasts, and marshmallow burnings
over bonfires. And there she was again a younger entity, youth asphyxiating in
the dust storm of talcum powder that, in her trailer, she swept across the
hills of his buttocks, wishing to walk across hills and depart from family. .
He felt her true, committed, objection to everything in her big lonely home and
with everything consisting of so much it stayed latent in the confines of her
leaden eyes. He pulled out a notebook and sketched her different varieties.
Underneath her image, he began to cluster a second draft of words and notes. He
didn't know what he was doing.




Chapter Four


Having had no book to sink into when he arrived at an apartment in Umsong
months earlier, he (this new arrival from America) must have seemed like a bird
trying to build a nest with two or three sticks. It had been an insane episode
for the scrutiny of his roommate-coworkers: the way he had organized and
reorganized his few things in the loosely partitioned area of the living room
and how he had been so reluctant to speak. Hadn't he, in his disconnection,
looked like a man suffering from some neuron-entangled nervousness, heavy
neurosis, or a bad prion making the holes in his head to match the holes of his
being.

His sister had been raped and mutilated. At least that was the theory-as much
as one could assess from skeletal remains. The prosecution wanted to horrify
the jury with photographs. Maybe they had succeeded inordinately disconcerting
the jury so that it couldn't ascertain the facts and probabilities. The only
measurable impact that he knew of were ramifications of deep, paralyzing
shadows that the three of them fell into--so far and so eternal had been the
abyss. "Were the perpetrators human or hominids? If they were human, what did
that say about being human?" It had been their first unshared question easily
sensed in the eyes of each other. "Are all Americans like this?" they had all
silently thought. No one would have said such a thing. "Was all humanity this
way?" It was in their eyes--that and the wish to escape the species. They were
there: in this word "hell" that all had talked of and few had ever gone into.
Hell was full meaninglessness and savagery without rationale and with a
judicial system forcing the mutilated further into unprecedented horrors.

Pusillanimous and cowering in fetal positions within themselves, limping around
the days with perfunctory and lifeless movements, his father had nonetheless
spoken of "getting on" with things although he couldn't define what one was
supposed to get on with or what was worthy of getting on to. They all could
perceive the horror of everybody and everything so no matter what they
did--even killing themselves--it would all be equivalent to meaningless and
savagery.

It was good to have this hour of complete silence near the lake without any
sound but the rushing of cars, which also came in inundated waves, peaked, and
died. Still, one would have to hear a language sooner or later. At times if
only he could have a silence, a respite, from his thoughts to go with his free
time to think his recovery would be expedited. He thought of his sister. She
had kept her Korean. Occasionally, even as a teenager, she would mutter off
some idea in Korean to which his mother returned some reply. He had always felt
jealous of this secret language and here he was in Korea but the language was
still a secret to him.




Chapter Five


The social creature that even he was, if he were not to hear a voice for long
even those boats in the lake would have been a discomfiting
image--interspersing his conceptualization of them in depersonalized momentum.
He wanted to call Kwang Sook to hear her voice but also to cancel his classes.
He didn't need so much money. His former boss had deposited some of the owed
money after the issue had gone to the Department of Labor. He wanted to go back
to Seoul but classes were his equanimity. They personalized his world in a
professional and impersonal manner that gave him fortitude to float through the
expanse of his existential turns where it seemed that there were no other
sailors.

Maybe, he thought to himself, he would go into a video pang later and let drama
absorb him in a personal intimacy with a fictional entity of depth and
substance. He had no misgivings. His life was a stunted one. Still, back in
Chongju, he made the call and cancelled his classes. Then, near the bus
terminal, he went to a restaurant. He ordered some bogum bop, a thick mixture
of rice and vegetables that one mixed into a thick brown gravy that stood off
aside on the plate and the appetizer of kimchee maundu. Alone, eating and
reading a Newsweek he pulled out of his bag, he began to wonder of the lives of
those that owned or managed the restaurant. Their area was shielded only behind
sliding doors. Behind the tables and the chairs, their living area consisted of
just one space. A girl came out and he could see within it clothes drying on a
plastic rack and a small television that was on the floor. Then a man came out
with a baby in his arms. He wore an undershirt and boxer underwear. The women
cooked. Then, after they served Sang Huin a second helping of kimchee maundoo,
they put breakfast on a table for the family. They all ate together. Like Yang
Lin at Toksugum Palace seeing newlyweds and the wife he should have been, Sang
Huin saw his alter ego in the man. His life was probably limited. A wife and
children pinned him into a small existence with family commotion and
responsibilities. It floated in non-ambitious swaying like a plastic boat on
ripples in a bathtub. It probably droned on in its unaware and insignificant
tedium through the years, but it had its connections.




Chapter Six


Attempting to thwart his primitive hungers for sex and socialization
(synonymous words of civilization's shaping, but base nonetheless), and sensing
the true vacuous abyss that would exist without learning or creating, he went
into a park that was near the bus station. There, he worked on his amorphously
wordy musical composition that was a bit of everything and nothing. Still, he
told himself that this potpourri was worthwhile even though really he had his
misgivings about it. He told himself that he needed to test the musical aspects
of it on his cello later that day when he returned to the yogwam. It was a plan
of a return "home"(whatever that word meant) and a means to contravene his
deviance to Seoul. It was a self-created urgency to repress his sexual
obsessions and to clothe the animalistic movements and hunger of his naked
soul. To his delight, from previous recitals of Hayden at the yogwam, it would
probably bring to his door an audience of elderly tenants and one of his more
fulfilling connections.

He came upon a crowd of people clustered around an elderly man. The man was a
governmental employee paid as a teacher of Korean traditional dance. He was
promoting the program by a slow and illustrious dance. He wore the traditional
hanbok of the paji and chogori. Sang Huin was inveigled by the dance but the
sun god was putting him to sleep and 15 minutes into the performance he was on
a park bench fast asleep. When he awoke, the crowd that had gathered around the
dancer and the dancer himself were no longer there. Just as Sang Huin, the boy,
had skipped around the kindergarten teacher's desk, sat down to drink his
chocolate milk with his Graham crackers, and found himself a grown man
listening to a university professor's lecture on biology, so the sunlight of
this day's slight 2:00 descent vaporized the people he had been witnessing no
differently than it had vaporized the dinosaurs myriad afternoons of myriad
centuries ago or the body of his sister that had decomposed in a park. It had
all gone-gone but where it had gone he couldn't say.

Like a 5 year old, he rubbed his eyes to wake up. Following an instinctive
response that was a yearning overwhelming his common sense, he felt the impulse
to stretch forth toward Seoul: toward adventure in the masses and bathing the
rational mind in sensual massage. He wanted meretricious sex. Young men
encroached on his mind in droves. Maybe this obsession, if it were such, was
from an inability to communicate in any other way. He did not mind--well, he
did, but what could he do, he argued, when the irrationality of pleasure
seeking sedated one as he journeyed around alone on the rugged terrain of the
Earth. He did not believe in much platonic constraint. When his hormones were
boiling to overflow he "hauled [his] ass" to Seoul. There, a theatre existed
for meeting and touching men near Chongno Samga Road and he had been told that
there was a gay Turkish bath in the area of Myong Dong. Too much creative
energy would be depleted if he were to lasso the wild bore for long. Too much
craziness would go into creating sense in insensible passions. Wasn't marriage
created to give sense to such passions? Hadn't this lifetime contract that his
parents signed in their marital vows caught two of life's myriad souls in the
idea that they could defy a changing universe and be as non-changeable as
rocks? Hadn't their confinement of each other in this materialistic American
dream become the incommunicable cries of two strangers tied back to back by
weeds from their many parcels of land after all substantial conversation had
been exhausted? Yet, his liaisons were not exactly more viable versions of
relationships. He did not want to talk to these men nor, as he knew, would they
to him. Ideally he did; but it was just a fleeting expression or whim. Reality
sang another tune. There was this day's ticket to a symphony in Seoul that
Kwang Sook had given to him because she couldn't go. He had taken it. He loved
symphonies and there were parts of this day when he told himself that he would
go to Seoul for that purpose. Really, however, he wouldn't have bothered at all
had it not been for the urges of his body anxiously nudging him northward.

He bought another ticket to Seoul and drank milk he obtained from the bus
station vendor while waiting for his designated departure. The noxious smell of
bus exhausts filled the open cavities of the bus station. A torn back on a
plastic seat seemed to snag his shirt more than once like a cat's claws. The
wait was not long since a half hour later he was part of a line to get on
board. This particular flatulent bus seemed to say his name, Sang Huin, as a
feces colored gas, carbon, exuded from its rear. Strange ideas like the talking
bus and the clawing chair, in the back regions of the mind, were only
experienced by the lonely and the isolated. He knew this. Those who were
isolated were such out of their contempt for the sadistic and hedonistic
impulses that were hidden in smiles. They were such to protect their own
ingenuous vulnerabilities despite being sociable human creatures; and they
weren't always so firmly in their right minds. The landscape seen from the
moving bus was unremarkable but still the beauty that was there dazed him into
self-reflections. More than the physical response what did he crave? To be
loved and to love was like a dog chasing its tail; and if his tail were long
enough he would have it in the mouth. He would have it there in his mouth if
the mouth liked the taste of the tail and the tail the feel of the mouth.
Foolish as he was going to Seoul once again for his fun, he wasn't a fool. Most
people obeyed their sexual inclinations as if they were great oracles of wisdom
that would broaden them beyond the limits of themselves in such a primitive
interaction. He couldn't say that he wasn't as they were, but unlike them, he
knew that the whole thing was a mirage for those who couldn't or didn't know
how to build worlds within themselves. A Newsweek article had proven to his
satisfaction that love was not a splendid thing. It was just a four-year
addiction at best. The article had theorized that primitive man needed to stay
with the woman long enough to help with the child's welfare by feeding the
creature and its mother during those years when the baby encumbered the woman
from hunting on her own. He didn't need more than that.

In Kwang Sook's school, Sang Huin had asked the children to draw verbs next to
a series of words they found from his handout. When this was finished, he would
read sentences with those vocabulary words like "A tall boy hits a ball in the
air." "How many people are there?" "There is one person," they would say. "What
does he do?" "He hits?" "What does he hit?" "He hits a ball." "Where is the
ball?" "It is in the sky." "What does he look like?" "He is tall." The younger
ones were so competitive with each other in the games he devised for them as if
beating others in the game of survival were entrenched in human curiosities.

They had also done English exercises together on the roof where he had been the
military sergeant giving peremptory whims and they had to jump, run, go to the
right, go to the left, etc. at his command.

The boys had been especially fond of him chasing them around trying to eat them
on the roof as he sang, "This is the way we kill a pig, kill a pig, kill a pig.
This is the way we kill a pig so early in the morning." This play-acting and
making the brutal world seem as nothing but an innocuous frivolity caused them
to squeal like piglets. It was insignificant wrestling around with the children
in a job that did not take too much talent or knowledge but it was a silly
example of love. He wanted to give that spark of imagination and knowledge just
because it seemed right to give it. Weren't more altruistic connections really
what life was about? And yet if this were the true form of love, he often asked
himself, wouldn't it be so fulfilling that he would give himself to it
completely?

When he arrived at the express bus terminal, he took the subway to Chongno.
Near Pagoda Park, he went to Hardee's . The break from Hanguk food
(particularly kimchee) he found nourishing to his imagination that craved
variety. He wanted to be a vegetarian but at times he thought that he almost
lapped up the grease like a starving dog. When he finished, he found himself on
one of his first safaris to a gay sauna. He was still unsure how to get there
and so he looked down at the "chito" (map) a fellow hunter at the theatre had
drawn for him on the back cover of his "Expatriate In Korea" resource book one
time when he was at the theater.

Once there, he took off his shoes at the front desk and collected a key and a
toothbrush. Then he went upstairs. After his shower, a brief phase in the hot
whirlpool, and a second cool shower, he put on a robe from those that were on
hangers and went to a hallway of rooms where orgies were in progress. Some men
in the hallway wandered from room to room, selective of that which most excited
them on the tatami mats of the floors. Others joined shadows of faintly visible
figures groping around in a state of almost complete darkness. For him only
lighter rooms were an option since less illusionary beings were the only meat
and grease he could stomach. With the barrage of his passions released in one
of those rooms, he became a perfect receiver of transmission. There was no
interference from either psyche or physique. He relaxed on one of the leather
sofas in the lounge with other smokers and those limp individuals in between
engagements. Visions came unto him and he almost felt holy writing out aspects
of Gabriele's life within the fog of his smoke. Naked bodies in contrast to
his, that was now clothed in underwear, did not distract him. In the next room
men bathed themselves in the whirlpool or heated themselves in the sauna and
behind him were others engaging in what he had done. If human beings were only
shadows passing in and out of memory, which was nothing but the night sky for
such ghosts, what then, he asked himself, were one's dreams? The fantasies and
emotion propelled thought; and thought propelled action. Surely action was more
real and tangible than the hopes and dreams and yet how could it be such if
dreams and emotion conceived action.

Ideas of Gabriele grasped him as if she were more real than he was. Pages of
words created themselves on his lap while above the couch was a television
showing a drama of an ancient Korean period linked with reverberating
melancholic Buddhist melodies. Toward 6 o'clock, he was still there--and for
his excesses his underwear was stolen off of his body when he was performing on
someone else. He wasn't sure exactly how it happened. His head hurt; and he
felt a nausea concerning his life. He left wishing that he were ten again
gaining the rapture of a millefleur morning of dandelions patterned into a
greener fabric of grass after the evening's rain and exploring a more oceanic
landscape with his sister as they splashed through an alien terrain in their
rain boots. He wished for the time when she existed long before her attraction
to older married men like her boss-long before her attraction to men at all. He
reassured himself that he wasn't completely bad, that he was a caring person
who did not harm others even with the knowledge that there was no real right or
wrong on the planet, and that innocence hadn't left him entirely. He told
himself that he was innocent in many ways, if not an outright fool, since he
had shown himself to be kind and easily taken advantage of in business (he
would have continued to tolerate only getting two-thirds of his salary so that
the other teachers would get paid had it not been for the fact that he stopped
paying his secretaries as well and began to rehire new ones when the old ones
quit). When he arrived in Chongno Samga again his pain did not abate. He went
to a pharmacy. The woman at the pharmacy was a grandmotherly type and a little
boy sat on a stool in front of him. She asked what he wanted. He told her in
his babyish Korean. She asked how many aspirin he wanted. He told her six. She
asked him other things. He told her that he was an American and could not say
much anything in Korean. When he was leaving the boy told him, "Good-by" in
English. The Grandmother laughed warmly. Sang Huin felt pleasure from this
little minute of his life as if all sweet and little moments were not gone
altogether; and his nausea from believing that all human beings perceived each
other as a voracious fulfilling of appetites diminished.

From the cannibalism of sexual excess, he ate a salad at Wendy's restaurant
despite its exorbitant price and the one plate serving rule. It was a nice
respite from eating too much of the dumpling snack of kimchee maundoo. The
thought of eating meat did not agree with him. He shoved down some aspirin with
his chocolate frosty and stared out of the window. It was past 6:30 and this
area of Chongno Samga was already riveting in youthful crowds. In a few hours
young men would bee vomiting on the sidewalk for their alcoholic excess as he
had done on Uchiro Samga after coming out of the sauna. He hurryingly got a
yogwam. He turned on AFKN, the American military channel and saw a bit of a
movie on Franklin Delano Roosevelt while he pulled out a suit jacket and a tie
that he had folded away in his book bag. Then he got into a taxi and went to
the Sejong Cultural Center. His seat was located in the middle of the
auditorium. As he sat down his cigarettes fell out of his front pocket and as
he picked them up he noticed the blind man he had seen before in the subway
seated with his dog in the same row. Time had made him think that the person
had just been a flitting fantasy but there he was. It was a basic instinct of
the lonely human psyche to wish for meaning and connection in such events as if
God would move heaven and hell to give him a companion. He put the cigarettes
into the slit of his pack and then glanced over to his left in the hope that no
one had noticed his clumsiness. A man that looked like his sister's boss was
seated next to him. It was a slight resemblance but still it horrified him.
When that "thing" had been declared "not guilty" in reference to his sister's
murder despite all the evidence that the prosecution had brought forward, he
had fainted for a few seconds. Then, in a slow dizziness, some feelings had
assembled themselves and then he had begun to think that he wanted death; and
then he had just wanted out of America.




Chapter 7


During an intermission, while others were leaving, the stranger got up and left
with his dog. Sang Huin, on impulse, followed. Without yearning for a
cigarette, he lit one in the lobby and waited at the entry of the bathroom. If
he were troubled by the peculiarity of his actions, he was only marginally
reassured by the fact that they were not witnessed. His actions seemed that of
a stalker although this seeming, this appearance, was only ruminated on by
himself. His motives, however, were nebulous in this desire; and this inability
to understand why he was seeking this individual was a troubling factor. It was
the impulsiveness of one lacking social skills who suddenly drives up to a
school playground to form intimacies, discards the body in abhorrence and
disbelief over being the perpetrator of the crime, and in a half hour finds
himself to be a pedophile and a murderer. And yet he wasn't stalking a child
but a man and he wasn't running on the energy of sexual conquest and hate, but
just running away from loneliness. If this innocuous action were stalking, all
humans, he told himself, were stalkers. Without question, he was so desperate
to disrupt his isolation like the pensive ruminations of a mute circus gypsy
alone in the back of his tent. He was so anxious to escape his incommunicable
thoughts through friendship, or the hope of it, that he was ready to shoot it
out randomly to whomever caught his eye. Many selfish whims constituted an
attraction, but he told himself that this was not the making of a stalker. Then
the stranger and his dog came out.

"Anyong hashimnika," greeted Sang Huin as he touched the man's arm so that he
would know he was addressing him.

"Anyong haseyo" (informal: peace, you do). They spoke loudly because of the
noise of the crowds loitering and coming and going from the restrooms.

"Yongo mal ha su isumnika?"

"Yes, I can speak English. Can I help you?"

It was interesting for him to be thought of as an American instantaneously.
Sang Huin found it refreshing to not have someone give him that surprise and
grimace for being a Korean without a language.

"No. Good symphony. Do you like Rimsky?"

"Rimsky-Korsakov. Yes, not all of the music is Rimsky's but they were playing
music from that composer earlier. He is Russian, one of the best, I think."
Sang Huin smiled at the acquaintance and then realized that his smile wouldn't
pierce through the sunglasses. Unable to let his benign nature penetrate
through the plastic, he again thought of himself as somewhat equivalent to a
stalker. He felt nervous.

""Would you like a cigarette? We've got ten minutes." He thought of the words
and instruments which human beings employed to break from their innate states
of emptiness; and the connections sought from attractions that would be
forsaken if the experiences seemed shallow and there was an assumption that no
major connections would evolve from them.

Sang Huin crunched the pack for a bit of noise and the stranger took one of the
cigarettes which he then aimed toward the hiss of the emerging flame that Sang
Huin provided with the click of his lighter. The blind man inhaled a couple
times but then coughed in perpetual rhythms like the beats of a drum. The
seeing-eye dog gnarled its mouth the best it was able to do and growled
importunely. "He doesn't like," said the blind man barely able to get out his
idea from his stanched breath. Sang Huin thought of Sungki's syntax which also
lacked object pronouns in "You must all eat."

"Is there an ashtray? I'll put this out. I'm sorry I wasted it," said the blind
man.

"No problem," said Sang Huin as he took the cigarette and smashed it into an
ashtray a few feet away and then walked back to where he was. "I feel a bit
foolish." He chortled for a couple of seconds nervously. "I was seated alone,
really, not liking that feeling as much as I thought I would; and then I
noticed you. I've seen you before on a subway: you and your dog. It was a few
days ago. You got out shortly after I did in Tonggyo-dong."

"Do you stay in a hotel in that area?"

"No, but a few times when there were demonstrations at Yongsei University I
went there and watched the police and the tear gas from the fourth floor of a
building that has a pastry shop. I guess that is a bit strange, huh?" The
stranger filled air and space with a feigned smile and a nod, not knowing what
to say. "No; I live in Chongju," continued Sang Huin, "but I come to Seoul as
often as I can. I'm American. At least I say I am. My friends call me Shawn in
America but my friends here call me by my real name, Beck Sang Huin." He knew
that he didn't really have friends in either place.

"Saeng Sob," said the acquaintance. They shook hands although both were
doubtful that they could concatenate a conversation. When the man said his
name, Saeng Seob, Sang Huin thought of the boy in Kwang Sook's school who also
had this name. He was in his class; but Kwang Sook said that the last year he
had to drop out of her school completely after going through more surgeries
from being hit by a truck. That accident had happened a year earlier. Even
during the brief months Sang Huin was familiar with him there was yet another
surgery for his legs and feet. Sang Huin brought him toys every few days.
During this time he hated having the poor boy languish in the bed--skin from
his buttocks used to supplement the thin blackish skin of his legs and the pins
in his toes. It was the least he could do.

Hadn't there been a time when he and his sister were driven to the home of
their Grandma Vera and rather than connecting to her chose to run across the
street to a nearby park and feel alive with the swing against the winds as
their parents socialized? Hadn't there been a time when he knew the brilliance
of grass poking through the crevices of his bare feet? Then puberty came and
there was an aching need for other people. The aching was incessant.

"I guess you are here with friends and family. I should let you get back to
them and the performance."

"We're here alone," said Saeng Sob, " but I guess we should go back in before
the second part begins." Sang Huin did not know if he was included in the
conceptualization of "we."

"Do you live in Tonggyo-dong?," asked Sang Huin creating a mental barricade to
stop the closure.

" No, but I work and study at the university." He paused and then filled in the
silence. "My cousin is a dean in the mathematics department. I work part-time
at Yongsei as his receptionist so that is probably why you saw us there," said
the man speaking of himself in plurality.

"And you take classes?" asked Sang Huin.

"Sometimes," said Saeng Sob.

"Maybe we can get something to eat after the performance if you aren't busy,"
said Sang Huin.

"Maybe. They're probably ready to start." Sang Huin and the blind Saeng Seob
returned to their seats.

Then, after the performance, he cornered him in the ambiguity of a "maybe"
which a strong will could distort to affirmation. Such enthusiasm could not
easily be negated especially if it came from an American and soon he was with
the blind Seong Seob answering questions about his life in the US and eating
some cold noodles in soup that was as flavorless as water. The meal tasted like
a cold and bland version of Ramen noodles ("Ramyen" in Korean) but he was told
that it was not Ramyen. He didn't like the food and yet his closed lips
twitched up smilingly as if the opposite were true. Deferential deception
seemed the most cordial solution. Through children observing it in his society
in various forms it was passed down through the generations by imitation. And
as humans had and in interactions proliferated these tactics of coexistence to
the young that were successful enough to keep the species, so far, from
self-destruction, what did he in his short life know that was a better
substitute? In reinventing etiquette, it was hard to know if the new behavior
was better or worse than the old one in the abstract. The only measurement
would be the reaction of others. To eat and smile while hating what was being
eaten and to succeed at it pleased him. It made him feel that he was a decent
person. In that minute it picked him up on a wave of optimism that distracted
the lonely, mundane, and stunted life that he chartered for himself. Sang Huin
spoke frankly about why he had come to Korea. He had been so lost after his
sister's death, his father's suicide, and the exacerbated disconnection from
the robotic and perfunctory movements and rambling of his mother month after
month. He had to break away and become acquainted with his heritage the way
Seong Seob, as much as he was capable of, had to flee from the cousin and then
him, as perverted as he was, to end those 20+ years of disparaged containment.
Both had to chart independent lives exempt of family and without the
possibility of ever having one; but really was that so bad - to be ungrounded
and to float on winds of circumstance. In the right perspective it was
liberation.

Sang Huin wondered what this name, Seng Seob, meant (not that he knew the
meaning of his own) and why he was so excited to be with him. They agreed that
they would just be together for an hour. That hour became two and then it was
the rest of the evening. They drank soju, a mild equivalent of sake. Late into
the evening Sang Huin had the waiter calculate the tab and then suggested that
they continue drinking elsewhere. Both were drunk at this time and drunkenness
was making them thirsty. He and Saeng Sob returned to the yogwam with a case of
beer they purchased at a convenience store.

They slept together. Naked and awakening from sleep, Sang Huin listened to the
breathing of his friend. For the first time since his sister's death he did not
feel alone. Later on in the morning when the light began to shine into the room
he continued his prose, every now and then looking at the presence that slept
there as well as the imposition of his dog.




              Book Two:

         The Book of Gabriele and Sang Huin


   "Thought is the idea of extension and extension the embodiment of thought"
   --Baruch Spinzoa

   "Mind+entity=truth Sensory perception+things=opinion" --Parmenides




Chapter Eight


Hunched over a TV tray, with the baby locked into her lap in one hand and snuff
locked into a cheek, she wrote her story. Occasionally she would write while
dribbling brown into the open portal of her empty beer can. She needed her
portals for they led her, like a child, into animistic realms far from the
mundane of soiled diapers or the powdering of a bottom as repulsive, to her, as
perfume scented women. She was dressed in nothing but a dark bathrobe of a
bosky fabric and like a soldier in military fatigues, she blended in with the
subdued light of a tepid morning, which stumbled onto the floor of her trailer
like a collapsing drunk. Every few moments while she wrote, her thoughts became
distracted by the hail that besieged the roof and walls or by the screams of
the baby which made her glower whenever he spat out his pacifier to become the
self-centered squealer that she knew to be the base nature propelling human
actions and society's disarray. Richard Dawkins' idea that one was born selfish
but did not have to stay that way was an adage that, with the energy she had in
her glowering eyes, she wanted to etch onto him if only her eyes were lasers
where her commandments could cauterize the human brain. It seemed to her that
Jehovah, had he existed, would have glowering eyes no different than hers and
such lasers would have gone simply into the malleable substance of the human
brain instead of searing it into stone. With aversion to reading anything
printed on paper let alone etched in stone so acute it would be more sensible.
Had Piaget really studied beings such as this, she thought, he would have seen
them as the making of Wall Street and the thunder of armies. She listened more
intensely to the hail that was like a machine gun with rubber coated pellets.
She imagined herself riding on a tank through a desert and into Baghdad
half-naked and exposed, waving her red white and blue brassiere from the opened
hatch of the tank. Yes, she admitted, she needed portals. She needed her exits.
She needed a change, a respite, from the monotony of motherhood that was
sinking her into it like a hole. The baby was a gift, and more a choice and for
these points a sacred responsibility to which, she told herself, she would
rectify past grievances that her parents, and even Aunt Peggy herself, had done
to her. She would never engage in the treachery that had flattened her out
under its tank when she was so young (although, she had to admit, the demise of
early sensitivities had made her, in such early childhood, reconstruct a new
and indomitable self). As she thought this she noticed a spider crawling onto
her hand, which held the pen. When the hurricane of all the air from her lungs
was not enough to release it from her palm, she did not drop the pen. She
decided to look on the intruder as a lecturer on persistency and to gain
inspiration from it. She knew that once she finished writing her piece, the
spider would be smashed, but she believed that the act should be performed with
conscience. Gabriele did not subscribe to the idea of civilized man that life
was ranked into a hierarchy of importance. A human certainly could not get by
without killing, or picking up killed produce from a grocery shelf, but the
idea that there should be a real distinction between a can of beans and the
entrails of a local senator seemed absurd, although she did not think that
being put in an electric chair for having eaten her local senator ranked very
high up there in the chances of probability. Yes, she again told herself, the
child was a gift and a responsibility but she would not dote him. The world
flattered itself that doting mothers carrying their worms to the baby birds
exuded such a profound love by this thoughtless emotional instinct of proud and
adoring pampering. They thought that pampering the pleasure-seeking savage was
the acme of nurturing motherhood and the making of good human beings. She
thought to herself that such mindless bitches, doting as Aunt Peggy had done
with her children, were an embarrassment to this word love. Love in its purest
sense (what little one was humanly capable of) would be a selfless caring of
another without such instincts to keep one's genes replicating for all
eternity. It was not suffocating one's children in dependency so that one could
have the role of mommy to avoid rolelessness and void. It was not needing a
child. Being a doting mother was as far from her instinctually as those bizarre
apathetic ones who could toss a child on a relative or an ex-husband himself
before joining the military. The other day, on page 2 of the Ithaca Times she
saw that there was an article on some such oddity although much bigger stories
with more bizarre and sadistic ramifications were buried each day on page 1,999
of the New York Times. She would always read voraciously and thereby find their
cadavers. "Piaget, Piaget, go away, go away," she mumbled inaudibly to herself
slurring and babbling the consonants and vowels as if she were now beginning to
imitate the language of her son atavistically.

Her calligraphy was composed of letters that were large, circular, and loosely
connected. The sentences contained at least one or two words scratched out with
others sustained above them. She considered herself a scholar when it came to
writing and so imaginative works, in such a medium, did not come easily. Still
she could not fathom in herself such a shallow stream of sentiments that would
actually cause her to repeat the words of the lullaby, "Rock a by, baby, in a
tree top" nor hum even the notes of the lullaby symphony of Brahms. For this
reason, she allowed her back to ache and a slow-moving spider to climb along
her hand to finish an alternative lullaby--a truth beyond a myth although she
did not delude herself by thinking it other than her own personal concoction at
a different mythology the way Psalm 104 might have seemed original long after
the Great Hymn of Aten was written in Ancient Egypt. In constructing another
paragraph she began to ask herself whether or not she had ended the story. She
wasn't sure how one would know about such things that were so lacking of
scientific or mathematic certainties. Then she began to wonder if she should
have written it with a zoomorphic emphasis (maybe a bovine God standing there
in its pasture cognizant of nothing, wholly holy in the innocence of stupidity
and lack of aggressive tendencies--great virtues to which no other gods
comported). She stretched her large muscular framed back; heard a thump on the
bookshelf but, in her state of concentration, she dismissed it; dropped the
baby back into its crib, and took the top of a TV tray off its legs. In place
of the baby, she sat the tray upon her lap providing a close-up foundation for
her manuscript.

The hailstorm that was once like artillery against her flimsy enclave now
seemed a milder sleet tapping and scraping the ceiling and walls. This type of
weather was a bit like the tapping and scraping of her cat, Mouse, clinging and
banging its body on the screen of the door in the hope of getting in during the
times she threw him out, and she imagined that it would go on this way 1990
times. She listened intensely to some of its 1990 scraping taps, tapings of
"the year of our lord" which also happened to be the year of the American war
against Mesopotamia. The sleet was mixed in the wind; and for those who resided
in warmth and even those who ran through it in the hope of finding shelter such
falling crystal, that was once an ethereal gas, couldn't have been anything
other than splendor. At least, in a diminished way, it was for her who could
only hear and imagine it within the ruminations of her cynicism and maternal
gloom.

For a couple of distracted seconds she contemplated her isolated existence in
an obscure trailer park in Ithaca, New York within the middle of winter in
contrast to the crowds of Iraqi and American soldiers ready to ignite the
deserts the way crowded rats, too overpopulated, too irascible, and too
conscious of the movements of other rats, kill each other off. The whole thing
should have made her feel leery: a single woman near the outskirts of the city
limits all alone with a baby, hearing banging against her home and listening
intermittingly to the news on her radio about the Persian Gulf War. She did
have knowledge of Judo and fully believed that any violent intruders would
regret trespassing on her space but she knew that it did not protect her from
the fact that she was a tenuous mortal, a woman with a baby in a flimsy
trailer, and that this trailer was in an inauspicious location in one of the
more violent countries on the planet. To compound matters, she didn't have any
friends or much society except for her bovine-thinking neighbor, Rita. That
woman, who called herself Lily, was like a lackadaisical grass-snacking cow
right before slaughter time. She had been a former group-home girl at a home
for schizophrenics and manic-depressives although she recently graduated to
semi-independent living. For Gabriele, her intrusive presence often cut through
the black gauze of isolation that could cover every aperture of one's senses
prompting her to feel an extreme numbness. But, apart from this mental
sustenance, isolation was something that she thrived on like a light hating
moss deep in damp and obscure crevices. The walls seemed to shudder in the
winds but she did not mind the cold. She felt that it was comforting and when
it crept in it seemed to be tangible and come through the cracks around the
windows and the door like waves. The baby, however, was another matter. It
sneezed out into the cold.

The previous day he was crying in part from the cold and the need to be
suckled. And she did suckle him occasionally although, less euphemistically,
she saw it as him being allowed to devour her. She did this to pass on her
nutrients and antibodies, although giving milk and having a child use her for
her tit repulsed and stiffened her posture at times like a soldier at a machine
gun in a trench and at other times like a soldier in a queue waiting for
inspection. This act more than any other was a reminder of the fact that she
was a bit like all other women: a female animal there to be bred and to nurture
the continuum of her breed. She fed him and dressed him even more warmly, then,
but it was to no avail. Lacking options, she repelled her repulsion toward the
rock-a-by song by telling herself that it was the collective culture in the
earliest of all primitive American, if not western minds, and so inescapable in
a sense. On that day she brought herself to hum a few bars while rocking him
according to the melody of the song; but he frowned and looked at her
skeptically if babies were capable of skepticism, and so she had to speed up
the movement. The faster and harder she rocked him the more he seemed to enjoy
it, baby-laughing that one monotone squeal and slobbering all over her. At that
time of such Pavlovian drooling she wondered to herself belatedly if having him
there to seize her day was worthwhile but the squealing gave her a sense that
it was. This roller-rocking of her arms was at first enjoyable because his
squeals of euphoria were delightful to listen to but soon she found them to be
a tiring repetition and so she gently tossed him back into the crib which
inadvertently caused him to cry once again.

This was a new approach following a few minutes of having him "swig [his]
bottle." "Unlike present day Ithaca, in the land of Ancient Atlantis," she read
after raising the baby up to the tray like a cold piece of meat and then
squashing the insect into her composition, "there was harmony;" and even when
he "puked"-she would never say 'spit-up' because it was not so--she recited a
few paragraphs of what she had written while the vomit seeped into her
bathrobe. Her bold attempt to be indifferent to such an inauspicious start to
the morning was becoming a poorly constructed fa?ade for her determination was
crumbling like a desiccating sand castle. The smell of the vomit and all of the
baby smells bothered her. As her body fidgeted, which in turn caused the cat to
bury itself behind the lowest area of the bookshelf (although this time
avoiding the tripping on a ceramic dish) she contemplated this euphemism,
"spit-up." The term didn't matter in public, she argued; but to oneself, she
thought, one had to be honest. Puke was puke, and she had a tale to tell, and
her child needed to listen and she needed to resist shoving her child back into
the crib to change out of her bathrobe.

As one of her long arms stretched and she grabbed one of his baby bibs that was
folded on an end table, dabbing herself with it, she thought about how the two
of them were family because of a sexual indiscretion. Fate had backed into her
earlier thinking that family was nothing but war games. At one time she
believed that husband and wife soldiers of the same side often acted as if they
were enemies; and as they played with each other they often forgot about the
children, inadvertently or deliberately rolled their tanks over them, or
abandoned them entirely to pursue a second honeymoon. At one time she believed
that all good soldiers (all military families) did the same thing as this. Her
pregnancy (fate) had flattened her notion that an individual only had herself
in this world. It had rolled over her idea that a collective unit was a
neurotic delusion like the concept of God. She had been rolled on by a tank a
second time and had been forced to reassess earlier conclusions. Motherhood was
beginning to make her fully aware of the extent by which there was an
interdependence of the social members of society and she was beginning to think
of her son as a gift from God since the birth of a baby was such a miracle. And
here they were tucked away in their home in a scantily lit morning. The trailer
was the fortress from artillery shells, taps, and scrapes. For a moment she
listened to its splendor with her usual intensity: the taping of it, the
refrigerator mysteriously clicking into life with a hum slightly like a ticking
heart of a great body in hibernation, and the heater that didn't work so well
exhaling in dreaming snores through the mouths of floor vents. She listened
until it all abruptly ended by his cries. She then thought that she was
becoming overly sentimental if not completely and loathsomely maudlin in the
scramble of impressions that spewed out from her subconscious. She wondered if
she could shut him up in time to perform aerobics with the television
instructor.

The child she had given birth to had been like a dragon of the womb, pushing
its young being of fiery hell out of her. This was an image that Gabriele
conjured up in her imagination as the bathrobe, that was the only thing
separating her from complete nakedness, began to have such an acrid and fetid
stench. She changed his diaper and lodged a pacifier into his mouth. "Unlike
present day Ithaca, in the land of Ancient Atlantis, which the residents of
this small island called Antinomy, there was harmony." She again recited and
adlibbed the beginning of her story as a wild idea of cracking her inattentive
child's head like a nut crazily passed through her consciousness, quickly
diffusing and departing like a bad smell. "Once upon a time they were the
happiest of people glowing from ear to ear almost as cute as you do, Adagio, on
those rare times that you actually do smile. Their smiles were not inane and
senseless as giddy American teenagers…no,no-Americans as a whole really before
they have their heart attacks from the stress of competing for more and more or
the greasy food they clog into their blood vessels or from fright at possibly
being blown away when some stressed out nut comes into a fast food joint with a
semi-automatic. Their kindness was genuine because valuing their link to the
energy that radiated into them, competing for conveniences and pleasures was
not their priority. And they weren't just happy and nice but these residents of
Atlantis or Antinomy (I give you, Mr. Adagio, permission to use either
word---either word depending on Adagio's silly whims). And they weren't just
happy and nice but they were also resourceful. The Antinomians when they took a
crap did not have diapers to catch it. They preferred the natural way of
letting it drop, and dry out a bit under the sun god, so that they could make
bowls and pitchers from the dung heap. When they climbed coconut trees for the
fruit, they could get up the trees in three seconds. Likewise when they hunted
their wild boars they didn't need spears, little man. They just ran and pounced
on the animals. Now you may ask how they did such things so well so let me
answer the query of your inquisitive mind. These superhuman people were
everything good: kind and gentle, strong and smart because they weren't
arrogant. They had no civilization that told them to flush dung down the
toilet, and no amicable smiles that are part of business transactions. They
were natural, ingenuous people who meditated on the energy emanated by the sun
and this link of themselves to natural forces prompted them to be more than
ordinary men. The sun god liked those who meditated on the energy he supplied
them so he gave them a boost-a bit of caffeine if you will. That's the way it
was, Little Man, in maybe the 8th century B.C." She knew that if he were to
squeal during the story this behavior would be most inhospitable to the story
telling host, and so as a preemptive move she used crazed gestures that would
get his attention. By getting his attention she could lure him into a story
that had the potential of putting him to sleep. The name on his birth
certificate was Nathaniel, a name she liked but regretted having given to him.
It was her hope that the nickname, "Adagio," would, like magic, get him to be
calm if not elicit from the child a rather scholastic attentiveness within his
infantile limitations. She often played for him the classical music,
"Scaramouche-modere" by Darius Milhaud. It was her favorite adagio if indeed it
was an adagio at all. It was adagio enough for her and she believed that was
all that mattered.

She was seated on a director's chair looking at the slight movements of her
child's body and wondering why its mouth could not be equally delicate. She
silently called it the Spanish word of "criatura." Her extended family had been
a mixture of Germans and German-Argentineans, a passionate and passionless
crowd who often did not know if they should call her Gabriela or Gabriele and
so they had been reluctant to say anything at all to her. She kissed her son on
the forehead but this action provoked vehement cries of cacophony. Assessing
that her son had reactions no different than any hard Visigoth, she ignored his
bellowing voice and continued the story. "Listen to this, little man.
Concentrate. Scream as you will, but concentrate! They, the Antinomians of
Atlantis, considered themselves a loose conglomeration of a tribe and did not
have any inclination for a central government for governments are only needed
to control malevolent men. When the scattered men unified for monthly
reproductive sessions with their estranged spouses to ravage their fluids on
their--quote- unquote 'their'--women, they were not protected under roofs from
the elements but did the banging on the backs of horses. Uncomfortable, you
say. I'd agree: uncomfortable but quick and quick ejaculations were what they
wanted. This doing it in the open was a rather brave act, wouldn't you say,
considering that they could be struck down by lightning should the sun god deem
them as gaining more hedonistic pleasure, or spending too much of their
thoughts in activities not suited to gentle, uncivilized men. They did not
marry in the auspices of a sacrament-oriented fiend from the heavens but
acknowledged the vulgarity of their intersections not in affected guilt but by
cleansing and anointing their horses afterward. They weren't selfish creatures
apart from those 15-minute rides and so they didn't have this wish to hide
themselves in the affectation of matrimony and love like modern men and they
did not need to hide themselves in clothes. The land of Antinomy was warm, you
know. There would have been a different reality if Antinomy had been a little
island off of our beloved motherland of Antarctica. Anyhow, in the land of
Atlantis or Antinomy a child was born in this manner and grew up not with
Mother or Father but in independence and its relationship with the Earth and
the sun. She, the Earth, would find him. She would tell him that he was hers.
He would know that there was no purpose to being alive other than living and
being grateful for life. Of course, in modern societies like Ithaca, Adagio,
you have no merit at all-you aren't even thought as worthy of the respect of an
insect-unless you have a job and are in one way or another part of the Great
Factory but not in Atlantis, my little buddy. No, not there. There, to be
without aim was accepted since the meaning of life was in life itself: vibrant
energy for no reason bursting forth for no reason as fireworks in a desert."

For a couple seconds she thought about how any common criminal or intruder to
her domain would be immediately repelled from trespassing by her strange oral
dissertations. Perhaps he or she would find himself discomfited to find logic
and honesty in such an eccentric array and wouldn't know what to make of it:
Mother Teresa of Calcutta or Marquis de Sade of Paris. Such a person would
assume that she had been dropped on her head as an infant in a most dramatic
way not knowing the reality that, in early girlhood, she had been flattened by
a tank.

"The skies clothed the babies of these ingenuous savages just as it did their
naked mothers and fathers. As I said before, no clothes and no shame for them
for they were kind and their consciences were pure. They spoke the truth as
they perceived it at the moment they spoke it and no- one resented each other
because they understood that each was just trying to assemble ideas together
the way prisoners in a dungeon used anything as platforms that would edge them
closer to the window." At this point she did not understand her own writing so
she adlibbed entirely. "A given baby had the world as his own. He did not cry
in the night like a baby in need of a night light since all the books created
from previous centuries…all those mysterious words in all the pages from the
books created from previous centuries and shipped to Atlantis…all those
mysterious words in all the pages from the books of 'truth' since the beginning
of time (books seen as irrelevantly reverent, and maliciously deceiving fables)
were burnt each night in his world; and this did add a small twinkle in his
eyes. Yet it was Mother Earth who cradled him, after his abandonment at birth
and nourished him- -" Composed pell-mell and visibly entangled in nonsense, she
felt that the latter part of her myth was ruined in sententiousness and knew
that she was no longer believing that their words had any truth whatsoever.
That being the case, she stopped babbling. When she saw that the baby was
asleep she put him in the crib, disrobed, took a shower, and got dressed. She
turned on the television but realizing it was Sunday and that church
programming had usurped her exorcise regimen she felt disappointed. Not knowing
what to do with the day, she looked out of the window for a period of minutes
that seemed like hours. A car came through the trailer park lot mixing the
water with dirt. One nearby puddle looked like chocolate milk. She thought to
herself that she needed to warm some baby formula. Instead, she sat down in her
director's chair, stared out into nothingness, and listened to tapping that
seemed more like rain. Her thoughts rambled on: "800,000 African children die
from dysentery each year and yet the news is about the continuing air strikes
against Iraq as if American victory were something other than a foregone
conclusion." At least, the bully that it was, America was a democracy and
Gabriele, as hard as she tried, could not keep herself from feeling a bit
fortunate to live there. She found it somewhat comforting that the murky
morality of such engagements was debated by senators and talk show hosts.
Protecting Kuwait or securing the free flow of oil seemed an easy riddle to
figure out. Prior to the war, what American had ever known of the existence of
Kuwait outside of geography teachers? Her idea was not so novel. It was the
same type of thought of commonplace dissenters but, after examining the idea,
it was also that of her own. This was her last thought as she fell asleep.

She dreamed that her son was the neighbor woman, Rita (who thought of herself
as Lily), with blonde hair and glasses, and that a nuclear bomb had gone off
somewhere nearby Ithaca--maybe Salem for the strangers on the street,
bewildered and whispering to themselves, kept mentioning the name of that city.
The city of Ithaca was filled with rumors that the event had occurred and the
rumors were loud in an atmosphere where everything else was silent and seemed
to take on a texture of emptiness. The rumors seemed tactile and to have a
visible substance that was ochre but thick as a heavy fog. Although they were
no louder than whispers, these whispers were cries of bewilderment albeit
softer than agony since they could not be fully articulated for lack of any
definite knowledge.

"They have shut us off from knowing," said one young woman desperately.

"Sure," said a man with an Appalachian draw. "The damn people up there higher
than God! They don't want us to know what has happened for fear that we'll fear
others are comun'... maybe make some phone calls!"

"Are we to believe this craziness we are hearing? We live in civilized times.
This can not be," said another female voice. Her accent was of a New Jerseyite.

A red headed woman, next to Gabriele on a street corner, said to a grayish
woman that looked like a cat, "If the president is with them on this it is
true." The words in the typical New York accent for some reason seemed the most
tangible element of the dream, greater than its visionary components, and the
most worthy truth. Gabriele backed away from the cat, and wished for death
rather than to bear this horror where not even the surety of the death of
thousands or millions could be known, whether or not the people of Ithaca would
eventually be radiated, or whether or not there was indeed a conspiracy to keep
them ignorant that more missiles were coming. "Let others die but not me; let
other cities perish but not ours" was a dominant thought in everyone's head. It
was so loud and everyone could hear it no matter how hard they pretended
otherwise. She loathed that wretched instinct of self-interest that was innate
in a being to make it survive, prosper, and propagate dynastically. She thought
to herself that survival of the fittest truly played out in all things and
selfishness was its impetus. The meek, when not uneducated and famished, were
so sensitive to injustice and disparity that they became neurotic and
disturbed. The truly meek were too gentle and reticent to muster the
selfishness to bring forth offspring, and they inherited nothing outside of
their own coffins. She also loathed that small portion of her sociable will,
which stooped to what they were saying, now, with complete conviction in the
streets. She heard one elderly man in particular. He was like an older version
of someone in her past but the dream, which was a reality of its own, did not
directly make that correlation. "Come on now. Let's not panic. It's been hot in
Salem with no wind. Maybe the radiation will just stay there. What little
breeze there is probably is just in the upper stratosphere. My son's a
weatherman, you know." The elderly man in thick glasses pointed out Gabriele's
Lily shaped son as his own. "He says that not feeling a breeze means no breeze
at all except way up there in the stratosphere. The radiation is below that. If
it moves slightly it will go to New York City. It will never come this way. You
can count on it so let's not panic." It was a hope for self- preservation. It
was a hope of the deaths of millions of people rather than themselves who
resided in Ithaca. She saw the cat woman crying and a man petting her back. He
was comforting her compassionately; but like one who does not wish to spend
resources on exploratory surgery to find out whether or not the lymphatic
cancer had spread in an aging pet, the man turned away from the woman. Gabriele
could see him pursuing his own private minutes of self-pity and rage deep in
lost, silent eyes.

Then the cat rubbed itself against her face and she awakened, recalling that
the elderly man in the dream was a distorted version of the lover who had made
her into this child's mother. She had not been meek when she went to Houston to
pursue a graduate degree. She had hungered after the assistant professor
because he had been as inaccessible as Antarctica. She had successfully
obtained him and this was due to the fact that people loved those of a strong
will who seemed immortal in inexhaustible energy, swinging their machetes
beyond diffidence and forging paths and realities boldly. This sort of energy
being erotic to them, they were attracted, mesmerized, and orphic to the id?e
fixe, which was nothing other than everlasting youthful vigor. The assistant
professor, yearning for immorality, had coupled with her. It had been a
successful wish and a successful coupling because from it she had gotten
pregnant. With her sleeve, she wiped her face that sparkled in greasy sweat,
and then gently cradled the cat to her face. The cat scratched her and leaped
away to where it once again hid itself behind the books.

Gabriele's cheek bled but still she did not kill the cat. She didn't know the
reason her hands, pulsating in rushes of vengeful energy, did not catch it and
crush it in her fingertips. At that moment she did not know her reasons for
anything. She tried to stop the bleeding with the back of her hand, for the bib
near her feet was unusable since it was fuming in vomit. As she looked at the
swab of blood that was there on her hand she felt a void careen into her (or
herself careening into the void), heard a parents' declaration to depart from
her, and again felt the impact of being rolled on by a tank. She imagined the
cat deliberately paralyzing itself in the actions of the prey it had often
witnessed. She imagined it praying to the earth for a delay of its execution
and subsequent decomposition by having the earth force compassion on Gabriele,
the executioner. She imagined it praying to the earth that magically brought it
into life to shrink its size into something so much smaller than a cat in order
to be at all. She did not know why it happened. She just did not kill the cat
but instead watched it masquerade itself as dead. Gabriele picked up the cat by
the neck and the four eyes met. The cat did not swipe. It concentrated on
cowardly prayers and of remaining limp. Gabriele tossed this other "criatura."
It landed on top of a book on Freud on the lowest part of her bookshelf.




Chapter Nine


The reasons for the specific elements of a myth (the cryptic reason why a given
culture might have chosen a serpent god or the son of god over the sun god) are
ineffable, and all attempted explanations of a myth are mythical. Scholars of
myths compare religions to find that spiritual element that links and validates
the human search (that search to find that which is everlasting within the
brevity of a human's lifespan); and historians of recorded cultures thread
together implication, meaning, and motive from a few tangible and often random
happenings.

The myth of Aten came from the Eighteenth Dynasty of Ancient Egypt. For over
1500 years Ancient Egypt practiced polytheism with each town having its own
god. Usually such gods were animal gods as was the case with the cat-goddess,
Bast of Bubastis, but many of the towns found that once they attached the word
"Re," the commonest name for the sun god, it enhanced the denotation so that
local gods became more ubiquitous and more deserving of reverence. In the case
of the falcon god, Re-Harakhti, a name change was given to It (the great It)
that contained more overt connotations. Not only was the word, "Re" put before
the regular name of the falcon-god, but engravings depicted It with the sun god
above It's head.

The pharaoh, Akhenaten, in his quest for the one sun god, Aten, disliked
focusing all of his energies toward military ventures that would have decimated
the bellicose Nubian-like creatures and stray Hittites that fell onto his
shores like waves. He knew that he could decimate them if continual efforts
were applied the way one wipes away a group of ants again and again. He hadn't
even considered that it would wipe out his nation's treasury not to mention his
own personal coffers. He didn't want to give himself to anti-terrorist
strategies and 24 hour a day campaigns that would have sustained his empire but
buried him in lonely problematic calculations, hypotheses about the thinking of
some elusive enemy, and general logic (not that the President Bushes used any
of the above). He was reluctant to part from continual dreaminess and to end
the world of the child that saw magic in a waving leaf on a branch of a tree.
He didn't want tedium that was as long as the sentences of this prose. The only
military ventures he envisioned for himself were preemptive and bloody
executions of the more vocally intransigent non-believers who would diminish
the ubiquitousness of his own god and challenge his animistic thinking of
nature as being linked to man by their harping on animal gods. For his eternal
link to the sun was more essential and part of himself than any of his arms or
legs. And so, reluctant to part from dreaminess, he built a new capital city
for Egypt that he devoted to the worship of Aten. The city, Amarna, was created
to be Aten's sacrosanct home. As for the crusades to extirpate all memory of
any gods other than Aten through the destruction of temples and relieves
(particularly the temples and reliefs of gods that had a "Re" attached to their
names), none of it would have been so bloody had the believers allowed him to
clean away their chiseled nonsense the way one would the crayon happy markings
of children on the walls of the family home.

Gabriele's motives for creating a non-melodic lullaby about a god that had been
extinct for thousands of years were even a little unclear unto her. Perhaps the
reasons for the avant-garde lullaby could have come from that one afternoon
when she was four. On that day she had become less interested in nursing a
wounded bird and so began to play with her tiny plastic toy soldiers beside her
mother who was clipping wet shirts and military trousers on the clothesline.

The noon sun was slapping both their faces the way the heat from an oven
evaporates the grease put on two baked potatoes. Gabriele, bothered by the
heat, turned away from the soldiers and then took a glance at the sun. She
turned toward her mother and mentioned some eagerness for Christmas. Her mother
turned toward Gabriele with stoic facial expressions and then crassly spoke in
German that Gabriele should stop thinking about Christmas since it was a long
way off. The mother snapped the clothes on the line with more forceful pinches
and then asked her daughter if she didn't think she was a bit old to pursue
such nonsense as Christmas. Gabriele said that she didn't understand and so her
mother unhesitatingly told her that there was no such thing as Santa Claus.
Gabriele saw her mother smile sadly. She sensed a kindness in this smashing of
ignorance and innocence the way she had seen Aunt Peggy smash a horse fly on
one of her uncle's stallions.

"In a way, I am glad you brought this up," continued Gabriele's mother in
German. "There are some things that will be changing soon." A cloud ran by the
sun and in its shadow Gabriele glanced up at a frothy blob that looked like the
form of an old man in ancient garb. At the age of four she could not recognize
the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus sculpted into the cloud or a cloud shaped or
sculpted into Heraclitus. "There is some early news I should tell you. I really
should but it is a little hard to get it out. You are such a baby, you are, but
now you are a bit wiser, eh? You know the situation with Santa. Life is going
to be full of sobering face slappings like that .I am very glad that you are
clogging your tears like a good girl. I'm proud of that fact. I was a little
worried that you would be bawling like stupid little thing. Crying about such
things like this would be bad, bad behavior when there are so many bigger
things one shouldn't cry about either." The girl couldn't help having watery
eyes even though she did not release the tears and soon mucus began to run from
her nostrils. She wiped it onto the back of her hand. "Heavens, Gabriele,
that's nasty. Remember to not get into the cookie jar without scrubbing those
hands of yours thoroughly. Well…now, you are wiser for knowing the situation
with Santa so I can tell you things, eh? You have a wiser and smarter brain
than any other 4 year old who has ever walked the planet, don't you think so?
Now I can tell you things because there won't be any damage, eh? Oh, why won't
my mouth work right at getting this out? " Gabriele stood stiff. Questions were
piercing into her as if she were target practice but she stood stiffly not
feeling a thing accept the demise of Santa Claus. "Christmas is so lovely with
everyone being together, don't you think so? Still that doesn't always happen,
eh? When this doesn't happen there is no weeping. In this case, there will just
be smiles on the kitten's face, eh? I'm sorry but we will not all be together
this Christmas. We are parting our ways. Your father and I will be experiencing
something new and you will be experiencing a different thing that is something
new. In experiencing something new, you've got to be bold and take one's stance
with a smile on the kitten's face. Some things are the way they are. No wishing
will bring Santa Claus into existence and wishing won't stop new things from
happening. You will soon go live with your Aunt Peggy. Your father and I are
going back to Germany. He is going to be stationed there again. Your father is
a great American patriot and has been asked to return to our motherland of
Germany on important duties. You like your father's sister so much. Am I right?
Your aunt Peggy: we are lucky to have her. Really, we are. Strange lady though;
but with all those horses, maybe she'll take you for a ride sometime. Horses
have ponies. They could give you one. You never know. She will have a tutor to
help you to read and do math and will let you play sports in her yard under the
supervision of an athletic trainer. The yard is large and fenced in nice. You
know that. You will be happy there. The house is near a Catholic school. You
will go there each day with those monkeys of hers. Much better than being here
and there with us; and with this plan, you get two mommies instead of just one.
That makes you better than the stupid little rascals your age."

If the little girl within Gabriele had been born a boy and that boy hadn't
slipped away from the influence of the mother toward a male role model, she
would have been branded a homosexual by one impact of the brain onto another.
It would have been a gradual but ineluctable branding within a few critical
years. But these few minutes of a girl's life at the clothesline with her
mother made her into a misogynist, a stoic and an atheist. From this time at
the clothesline she learned that everything was a myth or prevarication and the
only kind of reality that existed was her own self and the natural forces that
beamed onto her. Romanticizing the sun that burnt her face and could end up
giving her skin cancer was better than the self-defeating flames of hate that
might have been a force inside her consuming what could have been her. This
silly, and barely believed myth gave grace to her infrequent social
interactions and regulated her sleep patterns.




Chapter Ten


(1989: Houston)

Turning away from the cooked bacon strips dripping grease on their paper towel
bedding, he walked to the bathroom. He hoped that she would come into the
kitchen while he was away. He hoped that she would swig her juice in one gulp
and quickly eat her share of the bacon and toast; and once finished, that she
would quickly go out with the garbage of the early morning that would soon be
picked up by the sanitation workers whom people crudely referred to as garbage
men. He hoped that this could be done while he was in the bathroom and while
his new bacon began to sizzle in the skillet. She knew this as much as one knew
anything. She believed that it came to her intuitively without the use of her
faulty senses that were capable of adulterating reality; or, if sensed, that it
entered her consciousness ineffably similar to the passing dog that recognizes
the pheromone spray of a much earlier dog. She did not mind. Non-romantic
conclusions were non-confining. They were spring breeze declaring the end of
winter. This was a beginning and an ending of a relationship within the space
of 6 or 7 hours and she did not mind that at all. All relationships were the
beginning of an end and the quicker expedited the better off she thought she
would be.

She was in the bedroom dressing herself in a very faint light of early morning
and she could not see him return from the bathroom to cook the last of his
bacon where the strips shrank phallically in the heat. But from the smell she,
of course, knew that was happening and she could imagine that he was analyzing
their experience together in front of his skillet, and sinking into a void. She
could guess this because he, like all humans, was incapable of reliving the
frenzy through a precise memory of it; and he was now trying to find some
sensibility in his voracious, self-consuming frenzy. She wanted to laugh out
loud the way she had laughed out when they were in bed together and she seeing
his body, less real in the darkness, become wholly stiff before her. Yes, she
thought then scoffingly, he was a holy stiff. Now, kitchen-bound, he was no
doubt using logic to create a sententious wallowing where the act was more
hallowed in the past. She presumed that he was thinking back on his experiences
with his wife and comparing this one without "love" to the separated wife's
loving caresses. She thought about the way he looked ten minutes earlier
scrambling around for his clothes that were by his bed in almost arthritic
movements. Even as she slipped on her skirt, she still felt the same repulsion
and indifference toward him because of this action. Certainly no friendship
could ensue from this intimacy with the young assistant professor. It was
always a bit disappointing for her, really, that physical intimacies were so
gluttonously selfish and fully incompatible for caring relationships. She knew
that reality every time she engaged in such activities and yet she somewhat
inaccurately told herself that with each new sexual experience she acted like
an innocent girl in her first sexual foray. Following a mirage, she told
herself, was just an inane pitfall to being human, and only a fool was
disappointed in human vulnerabilities-as slight as she told herself hers were.

She hadn't run over him with a car to create those arthritic movements in the
bedroom nor had she cast some spell on him although she was loosely affiliated
with bewitching organizations like WICCA despite their ecclesiastic and
congregational ambiance. His pathetic reaction was strange although undoubtedly
provoked. Sure, in bed together she had guffawed at his ridiculous post-sexual
statement that he could not leave his wife as if women could not have sex with
handsome men for pleasure. She apologized to him immediately afterward for this
egregious chortling. After all, he wasn't so mistaken. Most women were there to
mate with a man for the purpose of perpetuating their selfish genes by
breeding. Most could not sense themselves beyond that feeling, that rush of
love, that dopamine addiction that was cajoling them to breed. In fact, she had
to admit that she had never met a woman who was not like that; but then,
unbeknown to him, she never categorized herself as a woman. She was a female
with nothing womanly inside of her. To her knowledge, there was no pathetic
lonely neediness or "womanity" that brewed within her. Hearing her guffaw in
bed an hour earlier and her bashful apology afterward, he probably did not
think about anything in particular except how best to create an amicable
departure. But then, still in bed, she made an analogy of sex to stale potato
chips, which upon occasion she did not mind eating for the salt that was
contained there. This faux paus must have made him feel as if he had had
intercourse with a cannibal for soon there was that arthritic rustling with his
clothes. The corollary of seeing him look for his clothes feebly was the
igniting of her "miso-him-ony" (a word that she coined gabrielishly).

She went into the kitchen and to her satisfaction she found the man transformed
into bacon. Anyhow, he wasn't there so she ate her breakfast snack, went to the
bathroom, and then came out only to imagine that she heard him crying in the
closet between the muffling of jackets, with empty hangers lightly clanging
against each other. She felt a sorrow for him and took on his mental void. She
saw, however, that he was outside and felt foolish. Had her senses been more
astute than her cognition? It sometimes happened. From the window she saw him
in the tiny park swinging alone with the full moon diluted by the rising sun.

Sex, she thought, as she watched his body hit the winds, was being massaged by
one's own hormones, turned on by oneself, or more accurately one's sense of
pleasure, and making love to fantasies of one's mind rather than the individual
locked into one's body. Yet she was titillated if not inveigled by such
physical pleasures that kept her imagination more bound than what she would
have liked. Sensate hungers of animals and men were ineluctable but
inconsequential "things" that she would not allow to be the synopsis of herself
even if upon occasion she explored these appetites fully. This night was more
than just diving into sensual experiences when she could no longer stay logical
without slipping into a philosophical void: it had been a sociological
experiment of seducing the opposite sex in a gay bar called "Heaven" more from
compassionate and empathic dialogue than sexual ploys; it had been because of
the humidity of Houston; it had been...she was not sure what it was. She,
having gone with some of her gay friends to "Heaven," had become one of those
"fag hags" that such non-lesbian gay bar-going women are often called.
Ostensibly, the night had been so different and so speciously amusing but
really any nightclub was the same: that same loneliness and that same sense
that appetites were fueling a human form like a smart bomb that was out of
control. She scorned having had sympathy for him. She rebuked herself for
having sympathy for situations that did not exist, which was so much worse. To
think that he had been in a closet crying was worse than insane for one who was
so proud of her logical skills, and so believing that she could stare down the
eyes of wild leopards and not shirk from the eyes of lepers. Sorrow for him,
she told herself, was a brief misfiring of neurons in an awkward situation that
brought on a second of a brief hallucination and an emotional barricade that
she now had to scurry around.

Gabriele ate a piece of cold toast abandoned near the bacon. She did not delude
herself: he had prepared this meal (such as it was) to minimize his feelings
that he had used her, although really she had used him. She was hungry so she
ate. The fact that it was cold showed his hostility toward her. She knew this
but ate the toast with a smirk on her face. A minute later, she took out some
snuff from her purse and a cold beer from the refrigerator and then went onto
the porch. Outside, the wind was still bringing the coolness of winter nights
that the sun beat down with the days. She drank and watched him. She felt
repulsion for her one-night stand and wanted to get into her car, which would
move her to her apartment, exclusive to herself and her logic. The impulse to
play, however, was too much; so after mildly draining the tobacco-saliva from
her mouth into the beer can, she crossed Dunlavy street to join him on the
swing set.

"Y-e-s!" said Gabriele in a tone of affected romanticism of the trivial,
kicking the air beneath her as his swing lost momentum. She giggled like a
schoolgirl. She reduced her swinging gradually to cessation careful to not just
stop because he had done so. After her feet were dragging and cutting into the
dirt, he pulled out a cigarette to hang in his face.

"I fixed some bacon," he said indifferently after she was equally stagnant and
inert.

"So you did," she responded less zealously.

He didn't say anything but she could read it all the same. He didn't say, "I'm
sorry, but could you go?" He didn't say, "We enjoyed each other's company, I
think." He didn't say, "I've got a relationship, more or less, with my wife
although she doesn't know my other side." He didn't say, "I thought being with
you might make me feel more desire for women, be more romantic, and get her
back into my life again. I hope you don't think I've used you." He did not say
that predominant thought that was in his eyes, "I'm sorry, but could you go,
please?" There would have been a pleading "please" in it if he had been able to
"find the backbone" to articulate his request. There was none of that "stuff"
said among nearly all men from one generation to the next with a few extra
contemporary novelties that saved men from being completely trite. She liked
wordless empathy. It could be shut off at any second like tap water."

"Relationships: they are plural, complicated, and opposing for you, it seems."
Gabriele said this with her hand under her chin as if her lover were an
interview for a dissertation. "Don't be so worried." She smiled. "My fear of
you hunting me down has more merit than any fears you might have of me." She
chuckled at herself. Her mind repeated his laconic words: "I fixed you some
bacon." They began to echo in her mind. "What is this?" she thought. "Does he
want me to think this breakfast of his is my reward for this bit of a roll in
the hay?" She snickered to avoid piercing him with dilating eyes of hate. Then
she smiled at her former professor. It was a contrived smile and although she
hated artifice, in a world of getting one's needs met one needed to behave
insincerely.

"Complicated and opposing, are they? Okay, if you want to look at it that way,"
he retorted. "Well, you can't exactly say that you weren't in Heaven, can you?"

"Si' estaba alli tambien. Eso es innegable"("Yes, I was there also. This fact
is indisputable"). She spoke to his dark Brazilian skin. She spoke to all of
his Morris codes and secret languages that she understood all and had contempt
for everything that he was. She wanted to speak to her former psychology
professor as a cheerful therapist but such nascent words when she tried to
formulate them in her mouth became dying winds over the rubble reef of her
tongue and the sea of her saliva. Still she smiled although a supercilious
undertone tried to gain beastly dominion. "The sport of seduction was all I had
in mind, Mr., and then you went ahead and gave me more. You cooked some bacon
and toast. I thank you." When his face again fell, as she wanted it to fall,
she raised herself from the swing. The tree limbs seemed to wave goodbye to
him. Then they bent as she walked away from him; and as she, on reflex, glanced
back, they ricocheted and then folded back like a curtain which had material
composed of the darkness of the limbs and the sketchy sunlight. She could not
see him, and she appreciated this fact. The vinyl and its coolness, within the
car, made her upper body shiver--how she sank into it and felt soothed. She
thought of the waves of the Gulf, at Galveston Bay, pulling at her legs with
cool and non- scathing talons. Although she was attracted to the Gulf of
Mexico, and felt befriended by an identity of its vastness synonymous to her
own, at this moment she preferred how she felt from the vinyl, which was
limited and all encompassing. It snuggled around the back of her throbbing head
and body.

The accelerator, firm and responsive to pressure, was freedom that the social
instinct (what little she had) and society at large robbed from her. It moved
to the embodiment of her will, propelling her from anything she chose to
disregard. She turned onto Westheimer Street. She had gone as far as the
thirteen-thousand block once, a year ago, after enrolling at Rice University to
pursue her graduate studies. Someone had told her that Westheimer finally
turned into a farm road, but back then she decided to let her experience
testify otherwise by choosing to not go that far.

She drove on and on and soon she could see the roof of a church. In an hour,
she thought, there would be the culmination of activity from the followers (the
sheep) and the fully arrayed morning. Inside the cathedral of Santa Anna, which
she was now approaching, a priest would soon begin to prepare himself for an
early mass after the golden curved roof began to reflect the sunlight in a
seductive glare. The marble walls would seem steady to these followers as if
prayers said within these corridors would cause one to be as steady and
seemingly everlasting as those very walls. The church would shelter the
convictions of the myth reinforcers who actively promoted their religion so
that anxieties of injustice, the vulnerability of the human form, the madness
of a violent world and violent thoughts and feelings from within, and the issue
of mortality could be eased. In the face of challenges from other ideologies,
Christians protected their God and religion with defensive armament of an
anxiety-ridden people. It wasn't so hard to keep an individual-caring God
inculpable of genocide, typhoons, and plagues. In modern times, those issues
occurred in underdeveloped foreign countries among heathen populations. But car
accidents, cancer, high mortgage payments, a fire gutting a family home, and
stock market decline made the firm arms of a loving god into a tenuous thing.
It shook the marble walls of the church. Further, made insecure by the
believability of alternative religions with scriptures or some dogmatic
premises that were also claimed as infallible, the Buddhist and the Moslem were
threats for an American Christian no less than the witch. She wondered why she
did not hate religion more than what she did. She asked herself why she did not
circle around the block for an hour and then grind a soul or two to the
pavement. Now that she was thinking such peculiar things she continued with
them. She assumed that driving through a crowd of people was a lot like bowling
only the pins weren't stationary. Actually, she thought, it did sound more of a
sport than bowling ever did. However, the thought of doing such things out of
the context of her playful inner world was so repugnant to her that it struck a
chill down her spine. Only an unequivocal nervous breakdown would cause her to
obey the savage and crazed thoughts that ran amuck in one's head. Like any
German dam, such energy was a trickling stream next to the mammoth structure
that contained and regulated it. She not only was her own effective dam and
continually building upon it, but she constructed worlds of ideas there. From
the mammoth height of intellectualism, her turbid passionate waters seemed
almost puny. German people, she thought, did not camouflage their barbarity in
"goodness." Early in history, except for notable flare- ups, Germans were aware
of their barbaric impulses so, like Nietzsche, they coldly refined all emotions
into philosophic rationales.

The idea of wanting to preserve oneself in the spirit made her face cringe. She
had often felt this way throughout her life, and it seemed so alien to her that
those people who could not create their own sense of truth regardless of man's
basic purpose (which was never known), desperately sought immortality.

Myths, themselves, would give half-rational women and men artificially solved
philosophical truths that would ease their minds into their jobs, their
families, their adultery, their small capitalistic ventures with large levels
of greed, and their soap opera, small-life concerns; but she could not
conceptualize why their myths had the element of self-preservation. She did not
care to preserve herself. Just in dying, and letting microorganisms rot her
body away, she would give her energy back to the world that would radiate it
again elsewhere in another form. If she had a child, she thought, she or he
would not be allowed to be subject to this Christianity, which had the
plagiarism of Ancient Egyptian Literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Plato,
Confucius, and God knows what as scripture. Still, there was no escape from the
West for fresher lies. The whole world was western now. All that was possible
was to abscond from it as much as possible.

Friendship, as that with her roommate, Betty, would be plugged up in smiles and
feigned promises to write. A day earlier she was folding, sealing away, and
throwing away material things and now it would be states of mind. It was very
exciting-more than even a racket ball game with Betty whose African American
skin, muscular physique, and strong competitive strife got her equated as the
sister of many famous sports legends. This bantering was a subject for mutual
scowling since both wanted "female" sports to be "on an equal footing" and for
races and genders to not be stereotyped to certain activities. With a thesis
accepted, the fourth largest city in America was to be nothing but a folded map
forgotten in the outside pocket of one's suitcase. What would she do now that
her graduate studies had ended? She did not know. She had gained the knowledge
by which to do nothing with complete confidence and so taking it into a PHD
level seemed redundant. As much as a human could be free, she was now free.

She wondered if the homosexuals at the bar last night were free. She had
enjoyed the men in colorful briefs-some who had danced on wooden platforms
covering two juxtaposed pool tables to be more into the crowd. When someone of
her own sex had introduced herself with lust in her eyes, Gabriele had wanted
to sprint a quick exit through the wall but, instead of cowardice, gave her a
quick kiss on one of her cheeks and declared, in her giggling, that this would
be as far as she would go in that type of liaison. At the same time she
wondered a little whether that woman felt more free by subconsciously choosing
the type of sex she wanted to copulate and then following the dictates of her
own hormones instead of having hormones dictated by social mores.

She was almost at her apartment when she consciously noticed Betty's cigarette
butts in her car ashtray. She chastised such vile and unaesthetic habits, but
really it was her own maudlin oozing that she despised. Needing some time alone
to sink into herself, she decided to procrastinate packing and her last meeting
with Betty by going to Allen Parkway. She parked her car in a lot nearby and
told herself it was time for her one-person celebration and to ensure that the
past would not be left in abeyance suffocating her in sentimental mush. She
wanted people of the fading present to depart from her like releasing a deep
breath. She sat in an obscure area of the Buffalo Bayou away from the bike
trail and a herd of morning bicyclists approaching the fountain. She sat in the
grass and allowed her body to be prey to fire ants, which, like a goddess, she
would then smash with her fingertips or gently remove to blades of grass. She
meditated on the theme of chance that was so intricate in the fabric of all
things. She picked clover and dismembered their leaves, gladdened that the
little girl flattened out as she had been by the tank, still floated like a
ghost in the ethereal parts of her imagination. She told herself that she would
be an empty shell of an adult to be bereft of her.

She again thought of the go-go boys dancing both on stage and on pool tables.
They had been such titillation but as different as they were, she doubted that
they were free. By their freedoms, they were imploding into their own hungers
just as she was imploding in memories of last night that she couldn't quite
shake. She remembered how with each beer her mind lost the paralysis of logic
and she began to be more sociable and pay less attention to the flickering
icon, on the wall, that was shaped like a wine glass; the queer associations of
social butterflies known as transvestites; the mirror which gave a blurred
version of this other part of humanity; and of course the dancers, who were
rather boring after a few minutes of seeing the ends of their briefs sag from
being paid for non-sexual tricks. Except for glances at the surreal mosaic
fragments of commercials and video music that played on television sets, which
were on the far corners of the walls, she sometimes stared at men throughout
the night with a specific intention of wanting to copulate with one or all of
them, but enjoying the aspect of feeling sensual regardless. It was there that
she met her professor. He was someone who, according to her friends, often came
to the bar, and yet he looked lost. The seduction was easy. She asked if he
wanted to go with her, and he said that he did. Nothing was simpler and more
exempt from life's energy consuming, cat and mouse games. She thought about the
butts in her ashtray. She wasn't sure the reason. Maybe the thought of the
smoke filled bar triggered this memory. Betty should have cleaned out those
cigarette butts, she thought. What an ugly reminder of herself. She looked at
the grass all around her and then at the traffic speeding by. The creation was
sublime and chaotic. She pondered how simplistic human logic was: the eyes
taking in the light, the image of the object refracted on the retina, the
mental image playing in the brain, recent memories regarding that object, and
an abstract idea. She didn't want to think of anything. She just wanted to
watch the early morning sunrise over the bayou.




Chapter Eleven


Jiffypop popcorn leaping over the heat of the stove's burner, the expanding of
the aluminum foil cover into a crown, and his sister, Jung- Jun (that girl
sister as dead and yet phantomesque as the murdered adult) tacit and waiting
anxiously to be the first to pierce into the crown to obtain its edible jewels
-the early days of her teaching him how to catch a baseball, how to tie his tie
before they went off to Sunday school… He woke up from some forgotten but
unsettling dream with a few thoughts of her trickling into his consciousness.
His thoughts were uninvited and he tried to shake them off like a wet dog. As
much as they were the past, they materialized through distant, sealed corridors
to haunt him. Anything could be remembered. One thought slapped into another in
a restrained domino effect in the primitive human psyche. Human will was like
meat skewered and cooked on the rotisserie.

He had only recently moved to Seoul. Desperate for work, English had delivered
and cursed him once again; although this time he had become a clerk in a
convenience store in the American military sector of Itaewan. He had a room in
the back area. It was really an extra stock room. The owner had been so
insistent in the interview that any employee he chose would need to live in the
back area as an extra security precaution. Sang Huin didn't have the inordinate
money required to obtain an apartment since in Korea deposits on apartments
were like the purchases of condominiums and so, not wanting to live in a
yongwam, he had agreed. So upon waking this night, he did not immediately
recognize where he was. Waking in darkness and wondering where he was at, it
was Gabriele who dominated over his thoughts of Jung-Jun.

Gabriele's mind was sticky in malaise. The child that she had had not grounded
her. It's crying was without rhyme or reason. It spouted out vehement, hellish,
and non-stoppable roars like a locomotive. The malaise was hot and sticky. It
was as if all of his insatiable needs were like a vomit-smelling glue and it
was in her hair, on her face, and in her clothes. She could not escape. Her
intellectualism was being stunted to this exclusive task of being an infant's
caretaker. "I will surely snap like a twig on a crisp winter morning if I do
not leave this trailer," she thought to herself although she did not completely
believe it since solitude did not have much of an effect on her. In this moment
of weakness where she did feel the need to depart from all the responsibilities
and the cacophony that was her son, she looked at him disconcertedly. He was no
more family than the one she had come out of. "I am like this lone soul that is
forever seeking, although not expecting, the one true friend that wants nothing
from me other than to be with me…that person who will love me for just that."
She further thought, "I shouldn't have had this accident of conceiving a
child…this mistake of giving birth to one. However, here he is. I can't exactly
return him." Sang Huin recollected where he was. He got up and opened his door.
He saw the aisles of groceries. Living here, he thought, was like living in a
storage area or a gigantic pantry. He sighed. He grabbed some milk and a
package of Oreo cookies that he would have to pay for later. Then he sat on his
bed and took notes on what he had been thinking concerning Gabriele.

But it was his sister who haunted him more. As teenagers, they would jog
together at the high school track and in school she looked so beautiful wearing
a skirt and her hair in a bun. She was experimenting with makeup at the age of
14. She never did like it, dabbing it timidly over her beautiful face. She
didn't need it any more in her late twenties. With their mother she would
continue to talk in that mysterious language of Korean (Hangkuk-mal) that he
did not understand. It was their secret language. It was their girlish society
that he had been excluded from. As a family they functioned fine. However, he
and his father never had connected personally when they were apart from the
others. The man had always absconded from him. He had been aloof. Both of his
parents were so aloof and so aged during the 14 months of Jun-Jung's
disappearance and seemingly elderly at the discovery of the skeletal remains
and the ensuing trial.

Gabriele felt as if she were at an amusement park and that her own little world
were nothing but a house of mirrors. Each subsequent mirror (despite her youth)
cast an impression of more furrowed wrinkles on her forehead, seemed to expand
the appearance of bags under her eyes, and made her hair look increasingly
gray. Life was nothing but a bottle, a diaper, burping, feeding, and washing.
The robotic movements he demanded her to do to take care of him went on
perpetually. His crying went on perpetually.

Like with other late evenings that week, at 11:30 p.m. Saeng Seob and his
seeing-eye dog took the 40-minute subway ride over to meet him, who would be
waiting there in the terminal. Saeng Seob resented him some for quaking and
thwarting the direction of his passionate river that most men felt, rode, and
defined themselves from. Still, he kept the resentment mute. Being corrupted
was a marginal thing when confronted daily with oceans of loneliness.
Consciousness needed an object and he needed a consciousness that wasn't always
disconcerted, diffident, and being thrust about like a lost, lonely man sucked
up in the waves. When he finished dabbling in some work for his cousin at the
university it was good to go someplace where he was wanted-someplace away from
the campus where friendship gave him identity that an indifferent cousin
cajoled or coerced into helping him failed to do. Sang Huin had the need to
impress him with the material that he had written from the previous day or two.
For Seng Seob, listening had become a means of inveigling those who needed to
feel that someone cared to hear them-a lifebuoy that he could embrace around
himself when encountering the waves. Sang Huin was not frightened away by his
dead orbs and so Saeng Seob let swimming, eating together, listening to the
recitation, giving Sang Huin brief tutorials in Korean, and this peculiar
sleeping together become the activities that bonded them. Each needed to chisel
his name on the other one's brain in a city of ten million strangers. In a
world of 6 billion people, each one needed a special lure, and for him it was
listening intensely to others. He saw himself as a demure epicure with no
published writing and nothing outwardly erudite to show for it. He in his
reserve believed that in a world of nonsense spoken by barbarians little
outside of human culture had a positive worth except for friendship, and if he
needed to listen all night to someone he cared for, he would do just that.

In the back of the convenience store it was hard for him to critique Sang
Huin's prose. After all, it was a foreign language being read to him but
despite its blur to his mind it dazzled him in new vocabulary that he would
look up in his dictionary later. The role of boyfriend to Seong Seob was
peculiar but the human gourmandized touch above all ambrosia. It was a special
sensory input to the reticular formation of the brain. Touch gave a
consciousness of relationship and belonging that were the highest goals of all
such humans, hominids, and primates creeping their way to godhood. He hadn't
felt particularly inclined to be homosexual and yet that had little meaning
when one needed touch and friendship. Being blind made touch even more of an
instrument of knowing something although all grabbled around in darkness.

The next morning was Sang Huin's bit of a weekend and so Seong Seob feigned
sickness in a phone call to his cousin. The cousin was indifferent and if he
questioned the logic of calling in sick while being absent from the home that
both of them shared, he did not mention it. So Seong Seob and Sang Huin went
out to experience the changing of the guard ceremony at Toksugum Palace: the
soldiers in their colorful ancient garb and round black brimmed hats, the
horns, the drums and the changing staffs. At first they went to Lawson's
convenience store and bought some kim bop (a Korean version of sushi), potato
chips, and cola. They took the food to a stack of lumber that had been piled to
the area opposite of the ticket counter and, for some minutes, plopped
themselves on top of it and witnessed what their senses allotted. Later, they
went to the amusement park, Lotte World. For each ride they stood in line over
half an hour. Once, as they were going into the bathroom, Sang Huin kissed
Seong Seob hurriedly before more men entered. Saeng Seob disliked the intrusive
act that brought the acknowledgement of his aberration if not perversion into
the light of day but the hot mouth was full of molecules and passing of
molecules in a kiss was an intoxicating thing that took one away from the
mundane aspects of reality. Further, he knew that the only wrong was in judging
one Epicurean quest over that of another. It was an inconsequential thing.




Chapter Twelve


Gabriele smashed a corpulent ant into her second composition when neither
flicking it away with her fingertips nor blowing it off her paper was
successful. She was writing a second story to put her son to sleep after
finding the first composition ridiculous. From this action the insect was
nothing but a brownish green blotch on her new work. "Thai Tiger," she rewrote
after scratching out the earlier paragraph that had the blotch in it, "waved
goodbye to his mother and father from the window of the plane. He was both sad
and happy because he was leaving one thing he loved and going to another. The
plane went into the clouds and came down in Sri Lanka. Tamil Tiger was waiting
for him. Tamil Tiger's mother took Tamil Tiger and Thai Tiger to her home in
downtown Colombo. What is Colombo like, asked Thai Tiger from the backseat of
the car where he sat with Tamil Tiger. It is full of wars, said Tamil Tiger.
What are wars, asked Thai Tiger. Let's change the subject, retorted Tamil
Tiger."

Gabriele paused from her writing and remembered her time in a Moslem country.
For three months, when she was almost 6, she was in Turkey. She remembered that
day when her mother suddenly came to Kansas for her. It had been nearly a year
since she had seen her and she felt a mixture of fear, surprise, and happiness
at the thought of having the fragmented pieces of her life reassembled. She did
not know if this interruption of her adaptation to her aunt, uncle, and cousins
had some permanency. She was already speculating that there was no permanency-
only being banged in the buttocks with bumper cars or being run over by tanks.
She was only told that they would be going on a trip to the other side of the
world. The potential of seeing something outside of Kansas made her very happy.
Like any child, the discovery of flight was a marvel and she stared out of the
window as much as she could. It was a subject of curiosity that the clouds she
had always looked up to (a good many in the shape of the philosopher,
Heraclitus) had really been nothing but footstools with wooly sheepskins on
them all along. It was quite a surprise and shook her hypothesis that her
mother was mistaken in saying that there wasn't a Santa Claus. She had
formulated this hypothesis erroneously by the evidence of some irregular clouds
that seemed as if they were Santa's frothy sugar castles.

In Istanbul she became reacquainted with her father again. Like in olden times
when she was four, he began to take her on trips to the beach to pick up
seashells or shop for groceries. Once they were shopping for some vegetables in
a tight labyrinth of a crowded and dusty outdoor market when suddenly they
heard the sound of that Moslem call to worship (a hybrid sound like of an
instrument and a human voice) but the call was at the irregular time of 3:00 on
a Friday afternoon. Pandemonium was in the streets, but everyone was going in
the same direction so actually Istanbul was less helter-skelter than usual.
Pushed with the herds, she and her father walked 5 blocks to an ornate mosque.
She wanted to know what was "going on" so her father put her on his shoulders
and told her that a special Turkish custom of a beheading was to begin shortly.
"Beheading?" she asked. "Yes," he said with a wry and troubled smile. "To be
without a head like the headless horseman although I suppose a less animated
one." For a moment she was so pleased and excited that she would witness such a
splendor until she saw a man with a bag over his face dragged up against his
will onto the marble stairs leading to the temple and a third man with a huge
scythe in his hands. A second later she witnessed the burly third man swing,
with all his round, bulging, muscular might in one fail swoop and the head part
from the shoulders which the second man placed in a basket. There was
surprisingly little blood at first. Then the arteries disgorged their content
while the body fidgeted a few times on the holy marble.

She suddenly knew that adults were monsters and that they ran amuck in the
world inimical to human decency. In deep pain of one fragmented and grieving
for this man and the human race, she nonetheless controlled her urge to cry.
She assessed her situation. If indeed she were in a land of adult monsters,
outwardly she had to acclimate to their mores and yet do the best she could,
while growing up, to refrain from becoming a monster herself. If one couldn't
withdraw from a situation, she felt more than thought, a girl must play the
game. If she were to leak out her pain by blubbering, they would hate her and
she would be perceived as foolish and weak. Crying would never help. It would
only get her into trouble. She asked herself how best to achieve this
ostensible aim and she told herself that she should be inquisitive. She calmly
asked why the beheading had occurred, the reason for the timing of the
occurrence, the exact nature of the crime, if beheadings were permitted in
America, and the final resting place for a 2 part individual. The questions
made her father, a USAF officer for NATO, and her mother, a USAF soldier's
housewife, so happy. The next day as her mother was with curlers in her hair
and her head in tact and under the dryer at the beauty parlor, the young mother
pointed out her daughter and boasted about all the questions she had posed
regarding the beheading the previous night. They boasted about her often;
however, two more months passed and the clarity of the ephemeral nature of the
reunion with her parents became clear. After her summer holiday was over and
their honeymoon reunion with their child had ended, Gabriele was sent back all
alone in a jet to New York City and then a second connecting flight that would
lead her back to her aunt in Kansas.




Chapter Thirteen


It is 2008 and he, sometimes Adagio and sometimes Nathaniel or various
nicknames, still doesn't even have a consistent label for himself. Not even a
consistent name has stuck on him all these 18 years; and the half hour that he
has sat in the library there is that same mental numbness of all other previous
half hours. It is numbness as empty as a pit in the mouth from an extracted
tooth. He knows that most men wander around the world untouched, unknown, not
touching, and not known or knowing. He knows that such men use girlfriends to
prop themselves up in order to feel fortified outwardly in 6 billion mostly
"nobodies" within a universe of continual flux. He knows the selfish jaundice
of both men and women in a relationship and how with any length of time it
inflicts the relationship with the disease that is an extension of the two. He
has been there and done that. He had one steady girlfriend but the relationship
was hard to maintain when swirling colorful treats in many edible shapes,
smells, and voices of varying feminine nectar fell through the orifices of his
senses. It does not bother him to be no one special. It does not bother him to
be the same as "regular guys" although most of them have consistent names,
nicknames, or aliases they do not cower from. They make up the masses; and the
masses are a brute force to which he is one of the billions. When a thing or a
way of being exists in large numbers, he supposes, it is bound to be right. At
a large table in front of an open book, with fingertips he grazes an area of
skin above his upper lip. The facial stubble, when he rubs it, gives him extra
reinforcement in his vain embellishment of masculinity. It is a vain
reinforcement that the litter of pornography he perused like a philomath in his
car a few minutes before entering the library did not do. Even the insouciance
that he artificially concocted there with the puff of a cigarette while waiting
for the rain to soften enough to drive did not make him more conscious of his
male vigor than a brief feel of facial stubble. There is little beyond sexual
energy to define him. No fields, no disciplines, have awakened an internal
voice. Not yet, not ever, he thinks. He is a man without a voice and such a man
is most conscious of the primordial emotions of hating those who bar his
pleasure and love toward those who facilitate it. Adagio-it was a somewhat
forgotten word, which once popped into his head for the creation of an email
address. The word has inadvertently been a perfect epitome of his slow mental
activity for books. Slow in that respect, academics with their words and
numbers in infinity have stood out like the awkward anachronisms of hieroglyphs
chiseled into stone. It would seem ironic that someone who perceives books to
be as lifeless as stones should be in a library watching the pages of a book
occasionally turn under the draft of the ceiling fan when not under the
directive of his own will. The book is of 20th century American art and
contains a few examples of his mother's work. Only pleasures from pictures have
had some vague calling or tugging; but then it has been pictures that have
composed so much of his existence.

He had detoured from the interstate and came into the town to buy a sandwich
and cola at a convenience store, which fostered the purchase of the newest
issues of Playboy and Hustler as well. He is downtown because the heavy
diluting of rain in this small town necessitated him to pull over to the side
of the road and park his car. He is in the library because it was a two-block
run from where he parked his car. The continual pounding of rain caused him to
have to go to the bathroom sooner than what he would have done otherwise, for
he is in all respects a follower of nature's suggestions. The bathroom was his
impetus for entering the library. In the process of staring up at the fan to
focus a second of hate toward it he sees a woman straightening her body after
rising off the seat. She is at a table around 50 feet from that of his own. Her
table is near a small wall of books. He regrets that he has not seen her legs
slide on the shiny wood of the chair or her thighs rising up to him although
imagined action can be continually repeated and he continually repeats it.
Bound in black stockings, the legs go to the front desk where some hands scan
titles of her videos.

"It seems nobody checks out books any longer. We've had to restrict the kids
use of the internet upstairs. They'll do nothing but chat the whole day if
nobody catches them and then before they leave they check out videos to take
back home."

"Well, guess I should feel honored to be thought of as a kid when I'm nearly
42. I am really in a hurry so could you please…"

"All right."

For a minute if not longer there is a momentary lapse in the present before he
becomes conscious of it again. Fueled on adrenalin and hunger, he finds himself
walking behind her in the rain. He imagines himself catching up and offering
his umbrella to her but she has one of her own and so he timidly tracks her
from a distance. He imagines her dropping the keys to her car but the fates
also do not allow him this prop. He sees her get in but imagines her already
seated with the door shut but unable to start the car. This does not happen
either. He is unable to monitor himself. Like a child he distances himself from
his actions. He is feeling the movements of someone else's body. Will has been
frozen in time. There is a cold frozen constancy in his consciousness of the
present moment. He finds himself knocking on the window. She rolls it down. He
does not know what to say. She hasn't dropped one of her videos in the rain. He
is as if naked and without a gift or prop with which to make a confidence. He
stares at her mature beauty.

"Yes?" she asks.

"Looks like the air in one of your tires is low-this one on the driver's side."

"Oh. That shouldn't be the case. I filled them up yesterday. Do you..." She
hesitates. "Do you think I need to come out and look?" Her words are
circumspect. They are of one who does not trust his intentions. If only she
could have said this with confidence, he thinks. He means that then he could
have gotten the opportunity to have her outside. He could have pushed her under
the car and accosted her with his body.

"No, maybe you'll get back home okay. I think you will. I just noticed it
looked down a little."

She smiles. "Maybe because I am sitting here. Don't you think so? - Or maybe
not." Her tone reflects more confidence in him and she treats his ideas with
deference. She defers all mechanical judgments to men whom she supposes to have
such genetic predispositions.

"It's low," he says, "but I think you'll get back fine. In the morning you can
put air in it."

"Thanks so much. Okay." She pushes the button to roll up the window. He wants
to stop its progression. He wants to put his hands in what is left of the
closing hole and break out the window. He wants to shove himself on top of her,
slap her down onto the passenger seat, and have his pleasure. As strong as that
urge is, he is too socialized and can't break in. He retreats to his car. He
subconsciously pushes in the lever of his umbrella and carries it, compacted,
within his hands despite being drenched by rain. He feels the tightening of his
sinuses. He is getting ill but he isn't aware of this. He passes a music store.
He notices that his shoestring, to the left, is dragging onto the wet pavement
like broken strings of a guitar. Passing an alley he envisions her there to be
grasped like a guitar's case; yanking the instrument from its case; and letting
his tongue strum. He feels incontinent and he notices his erection. He imagines
her without ablution, naked to smell, touch, sight, and taste. He gets into his
car, ties his shoe, pulls a handkerchief out of the glove compartment, and
wipes the sweat and rain from his forehead and face. For a moment he rests his
aching forehead against the rim of the steering wheel.




Chapter Fourteen


(1989: Houston)

Back from Allen Parkway, Gabriele pulled into the driveway of the house she and
Betty rented. She drove beside three black girls at an adjacent property who
were tilting back a large stone. As Gabriele opened her car door, she wondered
what was underneath that had gotten their attention. It had to be a salamander,
a gecko, or a swarm of large fire ants. A two-part skeleton of a midget in a
partially underground ossuary wasn't in the realm of possibility; but whatever
existed there, it caused their squeamish giggling. She felt a little squeamish,
herself, at the thought of children grotesquely disgorging into her senses.
What made it worse was the fact that they were there doing this when she was in
such a need of finally reaching her home-her sanctuary. She thought about the
Turk that had been decapitated twenty- three years earlier, although it seemed
only days ago. Back then she had been as young as the youngest of the three
girls whom she was now looking at.

She remembered how one of those bedeviled executioners let the head roll out of
the bag, took it by the hair, and displayed it to the crowd before returning it
to its basket-a basket that looked to the very young Gabriele as if it should
be used for apples. Even so long ago she tacitly condemned the adult monsters
that enjoyed the macabre and applauded such savagery in the name of justice.
Still her monstrous father, her teacher, had inadvertently led her into that
large life- changing enlightenment that was always arrived at from a corridor
through the darkest abyss. Partially from being pushed along with the crowd and
partially from human curiosity, he had shown her the loss of innocence through
the realization that society, that lovely refinement of conveniences and kind
neighboring policemen, was a horror. Even when so young, she intuitively
guessed that Turkey was just an outward display of a refined and obscure
savagery that had to be in all adult institutions regardless of what they were
or the nations they were in. She didn't exactly think it but she felt it all
the same. With tears that she could never shed and by grief, full empathy, and
comradery for this unknown individual, she had walked into the full darkness of
enlightenment. The sentiments for the slain man would remain dormant and mute
in her thoughts all the rest of her life but the enlightenment, the darkness,
would be more active in its behavioral influence.

Twenty-three years ago she imagined all children as the good and the innocent
as she believed herself to be back then. That was before she went to school and
learned what egocentric sadists they really were. For they, the masses, enjoyed
the ruthlessness of the name callers whose arrows and vitriol of "Four eyes!
Four eyes!" and "Piggy! Piggy!" toward two of her classmates was inexorable.
How deeply ingrained was the hunter and the competitor in every child. She
could see it in the sports they played together. She could see it in the
spelling bees. She could see it in the name-calling, which was an aversion
toward anybody who was different. Differences might be deleterious to the
concept of the tribe. It was the corollary of the need to survive that existed
atavistically and came about instinctually as a response passed on from the
youngest of the earliest Homo sapiens. It was they who, as sexually
reproductive adults, passed on the knowledge of their inner children. Gabriele
was so fortified that attempts at name-calling directed toward her personally
did not even scathe her. But when the name callers and all their tacit
accomplices shot their arrows and threw buckets of vitriol at the fat girl and
the girl with glasses, her wrath was also implacable. She would beat up the
worst of these tiny savages. Innocent expressions and gauche interactions of
ostensibly pure children belied what the offspring of these adult monsters were
really like; and as if misogyny and mis-himony were not enough, such incidents
caused both mis- girlony and mis-boyany. Normally such an abnormality of four
misses would constitute the misanthropy of serial or spree killers but Gabriele
did not feel much misanthropy.

Her ideas, she knew, were as rare as a Tennessee Coneflower or a Black Outhouse
Hollyhock-both of which bordered on extinction. They were as ineffable as the
very universe she resided in and as pessimistic as Hobbes' social contract
theory (although to her who often liked dressing up in black, black was not
pessimistic being the color of intrigue and enlightenment). She believed that
Hobbes was somewhat wrong in thinking that humans suppressed their own savagery
through the common necessity of not wanting to be murdered in their beds. The
contract wasn't as simple as that alone. The adult Gabriele thought that
through society small doses of competitive cunning could be exuded in basic
business competition and politics for the whole duration of one's long life.
The common workers left out of both, if given a high enough salary, would not
be anarchists or proletariat revolutionaries if they had enough money to go to
action packed movies or sports stadiums, buy whores once in a while, or other
benign conduits of savagery. In short, she believed that society came about for
the purpose of giving its members a long lifetime of small doses of savagery
instead of a few episodes of gluttonous devouring that could cause one to be
murdered rather easily. She wasn't sure of the specifics. She hadn't thought it
worthy of her time to think them out in an obscure philosophical treatise.
Besides, figuring out why the dog bit the bone wouldn't stop the biting.

"What are you doing, girls?" Gabriele smiled at them and walked toward the
stone.

"Wer' gonna killem, Lady," said the eldest girl.

"What per se are you hoping to rob of a life?"

"Lady'speakin' Shakespeare," said the eldest.

"Wer' gonna open these lizzardheads like coconuts and pull out the brains and
give'em to you, Lady, so that you can have breakfast," elucidated the second
one.

They laughed and Gabriele smiled widely, fully amused by their non- feminine
creative play. "My ladies, methinks thou art so nice, but unfortunately I've
already had breakfast."

"Lady'speakin Shakespeare again," said the first one.

"Oh, that Lady," scowled the second one playfully.

"Yeah, it's the Shakespeare language," continued the first, "But I'm good at
figerin'out Morse code so I can do this. There's more English in Shakespeare
than in Morse code. She's meanin' she already had breakfast but I don't think
that matters none. It ain't an issue."

"Yeah-ain't anissue-- any o'that," mimicked the second one.

"You can put it in your 'frigerator," said the oldest

"Pootit in your 'frigerator" said the third and smallest of the girls. The two
eldest girls laughed at her intrusion into the conversation. Everybody began to
laugh including Gabriele.

"No," Gabriele said, "The refrigerator is full." She was quickly becoming
serious. She saw sharp little stones in the hands of the eldest one. Even a
child was a brutal force or, at any rate, immolated in play the brutality of
life on the planet. She sighed and took away their instruments of war. She
wanted to scold them but there was no way to scold all humanity of the past,
present, and future. Only a crazed individual would not be cognizant of their
limitations.

"Damned if she done takenway the lizzardknife," said the second one in
disbelief. To the luck of all concerned Gabriele didn't hear them and wasn't
even aware that one of them tried to spit at her from behind as she was walking
toward the house. She climbed up the stairs to where she and Betty were living.

She hoped that Betty would not be there. She needed some time alone to be in
that harmony within and to probe the endless fathoms of her probity and
intelligence without the intrusions of the outside world. Even in childhood,
Gabriele thought, she had projected an aloof quality of a stereotypical German.
A sotto voce current in her brain called "conscience" when in fact it was
nothing but a less dominant or minority opinion that was disgruntled at being
such chastised her for her "bitchiness" (an indifference that both barked and
bit). Still, she told herself, it did not matter. How was a self an extension
of others? When she was born did she bring them into existence, and when she
died would the human race cease to exist? People came and went as they should
and friendship was merely for those of feeble ideas needing to be reinforced by
the herd. For her whose ideas were such steady companions and was real within
herself without needing to be reflected in her associations with others what
need had she of the Betties of the world. She had never met a German whose
example confuted the stereotype. She remembered the few times that her father
took her to a beach along the East Coast and the myriad times when he took her
to the beaches in Turkey. She always wandered to one side of the beach, culling
certain miscellaneous seashells to examine as her father sojourned away from
her with pensive and hard expressions, sunk in his own mind. The expressions
told her that he savored the idea of being alone in his own cold, watery depth.
Despite the fact that he had taken her to the execution, she loved him most as
far as people were concerned.

She turned her key in the doorknob and opened her part of the house. She
thought, "The human mind when opened up has, at its crypt, humanity."
Particularly for herself she loathed the idea of being a social creature. She
often thought of her roommate each day of each semester, the homeless grass
chewing Filipino whom a woman at the Laundromat nicknamed the botanist,
professors, her family, and acquaintances: they all made up her reality. She
did forget about Betty during vacations and she forgot about her aunt, uncle,
and cousins except during the vacations but she couldn't quite escape thinking
about them altogether. Overall, she didn't have much sentiment toward anyone,
and they could easily be shaken and faded from her memory once she was away.

Betty was usually an early riser, but not hearing any noise in the kitchen or
living room, Gabriele at first assumed she was sleeping. She checked all the
rooms but they were empty except in sound, where a small television remained
turned on. A newscaster was discussing the economic powers of the East with
reference to the new economic experiments in the Soviet Union and China. "The
whole f-- world is West," thought Gabriele. She felt that democracy was as much
an experiment as communism: an experiment on how free to be greedy things could
get without entirely destroying the ecology that was the base of it all whereas
the original communism of Trotsky was an experiment on how equal life could get
and still be bearable in its world of frightened and impoverished clones. It
all missed the mark as far as she was concerned. If each and every person was
not granted food, shelter, and a profession by which to feel worthy (if indeed
there were worthy professions, a question that she posed to herself) all of
these socioeconomic systems were nothing to her but debauchery. She
contemplated the fate of the homeless Filipino: wasn't she quite the hypocrite
to say that the world was wretched to not offer him assistance that would pull
him from the streets and away from feeling disoriented and hearing voices in
his own head when she didn't care to bring him into her apartment. Still, she
didn't want him any more than she would want a tick, a cockroach, or a bedbug.
If he wanted to come into her apartment and be Betty's lover, after the last
bag was put into her car, that was another thing altogether.

The living room had the smell of light and stagnant smoke of Betty's cigars.
Betty, she thought, must have recently gone to another final examination. It
was best that way. With her gone Gabriele would not have to coerce some
giggling and mild sighs as she packed her racket ball paddle with other items.
There would be pleasant but vague and generalized memories of their racket ball
entertainment together but, to be sociable, she would have to affect some
maudlin sentiments of loss. She would need to feign loss particularly about
them living together as if it had made them conjoined spiritually although
obviously not Siamese twins. She would have to use the width of her arms to
symbolize an embrace (a real embrace would have been impossible when a sexual
embrace with a man was bad enough). She quickly entered the bathroom to take a
shower that might wash away any odor of the man she had slept with; packed more
of her things; saluted the new communism in her heart; snickered inside at the
thought that Japan had out-capitalized the West the way it tried to
out-imperialize the imperialists; turned off the television, and left with the
remaining two boxes. She swerved off the drive, veering somewhat near the girls
in her eagerness to leave.

"What's wrong with you, woman?" yelled the eldest one.

"What's wrong with you, nigga" yelled the little black girl full of energy. The
girl did not know the full pejorative nature of the word nor the fact that
Gabriele, being white, could not be a Negro unless one were to label her such
for the black clothing she often wore. The other two stood with legs arched and
bulging hominid-like--the eldest with right arm erect and out from her body and
the hand half-clenched into a fist. Gabriele saw this from the mirror. She
hadn't driven that close to the girls so she thought their reaction was
unjustified. The fact that she thought they looked like hominoids had nothing
to do with their skin color nor their nonstandard use of language but her own
aversion toward children and adults based upon the sensitivities she had as a
young child and the fact that these girls were pelting the top of her car with
clods. She returned to the drive. "Hey!" she yelled from the window. "Your
mother's insurance is gonna pay for any damage. You are lucky that I'm not
opening my car door because if I were to get you I would -" she had to stop
herself. Whatever she said under these circumstances could only put violence
and hatred into their callow minds, exacerbating their nature as hers, so prone
to its aggressive flares. She could only make it worse than what it would be if
these children were merely left to glower and ponder in silence as she was now
doing. And yet there was little delectation in self-restraint. A fully sociable
being was one who liked to provoke responses positive or negative like billiard
balls banging against each other. One felt alive based upon the vibrations
gained from being knocked around; and as eremitic and misanthropic as she was,
Gabriele was a girl who liked her fun. She saw the clods of dirt in their hands
and the dirt on the windshield. She slowly got out of the door, which caused
them to back away a few steps. She didn't look at them but instead walked
around her car. Seeing that no damage had occured, she then returned to the
driver's seat. She decided to leave the matter alone so she spit a cannon ball
of chewing tobacco toward the girls and ventured onward. The cannon ball was
the penalty phase. After all, she did not want them to think that they could
pelt motorists with impunity. Still she imagined the sullied tribulation that
she must have caused the younger one. She could feel the devastating
humiliation that perhaps they all felt at a wad of snuff coming at them like a
projectile. She hoped that they would not interpret it as racial hatred. She
felt the horror behind what she had done and yet there was nothing she could
do. If she were to stop the car and return to them to apologize they would
probably pelt her and the car both with stones. She disliked egocentric
children. She even disliked the refugee children whom she worked with part-time
until two days ago although she camouflaged it in professionalism. She knew
that if only human beings were able to pierce their protective bubbles they
would find that one genuine love within, that innate tender need to be liked,
cared about, and have one's human worth confirmed and an identification of this
sentiment in other sentient beings. Still the world was what it was and she
told herself that if she were to return she would be stoned or clodded based
upon their whims.

In this odd corner behind the skyscrapers and away from the Houston Symphony,
the Meneil Collection with its engravings of Aten and Ptah, the Rothko Chapel,
the Astrodome, the Miller Theatre in Herman Park, the University of St. Thomas,
the University of Houston, and her Rice University, nothing touched her sense
of imagination so much as the ghettos strewn around them. She admired the
simple life burrowed away from the congested avarice of the city's center. She
felt compassion for the poorest of the poor who had to be in bleak
circumstances but she could not do anything in her two years in Houston but
take photographs of the infamy of the free enterprise system and continue with
her job working with refugees. She didn't do all that much. She sat with the
Ugandans and the Kenyans on the porches of refugee houses and with them looked
onto the skyscrapers at the approach of dusk. Driving in her car, she could
remember the Vietnamese families clogging the sinks of the refugee houses with
rice; the sight and smell of the blood of rotting vegetables in the
refrigerators of those houses; the fire ants that stung her around the refugee
houses; mowing the yards when she couldn't budge the refugees to do it; the
disputes over whose food was in the refrigerators or how much clothing she was
supposed to supply them with, and how the Ugandans tended to accumulate trash
without ever emptying it. She remembered Senor Sanchez. Making a detour back
into the city from the interstate, she decided to go to the refugee houses and
say "goodbye" even though a couple days ago she had chosen not to tell the
refugees that she was leaving in her usual obdurate opposition to sentiment.
She could imagine herself telling Senor Sanchez about her immediate departure
and him saying, "Heaven forbid, you are really leaving us now that you have a
Master's in psychology from a great university?." She would say, "Yes, I always
leave when I get Master's degrees. This one from a great university equalizes a
not so great one in criminology at Emporia University." "Do you have two
Master's degrees?" "Yes," she would say, "I collect them." "What will you do
with your knowledge?" he would ask. "Be a better person for it and that is all.
I'll sit on my butt in the future." "Oh, very good," he would say. "Maybe you
can put Fidel Castro on your lap while you sit and get him to purr like a
kitten." "Oh, what an excellent idea," she would say.

Senor Sanchez came from Havana. On that first day of their meeting she gave him
clothes from the Welcome Center, which he took. She put food in the
refrigerator and yet he would rarely eat it. "Necesito volver a Miami, orita!
Esta lugar"-and there he rambled off in passionate Cuban speed which she did
not understand. They sat on the porch to the Welcome Center. Gabriele handed
him a pen and paper but his calligraphy was not legible. "Orita? Que significa
"orita?" she asked. He snapped his fingers fiercely and then rambled
incommunicably. Her eyes became stiff and large in her detest of his
irascibility. Sanchez would always whistle for her attention. Then he would
laugh at her hating eyes; whistle again; look up in the air, and flap his arms
in an attempt to have her get him something. Partial or complete hunger
strikes, she told him in Spanish would not hasten his trip back to Miami but
only make his stay intolerable for everyone.

"But you buy shit for us to eat!" he stormed one time.

"I'd have trouble getting it down too," she admitted. "Suit yourself. If you
die defiantly you will be my personal hero but the carcass will stay in
Houston. We don't ship carcasses to Miami," she said. He was her personal
favorite.

The Cubans told her one time that the U.S. was responsible for putting Fidel
Castro into power since the Cuban masses needed to support any man whose
rhetoric condemned American investments and the American control of their
economy; and her response was, "Well, which is it-if you hate the guy so much
it seems ridiculous to use such an argument even though it does have some
truth. I know if I were to engage him he would be a pussycat purring on my lap
and you guys could make any political cartoon on him you pleased." The Africans
once said that the military cost of their civil wars were the result of Western
colonial boundaries fusing incompatible tribes into nations, keeping Africa
from being able to feed herself; and her response was, "Well, which is it-- If
you hate the idea of imperialism why are we speaking in English now; and why is
your government trying to lure in foreign investment?" When the older
Vietnamese individuals mentioned the war she listened to their stories
intensely through a rough translation. She listened to life's horror and the
ensuing trauma. That was all she could do. The past and the future did not
exist but traumas of the past went on perpetually. Once she had to translate
Thuc's "New House Rules for Immigrants" to the Latinos as they sat before her
on metal seats. They were lectured that the food given to them should be put in
boxes and set in the refrigerators so that they would know that the food was
being distributed equally and without a cause for bickering. Thuc nodded her
Vietnamese face at Gabriele's ostensible translations when really Gabriele was
only giving a synopsis of what was being said with commentary disparaging of
the YMCA treatment of its refugees and a system that was generally f--

There might have been poetic significance in having done this mundane job:
having taken the refugee children to the zoo with seventy year old Jesus and
the fifty year old Sanchez; having said the names of the animals in English and
the girls giving the Vietnamese equivalent; having taken them to the social
security office to get them cards with designated numbers; having taken the
Cambodian boy into the clothes room of the Welcome Center to try on pants of
various sizes but when he would not put them on and take them off with an adult
sense of speed, having performed the unzipping and zipping herself; having
taken the little Cuban girl to the Vietnamese doctor when she had a fever
although the doctor only gave Gabriele the suggestion of Gatorade and crackers;
and having often heard the little Laotian girl imitating Gabriele's growls
through the tattered 1screen of a window although Gabriele's growls toward the
girl were real ones. Still, all in all, she thought in the car, it had been a
waste of time to have prostituted herself to such an agency. She liked these
refugees for various reasons but one less altruistic reason was that she didn't
have any other people whom she liked and thus she needed to like them. She
chastised her maudlin disposition and returned to the interstate.




Chapter Fifteen


After washing her wounds and cursing the cat, she again picked it up by the
neck. But this time she threw it outside into a light surface of snow that had
fallen an hour earlier. Frothy top layers sometimes drifted about like desert
sands in the occasional strong gusts. They went here and there as directionless
as her mind that, in one respect, had become detached from traditional roles
and responsibilities, and in another had sunk into the mire of motherhood.
Inside closed doors, she was resistant against the cat's cries. Empathy, she
told herself, was not in her vocabulary. But when the cat, named Mouse, could
no longer be heard, she stood outside on the steps and called for it until it
at last appeared from under the trailer. She warmed a bottle in one large pan
and a bit of milk for the cat in a saucepan. She had never warmed milk for the
cat before; but she decided that if she was doing it for one she might as well
do it for the other particularly with the advent of the furriest one being
subjected to the cold. When both animals were fed she watched the television
but its senseless action and its fictitious and ludicrous sentimentalism were
putting her into a numb and depressed apathy. It was deflating her of all
energy to the point where she couldn't follow the characters or plot since the
figures were now helter-skelter in the meaninglessness that was rife in her own
mind.

To escape a stagnating and a somewhat discombobulating loss of herself, she
grabbed her sketchbook and drew the exact likeness of her child with little
time and effort. The book, like a photograph album, was filled with her
sketches in chronological order: stoic and erect poses of her parents based
more on childhood memories than some brief reunions when she was a teen-ager; a
13 year old friend in her bicycle club; the faces of drunken high school
classmates when she was bar- hopping and ignoring most mandates of her aunt and
uncle; some of a trip to Germany with her aunt; college friends; and yet some
of unknown Antarctica, a dreamy non-asthmatic land of ice mountains and
valleys. In such a place dreamed about and sketched from her asthmatic youth
onward neither rivers of flowing pollutants nor mountainous landfills existed.
Within its solitary and pristine nature, there would be no tacit or overt
pressures to get a job and become someone. In Antarctica an exceptionally aware
person would not have to go through the degradation of being compelled to
reinforce the rules and procedures of a business or organization in order to
have the income derived from a job. No professional, entrepreneurial, or common
slaves would exist here.

In this place, which she fabricated as being no less habitable than Greenland,
there would at least be a small ecosystem of fish and seaweed for food, and
societies of walruses, seals, and penguins which she could watch and record
their social interaction. Such a record would be exclusively for the one-person
audience of Gabriele. That being the case, the purpose of an article to which
author and reader were one person without the prospect of extending further
seemed a futile waste of time; and yet if meaning in a record of the habits of
species could only be gained by sharing this information with others or if the
whole essence of meaning existed in edifying others and by shared experiences
this would be the source of another research paper which she would conduct in
Antarctica.

Daydreams gave movement and stimulation to housewives standing in line at
supermarkets and provided an escape for mothers of infants who sat alone as
inert and purposeless as rocks until becoming instruments to be used by their
babies. To find the source of his discomfort and ease it was in a child's mind
a woman's only role; and this particular one also felt that his mother could
also be manipulated by slight smiles and the temporary end of tantrums. And in
a sense she was manipulated to toss him in the air, albeit only in the physical
gesture itself for only fools read expressions of love in these smiles and the
cessation of screams. Gabriele accommodated him beyond what was necessary for
his welfare only because of the horrendous nature of his cries if she didn't do
so. Throughout these months of care giving she did not have any other world
beyond the child. She tried to keep herself from being flattened by the
perfunctory role of bathing, feeding him, and changing his diapers by telling
herself that motherhood would pull her into the swathes of human experience and
its interconnectedness, that it would be a novel learning experience on
coexistence, that it might be a means of duplicating the ideas of respected
child development theorists so as to corroborate or discredit them, and that he
could be the specimen of an experiment on how the instincts and proclivities of
a male child might be altered into more ethical variations although she wasn't
quite able to isolate the exact nature of the experiment and its parameters.
But really these ideas did little to counter this pauper's version of ennui
that fogged over her perceptions. What sustained her were her daydreams and
art. Once she drew a surreal image of her baby in a business suit with an
attachZ case in his hand. It was a partially adult caricature of a being
standing proudly alone on an ice mountain. She drew its contumely as master of
itself in all of its avarice, ability to facilitate its own pleasures. It was a
fragmented child glued back together as an enraged whole and she accentuated
this by drawing myriad cracks within its porcelain skin. . When she finished
the sketch she knew that charcoal was an ineffective tool for the ideas and the
color that rushed inside of her. Still, the sketchbook was compact as an album,
and a bit of paper and charcoal were affordable.

Closing the sketchbook on a mental catharsis, she did pushups and situps beside
her director's chair and then aerobics to the televised instructors who glowed
in a little box in front of her. It all helped to extract her from malaise. She
really needed the physical exertion of games like racket ball, and in a very
self-centered way Betty began to permeate her thoughts. The idea of her
friendship became more palatable to reminisce over. Then she fell asleep with
the ideas of Antarctica in her mind. When she woke, her thoughts were
disconcerted and there was a forlorn neediness sticky as the baby's vomit. She
needed a break from solitude and an exit away from the obligations of
motherhood that tyrannized over her. For the first time in her months of doing
this she needed an adult presence in her life and she yearned for the
appearance of this Rita/Lily person who lived somewhat nearby and was adult in
the sense that she could be spoken to. Lily (she was mostly that and preferred
this label although she was really Rita) was supposed to have come earlier and
Gabriele wondered where this Rita/Lily person was. She heard the baby crying.
Maybe too much light in the trailer was irritating his eyes. A silver light
from the glare of the snow with its power to make objects (even the baby) seem
blindingly unreal was bleeding throughout the whole trailer. It captivated her
and made her think that the baby and its needs were nothing short of a dream.
She stared out of the window to confirm that an outside world did indeed exist.
She saw a neighbor's car pull out of a rocky driveway and one young boy
unsuccessfully trying to pull his brother on a sled in the superficial layer of
snow and left over hail. Too many weeds were blocking their progress. Too many
diapers were blocking her own.

She packed some baby food and disposable diapers in a bag. Imitating the
witch's dogma of the sanctity of the earth, for a few months after Nathaniel's
birth she had been adamant that she wouldn't use disposable diapers even though
she had yearned for their ease. Back then she saw mothers with money and
impunity buying boxes of them at the supermarket and she loathed these vile
mothers who degraded the environment. Once, however, when she had a migraine
headache while experiencing some asthma problems and he was suffering from
diarrhea she had trudged over to the store with him in her arms and bought a
box of diapers. From that point forward it became part of her habits. To not do
so now would only inconvenience her. Not even if thousands of mothers went back
to cloth diapers and their plastic over-panty counterparts would such
thoughtfulness save the environment. It would merely postpone the inevitable. A
slight postponement could not be achieved by one alone and, even if it could,
she didn't see that it would merit her discomfort.

Giving up on the idea of Rita coming to her home, she fixed a tuna sandwich for
herself and ate. Then she undressed the two of them; and they sank into a
soothing bubble bath. Gabriele made soap castles for her son, and smacked top
stories off of them, which caused his eyes to become wider with curiosity and
his mouth to become circular in the wonder of all things new. She slowly sang a
choral movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, emphasizing the accent of each
German vowel and syllable exaggeratedly. She internally debated the merit of
giving her child mendacities as she told him German nursery rhymes and lightly
washed his small body. She supposed that the sparked imagination that could
deliver him from being a somber, adult zombie, alive only in insatiable
hungers, was important enough that she didn't have to think of such lies as
bad. Besides, if reality and goodness were perceived differently by each
individual, she didn't want to rush toward an indictment even if she would be a
most willing judge in rendering a verdict in the Gabriele-made indictment of
the past 7000 to 10,000 years of civilization.

Drying herself and the baby in front of the window she put her fingers into the
crevices of the plastic blind. She pressed down on one rectangular piece of
this thing called a blind and wondered what piece, if any, her blind life had
in this thing called society. She looked at the outside world. From the
relatively quiet trailer park, it was hard to imagine how much all the
inhabitants of Ithaca spun around in life. As futile as it was to spin, she
thought, humans were not meant for thought. They were creatures meant to expend
energy and to overtake their world. Maybe this was needed for the evolution of
a higher species than man to exist on the planet. Sexual reproduction was not
thought but illusion and frenzy, which brought forth offspring. It was
overtaking women. A human (women included although she found them a bit more
repulsive than the average human) was mostly all energy conquering the planet,
making it subordinate to human will. If care was not given toward the
environment and humans overtook the planet too forcefully, the world would
expunge them from the list of species. Any caretaker of a child needed to spin
from time to time too and Gabriele needed to do this to fight off sensory
deprivation. She pulled up the blind. Naked, she was in a pillar of light the
way the so-called prophet, Joseph Smith had been-only, being atheist, her
pillar was only silver. She knew that a personification of the sun was absurd,
as was all religion, which she had dabbled in knowing about years earlier; and
yet she did not want to believe that this was all there was. Television,
movies, billboards, and music all recorded that the rich, and happy people who
played in this survival of the fittest game so successfully did so by following
their desires with confidence and unapologetic insouciance. These most capable
people monopolized over the world's resources leaving the vast majority of
humans destitute, hopeless, burdened by hard labor for sustenance, and in some
cases famished. They chased around like mad men trying to buy up the planet.
Some of the mad men did so while repudiating their own mortality. Others
acknowledged their mortality and so they told themselves they would gormandize
while the feast was on the table. There had to be more than this.

She dressed him and herself warmly and when she was outside she realized that
she had overdone it. The temperature was already above freezing and the traces
of snow were evaporating tracelessly, later to be sucked up into a Heraclitus
shaped cloud. The odd weather, which was becoming less odd annually, concerned
her especially after the United Nations report that the world temperature would
rise two degrees over the next three decades. She knew, however, that there
wasn't "a damned thing" she could do about it. She supposed that she might be
able to stand in front of Cornell University with placards advocating that
human beings go back to being the hunters and gatherers from whence they came.
She could stand there like a madwoman denouncing the past 7000-10,000 years.
Nothing would come out of it but 12 hours of sitting in a jailhouse and then
paying a fine.

After waiting over forty minutes for the rare and irregularly timed buses to
come by within this small city, she got on a bus with her baby pouched onto her
back. A seat near a young man with a plain face who was thumping his foot to
the music of his portable radio was the only one left. She took it. She was
grateful to have it. Having to balance herself and a baby to the movements of a
bus was something she had mastered like a sport but it wasn't a preferable
hobby. Adagio liked the bounces but she doubted that he would care to bounce
off of a window. After the door of the bus was shut and the vehicle was
beginning to roll without any sudden speed it was rapped by a hand. The driver
stopped the bus and folded the door again. A woman around 20 years old entered.
She smiled and greeted Gabriele with diffident childishness after shouting her
name triumphantly to the back of the bus and by a wave of her hand. Then as the
vehicle picked up speed her expressions became more diffident and she stumbled
to the back of the bus. "What do I do?" she said. "I don't see anywhere to
sit."

"You'll have to stand," said Gabriele.

"What do I do?"

"Hold onto the railing," she scoffed.

Lily grabbed it and began to dangle there like a leaf on a tree. "I guess you
forgot me," she said timidly.

"No, you said that you would come in the morning. I thought maybe you had
decided against coming." Her expressions were hard. It wasn't her idea to get
this Rita/Lily person to come with her but she didn't own the services so she
couldn't tell her to not come. "Really, you know, it isn't for everyone, Lily"

"Rita," she said.

Gabriele could never empirically detect the existence of a second personality
that the girl purportedly had, and as such she could not believe that one
personality came out in manic stages and the other during depression. When the
Rita/Lily person called herself Rita and when she called herself Lily she was
both timid and fragile, and tended to lie or imitate language like a parrot
within her stages of depression. When she called herself Rita and when she
called herself Lily she was even a little timid and fragile within contumacious
manic fun. A month earlier she had contradicted herself by saying that she had
not been sexually abused when she was young and that the patriarchal abuse she
was "always talking about" was infrequent sexual abuse experienced as a
teenager. The abuser was also amorphous: at one time a stepfather and another
time a biological father. Gabriele again thought, "Once didn't she claim that
her mother and father would soon be experiencing their twenty-fifth wedding
anniversary? And yet there is a stepfather? What an interesting little liar."
These contradictions were performed consistently by both of the
"personalities." Furthermore, she talked of enjoyable times that she
experienced with her parents. These times seemed to be ongoing. At any rate she
spoke of them happily instead of looking onto happy but deceased memories
sadly. It didn't appear that emotional trauma or abuse was bedizened as sexual
abuse in a display to get others to empathize with her tattered past. It didn't
seem that she was fabricating a happy family life scenario like someone
extirpating weeds to plant flowers. That would be trauma- induced schizophrenia
that would not be attributed to a manic-depressive who was being prescribed
lithium. She claimed to have had a hysterectomy although neither childhood
molestation nor cancer was claimed as the culprit. Gabriele thought that having
advised Rita to go to a gynecologist once a year for a checkup might have
brought on this comment. Maybe the Rita/Lily person fabricated information to
keep a conversation ongoing. Maybe she needed continual conversation because it
blocked out the moods that were a catalyst for divergent and erroneous
perspectives and ideas. Gabriele's conjecture was that the split personality
was nothing but the Rita/Lily person's own way of justifying why she had shifts
in moods.

If she were sexually traumatized, it didn't come across with any more poignancy
than her reactions toward not knowing what to do when she could not find
anywhere to sit on the bus. She only became taciturn if she felt that too many
questions and too much scrutiny were being paid toward her statements. None of
the pieces added up. Gabriele thought that she did not know this person at all.
She thought that she did not know any person at anytime in her life really. A
person was never quite known. All one had were one's concoctions of plausible
scenarios about the person's history and how he or she might behave from
empirical personal experiences or what was witnessed when with others. It
wasn't the person. The fact that one never knew anything didn't bother her. It
was more of a mystery to walk around the planet in a loose blindfold.

"It isn't for everyone," Gabriele repeated.

"I want to go," said Rita. Will they tie me up until I make a vow of secrecy by
signing my allegiance in blood? Something like that was on TV."

"Hmm," said Gabriele. "One takes chances in this life for sure. Still, I'm
afraid it's more mundane-boring-- than that. You need to keep away from that TV
set, don't you think."

She giggled as if manic. "No spells?"

"No spells," said Gabriele, "and vegetarian recipes afterward. It is really
quite boring."

"It is just like any church?"

Gabriele thought of the Wicca services. They always reminded her of Catholic
masses but without the Eucharist. However, they tapped into a mystery of
spiritual forces without putting a human face on the creator or creation that
was continually reinventing itself with each new generation of flora and fauna.
She knew the guilt and fear of pouring oneself from the container of traditions
he or she was raised with. Most people needed to change containers to get any
perspective on how all of these beliefs were equal expressions of a wish for
more than one's silly temporal domain. Still, someone who was definitely
insecure and probably needed to project herself as crazy did not seem like
someone suited for an experience at Wicca. In Gabriele's judgment, Rita/Lily
was not in need of changing containers but rather, someone in need of finding
the liquid to put into a given container.

"Sort of," said Gabriele.

"They believe in God, don't they?"

"Heavens, you wondered whether they were devil worshipers a minute ago. Some
might believe in God and gods. I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't."

"And the devil?"

"No. No, I've been certain of that since I was 4 years old. People cause their
own evil."

"Why don't you believe in God?"

"The reason for not believing. The why," she spoke out loud although the
thoughts were really ones she meant to keep inside. She thought on this issue.
"Well, if my life is good-and I guess it is. I'm healthy, well-educated, have
food in my stomach and a roof over my head."

"And Adagio…your baby, Nathaniel"

"Him too," she sighed. "And my friendliness with you." It was often a stretch
to even say "friendliness" in association to the Rita/Lily person but she did
not know what else to call their association. "Well, if I am a happy
solipsistic person I might well believe in God and appreciate my dizzying
blessings but in doing this I'd be guilty of saying that this god cared about
me but didn't care for those he allowed to starve or be eaten by a cannibal or
forced into a predicament of having to jump out of a burning building-whatever.
I suppose he could care about some of us and not others, but wouldn't that
lower him to human levels? If I really believed in God, then this is the only
god there is; and yet to be such a god it is quite obvious that he or she is no
different than you or me…and I don't know about you, but I certainly can't
create the Earth and the universe no matter how hard I try, and believe me I
try." The baby began to scream. It pierced all the air of the bus. "I'll be
lucky if I make it to 90 and don't have to wear diapers. There is a chance he,
she, or it exists as a being that is not sympathetic about me or anyone else.
If he is this, he is so large and so eternal, with no sense of human time, that
a human life and its brief series of short-lived motions on one obscure planet
would be inconsequential. If so, he doesn't think about me any more than you
think about that last second you picked your nose. Yes, I'm watching." The
Rita/Lily giggled manically despite her depression. "Also, he isn't one I can
grasp so there isn't much sense in considering him. I'm just a fire ant
stinging anything that threatens me, cognizant of nothing least of all the man
that is there to squash me because of my sting. An ant might know about being
threatened but he knows nothing about the being that threatens him. So it is
with us and such a God." She could tell that the Rita/Lily person was not
understanding much of the conversation but her eyes seemed to register that she
was in a godless universe for fear had dilated her pupils.

Gabriele thought about this subject or quasi-subject of philosophy. She wasn't
even a philosopher and yet in a minute and a half she had formulated a treatise
and had proven it as much as was possible. She hadn't exactly proven that there
wasn't a god. She assumed that would take an additional three minutes. But she
had proven that it was not a worthwhile pursuit for humans to undertake.
Smoking marijuana from morning until wee hours of the night seemed a more
constructive use of one's faculties. She wondered how it was that Socrates
could lose himself for hours in a question that perplexed him when really all
he needed was just a few minutes.

"What did you eat today, Rita?"

"Lily."

"Whatever."

"I ate well."

"What?"

"Oh…" Lily said in a contemplative pose. A minute passed. Then, taking pride in
thinking of an answer that would satisfy Gabriele she said, "I did have an
apple…and I did have some peanut butter. That was good. Nutritious."

"Maybe it would be better if you went home to get something to eat. I don't
think you'd understand the implications of the ceremony anyhow."

"We are…we are still going, aren't we to…"

"The baby and I are going there," Gabriele interrupted, hoping to stop Lily
from saying the word "witch" on a public bus and relegating her life to strange
stares. "Maybe I'm wrong about God. I'm sure I am. What you can do for me right
now in my ignorance is to go home and think of different ways to discover him
like smelling a fragrant flower or putting coins into the Salvation Army tin
cans. If you were to hear someone preaching at you for two hours you would be
two hours from telling me all those ways to find God." Rita/Lily agreed and
began to get off of the bus. Gabriele got up and yelled toward her. " Wait a
second. Remember, you have to stand on the other side of the road to go home."
Rita/Lily smiled. Someone cared about her. Indeed there was a god.

Gabriele went to the service, which was held at the house of the new High
Priestess. However, being there, she found that the paternal yearning to
perform chants to Mother Earth and Father Sky a bit too much for her taste.
Tarot, crystals to ward off negative energy, the black attire, the candles, the
chants, and those god awful vegetarian recipes seemed outrageous. The only
dogma her contumacious mind could obey were her own ideas. Feeling at odds with
the day, she went home earlier than she had expected.




Chapter Sixteen


"He enjoys the pleasure. He is the man. The pleasure becomes the man. She is
wedged there in the sharp gravel of the alley littered with her videos. It is
good that she is there with the earth also digging in carbon to carbon. Face
juxtaposed to the trashcans, and mouth gagged with his strong hand that she
fears (hands that could twist a head and break a neck, and those that in
younger days and as a smaller size, had in fact snapped off the heads of
crawdads) she is paralyzed. She is obsequious to him, the man. Who would
dispute the naturalness of a woman being there for a man's pleasures? Who would
dispute the docile make of a woman to be ravaged? He thinks that even with
married couples the relationship is probably conceived by desperate thrusts in
a hole- thrusts of pleasure; thrusts against being denizen to one's isolated
sphere; thrusts against maternal domination when one was a boy; thrusts to have
some form of intimacy not related to the misinterpretations of language;
thrusts against loneliness; thrusts like the hands of a thrill seeking, dice
rolling gambler who enjoys the uncertainty on whether or not a conception would
take place; thrusts as copulative sports; thrusts to relieve tension; and
thrusts of aggression against the abstraction of nature that could efface the
memory of a man at any moment in sudden death. If family matters like the
intimacies of a man and his wife are restrained expressions of a man's
subconscious wishes, who could say that he is unnatural? Rape, not just sex, is
what he knows a man to really long for. It is as Genghis Khan believed: 'To
kill the villagers, rape their women, burn their villages, and run off with
their horses--this is the good life.'"

Sang Huin crumbled up the sheet of paper. Words were trapping him in their
clutter. He tried to use their thrust to be because they were all there was;
and yet as he tried to steer himself in them they were often nothing but bumper
cars obstructing his every move or regular cars piling onto each other in a
crash. He wanted to raze these walls of wrecked cars. Nathaniel would not know
of Genghis Khan. Besides, interesting as the thoughts might be, they weren't
applicable to Nathaniel unless he were to rewrite one of the earlier chapters.
How could he be raping the woman when he, Sang Huin, had written him in his
car, repressing his savage impulses like a good social creature? Also if he,
Sang Huin, were to interpolate such ideas, he told himself, he would be like
all those other writers who took pride in writing their salacious pieces. From
the point of instigating pain on the giver of life and the bloody cut of the
umbilical cord soon came the knowledge of mortality in the death of pets and
vicissitudes and the ephemeral nature of all things in childhood friendships
thwarted by the mutability of its members. Its hormonal promptings to socialize
more for meat to satisfy hungers, the voracious appetite for human flesh,
fornications to maximize its pleasures and gain its intimacies, its ambitions
toward money, power and status within this ticking of limited time, the deaths
of family members, its own gauche stumbling attempts at family as an auxiliary
and then an outright replacement for the deterioration of this first family,
and it (equally so in so-called saints and laymen) was graphic. It was
salacious. It was violent. It was the desperation of one in mortality who
wanted something for his short time on the planet. And of art, what was it
actually? It was not so much a reflection of the self in still waters as a
reflection of something deeper sensed in the rhythms of the falling rain and
the movements of fictional others in plotless lives plodding along as his was.
As another graphic creation appealing to the hedonistic pleasure receptors of
the brain he would have more readers if the violence were to extremes. Still,
did he really want to write something that others might imitate unwisely? He
laughed. This was a frivolous concern when he knew that nothing he might write
would be publishable.

And yet macabre as it was, he wanted to know the reason for his sister's death
through his creations. He still wanted to know what had brought her to that
park, if it had been her boss who had done this to her or a serial killer, and
the motivation. One could read profiles of serial killers on the Internet. He
had done so; but even if a serial killer had done this not all of them were the
same. He did not want a generalization full of inaccuracies. He wanted to know
the real person and what had caused him to act as he did. He wanted to know of
deep repentance, and deep psychological travail on the part of the man- whoever
this man was. Earlier he had been so certain that the accused had perpetrated
the act but then a jury had acquitted this person or quasi-person and as time
went on he did not know anything.

He went back to the making of kimchee maundoo. The flour had already been made
into dough that he had cut into pieces. Now he inserted the cooked pork and the
kimchee and pinched the dough of these cabbage dumplings into shape. He boiled
a little bit of hot water in his rice cooker and set them in there to steam. He
felt so restless. He wanted to be raptured from lonely nights that followed
hard work in this convenience store or for Seong Seob to call. Every time he
now called his friend's cellular telephone number there was no answer. Seong
Seob had a program that would instantaneously change letters into sound every
time the computer dialed into a server but every time he e- mailed him there
was no response. "So little did one know a person," he thought. Three days had
gone by and he did not know of any altercation that could have caused this
absconding. His mind was vertiginous. There was nothing worse than an
inexplicable rupture of a friendship, he thought to himself; and yet he knew
that this was not so. North Korean children were starving to death in a
faltering totalitarian regime and here he was playing in his personal life, and
in so doing, getting hurt. There were a lot worse things but a lot of good too.
There was good everywhere. It was in the atoms themselves: in the steam rising
above the rice cooker or the feel of the hot pipes under the floor, which
warmed his bare feet in the cold room. Man might miss the mark of kindness but
sometimes man tried for kindness since kindness was in the atoms although
self-preservation was in the selfish genes. This good was readily visible in
simple pleasures when one was sagacious enough to appreciate them like a child.
But Seong Seob would not leave his mind. What could have happened? Was this
friend hit by a car? After all, he was blind. Sung Huin did not know any of his
friends or relatives, so there was no one to call. Did this friend become busy?
Did Seong Seob decide that the relationship was not for him? Had he, Sung Huin,
personally said anything at all to cause this? He reexamined their last
conversations. The only thing he could remember was that he mentioned to Seong
Seob his own need to make more friends, but that wasn't meant to negate the
friendship that he had. He didn't know. He turned on the television to obstruct
his thoughts.

"Oh, no," thought Sang Huin. His customers had talked about buildings on fire
in New York. He had been so busy all night that their words and horrified
expressions hadn't penetrated him. Moslems (the speculation was Al Queida) had
flown two jets into the World Trade Center in Manhattan. The American military
channel was showing CNN coverage of people jumping out of hundred story
windows. Their bodies were flailing against the winds as if they were having
second thoughts. He sat down on the edge of his bed. The quandaries of his
personal life vanished and he became numb. He kept saying to himself, "Oh, my.
This is the empirical evidence that there is no god." Solipsistic for a second,
he then thought, "It is as if God is proving to me that he doesn't exist-that I
am right in what I recorded in the Gabriele and Lily chapter." The incident
itself shouldn't have been altogether shocking. America was an arrogant
country. It thought that it was the godly power that was allowed to prosper
while God subjected heathen people to dire circumstances. America felt it was
entitled to bully all nations and befriend Israel beyond human decency to keep
the Christian constituents, brethren of Israel, happy. Its political
engagements were for its own economic and military hegemony instead of fairness
and the greater good. It would be understandable, he thought, how the Moslems
might think of this as a reckoning of justice. In ways it was no surprise. The
real surprise was that there was no large palm of God out there hovering like a
cloud capturing these falling people within it. What was incredible was that
the power that would make a universe couldn't capture a few humans into its
clouds like nets. Numb, he knew without thinking of himself that this numbness
would continue on for many weeks and, to less extreme levels, for months and
years. It was an eternal sting. When he did look at his manuscript again to
expound upon it he thought, "Gabriele, sitting in the living room and waiting
for a customer, jotted down some notes about how to live godly in a godless
universe. However, at present her time to really write it was being usurped by
Adagio." Then he deleted it.




Chapter Seventeen


Out of the bus, she trudged back home in early evening through the marshland of
the melted snow that was refreezing treacherously. Then she detoured a block
west from the trailer park to the apartment complex where Rita/Lily resided.
Gabriele heard popular music playing in Lily's apartment. She knocked.

"Uh...just a second," said Lily. Gabriele heard the movement of papers and
magazines being suddenly assorted and things being scooted.

"Who is it?"

"It's me. I don't give a flying f-- what your apartment looks like!"

"G-a-b-r-i-e-l-e!" Lily said the name like music. "Please wait a minute,
please," she said with childish delicacy.

For a few minutes Gabriele waited and listened to the rustling. During a minute
of that time she was interested because the rustling was the rustling of a
mind, and the mind was interesting indeed. "I'm leaving, Lily. In the bus you
dropped one of your gloves from a pocket in your coat. I'm leaving it right
here." The radio music suddenly changed to classical music with a National
Public Radio DJ. Gabriele waited a couple more minutes. "Goodbye," said
Gabriele.

"Oh. I'll come over and get them." Gabriele did not know what that meant. She
heard the unlocking of the door bedizen with many bolts. The door opened.
Gabriele handed her the glove without eye contact and turned away. "I'm
working," she said coldly.

"Thanks so much. Thank you, Gabriele...well I could fix you some coffee if
you'd come in...well, I'll -- " Gabriele was already walking away and did not,
by choice, register the rest except for that redundant word, "please." The word
was projected in such a melancholic and extinguished tone that it caused her
German heart to thaw for human suffering. After descending a couple flights of
stairs she paused, thought, and then returned to the apartment. She knocked on
the door and Lily opened it while trembling and in tears.

"Are you okay?" asked Gabriele.

"I'm nutty. Don't hate me. Please don't hate me."

"I don't."

"Everybody turns away from me. Why wouldn't they? I wash the same plate over
and over again for an hour. I just want to not be hated. I just need a friend.
I'm so scared like I'm falling in a dark pit and no one cares about me."
Gabriele knew. The dark pit was the anxiety of cognizant man who knew of
imminent death. It was an anxiety exuding into the bleeding of loneliness and
only interaction with others repressed that anxiety. That was for normal
people. For those others who did not fit easily into normality or categories of
abnormality and who could not capture or claim the illusion of self the
loneliness was all the more inexorable.

"I haven't turned away," said Gabriele. Lily hugged her clingingly. Gabriele,
not knowing how to really touch her, patted her on the back. She felt as if her
body were being traversed by a colony of ants; and yet as repugnant as it felt
being hugged in such a way, she kept this feeling enclosed deep in her inner
self for the purpose of going beyond it and perhaps illustrating some sense of
human kindness. "When you do obsessive acts it isn't exactly nutty. You are
trying to seek order in past trauma. It's okay. It will be okay."

Gabriele let her sob on her back until the catharsis was complete. She then
looked at her once again and a restoration of manic energy was taking place.
Still bleak and baggy from tears, Rita/Lily began to smile. Gabriele thought
about how vulnerable the human condition was. Rita/Lily was an extreme case but
the vulnerability was ubiquitous in the species. She knew that it stretched in
a diminutive way even into her self. "And you know something," said Gabriele.
"You are probably the only person in New York State to have germless plates.
Yours also have an extra coating of soap on them to kill any forthcoming germs
that might land upon them. That's good especially with Saddam Hussein on the
loose. Visitors won't mind eating with you at all." Lily released her grasp of
Gabriele's figure and laughed manically.

"Sit down, sit down my good friend," said Lily. "Let me hold the baby."
Gabriele released him from the pouch and held him. "No, I've got him." She sat
down. She did not trust her friendly acquaintance holding the baby. Also, she
disliked those eyes, which were like those of her aunt: eyes of needing to be a
mommy. A responsibility toward any child was to raise him or her to be a good
and independent creature. Motherhood wasn't for gaining a purpose in life nor
for having adoring beings who would bring one a lifetime of "love" as well as a
crutch to get through life's lonely void. Real love, if it were possible,
should not be self-serving. No sooner had she thought this than Rita/Lily said,
"I wish I had a baby."

"Believe me, they aren't toys. If they were toys I would have returned this one
months ago and gotten my money back. They are needy human beings. They are a
lot of thankless hard work and believe me you don't want one. If you think you
are nutty now, a baby would make shambles out of your biochemistry and throw
you off the deep end if being in love with a man didn't do it. Besides, this
one is too temperamental."

"He looks angry now, doesn't he? I've never seen an angry baby before."

"Huh…good observation. I've been thinking the same thing. I had never seen an
angry baby until I had this one. He was yelling so horribly in the WICCA
service that I had to gag him with a pacifier. He keeps spitting out this thing
like a missile. Who can blame him? I often do the same thing myself." She knew
that in reality a baby couldn't be angry for to have anger one needed a self.
Since self was the product of thought and thought was the product of language
her creature could not be angry per se. He was feeling discomfort. That was
true. But there wasn't a possibility of Adagio thinking of himself as a bona
fide individual that was distinct from other selves nor was it possible for him
to hate outside forces for the indignities they caused him (although it was she
who changed the diapers so she wasn't sure what indignities there could be).
Still, it was indisputable that he appeared to be angry.

She thought of her Aunt Peggy revolving pathetically around all the
self-centered members of her family like the Viking orbiter. Peggy had even
orbited around Gabriele's parents gregariously. Gabriele had been excluded from
that whole bunch. With the exception of Peggy to some limited degree, she had
been banished to the companionship of her books and to learn of greatness away
from their commotion. In childhood and adolescence she kept the invisible
pacifier in her mouth. Then she went away and when she rarely returned on brief
visits she was as obdurate as a Nazi. Her rebellion had not been a disgorging
of the pacifier, like Nathaniel, but a subtle insurrection that would not cause
Peggy's tears. She was partial to calculated and unemotional reactions. They
were less theatrical. Their performances had more reality and substance. Also,
such planned and subtle rebellions never brought emotional counterattacks to
make one feel guilty. Now that she was a Mommy herself, orbiting her life
around her own beloved, they could not accuse her of abandoning family.
Photographs of Nathaniel sent in the mail once every few weeks seemed to be
enough to get them off her back.

"Hello, little Nathaniel. Maybe he understands us and knows we are talking
about him. Do you think so? Do you think that could be making him angry?"

"Be careful. He's got a tooth now. You don't want him to bite you. Did you eat
anything nutritious earlier?"

"Of course."

"No Ramen noodles this time?"

"No. A salad-a wonderful nutritious salad and some nice nutritious lithium.
Like you're always saying, I need to keep away from chocolate and…what do you
call them…oh, yeah, carbohydrates. And there are those bad cholesterols too.
You are smart. Like you say, you keep me from bouncing off of the walls. That's
what you always tell me. 'Sit down and don't bounce off of the walls, kid. I've
already got one bouncing baby. I don't need a second.'" She gagged her mouth
with her hand and then disgorged her laughter.

"Okay, okay. No more mocking of me," said Gabriele with a bashful smile.

"Yes, I did what you told me to do, Gabriele. I had a salad." Her voice leapt
like a spark of electricity on a coil. "I followed your directions. I always
follow your directions. You are my good friend-my best friend. I always want to
follow your directions." Suddenly it dragged in a moment of unpleasant
thoughts. "But when I ate it I was first thinking about you. I was thinking
that maybe you didn't like me. I mean, you sent me away. You didn't want me to
go with you." Gabriele frowned. She felt bored and she didn't want to rehash
this petty incident. She wanted to go back home. "You've got good reasons. It
doesn't matter. And since I came back I've been thinking about all the
different things you can see God in. Do you remember? You told me to do that
for you. I'm still working on it."

"Gee, thanks," said Gabriele indifferently. "Well, gotta go."

"Please wait. Here's what I want to tell you. You'll like hearing this." She
knew that to some degree she needed to interest Gabriele in order to have her
compassion. She feigned a smile but from her manic energy it changed and became
real. Anecdotes were ready to disgorge from her mouth. "When I was eating the
nutritious salad I started to feel lonely. You know how lonely I can get with
my head thumpin' at thinking what my grandfather did to me all drunk and
pressing against me like he often did -- so I tried to call Gary-you know the
guy in the orange trailer -- but there was no answer. I wanted to tell him I
was sorry about everything that happened this morning -- Oh, you do not know
what happened this morning. You've gotta hear what happened this morning! I
wanted to say I was sorry but I wasn't sorry, you know, because what happened
was so funny and it was just like a blessing because I prayed for it, you know.
I prayed for this type of a thing and then it happened. You don't know what
happened this morning-Oh, you've got to hear it. Do you want to hear
everything?" She began an ongoing laughter as she narrated her anecdote,
pausing in certain moments to release her manic chortles. "He came by this
morning-you should have seen him-'Rita, my darling,' he said-and I said,
'Rita's not home. Lily is here so maybe you should come back when Rita
returns.' 'When will she return?' 'Next year,' I told him. I told him next
year. I guess I was playing with him…what do you say…flirting -- I don't know.
Maybe it was a little naughty, but men like that sort of thing, don't you think
so Gabriele? I said, 'She's starting up a cosmetic company in Africa.' He said,
'Oh, that's too long to wait. I like both of you. You're both Italian
sweeties.' So then I invited him in. He kicked off his shoes, rubbing his feet
together like he was trying to make fire, wiggling toes on the footstool. Those
feet were so cute in his white socks so dirty on the soles of his feet. I guess
that sounds strange, doesn't it -- thinking a man's dirty socks were beautiful,
but they were. I think so. Maybe I'm crazy, but I was thinking so then-his
dirty souls. Do you think so, Gabriele. Then he said something like, "Before
long, I'm gonna actually believe there's a second girl. You've got that
influence over me, you know. Africa?" he laughed like someone who doesn't
believe something somebody says. I told him that I guessed that they needed
cosmetics in Africa. He said that he was sure they did. "Which country," he
asked. "Timbuktu," I said. "Is that so?," he said. He was playing with me. "Too
bad I never get to see both of you at the same time. Nothing better for a man
than boobsy twins." I fixed him breakfast and when we were eating some pancakes
--- actually black round things because I burnt them but he ate them like they
were still pancakes -- he was lookin' at my boobs. 'What big boobs you have,'
he said. 'Each one jiggles independently like two girls talking and dancing at
a disco. They seem to be talking to me.' 'Don't look at them. It makes me
nervous,' I said. 'How can I not?' he said. 'Look at my face when you talk. Not
down there or I'll think you are a dirty boy' 'I am,' he said. I said to him
that he was like the soles of his feet. "You are like the soles of your feet.
You have dirty souls.' Then he persuaded me to take off my shirt so that he
could hear them better. He wanted to pull off my bra but I wouldn't allow him
to do it - - not at the kitchen table, not anywhere ever. He said that we could
be more private in the bedroom and I said no. 'Come on, sweetie,' he said. I
did want to kiss him-I've done that before…just that, a little. I didn't want
to get caught kissing or being without a shirt and near a man. And he kept on
saying, 'Come on, sweetie." So I went back there with him but only after he
agreed that we would just kiss. Anyhow, in the bedroom he stripped into his
underpants. I was so scared and I kept telling him, 'No, No, I don't want that.
We can just kiss' but his fingers kept going up there and down there but never
around me in a nice way. Then we heard the door open and I knew it was one of
the Semi- independent counselors so I had to hide him in the closet. The
counselor stayed for over an hour and when I opened up the closet there he was
with a round wet patch on his underwear. He'd peed his underwear. I laughed and
pointed at his hole."

"I hope you told him that with a hole he was now the woman," Gabriele
interjected. Rita began laughing so hard that she choked on her saliva. "You
know, all of us have to be cautious -- not just with men and sex (both of which
are confusing and should be off limits TO YOU) but everything and everybody.
You have to realize that in everything people use each other even though it
isn't altogether bad. Think of it this way: if they don't use each other they
would have no use of them. You just need to define if that person's use in
yourself is your use in him, her, them, whatever. If they are the same, a
relationship can ensue. That's my idea."

"Oh, you're so smart. I wish I was smart like that. Do you need to use me?"
asked Rita/Lily with hopeful childish innocence.

Gabriele could not think of a use for her. Simple compassion had plagued her
here. She wanted to be home "Sure," she lied. "Something like that. Of course
you are one of my few friendly people." She looked at her watch. "My customer
will come in another hour, Lilian." Names shifted like tectonic plates. "I
really should leave and put Adagio to bed." She knew that Rita was still
wondering to herself why Gabriele did not teach her these German shoulder
massage and acupuncture techniques so that she could have her own customers.
She knew that Rita yearned for a vocation and a bit of pocket money.
Rita/Lily's thoughts could be read easily from her eyes. She was so ingenuous
and without guile or calculation except when men made her nervous. It was for
this that Gabriele actually liked her.

Rita picked up the pacifier that had just flown out of the screaming child and
handed it to Gabriele. "I'll make some hot coffee before you and Baby Nathaniel
go out into the cold."

"Oh, all right," said Gabriele. She was not capitulating to outside pressure
but only to the sense that she could not entirely part from the discomfort of
compassion, which was the only good trait of man outside his creativity and
intelligence. Compassion was half rational. The rest of its composition was
that other version of love, the highest of all primordial feelings. Compassion,
according to Gabriele, "flared up at the damnedest of times," and as
inconvenient as it was to have it, she knew better than to forsake it. She had
her distasteful coffee in a soapy cup, and once it was drunk she was pleased
that by her compassionate act she had made herself into a better creature; but
she knew that enough was enough. She needed to treat herself to compassion by
"getting out of Dodge".

In the trailer she took a shower to prepare herself for relieving a customer;
finished her session with him; laughed uncontrollably at his angry grievance
over the fact that in zipping up his pants with one hand and reaching the other
hand over to play with the little boy's fingers, the baby had bit him; and then
she had another shower. In the second shower she kept remembering his words,
"You'd better put that kid ina cage if you want any men to step over'ere. I'd
better get me a tetanus shot." Her own laughter was so inordinate that it soon
gave her a headache. After swallowing some aspirin, she began her other job.
She preferred making a living on weekends to the rest of the week since it was
so much shorter. Outside a little physical prostitution, on weekends she would
freelance her "bull shit sketches"(her "mental prostitution) that went with the
little "asinine" sentiments that Hallmark Greeting Cards sent to her; and then
the week's work would be, for the most part, over. At least she terminated the
workweek after Sunday. She loathed "prostituting" herself "to assholes" but the
way she looked at it, everything was a form of prostitution from the time that
one washed and blow-dried her hair that was cut in such a way that was
aesthetically pleasing to "Western farts controlling economic institutions" to
rolls that bound human thoughts in its limited pages, the social interaction
one engaged in to stay sane, and the tricks one did to get one's little bowl of
Alpo dog food. It was her belief that physical prostitution was less of a
deleterious moral injustice to oneself than any other kind. Done with a condom,
its physical discomfort was also fairly safe and brief. Done enough times with
strangers one did not care for, it serendipitously shaped her into a regular
Buddha reducing her desires and appetites.

She cut the list of maudlin mottoes into myriad strips; put paper clips around
each strip, and then attached each one around a tarot card. She lit the four or
five candles that were on the kitchen table; shuffled the deck; drank four cans
of beer quickly; and then mumbled a bitching mumble about having to prostitute
herself. With her visual perception more mobile and her brain in a buzz, she
unevenly laid out the whole of this partial motto-mottled deck in a larger than
Celtic layout beginning with the cards patterned out as a cross; meditated on
each motto; and then drew her designs. The first motto that she encountered was
"Happy Birthday To A Grandson Who Has A Wonderful Personality, Good Looks And A
Fine Character. I Guess There Are Some Things That Are Just Hereditary."
Suddenly an image flashed through her mind and she began to draw. For a moment
she was completely stunned by what she was drawing, and completely incredulous
that this was coming from her mind.

As she became aware of bearing this unique, full, and outrageous creation so
effortlessly, she fell into hysterical laughter at the sketch of an old woman
in a party hat, who smiles on sweetly as her grandson, abandoning all of the
packages surrounding him, lifts her skirt curiously. But then for the
non-pornographic version she made a young man with a girlfriend bound
hand-in-hand and a second hand reaching out to his grandmother who stands near
the birthday cake. By drawing this second version she was providing Hallmark
with sentimental froth for those who did not see that humans were replaceable
in one's own life and that the whole of a life, itself, was more froth splashed
up in the washing of time. On a deeper albeit subliminal level she was stating
that one could go forward in time and still retain childish affections. She
knew it was not so. Only minds like Parmenides and Plato (a mind that she had)
could conceptualize changeless eternity within the entity. Such unique
individuals did not need to reminisce about the past. She never kept a
photograph album apart from her corpus of sketches. She didn't want to be one
of the masses. They were like school children trying to find their loose-leaf
homework that had been taken from their hands by the winds and scattered behind
them.

After she picked up the twentieth Tarot card to begin another preliminary
sketch, she became aware of the fact that the flickering candles were making
her extremely tired. She knew that being tired all the time was more from the
monotony of being a single parent and had little to do with a full night of
prostitution that she hadn't even yet begun to complete. For a moment she
blamed a woman's susceptibility to become a mother for her blas? existence but
it had been her choice to remain pregnant and it was her choice to raise this
being whom she could have easily given away for adoption. Likewise, it was her
choice to not seek employment. She had striven for isolation; but she hadn't
done it with absolute perfection. She had given birth to a child and driven him
into her shadows although she might have done it all alone. She knew that she
had that capacity. Human society was for her a boring fair ground with the same
quick-thrill rides and the same clones in freak shows. The war of the "Kuwaiti
theatre" and Saddam Hussein were freak shows that Americans entertained
themselves with from their television shows. These freak shows bored and
sickened her and yet she listened to war broadcasts from her radio with the
gluttony of other news junkies. She liked radio. She could imagine news more
accurately without the visual images.

Apart from what important minds could vaguely construe to be permanent truth,
human society was bereft of ontological meaning; the West was on a collision
path with the environment and Islamic extremists; more and more societies
possessed weapons of mass destruction that had the potential force that was
beyond her imagination to conceive; and all societies were full of lies and
manipulating fables disguised as truths-their own Moseses parting their own Red
Seas. To be God's appointed bully of world events and His proponent of
capitalism and democratic tyranny was the American myth. She often asked
herself how she could even take on a janitorial job and sweep away the dirt of
a capitalistic institution. How could she do functions that would keep it nice
and operative looking? How could she empty its trash, and change its burnt out
light bulbs when that institution was one of a billion which would bring about
the destruction of the environment, the vitiation of curiosity and innovation
among pampered capitalists, and often exploited third world workers. How could
she contribute to society when she did not believe in it?

The telephone rang. "Hello, Lily"

"Rita speaking. How did you know it was me?"

"I'm a supersensory," said Gabriele.

"What is that?"

"I'm a psychic-witch, Rita."

"Really? Witching allows you to know who is on the phone?"

"I'm just joking."

"Oh. Am I disturbing you?"

" No, actually I was wanting something to keep me from falling asleep. What can
I do for you?"

"Gary called. He wants to see me tonight"

"It is nearly 10. You aren't supposed to have visitors after 10. Isn't that
what those group home counselors of yours tell you?"

"He wants me to go to the convenience store and talk to him. He wants to meet
me now. I told him I was in another call and that I'd call him at the number on
his pay phone booth. I don't know what to say to him."

"I think you want to see him, don't you?"

"I want and I don't want."

"So you want to stop wanting to see him."

"Right. What do I do?"

"I don't know. He'll only look as he does for a short period of years. If you
really want to not want a man picture him in what will be his permanent
state-the broken skeleton of another hundred and fifty years. That always works
for me."

"Oh, thank you, Gabriele."

"Sure, Lily --- Rita/Lily. Bye now." She hung up the telephone and turned on
the radio to keep herself awake. As she was listening to the classical music of
Gabrieli's Canzoni and her own internal voice gabrieleishly, she left the table
and began to warm the bottle containing the baby's formula. She fixed herself a
large salad. She ate it and a piece of cold leftover pizza while feeding the
baby the bottle of milk. As she was doing this she heard the news announcement
of Saddam Hussein deliberately flooding the gulf with oil and igniting some of
the Kuwaiti oil fields. Her mind was filled with the painful images of a whole
ecosystem made into black and tarred corpses. She put her hand over her mouth
and ran into the bathroom. She felt like vomiting and attempted to do so but
nothing came up. It was nothing but heartburn from the pizza. She sat down and
stayed emotionless in her director's chair until the heartburn subsided. And
once it had she fell asleep.

She dreamt of her Aunt Peggy. In the dream Peggy and Gabriele stepped inside a
grocery store. Both were wearing oxygen masks. All the visible items of the
store that were on the shelves were locked away behind glass. All of the
cashiers, grocery stockmen, and other personnel were dead at their stations.
Gabriele was around the age of five. She hid her face in Peggy's dragging
skirt.

"That's no way for a young lady to act," said Peggy as she reached over to the
shelves, and conducting pantomime, bent her hand as if it were grasping an
item, and then put it into a non-existent cart. She was trying to save money by
purchasing invisible items. Stinginess was what had made them rich all of these
years. "What is wrong with you?" condemned the aunt. Gabriele pulled away from
her, once again realizing that only in reticent and hardened expressions would
her inner sensitivities be fortified from the real world. Looking at her aunt's
hardened expressions toward death that abounded everywhere she realized that
she should not expect anything new and kind in the state of Kansas. After all,
humans were adaptive animals. The world was survival of the fittest, and man
surviving within the perils of his environment. Why should society be
structured differently? Why should being in Kansas under the auspices of an
aunt be different? She glanced down at the corpses at her feet unflinchingly
and then over to where Peggy was supposedly picking up vegetables and fruit.
She could see decapitated Turkish heads locked away behind glass. They were on
the refrigerated shelf where the cantaloupes should have been. The more she
looked at the Turkish heads the less impact they made upon her. They were no
different than any other form of food.

"They are always locking up the cantaloupe. I don't know why they do that,"
complained the aunt. They moved toward where the pastry section should have
been.

The aunt used gestures as if she were putting a large cake into an invisible
cart. "They don't seem to have a chocolate cake with vanilla icing. It is
vanilla and vanilla or chocolate and chocolate. Now, you remember that no one
is to eat any of this cake until the dinner guests have not only arrived but
have finished eating their dinner and any business conversation is completed.
Some important people have scheduled a meeting with your uncle so they'll be at
your birthday party. To wine and dine them, as our family should, is very
little to do when they can help bring more business to your uncle. Don't pout
over your friends not being allowed to come. Your uncle wouldn't have much luck
with business if children were tearing through the place. No pouting about the
fact that we can't find a chocolate cake with vanilla icing either. Cakes like
this don't have any taste so I can't see how you'd know the difference if it
hadn't been for you shopping with me now."

After they walked around the store using gestures of picking up items, they
walked up to the cash register. Gabriele thought, "They're dead!" but she
remained taciturn. Peggy put the invisible items on the belt of the counter
that remained still. Peggy tilted up her chin toward nothing and smiled
affectedly as if she were responding to a nonexistent cashier. "I'm very well.
Thank you," said Peggy. Then her face tilted back toward the invisible items
and the smile deadened. Gabriele felt the slapping of her back. Peggy put her
mouth toward Gabriele's ear. She whispered, "Stand up straight. I don't want
you to look like one of them" (meaning the cashier that was supposedly ringing
up the purchases although her corpse was obviously rotting on the floor with
maggots swarming in and out of it.

"Give me that candy bar," scolded Peggy. Gabriele looked at her right hand. It
was curled with the fingers almost touching as if she had a candy bar in her
hand. "You thought you would put a smart one on me. Hide it behind the laundry
soap when I'm not looking. Nothing gets by me."

On their way home through the empty streets they quickly arrived at their
neighborhood when suddenly Peggy honked on a horn and slammed on the
brakes-ding-dong. A young Korean boy and his sister were on the road.
Ding-dong. The girl had run in front of the car in an attempt to get the ball
that her brother had overthrown. It was too late. The car slammed against her
body. Peggy Peggy Ding-dong Peggy Ding-dong.

Gabriele woke to the sound of the doorbell. At first her mind tried to grasp a
concrete image that could go with the sound. Then she knew it, and the cause of
it. "Shit!" she said out loud. Now did she once again have to prostitute
herself in the physical domain with some stranger at the door? She didn't want
to work. People worked for money and they worked to escape the void. They
abhorred the void that they would fall into if engaged in inaction. There were
times that doing nothing did nothing for her either. There were days when she
was a little lost in her lack of valid employment. But more times than not
being completely paralyzed on what she needed to do or would like to do with
her day was advantageous. Doing nothing but sitting in her living room staring
up at the walls and letting the void overtake her made her all the wiser. She
seemed to be unlike the rest of humanity who had to desperately see someone or
go somewhere to escape slipping into themselves.

She did not want to see her clients any more than she wanted to return to work
as a staff psychologist in a high security prison on the outskirts of Ithaca-a
good job that she had taken upon graduating from Rice University and had
brought her here. Eight months doing that had been enough. Eight weeks in a
following job as an assistant director of a girl's home babysitting "women
creatures" who, gaining their freedom at the age of 18 perpetuate the
"classless undergrowth of society" had been worse than the prisoners. Girls and
prisoners were often like comparing rotten apples and rotten oranges. There
were times when she thought that the prisoners had been worse. Their sexual
man-on-the-make innuendos had often frustrated parole assessments. In contrast,
eight weekends with her clients (give or take a weekend) was a lesser
prostitution. By the fifth ringing of the doorbell she decided to answer it so
that it would stop ringing.

Two of them stood there: men. She knew she had an appointment with one client,
but here were two of them. She gave a seductive smile and then informed them
that she would only allow one of them at a time into her domain. The other
would have to wait in the vehicle until his buddy came out. As one of them came
in she thought to herself that she was really performing an important social
function. Being a prison psychologist or a girl's group home supervisor had
been paperwork jobs. The positions had not helped anyone. Here, at a discount
since she was not beautiful, she relieved men of aggressive tendencies and
stress. They were less likely to beat up on their wives or open fire in a
McDonald's Restaurant as a consequence. She even argued to herself that by her
service she was a bit like the Buddha who claimed that one should take the
middle of the road. To her, that was the Buddha's tacit endorsement that a
little bit of prostitution was needed to sustain oneself physically although it
should never be taken to excesses.




Chapter Eighteen


Within the relationship he had not even been tempted to wander in the
labyrinths of dark hallways of bathhouses in the hope of stumbling across that
perfect form. There had been less discontent even if the passionate response
had been the same. The suicidal risk-taker drawn to darkness, that
relinquishing to the self-consumption of shadows, had been somewhat tamed. But
now with this partner gone Sang Huin's mind was slipping back into decadence.
Meandering and not feeling that the ground one walked on was the least bit
stable, desperate yearnings prompted him to find pleasure and hope in appetites
that swelled as obsessions, burst, and were quickly gone no different than the
instinctual promptings that were within the dumbest of animals. He hadn't yet
gone back to his desperate habits of bathhouses and the R- rated petting in the
gay movie theatres of conservative Soul but he could still sense himself
slipping away.

To have the monogamous prototype of a gay couple for others to emulate there
needed to be something giving it at least the suggestion or illusion of stable
ground. And yet there was no higher entity to suggest such a bonding. There
were no symbolic marriage certificates suggesting that society and the creator
of the universe gave their implicit endorsement of such mergers to which logic
would say that they would be no more preoccupied with than a man the mating
habits of a rat in a city park. Also, within this alternative channel of one's
sexual energy there were no children to rear, not that children remained such
forever. Instead, for one who was gay there were only appetites and one's
erratic but less illusionary emotional responses as the substance of a
relationship. These were one's only sense of being in a gay relationship and as
such they were the only compasses to find one's way around. In some ways it was
worse than a bathhouse labyrinth of complete darkness for being in a
relationship of this nature was not walking around lost and trying to find the
perfect form. It was being disgorged in passionate love for another human being
and only this--this spray of molecules, which lasted as long as the spray. That
is not to say that heterosexual couples did not experience the sense that these
foundations of relationships, family, and reality could never be shaken. They
too were sentient beings. They too knew that they were constructing homes in
the San Andreas Fault Line. The shaking was quite palpable but what could they
do other than pretend that what they were creating was forever? They too felt
the rumblings of the separating earth that they stood on. Had it not been
signatures on tenuous pieces of paper and the responsibilities of children who
again would not be such forever more of them, thought Sang Huin, would feel as
he did. What he was experiencing, he told himself, was the exemplification of
the human condition itself and so he comforted himself that he was not strange.

One evening on his free day when the cello would not play for him anything
other than just notes and Gabriele was nothing but words of clutter like the
dirty socks he seemed to strew across his room, he tried to avoid the callings
of desperation and the wish to escape his lonely malaise by changing a few
florescent light bulbs that had been flickering in the convenience store. He
was changing the second bulb on the ladder, absconding from his temptations to
go to a sauna, when he heard a flurry of tapping as if the limbs of a tree were
knocking against a window. It was a tapping or a light knocking. He got down
from the ladder and followed it into his room. He opened the door and there was
Saeng Seob. Sang Huin's bereaved mind had already buried him as one more corpse
of friendship that had amassed in a huge burial hill since early childhood. He
did not know what to say.

"Can I come in?" asked Seong Seob.

"You came all the way here by yourself?" asked Sang Huin.

"I'm blind but I'm not ignorant of how to tell a taxi driver an address," said
Saeng Seob.

"Sure, come in," said Sang Huin indifferently. He paused. "Where have you been?
I didn't know what happened to you. I didn't know if you were hurt. I didn't
have a telephone number to call anyone and ask about you. I didn't-"

"I was busy," said Saeng Seob.

Sang Huin thought about leaving this idea alone. He thought about just letting
such a topic of discourse die there without comment. The wisp of air and the
positioning of the tongue to begin, "So, what do you want with me" was at the
roof of his mouth.

"Maybe we should move in together," said Saeng Seob.

"Here?" asked Sang Huin.

"I don't know. Somewhere."

"My job here means that I have to live here alone."

"You have a college education from America. You shouldn't be wasting yourself
working at a convenience store. Go back to what you were doing before. I can
get you private lessons. It is Seoul. There is gold in them there hills."

Sang Huin laughed. He felt at home within this American Hillbilly
colloquialism. "All right," he said; and so this was what they did. They stayed
together that night and then looked for an apartment the next morning. And then
a year passed in living together: Seong Seob finding jobs for him as one might
find errands for schoolboys. There wasn't gold in the hills but there was
plenty of silver and paper to come into such wealthy homes bringing to families
and sometimes their businesses pure American English in the mouth of a Korean.
And each morning, exuded from the little time not consumed in a personal life,
a quasi-professional life, sleep, and various bodily mandates, he worked on
Gabriele. He found it interesting that their two worlds were now converging in
the respect that she was taking care of a baby at the time of the first Gulf
War with Iraq and he seemed to be living at the inception of the second one
that had even more of a chance of exploding into something quite large and
horrid within the presence or ghost of Osama Bin Laden.

One day they went to visit a boy of one of those families, who also had the
name of Seong Seob. He was suffering at Soul's Yonsei University Hospital. The
boy's mother, who was in the hallway, grabbed Sang Huin's hand and
enthusiastically took him into the room. The boy's legs and feet were in casts
and elevated. His face, bored and withdrawn, brightened slightly as he said his
first English word of the visit: "Toy." Sang Huin laughed as he walked further
into the room presenting the board game to the boy. The hospital room looked
almost the same as an American hospital room except that there were four beds;
no curtain partitions; and cushioned benches next to each bed.

There were not many differences between American and Korean lifestyles from
what he could see. Korea was like living in the Ozarks with high hills
everywhere. He had lived in both Missouri and Texas depending on the needs of
his father's work. They had homes in both places. Both countries seemed to be
arrogant and fortified within their cultural expressions. One certainly could
never part a Korean from his kimchee. Here women strapped babies behind their
backs but even in a rural town like Umsong many carried cellular telephones in
their purses. Pagers were only slowly becoming obsolete. Koreans' love of
making their country into a high tech Mecca was only secondary to their
continued devotion to their obsolete pagers. When a college student's pager
vibrated with activity he or she would still run into a coffee shop to call his
or her friend on the table phones and wait for that person there. There were
video pangs (VCR rooms); table tennis rooms; noripangs (Karaoke singing rooms);
outdoor vendors and restaurants; crippled singing beggars and vendors who
crawled down pedestrian streets like worms as they pushed their carts that
blared traditional music from small speakers, and sang into microphones; more
mom and pop stores on each block than one could count; and tight department
stores with small supermarkets underneath.

One could find in Chongju a McDonalds with an Internet caf? underneath, Pizza
Hut, and Baskin-Robbins Ice cream shops. One could always find M&M chocolate
candies and shirts displaying American university logos. One could find
American and Hong Kong movies, which intrigued Koreans with their violence.
Koreans lived under the insecurities of North Korea and their students always
found a subject for protest but the country did not foment and fray in
violence.

Sang Huin did not know why he was thinking this. He had always hated Chongju
and Umsong in particular. And yet rural scenes (like the traveling markets in
Umsong) were sort of sweet and real. The only vestige rural traditions in Seoul
were the traditional weddings at the Korean Folk Village and traditional
dancers no longer on the street corners but contained in a theatre.

He thought about once when he and Yang Kwam were shopping for clothes in
Itaewan Dong of Seoul on that same street where he worked at a convenience
store. It was raining and cold and his sickness was getting worse. Yang Kwam
was wearing a shirt with the American flag on it. Dizzy and disoriented, Sang
Huin had followed that American flag in subways, underground transfer
corridors, exits, and sidewalks. He was acting the same way now only he wasn't
sick. He was following Seong Seob into a relationship blindly to have concrete
experiences and happiness that could only be obtained in shared experiences.

Sang Huin (Shawn most of the time to Seong Seob) grabbed his blind friend by
the arm and awkwardly yanked him nudgingly to the child's bed. It was a cocky
American gesture with the sotto voce of one insinuating by touch an inhibition
to touch at all. The tepid force of this gesture was, in part, of someone who
had been abandoned inexplicably before. Seong Seob had felt Shawn's awkward
half-hearted attachment and reticence for a year now. He couldn't blame him
since he realized his part in bringing it about. He had thought that living
together would smooth over everything and felt dismayed that a year later Sang
Huin still touched and spoke to him with the uncertainty of the two belonging
to each other. And yet in bed it was compensated by desperate and passionate
thumping which was the best kind of love making there was. Seong Seob needed to
feel that another person hungered for him for this was the contract. This was
the binding of love. It was a covenant with this relationship-being that
virtually all people deemed as higher than themselves. It was a belonging that
all humans sought.

Sang Huin's mind questioned the legitimacy of human feelings and the meaning of
others' presence in his life, which without exception seemed so fleeting. His
mind was in a torture chamber of its own making. He yearned for harder
realities outside of one's experiences and yet finding none he did not retreat
to the limits of his feelings and the input he got from his senses. Headstrong,
he believed that there had to be something that he was missing and so he went
on searching like a madman batted about in erratic thoughts.

"I wonder when he will leave again," he thought. "I wonder what little thing
will be too much for him and cause him to hide like a coward never to return
again. Will I get a hateful text message on my cellular telephone? Will this be
how it will go awry? It's bound to go bad. Everything changes. How can a
relationship change to be closer than what it started out initially?" Although
the present often stood free without a guard, within the infliction of memory
it roamed no further than the prison gate that its imagination conjured up from
past ruins.

And yet the ruminator that this "Shawn" was, he was still the product of his
culture that was not too keen on ruminations. One's culture was prevalent in
every thought even within an introvert like himself. Culture was a cookie
cutter pressing out shape in the amorphous dough of one's thoughts. It was the
re-legitimization of Marx. It was as Aristotle stated ambiguously as form
shaping matter. It was the American in him that had cajoled and coerced Seong
Seob to the hospital against his will according to the characteristics of his
nationality even if it had been done diffidently.

"I sarem i irum Seong Seob imnida. I sarem i Seong Seob imnida." He paused and
turned to the older Seong Seob. "Go ahead. You've been introduced. You both are
each other. Ask him how he is. I can't speak Korean as you well know every
minute of everyday." The older Seong Seob laughed and then began to flutter
within the native language that animated him most. Sang Huin watched as the
three creatures (his friend, the mother, and her son who was also named Seong
Seob) expressed their color and movement in Hanguk-mal. He felt as if he were
in a flower market instead of a hospital. Flowers encompassed the boy in all
directions. Sang Huin remembered being sick himself and hearing the cryptic
language that his mother and sister spoken around him. That cryptic language
was now there in the confines of the walls of this hospital room and unable to
escape it he felt as if he were a minority within it. It was the ethereal
language that had soared his family above and away from his terrestrial
boundaries.

Sang Huin thought about that time at the English winter camp when he first met
this now hospitalized boy, Seong Seob. Everything proceeded fine for a few days
and then one night Seong Seob scathed his knees in play and suddenly pulled off
his pants in front of the school children and staff. The boy exposed his
vulnerabilities. He showed the flimsy mortal creature of man for what he was.
Horror and tempestuous hatred toward the mincing of one's boyhood innocence was
in his animated eyes and it mixed into his cries of despair. Five seconds
earlier he had been running and wrestling with the other boys and then with a
little pain and the rolling of a small stream of blood came the memories of
being run over by a truck and all of its ensuing surgeries.

Saeng Seob had not wanted to come; and even in the hospital room he and the dog
wanted to stay aloof. Despite his more gregarious tendencies and his smile so
wide to compensate for the lack of expression in his sunglass-confined orbs,
Seong Seob and his dog stood away from the railing of the bed. The dog
perceived its master's nasocomial fears but instead of looking at the
atmosphere as something that might alert its senses, its face, every few
moments, made movements toward the door not much different than the master. It
had led the way through outpatient units of hospitals before. It knew its
master's aversion to places of suffering and could sense the gloom that
pervaded all rooms and corridors in a hospital. The surgeries on Seong Seob's
eyes had been performed when he was a boy to no avail. The dog had escorted the
master from the ages of 12 to 15 on subsequent visits that procured nothing but
the dread of hospitals.

The fear of hospitals seemed to be a fear of death. Even a cockroach was afraid
of death and so to be afraid of such a thing, thought Sang Huin, was natural.
And yet death itself was natural. It might well be liberation instead of
annihilation. It seemed absurd to prejudge such a natural occurrence that
living creatures knew nothing about. It might be as beautiful as all the
flowers that surrounded the bed of the boy, Seong Seob, who was playing with
the board game that he had unwrapped and opened from the box. What did a
cockroach know? For it perceived nothing outside of its own physical survival.
What did a dog know? For it perceived hospitals as containers of human
suffering instead of deliverance from illness?

Sang Huin understood that Seong Seob was pursing a relationship that was more
than a bit at odds with the world in even the most libertine culture. He also
acknowledged that Saeng Seob was visiting a suffering boy whom he wanted to run
away from. Sang Huin could not do much of anything to fill in the crevices of
time and in awkward moments of not knowing what to say he just stood there
uncomfortably but with a degree of appreciation for Seong Seob. Sang Huin had
empathy as deep as the gods.




Chapter Nineteen


Had it not been for her youth that allowed her to engage in prostitution, she
would have been at the welfare office every month. Each month she would have
spent a day slowly making her way through the queue to that ultimate goal of
staring through a translucent partition and into the faces of intake workers.
Necessity would have compelled her, each time, to submit her documentation of a
driver's license, social security card, and statement of approval through a
hole within the glassy wall. As a reticent and less than proud potential
recipient of food stamps and Aid for Dependent Children, she would have
silently deposited her artifacts depicting the reality of her existence and
watched these worker bees document her documentation and re-scrutinize what had
already been scrutinized and approved.

Monthly she would have been in a situation of needing to minimize her
imperturbable haughtiness so as to give cordial answers to questions without
being a formidable foe. She would have been in a situation of needing to be
sociable enough to give gentle but feigned smiles that might have a hope of
expediting the process of gaining benefits. In front of the intake personnel
her eye contact would have needed to be constant but not so much so that it
would have intimidated them. Poised and courteous, but with the intelligence of
her eyes aimed like lasers for the incineration of the layers of their hearts,
she would have wanted them to quail without realizing that she was the culpable
one causing them to quail.

Had she gone into the welfare office each month she would have needed to check
her haughty disposition above all else since the uneducated chattering clients,
the wait, and the lowly workers abounded and it all was such an indignity. Her
tacit repugnance of the apparatchik would not have been something that she
could have restrained fully. She would have needed to let bits of it ooze out
gradually and undetectably or the intake workers could have forced her to go
back to the IM worker's office and explain why she hadn't gone on very many job
interviews and why someone with a Master's degree from Rice University would
need assistance at all. She would have hated them not for any petty personal
grievance (she didn't "give a flying f--" what they thought of her) but for
reasons totally outside herself: if it weren't for derelicts and freeloaders,
these welfare workers would have been unemployed so it was outrageous of them
to be condescending if not outright hateful to the monthly recipients; and if
it were not for such do-nothings, breeders of illegitimate children,
iconoclasts, and antisocialites (all which summarized her in such a unique
blend) these client-intake workers would not have known the difference between
being indolent and being industrious. Not having anyone to compare themselves
to, they might have lived their lives in ignorance as to the meaning of such
concepts, or worse, found their own paper producing jobs as the lowest tier of
the caste.

Had it not been for prostitution, she would have been leeching onto public
assistance as a menace to herself and society at large. Each month Gabriele
Sangfroid's hard expressions would have probably intimidated the intake workers
more than the useful amount and she might have found herself forced to wait all
morning and afternoon on an income maintenance worker whose only wish would be
to avoid dealing with such a mad woman. Then in late afternoon a supervisor
might have called her name and she would have needed to encounter hateful
stares for being a flagrant mutineer of the American work ethic. There might
have been the undulating of the tongue reminding her that she was a Master's
degree holder. Such a supervisor, or a brave IM worker, would have shot
missiles of time consuming bureaucracy and lack of kindness at her and
Gabriele's laser eyes would have needed to shoot them down gently, cordially,
and politely. "I understand that someone with a Master's Degree from Rice
University could be gainfully employed. I realize that there are professional
jobs available to me. Right now I'm poor and I have a baby. I'm searching for
the right job that will allow me to continue to devote as much care for him
that I can do. You know the way it is with mothers. It is hard to find that
employer who is sensitive to the fact that one is a mother." Something like
that might have been what she would have communicated. It would have been
coordinated with the usual amount of artful guile and smiles to get her through
life.

She knew a little about the Department of Social Services from firsthand
experience with them when she first moved to Ithaca. It was in a day in
December as cold and merciless as February when she went there. Nathaniel or
Adagio was a newborn at that time. Back then, resigned to the fact that she
needed assistance so that she might continue with her contemplation of life,
she went into the New York Department of Social Services with him in a
bassinet. She discovered how her laser beams went through bullet proof glass
separating the intake workers from the waiting area and seemed to set fire to
the cubicles housing the IM workers.

In her first hour there she considered this agency a demeaning place in all
respects and that she shouldn't be partaking of services here; and yet her
feelings were muted by logic. and Gabriele was, after all, a very logical
person. She told herself that being here with illiterate, drug dependent, and
lethargic characters was not all that different than her work as a staff
psychologist in parole assessment at the state prison. Encountering client
abuse or being in the thickets as one of the worms were just two equally
uncomfortable situations. It was really nothing more than a substitution of one
form of abhorrence for that of another. Examined further, she couldn't see any
difference between being a freeloader and a worker apart from the worker's
obsession to think that his manner of wasting time was respectable. Since they
were the same apart from the means by which they chose to fritter away their
existence-the bums wanting to spend their time getting something and the
workers in producing it--she couldn't see any sense in feeling more abhorrence
from being behind the glass than in front of it. Besides, this experience here
also provided her with a new perspective of what life was like to be one of the
besmirched masses on the opposite side of the fort. Knowing multiple
perspectives made her contemplate the entity like Parmenides and contemplating
the entity brought her more in the realm of truth.

Looking onto it now, she did not think that these clients of hers were any more
or less degrading than collecting food stamps or in having worked as a
counselor in social services. It had only been the need for money that made her
deign to any of this prostitution.

She owed a lot to the male need to be touched, to dive into the high of an
orgasm, and to have innate aggression exorcised by thrusts within a subservient
woman. It was a good profession that took little time and no mental
prostitution thereby allowing her to contemplate God when the kid wasn't crying
for bottles, changed diapers, and swift rides in her arms. It was also useful
for society since men needed to be exorcised of aggression. After all, an
excess of testosterone had kept the planet in a type of marginal nightmare. It
certainly did not need to be plunged into it further by a lack of prostitutes.
Before she ever worked again as a psychologist avowing the criminality of
criminals or giving nice little labels on Lilys, she would go back to the bad
girl group home. Before she returned to the click-of-the-heels logic of girls,
she would become a janitor, a supermarket cashier, or a digger for bottles in
trashcans. And to keep away from all of it she would continue with the present
line of work as long as Adagio wasn't traumatized by strange men drifting in
and out of a trailer. A child needed the illusion of stability more than anyone
else; but bills also had to be paid.

And so time ran on like a shell-shocked soldier. Already the boy was four years
old and precocious regarding one thing: the emotional state of perplexity.
Strangers continued to come into his mother's domain and like always he watched
these unknown men come in and mysteriously pat him on the head in passing. Many
of her men felt a twinge of awkwardness as if they had to go through a
premature and impotent little sentinel to get to her. He was not sagacious
enough to understand that. He just wanted them to stay to talk with him instead
of always passing on to her. Ostensibly she looked more pleased to see them
than she did him. He noticed this, but little did he know that after having
changed diapers for three years and having given him baths, she was as
disinterested in the male anatomy as a female could be; and so not wanting sex,
love, or godly companionship from them, all they had to give her was money.

He was her human subject: and she wanted to keep all primitive and barbaric
impulses of pop-culture and unoriginal dogmatic religious premises from
influencing his brain. She did this partly from the wish to make him into a
good person and partly from a scientific curiosity about what would happen if
she mixed strange chemicals together. She was very curious about the outcome of
child rearing; but more, there was fun in the manipulation and fun in the
unknown of what he would become each year.

She trashed her television set into the back of a closet and in his bedroom she
began daily puppet shows of a simplified self-made Hamlet or King Lear
adaptation and she would have him dance to the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven in
unique movements she called the sangfroid. She grew pumpkin gardens and allowed
him to feel the weight of the largest ones against his small frame just as she
had done for the past two years. Now, for him, they had become gigantic balls
that he couldn't pick up to bounce or the wheels of tanks. They were no longer
the objects of wonder they had been a year earlier. She knew this inevitable
truth but she didn't mind it terribly. Losing the wonder of small things in
ones adventure to know bigger truths was the act of growing up and there was
nothing she could do to stop it. She knew: the loss of wonder came upon a
child's innocence like a Turkish beheading. She hoed around the 10 feet patch
of garden and imagined the texture of one pumpkin she had detached for him
recording itself onto his psyche as he rolled on it and scooted it around. She
grew flowers so that molecules of smell and sight could make sketchy replicas
of flowers in his brain. She wanted benign if not benevolent influences to make
him special. "There will be no battery operated cars for this boy," she often
told herself, for they would lead to a preoccupation with movement, and from
movement to targets. She did not want to nurture the hunter within him. Instead
she wanted to make him into a god for being alone in the celestial realm was
lonely business. The materialistic, hedonistic, shallow specimen of movement
had to go.

And yet they were not sedentary Buddha statuettes sitting on shelves and so she
often took him to an outdoor pool or a heated indoor pool depending on the
season. In earlier years, splashing in a baby pool large enough that he could
not easily see an end to its greatness achieved the same aim as the oceans her
father had taken her to. Within a large body of water one could always find
Parmenides' entity and Aristotle's Prime Mover as one pursued that innate human
need for physical movement. The realization that he was distressed about older
boys going into the large pool when he wasn't permitted to do so caused her to
lead him into deeper waters. He floated on a swimming board and sometimes on
her palm under his chest as she treaded water beside him and allowed him to
experience the tide when the whales of human bodies plunged in toward them

They also found mother and son bonding activities when lugging plastic
containers into an environmentally friendly grocery store. From her example she
wanted to nudge onto him a respect of Mother Earth, or at least a reluctance to
be reckless with her. She wanted him to gain the habit of being the least
environmentally destructive that was humanly possible. One of the bins had
animal crackers and she would fill a small plastic container with these dead
carcasses. She abhorred the drug of sugar and its impact on him but then she
did not like enduring the choleric displays of a drug addict who was being
blocked from getting his fix. He always craved for them like oxygen and there
was little one could do with cookie or animal cracker cravings but succumb to
them in the hope of getting some peace of mind. Always following the grocery
expedition she would take him to the zoo and feed him the cracker carcasses
only after he matched the animal cracker replicas to the beasts they were
approaching and could say the names of the zoo animals in English, German, and
Spanish. He couldn't sputter out the Latin so she had to give up on pushing
that language into his head since she couldn't pull it out of his mouth. They
spent Sunday mornings listening to church bells chime from their seats in a
Laundromat. Around 10:30 the adjacent diner opened for business and from a
window in one of the walls they would place orders for French Cream Cheese
sandwiches. They were the oddest creatures in the Laundromat, dancing the
sangfroid to a cassette recording of Evard Grieg's Peer Gynt with bread and
cream cheese gushing in their mouths as they waited for their laundry to dry.

One day they went downtown to pay utility bills and afterwards they walked
around the campus of Cornell University. At a bookstore she became intrigued by
a biography of Alfred Adler and for a couple minutes she became fully immersed
in the reading. During this time he bypassed her despite the fact that she had
been trying to keep him tracked in the corners of her eyes. Imagining ethereal
voices calling to him, he veered out the door and went to follow the Sun god
that was descending into the crevices of buildings. The display was, for him,
an obvious invitation of hide and seek. Pursuing the joy of the present moment,
his imagination interwove him in the tangle of one's sense of direction and the
deception of nature whose beauty belied its true disinterest in man since it
had no intention of obeying any mortal calls. Each building became a whole
forest, which overwhelmed him in vastness and darkness.

For over an hour she ran around like a mad woman frantically asking strangers
if they had seen a child. She felt like Achilles chasing the tortoise and she
scolded herself for not having put him on an arm leash the way she had when he
was three. When at last she saw him staring down at a gas lamp god reflected
into the waters of a lifeless fountain she at first wanted to pull down his
pants and give him a beating with her hard, powerful palm but she was taken off
guard by his emotional embrace and by her own unusual reactionary embrace of
him. She held onto him tightly even though she had never wanted to hold onto
anything. A lucid and excoriating speech was in her parched mouth but she could
not say it. She only said the idea in her mind:" A bad man could have taken
you. Don't you know that you can't run away from me?" A tear even slid down a
cheek. She was a needy creature enmeshed in another being, vulnerable and
susceptible to his actions. It was an uncomfortable state that she had never
wanted.

At last she said, "You little scoundrel."

"Yes," he said. "I am your little scoundrel," and she laughed. It was as if he
had read Nathaniel Hawthorne and he had cast himself into the part of Pearl.

That night she had dreams of Achilles chasing a tortoise and of different
geometric shapes that were before her soon eluding her. She woke up the next
morning in a cranky mood. Everything seemed to be aloof and impalpable. She
burnt the pancakes like Rita Lily and called him to breakfast indifferently.
His wishes that the orange juice be put into his new Mickey Mouse mug were
fulfilled. It was just the dumping of one liquid content into another
container. She did this without saying a word. She ate with him but she was
hardened to his complaints about the taste of the meal. She was frowning and
despondent the whole time.




Chapter Twenty


There was a triangular pack or trinity of stray dogs listlessly wiping snouts
in whatever might possibly be edible as they interweaved around pedestrians'
feet. Even the sniffing of its members was listless. A foot kicked one dog and
there was a high-pitched breathless squeal that was scarcely audible. The dog
pushed its weight and movement toward its right side the way a boy might sink
into genuflection when the wind is knocked out of him and then it slunk off the
sidewalk. Motionless for a moment while still standing, it then opted for
movement although it could only stagger. It was not alone. A smaller dog from
the trinity followed disconcertedly. It too veered in a right curve to the
mirage of a refuge on the edge of the road as if it were the mean between two
risky states. One hobbling and trying to yelp from a bit of a second wind and
the other accustomed to follow that which had secured its sustenance at
previous times, they walked together for a minute before being flattened by a
truck and swallowed into the pot hole mouth of the pavement. The road, from its
swallow, bloated and curved up like a hill before its true form materialized.
Ostensibly, it was a road on an emerging hill but really it was the mutant
growth of a head and a face. Out of nowhere it inexplicably gained animation
and being. It was with life and without purpose. It was naked existence. The
road would swallow much more again and again, get bigger, replicate more of
itself, and die. "Mutations of the carbon of the planet are everywhere! I see
it now: species are cells mutating over time; planets are clusters of cells;
the galaxies are mere organs; and the universe is an organism. Individuals play
their parts, thinking themselves autonomous as does any nucleus of a cell, but
it isn't true." These were her thoughts as she opened her eyes.

Gabriele woke up from a startled Heraclitus-flux of a nightmare the way she had
the previous night. Like then, the only pressing logic contained within such a
strange dream was a geometric leitmotif that was an insensible riddle. It
occurred to her how the subconscious was composed exclusively of chaotic winds
and not what she had at one time thought of as a cryptic but sensible Nubian
code for the astute transcriber. It was nothing but vehement typhoon spirals
with all sensory input and significant long and short-term memories blowing
erratically inside of them. It was a wonder that civilization existed at all.
Humans were great wonders unto themselves to be able to carry such a stir with
a degree of poise. It was amazing that over so many millenniums Homo sapiens
found some degree of cooperation to exist. It was a wonder that Homo sapiens
were able to develop dimensions of themselves outside the frenzy that was
trying to suck them back into it. Rational ideas and decisions might well be
influenced by the stir, but still to get through the day thinking one's benign
little ideas, evaluating and rejecting most truculent impulses, and trying to
make sense of issues beyond ones instincts, hungers, fears, and anxieties was
an absolute miracle. It was the greatest poise and magnanimity to forfeit the
compulsions of one's stir of night and to develop some semblance of civilized
society, benign and sensible. How strange, she thought, that the subconscious
was not universally declared as empirical as a fingerprint, DNA evidence, or a
signature on a sheet of paper showing one's intent. Any startled awakening from
a dream was the tangible proof of her claim that the subconscious was not
merely theoretical.

On her pillow she leaned toward the end table with the idea of picking up an
alarm clock to look at the time when she saw a handkerchief belonging to one of
her anonymous clients laying beside it. He had dropped it out of a pocket when
putting on his pants hours earlier and she remembered that she had found it
after he had gone away. She could see the large initials embroidered on it. It
was no doubt the embroidery of his special little lady. The initials were MF.
Was M for Michael? she asked unto herself, that high authority that answered
all of her questions. "Maybe it is," her higher authority said, "But I wouldn't
be able to decipher what F means unless the first initial stands for Mother."
She laughed out loud but she put the end of the pillow up to her mouth to keep
it muted. She did not want to wake up the boy. So content within herself like a
child, she could entertain herself so easily.

She was sure that this internal voice was most illuminating in intellectual
luminaries but it was not unlike what Rita Lily had. It existed even in the
most idiotic of people. Was a split personality a real concept? She had her
doubts. There were many erratic whims in any human being. It was only by
divorcing oneself from certain whims that one might assimilate two or more
spurious personalities, which would only come about from being abused in
extreme torturous cruelty. What was thought as split personalities existed, she
theorized, to reduce one's interaction with others whom have brought him or her
horrific trauma.

She thought about this MF. He had been polite to her and there weren't too many
like this. He had been the one massaging her. He had wanted her own pleasure as
much as his own. There weren't many like this either. He had even succeeded in
making her tingle and have orgasms. Even now, so many hours later, just the
thought of him made her tingle. She sniped at herself for entertaining this
absurd tingle that women often have long after the sexual stimulation is over.
"I am a female," she told herself, "but I'm no lowly woman." She picked up the
clock. It was 3:00 in the morning. She told herself that if a client was giving
her spurious romantic notions she needed to distance herself. She needed a
break from physical prostitution.

Before Hallmark removed her from their list of freelance artists for
accidentally mailing in one of her profane sketches, she had had this as
another form of income. Now the clients were all there was. The income was
sufficient to pay the bills and, more importantly, she was able to afford
canvas and a wide array of paints each month. This type of prostitution was in
many ways treating her well. It was instrumental in giving a burgeoning artist
canvas and contemplation but she had to admit that the boy was becoming jealous
of her time with these men and she was losing professional objectivity. She
decided that she should not go into work for a day or two. She needed to not
work in her bed but instead to go on vacation outside of it.

In the morning as she was burning French toast for the boy she told him that
they would go to the beach. After breakfast they made a straw hat and wire and
tissue paper sunglasses for Mouse to match the ones she had once crafted for
the boy months earlier. Then she put leashes around both of them. They got into
her old brown Ford and drove to the Entity.

"Why's Rita/Lily not coming?"

"Well, I didn't invite her."

"How come?"

"Well, with the two of you and the two of her that would be two too many.
Wouldn't you agree?"

He giggled as the jawbreaker moved from one part of his cheek to the other.

"Do you really think that thing in your mouth tastes good?"

"Same as a sucker," he said. "Do you want?" He pulled it out of his mouth. The
jawbreaker was coruscating with saliva. It was like a gleaming moon.

"Gee, thanks, but I'm on a diet. That is just too lovely but it would be all
the more so back in your mouth."

"Okay."

When they arrived she attached mouse to a stick stake that she wedged deep into
the sand. Anywhere her boy wanted to roam he took her with him because the two
were shackled to each other. Running around with the feel of wet sand
plastering into the crevices of his toes in its grounded rock and mud texture
she could again see that sense of awe and wonder that he had had when he was
three. They began to twirl each other around and the two of them fell down like
dizzy drunks. As she sat up she noticed that her son was staring directly at
the sun.

"Adagio, don't look at the sun like that."

"Why?" He turned to her. He was still wearing his tissue paper and wire
sunglasses just like the cat.

"Why? Because you don't want to be blind!"

"How can it blind me. It is the sun."

"Does it feel good to look at it directly?"

"No, not really"

"Well, gee, the proof is in the pudding. If it hurts to look up at it directly
that is a prime indication to not do it."

"Huh?" he asked.

"Don't be so asinine. Don't look at it directly," she scolded.

"It wants us to see it," he responded.

"Not directly! Maybe metaphorically," she said. "Why do you think that God put
stupid animals like Mouse on four legs? Have you ever thought about this issue?
Well, I have and let me tell you the reason. If God hadn't forced dumb
creatures like that to keep their front limbs as feet they would be looking up
at the sun and all of them would be blind. Put simply, Mouse can't look up at
the sun because God forced him to stand on four legs; and with a person, he is
usually brighter than a mouse. He is usually a little smarter than an animal so
God encourages him to buy sunglasses, suntan lotion, and to look down toward
one's own business: earthly matters like what you need to wear, the food you
need to fill your belly with, the story you are going to read, so on and so
forth." Each dour day of having to give the reasons behind things to keep this
little guy in one piece was exasperating and she felt that she was falling into
the mire of a never-ending story.

She wondered whether, in part, the religious stories (later to be cut down into
the book sized collections of scripture) had happened for the same reason.

"Ambulatory two legged individuals need to have less of an ethereal
concentration. That's my take on it."

"Huh?" he asked. He looked down at the sand, pulled up his glasses onto his
head, and said, "Let's make a house for the sun. Maybe it will get little and
stay in there and we can stare at it through the windows."

"Sounds good to me," said Gabriele. "You can do that while I set up house." She
got up and pulled him toward the area where Mouse was pacing in parched
emptiness nervously. She laid out a large rug near the staked cat, erected an
umbrella, and took out suntan lotion, a book, Coka Cola, a CD player, and
chewing tobacco from her large bag. She put on a hat that made her look like an
Asian rice farmer. Then she began to listen to Paganini's Caprices. Meanwhile
her son chose an area for the construction site. She wondered why he had chosen
one plot of sand over another plot. Sure, he was on a leash and so he did not
have a wide area to choose from; but a bigger question was why anyone would
choose to sit in one chair over another one in an audience where the seats were
not assigned. When one wasn't mandated to a table by one of those restaurant
hosts, why would a given customer choose one table over that of another? That
was a mystery. Did the mind fool a person into believing one spot was better
than another one so that action could be implemented without lots of
hesitation? She hadn't ever thought about this point before. Her son brought to
her many thoughts. "That is one good reason to keep him around," she kidded to
herself.

"The sand won't stick."

"Well put enough water on it to make it sticky and not so much to make it
runny. Same as cement. You really should begin the foundation of your castle
closer to the water-only not so close that the waves get to it. That way you
don't have to use so much bottled water."

"Well, then I need more rope," he said.

"Okay." She unraveled some of the rope from the leash that was wound on her
arm. She allotted to him more freedom for his imaginary worlds.

"I want a house. Not a castle. I want it to have a bed and its own room. The
closet will be in--"

He droned on and on. In some respects his little ideas were charming but she
had to turn off a great deal that he said to stay sane. "Castle, house, house,
castle--who gives a flying f--" permeated through her brain tissue. She loved
this egocentric being that had pulled out of her body and she did not consider
him too boring. She watched him work against the odds of crumbling sand and an
avalanche of shoddy construction, sculpting out some edifice that he attributed
as having meaning and a link to a civilized creator. She watched this little
individual who was a microcosm of all the worker ants sculpting their tunnels
of dirt that would ultimately collapse. None of them thought of the ultimate
corollary that human life and endeavors would go back to nothingness and the
entity that brought it all about. She felt compassion for him, for all of them,
like a goddess looking on her pathetic children. To some degree, she was
pleased that he emulated her myth of the sun. Within moderation it was a good
and humane fabrication. The creation of her version of the creator was a
meaningful and benevolent lie of universal brotherhood and it seemed to her
that the ultimate goal of motherhood was to nurture humane behavior even if one
had to lie upon occasion.

To escape a violent world daydreams, liquor, and hallucinogens were always
warranted. To counter innate violent inclinations there needed to be a
benevolent god to emulate-one that was palpable and touched everyone and one to
whom there weren't stories or rules to be brainwashed in to gain membership.
She did not know. There were no guidebooks for rearing children. One ad-libbed
the best that one could do. It was a daily chore and one where there weren't
any vacations that would allow objective contemplation of past mistakes.

She put away her book, Why I am not a Christian, by Bertrand Russell. The book
needed to be perused deeply but she couldn't do that because she needed to keep
a part of one eye on the boy and a part of the other eye on the cat. She went
over to help him with his futile task. Within an hour they had constructed an
elaborate castle. Fulfilling his intentions, this peeping Tom became fixated on
looking through the windows of the Sun house in the hope of seeing an
anthropomorphic sun god shrinking himself into its corridors. Finding nothing
but prolonged darkness, he returned to staring up at the clouds and the bright
intensity that was the sun.

She wanted to kick the sun castle. She wanted to destroy it, to blast it away,
and to bring it back to its initial matter. She even contemplated a more debase
act. She thought about unleashing Mouse and tossing it onto the roof of the
castle when Nathaniel was not looking-- however, she rationalized that a mother
who blamed her actions on a cat would be more despicable than a worm. This idea
of framing culpability on the cat swiftly left her consciousness to decompose
back into whatever neurotransmitter combinations and neurological circuitry had
come together to formulate it. She felt irritated at herself for ever
reinventing Aten and for being Akhenaten forcing one more damnable myth into
the world. After all, this one, for its merits, could ruin a boy's eyesight.

Her desire to kick the sun god house had been, in part, from the very desire to
cling to it. She wanted to keep Nathaniel in a state preserved from society's
lies, guile, opportunism, greed, and barbarity. She also wanted this private
and personal experience with him that no one had shared since Aten's extinction
in Egypt many thousands of years earlier.

From her most selfish inclinations she wanted his companionship to avoid a
loneliness that was so stagnating on her energies. Common sense told her that
he was a separate person and that his young and curious being, enveloped in the
freshness of experience that was part of childhood, did not exist to free her
from moments when the world just looked old and musty; and yet there were times
when feelings did not succumb well to common sense. More altruistically, she
wanted to keep him from having to witness Turkish beheadings and other real
world models that would vitiate ideals to the realization that it was every man
for himself. And yet he would be entering school soon: all innocence in a
bubble had to finally break.

She took him and the cat to the area where one could rent out inner tubes.
After paying for one, she re-staked the cat and pushed her son onto the waters
where both son and mother were assailed by the rays of the sun. "Nathaniel,"
she said, "No more of that looking up into the sky like a dreamy baboon. Just
watch the waves whisking us around." As she felt the undulations, she forgot
about the Entity and vaguely recalled that sexual exhilaration with MF. Moments
of Frenzy lived with one no longer than any of the passing winds against one's
face. They were pleasant sensations, boosts of fuel, giving one a positive
outlook toward more tangible encounters. With the exception of the best one,
they were never remembered. But, rising up and down with the waves, she was not
remembering any encounter, but rather the best one.

In later days and weeks she avoided work and clients more than she should have
done and took Nathaniel to Niagara Falls, tiny falls in rural Ithaca, and on
little rides in amusement parks in different areas of the state. Except for the
local falls, which were free, she just said, "Charge please" and handed out a
credit card to venders, ticket salesmen, and hotels. She handed them her bit of
plastic although she knew this action would make her, even more, into a slave
of her own brothel. She wanted to take him to Lake Placid in the Adirondack
Mountains too but common sense prevailed. She had second thoughts about the
matter for she knew that she needed to cut back on her spending. She had done
these other things with him from a gluttony to celebrate those rare whole days
when mother and son were fully together because she knew that they would not be
endless. In short it had been a desire to hold onto him. The poet, Lucretius,
was in her head. It was he who said, "The generations of living things pass in
a short time, and like runners hand on the torch of life."

He was now nearly the age of six and the near emergence of the school year
agitated her progressively. The vacations could not last forever and had not
lasted forever. One reality after another budged into a human's life pushing
the former one into a surreal dream. For an hour, each night, she would lock
herself in her room, change into a black negligee, write her fears in a journal
by the light of a candle, and often find her thoughts discombobulated by the
sound of his voice.

"Gabriele," he whined one night behind the door. She ignored him in the hope he
would go away. She was trying to perfect the doggerel she had written in her
journal the previous night. "Don't yell/for you can tell/I am myself/ to no one
else/ and like an ocean that says I am,/ an ocean by the name of Pam/and an
unmarried feminist named Sam,/ I am so large that you can't see all of me even
if you are traveling in a Pan AM./I just slap my waves on the shore./ I behave
according to my inner nature and don't ask for more./ I am an ocean and so
sometimes with my unfathomable depth it seems as if nothing touches me/ but it
does you will see./ Water evaporates from me./ Sailors sail in me./ It is my
glee/although I'm sometimes saddened by what is me." She rather liked the
alliteration and the variations of the feet. She thought that her word choice
was rather masterful although she wondered if the rhyme scheme wasn't a bit
excessive.

"Gabriele. Will you play checkers with me?" he said through the door

"I'm working," she said mildly

"There's nobody in there with you."

"I'm thinking. Thinking is working."

"There's nobody in there with you. You're not working," he said loudly

"Working can be thinking. It isn't always--" She stopped herself. She was about
ready to say, "It isn't always fucking."

"Mouse went to the bathroom in that fern thing and now there is shitty dirt
everywhere."

"Good God. Go clean it up."

"I don't know how."

"You know how to use a broom and a dustbin. Can't you sweep it into the
dustbin? You remember how!"

"It smells so really badly. If I go near it I'm gonna puke."

"I changed your diapers. It can't be worse than that. Plug your nose and try to
do a little. I'm tired of being the maid around here."

"I'm not a maid too."

"It's your cat."

"It's older than me. How come it's my cat?"

"My dear, when it goes to the bathroom in areas it shouldn't it becomes your
cat."

"How come?"

"Because I'd--" She stopped herself. She was ready to say, "Because if it did
that and I were to own it alone I would stuff it." Instead she said, "Because
it likes you better." That was a solid argument. The only thing he could ask
would be why the cat liked him better; and to ask such a thing would not have
been beneficial to his argument. She was eager to see if he was intelligent
enough to say nothing and he was. He just paused.

"I feel lonely."

"I'll be out soon"

He jiggled the knob. "How come you got that thing locked? I wanna play
checkers." His egocentric words grated on her nerves no different than barking
dogs in the trailer park. "I'm gonna ride my bike over to Chuck's."

"Not this late you're not."

"You gonna play checkers or am I gonna gota Chuck's?" Chuck was a neighbor boy
from the trailer park who recently moved into a house three blocks away. At
first she got up from her seat in a huff of anger to prune such insolence but
she couldn't help feeling amused by it so she sat back down on her chair at the
desk and smiled at the door. She wondered what happened to the mild natured
child of a month ago--the child that was 5 but seemed like 4. This one seemed
much older. She wondered if the formation of his first ultimatum was the
emulation of an ultimatum she had given to him and could not remember or if it
was from some innate incorrigible tendencies. She spent an additional half hour
on the poem. She couldn't see that she was making any improvements. "Maybe it
is perfect after all," she thought.

"Are you going to clean up the mess for Mommy?" she yelled. There was no
answer.

She wrote a few sentences in her journal. For the first time she jokingly
admitted, in its pages, the desire for MF to become a returning client. It
wasn't really so much good sex that she craved as the companionship of a male
friend or friendship in general. She had not exchanged perspectives of adult
realities (such as so and so sending a resume through email on this advent
called the Internet) nor had she engaged in racket ball competition since her
friendship with Betty at Rice University. She had not had a steady boyfriend
since early in her undergraduate education when she decided that men were
special creatures who were uniquely loathsome in no lesser degrees than women.
She felt a stagnancy of a life with little personal inside of it but her books,
paintings, and the child who would be going away to school fairly soon. It was
a bizarre version of stagnation in a life that by its prime purposes should not
have been stagnating at all: by being a mother, she nurtured; by reading she
was nurtured in the profound, and the profound was so unlike the pointless
levity of socializing with living creatures; and by painting she rose into
Godhood in the realm of ideas. And yet being wholly purposeful was such a
solitary domain relegated to gods and not to creatures of movement who needed
frivolity and interplay of ideas of the most shallow domain to feel alive.
Between the need for a physical feeling that one man had bewitched upon her and
that need for frivolity and friendship in the adult domain, she realized that
such a recipe could very well be a toxic combination of ingredients. It was the
baking of a vulnerability and she was not prone to consume vulnerabilities.
Women meandered around as gadabouts while consuming their chocolaty
vulnerability like bonbons but, she told herself, she was not a lowly woman.

She opened the bedroom door and walked out. She saw the fern in the living
room. That one plant was intact, stagnant and alive in the purpose of its pot
as she was in hers. She did not see any dirt anyplace. Even if Nathaniel had
cleaned the floor it wouldn't have been done so neatly. Mouse stood there in
front of her boldly. "Mouse, did you do something bad?" The cat looked at her
dumbfoundedly. "Hmm, I didn't think so," she said. So, the boy had lied to her
about the cat defecating in the fern's soil. "How did he learn to lie?" she
asked herself and her higher authority said that a boy did not need a model: he
would use logic like a sophist. He would display his rationale like fireworks
for dazzling and dazing one in darkness. He would dazzle and daze others into
believing that such brevity of lights was a firm reality. Her higher authority
said that using logic to one's advantage was an instinct no different than
sucking and biting. Then she saw that the door was open.

"He didn't!" she said, knowing that he had. She put a bosky robe over her black
negligee. In ways she was dressed as a soldier and as a witch and yet neither
role seemed too germane. Mother Earth, Father sky, and her own wrath would do
nothing to solve this situation. For five minutes she ran out of the trailer
park and a block down the road but acting like a lunatic got her nothing but
the split soul of a slipper. She swung a fist in the air and, as if she were a
female version of Zeus, the lightning pierced the sky. Still, this did nothing
for her. Would she act the maternal part of worrying, crying, and feeling angry
and betrayed? Such a part was too ludicrous to conceive. "What if he gets lost?
What if he gets hit by a car? What if he does?" she thought to herself. "I'm
not linked to him forever. Even good mothers can't monitor a child's movements
every second of the day. A child obeys his own self-centered little voice
despite a guardian's best intentions. The world is a risky place. That's not my
fault either. I've done nothing wrong." She locked all doors and windows but
the window in her bedroom that she left half open. When he crawled through it
like a thief hours later she gave him the spanking of his life. She was not
sure if spanking was for the benefit of the child through negative
reinforcement or to release the stress of a child's guardian. She couldn't see
that it mattered.




Chapter Twenty One


As the first days of the school year came and went, Gabriele still vied for
time through the sheer act of forgetting. Whatever apprehensions or misgivings
she was experiencing about sending her child to school, they were such that
she, nonchalant, would never claim them to be fears nor acknowledge any malaise
about the inevitability of external influences on her son. And yet subliminal
fears were pulling her away unaware like a sleeping motorist who gets towed
away with the vehicle for the impounding. She simply forgot about the date for
the school registration even though school buses were roaring about everywhere
in the city. Hearing buses from a distance, she should have easily remembered
failing to enroll him in kindergarten the previous year when he was five; but
her denial was a thick opaque fog and what she didn't do last year slipped from
her no differently than enrolling him into school this year. The higher
authority of self remained her goddess; and it was keeping her wrapped in
swaddling innocence. It was innocence consisting of a belief in the present
moment that she had serendipitously fallen into the previous autumn.

During last autumn, Adagio was particularly insistent on getting her to do what
Chuck's parents had done. Restive, she had to bite her lip and say nothing.
Emulating or just imitating someone else, even if it were done for her son,
made her feel awkward and look disconcerted if not gauche; and yet, thinking
about it for a moment, she had to admit that raking leaves into piles was not a
big request. She knew that it would take some scavenging to pull together a
pile or two of leaves but she decided that she could do this in her own unique
way. She didn't mind simple challenges like this as long as she did not have to
rake someone else's yard. She didn't want to meet neighbors for their small
talk would be too unbearable. Those she had met before never used small talk as
a step in the ladder toward more engaging topics. Each conversation was as if
the previous ones never happened. Also these neighbors would pose personal
questions to her and ask why she had so many male friends coming to the trailer
at all hours. They would be pure hypocrites as if they weren't having sexual
relations in their own trailers; and she would be there smiling at them but
looking totally baffled as to why these superficial matters of what one did
(action) instead of who one was (entity) were all that germane. She knew her
relations were more innocent than theirs. Hers were for that needed substance
called money but theirs were for the sleaze and pleasure of the moment; and if
they were monogamous that showed an unnatural behavior indicative of
psychological dependency. She could state boldly, "I think you are trying to
ask what I do with these men who come to the trailer. Right? Of course, it is
what you think. I'm a prostitute. Be sure to tell all your buddies." She could
look them in the eyes and smile during the ensuing discussions. She would be
able to declare such things and then talk affably about one neighbor's
burgeoning tomatoes with superb poise but such frankness might wind up with a
policeman on her doorstep, a short jail term, and a fine. She told herself that
she would rake only in her own confined space clearly demarcated by a wooden
fence and that such action would involve just a little imitation. She told
herself that a little imitation was fine. After all, she could not claim
herself to be 100 percent original. Even she imitated other people in myriad
actions she never even considered from buying fashionable shoes to not running
butt-naked in the streets.

The action of raking was at first a begrudging fulfillment of a simple request.
Then it became merely using the scanty resources of the tiny plot surrounding
the trailer to indifferently concoct what Chuck's father had done easily in the
yard of that new double-wide trailer with its many and varied trees. A
half-hour into the raking it refreshingly became an eagerly anticipated foray
into childhood, which so many years ago had been smashed under the metal belt
wheels of a metaphorical tank. With her son, she dived into piles, which she
had raked for him in tandem. Inferior to the mellifluous smelling orange piles
at Chuck's home (so she was told), these smaller, much greener, and dirtier
mounds were a scanty mixture of dried leaves with freshly mowed weeds, sparse
grass, and a couple bags of mulch. The piles were concocted but the experience
of falling into them was anything but concocted. Her son, and the summons of
fulfilling her role as a mother, inadvertently led her to the feel, taste, and
smell of the present moment. During those times of last autumn, not yet
experiencing the anxiety about necessarily having to send him off to school,
she fell into the entity; and surprisingly, it wasn't something that one stared
at from a beach. Mouth half open while plunging head first into the itching and
asphyxiating pile of elements as dark as death, this ostensible foray into
childhood belied the fact that the dive was really into the main artery of the
heart of the entity. In that moment of seeing, feeling, smelling, and
accidentally tasting the present moment other aspects of it were equally
enlightening. She was surprised that for all her walks on various beaches,
trying to make sophisticated judgments about life to match the thickets of her
adult neurological connections, by comparison these had been wasted hours. Such
attempts at staring at the ocean had never brought her as close to the entity
as this. They didn't give her much peace of mind. The oceans might have
untangled some of her twisted logic but they always tangled her in a new set
like seaweed adrift. Surprised that the entity had not been in the string of
sacrosanct words one concatenated silently in the corners of the mind to catch
truth the way a spider makes a web to catch its prey, she had found it to be in
simple experiences gained from one's senses. What was even more surprising was
that the entity could be sensed, for this empirical experience refuted the
theories of Parmenides and Plato. Also, she was surprised that it was her son
who, by this leaves-jumping, was leading her into a Gabrielish discovery and
yet she told herself that being so surprised was rather foolish in a way. After
all, how surprised should one be that the entity was grounded in simple
pleasures? To be any merit at all to a life, truth had to be more than mere
abstraction. And considering that insatiable and avaricious desires of
adulthood for higher and more intense pleasures was a loose debris of
discontentment only in the realm of the child (only of running to the feel of
the wind, grass poking through the toes of the feet, the fascination of changes
of division in light and shadow, and all considered in the pejorative as
childish and foolish) was one on a solid form of happiness.

"Is it as simple as jumping in a bunch of leaves?" she posed to herself
incredulously. But it was inevitable that with having had craven parental
defectors and deserters march in and out of her nativity, having been run over
by a tank, and having seen a Turkish beheading, the simple pleasures had eluded
her. Violence had caused her to build her fort and look onto the world as a
sentinel and sentinels were not equated with childish sentiments." She laughed
in that strange Gabrielish mixture of profound and morbid levity after rising
up from her second plunge into the pile and brushing off the leaf, grass, and
weed concoction.

Now, with four days into the school year already passed, she was still avoiding
the purchasing of groceries in the afternoons. She told herself that her
artwork was more poignant when the sun was at its fullest; but really it had
been from an avoidance of the yellow school buses that she would have
encountered. Subconsciously she wanted to spend as much time with him as she
could so she began to disregard the policy of him going to bed at 9:00. She
would allow him to play games until he fell asleep on the sofa forcing her to
carry him off to his bedroom. Since that autumn of a year ago she was living in
the present moment through most of each day and disregarding the future as
entirely as a mortal could. She repudiated any reality that went contrary to
the motif of finding the entity through simple pleasures of the senses
experienced in the present moment. She told herself that simple pleasures were
the real and the true foundation of happiness but from them arrogant and greedy
man made preposterous edifices--complete skyscrapers of selfishness and avarice
that would fall down from any jet being slammed into them (any life crisis that
tenuous carbon creatures of mortality were always bound to have).

[Sang Huin was seated on his bed with a laptop computer burning his skin. He
realized that the World Trade Center metaphor was an anachronism for the story
of Gabriele and yet it seemed to him that an omniscient and omnipresent
narrator might well be 6 or 7 years ahead of the time.]

On this day, as all others, she was mixing various vegetables into a potpourri
of soup that required as little culinary sense as an undomesticated female
needed to have. With vegetables being dumped in a crock-pot with a bit of water
and pepper, it seemed to her that it was impossible for much to go awry. The
lunch might have been monotonous but having little else from which to make a
negative judgment, her son didn't complain about this point. His only
experience was soup, pasta, and scrambled eggs that usually came out all right
and pancakes and French toast that had a 50 percent chance of being burnt
beyond recognition or going awry in the most unforeseen ways. Outside of giving
objections about burnt comestibles, he was a truly ignorant savage; and
concerning matters of culinary taste that was how she cared to keep him. When
she asked him to wash his hands he went over to the sink and exclaimed, "Oh
wow, chocolate."

"Get your hands out of that water! That's nasty looking stuff. Diarrhea
looking, it seems to me."

"What's that?"

"The runs, my dear, the runs."

"The sink has the runs? It's sick?" She chuckled at his animistic thinking.
Everything was alive in his judgment and, apart from some wild untoward
behavior, he was a creature who was sensitive to the feelings of the whole
world. She wished that she could keep him like this forever. The water pressure
became inconsistent and unevenly went on and off in thrusts. "Diarrhea and
constipation at the same time-- hard life for the poor sink. Well, until they
solve the problem here-- whoever the they are--use bottled water. Scrub with
soap." As she stirred the soup she saw a yellow school bus drive into the
trailer park and a kindergartner leaving it. Her half-day was over. "Do you
know that girl?" she asked.

He looked out of the window. "No, she's new; but anyway, I don't play with them
girls. They don't know how to play catch. They don't know what to do with balls
of all sorts."

"How would you know that?"

"Chuck told me."

"Is that a fact? Well, you haven't seen your mother play racket ball before. It
isn't exactly Olympic material but it's close. Hmm...oh, my, we got so carried
away with God only knows what and it looks like we've missed the first day of
classes once again. Mama Gabriele would teach you herself through all your
twelve or thirteen years if she didn't have to make a living. Well, I don't
know. Let's ponder this situation a bit longer." She stared at the yellow bus
through her little kitchen window. She abhorred it. She stared at it with the
intensity of a female version of Zeus wanting to strike it with lightning but
the lightning backfired. She felt a migraine headache coming on. "Honey, do me
a favor and share some of this soup with Mouse. The two of you can eat outside.
Then take mouse for a walk in the trailer park. Go talk to the little Girl and
see what she's up to. All alone, not knowing anybody in the trailer park, you
should say hello." Her sentences were dangling modifiers; but she did not care
about grammar since she had a headache. "Most people if left all alone will
come to no good so go talk to her and save civilization." This idea went
contrary to her life's model but she didn't care about the contradiction. She
just wanted to stop the headache. "Mommy's got to think now. Okay, scoot,
scoot. Take the bottle of water with you. It will be like a picnic." She handed
him the leash for the cat. When he was outside she locked the door. She felt
the migraine intensifying like the footsteps of a wrathful god incrementally
approaching her. She went into the bathroom and lit a joint. She watched a
cloud of smoke rise into the fan that had been installed in the door. She
inhaled her cannabis again and again.

"Miss Sangfroid--yes, you," said the higher authority with a sound and derision
of her Aunt Peggy's voice, "look at yourself cowering in a toilet." The form
was inconsistent. It subtly wavered between an appearance similar to that of
Peggy from long ago and her own ideal form.

"Motherhood was giving me an excruciating headache." Gabriele chuckled at
herself like a bashful girl and smiled painfully. "So I took a sabbatical where
I could get one--the little girl's room. I'm sorry." She felt as if she were
apologizing to her aunt for running away to Ithaca and not letting her see
Nathaniel.

"You're sorry. You have your son walk the streets so you can cower in here
smoking pot on the pot and you are sorry. Is that the only thing you can say?"

Gabriele chuckled at the dual meaning of the word, pot, but she was finding it
more difficult to concentrate and she was beginning to feel guilty for being,
or at least being perceived as being, a negligent mother. She, the
philosophical dictator of herself, was unlike her hero, President Clinton. She
inhaled before Puritanical scrutiny and admitted the inhalation. "Sometimes the
pot works better than the pills at stopping the migraines, and sometimes as a
mommy, a female needs to get high wherever and whenever she can. Please try to
understand. Don't be so critical--not now. If you could speak less loudly, I'd
appreciate it. I'm in pain here."

"Gabriele, such a lone soldier and yet so vulnerable," said the form gently.
The form had become less blurry. The higher authority was now more distinct and
Peggy was fading fast. This goddess or extraterrestrial of some kind had more
of a peaceful countenance and a more self-confident temerity than before. Also,
there was a halo about her head since sick people needed their mothers, gods,
and saints.

"Poor, Gaby, time has run by like a shell shocked soldier, and she's
accomplished nothing in her life but a bit of whoredom to keep body and spirit
together. She wanted to be a revolutionary but has only followed the natural
course of having gotten older."

"I became a mother. I can't call that nothing. There is some premature gray in
my family but that isn't until one's late thirties-- early forties. It won't
happen to me. I'll have beautiful dark hair until they carry me off in a
coffin--strike that, an urn for I will be cremated to go back to the elements
immediately."

"Look at that once stalwart face in the mirror--is this a human face or a
sponge that has sucked up too much water?" The ET's tone of voice was nurturing
in spite of her words.

"I don't feel well."

"You've been overtaken by the mundane. Look out of the window at the volant
clouds. Any frothy and floating substance natural or artificial will do: an
ocean, trees waving in the winds, passing clouds, soap spinning around in a
washer. Watching clouds in particular is instrumental to appreciate the
infinite possibilities of colliding atoms in creation or the infinite
possibilities of an unburdened life. Now look down at your mundane and
sedentary world so bereft of possibilities, so insalubrious, so sickening. See
your son on the steps. There he is with fingers of one hand down the cat's
throat, and the other hand pinning it down. Hmm...now he's spoon feeding it
something."

"Vegetable soup."

"Something. There's a bowl, a spoon, and something that looks like mud but
okay, vegetable soup, " said the ET. "Vegetables for a cat? Strange! Well, even
though your son is outside, his presence is still here. It permeates everything
in the trailer, doesn't it? You couldn't walk a minute from one room to the
next without thinking of him: his smell, his things, and messes are everywhere.
His storybooks and color books are the only things neatly on his shelf because
he doesn't like them. They aren't animated."

"He's always been partial to movement just like any boy." She paused and
thought. "Yeah, even when he goes out to play he is still everywhere in
here--every room. It was just a few years ago, sitting on this very pot, when
he was yelling, 'Mommy come wipe me' or 'Gabey, come wipe me'--something like
that."

"Truly the sentimental substance of long term memories," said the higher
authority indifferently.

"I half way wanted to desert him in a pasture along the highway."

"I dare say. Never part from your better instincts as they say. You have, I
must tell you my dear girl, failed your ideals. The big toy car running on D
batteries, the matchbox cars he crashes into walls, and that gun that shoots
out big plunger shaped bullets that stick onto car windows--all of these items
you have succumbed to buying for him even though initially you said that you
wouldn't. Yes, he is a creature of movement. You've known this all along. And
yet, choosing to ignore the fact that he goes through such tirades in favor of
thinking him as a partner leading you to the entity, you have succumbed to his
tantrums and tears in supermarkets and five & dime stores. You continually buy
him toys that aggravate his worse propensities and all those chocolate
pacifiers."

"He is exploring his world. He's trying on new versions of himself."

"He is a demanding, egocentric creature of movement far from the worlds of
contemplation and you give into his extortion. He gives ultimatums and runs
away from you at the drop of a hat only to be hugged later. What sort of
graduate psychology classes at Rice University taught you parenting techniques
like that?"

She laughed. "It is a little pathetic, I know."

"It's inane: a woman like you limiting herself to reproducing and rearing young
.You do this as though you can't find more purpose to life than this...someone
like you deigning to define herself in mortal roles of birth, reproduction, and
death to have someone to succeed you. Have you succumbed to being a woman, lost
without a mommy role. Fool, experience your contumely now...Feel those wings
that no one else has. You are innately volant if left to yourself. Cast him
away. Let him fend for himself." All the time the higher authority was smiling
and talking mildly like a mother reading a bedtime story.

"It isn't like that. I brought him into the world. I am responsible for him.
Besides that, he has led me into--"

"Into leaves"

"Okay, into leaves; but now I have decided. There will be no school for this
boy. I'll keep him here with me."

"You silly bitch!" yelled her higher authority vehemently. "I have better
things to do than argue with you about things so boring and irrelevant to the
scheme of things. The boy's already one year behind his peers. Being led to the
entity is well and good but if the kid's your crutch you've got serious mental
problems."

As if not hearing a word the higher authority was saying, Gabriele mumbled to
herself, "Maybe I could avoid putting him into kindergarten again this year.
Matter of fact, I'll teach him everything he needs to know throughout grade
school and then he can go to school with his peers when he is 13. He wouldn't
like being in kindergarten as the oldest one in the class anyway. I can't
imagine it to be a kinder garden than what I have here in this home. Likewise,
he wouldn't like first grade a year later because he'd be older than the other
kids, or second grade, or the third--" The higher authority did not answer. She
had vanished with the inhaling, coughing, and exhaling of a big puff of smoke;
and meanwhile Gabriele was high and smiling widely. She was vertiginous with so
much life running through her veins that she did not want to waste. It, like
the atoms of the cosmos, was pouring, clotting, recycling, breaking up, and
then flushing out into something new within her.

The marijuana had relaxed her and she was taking a piggy back ride on the
shoulders of a Heraclitus shaped cloud. Opaque questions seemed interlinked and
mysteriously solved: of motion versus contemplation; Parmenides versus
Heraclitus; being the warm, soft, cuddly mother depicted in Harlow's monkey
experiments so as to not have a traumatized monkey on her hands versus finding
more purpose to life than reering one's young; attachment versus independence;
and the containment of her son versus the release of him. What solved these
questions was the analogy that just as solar systems in the spilling universe
rarely have planets capable of sustaining life, few are the contemplatives in
the movements of sociable and voracious man. She told herself that she had only
one life and she would not dilute it for any "kid ." She thought, "I'll do my
thing and let him do his" but what she really meant was that she doubted that
she was capable of making him into a better person if she isolated him. With
the exception of creative goddesses like herself, a mind was a photocopy
machine and a file cabinet. Her son needed to go to school and copy external
forces for good or for bad and she needed to pull away from motherhood to
contemplate and create even if it meant going back to her lonely solitary ways.

He felt as if he were extirpated and then without roots replanted in foreign
soil; but at the same time as if he were something less than a boy and
shrinking exponentially every moment he was in school. Like any kindergartner,
daily he yearned for the mother he departed from and could not understand why
he was ushered so much of the week into a bus that took him away from her. He
didn't protest despite being tearful. He went like any semi-cognizant lamb and
camouflaged himself shyly in the thickets and brambles of himself. Mrs. Graham
told them to drink their pints of milk and eat their graham crackers, pledge
allegiance to the flag, skip around her desk happily or not, draw the lines
that were the parameters of form and create form by means of color, bang sticks
and rattles rhythmically like African Pygmies, lace and tie shoes neatly, say
their ABCs and the sounds they symbolized, listen to stories and articulate
questions about them, obey calls for mandated naps on mats where one could
never sleep, and try not to interrupt these activities with requests to go to
the bathroom while at the same time not wetting one's pants. Two years went by.
He was in his second year.

Touch football, soccer, gymnastics, and all realms of movement in PE class
helped to compensate for this institutionalized life. The discomforts of
confinement were also assuaged with the help of homeroom mothers like his who
brought in treats. Gabriele's cheese and cracker concoctions once each month
were woefully inadequate in comparison to preceding days of cupcakes; and
cognizant of this she all the more emoted a self-confident poise in the
distribution of her crackers. She was certain that no one yearned for things
but experiences; and by believing in the pleasures he and his classmates would
get from her little efforts, she made it so. Her presence was a lesson on the
quintessence of reality where successful emulation in superficial ways could be
bypassed if done confidently. He was glad for anything that would stifle the
unpleasant but pervading shadow of Mrs. Dinosaur who often forced him to stand
under a coat rack with his nose against the wall as coats and the shortage of
breathable air encased him. These episodes happened for letting his imagination
stow away on passing vehicles he could see from the window. She alone was not
the gravamen of his long list of grievances. He hated having to keep track of
paper and pens, Little Orphan Annie with her preponderance of fat who aimed
dodge balls toward boys' balls, and Shirley and her hitgirls who, during
recesses, would often pin him down on the merry-go-round for the smothering of
kisses.

One day he was sitting in the classroom dreading another time of having his
energy subjugated to the mat when out of nowhere came a mathematical question
aimed and moving toward him as an arrow. He felt the sting, fidgeted worse than
ever, perspired heavily, and began to blush. The corollary of looking stupid,
he knew, would be his inevitable smothering within the heavy coats of the
clothes rack for not being able to give an answer. He would be standing with
his nose pressed against a wall while his classmates took their naps. He wanted
to answer the question and yet he couldn't see how he could do this if he
hadn't heard it. He was at a loss and he resented his predicament. He wanted
both to cry and put more holes into the pothole-faced teacher with the aid of
his rarely forsaken tools of rubber bands and quickly manufactured spit wads.
His ethereal dreaminess, moving and emblazoned with the sun, was an
unrecognized form of experience. Experience was knowledge as intangible and
ineffable as daydreams probably were; and yet this dreaminess was being
indicted by Mrs. Dinosaur and usurped by her mathematical abstractions. "I
don't give a flying fuck about numbers" he told her with the honesty Gabriele
extolled and espoused as well as her word choice. His two front teeth were
missing at the time so as he literally spit out the opinion in a lisped and
retarded noise the teacher was stunned to hear profanity of the worse kind not
only coming from a boy that was her pupil but in the tone of Daffy Duck. Words,
wisps of vibrating air, which should have been as fleetingly unreal as any
passing wind, were such indelible things. They couldn't be dropped into one's
shoes like doodled parodies of the teacher that he and his classmates often
exchanged so that they could be perused later in the toilet and flushed away
invisibly with urine and excrement. In ways, an idea in sound permeated another
being immediately and non- retractably like a noxious gas.

Before school had started it was as if Gabriele and Nathaniel were completely
alone except for the clients. It was as if in her remote choice for a home she
had the idea that she could plant a society like a garden, water it nicely, and
extirpate it of weedy or symbiotic associations. It was as if she believed that
when left to her guidance, allowed to spin around happily in play according to
his own benign whims, and following nothing but the occasional orphic music of
the ice- cream truck, her son would be a self-contained paradigm of happiness.
Back then when he was four and five she had two years of really believing that
such bliss would go on perpetually and she half dreamed that if she succeeded
with him, she could advocate Gabrieleism everywhere. It would be her
movement--a philosophy of self-containment and human empowerment to ward off
loneliness, curiosity, and hormones that always stunted intelligent beings from
pushing onto the next species. Guarding against these foibles, according to
her, would make one less of a sociable and hedonistic monster than he or she
would be otherwise.

And yet, despite her conviction that her strange life was the way of truth, she
had her misgivings about it. There were times she hated clients who had banged
forcefully within her; and that tacit hate shot out like lasers from her eyes.
It would be directed toward situations such as loud cellular telephone
conversationalists interrupting her contemplative sketches in the park, and
bank tellers who closed the counters to go to lunch once she arrived at the
head of the queue with her non-taxable, ill-gotten gain. With the bank tellers
in particular she wanted to snap off their noses like the ends of green beans.
Also, there were times within her migraines when her stalwart ship felt puny
and spun around in waves with all abilities to track its coordinates failing to
operate. In illness she often wondered if her ideas about life were nothing but
rabid madness. She wondered, at times, if denuding a human with her Gabrielism
was like picking off the meat of the man or woman to get to the real human; and
since she was smart enough to have reservations about her logic, everyday she
continued to put her son on the yellow school bus. "Anyhow," she thought many
times through these three years, "rightfully, there are laws against keeping
children out of schools and breaking laws to live with an ignorant savage is
more trouble than its worth." She was just sorry that she couldn't afford the
time to home school him herself or send him to a private school.

From imagined ideas of Rita/Lily seemingly more real than the carbon-flesh
copy, Gabriele drew her sitting on a bench in the mall admiring all the smiling
facades of sociable creatures. According to Gabrielish logic, mall shoppers had
such hobbies as retribution for having to prostitute a living and having to
forsake the slow contemplation of truth and goodness in the fast pace monster
called society. Gabriele drew anxious and hurried desperation in the smiles of
her mallhoppers, depicting them with the rectangular forms of grasshoppers. She
thought about the fact that, outside of clients, Lily was always her family's
only peripheral link to society. She wondered if it had been for the fact that
in her confused state and the changing labels that doctors pinned her with,
Lily was a society that was not part of the society at large.

Gabriele was not intrigued with other people since she found herself to be her
main subject of interest and wonder. Riding into the depths of herself was
oceanic but floating on the rivers of others in conversation was like having to
carry the raft half of the time because the river consisted mostly of nothing
but sledge and rocks. Many were the years in which she preferred the
companionship of herself; and from childhood her eyes became incrementally hard
and cold to others. She had to admit that having a hard haughtiness did nothing
to make the world into a gentler and more affable place. If one could shop for
a character before acquiring it she knew that hers would not be her first
choice; and yet she had it because it was the natural consequence of a military
family. From her mother and then Peggy and her husband she had been assailed
with criticism (where she sat, where she stood, how she sat, how she stood,
what she put on her plate, why the quantity she put on the plate, the time she
spent in her room, the antisociable tendencies that had to be inherent for
anyone to go into a bedroom as much as she did, how she parted her hair, whose
comb she had used to part it even though it was always her comb, what she wore,
how she shouldn't be wearing it since she shouldn't be acting like a princess
or a tomboy, why she chose idiots to associate with as friends...). Still, it
had been to the glory of herself. She told herself that the war games within
the boot camp of family had made her fortified. She did not need people in her
life. There might be some level of social interaction that was psychologically
indispensable but even this sustenance of sociability could be breathed in and
released as air. She would cling to no one; and she continually told herself
that one day she would go to Antarctica.

Gabriele thought again about her interaction with this woman, Rita/Lily,
Lily/Rita, Rita/Rita, or whatever. Sometimes she was truly empathic with her.
For the most part, she used her as that extra person out there with whom she
and Nathaniel could mention from time to time. Mostly she didn't give a damn
about her one way or the other. Gabriele rued and ruminated about this fact.
"Oh well, it's the human condition," she told herself as if she had the perfect
excuse. She wondered if Rita and all isolated halfwits needed to imagine
someone as caring about them even if such people really did not care. Just by
being that imagined benefactress, she argued to herself, she helped the girl
without even having to do it in reality. As she was thinking this she heard
knocking on the door.

She put a wad of tobacco into her mouth. "Who is it?" asked Gabriele as if
there could be infinite possibilities. "G-a-b-r-i-e-l- e," sang Rita. It was a
sing-songey, monotonous, and lethargic tune. "Identify yourself," said Gabriele
and then quickly began to move the canvas, tripod, brushes, and paint into her
bedroom. The painting wasn't completed and she didn't want to respond to
questions about it. More importantly, she did not want to be made to feel that
she owed the painting or a replica of it to the unwitting model. "I'm Lily."

"Lily who?"

Lily giggled audibly through the closed door. "Lily Rita"

"Those are first names. What is your last name?"

"Nothing special. Just Smith."

"Kennedy Smith of the Kennedy dynasty--are you from the family of wealthy
politicians?"

"No, nothing special. Hardware store."

"A hardware tycoon."

"Dad's a worker; but he supervises others--a manager. Nothing special."

"I think that is special." She opened the door. "Come in, Miss Kennedy Smith.
Sit down over there while I pour you whiskey and cola without the whiskey." She
had to admit to herself that she found her little friendship with Rita/Lily
rather amusing. What more could one want from a friendship? It was fresh air in
the stale cellar of one's mind.

As she took a bottle out of the refrigerator and poured the content into
glasses on the counter, she looked onto this pathetic society that was hers.
Rita/Lily's feigned smile was lasting an abnormally long time and waxed and
waned awkwardly. "Man problems?" asked Gabriele.

"Sort of," she giggled bashfully. "Really, it's not having one. I feel lonely.
I don't know what to do with myself."

"You're not supposed to date anyhow. Didn't you say that the group home got you
a job waiting on tables in the concession area of the skating rink?"

"Semi-independent. I'm in semi-independent. Semi-independent counselors."

"Whatever. Same counselors; but okay, let's be precise: semi."

"I feel alone in the evenings."

"Read a book."

"Too tired to read. Gabriele, why don't you get married?"

Gabriele brought the drinks and sat down in her director's chair.

"I'd need a boyfriend first." She wondered if she had one, a hundred, or zero.
She wasn't exactly sure what constituted a relationship with a man.
Furthermore, she wasn't even remotely sure what a marriage was either: a couple
of signatures on a sheet of paper, matching bath towels that said his and hers,
or a declaration of two people as a unit which would then be naively believed
and acknowledged by outsiders as having legitimacy.

"You are so clever and smart. Clever and smart guys would die for someone like
you."

"What would I want with a man, Lily? I've already got the kid and he would
fritter away my time every chance he could if he weren't in school. My god,
after being a masseuse all day, it's bad enough to have one more male around
here let alone two. I don't want to devote the time Adagio doesn't extract from
me to fulfill more male demands. Then there are all those womanly things: to
continually ask myself if some guy really loves me and how I can become slimmer
and more desirable for him and all that crap. Worst of it all would be jealousy
when he sleeps with someone else on a bad hair day. It always happens. I'd be
eroded away and then I'd start asking myself who the hell I was"

"But love--not being alone."

"Perfect equation. Love is many selfish equations like that. I don't know. A
female has to be a puppet taking back her own gossamer strings or she will
follow the movements of love into the abyss. As for being alone, it is the only
time to be free to sail in oneself without having to answer to anybody. A
relationship is like trying to put on some fashionable pants that are a size
too small with him trying to get into them too. No thanks." She spit out her
tobacco in the trashcan and then drank the cola.

"Is that stuff good?" asked Lily.

"Snuff, Lilly. Not stuff! Do you want some chewing tobacco?"

"No...that is I don't think so...well, maybe a little." She laughed. Gabriele
shared the substance. Lily began to chew for a few seconds and then reached her
finger in to extract it from the crevices of her teeth.

"Do you have an empty beer can?" she panicked. She began to gag. Gabriele moved
the trashcan near Lily and bent her face. She spit it out but didn't vomit.

"Maybe you should wash out your mouth and then drink your coke."

Rita/Lily ran to the bathroom, turned on the tap water, and then began gargling
with water and then with mouthwash.

"That minty stuff sure has a good taste, Rita," yelled Gabriele toward the
bathroom. "Make sure you don't swallow the damned stuff or we'll be doing this
again."

Lily gargled, spat, repeated the process, and then yelled back toward
Gabriele,"Do you miss Nathaniel, your Adagio?"

"Lily, you ask the same old questions again and again forcing me to come up
with new answers to everything from why I don't have a boyfriend to if I take a
crap when I get up in the mornings."

Rita laughed awkwardly for both were subjects she often asked about. "I
want..." She gargled again and spat the mouthwash out. "I like to find out if
people's ideas change."

"This people doesn't change. I'm glad the little--" She was going to say
"little fucker" but she censored it out. "...guy is in school as I've said for
the umpteenth time."

Gabriele chortled when Rita/Lily came back looking battered and weakened from
her experience with tobacco. "Rita," she said, "It will take practice but
before long you'll get the hang of it. You'll be chewing tobacco just like one
of the boys. Then after more years of experience...if you practice...you'll be
a pro' like me. You might even begin to condition American Barbie dames in the
proper ways to spit it out like a cannon."

Lily laughed diffidently since she was in a depressed state and words were
running about nonsensibly in her head like the yelping cries of wild savages.
She sat down stiff as lead and Gabriele could see the terror of visceral
loneliness in her face. She was afraid that the girl would be anchored like
that during the rest of the day as a hindrance of her painting. "Oh," said
Rita/Lily suddenly out of her saturnine depths, "I nearly forgot. The call. In
my room."

"What call?"

"Huh?" asked the obtuse girl

"What call?"

Rita tried to reign in her thoughts and focus on where she was at and her
relationship with Gabriele. "The school couldn't reach you. You've got to call
them. They said it was really important." From her pocket she pulled out a slip
of paper that had a phone number on it and gave it to Gabriele.

"Hmm, okay," said Gabriele. She took her telephone out of a drawer and put it
in the phone jack.

When she arrived at the door of the home room with a bag of treats dangling
inside a fist, her son's teacher told her that she had go go to the principal's
office. The word, "must," took some swallowing but she accepted it
magnanimously. She could see that the teacher, Mrs. Recla, found her daunting.
The proof was in the face that was being taxed by not being able to frown. She
knew that she was emoting a more civil aversion than the teacher could muster.
As Gabriele tried not to conceptualize her as "the dinosaur" or "Reclasaur,"
demeaning second grader terminology, there was a subtle smile on her
countenance (feigned or not). In part, it was amusement about the word,
Reclasaur, but it was mostly of one who was valiently beyond worldly matters.
With her equanimity she also displayed an obdurate, formidable haughtiness no
different than any engraving or statue from Akhenaten to Lincoln, or Joan of
Ark to Eleanor Roosevelt.

Indifferent to the fact that this was not her appointed time for being a
homeroom mother and by the disposition of a teacher who was usually more
affable (feigned or not), Gabriele officiously submitted her treats. Like a
poorly written essay, they were glanced at and rejected snobbishly. She wanted
to check up on her son who often sat in the back row but she was prohibited
from looking into the room. She wanted to ask the Reclasaur what he had done to
make her so "uptight" but Gabriele changed her mind. She decided that unless it
were an emergency (and the teacher would have undoubtedly given the details of
an emergency) she should defer knowledge as long as she could. She imagined
that once she returned home there would be more to swallow than just cheese and
crackers.

In the girl's room Gabriele lit a cigarette and stared at herself in a mirror.
She didn't care what others thought of her but in a world where only
appearances mattered she thought that wrapping up what little beauty she did
posess would go further with a female principal. She did not believe in
appearances but she was pragmatic enough to realize that appearances had their
uses. Eyeglasses would make her look more intellectual if not outright erudite
and opaque. Her turgid opinions would have more merit in such a look. She
pinned her hair up into a bun and put on some tinted glasses that she rarely
ever used. She smoked for a few minutes, staring in awe at this formidable
higher authority being reflected from the mirror. Smoking like this in front of
a mirror in the girl's room reminded her of her actions from the age of ten and
as she chuckled inwardly to herself she then lifted the plug in the sink and
lodged the cigarette down the drain untracably. In the principal's office she
scanned an issue of Jack and Jill for 45 minutes. Then she became irascible and
restless.

"Miss," said Gabriele with contumely toward the secretary who was the only
visible party responsible for making her wait, "will it be much longer? I do
have things to do and I can pretty well tell at this point that Jack and Jill
is not very good reading--not for me, it isn't."

The secretary smiled painfully. "I'm sure that you won't have to wait much
longer. I'm sure Mr. Quest will be with you shortly."

She wondered about waiting like this. Did authority figures believe that making
others wait aggrandized their influence? For her, it lessened it. If such a
person was not readily available to cater to her high ideals she assumed that
he or she was a derelict in a back office playing solitaire or a lascivious
Neanderthal playing footsie with one of the office staff. "Mr. Quest? Aren't I
supposed to see Mrs. Simmons?" asked Gabriele.

"No," said the secretary.

"Who is this Mr. Quest?"

"Mr. Quest is the vice principal," said the secretary.

"Of course," she told the secretary. "Who else better to handle vice" Now she
knew for sure that being invited here as this less than honorary guest would
involve disciplinary matters. Quest's guest: there would probably be the
abrading of both the son and the caregiver. She wondered whether this was about
her son at all. Perhaps it was an inquest probing into her personal life to
which she alone would be excoriated. It was a rather enticing thought to be
under the spotlight as the pillory of ignorant people. It would give her the
chance to refute their ideas to make these authorities realize that they were
the ones strumpeting themselves as loud as trumpets. It was she who did it
softly in her own little massage parlor in a trailer and only when in need of
money and for as brief a time as she could manage. How many wives and husbands
(wives most saliently) became such all of their lives to better their own
fortunes: this was the idea that she wanted to haunt the corridors of their
minds. If it would not besmirch her son and had no bearing on him, she would
air her dirty laundry. She would submit a slutty biographical profile that
would leave them irrevocably in a state of shock and awe but this would not be
the case. She knew that this misbehavior (misbehavior being defined as action
that was not sensitive to the feelings of others) would be detrimental to her
son and so she did not want to go into the school to be scrutinized by these
creatures.

"No," she thought again, "even if they have found out what I do for a living
they wouldn't have arranged a meeting to confront me directly about it. The
matter would go through social services." She foolishly released some of her
desultory thoughts to the secretary as she stared at the Jack and Jill
magazine. "How strange," she said, "that someone should wind up with such a
grandiose name, but I guess it wasn't his choice to be named Quest. Good god,
the images in Jack and Jill are so violent. What with little children waiting
all morning for the inevitable paddling and picking up magazines which have
cartoons catered to Charles Manson it is a wonder that there aren't more school
shootings. Wouldn't you say so, Mrs....I'm sorry, I didn't get your name."

The vice-principal opened the door. If it hadn't been for the obscurity of her
eyes behind her glasses it would have seemed that he was penetrating her eyes
with intimate familiarity.

"Mrs. Sangfroid?"

"Yes, something like that," she said.

"That's not right?"

"Miss, if you don't mind; and even though I am a disciple of Freud, as much as
I can be a disciple of anything, the pronounciation is "fraw" and not "Freud."

"Sorry."

"It's okay. I've been called worse things."

"Would you care to come into my office?"

"Sure," said Gabriele with a smile. She walked into Spiderman's web with great
insouciance and sat down. "Hmm...I haven't been in one of these rooms since I
was a little girl and got paddlings."

"Were you a rather naughty child," he asked facetiously.

Gabriele smiled at his boldness. She again thought it had a familiar warmth to
it. "Not so bad. Actually, I was diligent enough. I just stayed to myself a bit
much -- a very German characteristic but kids hate that sort of thing--maybe
not in Germany. Who knows? Hating my stand-offishness they blamed me for what
they did. Well," she interjected with a laugh, "I was a bit of a rascal too. I
didn't squeal on them but got even -- putting bubble gum in girl's braids and
things like that. I got the paddle on many occasions. I never cried
though...but you don't want to hear about me way back then."

"No, it's okay. You don't have to stop so quickly for me. Learning about
children's behavior is part of my job besides reinforcing student codes and the
curriculum--understanding them--even kids as big as you with kids of her own--
and making policies suited to them...being flexible. Paddling too if needed."

"So, I guess it was you who asked me to come here."

"Yes, right."

"Concerning Nathaniel?"

"Yes, in a way. As you know, Miss Sangfroid, children aren't sheltered from
violence in images or words any longer. The effects of television violence are
debated year after year and nobody does anything about it. The way children
behave today at this school is the way they might have behaved in Harlem or the
Bronx ten years ago. I see more and more children who aren't sheltered from
baseness. It's more than just catching a couple older children smoking in the
bathroom once every few months: drug addiction, brawls, foul mouths--fouler
than anything I would ever have imagined. These base influences make the
children something different than children and I suspect that not being allowed
to be innocent they won't see anything good in themselves or the world when
they are adults -- just the baseness. Wouldn't you think so? They would become
full of rage."

"I don't know," she said circumspectly. "Let's hear specifics if you are
talking about Nathaniel."

"You are surely aware of him swearing the way he does or if he doesn't swear in
front of you--"

"He does sometimes."

"Okay," he reaffirmed mildly. He found some satisfaction in the honesty. "Then
maybe there are too many R-rated videos being played at home or other media
where he might be hearing words like--"

"Fuck? From me, but he only uses words like this in choice situations."

"Lady, there are no choice situations for that," scoffed the vice- principal.

"I don't like the pejorative way you said the word, "lady." She stood up. She
couldn't imagine being called a more vulgar word."

"I think we should talk about this. Sorry, I didn't mean to be disrespectful.
You are obviously highly educated and I want to hear what you have to say. If
we don't talk about it now sooner or later he'll get into trouble even if we
ignore it this time."

She sat down. With unapologietic indifference she said, "Does it happen very
often?"

"Not that I'm aware of but it shouldn't happen once. It was directed toward one
of our teachers."

"Nathaniel's home room teacher?"

"Yes."

"The one who puts him in the coats with his nose against the wall-- the one
they call the Reclasaur. Yes, I've heard about her. As a homeroom mother I've
witnessed her. Matter of fact, I was planning to come to see the principal
about this Mrs. Recla. You just gave me the incentive. Do you approve of
teachers doing that to students?"

"Not really; but from what I've heard he never pays attention in class."

"Who would, with violence being perpetrated in the classroom. Would you pay
attention to this discussion if I threw coffee in your lap? Of course, not.
You'd be concerned about how you feel from coffee being spilt on you. We learn
what we have to to learn to survive in our environment but if the environment
is all bad than we withdraw from it. Daydreaming is one of many defense
mechanisms not listed in psychology texts. It's used by children when old
things like Recla don't know how to make them enjoy learning. It's used to
escape if confined in violent environments. If he is stripped of daydreaming
and is being coerced back into an unfriendly environment he'll use words--any
words violently. Sure, with enough words being used violently as a teenager one
then moves them into the concrete realm of actions. I really should remove him
from school altogether. This is not the road I want him traveling on."

"I'll ask Mrs. Recla to not use him as an example in front of the class.
Discipline like that can be humiliating to a boy."

"Damned right it can."

"Do you always use profanity in your home in what you call choice occasions?"

"I sometimes do. I like to feel free to let words gush out but I'm careful not
to use them in violent ways."

"Well, he used the F word. I think of that as violent. Don't you?"

"No, I don't," she said. "Words aren't innately bad." She knew. The big bang
was violent. Movement was violent. She knew too well that any sexual act was a
violent shot at conception wrapped in pleasurable hallucinogenics. Virtually
all music, movies, and other forms of popular culture were the celebration of
sex, a celebration lasting much longer and more indeliably than the act being
celebrated; and so culture was violent. Commerce was definitely strife. It was
a competitive attempt to get the goods in a world of limited resources. A world
with people tripping over each other in their competetive movements flooded
one's senses. Noise was continually interrupting the contemplative assessment
of what one has taken in with the senses or invented in the sacred domain of
the mind. Movement and noise were the real culprits; and yet humans, sociable
creatures of movement, would never indict them. Such beloved villians that
brought them titilation were always allowed to go free. "Again, you seem to
think that violence or love for that matter is in words instead of the love and
hate moving them about. That is ludicrous especially with small children who
experiment with language and haven't learned the appropriateness of words for
various situations. When Nancy Sinatra sang, 'One of these days these boots are
going to walk all over you' the word boot changed--maybe not indeliably but at
least during the year of the popularity of the song. All words are sounds.
Negative and positive connotations to words are constantly changing.
'Conversation' meant sexual intercourse in the seventeenth century and
'intercourse' meant conversation. Haven't you ever been on the bleachers at a
great baseball game and yelled out, "What a fucking great hit."

The vice-principal laughed. "Well, all right, maybe well-meaning men with cans
of beer in their hands might slip on occasion and say such things but again
that is adults. I guess you don't see the problem."

"Listen, Mr. Quest. What is your first name?"

"Michael."

"Do you have a middle name?"

"Yes, but why do you want to know that?"

"I don't know. I do. I like to know who I'm talking with."

"Frasier."

"Well, Michael Frasier Quest, I apologize that my son said the F word to his
teacher. All right? This was disrespectful and I'll talk with him gently, nose
free and out of the coat rack, and we'll see if we can calmly detach this word
from his lexicon. And I guess you will have a talk with his homeroom teacher
about proper ways to discipline a child that can be reprimanding but
reassuring. Now, do I think that being playful with the English language is a
bad reflection on my son, no I don't. Creative people find creative and
positive ways to use words. Still, as I said, I'll remind him that the use of
this one in particular has its limitations in society...that it can be
offensive in most situations. Children are intelligent creatures. They seek
approval. If you explain the reality to them, they tend to emulate the
instruction."

"Fine," he said. "I think we can leave it there."

"What is that?" she asked. She pointed to a file that had her name on it.

"Oh, it isn't really anything. Just some information I found-- merely notes--to
help me know you a little bit before you came here."

"May I look?"

"Well, okay. I guess that would be fine." She could see that his thoughts sank
back with his eyes. She knew that he did not want her to see these notes and so
she wanted to see them with more yearning.

She took out a sheet of paper. She was relieved that there was just one. She
read: Gabriele Isabella Sangfroid — 32 -- graduate of the University of Kansas;
a Master's degree in criminology at Emporia State; a Master's degree in
psychology at Rice University; worked for the state prison system in Kansas;
and although not currently on public assistance such as food stamps and AFDC
gained Federal Emergency Monetary Aid, FEMA, to pay utility expenses in January
of last year; foodstamps once one month in 1990; no criminal record." She
looked at him sternly. "This information is that obtainable?" she asked.

"Between state authorities and schools, it is."

"I don't care," she said indifferently but with a sotto voce of acerbity. "Make
your little notes; type them up; publish them. People are amused by so little."

"It's just a note."

She nodded. "I know that but I'm not noteworthy." Even though she proudly
scorned this bit of voyerism, she again felt relieved that there wasn't more.

She could imagine him having asked her how she supported herself and her child
financially. This question would have forced her to explain how she had
considered all prostitution that every human did in life and had chosen the
physical version to be the most honorable. It would have brought her such
sadistic pleasure to watch him squirm around in iconoclastic ideas the way a
convict had to adapt to prison or a mouth to the wiggling substance of hideous
tasting Jello. Fortunately for both of them, he did not ask. She got up from
her seat thinking how ignorant he was of the earliest essays and arguments
about education. Even centuries ago intellectuals believed that education
should not be indoctrination or to learn a practical skill, but exposure to
important ideas that would help to guide an individual's perceptions. "Well,
Mr. Quest, it's been a pleasure," she said as she shook his hand. "Just
remember that if you soften Recla's approach toward Nathaniel I can't exactly
guarantee what he will say to her at all times but I can guarantee that the
vowels and syllables he uses will be benign. They will be creative and not
hateful. Please talk to this easily offended teacher and remind her not to put
him in with the coats anymore. That is if she wants to not deal with me in any
other way than with a smile on my face and cheese and crackers in my hands."




Chapter Twenty-Two


He had assumed the continuum of excitement in the exotic anomaly of living
together with a man. In the first month of living with Seong Seob he believed
(as much as his ruminations allowed) that a union with a man would be perennial
splendor. Back then he thought it would be more emotionally and intellectually
superior to what his parents felt toward each other. There would be no transfer
of a wife's affections to the children; and not having shared property,
lackadaisical rose, shrub, and tree plantings and the conversations thereof
would not bury him alive in a landslide of the mundane.

One night in particular Sang Huin was bored with love making toward his friend.
Love was yearning for what one lacked and now, with all this time of having
him, he could not sense that wish to possess what he had months earlier
obtained. And yet like all other times they nonetheless climaxed to sleep the
way one might eat some leftover pie to wash a pan.

Somewhere into 2:00 in the morning the ghost of his sister, Jun Jin, eclipsed
over his brain and he woke in the shadow and heat of its passing. He was
thinking of her progressively less all the time. Indeed, she was passing into a
realm no different than nameless, traceless ancestors diffusing out and away
like the molecules that once composed a mist. But still she did not go easily.
If not clasping onto him chokingly as one who, dead, was nonetheless drowning,
she would slam him against the internal walls of his brain for trying to
relegate her into oblivion. She would definitely not go easily.

He felt a headache and imagined Gabriele's as well. He tried to shrug off both
but was only able to dismiss what he imagined hers as being. He looked at the
rising and falling of Seong Seob's chest within the silvery tinted shadows of
twilight that fell through the curtain of their bedroom. The breathing of this
friend was harmonic beauty and, at that moment, he halfway yearned for him.

Evading Gabriele motioning for him in the hallway as if he were supposed to go
into the bathroom to help her vomit, he went into the living room and turned on
the American military station, AFKN. New divisions of soldiers were being sent
to Kuwaiti bases for another confrontation with Iraq. Pyongyang had recently
dismissed nuclear monitors. The troops at the Itaewon base and at the DMZ were
on a heightened alert to North Korean actions. They were the same old
unresolved conflicts. "Feelin' good," said a soldier in military uniform before
a television camera. "Feelin' the adrenaline. Glad I'm here to serve American
interests and the people of South Korea, practicing war games and the like. I
and my unit - all these great men from every division - are ready to go into
action any minute we're requested to fight." Peace, thought Sang Huin, was not
the natural state. Being titillated by the infinite possibilities in sexual
liaisons with strangers and a propensity for violence were both the natural
state.

Sang Huin turned on his computer. He could only jot down Nathaniel's thoughts.
"The car is hot. He feels the burning sensation of his legs against the
upholstery. He likes the heat. It prompts him to not delay by thinking, but
just to move quickly. There is something pleasing in the car passing the world
as wind. It almost makes him feel that he can pass through anything: through
another car, or through the side of an embankment. He does not know where he is
going." Sang Huin stopped. He was being taken downstream with his memories.
They pulled him into them because they were the substance of who he was. As the
founder of philosophy, Thales, stated, everything was made of water.


Sang Huin, this Shawn or Sean depending on how he spelled his nickname, had
returned home from one of his last days of his senior year in high school to
find his sister, Jun Jin, crying on the bottom step of the staircase. Her eyes
were black and swollen and they were as dark as marble. She didn't seem real.

"Who did this to you?" he demanded, although he believed that he knew. He
approached her slowly and solemnly. He pulled the strap of his book bag beyond
his clavicle and allowed it to slide down his arm. He propped the bag against
the side of the first step. It wasted a minute. He wanted to avoid this
situation and a protective, invisible wall was around him. He felt as if he
were watching a movie of quasi- real beings in an unusually personal situation
that was just somewhat believable. He felt that both he and his sister were
unreal just like the unreal situation he was facing. He was reluctant to broach
the subject and he found his voice faltering when he repeated the question for
a second time. The softness of an uncertain voice awakened her from the
withdrawal in a capsule of non-being. She responded for she knew uncertainty
and to hear it in another being coaxed her to come out of her own protective
shell to acknowledge his suffering as well as her own.

"Help me," she said.

"How?" he asked.

"I don't know -- I don't -- just be with me now…that's all," she whispered. She
gave to him what she had: a bit of a morose smile. But, water to cement, his
expressions were hardening from it. She could see this and again crawled up
into herself. She was languid and bent despite her stiffness but her feet were
tilted to the floor and suctioned into the frontal base of the step like an
upside down insect. One of her hands had such a firm tightness as if enmeshed
in the railing and the other one dangled without movement.

There was a child within him who was uncertain, who would placate and comfort
those in distress from the knowledge of distress himself; and thus for a
splendid moment he wavered non-judgmentally. And yet it was his father's tone
he wanted to emulate. Shawn was now the representative of family with its
senior members away at work. He could listen, comfort this stiff battered being
who like him was a puppet being pulled from all directions, fragmenting,
searching for truth in void, and at a loss with radically different thoughts,
feelings, and probable outcomes. And yet there was the tone he started from, a
tone he could not diverge from now that his face was stern, the gift was
despised, and she, this older sister was absconding into herself once again. He
had to stay on one track if he wanted to be a man at all. He reinforced his
earlier words, the words of manhood.

"Whoever did this to you -- I'll kill him. You tell me now!" He blared his
visceral rage. Alien manhood was disgorging out of him like a geyser as it did
in all males when forced to forfeit being human for being men. The compounds
being disgorged were obdurate, callous, and hard.

"Please don't tell mama or daddy!" she mumbled weakly.

"They'll see! Look at you!"

"I know." She pierced him with being lost. He was lost too but resented having
it being mirrored onto him. It wasn't the model for being a man that he could
pass onto his sons should he have sons, and he felt that he should have sons no
matter what his sexual feelings were.

"What's happened to you?" he asked mildly. "For one year you've been a
stranger. I can guess. I'm always left guessing."

"I've been ill -- so ill."

"Ill?" He wanted to believe her. Strangely, he wanted to believe in viruses
that blackened eyes. He wanted to believe in physical sickness, which often had
cures. It wasn't a major divergence: sickness meant being overtaken by a virus
that was alien and so with love it could be as unwanted as this. One could be
inundated with pleasure- neurotransmitters like anyone whose consciousness
succumbs to a knockout gas. This was his subconscious association; and yet
consciously he wanted to believe that she was literally ill and despised her
for not being so.

"Take my hand. Let's go upstairs."

"I'll die if I go up there."

"No! Mom, Dad, and I will help you to become well…if you're sick." He
emphasized "if you're sick" doubtfully. Then he became aware of the fact that
he was playing a game the way he had always been led around by childish games
when he was a naive and gullible boy. He hated her for making him look foolish
once again. "Go up, June!"

"Sang Huin, if I go to my bedroom I'll slit my wrist. I'll jump from the window
headfirst. I don't know. I'll end it somehow."

"What are you saying?"

"Feel it!" She put his hand on her lap. "It's alive."

He took back his hand in revulsion of it being placed there. Then his face
grimaced.

"You're pregnant with a guy that gives you this!" He lifted her lowered face in
his palm. "What's the name of this guy?" he demanded. He knew and it wasn't
just a guy whom she had bred with but the adrenaline of being with one who had
power, the glitter of being with one who had money and influence, the love of a
body, and the friendship with this man who was her boss. She had been seduced
by the demonstration that some male birds give to prospective mates when
dangling worms from their mouths. It was the American dream. He had always
believed that womanhood and prostitution were the same thing. "Release your
hand from the railing."

"No, please, I can't go up!"

"Who's to say anything about going up. We're going down, down to him. I'll give
you to him since you are his second marriage. He signed it with that thing
growing inside you. Maybe you'll be his wife's servant. You're definitely his
whore. You've seen this home for the last time."




Chapter Twenty-Three


Absent of Christ, this Easter morning began like many of those secular Easters
of earlier years: getting up to fix some scrambled eggs in her bosky bath robe
only to find her attempts at providing a substance of animal protein/vitamin
B12 rejected for the chocolate effigy of a rabbit in the refrigerator, feeding
him more chocolate than he typically got on a given day, and fixing dye in
bowls so that he could color his eggs. She fixed some breakfast for herself. It
was a self-made Eucharist of thickly burnt whole wheat toast, some beer, and a
grapefruit. When he finished dabbing eggs in various dyes and giving to each a
distinct design, she poured out some cereal for him.

He sat down with his usual fidgetiness at having to sit at all and let his
cornflakes get soggy as he picked at them with his spoon. Easters were for him
like walking about mesmerized in a choclatey mist. He was preoccupied with
catching the ethereal on his tongue; and Gabriele's bottle of beer looked more
ethereal than the rabbit. His incessant whining for some of her beer caused her
to doctor a bit of his orange juice in the hope that he would be satisfied if
not happy in the last vestige of pure childhood.

As they consumed the putrid and execrable half-baked scramble of her macabre
sense of a meal they heard church bells ringing superfluously at a distance in
downtown Ithaca. Church bells were the metallic clanging for the assembly of
superstitious tribes. Still, because she always heard more of them each Easter,
they seemed melodious the way simple Christmas music fused with the happiness
of being with family members while decorating a tree. And yet she knew that
once he disregarded eggs, chocolate rabbits, and store-bought sugar cookies for
more selfish pleasures, her Easters would entirely vanish. A child grew out of
pleasures the way he grew out of his britches; and once this happened such
clanging church bells would no longer have anything musical within them. They
would only be noise. She sighed, thinking that all benevolent myths washed away
like the sandcastle he had made for the sun long ago.

It was just a little over a year ago, while pinning damp clothes onto the
clothes line, that he wanted to know the truth as to why his friends were
repudiating Santa Claus. She explained that they were right in what they said;
and that in a world such as this, what one saw was pretty much what one got. It
was a testament in favor of empirical evidence. It was a statement that ideas
were sometimes the copies instead of physical reality being copies of ideas.
She told him, "Reindeer flying from house to house in a population of 6 billion
people in 6 habitable continents just doesn't cut the mustard." Now she
regretted that she had said it.

When they finished eating, she sent him out to play in the streets while she
fornicated with a couple newly arrived clients. Following such extroverted
activities that required all her acting abilities and social skills to be on
target, she sank back into her hallowed, private domain. She drew a few
freelance sketches for a local card company, cleaned the trailer hurriedly, and
then began preparing lunch. It would be little bits of beef in gravy to be put
on toast, which she so aptly and succinctly labeled as "shit on a shingle;" but
for now it was butter in a skillet spewing anew in streams of orangish yellow
sizzlings and sputterings like early components of galaxies swirling out into
open space.

"Over here, Miss Gabriele. Howdy and top of the morning to you!" She looked
toward this strange Southern and Irish sound and saw her son walking back and
forth on stilts before the kitchen window. She looked at this freakishly
elongated creature of ostentatious movements doing its dance. In ways she was
envious of his sense of celebration in the moments, hours, and days of being
but she couldn't help asking herself if this gyrating form had actually come
from her although indeed it had.

"Howdy, over there," she said with the amicable indifference of cordiality.

"When's that shit on a shingle stuff gonna be done?"

"Don't know." She poured in her milk and flour. "What do you want with it?"

"Lasagna."

"Lasagna--always lasagna if not goulash. Well, we tried that last night." She
thought of that mildly humiliating moment when his face had wrinkled and
cringed. The face had crinkled like an old newspaper in the muscles of a palm.
She, his heroine of all these years, had been regarded with disapproval. Sure,
the pasta had been overcooked and the starch had dripped from it but she
couldn't see that this was any more repugnant than a juicy hamburger. His
repugnance had surprised her and his exaggerated expressions had not seemed a
commensurate reaction.

Yesterday the behavior struck her with its impudence. Even more, she was struck
that just by living together as they did, she could feel a twinge of pain so
easily and so preposterously. She was worried then that she was becoming as
ridiculous a human being as everyone else. It was just a twinge of pain lasting
a moment but it was too much. The whole foray into obeying a cookbook was an
unsuccessful attempt at imitating school cuisine which she dumped in the trash
in a choleric gesture lasting no longer than his facial grimace. She took the
plate from him, removed her own as well, and scraped the contents away in five
seconds. It had been a little thing but it was hard for her to forget it now
that she was cooking another meal for him.

"Rick's gonna come."

"Who's that?" she asked as she stirred her concoction while picking at the meat
the way one might kick away dead bodies littering the street." She turned back
to the window but he was no longer in that frame. Already the stilts were
forsaken action and he was going off somewhere else on a bicycle. She could
only see this diminishing figure from behind. She was irritated that so much of
the time he went off without permission and yet she did not feel that she could
chastise him for what she had done when she was his age. Even now she was doing
it: she was dragging him into a shiftless domain of a trailer-whore hoping that
something extraordinarily advante garde would happen to him here. Maybe she had
a moral obligation to take care of one whom she had brought into the world but
his coming from her womb did not mean a claim to him. At least, this was what
she told herself. She could guide him the best that she was able but if he
wanted to jump fifty feet from a top branch of a tree or ride on a bicycle head
first into a bus it was his choice. If he wanted to run off without permission,
she told herself, why should she feel any pang from it; and yet, like a
ridiculous human being, she did.

Phallicly shaking out some Worchestershire sauce into a big black tempest, she
wondered how the sanctity of monogamy existed with the tenet to be fruitful and
multiply. If promiscuity were the natural order, monogamy had to be the
unnatural one: and yet, paradoxically, monogamy had become a revered moral code
of conduct. It was no wonder, she thought to herself, that people were
frustrated and confused. She told herself that there had to be a reason for
monogamy to be such a sacrosanct striving although she was having trouble
figuring out what that reason could be. The tenet existed but within it most
men were given the wink for indiscretions while some women were stoned to death
for them. They were stoned, she theorized, for making other men question
whether or not the children within their own homes contained someone else's
peculiar genetic codes. They were stoned for implanting anxieties in the piece
of mind that man had. They were stoned because of this competitive need
engrained in the human psyche to survive as long as one could and to pass one's
genetic codes to the next generation. The tendentious rationalist further
theorized that if one were to live in a remote rural town he or she would not
make compatability an issue. Knowing that there was no chance of finding anyone
better than the person one was with, such a couple would grow apart, stay
together, and plant trees. She couldn't prove it; and if she could it would be
just one more empty fact. And yet now it was an empty theory. Sometimes it
struck her how this dance with ideas was like awakening to the fact that one
was all alone dancing in an empty room of a lunatic asylum.

The quantum theory of her life -- the forces that drove her away from humanity
(perhaps some inherent German characteristics, although she was but half
German) and the circumstances that drove her back to humanity, the inherent
need to be a social creature and the need for self-preservation within her own
cloistered domain-- were the making of a dilemma; and being in a dilemma (a
soap opera of one's making) was like finding oneself in a beautiful garden of
undiscovered geysers. A dilemma was the air of Thales, the water of Anaximenes,
and the fire of Heraclitus.

These forces of withdrawing and shunning but needing people were like the
peculiar components of atoms. They bounced off each other and made her. At
times the atoms pushed away from society: and then they oscillated back,
compacting her to the world of selfish people with their insatiable
movements...cats with their insatiable movements...insatiable cries.

The cat had once again dragged its prey to the metal steps that went up to the
door of the trailer. She could hear that specific songish whine that it
repeated for the acknowledgement of having made its capture. She looked out the
window and saw her son and another boy standing there listening to these cries.
The cat was wanting their praise for its work. From the cat she realized what
work was: it was feeling self-worth from believing that one had gained
something special in one's movements and demanding that other's acknowledge
these captures for to not do so would relegate them back to the insignificance
of just movement.

All creatures needed some type of work and yet she had none and she wanted
none. Outside of the obligation of motherhood, all that she engaged in were art
and prostitution. Neither one of them were movement in the strictest sense and
so as such they were not work: the former was not action but contemplation and
the latter one involved lying on a bed. In both art and prostitution she did
not need or want praise from others for she had nothing to capture in movement
since she was not moving. Even in motherhood, she was not trying to obtain some
being to fill a void in her life. There was no void. She had been accepted as
an FBI profiler prior to finding herself pregnant. She could have gone to that
or to nothingness; and with the obligations of motherhood she had slowly
chartered a path into nothingness. She did not need anyone telling her that she
was beautiful or that her art work was worthwhile. Matter of fact, she did not
need them at all. Others could come and go from her life through the revolving
door in her castle if anyone had the power to budge it after crossing her moat.
They could come and go and she would inhale and exhale them like respiration so
long as they made no claim on her as she made no claim on them. Breaking
definitions of work, how to make a living, and sociability, she told herself
that she was a macro- human living with mere earthlings she could not fully
identify with. Her mind was a bit scrambled in what she was thinking. Maybe she
was saying that she was pure contemplation--someting like that. She wasn't a
hundred percent sure of any of her ideas. They changed with the moment even
though ideas should be permanent and immutable when the physical world was
neither. Being profound was like driving one's car through potholes for the
hell of it and hoping to not get a flat. Maybe contemplation was movement.

If the cat wanted to follow its instincts, contribute to her pathetic meals,
and gain a bit of praise, she did not mind. She or Nathaniel could praise it;
but this sport of playing with one's eventual meal, however, was loathsome. It
was hard to revere Mother Earth and Father Sky, or nature as a whole, when it
was essentially barbaric. She hated Mouse when it allowed its half dead prey to
escape so that it could recapture it again and slap it around with the stiff
rackets of its paws. She opened the window.

"Who are you?," she asked.

"I'm Rick," said the other boy.

"Do you have a last name?"

"Quest," said Rick.

"Quest as in Mr. Quest at the school?"

"One and the same," said Nathaniel.

"What's with the cat?" she asked

"It got a black bird."

"Not the owl?" She was anxious that it not be the owl that had nested itself in
a wooden flower pot that hung beneath her window.

"No, your owl is okay I guess."

"Good." She turned to Rick. "Are you staying for lunch?" asked Gabriele.

"We will if your cooking doesn't make anybody sick," said Nathaniel.

"I'm sorry. What did you say?"

For a few seconds he hesitated fearfully but he pushed himself and let his
temerity ooze out. "I don't want anybody to get sick eating it!" Her eyes
became hard and haughty. She smiled a hateful smile for that son of hers "had
balls." Gabriele shut the window on the opinions and personality formulating
within this son of hers. With the window fully closed, she could still hear
that whining of the cat wanting the payment of praise for having made its
capture. "God," she thought. "Why does it have to play with its prey? If
society is barbaric, the nature of an individual is worse." She wondered where
she could move under the sun without projecting a shadow. She wondered if by
finding a mission in life for the benefit of herself and others in the hope of
making the world a less obscene place she would become more indecent than what
she was. She wondered if she could even learn anything from a world where the
nature of things wasn't exactly evil but was definitely cold, crude,
self-centered, and merciless. She supposed that this question was the
predominant experiment of her life, and it incorporated Nathaniel into it. The
redundancy of the cat's disharmonious songish cries grated her gray matter. She
filled up a bucket with water and threw it onto the steps to cause Mouse to
abscond to happier fields.

As if both were very young boys, she wanted to make playdough for her son and
this other little entity that he had dragged back with him. She yearned to
foster in a small way those who could still mingle within the solitary
wanderings of the mind. From this malleable substance of flour children could
be encouraged to continue as solitary units of the present moment where just
the peculiar aspect of being alive would be enough to totally enthrall them.
And yet she realized that she would be fostering that which was tepid in all of
them for boys grew older and more sociable by the day and she, a maimed and
hurting soul, was sour to the world. This sour quality ricocheted its dour
force on her inner harmony forcing cynical ruminations and recondite
perspectives. The railing, in her own head, about "the prostitution of work"
was merely an excuse for not being more contemplative and productive. The
reality was that she could not reside comfortably in the inner world even if
she had all the time in the world. All that she could do would be to conjure
oil paints and malleable pottery clay if not playdough in the hope of retaining
an inner depth in a child capable of perceiving the entity in a unique way.
Maybe the wish to make him once again interested in playdough was from the
yearning to retain the earliest aspects of him. Through him she could have a
childhood vicariously. After all, with Mother and Father riding off into the
sunset in a tank, the beheading, and the disparaging comments by the Peggyites
in the bootcamp of Peggy's Kansas home, she still needed innocence vicariously.
She rejected the idea of making playdough. "I don't want to confuse the
playdough with the meal," she told herself but really she didn't want to feel
that malaise of one foolish enough to have a 7 and 8 year old do activities
that they had outgrown. Her grandmother still thought that Peggy's thirty year
old children collected coins and she still sent commemorative coins from every
new state that she visited. After so many years Gabriele still felt blessed to
be out of that fray because nothing was worse than trying to feel close to a
bunch of hostile strangers whose only closeness was proximity and blood.

Glancing from the window at these boys competing with each other in a game of
soccer, she was reminded even more of the way things were. Her son was a social
animal now and all meaning would be in others. She tossed a salad.
Unfortunately, as she was reaching for the burning toast she set the bowl on
the bar with a bit too much thrust of the wrist, tossing it everywhere. She
cleaned up her mess, raised the window, and tried to avoid being controlled by
the roaring negative irascibility that strummed discordantly within her.
Restraining herself, she said mildly, "Okay fellows, better put the game aside
and eat this stuff or I'll feed it to the Mouse." Nathaniel picked up his ball
and raced his friend to the door. The meal might have made him procrastinate
were it not for hungers and thoughts of a chocolatey allure.

"Do you have mice inside there?" asked Rick as the two boys entered the
kitchen.

"No, that's just her name for that old cat."

Gabriele interjected, "I take it that the 'her' might be in reference to me,
your mother. And as for Mouse, what other name has it ever had? I wouldn't call
it old either if it is still able to hunt." She disliked her son's disparaging
tone towards a member of her family that had been with her longer than he had.
She thought that the words were rather treacherous and scowled; and yet she was
cognizant that gender neutral pronouns akin to a chair and having thrown water
at her furry child weren't outward symbols of love although they might be
equivalent to how she was treated in Peggy's home as one of their family. "Are
you hungry, Rick?" she asked.

"Yes, please."

"Good." She scooped up some lettuce, apple sauce, and cottage cheese and put
them on a plate for him next to the shit on a shingle. "Here, Rick. This'll put
some hair on your chest. "Tell me, with Easter and all, don't you and your
family go to church?"

"It's just me and my dad. He likes Saturday Mass better."

"I see. No mom?"

"Dead."

"Oh." Her interjection was lucid but sympathetic. She thought it the right
combination for matters like this. She admired his strong and unambiguous
declaration. He knew that death was death and for one so young not to fudge
when saying it gave her newly found respect for this widower, Mr. Quest, as
well as his son. Was there really a realm where ideas were the true form? She
was certain that Plato was right in thinking that there was. We were all
imitations of ideas. But she was equally certain that no one returned to the
realm of ideas once they were dead. Death was death. It sometimes occurred to
her that if humans weren't honest about the tenants for the parameters of birth
and death (sex and closure) they would lie about everything else within those
parameters. If she could only get through the factory of life without becoming
a defective misanthrope she knew this to be the highest measurement of success.

She listened to their kid talk for half an hour: some other kid who couldn't
catch baseballs and whom they attributed as the culprit in losing a game; those
who were successes and failures in a broad jump; teachers who reprimanded them;
wretched gossip about poor Little Orphan Annie and her continual penchant for
launching her cannon balls at male genitalia; action packed television movies
they had seen; popular cartoons on lunch boxes; and sardonic complaints from
the deprived Adagio for only getting to watch TV three days per week. She did
find the food jolting around their mouths as they spoke rather amusing; but on
whole it was dreary conversation and it began to give her a headache.

"Put your plates in the sink when the two of you finish. I need to think."

She excused herself and retreated into the bedroom while they ran to the
refrigerator to put their ravenous fangs into the carcass of the chocolate
bunny.

In her bedroom she listened for the door of scurrying boys to open and close.
Then she began to smoke her cannabis like Shakespeare and let words in thoughts
rise from the ashes of the mundane. As they rose in a cani-beer cloud with the
levity of laughing gas, she stayed in the bedroom and began to write. She did
not feel sick enough to go to the bathroom this time. She thought that she
should really lock the door of the trailer but she knew that the Nathaniel
would stay outside busy unto himself or with his friend. Less and less would
her company be needed. She wrote: "Dear journal, I've been thinking that the
personal life should be banned. This socializing and lovey-doving just slows
down society's progress. Everywhere, clogging sidewalks, there are these
Cornell University girls holding hands with their guys. Makes me sick. If I go
to a waterfall or a park to paint or pick up some milk at the 7-11 I have to
wave my hand and shoo them away like pesky flies. And you know that each of
them is thinking about what he's thinking about her. So apparent! They are
orbiting around their guys at all moments of the hours. They are everywhere
subservient to chemicals of love in their heads that make them subservient to
his whims; and I want to be the demolition of those ties. I see my vocation as
roller blading down sidewalks through those linked hands while I get to my
destination. I see myself on sidewalks leading to the grocery store. I'm on
roller blades and I'm breaking a few arms and blading a few lovey-dovey hearts.
Sometimes I dream of shouting through a megaphone, 'About relationships and
needing people I caution everyone to be circumspect. Can another be water or
oxygen? Can another one be your sustenance? Stop this delusional MTV thinking!
You are letting one simple neurotransmitter banging against a pleasure receptor
control you. Females, don't be foolish enough to be women! What are you doing
wasting all the minutes of your life trying to get someone to be with you? What
on Earth makes you want to block off your own thoughts this way? A man won't
stay with you forever. They never do and sooner or later you must confront your
own inane foolish selves that have been underdeveloped and unchartered all this
time. Find a deeper awareness than the personal life. Find a vocation that will
allow you to tap into the entity. Tap, tap to not be the whimsical dictates of
a selfish man. Tap and confront one's real aloneness. Be intrepid by aloneness
for from it one finds oneself. It is by being gregarious that you lose yourself
. Befriend your aloneness. To do otherwise makes men think that your highest
duty is to be ridden in like riding on a horse. Tap Tap. Buck the man from
vaginal penetration. Watch him run away like a horse slapped on its side. Plug
into your special talent that links you to the entity and you will never be
lost again. You will be part of the new invincible species.' Still, what can I
do? I'm just a mere me. I mailed some photographs of Adagio to Peggy and her
gang. Sort of appearance only. Decided it was best to keep up their interest in
him. Promised that someday they would not only see him but keep him for a
while. Don't know why -- True, I don't like them despite that they are his his
godparents and all--but sometimes the idea of a hiatus from this Mommy game is
a bit tempting. I could dump him on them. Antarctica -- Antarctica. It's still
in my dreams --"

"What about me? Willya' take me with you when you go off to the seventh
continent?" The voice was that of Smokey-The-Bear in the "Don't start forest
fires" advertisements.

"Up here, youn' lady."

She looked on the shelf. "Well, fuck. You're not Smokey at all."

"No, youn' lady, I'm not. He's just a distant cousin." Gabriele looked at the
foot long stuffed polar bear sitting on a man's handkerchief on a shelf above
the dresser. She had bought him one time when she went to Buffalo, New York.
"Poor Gabey, nobody loves ya' 'cause ya' don't love 'em. Going to restaurants
all alone isn't no fun. Parks alone, waterfalls and painting with your paint
brush, even fornicating alone. Even when you are with people you are separate.
Poor Gabey." Suddenly the polar bear began to change into the higher authority.

"Gabriele, it is me" said the higher authority. " Look at yourself, held
together by the stitching of hate-the plastic-eyed polar bear with the stiff
arms that the factory of the human race mutantly created -- it will be you who
shall feel the walls of artificial fur ripped from its threads, and your
stuffing falling out. For a little beer on top of four joints makes a person
see the unsealed human fragments that had been smoothed over in time. Come on
Gabriele, the gal who still chews tobacco and spits it into an empty beer
can...the gal with the deep dark-ocean eyes...the gal bereft of what the normal
means, grip that other beer bottle now. Together with the joints, this is the
only medicine devised to rebreak the strangely concocted pieces that have been
glued into the broken you. Drink and smoke! Become fragmented again with the
hope that you will heal and be normal. A 17 year old girl goes to eat a meal in
her boyfriend's home and a wife to her in-laws. How is it that such simple
pleasures continually elude you? How is it that you have made such cynical and
erroneous views of the world?" No sooner had her higher authority spoken then
Gabriele heard a skid of a fast moving car suddenly stop and a child scream.
The polar bear and the handkerchief with the initials embroidered on it tumbled
from the shelf. Gabriele quickly stabbed the marijuana to its ashtray of death
and flew out the door.

"Who is this mother fucker?" she mumbled to herself. Then she knew. Here was
MF, the vice principal of her son, her former client, shouted at hysterically
by the mother of the dead little girl. Gabriele held the woman who was deranged
in bereavement and sunk into gravel and dust of the trailer park. She was her
bulwark.

"So, he will be her lover -- this MF?" scoffed Saeng Seob in their bed upon
hearing his last chapter.

Sang Huin regretted having begrudgingly read him this chapter. He only read
parts of the manuscript when asked to do so. Seong Seob could only understand
the superficial aspects of the story at best and he only asked to hear those
bits of it read out when Sang Huin seemed to preoccupied with writing it. Sang
Huin supposed it gave them something in common. "Maybe. I don't know, really,"
he said evasively. He removed his computer to a table that was adjacent to the
bed and picked up a magazine. His eyes began to peruse the photographs of male
models in Gentleman's Quarterly who if known and involved in his life would
pull him out of his numb abyss of insipid days into the vibrancy of desire in
nightly embraces.

"And become pregnant?"

"I don't think so. I don't know at this point." He yawned. "I wouldn't know
what to do with that. I need some believable drama in it." And yet he felt that
there was no drama within his own life. Giving private lessons to children he
didn't particularly care for, his days were missionless clutter that exhausted
what little extroverted characteristics were within him; and coming home to
Seong Seob with a lack of sexual variety in that domain was flattening him in
the malaise of inordinate boredom. He was certain that there was no drama in
his life; and yet paradoxically he knew that drama was inherent even in rocks
that weathered away in time. Drama was change and it was in all things. If
drama were in the rocks, it too was there in a simple life. His was laden in
resentment over the idea of returning home to this blind lover who couldn't see
that the two of them living together was inhibiting the progress of his
manuscript. "Any ideas," he asked.

"She could have a baby and then throw him in a well."

"Why? What well? I don't want to write unbelievable melodrama."

"It's not unbelievable. It happened?"

"Huh?"

"To me. Postpartum depression. I'm told that a few weeks after my brother was
born my mother became depressed. She wouldn't eat very much. She wouldn't leave
her room except to go to the temple. One day she wanted to go to the temple and
she couldn't find my brother's shoes. When the servants couldn't find them
either, she dismissed the servants. She told them to not come back. When they
were gone she made a bath for my brother and drowned him. My family says that
maybe I fought back and it was too much trouble for her in the bathtub. Anyhow,
she decided to drive me to an old contaminated well on my grandmother's estate,
pried the boards loose that covered what was left of it, and dumped me in.
There wasn't much water in it so I didn't drown, but I lost my eyesight. " Sang
Huin felt an empathy as deep as the gods while he listened to the wind howling
through the crack of the window. It was a barely audible murmuring of ineffable
pain. It was palaver but it called to him somehow, pushing him from his malaise
to the malaise of it all.




Chapter Twenty-Four


She could guess that the quick entrance into the trailer park, if it were such,
was a reaction to her, the nefarious whore, whom he had ridden in sync to a
female's need for pleasure many years earlier. Maybe as an afterthought to the
decision of allowing his son to go off with Nathaniel, Rick's father recognized
the address his son had gone to. If that were the case she supposed that she
was in some way culpable for him driving quickly, if it were indeed done
quickly, to remove his son. The inescapable fact zipped her up into its body
bag: the removal had lead to the neighbor girl's ill fate and early demise.

She wasn't sure who was to blame. Perhaps it was fate itself. She parsed this
concept of fate. She asked herself what it was and it seemed to her that in
most situations it was the selfishness of myriad individuals who, together at a
convergence, unintentionally brought about another person's harm. She rued over
the unfairness of those who thrived for a time and those who seemed bound to
perish from their inception. She could become engrossed in her own
quasi-pleasant little world and not think about the bigger picture. By
comparison to many others suffering from starvation, disease, war, and menial
labor her life was that of a contumacious child who refused to leave the
amusement park for fear of no longer having such a dizzy perspective of it all.
She could become a bit religious (anything from a witch to a Christian) and
further the vertigo. Within the lotusland of America, so removed from intense
pain and hunger, she could hide to have a brighter perspective where some god
or another was still keeping the whole creation, if not each and every
individual, safely in his pocket. She did not, however, want self-deception. As
much as she was able to do so, she wanted to know reality. Justice was equity
but equity was not in the natural order and so the natural order was unjust.
What justice there was existed as the creation of man; and so, in ways, society
was more righteous than the natural order.

A day before the funeral she could sense a malaise so palpable it seemed to
flatten her under its foot like a bug. While her Adagio was at school (if he
were indeed hers, for she doubted the tenet of people belonging to each other
as it was action and clutter of small earthly creatures who needed to fill
their time and the vaccum of their minds no differently than her son and this
Rick when they had played with a soccer ball, plastic and air, to gain a
connection that bypassed one's lonely domain), she went into the bathroom. She
stared at the mountain of his and her clothing beside the washer, which she had
crowded into the stall of her shower. The molecules of their stink seemed to
bang against each other in the musical vibrations of Eric Satie's musical
composition, Gymnopedies; and with the dead heap of morose and musical laundry,
her lethargy, and the horror of being a domesticated woman as all womanly
slaves since the beginning of time, she couldn't bring herself to do the
laundry.

She told herself that she was indeed a silly woman. Nine years ago she had
entertained herself in this mental challenge of being desired by one whose
orientation was not so inclined to women, spun herself in a specious illusion
of intimacy when, in youth, sex was such a novel and believable medium of
intimacy, and given birth in the belief that aborting an embryo was barbaric.
Now she was struck by how this connection that she brought into the world would
be an ongoing frittering away of her days. She cachinnated at her absurdity,
which caused Mouse to jump on top of the washer and stare at this mad woman
inquisitively. "Hi there, Mouse. Haven't you ever seen a woman laugh while
doing the laundry before? You really must get a life." She chuckled at the cat.

She told herself that there were too many people in her life when really there
was just one. She told herself that contrary to her precept that people should
be breathed in and out she was cluttering up her life with them although really
a neatly isolated and Antarctic existence would have given her nothing to
contemplate. Still, she again entertained the idea of dumping her son at
Peggy's for he had become too indespensable to her life and this was a deep
vulnerability. Still the quandary persisted: there was no way that she could
allow him to be damaged by the disparaging animadversion of a family no
different than a "boot camp" or military training camp. The internecine war
games in this so called family of which she had extricated herself brought most
damage onto outsiders like herself and she did not want to perpetuate it to the
next generation.

Gabriele heard a thump in her mailbox. She received a letter telling her that
she was terminated from the local greeting card company. She rummaged though
her sketches and found one of her impish ones, less pertaining to social
etiquette, missing from the rest. She must have mailed it in by mistake. She
guessed that this was similar to what she might have done to be ignored by
Hallmark. With Hallmark she wasn't quite sure what she had done but this local
greeting cards publishing house was clearly piqued. Did the subconscious, like
an empress dowager, make its maneuvers on conscious reality behind the scenes?
She had played such games for so long. It was no great wonder they had
dismissed her. Only an idiot would have been surprised by this playing with the
fates. She also realized that she could not prostitute herself more in her
other occupation to rectify the lack of incoming finances. Sanity only allotted
so much prostitution per week. "Oh, well," she thought. "Maybe I could sell my
paintings."

The thought of herself as an artist the way some might proclaim the title as a
full summation of themselves was never something that Gabriele did. She could
admit, "I paint" to herself. This was an obvious fact, but she never went
beyond that. This added relevance of a bleak economic situation, however, made
her say, "I could possibly be an artist."

Evading the menace of time consuming laundry, she sat in front of her canvas
but found herself thinking about the neighbor woman and her deceased child.
That woman would have pillaged through hell for the opportunity to wash clothes
for her daughter. Gabriele felt ashamed of herself for groaning about domestic
chores and she felt deep empathy for her neighbor. She went to the grocery
store and then brought over a packaged basket of fruit for the grieving mother.
She knocked and the woman opened the door slightly.

"What?" she murmered numbly.

"Hello. I hope you don't mind. I was worried that you might not be eating."

"They let him go, you know."

"Quest?"

She took the basket. "More food. People always give food, energy." She laughed
bitterly. "Yes, Quest, and I don't know why."

Gabriele released a sympathetic interjection of "Oh, my!"

"It doesn't matter. Nothing matters now. If I'm alone for a minute I keep
hearing her everywhere I go but there-there just isn't anything. It doesn't
seem real. I don't seem real. I make movements but it doesn't seem like me. I'm
talking to you now but it seems like there is somebody else talking who isn't
me. You aren't you either. I'm just watching you like from a distant seat at a
movie theatre or something is watching that isn't me. "

"That's natural. It will be that way for some time. Feel it your way as long as
it takes."

"How would you know?" the woman asked bitterly.

"I don't. I just imagine it is," Gabriele said softly. She did not want what
she knew to intrude. She just wanted to listen.

"The police say nobody saw him when he entered the trailer park. Nobody knows
if he was speeding. According to the police, Sally ran in front of him to get a
ball some boys threw to her." Gabriele couldn't imagine her boy wanting to play
with a girl. Then a cold feeling shot through her body: what if her son had
thrown the ball at the moment that the car was coming into the trailer park in
the hope that the girl would run after it and get killed. "What if this is a
reaction to Little Orphan Annie?" she thought. The idea was too chimerical and
grotesque to take seriously. She dismissed it but the cold still streaked
through her body.

"Have you had breakfast? I know it is the same food idea. It is an empty
gesture in an empty world. Would you like for me to stay with you for a while
and help you get something to eat - I'd stay for as long as you'd like."

"My mother's here. I've got to go now. Thank you."

"Sure, but take this" said Gabriele. She wrote down her telephone number on a
sheet of paper that she pulled out of a pocket. "Call me anytime, any hour, if
you need a listener."

"All right," said the woman. She shut the door.

Gabriele went back to bed. The sun dominated through the covering of the
drapes. She took her quilt and draped it from the curtain rod. She could not
see the point in anything other than sleep. The experience of the senselessness
of the girl's death had just fused into other elements of the void and stunted
her. If her son were here and continued to be absolutely unaffected by what had
occured she would have been tempted to allow him to bring in orange juice and
burnt poptarts to show sympathy for herself who was a woman in a philosophic
void. She might have done this despite knowing that he would never be empathic
to such philosophic quandaries. He was a product of motion and he hadn't
experienced enough of life to understand something like this. Like now, each
time when the void descended upon her she told herself that she could not fight
it off anymore than one could avoid inclement weather. She would just have to
ride through the fog that permeated it all. She let the void devour her energy,
and then she fell into the sleep that the Ancient Egyptians thought of as the
death of the soul. When the quilt fell from the curtain rod she woke up to a
tepid rejuvenation.

She got up to fix herself something to eat. The cat was on the table eating the
left-over pancakes that she had fixed for her son before he went off to school.
Instead of shaking the cat in the air, making it appear to be in the midst of
convulsions, she just sat down and watched it eat. Then she tossed the dirty
plates into the sink--a function that was not habitual to her, but one that she
didn't mind taking on this day when washing them would add to her mental void.

She didn't have him go into school for any part of the day even though the
funeral wouldn't take place until 5:00. Instead, long before sunrise she loaded
up kid and canvases into her old car. Then they began a long ride that would
take them briefly into Syracuse, into Albany, and then back to Ithaca in a
circuitious meandering of interstates and main streets. She had that pivotal
expectation that if she were able to find the addresses of art galleries the
curators there would guide her toward various amateur art fairs so that she
could sell her work. There was, however, that less realistic hope that they
would have customers who might like the "sui generis" of a Gabriele Sangfroid
enough to ferret out the libertine creator from obscurity with this needed
substance of money. For their purchases such members of the apparatchik would
find a link back to originality and freedom that would assuage their banal and
stressful existences.

However, in his untoward behavior characterized by argumentative
insubordination about getting in either the car or the school bus, restless
climbing over the front seat within the first 15 minutes into the ride, being
told to go to a theme park every ten minutes, and claims of car sickness, she
could not feel that anything auspicious would happen to her.

"I don't know why you dragged me here with you," he complained early into the
morning when they were approaching the city limits of Syracuse.

"Drag, my dear, would be to tie you to the back of the car and pull you on that
sweet behind of yours." She gave a wry but playful smile. "Would you like
that?"

"Sure. It'd be like water skiing."

She remembered the time that she had taken him to a lake along the Addrionick
Mountains to bring to him the entity, the best that she could, since jumping
into leaves had been construed as child's play. From a restricted area used for
paddle boats and used by swimmers they had rowed along and watched sailboats
and water skiers within a bloody orange sunset. She added,"Yes, but with no
water or skis--only hard pavement worse than being throttled by a vice
principal."

"Mr. Quest?" he asked.

She did not say anything. She no longer spoke of him. The police had not
charged him with manslaughter and as far as she knew, the boys had lost their
ball, the girl had gone after it, and MF had just turned into the trailer park
at a normal speed. She had tried several times to engage her son about his
feelings and experience being present at the girl's death and yet then and now
he did not seem particularly bothered by it. He never said anything depicting
blame and confusion over Mr. Quest's role in the tragic incident.

"Sure, I'd like to be dragged that way" he reiterated.

"Hmm," she said as she pulled out a bag of chocolate from her bookbag. In most
occasions she was so conspicuously purseless."Here, have some chocolate and
peanut butter things and eat them in the back seat-and be careful that you
don't drop part of one and sit on it. I don't want that stuff squashed into the
vinyl , or worse, to have to scrub it out of your clothes."

"You need a new car like Chuck's mom. She rides around in a shinny big red van
and not like this stinky old thing."

"That ostentatious woman again. Well, I'm delighted for her. I guess if her van
is not stinky she must have a son who is neat and doesn't smash chocolate and
peanut butter things into the vinyl."

"What is stinkiness?"

"What is stinkiness? I guess it's the decomposition of matter, molecules
dancing around in the air or beginning to come apart like the chocolate in
one's mouth. Chocolate, however, isn't stinky. Maybe the decomposition of
things falling apart and going back to elements like hydrogen, oxygen, and
carbon can either stink or be rather fragrant"

"Why isn't the chocolate stinky?"

"Good question. I hope that you become a scientist who specializes in that very
thing."

"I hate the smell of those deCOMosing paintings in the trunk. I can smell them
from here."

"To each his own," she retorted.

"Why do they smell so bad."

"So that you won't eat them."

"But the smell is so bad I might think they're trash and throw them in the
trash."

"No, you'd know better than that because you'd find yourself in the trash.We're
searching for buyers of these paintings so that way we won't offend that dainty
little princess nose of yours."

"I don't have a princess nose. I have a manly prince nose."

She smiled. She liked the bantering especially at times like this when it
wasn't a distraction from a higher contemplation but a distraction from a
monotonous one. The minutes went by and soon they were in Syracuse. She
presented some of her less preferred paintings and three of them were taken on
consignment. In Albany two of her best paintings were offered a showing this
way; but as she was insisting on cash, they aquiesced to a paltry pittance of
$300.00, which she, in her ignorance, was delighted to gain. She vowed to
attempt Rochester and New York City at a later date. After eating some
vegeburgers and hamburgers from a fast food restaurant, they returned to Ithaca
for the funeral.

During the funeral she saw that sadness had flattened over the bagginess of
MF's sleepless face. She felt sorry for him. She realized that he was a
sympathetic character who could not be made into the abhorred culprit. It
occured to her that the four of them were a microcosm of the human family-each
unwittingly doing its small part in the harm of others and each insecurely
cuddling in the blanket of themselves where they might dodge feelings of
compunction. They would not be alone: there too Little Orphan Annie, the
company of executives in charge of manufacturing dodge balls, and the males who
had harmed the poor girl, might also abscond.




Chapter Twenty-five


A couple years passed of being no one's whore. She just painted and studied
toward a Master's degree in art history, passively delegating the obstructive
clutter of motherhood and all other clutter to her assistant. Her work was
resplendent to few; and yet within the limited coterie of art enthusiasts and
modern art collectors searching for potential investments, she was a success.
They made her so for having one of her paintings on a wall was a portal out of
the mundane.

She also believed that she had succeeded. To her, success was measured inwardly
but bolstered by things obtained with the purchasing power of money such as her
recently built home within an Albany suburb, a new van, and choosing to be
bedizen in some expensive jewelry that she wore repeatedly. More importantly,
she was bolstered by her freedom. She was now one of those rare birds under the
sun, free to explore her ethereal ideas and whims without any major economic
considerations. She was one of those rare birds left alone to grow fully within
herself.

Apart from beautifying herself unnaturally in the concrete of makeup and
displaying feigned smiles, which were done for potential art buyers and
Gabriele aficionados, no demands were put on her that she didn't choose to
place on herself. The house, the coruscating bits of rock that sometimes
dangled from ears and neck, and her new van would have meant little to her if
it weren't for how strangely unfettered this success was. It was exempt from
all forms of prostitution and she was C.E.O. of only herself. This C.E.O. had
no behemoth bureaucratic agency to feed, tame, and prod to a gallop at all
hours. She did not have to give her every conscious thought to it and every
unconscious thought trying to find some aspect of herself outside of the
dinosaur she rode upon and whose domineering presence enervated her when she
tried to control it. Instead, her success was full license to run around in the
thickets of herself. She was in that other garden of the barefoot child; and
she had arrived there on a magic carpet to which few adults could shrink and
reposition their limbs to sit comfortably enough to guide the flimsy rug
through the windy caprice of ideas.

No longer clinging to poverty as the savior of oneself from prostitution, she
was able to relinquish domestic womanly servitude by this appointee, Hispanic
Betty, as her housekeeper, cook, and office worker. From this faithful, illegal
worker she was able to relinquish soiled underwear, stubborn grass stained
pants, meals she was never able to master, buying multi-colored tissue paper
for decorating a Valentine's day box, exhorting him to do his homework, and a
host of trivial matters on a given day. Because of Hispanic Betty, who was ripe
for servitude no less than a virgin for plucking, she could dispense with such
trivial clutter. She could spend her time on the meditation of the entity,
which always gave her tokens of appreciation in the form of unique perspectives
concerning her world. In such a figurative and literal garden where she painted
behind her house, she was aided by the verdant colors of the yard half the year
and the snow and holly during the other half, the mellifluous smells of clean
cold air of winter or of neighbors burning grass or leaves, the winsome blowing
of the limbs of her trees, and the dulcet sounds of birds making their homes
within them.

With such an idyllic life she should have had headaches less frequently and yet
they came with more regularity and intensity, smacking her forehead from within
and dredging what was once pure and cloistered waters. With a temperature,
black spots filming over her vision, and the need to vomit on and off for a
period of hours, each time she experienced a migraine she would be thrust into
human vulnerabilities and find herself extremely perplexed as to why she should
be so diminished.

The previous day, February 12th, every small movement was exacting and she was
forced to go to the drugstore instead of a pot dealer's home since this inward
insurrection was so great. She suggested that Hispanic Betty drive her to the
doctor. When the woman kept trying to insert the key in the same wrong position
within the ignition and at last primed a bit of gas into the icy cold vehicle
with the accelerator instead of pumping on the brake peddle, she still had no
confidence in her. Lacking this confidence, they switched to a taxi. Throughout
that day she was vertiginous and lost, not knowing how to center herself or
what to center herself around. The day had been like walking around in an
eye-stinging blizzard.

Now it was February 13th and Gabriele was outside drawing the creatures of love
depicted by Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium: the hubris of whole beings that
Zeus was ready to slice in half and those already cut and diminished
desperately searching for their "better halves." She cynically snubbed love as
hungers for sex and that personal domain of wanting to love and be loved, which
were more hungers and more neediness. Then two things dawned on her. They were
opposing ideas that refused to be irrelevant. They refused to be vanquished
from the kingdom. They refused to stand outside begging like a Buddhist
mendicant at 6:00 a.m. in Laos. They were the making of a more self- actualized
Gabriele. She realized that there was great beauty in two people caring about
each other for it was nature's plan to use selfish hungers to create that
vulnerable spot within the human psyche that needed consistency and permanence
among other things; and that she too yearned for a studly apparition who would
touch her and by his touch make her real. She felt so empty within these past
two years of celibacy. There were days in which she felt that her pristine
intellectualism was an absolutely drab prison cell. If someone were to touch
her on her shoulder--just a simple human touch--she would not be wallowing in
the sludge of her thoughts. She would not be masticating them like a worm.

Taking a break on the porch, she began reading one of her textbooks but soon
she fell asleep because of the decongestant she had taken earlier for a cold.
For a minute she dreamed that the makeup on her face was an oddly pleasant
sensation like baby powder on an infant's buttocks and then the powder began to
constrict her face into feigned smiles. She ran into the kitchen and grabbed a
scouring pad to abrade away the stiffness before it all began to make her face
crack. When she woke up she saw the mail truck drive away. Then the door opened
and a woman stepped out with a stack of envelopes in her hands.

"Hispanic Betty," Gabriele asked, "The mail has already come?"

"Aqui esta, senora."

"Anything important?"

"No se nada acerca de esta asunta. I don't know nothing about it. I just get
it. Don't look at it." Gabriele didn't care what the woman purportedly hadn't
done. It seemed to her that anyone who did a family's laundry had to develop
some curiosity about them and she thought it would be rather unnatural to not
scan the addresses on envelopes. It irritated her that the woman was so
circumspect if not outright leery; and yet she was an illegal worker who needed
a job.

"That's professional of you," she said indifferently.

"That's the type of woman I am."

"Swell," said Gabriele indifferently as she perused each envelope. She mumbled
aloud. "Ah, not unexpected. A Valentine's card from Rita Lily and one for
Adagio from Peggy. Not unexpected there either." She sighed.

"Esta desmasiado frio estar fuera. Necesito volver a mi trabajo. Tengo cosas
hacer."

"De acuerdo," said Gabriele and she watched the busy bee fly away from her cold
Antarctic garden. Given her new awareness that claiming others in a mutable
world was an innate human instinct whereas breathing people in and out of one's
life was just a defensive anchor keeping one from being carried away by an
instinctive reality to cling to someone, she felt regret that she hadn't taken
an interest in her son's construction of a Valentine's day box. She told
herself that that this year might be his last year of actually believing that
the world was full of beautiful cards and sentiment exchanged with one's peers.
She went inside to write letters of contrived gratitude to Rita/Lily and Peggy
the way her son and his classmates made Valentine's Day cards for a world of
virtual strangers. It wasn't totally contrived. She needed others. She loved
others.




             Book Three: Alone


  "No good can come from chilling tears. This is the fate the gods have spun
  for poor mortal men, that we should live in misery, but they themselves have
  no sorrows. There are two jars standing on Zeus' floor which hold the gifts
  he gives us: one holds evils, the other blessings. When Zeus who delights in
  thunder mixes his gifts to a man, he meets now with evil, and now with good.
  But when Zeus gives from the jar of misery only, he brings a man to
  degradation, and vile starvation drives him over the holy earth" --Iliad




Chapter Twenty-six


A colonial sofa with an arched wooden back; the dark drapes absorbing the light
that would have saturated the living room; Ravel's Bolero playing lightly from
her CD; and a fly above vher face...cacooning there, she could only focus on
little monads of reality at a time: now it was pulling back the hair out of the
face and toward her pillowed head; comparing her thoughts to the over-shuffling
of Tarot cards flying off in all directions, the choping of meat at a butcher's
shop, or the static of television stations intruding into each other; and the
recent and recurrent memory of MF (visibly older but obviously easily
recognizable when she saw him in the audience while making her address from the
podium). For ten or eleven hours now there was pain and the slow scattering of
her thoughts was as a child on a beach with a fist full of sand who discovers
his souvenir has been ebbing out of the cracks between his fingers.

She could not shoo away the pesty fly that was as pesty as Mormon flies (those
sententious dragon fly missionaries who had knocked on her door earlier that
week--Nauvoo, Illinois, Mormon flies so succulent and "so fuckable," whom she
had reluctantly rejected from her door). The migraine was intense and she could
only lay there in her tomb. Her sterile thoughts were filth. Her harmonic bliss
in aloneness was, in illness, devestating and lonely as one suffering in
solitary confinement. Within her sickness earlier suppositions about the world
discomfited her. They mutated into something less than worms and hid themselves
in her gray matter.

Powerless--she who years earlier had been an avid racketball player,
criminology and psychology scholar, and a forger of a new destiny, an
individual who had made a success by embellishing her inner self in marketable
products on canvas--here she was lying on a sofa unable to even successfully
shoo away a fly. The weak thing she had become, she tried to suck it into her
mouth. She tried to use the human mouth as a vaccum cleaner as this fly
incessantly tried to land on the contours of her face. She put a hand over her
face and turned on her side. "Come away with me!" she imagined MF as saying.
"Come away with me, the two of us out of this pase place!" And again, as
throughout her illness, the thought of him was as a light beyond the tunnel.
She did not know the reason for it. She had only spoken to him once beyond the
service she had initially given to the widower in her previous profession. They
hadn't spoken at the funeral. Even though she could have met him again through
parent teacher conferences she had delegated these sessions to Hispanic Betty.

The previous night had been an extroverted evening: a reception at a temporary
art exhibition where many of her works were on display and then a speech she
gave to art students, faculty, and others interested in her art at a university
in Albany. She told them that successful art could be a natural propensity or
from just learning to paint when not having a natural propensity for it at all
(usually something in between) + dispensing with any conventions that stifled
an unbiased and uninhibited desire to play in ideas and see the wonder of
everything anew. She supported her premise with quotations from Emerson,
Thoreau, and myriad artists. It was a typical speech presented and specifically
catered to those who yearned to hear motifs stressing independence even if it
bordered on the absurd. To her the self should be married and revered but
seeking uniqueness in a forest like a post Taoist or post Transcendentalist was
to seek it from an external force. Still such was her audience and she would
prostitute herself to them a little bit.

As she was listening to Ravel's "Pavane pour une Infante Defunte" she heard the
doorbell. She knew that she could not get up without the most trying effort so,
staring at the fire alarm some seconds, she finally raised herself briefly. She
pushed the "test" button and continued to press it for a long moment of a
sonorous outcry. Was her door unlocked? She hoped it was and wasn't. She heard
a door open and footsteps. She returned to the sofa. She wondered if it might
be a bill collector, a life insurance salesman, or a well endowed and handsome
rapist. A whole host of other possibilities entered her head. She told herself
that whoever it was, thief or saint, if this person weren't scared away by the
fire alarm, she would demand that he or she go buy her some asprin. Surely it
wasn't Lily. She hadn't spoken to her for so long and she would never be able
to figure out how to get to this city let alone her home. Was that it? Had she
used Rita/Lily to fulfill her limited social requirements and then dumped her,
figuratively, on the side of the freeway linking to Albany? Had she forgotten
about her when there were other people in her life? Were all humans this way?
Was there no such thing as caring? She heard further steps pursue the top
story...or was she imagining them? She wanted to push the fire alarm again--it
didn't make sense but in her pained mind the sound of the fire alarm would make
robbers leave and Zulu witch doctors with instantaneous and magical remedies
appear. She did not, however, have the energy and that fly kept buzzing around
her ears. She kept swatting it but missing it each time. The footsteps were
those of a man's. She heard boot soles clunking hurriedly up the stairs under
her miniature chandalier. Were they Michael's footsteps? No, surely not and yet
she hoped they were all the same. There before her, in leather boots,was
Hispanic Betty.

"Fuego! Levantese, senora. Hay un fuego en su casa, dama."

"Oh, it is you, Hispanic Betty. There isn't a fire, you silly deranged fool."

"No, hay un fuego.I heard the fire bell."

"Oh, all right. Just trying to get your attention." She had to muster up all
her strength to make her ideas cohesive and sensible. She smiled with the full
manipulation of her white fangs. "Please go after some asprin. I swear I can't
take much more of this without some relief. El dolor esta desmasiado. Por favor
compreme unos asprina a la 7-11 convenience tienda." She closed her eyes. Words
were arduous feats.

"Esta usted enferma otra vez?"

"Yeah, sick again. I thought you were on vacation. No desea ir el vacaciones?"

"Purse. La otra noche perdi mi monedero."

"Yeah, I saw your purse, tu bolsa upstairs--arriba la escalera; but run to the
convenience store or the grocery store for the asprin-- whatever is quickest.
Rapidamente!"

"No, dama. Hoy no tengo trabajar hasta cinco."

"For Pete's sake usted es terrible perezosa. You are floja-lazy floja,
floja-lazy."

"I'm not none floja, please Miss. I'm your good illegal trabajadora. Don't
throw me in the streets."

Gabriele again thought of having figuratively tossed the carcass of Rita/Lily
into the thickets of weeds on the embankment."Please, Hispanic Betty, as one of
our family go out to get it and then you can have the day off hasta cinco por
la tarde."

"You won't fire me now for looking floja?"

"Not if you filfill my fucking request and get the goddamn asprin."

After she took the asprin she got some relief. She had Hispanic Betty get
Nathaniel ready for summer school and then she sent him off in a taxi herself.
When both were gone she ate a little something. When she recovered more of her
strength her mind was still very groggy and painting was far removed from the
agenda of the day. Since there was no painting there was no agenda and so she
began to clean the house. Inaction, she thought, might lead to a void. A void
in the proper state of mind could lead a strong person to philosophic
discoveries and a strengthening of one's fortitude; but in weakness a void
required energy to escape, and so it was best to keep busy. She saw that a
string of cobwebs was dangling from one of the elements of the chandalier. She
looked at it, and not knowing how to get up there she decided that this was not
a good place to start on a day when one happened to be sick; and so she went
into Nathaniel's room.

In the room she dusted everything from the little volkswagon that ran on D
batteries to the breeches of the stuffed animal, Pluto. When she opened one of
his desk drawers she discovered a child's book called "Heroes of the Bible." It
was published by the Latter Day Saints. She wondered whether these dragon flies
were so insecure that they even needed children to validate the stories they
projected into their minds. Religious minds not only projected such stories
onto all the walls of their brains but cast themselves as more Disney
characters into this metaphysical film within the most salient roles. God that
destroyed humanity in the flood so that something "good" might generate from
it; Abraham who was ready to sacrifice his son to any arbitrary and barbaric
whim that this godly tyrant entertained--the Bible was camauflaged brutality as
was this book that catalogued Joseph to Joseph Smith. Plato would call it more
misrepresentation of the gods and yet she couldn't call it libel, slander, or
misrepresentation if there was no god and nothing to misrepresent. She took a
break and had some bread and grape juice like one more cannibal eating Jesus'
2000 year old body and drinking the virulent tonic of his 2000 year old blood.
She resented the Mormon flies for having given her son that book and yet she
knew that sometimes people could be positively influenced by something at a
certain stage that years later would be beneath them.

She told herself that since Hispanic Betty would be back at 5:00 she could
spend the day recuperating in a park. She would not be missed. When he needed
his bicycle fixed it was Hispanic Betty whom he turned to. Just the other
evening she saw him drag a tent out of the garage. She asked if she could help
him. "Hispanic'll do it," he said.

"Well, I'm rather good at such things--repelling, camping, and you name it as
long as its outside the house."

"S'not an issue. She's good at everything. You're not needed," he said and the
words resonated deep into the far reaches of herself where she remembered Peggy
saying, "They don't want you so they pawned you here so quit blubbering for
them. I opened our door to you; fought with my husband when I didn't want you
here either--and look what you did to me. Look again! Pen marks on this
upholstery.You ruined the sofa--a two hundred year old piece of furniture
because you don't have sense enough to take pens out of your pants." She
remembered all those years where she was this pariah absconding into her room.
She remembered this second war where they laughed and ridiculed her every move
and how Peggy never acknowledged it was happening. She remembered how Peggy's
husband had one day come to her and tried to undress her and that she bit him
which invited his fullest hatred of her. From that day onward there wasn't a
comfortable moment. Even at Christmas this "uncle" excoriated her for sitting
with the rest. She had to sit in a corner of the room and hide in books and
distant places. She wanted to tell Peggy about how he had drooled over her with
his wet slobbering eyes and then tried to undress her, the biting, and how the
biting had led to more contempt. But she was wise. She knew that there was no
use broaching this subject any more than shedding any feelings over the
decapitation of the Turk. She was all alone in the world and the choices were
to kill herself or to become immune to others and not let them affect her and
she chose the latter path.

At the park she swam for a short time in the swimming pool. Gleaming studfish
of the Spandex species were everywhere and their gleaming bodies magically
invoked within her sexual feelings--each in his own way. Then she sat along a
lake watching row boats stir the waters that were turned to silver in the
sunlight and joggers running on a road that was to her right. Her womanly
instincts wondered what life would be like to be involved with one of such
studly apparitions. She disregarded such lowly inclinations by walking around
the park. She followed loud pop music and then with a hundred others she did
some aerobics according to the movements of the teacher on his wooden platform
and then, exhausted, she lay in the shade of the trees. She became aware of
feathery leaves, angular leaves, paddle shaped leaves and the fronds of palms
and ferns. She briefly fell asleep and when she awoke those leaves had become a
silhouette. She felt blessed to be in such beautiful variety and the ostensible
plan that went into it, or at any rate, "one hell of a variety from
adaptation"; and this healed and restored her. As she watched runners also fade
into silhouettes she yearned for the mystery of their movement. She wanted to
run to foreign countries and escape this God sanctioned superpower that school
children were brainwashed into believing as better than all other countires.
She wanted to peak inside these foreign lands and say "Hi" to its denizens.

She went into a bathroom in a McDonald's restaurant and changed into more
formal clothes. Then she went shopping at Sax. The outlandish prices to the
clothing of super rich snobs appealed to her, as it had before, but when she
got back to her car she was reminded that they were just foder for covering
nakedness.

By chance she saw that a travel agency was still open and she stepped into it.
Photographs of Peru, Mexico, Egypt, Italy, and China graced her. Where would
she go? Should she take her son with her as part of his education? No, she told
herself. This would be a contemplative retreat.

A week later she went from New York to San Fransisco; San Fransisco to Tokyo;
and then Tokyo to Bangkok. She took in temples and Buddhas via the river boat
bus, the Chao Phraya Express. She saw opulent skyscrapers and she meandered
through labyrinths of tackey tin and wooden cobbled shacks along the river. She
saw two young boys with Butch haircuts in dark blue shorts and light blue
shirts embracing each other as they walked closer than lovers, emaciated and
fur-lost dogs beaten with sticks and then shoved into large racket and burlap
bag instruments like butterfly nets. She watched the dog catchers dump the
hounds into wooden crates, uniformed teenagers in sidewalk restaurants enjoying
the process, coconut tonic vendors putting straws in the cut cocunut shells and
fruit on a stick salesmen pushing their glass ice and fruit carts. She spent
most of her time downtown. On the sidewalk she saw men's underwear sprawled on
a table top that was balanced by one of those plastic stools used as chairs at
sidewalk restaurants or those for tired sidewalk salesmen. "I wish I had the
man in the undies" she said aloud to her amusement. Then she passed containers
of raw fish on ice next to the sharkfin restaurant. A young man who gained a
commission from bringing in the masses into the restaurant said, "Fish! good!"
He was so palpable and so much in her reach. She turned toward him and stopped.
She put her hand on his chest and slid it down to his waist. "Fish good, you
say?" she asked and then giggled like an embarrassed school girl for she was
embarrassed by her own temerity. "Fish very good!" said the google and glaze
eyed fish salesmen. He put his fingers into the waste line of his pants and
jiggled them in a couple seductive bounces. Outside of the fomenting of her own
sensuality, she felt the imagined spirit of Buddha permeating everything like a
warm wind.

After three days here she went from Bangkok to Rome. Her world was that other
world, that etheral world consisting of the highest apogee of man, that which
was least in his making and yet here it was manifest in tangible objects from
one museum to another. This was her idea of heaven: to be fully in that small
realm of one's mind where true beauty existed and within a city where others,
some living and most dead, had also engaged in that area of the brain and
produced objects so splendid. At a Burger King a block away from such a museum
she bought a couple vegie-burgers, an apple pie turnover, and a chocolate
shake. When they were deposited on her tray she turned and walked to an empty
table. Near it she stopped with mouth agape. There at an adjacent table were
Rick and his father, MF.




Chapter Twenty-Seven


In Burger King words ensnared the artistic ascetic for she too succumbed to
polite requests and smiles. For whatever chimerical ideas she had about
isolation in Antarctica she knew that too little society, as too much of it,
would be deleterious. She too would have been an incontrovertible loose canon
had she not maintained some sociable traits; and so she sat down at their table
despite not wanting to do so. "Rick, if you weren't seated with your father I
wouldn't have recognized you. Heavens!" Heaven--it was a word that nobody
believed in and everybody used. She put her elbow on the table, chin in a palm.
Then she focused her intensity sociably, basking him with it gently in the rays
of her orbs. She knew that her gesture was probably an affected one, oblivious
to the fact as father and son might be, but she did not think its contrived
essence as being all that important. Hers was like one of Peggy's few favorable
gestures, only she had improved upon it. Instead of using this gesture for
situations where there was an affinity of values she used it, on occasion, to
further rapport. By pretending to care more than one actually did one couldn't
help but emulate and believe in the skit, making the dubiously real in fact
real. With a deep albeit contrived sense of caring, she said, "I haven't seen
you for so long. Are you still friends with Nathaniel?"

"So-so," said the boy ruefully.

"Well, don't worry. Everybody meets new people and are attracted to those new
influences for a time which help them grow. I'm sure you and Adagio will be
friends again. I bet he likes you very much. I know I do." Then to MF she said,
"So you guys are taking in Rome?"

"Yes and other bits here and there. We were in Venice a couple days ago.
Nice--well worth seeing as I'm sure Florence would be. The problem is that a
man can spend the whole trip traveling from one city to the next. So...I've
decided that I and this big guy will just stay here in Rome for the rest of the
time. Are you here all by yourself?"

"Yes, here all alone. Tell me about yourself. There's got to be a lady friend
somewhere here in Rome."

"No." He smiled bashfully. " Just here with my son."

She guessed that the widower was being faithful to the memory of his wife by
not pursuing any other relationship outside of an occasional sexual liaison
with a whore like herself. She liked the assumption and it made her feel closer
to him. To some degree she wanted to ferret out the truth on this matter but
the assumption gave her such a warm feeling and she too liked her endorphins
and dopamine. "Nathaniel is at home staying with Hispanic Betty."

"Hispanic who?" He chuckled.

"Hispanic Betty. Well, that's my name for her. My assistant -- a lovely person
in her own way. She's illiterate in both languages but again in her own unique
way a lovely enough character. I give nicknames to everything. Nathaniel is
Adagio and my cat, Friskie, is Mouse. Nathaniel will be fine with Hispanic
Betty. Did you guys just come from the museum?"

"No, we've been sitting here waiting for you for days. Finally we can go into
the museum now that we have an expert to show us around. It's been rough
sitting."

She laughed. "Wow, Michael! You knew I'd be on this very speck of the planet
within this time and space. Handsome and charming as well as psychic. I'm
impressed." She laughed again as she glanced at his playful smile. It occurred
to her how much of a human's life was consumed in frivolous exchanges of happy
feelings. There was really no substance in it at all. She turned back to Rick
who was as yet free from being overwhelmed in the sensual impulses that created
the libidinous ego, lascivious sociability, and the lustful lies of human will
that willed the stimulation of the pleasure receptors of the brain at all
times. "You and your father will have your eyeballs shooting out of your
sockets when you begin the art tour in this beautiful city, I promise."

The boy laughed with a feral, garrulous confidence. "Now it's my eyes out.
Before it was gettin' hair on my chest if I ate your stuff."

She smiled. "You remember. It was called 'Shit on a Shingle.' To MF she
explained, "That's a nickname for one of my domestic dishes. It's also known as
beef and gravy on toast." To Rick she added, "And given time it will grow hair
on your chest. I promise." She began eating her veggie burger.

"Mrs. Sangfroid," said Rick, "what are you eating? It's orange."

She looked at the edge of her burger. "More like raw sienna, golden ochre,
cadmium yellow, and goldenrod dark...hard to explain the color. Saffron the
closer you dig into the corn. This vegetarian hamburger probably isn't all that
nutritious fried with hamburgers but here we are as guinea pigs within modern
existence."

"That's a heavy one from a sandwich. Tell me what you mean," said MF.

"Well, I mean that we don't grow our own food so we are reliant on what others
present to us as good and we follow the masses into places like this out of
convenience and laziness. We are like cognizant teddy bears on an assembly line
to have our apertures plugged up with plastic eyes but there is nothing we can
do about it. Anyhow, two cheers for Burger King. Hip hip hurray! Hip hip
hurray!" She laughed, more amused and interested in herself than anyone else.

"You don't eat meat, Gabriele?"

"Not much," she said.

"Okay," MF said disapprovingly.

"Whether or not animals have any value outside of becoming a product to serve
to us doesn't matter so much to me. I think what I think but you can't prove it
one way or the other. I just feel that having the attitude that everything
exists to serve human pleasures and appetites stunts any enlightenment one
might hope to get on this planet. It's not the animal rights perspective but my
own."

"Good for you. I admire that," he lied. Their conversation paused and she saw
that MF had removed both onions and pickles from his hamburger. She watched
both males sink their fangs into the aesthetic round bits of carcass. She told
herself that there was indeed something atavistic about it.

"Dad hates vegetables--won't ever eat them."

"Is that a fact!" said Gabriele.

"That isn't true; and don't talk with your mouth full!" rebutted MF irascibly.

"We never have tomatoes in the refrigerator."

"We have Ketchup. It is tomatoes plus."

Gabriele laughed. She as marginally enthralled with the charm of their
bantering. Then, like the sound of crickets, the human noise became monotonous.
Still, it was better than being deaf, and it bedizened her ears like large
cheap earrings containing bogus stones.

"I saw you when you gave your lecture in Albany," said MF to Gabriele as if
wanting to change the topic.

"I know. I saw you there. I wanted to catch you but there were droves of people
and one reporter swarming all over the place."

"I understood that. It's okay."

"Did you drive up just for that?"

"No, my parents live in Albany but I wanted to see your work and listen to
you."

"Wow, thank you" she said humbly.

When they finished eating and were walking to the museum he said, "So, you were
in Thailand before coming here. What were your impressions of it?"

"Hmm...I guess that before I went there I half-way wondered if it would be
comprised of people without wills the way the Buddha rejected self saying it
was an illusion--but no; it was full of mall hoppers and people pacing here and
there anxiously with their cellular telephones, eyes glazed over, totally
self-absorbed like in the states although perhaps less of them...a lot of poor
seeming so quaint from my vantage point but probably not from theirs. What's
your impression of Italy so far?"

"Well, it is hard to say with so many tourists. If they get rid of the tourists
one can have an impression."

She laughed. She liked that answer. It seemed to her the correct answer; and
since he seemed to her a conduit of reality, she felt that he was enmeshed with
her somehow. She did not want to believe in fate but here they were together in
such an unexpected place. The strangeness made her a bit superstitious. "How
long will you be here?"

"Maybe a week. And you?"

"Not long. I can't afford it and Nathaniel won't pick up the phone or reply to
email so that troubles me."

"Anything wrong?"

"No, I'm sure it is a bit of resentment about me going on this trip."

"Won't Hispanic Betty answer the telephone?"

"Are you kidding? No, she refuses. She dusts around a telephone like it's a
snake and moves to a different room when it rings." He laughed.

She led them into color, perspective, and forms of Masters who had died long
ago. They led her to a planetarium, the coliseum, and then a small amusement
park on the outskirts of Rome. After Ferris wheel and a roller coaster rides
she and they were addicted to motion and so they went on the water log ride as
well. As they came down a miniature waterfall they were drenched. From these
rides she knew that she was thrust into further action. Without consciously
choosing it, she was now on a womanly ride of feeling great pleasure in the
company of a man and something resembling family. It occurred to her that this
was the ride that all broken adults with battered children inside them went on.
From love and establishing a family of one's own one could break from the
wretched past. One could remove the glass fragments from the exploding glass
house of family, bandage wounded childhood, and could at last distance oneself
from memories of the guardians of hell. The ride would be that of a new family
and beginning, a type of forgetfulness.


All this time had gone by and still Sang Huin woke up from nightmares with a
sweat glazing his forehead. He could not help but remember driving his battered
sister to her lover's mansion, dragging her up to the door, watching her faint
on the stoop as he pushed the doorbell, and then watching from his car as the
wife discovered his delivery.




Chapter Twenty-Eight


Sang Huin had a very strange dream one night. It was a night in which he had
experienced a cancellation of a lesson and instead of returning home he had
gone toward the Myong Dong area of Seoul to a gay Turkish bath, which he hoped
would exorcise him of the void.

Like any explosive, the chemicals for the detonation were inside the container
(himself); and all it required was a small sensation as its spark. It always
struck him as peculiar and intriguing how a sexual feeling that was so internal
should be linked so indelibly with the external like a woman's ability to
produce milk, which required birth and a baby to suckle if it were to not dry
up.

There, once again in the Turkish bath (as if this time would be a less specious
form of intimacy than all others), he had sought excitement -- fireworks of
sensation within a dark room for orgies. There, like a balloon, he had blown
his body in titillations and desire only to be deflated to a moment or two of
tameness and godhood and then an equilibrium -- this concoction of a little god
and a lot of animal called a human being.

And when he returned home to Seong Seob, there was a contrived inflation and
deflation of the phallus in the ersatz of coerced will. Then he lay there like
a squeezed orange, albeit a discontent one. He was unable to sleep for
countless minutes that seemed as hours. And when he did go to sleep he dreamed
strange and erratic things. At worst these images burst and burned against the
walls of his brain like jets against the World Trade Center. At best they
expanded and contracted nerves in his brain like the coldness of an ice cream
headache. Accelerated by too many graphic CNN reports and satiated in anxieties
and guilt within his own life, he dreamed that Gabriele was living in an
isolated area in Pakistan with her cat, Mouse. One evening there was knocking
on her door and when she answered it a stoic Rita/Lily with obdurate,
mechanical, and glazed eyes injected a drug into her arm. When Gabriele woke up
she was staring into the face of Osama Bin Laden. "Where am I?" she asked as
she lifted her head and wiped the pallid dirt from hair and face. A translator
relayed her voice to Osama Bin Laden. She recognized him too. He was Khalid
Shaik Mohammed. Osama said something and the translation was "Al Qaiida Hills
in what people wrong to call Afghanistan behind Tora Bora. You relatives must
pay big ransom or we cut off you head."

"Relatives?" said Gabriele. " If you mean Peggy, you inane turbaned bearded
little freaks, she wouldn't give you a nickel or a dime to save my head. She
wants every cent to go to Wal-Mart to buy toys for her beloved grandbabies so
they will smile at her and reach for her before they do their own mommies. She
likes babies: the thought of them fills her with dopamines and endorphins; and
the inveterate shopper that she is, buying for them couldn't make her much
higher. Such neurotransmitters run amuck in her. Mama bird must do what she is
created for. Anyhow, nobody's getting rich off of my head and I want -- no
demand -- I demand to know how I got here and I further demand that l be
transported back immediately."

"Remember Rita/Lily, devout Moslem sister: she inject you with tranquilizers,
give you swallow sleepy pills, and then put you in trunk of you car. There she
drive across border," said Khalid Sheik Mohammed."

"Thanks for the info, Shake!" said Gabriele. "She always was a crazy; and
crazies are always religious--no offense." Gabriele heard Osama's palaver in
Arabic."

"Osama wants to know if you play volleyball with us." said Khalid Sheik
Mohammed. Khalid Sheik Mohamed smiled widely with his fangs.

"Volleyball?" asked Gabriele. "It's a bit strange, but what the fuck. Will it
expedite me getting out of here?"

"No doubt! Osama want to be a good host while you here. He want to have fun
with you."

"All right, if I must."

"Splendid," said Khalid Sheik Mohammed. "You must."

Osama slapped a desert mosquito that kept circling around his big nose. He
flattened it on his face. Then his large tongue came out with the twitch of his
face and the mosquito fell onto its waterbed coffin. No sooner had the Al
Quaida mastermind eaten it than the Taleban cleric, Mullah Mohammed Omar, snuck
up like Death in a brown hood and robe. The one eyed reptile then cut off
Gabriele's head with his hatchet. Osama Bin Laden and Khalid Sheik Mohammed
then began their game of volleyball. Mullah Mohammed Omar stood at the side of
an invisible net counting score as the two other men volleyed the head over the
line which he had dug into the dirt with a stick. There was talk of getting
access to North Korean nuclear fuel rods, a strange epidemic that they had
manufactured and proliferated in East Asia, and assassination plans for George
Bush. The face of Gabriele's head kept staring at them while she volleyed
about. Gabriele thought, "Talking politics and playing ball: these inane
turbaned bearded little freaks can walk and chew gum at the same time."

Sang Huin suddenly woke up and went into the bathroom where he splashed some
water on his face. His face looked heavier when he stared at it in the mirror.
He realized that as much as he had hoped to hold onto youth, it was already
shed and blowing around like fragile leaves within another time and space. He
chastised himself. He was getting older by the hour and yet he had no career
aspirations. His Bachelor's degree in music history was worthless. He probably
had no special aptitude for teaching and even if he did, he doubted that being
this native gypsy who appeared on people's doorsteps at their request counted
him within the ranks of teachers. What did he know that he could teach? There
was nothing he was trained for, he had no competitive strife, and he did not
know of anything worth doing.

He heard the sound of rain and so he went to a window but could not see the
substance of this harmonic pattering in external darkness. He listened to its
orphic sounds, inventing reasons to go into this gentle falling of sky: milk
for his cornflakes or batteries for his Walkman that he could purchase at the
AM/PM or the 7-11.

He wrote: Gabriele put on her hat and sunglasses and went into the rain with a
bag carrying her keys, passport, wallet, sketchbook, and charcoal pencil as
well as makeup and a bottle of this newly acquired substance, perfume. She had
been told that there was a park near her hotel where she could see the ruins
but, despite floating on cloud nine, when she arrived there all she could see
were the ruins of her own life.

Michael was lovingly amuck in her thoughts and since she would see him in a few
hours she was in a heavenly abyss greater than having the license to do some
Italian stud fishing in the pool of her hotel. She loathed how the chemicals of
this infatuation had been detonated in the Leaning Tower of Gabriele causing
major structural damage. Furthermore, the smoke of the aftermath distorted the
world in such a fervent red mist. If she hadn't been on her guard or had been
born a half-wit she could have easily believed in love and bliss at every turn.
She, the master of reality, guessed that she was walking on a precipice: that
very soon if she were to part with him for a week she would be there in the
pangs of the travail of loneliness -- a most lost and forlorn creature and an
ignominy to herself.

And yet despite her higher authority and monitor wanting her to discard this
man sooner rather than later, she regretted that she had resisted the idea of
him getting a room in the same hotel where she was staying. She could have made
his trip less lordly and more "in touch" with the common man if he had stayed
with her instead of ensconcing himself in four-star hotels. Also she would have
saved him money, not that saving money was so essential if he were indeed part
of the wealthy Quest family of Albany.

She thought it was noble that he, a member of the wealthy class, had chosen to
be a mere educator to help young minds. " In a sense," she thought, "we are
both educators but he has chosen to not make business and money a priority
whereas I yearn for money and things. I am just a fool who has gone from being
impecunious to an upper middleclass snob -- okay, a bitch with a servant even
if I call her my assistant. And I am not free. I'm always fettered to canvas."
She meant that as free as she was she always had to be unique, clever, and
technically masterful at all times to have a reputation and to pay her
bills--one of which was her tuition. She could have gained a "scholarship" but
she did not care to have strings attached. She did not want to teach pathetic
dilettantes in some basic class what a paintbrush and pallet looked like. She
didn't want to sing to them, "This is the way we paint a pig, paint a pig,
paint a pig. This is the way we paint a pig so early in the morning."

Perambulating through the park, attempting to conceptualize the internal and
external reality she wanted to transpose to canvas, she became distracted by
Italian lovers. Strangely, for her, she looked on them in joyful awe. Unlike in
America when she had wanted to roller- blade through their interlinked arms or
sweep away these lovers who littered the world with their specious illusions,
she now appreciated them. These Italian couples abetted her fantasies of she
and Michael strolling together under one umbrella instead of the solo half
being under there now. She could sense that her rule in the crumbling and
further leaning tower of Gabriele was faltering, floundering, and foundering.
This, while she walked, was evident by her sporadic humming of Joni Mitchell's
"Michael from Mountains."

Sitting on a bench in the gentle rain, she watched the heavy traffic and the
shuffling array of Italians through the iron bars of one of the many walls that
went around the park. It seemed to her that it all had the splendor and
significance of love. She was not at ease in this rosy/fiery way of looking at
all things and yet she couldn't quite see the harm in such elated perspectives.
If all people were like Moonie cult members avoiding negativity wouldn't the
illusion transform reality? If love were an illusion, she couldn't see how it
was different from anything else. Each generation of people were passing
shadows thrust out at dusk before being swept into darkness. Everything was an
illusion although it seemed to her that some things were more real than others
or at least less illusionary. Shadows were illusions of tangible things and
perhaps these blocked rays of light or diminished forms were of something
bigger. Was life just a pale version of what was really out there? She did not
know. She was still waiting to get an email from God.

This inchoate friendship/ relationship was releasing her from the manacles of
heavy, oppressive, and dragging thoughts and so in certain moments she couldn't
see any reason to oppose it. Did she care to be as dour and sour as a spinster?
Such women became more acrimonious with each new birthday.

Before she had time to go back to her hotel room with only a couple rough
drafts to show for her efforts, they came for her in the park. Although he,
like his son, preferred motion, Michael had persuaded his son to sacrifice a
bit more of their time before her beloved alter of art. The taxi's meter was
aggrandizing numbers for some time when they finally found her and took her
away with them.

He believed that his closeness to Gabriele would increase if he showed himself
as someone willing to enter her hallowed institutions -- institutions he came
here to see but on the fifth or sixth time these buildings were like visits to
a mausoleum.

Only as they were trudging up more concrete steps did it occur to him that he
should have asked her if she wanted to do something different. And yet when he
looked at her smile that was so radiant from being linked to art and linking it
to them he could tell that she would never find art museums boring let alone
cloying the soul. He was the deferential gentleman, and his inveterately shy
son tolerated the museums with little fidgetiness.

After they were inside for an hour she began to lean on him the way he liked
women to do even though he had not let them do it for many years. But he
detested how she was dressed. Like at the park, she was still wearing
sunglasses and a hat that coaxed upon itself and draped down as if it had been
thrown into the wash too many times. She would pull the glasses down to the tip
of her nose when they came to a work of art, talk about it and what she knew
about the artist (if anything), and then move them up her nose. He did not
understand this flagrant violation of femininity. It was as if she wanted to be
as inconspicuous and stealth as a bag lady for fear of being mistaken for
Michelangelo. He had avoided the subject in the taxi under the belief that she
would remove them once they were in the building.

"What is all this?" he at last asked as he pulled on the brim of her hat.

"Oh," she interjected and acquiesced wordlessly as she smoothed out her hair.
He was pleased. She was transforming from a sallow and destitute street person
back to an image more suited to be loved. Within the machinations of
self-centered man, each saw the other as an "opportunity" and each one
contemplated and re-contemplated what that opportunity was in vain.

He wanted to move about and change visual images as if he were in front of the
television with his remote control, but she wanted to stare for a few moments
at these portals into the entity.

When they were outside again she put on her sunglasses so as to counter these
feelings of "tenderness" which could misdirect her down a long and dark
labyrinth of tight one-way back-alley actions leading further into her own
obscurity and to prostate positions at a man-god's feet. For he was already
becoming a bit of an extension of her own little life and a medium for more
intense pleasures that she could not reach alone, and so she put on glasses
that he disapproved of so that she would not lose herself to him even in the
most miniscule way.

As with the brain that made deals and compromises to reconcile contradictory
opinions within itself, she knew that a woman would need to be deferential in a
relationship that was that extension of herself. She told herself that she
would try to be as little accommodating as possible. She smiled as if ready to
laugh for the two of them at this stage were nothing. They were merely
accidental traveling companions. She thought that even if they did become
involved with each other the myopic perspective of a personal life and love
might be nothing in reality but attempts at cell replication in this organ of
the Earth in this organism of the universe. Such was the human predicament of
not knowing anything of reality but one's own caprices. Her levity was
transient. She became serious.

"Why do you wear those things?" He smiled. His tone was more bantering than
condemning. If it had been altogether condemning she in her moody caprice would
have walked away proudly, severing him without saying a word in that behavior
typical to those whose youth had been besieged in the worst of ridicule.

"I don't know. Sometimes I want to be different. Sometimes the glare of the sun
gives me a headache."

"You aren't feeling sick now, are you?"

"No."

"Then take them off."

"Ask me in a nice way."

"Please do it. Do it please. Do please it." He laughed.

Her womanliness flowed in and she took them off, begrudgingly eager to please
and a little excited that someone should take an interest-- even a critical
interest-- in the mundane aspects of her life. She felt sexual energy hit her
in a large wave since two wills clashing against each other was a sexy thing.
They followed Rick who had run toward a hotdog stand.

"Corndogs -- won't you have one, Gabriele?" asked the former MF.

"I don't eat meat, you know."

"Well, you should, you know. Its why the brain size of man is so much bigger
than his hominoid predecessors."

"I doubt that much evolution can come from a corndog. And if I had a bigger
head it would probably explode all over the place. Wouldn't that be a pretty
sight?"

" Maybe your grandpa slaughtered your pet pig at his farm-- something made you
this sensitive. I wouldn't know about that but I do know that as long as the
killing isn't man to man it's just nature's checks and balances." She saw that
truth lay there and not wishing to dismiss it , she nodded. She wondered if he
had put too many limits on his theme. Maybe murder and wars were checks and
balances of man on man too. He smiled with a flippant boyish mischievousness.
"You know, by walking from the museum you have squashed at least a thousand
ants and other creepy things, but you haven't given up walking from what I see.
Survival of the fittest, Gabriele; and the fittest animal is the one with the
most bills in his wallet. If the pig had come with a wallet and could out-spend
me I'd be the one on the stick. Come on. Haven't you ever eaten a corndog
before?"

"Well, yes. When I was a girl, I guess."

"That's probably the best life gets as an adult: secondhand experiences,
reliving childhood." He ordered three corndogs and soft drinks from the vender
and gave each their share. "Here!" She took the corndog and began to eat with
them. She imagined the corndog as a vegetable. She imagined it as an important
experience.

"Good?"

"Yes."

"More ketchup?"

"No."

"Rick?"

"Yes." And she watched the bloody substance squeezed onto the boy's phallic
symbol.

"See, you enjoyed it as a girl until you thought that your pet pig would be
next. Associationism."

"David Hume?" she chuckled.

"John Locke/David Hume--I'm not sure which. "

Rick had to go to the toilet and so Gabriele was left in awkwardness at being
with Michael all alone. He grabbed her hand and led her to a bench. He kissed
her and she liked it even though the nearness of him felt as if she were being
stung by Houston fire ants. It was a sweet inimical sting. It was a contract of
mouths and joint breath, of two becoming one but not of equal parts--more of a
stronger company forcing a large competitor in a merger.

And the days of the week proceeded on--that day closing most eventfully on a
surrey, a four seated bicycle, peddling and encircling Roman sculpture at the
Borghese Garden, and then watching a mock chariot match in a field known as the
Circus Maximus. The ensuing days were of seeing the bones of 400 monks at the
Cappuchin Cemetery, going to the ancient Pantheon temple of the gods with its
open portal to the sky, sitting in outdoor restaurants near fountains still
spurting from ancient aqueducts, St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City, and the
catacombs. Their final whole day was filled with Etruscan art, a return to the
Coliseum, another meandering around the ancient statues at the Borghese Garden,
and back to Laneur Parco di Luna amusement park for a ferris wheel ride and
trampolines. For all her brooding on life she realized that such contemplation
was just hiding from it. She thought that motion and community were natural and
having opposed them all along had been foolish. Like diving into a pile of
leaves, these simple pleasures were transcendence into the entity. When she was
again alone at the airport showing her boarding pass she walked to the plane
like a propped up cadaver.




Chapter Twenty-nine


Lightning flashed into Hispanic Betty's makeshift bedroom and she woke up to
the artificiality of her life ensconced in a room that was not her own with
things in it that she was a little uncomfortable to touch even with a dust rag.
She was here and off the streets but the glitter of being such seemed dimmer as
she woke up in the flashes of lightning.

Her first self-coerced thought was of Nathaniel and needing to be responsible
for him. She was compelled to perform her newly delegated responsibilities of
guardian despite not really knowing what they should consist of. This role of
guardian, as she saw it, consisted of the same cooking, shopping, and cleaning
she always did plus maternal functions that varied with each woman like
checking on him at strange hours even if, fettered in language barriers and
stumbling about in her illegality, she might not know what to do if something
were really wrong.

Resenting the fact that this had been thrust upon her, she nonetheless was able
to drag herself out of bed to see if he was okay for the maternal instinct to
attend to the young during a storm was in the collective consciousness of all
female fauna. She knew that the true challenge would be for her, who had no
family or friends in this country, to perform this maternal role without caring
for him inordinately. She put on a bathrobe and snuck down the hall to his door
where light slid under the crack like an urgent note.

He was chatting with one of his Internet friends, seeking an affinity with
those acrimonious others who construed themselves as being abandoned and
neglected but hid it in cynicism of all other matters. But to her who knew
nothing of chat rooms or anything in particular about computers the boy was
simply writing a report for a class and so she was hesitant to knock on his
door and tell him to go to bed.

Hearing the pecked tapping of the keyboard, she imagined the sliver of light at
her feet as a computer printed note that said, "Mind your own business, Betty,
and go back to bed"; and, smiling from an amusing end to her ambivalence, that
was exactly what she did. From her bed, her lair (if she could call it hers),
she ruminated about what had happened to her recently: Gabriele having picked
her out of the homeless shelter from the other strays; the proud and sagacious
confidence, if not hubris, which Gabriele possessed in bringing her into this
home without even asking her to forfeit her passport; the loyalty generated
from such trust; fear that the ringing of the telephone was the attempted
connection of immigration authorities; barely getting around on the crutches of
the English language, which she had ineptly cobbled together from scraps; the
fear of the six and sometimes seven day a week servitude in this remote home
diminishing what little chance she, a homely 22 year old, might have of
creating her own family; this fear motivating her to get a cheap efficiency
downtown although she was rarely ever there; and how the imposition of taking
care of someone else's child was a calamity waiting to happen.

Over the course of the week she worried excessively. She worried that she
hadn't heard from Gabriele to know when she would return. She worried about
having this awkward tenderness for the child (this wanton thought of him)
caused by having to care for him and make him her exclusive concern and
pleasure. And she worried that she would resent Gabriele's return since it
would inevitably pry away this maternal fusion. She also had specific worries
of the present day: that this act of absconding in his room, not wanting to
play cards or board games like Checkers and Monopoly, meant that he might not
like her anymore; and that he was now in his room for two hours and she wasn't
exactly sure what he was doing in there.

Then came more of those ideas that self-flagellated her flaccid mental skin
throughout the week: if something bad were to happen to him she might not know
about it or have the vocabulary to ask about it; if she were aware of it that
she might not be able to explain it; and if she could explain it she might
prevaricate or become twisted in mendacities since she would not know how to
explain her connection to this Sangfroid family.

Still, no matter if these nightly ruminations made her placid or just got her
stuck in rehashing the same worries, she was glad to have them. They
resuscitated a self-concept that languished each day in being cognizant of her
own babbling in this north-of-the-border language.

She heard Nathaniel's footsteps in the hall. She wanted to open her door and
call to him and yet she knew it wasn't so much for him as for herself. For she
was feeling the travail of loneliness and it was not imagined suffering but a
physical assault on the body of the mind.

She did not want him to think that she was spying on him or that she, a
servant, would have the effrontery or impertinence to tell him what he could
and couldn't do in his own home; but still, she told herself, she needed to
monitor him. She once again diffidently walked into the hall and sought the
traces of the boy. He was downstairs in the kitchen as evident by the light.
Listening closely from the stairs, she could hear the refrigerator door open
and a pitcher of milk being drained.

Had she not felt like a florid group of cells shot out like random shells into
the void that made up the cosmos, she would have been satisfied by this and she
would have gone to bed and slept soundly. Instead, she went down the steps and
into the kitchen.

"Knock, knock, Nathaniel."

"Oh, hi there, Hispanic Betty."

"You no can sleep none?"

"Haven't tried."

"I can to fix you food. Maybe you are hungry."

"No, I've got a plate of Betty cookies. You know, I ate shit before you came
here."

"Es verdad?"

"You bet."

"Pobrecito. Well, your mother is smart, brilliant, wonderful artist. Everybody
has something good they can do and some things they can't do none."

"You could put these cookies in packages and sell them," said Nathaniel. "You'd
get more than working here for my stingy old mother." She smiled. She had been
random matter rolling about in empty space moments earlier and now she was put
safely back to earth snapped into society like an instrumental piece of life's
daily puzzle.

"Hispanic Betty, do you think school is like that?"

"What?."

"I mean good for some people and not others."

"So-so. Your madre, Gabriela, may probably kill me for saying it but I think
you're right. I mean you need kid school and teenager school. Nobody should to
be a dummy--but some maybe they find that special thing not in classes. You go
to bed soon?"

"Pronto."

"Pronto. Excelente. Necesitas dormir las horas bastante para tener un dia
grande por la manana. I go to bed now. You do it too after to eat your Betty
cookies."

"Hey, Hispanic Betty, why do you have two names?"

She laughed. "Because of Santa Gabriela. Como se dice? Nickname- -it's a
nickname. Your mother has told you when she comes back?"

"I don't know" the glutton said evasively as he devoured a cookie. "Buenos
noches."

"Buenos noches, Nathaniel."

In the morning Nathaniel took a bus to the facade of the school and then
meandered downtown as obscurely as he could. His virtual friend twenty years
his senior had told him that summer school wasn't "all that important" and
since this reinforced his own ideas about the matter, there was a guilt-ridden
conviction in his movements as he splashed through puddles in effusive kicks of
vexation. Nathaniel, who was less than a decade from the womb, had his mother
as his conscience; and this conscience chastised his every deviation. And yet
it was she who had made herself inaccessible. And when she had the chance to
make it up to him with a summer trip abroad it was she who had departed alone.

For a couple hours in front of a computer he used a joystick as an extension of
the arms of virtual boxers, and the flights of airplane bombers. With it he
could also maneuver entire armies according to his sense of viable strategies
not that his age and turbid thoughts at present could offer much beyond the
contribution of his reflexes. When his body felt stiff he paid, left, and then
lit a cigarette in the back alley. Stealth in front of the back wall of the
internet cafe and computer game arcade and crouched behind a trash barrel, he
tried to release clouds of smoke in various shapes the way in earlier years he
had blown bubbles of various sizes into the air. He coughed as much as he
smoked and the shapes of his smoke were nebulous; but his cigarettes were a
self-taught rebellion in back alleys like this one and lacking male influences
both good and bad maleness was an awkward stumbling of trial and error.

Coughing inordinately, not able to master smoking a cigarette with that
insouciant fortitude and confidence seen in movies, he went into a Ben Franklin
dime store. There he twirled the plastic sunglass rack.

"Hey kid, stop that," said a clerk "It's not a merry-go-round." But in fact he
had been imagining it as such and his mother strapped there by the clasp of
Lilliputian schoolboys the way Shirley and her friends had fettered him on
merry-go-rounds and besieged him with kisses. Only in this daydream there were
classmate enemies from a couple years earlier accosting Gabriele directly with
their ridicule. Simultaneously they reviled, scoffed, and guffawed the culprit
instead of her son with, "Dirty lady bringing men to your trailer drinking
their pee like a toilet. Our fathers know of you personally. In the Laundromats
our mothers talk of rationing water because one of your spells has caused the
lack of rain. "

"Kid!"

"I'm buying," said the boy with his mother's contumely. He pulled out a
twenty-dollar bill waving its voluble greenness as the true emblem that
conveyed everything about his country and his world. Restricted from spinning
the rack, he sought less mindless thrills. He tried on various pairs of
sunglasses before slipping one pair in his underwear and then walking up to the
cash register to pay for the other pair. It was a test of nonchalance and
despite palpitation and sweaty palms he passed it successfully.

He waited at the movie theater for the form behind the emailed image to come to
him.

"Nathaniel?" asked the man.

"Yeah," said the boy.

"Hi, I'm Tom." The boy began to reach out his hand toward this urbane form of
manhood he wistfully hoped would befriend him. A handshake was a guise of
strangers with amicable intentions; but he had to withdraw his hand awkwardly
when the man did not reciprocate. "Hope you haven't been waiting long--I went
to get some snacks for us. Every boy likes chocolate." He smiled but it waned
insincerely as he guardedly looked around the empty parking lot. "So you ran
away from school?" He bantered and then shoved a cigarette in his mouth. It
jiggled in his chuckle.

" Sort of. So, you ran away from work?"

"Sort of." Tom grinned sheepishly. "We've still got a few minutes until the
movie. I'd offer you a smoke but I probably shouldn't out here."

"I had one a few minutes ago."

"Oh, okay-- take off the sunglasses. Can't use them in there." Nathaniel pulled
them up on his head. "You look just like your photo minus the glasses. What
about me?"

"Older in person," said the boy.

"Oh," said the man. His tone, as his word choice, was vapid as life, to him,
was vapid. The thought of age slowly gnawing on him while he engaged in life
unawares made him want to evade conversation and entomb himself with youth in
the movement on a screen in a dark room.

"Let's go in if we can. I've got the tickets already. You sure you can get into
something R-rated this way?"

"I've done it before. Here: I bought you a gift." He took them from his
underwear.

"Ah...Children's sunglasses with a ninety nine cent price tag on them. You
shouldn't have." He sniffed them. "Although I do love the smell."

The boy gave a full hearty laugh.

"Do you always keep things in there like that?" He was careful about his words
and glanced around the sidewalk. The boy did not understand him and said
nothing. "What do I do with these things?"

"Give them to your son."

"I don't have one."

"When you have one"

"I won't have one," he mumbled evasively. He opened the door and they went in.

Seated together, they consumed contraband chocolate peanut butter cups and cola
that the man pulled out of his bag. The man told himself that the boy was like
a nephew. He did this to allay guilt that was burdening his positive self-image
and so that he might restrain himself from a touch that could cause him to lose
his prey so soon. His hormones boiled and steamed like the rolling levity of
atoms and yet he did not reach for the succulent young flesh there beside him.
The boy told himself that the stranger was like an uncle for there was a dull
aching within him of one needing to believe that somewhere he would find a
man's interest in him -- one who would take him to baseball games and whom he
could confide in, one who could teach him how to become a man.

When the movie ended the man said he had a better film in his apartment and
they went away together to his furtive domain.

On his sofa bed, which had not been pushed back into a sofa, they were propped
up on pillows. They were half sitting and half lying on a bed watching a movie
and eating grilled cheese sandwiches and potato chips. Somewhere into the video
was a car chase. Apoplectic expletives of the driver being chased--words that
were part of the lexicon of American culture but ones to which he did not
understand fully — puzzled and intrigued him. He was eager to know jargon that
he assumed was linked to this thing called sex (whatever it was) and
abbreviations like S&M and MF that were stranger yet. The ideas within these
abbreviations were so hidden there that he got a sense that they were the
conduit for experiencing great things. He felt that by cogitating all of these
mysterious words and abbreviations long enough he would be able to transcribe
them as if the English that was chiseled on the walls of his brain were a
Rosetta stone. As he was pondering this Morse code of the adult cabal, there
was a feeling of a hand under his buttocks -- a hand that then passed through
the border of the elasticity of his underwear to direct contact with his flesh.
Nonplussed, he turned to the trespasser and saw for the first time an erection
that seemed such a freakish abnormality (here it was poking out of jogging
pants that had been slid down to his hips). Even more fey was that mesmerized
and fixated look of yearning for absolute pleasure on the face of this stranger
called Tom. Nathaniel removed the hand.

" What are you doing?"

" Can you help me? Pull down your underwear. "

"Why?"

"Don't worry. I won't tell anyone you came here to my apartment—you won't get
punished if only you help me a little. Put your mouth on it or let me enter."

"Enter?"

"Your butt hole."

He asked himself it this was sex. He had assumed that it was a moonstruck look
and a bewitched yearning of adult lunatics for kisses from the opposite sex.

He wanted to scream, "No!" and to whine that he wanted to go home. He was
hurting and feeling diminished in years and he wanted to cry. He was scared
despite his interest in how this freakish penis augmentation was linked to sex.
He wished that he had never been so foolish as to come here or even gone to the
movie theatre with this stranger. And yet he tried to hold onto his senses. He
realized that to oppose a man trying to get his fix of exhilaration might be
risky. He tried to figure out the most innocuous or least deleterious path that
his childish mind could concoct. It was mostly a feeling since he was not all
that logical. He remembered that mesmerized and fixated look of yearning for
absolute pleasure on the face of this stranger. It was proof that although sex
was linked to another person, it was mostly an internal function. To disengage
himself and yet fulfill his curiosity, he returned one of the stranger's hands
on his buttocks and placed the other long hand onto the stranger himself. Then
he watched the stroking and pumping that lead to a whitish disgorging. With its
passing the stranger went into the bathroom to urinate. A few seconds later,
Nathaniel quietly exited the apartment for the first city bus he was able to
descry. He kept wistfully hoping for his mother's return. He missed her.


With all windows open and at top legal speed, the wind dishevels his hair .His
sunglasses are so dark that they make the day into dusk. His car is strewn with
myriad CDs but he repeats the same song from one that belongs to his mother. He
sings along with Led Zepplin.

"I've made up my mind to make a new start./ I'm going to California with an
aching in my heart./ Someone told me there is a girl out there/ with love in
her eyes and flowers in her ha-ir./ La la la la/ I took my chances on a big jet
plane./ Never let them tell you that they are a-l-l the same."


He beats the steering wheel to the remainder of the tune until he glances at
the gauge and decides to pull into the next gas station that he encounters . He
has to laugh and that laugh comes out in a bitter and cyical drool. He wipes
his mouth with his sleeve. His California girl lives in Sante Fe, New Mexico
where her husband recently divorced her. She isn't a girl but a woman who last
week, after recuperating from her face lift, emailed a photograph of her new
face. She is just Hispanic Betty but he doesn't mind. Older women are more
appealing to him and this one has always cared about him. He will use whatever
she has to give to him. He has no compunction.




Chapter Thirty


And for those who never had epileptic seizures or other afflictions as young
children and never witnessed their weaknesses mocked by cousins or other
"family," their blessings were to be content to emulate others in their society
and to follow the desires that were innate in human instincts.

But for outsiders like Gabriele, who when very young survived their mothers and
fathers running over them in tanks and their forging of mutinous lives in the
distant east only to then briefly succumb to spells of seizures following the
witnessing of state sanctioned and individual applauded barbarity (in her case
a couple weeks after the Turkish man's decapitation), their only blessing was a
key to the discontent of their days.

Abhorring the cold and cruel functioning of Turkey's legal system and the world
at large, this little Kansas girl, Gabriele, became sick upon her return to the
States. When her sickness and flaccid sensitivities were vehemently ridiculed
by "family," it was through the determination of her will that she willed
herself well; and the seizures that mysteriously came mysteriously vanished.

Realizing that she had gone from one group of belligerents to another, and that
this particular family was no less akin to war than the other one, she tried to
think how best to survive being in her aunt and uncle's domain. This family's
attempts to hurt her could not be controlled but being hurt resided in her
domain. The latter was her choice. She told herself (it was really more of a
feeling since, as precocious as she was she could not reason so well) that she
would not allow herself to be destroyed in deliberately planted psychological
landmines in this temporary coming together of family. In her own way, despite
her young age, she felt the equivalent of "Why should I be a casualty in a
make-believe war when the real landmines are real indeed and wide-spread in far
reaches of the planet." And so she walked through back corridors of herself
until at last she was in the outside world staring back at a gigantic cage. All
alone in the outside domain she read her books like a good scholar, and watched
some of the six billion spider monkeys within that cage. She saw how they
obeyed their hungers to eat and so they did some tricks to get their food,
hungers for sex and so they stole monkey mates which looked similar to
themselves (monkeys were notorious xenophobes who only desired non- threatening
monkey mates from nearby trees), hungers for stability so they clung to the
same sets of branches and ate the same brands of bananas, made sacrosanct rules
for themselves like never defecating on a tree, and developed little routines
for themselves as to when one must eat (the arbitrary concoction of breakfast,
lunch, and supper given appointed times) and when to swing to a new branch. So,
it was with true chagrin that despite her obdurate snobbery at having to live
beside such opprobrious creatures that she should find herself as one of the
myriad monkeys.

The four of them had just returned from an American football game and she was
still numb all over like someone who had been kidnapped, blindfolded, and
finally freed with no explanation. She would have been less discontent to sit
in a world football game (this thing Americans referred to as soccer). When
young, she liked playing the game herself so sitting through continual action,
even if it were continually boring, would not have been so bad. Better, she
would have eagerly challenged Michael to a racket ball or tennis competition or
played badminton or croquet with the whole family. Instead, like Patty Hearst
taken from relaxation in front of her TV at gunpoint, she had been carried off
and put on bleachers at an American football game. The boys, whom she nicknamed
Mr. Placid and Mr. Petulant (Michael, formerly MF, being Mr. Phlegmatic), had
willed this to happen. She couldn't have opposed them. It was her son's tenth
birthday. It was one of her presents to Adagio that she should sit there on the
bleachers stuffing these frankfurters or weenies into her mouth and staring
onto this little sea of intermittent tackle and throw action (the object being
thrown like an irregular, phallic weenie). There were crueler fates than the
desire to jump out of one's skull. She had to continually remind herself that
it was her son's tenth birthday and that she was doing this for him. These
reminders helped her to construct a florid and baroque facade of smiles and
chatter. Her chatter was a repetition of their ideas about the players and the
plays. Since she hadn't really observed a thing and they seemed to like womanly
creatures who would parrot their ideas, parrot them she did. The game being one
and then two hours relegated to the past, it still seemed to go on incessantly
in their imaginations.

Here she and Nathaniel were 8 years removed from patty cake. Here they were now
nestled together for his blowing out of the candles on the Betty Cake made from
a Betty Crocker cake mix. Here they were as part of something larger--four
birdies and a Betty in the nest. Because of the random bird droppings of fate
these people were somehow hers (or at least it seemed so according to her
feelings).

She told herself that in her promiscuous years in Houston she had been a crazy
woman defying her repugnance of physical touch to play seductress games, half
wanting to conceive a clump of clay in whom she could shape her animadversion
of life, her gentle contemplative preoccupation, and her glint of disdain.
However, these two--father and son-- were born through the sanity of her head
in a feeling of love. These relationships conceived in the art and beauty of
Rome were of friendship and a shared exploration.

In both how she conceived Nathaniel and how she had auspiciously gained the
other two she had to applaud the unconventional way it all came about. It was
much better than boy meets girl, boy and girl hunger for each other, boy and
girl claim each other to have something solid in a world of passing shadows,
boy and girl in part briefly dream up a romance for themselves to escape their
solitary enclosures, and boy and girl in part become victims of a delusive mist
the making of one's selfish genes which say, "Mortals, reproduce so that we,
the genes may go on in perpetuity."

As Nathaniel blew out the candles, Michael began to cut the cake. He did so
within the last remnant of light within dusk while obtruding a cloud of cigar
smoke into the room. Cigar smoke and clouds of it over her food was especially
loathsome to Gabriele; and yet she didn't say anything. She bit her tongue and
ruminated on what this thing called a relationship was. Her higher authority
said, "It is an intangible bridge of one person to another that seems more real
than the people who make up the relationship. It is keeping one's opinions
concerning a man's nasty habits in shackles."

"Fire! Something burns in the kitchen," said Hispanic Betty as she returned
into the darkness of the dining room after going to the bathroom. She had a
handkerchief half wadded up in her hands but bits of it still fluttered in her
gestures.

"No, he's puffing on an old man's turd." Gabriele's wanton words galloped away
like a wild stallion.

"Gabriele, why don't you try to be a little more crude if you can," Michael
interjected. "Betty, hit the lights if you will."

"Turn?" Betty saw the cigar as she turned on the lights. "Turd. Oh!" She
realized that which was spoken about was "turd" and not "turn."

"Sorry, Hispanic Betty," said Gabriele. "Nathaniel didn't want to wait for you.
He had to blow out the candles immediately so that he could inhale his cake."

"I waited ten minutes, Betty. How long does it take to piss, anyhow?"

"Adagio, women don't just lift the lid and spray. There is delicacy in it."
Gabriele hoped to break him of his misconception.

"Well, she doesn't make a trickle. I think she puts TP in there to clog up what
she thinks is bad sound because I don't hear nothing and we're always running
out of toilet paper."

Gabriele laughed. "Double negatives are for Spanish, dear heart."

Michael said, "My mother would have taken dish soap and washed my mouth out
with it if I had said something like that."

"Would have?" Gabriele laughed derisively. "Either she did or didn't. If she
didn't clean your mouth you wouldn't know that she was a profanity policewoman
ready to strike you with her bottle of Ivory dish soap. Am I right? To say
'Would' you would need to know about her doing it so that's proof of you saying
something wrong to provoke her to do that outrageous action. What did you do?"

"All right, Smarty. Once—just once and I learned my lesson; and no, I'm not
telling it."

"Scared that Mom might come over with the Ivory soap once again, eh?"

"Maybe."

"Please get that smoking turd out of my face."

"Gabriele, you are going to stop that crudeness right now! Here, give Betty
some Betty cake!"

"Que cosas oir! What things to hear." She sat down between Nathaniel and
Michael. "And smell."

"Betty," said Nathaniel, " Put your snot rags up your holes and you won't need
to know we are around."

"I taked care of you when tu madre was not here and this--you dices cosas
malvados a mi." Betty got up with her Betty cake and moved to a chair near Rick
who just ate and withdrew from the world of commotion.

Gabriele hit him on the head. "You. Apologize."

"Sorry, Hispanic Betty."

She hit him harder on the head and the smack made his ear burn.

"Sorry, Betty." True repentance, Gabriele assessed, was such a coerced thing. A
person naturally saw only his own perspective. To have empathy for others was
such a chore and in some cases was only gained with the crack of a whip.

Here he was at ten with at least a tenth of his life completed. Once an infant
content to have his feet played with, each year he needed more explosive
pleasures and a larger array of them and this would continue into insatiable
hungers of money, power, property, sex, and love. But she knew discontent was
in all things -- When she had picked up Mouse from the inhumanity of the Humane
Society it --

She could feel a nascent migraine swelling within her, and like Betty and her
allergies, she absconded to the bathroom.

A few minutes later Michael knocked on the bathroom door. She wanted him to go
away but at the same time she wanted him inside to hold her head and to pin her
hair back from the rim of the toilet. She wanted him to understand her pain and
console her in empathy.

"What's wrong? You alright in there?"

"Sure."

But he heard her strenuous efforts to vomit like the cries of stretched
muscles. They were as empty as yawns. "You're sick. Are you sick? What am I
smelling in there"

She turned on the fan.

"Smelling?" she asked idiotically.

"Open up the door."

She opened it and smiled painfully. "Don't freak out. It's a joint."

"It's illegal."

"It's necessary. It's preventive pot—sometimes when used responsibly. See, once
in a while, I feel a migraine coming on. Michael, darling, it isn't homeopathy
but it relieves symptoms for lots of illnesses and migraines too."

"Flush it down the toilet. What if the boys were to see you smoking that?"

"What if they did?"

"Flush it down the toilet," he commanded. She did as she was told. She watched
her tiny higher authority wave goodbye to her sadly as she was sucked into the
whirlpool with her ship.




Chapter Thirty-One


15 years ago when receiving her graduate degree in criminology at Emporia State
University Gabriele got cards of congratulations that were not at all palatable
to her. Reading the writing on these weighty bits of paper should have been
just more insipid clogging of one's time and shouldn't have made much of an
impression on her unfavorably and yet she couldn't help resenting this
intrusive attitude of "Read me! Read me! Take moments of your life and read
me!" She believed that the factory produced clichZs contained therein were not
congratulations of past academic accomplishments but more the prompting of
those who advocated that post-graduates utilize ideas for pragmatic pursuits.
These were mass produced clichZs of ignorant professionals in bondage to the
idea that worth was wealth secured in slavish development of commodities or
services, which were the means of affluence. Such people erroneously believed
that, if well compensated financially, a life spent planning a product to
develop an artificial and insatiable thirst or governing men so that they did
not founder totally in their base instincts, as all earlier predecessors had
done, was a constructive engagement of one's hours on the planet.

Among others, there was a card from her aunt and uncle and another one from her
perfidious and mutinous parents. She opened and read the other rubbish before
putting it in the rightful place but she let these particular envelopes lay on
the counter, near her toaster, for a day or two before stabbing her foot
against the ribbed lever and guiltlessly opening the trash can's jaws.
"Saccharine for the alligator--gotta feed 'gator," she thought and then pitched
the envelopes and their unopened content into the trash. It was such an
American gesture, which was an alloy of a disposable culture and the
independence by which one might extricate herself from the visceral, vitriolic
virulence of a dysfunctional family.

And when she got her Master's degree in psychology in Houston there was a
pleasant absence of this driest of sentimental tripe until one day Peggy sent a
belated card and letter with "Urgent" marked on the envelope. Gabriele opened
it begrudgingly. It was one of those half- hearted apologies of "If I've done
anything that has made you wrongly perceive..." or "If I've done anything that
has made you believe..." with something like "that you are unloved" or "that
you weren't wanted." Now she couldn't remember the exact details even if there
was that indelible impression of one who would never apologize or admit that
there was anything to be sorry about.

Still, it wasn't an unpleasant letter (she had had worse) and her vantage point
when she read it from a lawn chair on the deck brought a happy serenity even
onto it. A humming bird was boldly drinking from its feeder of nectar, a
butterfly was fluttering above a potted plant, a young boy who was running for
his ball was casting such an elongated shadow in the morning sunlight, and this
vertical shadow was appearing somewhat three dimensional from her aerial
perspective.

Furthermore, while concentrating on this invisible bombardment of molecules
rife in the verdant yard she was also trying to figure out how best to sketch
the atoms of fragrance and how this burgeoning dotty texture of atomism, rather
than impressionism, could be extended to the sketching of the boy, his shadow,
the butterfly, the humming bird, and a pensive woman looking out of the window
to avoid packing her things.

So, reading the letter and not being of a mood to demand contrition of one who
had never been contrite, she was not disappointed even though as an
undergraduate she had unwittingly expected a metamorphosis of contrition to
manifest itself in her aunt's sloppy handwriting. A more salient fact was that
this particular letter accompanied with a greeting card of congratulations was
a pensive deliberation on their relationship. That being the case, she kept it
for a couple weeks before at last passing it into the jaws of the trashcan. If
not a tacit apology this less than insipid letter was a wistful yearning to
reestablish the relationship and from it she felt deep sympathy for her aunt.

Hundreds of times anew from childhood, Gabriele was unable to even go back for
a day under the roof of an uncle whom she had successfully fought off from
attempted molestation countless selves ago. Gabriele never mentioned this
incident to anyone. Although in early childhood she was able to pinpoint it as
the catalyst of their vehemence toward her she never said a word. So her uncle
and male cousins disparaged her for what time she got up, how she combed her
hair, for being left- handed, how she held her fork, the amount of time that
she spent in the bathroom, where she sat, the position she sat in, why she read
so much, why she was spending so much time reading in her "cage," that she was
probably shedding hair on the living room sofa, why she put her legs together
so prim and proper at the supper table, and why she opened her legs like a
tomboy or a lesbian cunt. She told herself that childhood would not last
forever and that this was something that she would pass through without
crumbling to pieces. "Matter of fact," said the voice within her, "you will get
through it all unscathed." And throughout each day of each year she remained
sangfroid, believing that a relentless cold stare would attenuate their
cruelty, and yet no battles did she win with the Antarctic blasts that she sent
their way unabatedly. And years later she never mentioned it in her letters to
Peggy. Why would she with reality not being an external phenomenon but pictures
rendered by the brain that were unavoidably reworked to justify certain ugly
scenes ("Why don't you want to go with your uncle and cousins to the
lake-really Gabriele, you need to work on your disposition - no man would have
you the way you are becoming"). And yet her aunt sensed this absolute inability
to return to Kansas in their communication so she wrote that she would fly in
to see her. Gabriele agreed but looked at her coming with dread. Removed,
reshaped, and orbiting around other things in the depths of space, Gabriele was
a distant star. A connection back to Peggy, she then reasoned, would take
enormous energy in a sustained sympathy and it was doubtful that even with the
best effort, anything good could be gained from it.

The meeting happened. The aunt, who was usually such a martinet, asked about
her niece's weight gain as if it could be anything other than pregnancy.
Choosing chocolate as a more viable lie than a tumor Gabriele lied in speech
but Peggy lied in belief. Worse, when pressed on the issue, Gabriele promised
that she would come back for a visit and seek employment in Kansas. It was a
successful meeting of active but coerced lies and passive, cajoled mendacities.
There was a facade of feigned smiles throughout the day despite a sense of
consternation and loss. It was a day of many awkward and reticent moments of
not knowing quite what to say.

Now she was to be awarded a Master's degree in art history. For her it was an
eventless day without ceremony. It was a normal day of putting up new wallpaper
in one bedroom and then cleaning up to help Hispanic Betty with dinner but
interrupting the latter task from incompetence and the need to drive the boys
to little league practice. Even until now there were no cards or special
letters sent to her, and this was as she liked it. She did not need anyone to
congratulate her because she did not feel that there was anything to be praised
for. She might have learned the history of art but she had lost the sense of
herself as an artist. The cracks of her damp coldness had been filled as
complacently as a warm moss. In family there was no discontent with the world
and within these heavenly cellars all else seemed musty and art the specious
delusions of crack addicts.

Heretofore most of her paintings had such a still contemplative depth within
the glint of the eyes of prostitutes and street people who could pull down
lightning; movement had the fading lines of ripples in a pond; hard movements
belied the simple pleasures; pallid colors delineated the richness of form in a
world of vanquished color; friendship was portrayed with discomfited and
inexplicable sense of betrayal; people were stoic mannequins straining about in
contorted action and exhibiting eyes of consternation at being in ceremony and
societal roles that were not what they had imagined them to be; Antarctica was
a resplendent distant background in contrast to the war ravaged Middle East
with its oil wells ablaze; and in stores where customers headed for scanners
with an incessant array of things, these people were as blue as waves, curled
and dashing as foaming breakers, in movement seemingly happy but in practice
discontent. Sometimes the dominant colors were tawny but pert, ruddy and pale,
and recalcitrant but with lament. Often her protagonists possessed the ideal
curves of Raphael paintings and her antagonists had the angled linear depth of
El Greco portraits or of distant cars. Her protagonists had a resistance
against the social instinct; but she had succumbed to its truth like an insect
to the light of a lamp. She was flitting from one specious light bulb to that
of another: now not able to contemplate and finding sitting still to paint a
torturous sensory deprivation; and now with endorphins and dopamines uncorked,
she was oozing in the unbearable lightness of being.




Chapter Thirty-Two


By night she would lie with him in this hunger of flesh, pleasure, and merger;
and after the cessation of sexual intimacies she would still feel undulations.
She would snuggle up to his body and drowsily sink onto his chest while his
head turned away from her, parting to other dreams and other illusions since
the fire for this one had burnt itself out. The odors of his body would merge
into her, and they furthered her illusions of a metamorphosis into something
greater than the concoction of reason and the attempts at making sense of the
world, which had to be done alone --a sense that she engraved onto the interior
walls of her brain the way the ancient Egyptians chiseled eulogies in the tombs
of the pharaohs. The smells of his body brought to her a pleasant titillation
if not love of all things that were caught randomly by the magnet of her
pondering. As she snuggled there she was reassured that there were
possibilities of loving the world in ways she had never imagined by extending
herself to him and becoming something different than a stuffed polar bear with
the stiff arms that the factory of the human race mutantly created.

Then they would sleep some moments and his chest would no longer be her life
buoy at all but a magic carpet ride or a Shuttle flight as gentle for her as if
she were an insect on an eagle. She would be taken to where one's head might
brush against the stratosphere before descending in an arch back into
wakefulness. Upon them both awakening there would be frivolous pillow talk. He
would sometimes narrate snippets of his life in a cathartic random response to
whatever idea preceded it. In some ways he was like those who could not
tolerate the impersonal aspects of self-consuming jobs and would affirm their
existence to a psychologist or a priest at a confessional. She learned of the
attitudes that drove his interaction with the world--a family's overemphasis of
money, which made him become an educator, and yet a belief that owning and
operating a business was one's only means of success. He was cognizant how the
force of one's family caused one to emulate and oppose its attitudes and had a
sense of humor about this, which she admired.

Often these talks were of irrelevant and petty matters that were amusing on the
pillow but so easily forgotten off of it. One time he asked her what she would
be doing the following day; she told him that she had to go to Wal-Mart to buy
the boys some underwear and socks and some paint for the deck, and that she
might look around for some clothes for herself at a mall; and then he expressed
how once a cleaning lady who was doing her work in the men's bathroom in the
mall had caused him to be unable to relieve himself. She giggled like a
schoolgirl at a slumber party. She reciprocated by telling him that in
"Bang-COCK" cleaning ladies "go in and out of bathrooms with their mops with
impunity." She teased him that maybe there were these ostensible cleaning
ladies everywhere whose real duties were to cause inhibition, clogging, and
insecurity within the male gender. From this her mind took a tortuous and
serious linking of ideas. She began to ruminate that society was upside down.
Cleaning ladies in men's bathrooms, forced to smell urine, soap, and bleach all
day should be paid the most and that they who were the benefactors of the world
like presidents and prime ministers should be paid the least. She argued that
only then, when equality was gained and each person given either money or
admiration as compensation for their work, would the world be a just and
harmonious place. He laughed, thinking it was another joke, but she was deadly
serious.

And yet once he told her something significant. He told her that his mother was
not his mother at all but his aunt; that his real mother, suffering from post
partum depression, suffocated his baby brother in the bath water, dumped him,
Michael, in the bracken waters of an abandoned well at her parents' farm, and
hung herself in a shed. After the funeral, his aunt was urged to come to them
from her home in a small Italian town. Gabriele felt an empathy as deep as the
gods for she too had been run over in family which for her made hugging,
touching and feeling emotions such an alien plain to this date. She too had
been recalcitrant and had done antipodal actions to thwart this Aunt Peggy and
Uncle Jake but for all her freedom the actions had been emulation or rebellions
against this absurd, vague memory of family. Thinking of him at the age of
three clinging to rope and pail she knew that she loved him.


Hate was everywhere. It was the striving to exist and to have a dominant
importance in the inconsequential affairs of man. Just as the provincial Korean
bravado within Sang Huin or Shawn had made him so mercilessly obdurate in
administering justice against his sister and her pregnancy, so the Americans
camouflaged innate aggression behind terms like axis of evil, rogue country
harboring weapons of mass destruction, links to Al Queida, and liberation for
the Iraqi people. They and their preemptive strikes, they and their selective
targeting with improved smart bombs, were killing and harming thousands of
civilians after evoking psychological trauma in this failed shock and awe
campaign. They, by heat and explosion, decimated myriad soldiers who either
chose to be such to secure a decent livelihood or were conscripted with
threats; and yet the Americans melted their bodies in this internecine campaign
sending them up amongst the other gasses the way thousands of their civilians
had been melted within the World Trade Center towers. The Saddam Hussein
regime, for all its internal atrocities, had posed no new threat to the world.
It just had the potential for potential and this was enough because the days
were dark indeed. One group of tyrants and their sadistic entourage holding a
nation hostage for decades had to be the example for the capabilities of their
virulence was greater than that envisaged by Al Queida -- at least so the
George Jr. administration, for all its cowboy stuttering, still glibly and
volubly conveyed.

He thought this as Saeng Seob sat down in the living room and said, "Can you
really think with that thing on?" Sang Huin knew that he couldn't--at least not
well--but the television was their child from which conversation was begotten
and extant. Without it their intimacy would have exhausted their conversation
long ago.

"Turn it off if you want."

"It isn't bothering me. I'm used to AFKN by now."

"Well, sometimes AFKN has movies about American history but I guess not with
the war. I needed a break from CNN. An hour ago CNN reported that we--I mean
the Americans-- bombed a residence where they think Saddam Hussein was staying
at. Four two-thousand pound bombs. They thought that killing the innocent
people of that block was nothing next to the chance of him being there-- he and
his sadistic sons. Who knows how many innocent people were collateral damage."

"Do Americans think it was right?"

"I don't know."

"Was it right?"

"I don't know." It was a cold calculation, a moral choice that was not meant to
be that of humans; and yet someone behind a desk had made this one to have a
chance of reducing the length of the war and its casualties. He had never been
good at modern math so his studies were centered innocuously in musicology.
"What do I know about this?" he asked himself. "What do I know about anything?"

"Will they do that to the North Koreans?"

"I don't know. Don't know--hope not. What are you reading?"

"Nothing."

"What's nothing?"

"Comics."

"In Braille?"

"Yes."

"You can't see the pictures. There are no pictures in that book, are there?
There are words. I guess being blind makes you have to develop a vivid
imagination." Seong Seob did not say anything. "Comics about what?" He was
trying to control this disapproving undertone that often crept into his voice.
He disliked wasted leisure. It did not seem to him that leisure should be such
a frivolous pastime with the few when the many were so needy. He also did not
like Saeng Seob's lack of motivation; and it was only because of his friend's
blindness and knowledge that his mother had thrown him like a coin into a
wishing well of death that Sang Huin managed to stay mute about this issue. For
the first time a better reason for not judging others formulated in his head:
he who was a promiscuous homosexual, an unfaithful partner to his friend, one
who had urged the abortion of his former girl friend's embryo, and had by his
Puritanical Korean values been an inadvertent abettor of the crime against his
sister, Jun Jin, had no moral authority to state an opinion about anything.
Even if Saeng Seob at times exhibited double his own reticence making
conversation short of impossible, he knew that this was even less of a reason
to judge him than the fact that he was such an unmotivated sloth. Still it was
natural to think that one's own introverted character was right in being such
and that someone else who was sometimes even more reticent, was abnormal. He
thought, "So this guy has a part time job with his cousin and no real hobbies
outside of strumming on a guitar and light reading-- these are innocuous
pursuits in one who from his pain could have become a hardened criminal. Surely
there are blind bad guys in penitentiaries; and who am I to judge him?" . "A
cat"

"Garfield?"

"Yes."

"In a book?"

"A collection."

Relinquishing the idea of having a meaningful conversation, Sang Huin changed
the channel to CNN and got his fix of war updates; but a half hour later it
became an overdose. He turned down the macabre sounds and returned to his
computer.


By day Gabriele would make calls to her beloved so that she could get that rush
in the pleasure receptors of her brain. Then, when warranted, she would go over
to the site of the future school and Michael would always ask her what she
thought of the construction up to that point. She would say her unvaried line
of "It sure is coming along well," which of course it was invariably.
Occasionally she would sketch her ideas of the interiors of faculty lounges,
secretary offices, and other miscellaneous rooms. She would submit them to his
blank stares and then she would have to admit that she did not "know the first
thing about interior design." And yet the same aversion that she had toward
holding hands in the day was making her into less of an active lover at night.
Grateful to be made real by being pulled out of the stuffy chamber of her head,
still it was sometimes difficult to repeat the same half hour rapture each
night as if this hunger for merger and thoughtless ecstasy were to bring on
intimacies and awareness that the previous night's half hour failed to do. This
perspective was exacerbated all the more when she considered the fact that the
urges had been no less poignant during all their other times together. Each
night there was his hard thumping to please himself fully with little regard,
now, for the best means of her arousal. Although still pleasurable, and even
more of a gyrating release from thoughts, it now seemed more like being tossed
in a blender, and each night her embraces became more like frozen fruit.

On weekends they often went to nurseries to buy shrubs and trees for the
landscape of her home as well as that of the school; but one Saturday morning
he got her to acquiesce to this yearning to find one's maker that was there in
the collective consciousness of primordial modern man. At Mass she fidgeted
with some beads in her lap and chanted Hail Marries. She chanted these archaic
trifles although, tacit and hidden away amongst her private thoughts, she had
her own version of a Hail Mary: "Hell Mary Juana, full of recalcitrance, the
Lordess, Santa Gabriela, be with thee. Blessed art thou in the salubrious realm
of illegal substances and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, beer and chewing
tobacco. Hell Mary Juana, servant of the Gabriele goddess and her partner, the
sun god, give us something sweet to hallucinate now and at the hour of our
death. Amen." She looked over at Nathaniel there in her pew. He was barely able
to keep himself from launching through the roof. This sententiousness and pomp
was too much poop for him too. For the first time in months she felt a special
cognate affection for her son that excluded the others. Feigning smiles only
when cognizant of Michael glancing toward her and silent as death, she tacitly
spoke to Nathaniel in an imaginary utterance, "I'll make this up to you--we
must all play with the tinker toys of language in thought to have some degree
of meaning within our petty lives; but God and heaven are empty make believe
words of a feeble animal. They are a feeble species who need to look for
external meaning and finding only tragic random chance within the mortality of
the family and friends that have given them pleasure, and then their own
mortality as well, resort to storybook scripture, churches, and chants. Their
jargon of God, heaven, hell, and sin don't refer to anything-- totally empty
words--and to have to forfeit running around, celebrating life to sit
uncomfortably in this dark Saddam Husseinish torture chamber--I'll make up for
this. What can I give you? What about a dog or a gift certificate to Swenson's
Ice Cream parlor? No, too much sugar. I wouldn't want you bouncing off the
walls any more than usual."

Following the service the boys were sent to a Catholic version of Sunday school
and she was paraded in front of a bunch of stiff strangers with eyes euthanized
by talk of the heavens. He introduced her to various people but the
introductions were an awkward mix. She was given their names with little else
and they were given this spiel that she was an artist who had become his
girlfriend and was now contributing some ideas for the interior design for his
school, whose beauty was distracting him from building his version of a loosely
affiliated Catholic school, and who might draw some "pictures" of the school's
patron saint. He said it in various ways but each time she felt flaunted like a
woman seeing the image of herself in a bra on a lit billboard in front of a
bench at a bus stop only in her case bust size and her ability to wear lingerie
beautifully did not matter. It seemed to her that he was trying to boast a
vague connection of an artist to the school, which she couldn't quite figure
out unless he had the idea that she would teach art there. The stout and husky
figure that she was, she couldn't see that his introducing her as if she were
Helen of Troy would grant him a lot more customers. A half hour into being
introduced and memorizing names that she would forget once out of there (one
young Russian who exercised with Michael at a fitness center and had the most
forgettable name of all) she told herself that she did not want the four of
them to stay there a minute longer. She used English like a crowbar, demanding
that he remove the boys so that they could enjoy the remainder of the day; and
from his saturnine expressions she could see that she was the condemned one. As
the condemned one she knew that she would be free to implement whatever she
pleased since he would be too sullen to have it any other way. She knew this
for she had been condemned before.

Not needing to worry about being condemned since she was already such, she went
ahead and argued that the boys should be left with Hispanic Betty if the two of
them were still planning to go to the nursery. She didn't want to see them
dragged through flowers, trees, and shrubs (Nathaniel spilling his incessant
complaints and disturbing big Mr. Phlegmatic by making him morose) or kept in
the hot truck the way they were on the previous Saturday. To be in the truck
all alone with nothing to do but slap one another and pull each other's hair
while she and Michael were plant hunting for verdant plantings, they would be
nothing but prisoners and their apoplexy from incarceration would probably
cause severe fraternal loathing. If nothing else, their whole day would be
constricted by adults' self-centered preoccupation with contrived
accomplishments since it was adults who ruled over them -- adults who went
contrary to the senses which implored that through contemplation one might
celebrate the day.

Gabriele and Michael returned with two German Shepherds as well as five or six
tree roses in the back of the pickup. Caring less about the plants, Gabriele
was eager to witness dog meets boy and boy makes dog into a friend but the joy
was stymied in stepping inside the house. When they went in they saw mercurial
Mr. Petulant executing punishment against the son of Mr. Phlegmatic. Nathaniel
had Rick's head under the running water of the faucet. The crime was spilling a
glass of milk; the punishment was a near drowning; and the perspective she
chose to take for a fuller understanding of this situation, as Michael pulled
off his belt, was Piaget's idea of the moral absolutist. As the brazen non-
flinching boy was being whipped, she thought to herself that she would need
Betty to monitor their every move from now on for children's system of
government was more procrustean and draconian than that devised by adults in
most, but not all, areas of the global jungle.

On a Monday built vapidly on the vacuous graves of wasted hours, she heard the
school bus return and the barking of the two hounds. Curious about how
Nathaniel related to his dog when she was not around, she went to the studio
window to witness this interaction of dog and boy inconspicuously.

Outside the window there was the same rectangular wooden container where, at
the trailer, she had planted a flowerbed which an owl then used as a domicile.
Now it was fastened under the studio window with a different choice of flowers.
She remembered the days preceding that move to Ithaca: having climbed onto a
tree, which had been the umbrage of the trailer, with slow, surreptitious
movements, shooting the owl with a tranquilizer gun, and pulling its body into
a laundry bag without falling from the limbs of the tree. It had been a time
consuming undertaking and at the time she had doubted whether it would actually
succeed; and yet here the owl was well acclimated to its setting. Looking onto
the bird now she was pleased: it had succumbed to the belief that the trailer
had been nothing but a dream just as she had awakened or succumbed to the
belief that her arduous efforts to paint visions imagined in her head had no
substance and that only filling one's mind in the clutter of activity that
involved others did one actually live at all. After all, contemplation involved
having to contemplate something and what else was there but this ball, this
planet of movement? A racket ball player was called such because she played
racket ball and a rebel because she rebelled--all people had self-worth by
defining themselves in words of action.

From the window she noticed that Nathaniel played with his dog when she was not
around. He actually had some affection for it. Had she bought at least one of
these dogs for the experiment of discovering his ability to care or to prompt
that attribute? Was it for the companionship of both boys or was it for her own
companionship? Maybe the dogs were bought to fill the hours when she wasn't
taking the boys to their scout meetings, buying clothes for them, rooting for
them on bleachers at baseball games (she had tried rooting for them as a
voluntary concession stand worker, but her tacit words and supercilious
coldness to the inconsequential and insufferable gossip of these motherly peers
brought her a flurry of unfriendly glances not all that different than what she
received in all the other days in the years of her life), tree planting, or
going to the site of the school to say, "It looks like its really coming along
well." It was all of this and more. So much that was selfish, altruistic,
curious, and indifferent went into the simplest of acts.

She could see there, in this dog centering its actions on her boy and her boy
responding by throwing out a shoe for him to fetch, a reason for all this
carbon to be divided into so many organisms. Looking through the window at this
interaction (saliva drooling from the mouth of one and smiling fangs from the
other) she saw that the universe communicated with itself and that it's self
responded in a distinctly varied perspective. It was by doing so that the
universe was at last real. There was no doubt that there were other worlds like
the Earth throughout the cosmos. Simple pleasures, simple interactions, were
the entity, and she knew that the whole thing was good. She knew that this
overlapping of the universe in carbon beings interacting with each other in
their distinct ways were the talking heads that made the universe real. The
sight of forty-dollar sneakers there in the drooling waterfalls of the dog's
mouth caused her consternation. Still she did nothing. She just watched and
recalled what had occurred yesterday.

Yesterday, Sunday, when she had approached this gathering of boy and dog
Nathaniel had shoved the animal away and when it still pounced on his legs as
he walked away from it, he kicked it on its belly. She didn't mind him showing
that he disliked her. She saw it as a passing stage: a diminishing but still
open animus toward her for the trip to Asia and Europe without him, resenting
this distribution of her attention to include two other males, taking umbrage
over her slight favoritism of the chosen over the natural members of family if
he did indeed perceive it (certainly he saw and resented the grocery shopping
with Rick that was done without him), this refurbishing of the whole of family
within contrived Friday night croquet games of bonding regardless of the mood
and wishes of individual family members at the time, and this slipping out of a
boy's closeness to his mother so that he might fit into himself. She did not
concern herself with that in the least. He could critically assess her and show
his dislike openly so long as it was done respectfully. True motherly love was
raising children and not needing to smother them in maternal, nurturing
instincts or expecting understanding that their egocentric beings could not
muster. The paddling yesterday was not as punishment for hostilities toward her
(hostilities that existed because of issues he was trying to resolve in
himself) or to oppose Skinner's belief that negative reinforcement accomplished
very little. It was done as justice for the dog and a statement on behalf of it
and all other animals that they weren't there to be targets of aggression. It
wasn't negative reinforcement per se for none of that could work with him. She
knew that skinned knees from bicycle accidents and the whippings he got from
Michael (Whippings she was beginning to resent) were proof that the boy was
somewhat stoic to pain. Outside of learning that Nathaniel did not dislike his
pooch (only herself) she lost herself in Internet articles on owls until she
and Rick began racing and banging their carts against each other down the
aisles of the grocery store, and Monday went by uneventfully.

On Thursday morning, when everyone had gone in accordance with their habits,
she ate some burnt toast with her grapefruit and for ten minutes stared at a
coffee pot with glazed eyes. There was a time when inanimate objects never
failed at reflecting the ennui by which she gazed at them, causing profound
ideas to be projected onto her consciousness like a great beacon of light shown
onto a screen in dark movie theatre --a filmed documentary of the entity and
its discoverer, Parmenides. Now meditation on a blank wall brought a sketch of
that wall within her memory and this was all.

So, from pure boredom, she decided to watch the dogs that were all alone and
unto themselves in the back yard. Since she wasn't exactly next door to
Antarctic penguins and these two specimens were infinitely more fascinating
than calculating the exact strands of gray hair in the underbrush that lay
fully on her scalp, she cast spells onto the dogs making these smelly bodies
with panting faces oozing out halitosis objects of mild curiosity. They were
certainly something to consider for those who had nothing better to do with
their time. Betty was busy behind the loud vacuum cleaner, and Gabriele could
hardly retreat into her bedroom to escape the noise since the fusillade of
Michael's flatulence a half hour earlier had been so rife that the air
freshener could not do much but dilute it in an equally reprehensible odor.

She went out on the deck and looked onto a world that was definitely for the
dogs. The German Shepherds moved in the yard unrestrained. In a more genuine
way they seemed happier to sniff and distinguish bits of the world instead of
this obsessive bliss of centering themselves on human masters. Much of the time
Nathaniel's anti-social dog growled when Rick's dog came near him; but,
depending on its mood, the two at times could play and wrestle with each other
amicably. Gabriele fed them Puppy Chow and watched how they relinquished their
freedom to instantly come for their meals. She pondered how all creatures were
always slaves to hunger and the desire to obtain more than their allotted
share--at least both characteristics were apparent in Nathaniel's dog.

Her thoughts echoed the breakfast talk a little over an hour ago. Rick had
wanted to bring his dog to school and had suggested that he could tie it to a
bicycle rack. Nathaniel had scoffed, "Right, ignoramus. D'you think Betty'll
come behind the two of you with a pooper-scooper to keep your ass from being
expelled. I think not!" Now, thinking of it, it still struck her as funny. It
hadn't bothered Rick. He had retained his placidity the way his dog was now
happily wagging its tail and looking up at her while its partner stole the food
that was in its dish. As agreeable as Rick's dog was, she could understand Mr.
Petulant's canine perfectly. Half-battered and half-loved even for a few days
in this thing called family, it was lost there in the bosky thickets of
confusion. Made to sleep with Nathaniel so that it might know him as master, it
could already sense that his love was tepid at best. Feeling inferior and
groping around in pleasurable associations so inextricably linked to pain it
was sometimes bumptious, aggressive, and striving to leave a concept of its
superiority onto the other dog's mind.

Months passed. She could not think anything in particular about the owl or the
dogs let alone anything else. They just existed along with her existence and as
incommunicably as her reticence. The late April rains were making shallow ponds
within her yard. Sodden as the mustard MF put on his eggs, or the streams
rolling across her sidewalk, the turgid sediment brought turgid sentiments of
desperation in her mind. Then out of nowhere came a chain of events as if a
blessing. They offered a respite from the void by the clogging of one's days in
myriad tasks. It was clutter devised by her bed partner's making and it beeped
according to the schedule in a PDA/ pocket computer that he lent to her. It all
started one numb day when Rick's dog was licking her face and she wasn't even
cognizant of it doing so and the telephone was ringing but she wasn't aware of
it either; a message on her old answering machine informing her about
Nathaniel's truancy; the imbroglio discussed in pillow talk; and the smell of
MF's breath cajoling her to withdraw the boys from public school and to home
teach them until the private school opened.

Eager to escape imprisonment in the void, her intransigence on the issue began
to break down and there she was arguing with him playfully, agreeing with him
silently, kissing him, needing the intoxication of his breath, and that
tendentious male assertiveness of that one right perspective. Her tenuous
arguments were playful and like any male he felt licentious flames from this
clashing of wills, this electric and sexy friction, and this knowledge that by
rubbing her in his arms and planting his seed in her he would conquer all
resistance.

The next morning she kissed her MF at the breakfast table in front of the
others without inhibitions, massaged the nape of his neck, and then sat there
holding his hand under the table as she bobbed on some type of cloud. Betty's
frying of bacon did not seem nauseating; the mustard Michael put on his eggs
radiated warmly like the sun god, Aten; and the flatulence of one or more males
at the breakfast table seemed aromatic. Convinced of her mission to be a
teacher, she was suddenly the indispensable cue ball setting others in motion
but being banged along with them. Her busy new life often involved the search
of the right books to purchase; the readings, the making of handouts and
worksheets; her impatient lectures, enforced homework, and administered tests;
her punishment for recesses of savagery when Mr. Placid's head of hair was
often pulled out of the sink like a fisherman's trophy; more lectures; taking
Mr. Placid--never Mr. Petulant-- with her grocery shopping or searching for
acceptable amateur art for the school lounge (a Gabriele Sangfroid deemed not
tame enough); sending another one of Mr. Phlegmatic's suits to the dry cleaner;
and then driving the boys to baseball practice, boy scouts meetings, or
swimming lessons. Her only contemplation during the first week of this teacher
act was to sit on the toilet to urinate and defecate. It brought not only to
her a physical catharsis but, from the bathroom window a view of Betty burning
raked grass and leaves in the yard. Smoke hovered over the tree limbs like a
thick massive spider web and she saw that the fire that was leaping and the
smoke that was hovering was her own life. She told herself that she loathed
contemplation. And so the months passed by in a vapid and dizzying succession
of things to do. Real existential pondering or the internal creation of meaning
within herself were troubles she did not need to ponder.

Sometimes she doubted herself and wondered whether motion had become an ersatz;
and this quandary was as pesky as a fly trying to land on the oils of her shiny
nose. She kept having a recurring dream of floating on the mattress of her bed
to undulations and the sounds of waves splashing against a wall. These bedroom
walls had old pallid- yellow wallpaper that was bubbled and flaking off and
patterned onto the strips of wallpaper there were hexagon shapes. Cartoon
versions of herself and her family were trapped in each hexagon like
semi-beings in monads that were unable to connect to the bigger picture, but
like the wallpaper they were fading away.

In a last exasperated appeal for her to apply for work at the school before it
opened, he reminded her that the boys wouldn't be there to teach any longer so
she would need to do something with herself. Ruminating would never succeed;
but an external activity like painting that was so outwardly self-absorbing
might be used to subtly reiterate to them who she was as if an action or a set
of actions were the summation of a being. By painting she could only thwart the
aspirations of others by making them realize that her own selfish agenda came
before theirs. Such an appearance would make her outwardly narcissistic and
impregnable in their perspectives. For otherwise they could take her apart
piece by piece the way souvenir hunters chipped off Teotihuac‡n or walked off
with the Petrified Forest.

He would perceive the less concrete images in her paintings to be feral, and
yet he would remain taciturn, scowling but leaving her to be herself. Maybe
there would be some of these bedtime reminders, although not so many as now.
Now there were these continual reminders of suits to have cleaned, grocery
items for his palate and pallet (colors for his mouth that she would be vile
and immoral to ignore) and reminders of what their boys needed, the agenda of
pleasure for these little monkeys whom she was meant to chauffeur from place to
place (a karate class for one, a baseball practice for another, a friend's
birthday party for one, a jean and shirt buying extravaganza for both).

But now, she would not paint for she did not need it to support and pull
herself back as if she were the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Her foundation, she told
herself, was not as tenuous as this. And even though she was a true woman for
him, catering to family matters and allowing herself to be his whore (he asking
her questions about men she slept with so that it would excite him enough to
maximize his pleasure when impaling within her) she told herself that she could
do it without needing art as a crutch. She was a true woman as he liked it and
yet had her own sense of being fully Gabriele within her own head. Painting
would merely be a prop of a weak feminist. Yes, she could have told him that
she had her art, that focus of the realm of ideas that had been her vocation
before he moved in with her, and he would have scowled discreetly, never
criticizing its odd feral qualities directly. But she would not have believed
herself to be an artist anyhow since expressions were being effaced in each new
day of life's mundane inconsequentiality.

She just gave him a wry smile and shrugged her shoulders. Too busy: the phrase
was air above her lips and it just hovered there like the gossamer smoke strewn
in the branches from Hispanic Betty's burning of leaves. She didn't dare say
anything. She just let off a whiff of air. With head in denial, she silently
repudiated that the school was even being constructed let alone finished, and
that the two pupils who put motion and a sense of being busy into her life
would soon be gone. She didn't want to discuss any of it. Still the school
opened, not being subservient to her solipsistic thoughts. Its opening brought
to her regret that she had chosen to not work there and that a role and an
interaction with others, which had so easily defined her, would no longer be
there to cling to. She had circumscribed her yearnings to go on with teaching,
was now miserable, but believed that not prostituting herself in high school
psychology classes or elementary school finger painting had been the right
choice. Wounded not by vacuous stretches of hours but by the severing of this
habit to place meaning and happiness on one's role and interaction with others,
hers was a battered retreat. She withdrew into her own books to not be entirely
lost unto herself and she knew that knowledge contained there was one step
toward building herself apart from the addiction to the chaos and motion of
others. She again returned to the nothingness from whence she came. She
sometimes sat in her studio with a carton of Swenson's ice cream on her lap
reading books on owls like any good ornithologist, got nebulous readings of
Tarot cards that she smacked into Celtic designs on her bed, or sometimes drew
funny faces on the patio with the chalky edges of rocks. Feeling discontent if
left alone for five minutes and incrementally disconcerted for every minute
beyond ten, she often interrupted Hispanic Betty to ask what she was doing as
if housework were pantomime and the gestures could only be guessed at. The days
were invariably long and despite their plodding movements they clunked into
each other like two emaciated furless dogs in Thailand that were enervated and
stupefied by starvation and blindness.

She questioned who this MF was. The boys were easier: the preferable one who
had not come from her womb purred more often than he whined and the one with
the demanding mouth railed and complained in less of a dual personality than
the former but on the pettiest of things from her forgetting to buy him Pop
Tarts to Hispanic Betty's abuse of toilet paper; however both could be easily
characterized as egocentric toy soldiers who beat their drums chaotically when
their batteries needed recharging or a TV advertisement had indelibly branded a
"need" onto their brains. The other one (this Michael, this MF, this Mr.
Phlegmatic) she knew in multi-interpretable bits for all her intimacies with
him. She knew that he was glad that Rick now had a mother but this might have
just indicated that he was glad to have some woman chauffeur his kid to
after-school activities and take the kid clothes-shopping so that he did not
need to do it. She knew that he claimed to be pleased that Rick now had a
surrogate brother who might "toughen him up a bit" but this was ironic since
the only one he beat with his belt was Nathaniel (except for occasional S&M
sessions with her, and during that time she would struggle to gain the mastery
of the belt, and it was she who more often then not would be the sadist). She
knew that he had taken the boys to an amusement park a week ago when she was
going through what she believed he thought of as an imaginary sickness, and yet
she wasn't sure if it was from love that he removed all noise away from her or
from simple indifference and neglect. Inconsequential facts littered her mind
about Michael (facts like him giving his aunt a poinsettia every Christmas or
that he liked to sodden his eggs with mustard), but was this inconsequentiality
the real summation of the man? Was she, his woman, in such a needy state of
mind that facts like this and the manipulative power of sexual pleasure so much
more enhanced when with another should posed themselves as intimacy. Was this
the epitome of a woman? It might be; but then, she told herself, she was a
female and not a woman, and that she was a goddess and not a mere mortal. Her
love of him, she judged, was a few facts mixed in fantasies begotten in
neediness. What she asked and chose to know about him and the feeling of love
she mixed as color on her pallet to spread around these facts were her own
invention. She decided that she did not know him at all.

Her mind would not rest it there. She continued to think, "His obsession with
viewing his watch could be from nervous energy instead of a desperate wish to
succeed at every turn -- who knows? His change to a CEO instead of an educator
could be interpreted as a wish to make the educational experience everything
that it should be so who am I to say that he is a derelict to values I was
attracted to. His buying of other businesses and doing whatever it is he does
shows industriousness and the desire to leave something to his children." She
said these things to convince herself that she did not have a stranger who
slept in her bed. But then she thought, "Even if he is a stranger -- there have
been lots of strangers in my bed. Should I chase him away out of a fear that we
are all strangers?"

This enjoyment of hearing his footsteps on the linoleum when he stepped into
her home, his smell within the cologne he wore, the pleasure he gave her (now
less synchronized to her needs, now more male banging, but still pleasurable),
the beautiful black eyes that were hard and virile, sideburns on his handsome,
swarthy face, virile hair on the nape of his neck and as abundant growth on his
fertile chest, and a general masculine handsomeness that told a woman, that
breeding with him would grant unto her beautiful babies with little or no
chance of deformities--these things were the most primordial instinctual drives
of attraction and bonding that made her love him but still she did not think
that these things were so much him as they were the promptings of a woman's
breeding.

He was a busy little entrepreneur opening a fitness center with his Russian
friend one month, an Internet cafe the next, and some minor investments in
between that she knew less about. He did whatever he did throughout the day.
Questioning him about his schedule annoyed him in his taciturn ways. She was
made to feel that he did not want business to intrude on his personal domain or
the personal domain to intrude on business but that, she knew, might just be
her own positive interpretation. For what she knew there might be another
woman. She didn't own a man's body. He could do with it whatever he wished so
long as he didn't bring any disease to her. She told herself that jealousy was
a primitive instinct of men warding off the responsibilities of babies that
weren't composed in part by their own DNA, women who did not want to lose
income, that food of the hunt, for themselves and their kids, and both sexes
wanting to ensure that their bed partners were slavishly loyal at assisting
their pleasures. She told herself that she was beyond such absurd human foibles
as jealousy.

And yet she did not know who she was: she was now not even a teacher--just one
more person groping around lost and clinging to others and, to a much lesser
degree now, the commotion of the days, in order to be cognizant of being at
all. She did not want to think of him, herself, or the demise of her higher
authority nearly a year ago, and how like a good captain her higher authority
had bravely gone down the toilet with her reefer ship. She thought again about
the boys. Children were often thought of as callow adults making their inchoate
journeys into adulthood. To her, adulthood was not superior to childhood: it
was just two of the four links of recycled life no less purposeful than any
raindrop slapping into the surface of a river which would then ooze back into
the ocean before slowly being evaporated back from whence it came.

Sitting on the patio doodling on the concrete with the chalk of rock in her
right hand and left hand like Moses holding back the waters of drool that came
from her affectionate beasts, she felt the beginning of what she could tell
would be an intense migraine. She tried to ease her apprehension by joking to
herself that it would be no more than a seven or eight quake on the Gabriele
scale and yet the foreboding knowledge of her vulnerability was exacerbating
the pain and making her body rigid. In that sense it was a bit psychosomatic.
She went inside to take one of her pills that never did her much good. The
water was more immediately beneficial. She drank it voraciously to lubricate
her dry throat.

As she was drinking her water she heard the lonely howls of Rick's dog.
Disregarding simple pleasures, which should have slid down the apertures of a
being's senses and filled lonely vacuous gray matter with curiosity and awe,
this dog was fixated on her. It "needed" her. Domesticated creatures were so
needy and clinging but she was reluctant to disparage this behavior as
altogether delusional since she could not even disabuse herself of such inane
notions. It probably was delusional but it still deserved sympathy, and so she
once again went out to be with these dogs. Was this the only meaning of life,
she asked herself, this soothing of imagined mental travail? She believed that
it was. She picked up Rick's halitosis harried hound and took it into her
bedroom--the cat, Mouse, having succumbed to cancer shortly after she returned
from Europe and its body placed in a shoe box that was buried in the forest
behind the house. She went to her bed and had the dog lay at her feet. She
pressed her palm on her forehead and closed her eyes. "In Biblical times," she
thought in an attempt to recall, think through, and solidify to long-term
memory what she had read, "one of the fairest of fowl was the owl. The
historical origin of the owl is, of course, the historical origin of the bird
which probably evolved from one of two groups of dinosaurs, the--oh shit, I
can't remember-- during the early part of the Jurassic period. The term,
Preavisanussyphilus or I don't know what, is applied to flying reptiles.
Some…what's the word…ornithologists--some ornithologists say the earliest bird
was a tree dwelling reptile which began flight by gliding from one branch to
another although other experts say that it was a running, leaping, terrestrial
animal which gradually increased the length of its leaps by the use of long
forelimbs. After the appearance of Archaeopteryx Lithographica, the first known
bird, the myriad species descended from it. It is hard to isolate when the
first owls evolved. The first owl may have come out of the Cenozoic era of 70
to 40 million years ago if not the latter part of the Mesozoic era, which was
135 to 70 million years ago. The Mesozoic era was characterized by large seas,
lakes, deltas with deserts, and occasional glaciers. If the owls came out of
this period it was when the last of the dinosaurs were dying out. The Cenozoic
era had volcanic activity and geological unrest. The environment was -- " She
couldn't concentrate. She wasn't confident of her facts. They were like sand
falling through her fingers. She went downstairs into the kitchen, took another
pill with some cola, and then fixed some burnt toast but the idea of buttering
it seemed so nauseous to her that she ate it bare. Then she went back to her
bedroom, feeling as mad as the pharaoh, Akhenaten (or Akhenaton) who
purportedly worshiped the sun in his desert utopia until he was fully mad.

Her shadow on a wall in the hallway when passing into the bathroom to vomit
seemed fey and she somehow felt subordinate to its alien presence. She felt so
needy and wanted the shadow that was Michael, the last vestige of something
somewhat real, to merge into her shadow to give it pulp and tangibility that
she, who was less than her shadow, entirely lacked. She wanted the virile male
shadow to stifle her thoughts, to free her from ever becoming old, and to shoo
away loneliness and meaninglessness — an aloneness pesky as that incessant fly
landing on that shiny nose of hers and as meaningless as a sedentary stick
insect spending its life camouflaged as an inanimate object. She vomited before
she got the lid up and the colors looked like the hard, tactile brushstrokes of
thick orange palpable paint of a Van Gogh. Both her trembling head and her
strained and feral vomiting moans seemed to be to the rhythms of Chopin's
Funeral March.

She cleaned the bathroom for a few minutes and almost felt salubrious to be
wiping with her sponge around the toilet; but, losing energy and feeling the
heavier drumbeats of a migraine's gradual crescendo she realized that she was
just passing out of one pain and going into something more intense. There were
noticeable barricades to her thinking, checkpoints in the junctures of her
thoughts, the looting of her ideas, and a forehead on fire like buildings in
Sarajevo. Feeling extremely weak, she dried the floor, toilet, and sink with a
towel, rinsed out the sponge, and lay on her bed. She felt startled to see
Michael enter the bedroom.

"Hey," he said. It was his version of 'hello' distorted as it was in an
oxymoron of informal indifference. She wondered whether she could expect
anything better than this as sick and listless as she was. All sick people were
an ignominy to those who were well just as contemplation was an abhorrence to
all that spun in action, and as death was an opprobrium to the living.

She imagined the wraith of her higher authority saying, "Creatures of motion in
their mortal frames unto their termination at death are incapable of true
contemplation. Needing to subdue the earth, theirs are half-hearted prayers
never to reach their destination …th never -- "

"You have the dog in here," he reproached her with a gentle disdain.

She now wanted to waive him away like a fly -- he who a few minutes earlier had
been needed no less than air to breathe. She didn't say anything.

"Huh?" he demanded

"Yeah." It was her version of 'mind your own business.'

"Come here, Roman." He clapped his hands and made a downward gesture to the
dog.

"He won't come. Look at him." His eyes are alarmed and his chest is heaving.
Still, I think he knows that if I don't hold out as his aegis he can still
elude you. He knows that you find it repugnant to pick him up so he's playing
dumb."

"You're spoiling him. Get him out of here. I'm not coming into the bedroom
tonight if it smells like this."

"I smell your farting."

He cracked a smile bashfully despite himself. "Betty's cooking."

She wanted to say, "True she likes frijoles, jalape-os and the like, and the
boys like Mexican food too" but her pain trod into the breath of the utterance
like children kicking puddles. She was doing her best to put on an agreeable
facade--that appealing facade of the bantering bourgeois in the levity, the
amusement park, that was supposed to be the world-- but it was hard. It was too
hard.

"Why are you just lying around?" he asked critically.

"Just resting," she lied. She frowned. His repudiation of her sickness, as not
all that different than the attempts at malingering by former pupils whom he
had beaten with his board, irritated her; and yet she doubted herself. How did
she know what he thought? How did she know that he believed that her
malingering was synonymous to theirs and had disdain for both? She did not know
anything. It was speculation. It was discerning a mood and then devising
fiction around it. But then, how did she know that she didn't know what he
thought he knew? "I'll paint later. I am just thinking what to paint on" she
lied again to test his reaction toward her proposed return to herself.

"You should wash that dog--both of them."

"What time is it now?"

"3:30"

"You hardly ever get back here until eight."

He went into the bathroom where he began to brush his teeth. The toothbrush
muddled the cohesion of his words. "I'm in between meetings. While I was
driving I spilled some coffee and then some ketchup from my hamburger. I need
to change jackets so can you take the one I have on to the cleaners?" Water
came down the faucet but it was a parsimonious dribble. She thought to herself
that rich people were so stingy about the damnedest of things. She could not
hear any water but she did hear him spit into the basin. With a toothbrush
still in his mouth he glanced into the bedroom. "Are you unhappy with
something?"

"No," she said.

"These headaches again?" His disdainful tone had the sotto voce of exasperation
as if she were the pesky fly who should be shooed away.

"Fuck, don't say it that way. It isn't psychosomatic."

"What did you say?"

"The headaches aren't psychosomatic."

"You need to watch that mouth," he said sternly. He rinsed his mouth and spat.
Then to soften his austerity he added, "Remember there's a bottle of Ivory Soap
in here to wash out your mouth. You know, if there weren't two imitative boys
to consider I wouldn't really mind all that much a slip here and there. As you
have pointed out a bunch of times guys get enthusiastic at ball games and say
things they shouldn't say. I've been one of those guys. Fine, I can buy that;
and you are kind of right--the love and hate in the tone of voice matter more."
He turned off the faucet and came into the bedroom with the stained suit jacket
on a hanger. "Look over here. I'm putting the jacket on the chair. Make sure
that you take it this afternoon so that you can get it tomorrow morning."

"I'm ill, Michael."

"Then have Betty take it."

"She can't drive."

"She should know how to sit in a taxi, don't you think?"

"Well, I wouldn't know whether she knows how to sit or not," she retorted
spitefully. His voice was a meat cleaver to her thoughts. "Why don't you ask
her yourself? Tell me something: I want to know why you don't want me to
paint."

His face cringed. "Since when have I told you to not paint?"

She was silent and taken back since it was true that he had not expressed
anything like this. She told herself that she needed to acknowledge this fact
to be truthful to herself. He had not made her into a wifely errand girl but it
had occurred from following his subliminal promptings. It was her womanly love
that had made her succumb to his every wish less enthusiastically than most
women but with enthusiasm nonetheless. If she were a has-been artist she (not
he) had made it so.

"Sorry," she said. He was in the clothes closet, putting on a different jacket.

"No problem." He looked on this slug hanging from a pillow with a bad smelling
dog on its lap. Her lifelessness disgusted him. Then the next moment he was
disgusted by the thought that she was there, dormant, as if waiting on a bed
for her clients. Scrambled by a non-Christian desire to rape her and a bored
yearning to leave, he spoke what he knew that he should not say. "Listen,
Gabriele, there is something on my mind: my father and my aunt have asked when
they can meet you. When I introduce you, of course, I want to say, 'This is my
fiancZe, Gaw-bre-el spelled like Gabriel but with an E, loving mother to Rick
and her own son, who talks mildly and politely with no fowl words, and she is a
respectable teacher or she is an artist.' Of course I don't want to tell my
parents 'This is my fiancZe. She lies in bed and gets headaches just as she did
in her former profession.' 'What profession is that, dear son?' 'Dear mother
and father, it is the oldest non-taxable profession which is somewhat
illegal.'"

"My heavens! -- can I say 'My heavens' without getting my head cut off like a
bad Turk or aberrant Afghan woman not wearing her burka?" She took a deep
breath and tried to maintain a supercilious dignity. "You certainly have been
repressing your hatred of me, mister. I for one am certainly glad that you have
had your little catharsis." She feigned a smile and spoke weakly. "Please!
Leave me and my imagined sickness. You are hurting my head."

"I don't hate you. I love you. I sleep in the same bed with you."

"This grinding of sexual organs against each other, Mr. M.F. Quest is not the
making of love."

"Grinding of sexual organs." He sniggered. "Well, that's a new one. Here we go.
It's your perverse perspectives in your paintings and life in general that I
object to. You aren't always that way and you don't have to be that way. The
fact that you overcame obstacles to become such a successful artist was my
initial attraction. I encourage your art -- still-life, portraits, landscapes,
beautiful things. Those thing are a Catholic expression of God -- not the
surreal I don't know what that you put to canvas. It sells. That's good. It's
critically appraised. That's fine. But you need healthy expressions."

"Former profession…non-taxable income…somewhat illegal. I can't believe you are
rubbing my nose in this. I had a son to raise. You were one of my clients. You
aren't perfect either. I think we shouldn't say bad things. My head is—it's too
much"

"I'm sorry, Gabriele. That was--" He halted.

"Out of order," she filled in.

"Okay, a bit." Looking at the lifeless thing in the bed he spoke diffidently,
unsure of his words. "I would be honored if you would marry me. Now, get out of
bed and let's talk about it--take an Aspirin if your head hurts."

"That doesn't work with these things. What works you had me flush down the
toilet like an ignoramus."

"Where did you get it from? One of your Johns?"

She laughed bitterly. "No, I don't want to marry someone this ignorant and
insensitive."

"So what's this been if you don't love me."

"I care about you."

"What's the difference?"

"I'm tempted to say none, but that isn't it. Most people wouldn't agree with me
but I'd say that being in love is psychosomatic and caring is real; so yes, I
love you in a real way but I won't marry you. I won't be owned by a man and I
won't feel lost to him."

She said it despite these urges within her continually to just nod to whatever
he said and to cling to him as if family were the most concrete of life's
illusions. It was only from being run over by a tank or two and having known
the temporary nature of an insufferable family that she was saved from that
illusion. She smiled. It was wry with a general look of confusion. As he walked
away she found it mildly amusing that girlhood tragedies were delivering her
from feminine predilections.




Chapter Thirty-Three


Spinning as she was in her own head with important short term memories that
should have been for survival in her environment seeming so elusive, she
questioned if she were now in Ithaca; but for the most part believing that she
was, she wasn't sure whether she had driven or had flown there. She was not
only spinning within her own head with facts about petty events which happened
to her recently scurrying and absconding every time she tried to corner them
(what she did yesterday and what she was doing now a mystery), but instinctual
drives and fantasies of her subconscious were rife. They were at one moment
spinning strobe lights and at another time like twirling maelstroms of dirt and
trash flicking clockwise or counter-clockwise according to the caprice of
winds. Each time she tried to ground herself within an idea, a thought, a
memory of her life, it was futile. The winds would not allow it. If this
spinning of a fragmented self were to stop she might be able to sense herself
more fully. If only there was certain knowledge of where she was at she would
have a sense of a numb self existing someplace. But feelings and desires were
amuck like a dust storm and so who she was and where she was at were
unfathomable at certain moments. The drugs she was now beginning to believe
Candyman had slipped into her drink were allowing her wanton subconscious to
blow everywhere and nowhere now that they could escape from a fragmented
container called self.

At one moment many of those inconsequential but darker and subconscious
thoughts were of the wraith of Rita/Lily hovering around her with a countenance
showing the consternation of being abandoned and forgotten, the yearning to
kiss Candyman and founder into the black silk of his body, the virulent idea of
rollerblading through the held hands of couples so beautifully and speciously
linked together in their little eager walks along shopping areas near Cornell
University, and the voracious, hedonistic wish for anything that could feed her
with pleasure. In another moment she had an outright hatred of self-centered
lovers who would frolic together as if the world were conceived as nothing but
the orange glow of a sunset for everyone, an indifference toward others who
seemed so atavistic and unworthy of her company, the image of people being
breathed in and out of her life with as little conscious regard as one's own
breath, fantasies of women passing the romanticism of love to her like an
Olympic torch, the fantasies of young men as juicy to look at as the Candyman,
and the general hunger to merge with beauty. Still, in the next moment there
was this strange hunger for people and company to pour into her vapid life, the
wish to launch herself like a rocket, the trail of fire and heat from burning
fuel roaring from her vagina sending her to more intellectual realms where the
needs of the body wouldn't sap one of mental purpose, and that desire for
pleasure and adventure to escape her stagnant intellectualism that was stifling
her from feeling alive. She believed that she was in some drug dealer's house
in Ithaca and yet was beginning to believe that her beliefs were mad. Her only
conclusion was that she couldn't conclude that either of these matters could be
conclusive.

"He's spiked your drink with Ecstasy," said the higher authority. Gabriele
formulated her question to Candyman in deference to her higher authority's
promptings. "No, I didn't spike you drink none so relax there, Snowflake. I
just prepared my special." "What is in this special of yours?" she demanded as
she unbuttoned part of her shirt. "Hmm…my own little recipe." "What is in this
shit? I'm fucking hot." "You sure are. Nobody'd say that a husky ain't sexy if
he has any sense at all. Anybody does, he don't know the type of mama I got in
here with me. Not much of a snowflake, are you? That's fine; so fine! No worry
about that, Mamma. I like older chicks and husky women are better bed tackles."

Was Candyman a hallucination like Rita/Lily a few minutes ago? If not, wouldn't
that mean that she was back in Ithaca? For what she knew she could be ill from
a migraine and resting there on a bed in her home in Albany with her son
bringing to her wet washcloths to counter the fever that burnt under the
surface of her forehead. However, a hallucination was made up myriad transient
images, and the sight of Candyman had constancy. Either by plane or by car she
had gone there. That she knew. The Candyman was there before her face to face.
She couldn't imagine or hallucinate anything so clearly. And he was the
landmark for her knowing that she was at Cornell University in Ithaca, with its
eternally young and often drug addicted specimens, as much as the World Trade
Center towers, the Empire State Building and the Statue of Liberty were
landmarks of New York City. She anxiously tried to isolate what had happened to
her ten minutes earlier for to be without some facts about this self would be
like blocking the apertures of the senses with gauze and drifting in and out of
consciousness with no self at all — a mutiny against the higher authority and
the first mate by those with no navigable skills whatsoever; and as a bad omen
from tossing the corpses off the stern, the ship being tossed around in toilet
waters.

She more or less remembered knocking on his door and the ensuing conversation
thirty or forty minutes earlier in a rather generalized impression. "Whadaya
want, Snowflake," he said through the crack of the chained door. "I need some
weed," she said. "Whydaya think we got somethin' like that in here?" "Because
you're the Candyman," she said. "Is that a fact?" he said indifferently. "You a
cop?" he asked. "No, of course not. I've been here before even if it was a
couple years back. Don't you remember me?" "No, I don't." "Gabriele, the
whore." "I don't have a thing for you." "Tunafish sent me the first time I
came. He was your client and that of my own." "Whatzure job? How doya' know
Tunafish?" "I gave massages." "German massage?" "Yeah." "Oh, I remember. Almost
went to you myself. You gave Tunafish blowjobs." "I serviced him upon
occasion." "Come in Mama and get your weed." He unlocked the door and let her
pass into his living room. Then he locked himself in again. He fixed her a
drink and she drank it as one tends to do with drinks. "Master Card and Visa
machines ain't workin' today so I'll assume you to have cash and you assume me
to ask for it." "Any discount for me, Candyman? I—" She felt embarrassed that
she had forgotten her ATM card and only had $50.00 in her purse. She had come
so far and now there was the fear that the lack of these bits of paper called
currency had the possibility of being an obstacle to the procurement of her
stash. He did not say anything for a while but just smiled and let her sip the
lemonade. She felt a metamorphosis as if she were cracking out of the icy teddy
bear with the stiff arms that the factory of the human race mutantly created
and were now whimsical winds. At last he spoke. "'Cause I know you are a
professional and be all the more serviceable with large and handsome black men
like me so I'll make my body there in full 'vailability for you taste buds.
I'll let you tongue and lips give me a bath the way you did Tunafish and maybe
there will be a discount for you." He chuckled. His teeth glittered green as
the walls of nude centerfolds seemed to be turning around and the floor seemed
a soggy mire. She was a game to him and so with all games he, the player,
savored the moments, not wanting to delve into pleasures at full thrust lest
they end too soon.

Now, when she concentrated as fully as she was capable of she remembered the
drink and an imprecise replica of this initial conversation but there were some
minutes (she wasn't sure how many) that she couldn't account for as if she had
slipped and fallen into some vacuous abyss unawares and then had mysteriously
gotten to the other side of the chasm, slapping off the mud that besmirched her
clothing without being much more cognizant than this. Maybe she had serviced
him during this period or maybe she had just fallen into a vacuous state of one
who knew the state of the world: the multitudes who were calculative and
disingenuous users; life as the frivolous extroverted game of using others to
rack up points; a smile as an artifice; society as billiard balls slapping
against each other and rebounding; they who were customers of that which was
deleterious to them and were ready to use or be used to get it; and the few
higher ones linked to compassion and empathy, whose intellect saw the world and
yet had to give a cheerful rendering of it as "life" because one did have to
live in this world and celebrate it the best one was able to do. For the
empathic ones, hidden beneath hardened facades, their sensitivities were under
the scabs of hardened smiles.

"Can't figure out why you'd come all the way to Ithaca for some weed if you are
living in Albany like there ain't drugs in other cities." "Don't know anybody
else," she said. "Just the Candyman." Her fingers paused in this unbuttoning of
the blouse as if a wave of sensibility had momentarily washed upon her.
Obviously she hadn't serviced him yet but she could see that she was ready to
do so. She detoured his eyes from staring at her breasts by asking him to show
her his different brands of marijuana. She thought of Nathaniel to clog her
urging to be intimate with Candyman but she couldn't remember many specifics
about yesterday no matter how hard she tried. Still she unsuccessfully
concentrated in the hope that her ponderings would pull back the memory. It was
the following: Yesterday Nathaniel stepped off the school bus and went inside.
She was seated on her white colonial chair as superciliously cold, hard, and
beyond human frailties as the statue of Lincoln at the Lincoln Memorial seen on
a winter day. She was the throned Antarctic queen.

"Hey there. How was school?" she asked coldly

"Same."

"We need to talk!," she said.

"What's wrong?" he asked. He looked petrified as if she had discovered his
secret relationship with the man who had made going into R-rated movies so easy
for him (just the cost of showing his behind and letting those fingers graze on
his two hills and this payment deferred until after a movie or movies were
finished).

"Nothing she said. She smiled her haughty smile and spoke in her typical
phlegmatic tone. "I'm wondering about taking another trip abroad."

"With or without me?"

"Hmm…I love your subtlety. Maybe with you if you care to be a vagabond and
don't get in the way of me painting."

"What is a vagabond?"

"No Four Star hotels — living in little dumps that look like closets with no
air conditioning and a shared shower. Kind of like Boy Scouts, but no camping
out in the forest and bad ventilation in the rooms. Hotels for back packers
that are worthy of demolition."

"What's demolition?"

"Anyhow, ugly old buildings that if you were to look at them you would puke on
sight."

"You can count me out of staying in slave rooms 'specially if there are shared
bathrooms. That's nasty. I 'd scratch my toes and feet every minute morning,
day, and night. I scratch my toes and feet for an hour every time I shower in
the locker room after gym classes. I like four star hotels."

"You've never been to four star hotels—just seen photographs of Rick staying in
one while in Rome."

"I want to go. You need to let me go! But there will be no vagabombing."

"Aren't you the little male dictator. You sound like Michael. Do you like that
guy?"

"Better than nothing, I guess."

"'Better than nothing, I guess,'" she mocked. "Glad to know that perspective.
It makes it easier to know that you won't be upset when I tell you something.
Well, how do I say this? There are 6 billion people on the planet each with his
own personality, routine, and dreams to acquire this or that. Even lovers can't
get along. It's an absolute miracle that we don't go around plucking each
other's eyes out. It is good that we are smart enough to know that there would
be ramifications for actions like that. Okay, here it is: better than nothing
BEFORE, and NOW you have nothing. I've kicked out that rigid giraffe, Michael.
At this house he is no more. Michael won't be living here any longer; and this
trip to Euro-Asia, if I decide to do it, will be to celebrate not having that
guy silently pull my strings any longer."

"And Rick?"

"And Rick." She sighed. "I guess he won't be here."

"You gonna kick me out next?"

"Don't be ridiculous. You are my son."

"If I was to burn down the house would you keep me then."

"If you were to burn down the house your butt would be as hot as the house but
you would still be my son and no, I wouldn't throw you out of the house because
there wouldn't be a house for either of us since you would have burnt it down."

He laughed hysterically. His mother's clever sallies enthralled him. Then he
smirked hatefully. "Men don't like you very well."

She smiled widely. "It is a reciprocal thing—goes both ways. I don't care what
these self-centered little beasts like or don't like. Three cheers for men not
liking me and going their merry ways. Hip hip hurray! Hip hip hurray! Hip hip
hurray!"

"I think you are strange. You aren't like other moms at all, you know."

"What are they like?"

"I don't know. When I go over to my friends' parents' houses and stuff they
don't say weird shit all the time."

"But weird shit is what it is all about. How can you be interesting without
saying weird shit continually. It is impossible."

"Do I have to take care of both of those dogs out there?"

"I don't know. I guess someone will have to. We'll make it a joint chore. We'll
share the burden and make the dogs feel loved and happy here. What do you say?"

"I say that is a crock of bull shit."

Her mind was preoccupied with this declaration of being called weird. "I'm not
weird. I'm just clever. What is weird are moms whose brains change into rocks —
probably from too many years of marriage."

"When I was in the second grade kids would say that you catch men outside your
trailer, put spells on them, and then you drink their pee."

She looked at his earnest face. "Really? Is that what they said."

"Yeah."

"Why didn't you tell me that then."

"I didn't want to hurt your feelings."

"Oh, how sweet." She felt visibly touched that he should have thought of her
feelings over those of his own. She felt more optimistic about him growing up
into a decent individual. "Anyhow, I will be going someplace — maybe back to
Bangkok…who knows… anywhere really from Tokyo to Tijuana."

"Without me?"

"Probably."

"I don't care where you go. Betty's here to take care of me. She's a better
mother, really."

"Even if she takes up all the toilet paper you want to use on your precious
butt?"

"Even then," he said. They heard the dog barking, an opening of the door, and a
rush of footsteps.

"It's the favored one," said Nathaniel.

Rick rushed against Gabriele's body and this physical presence made her feel a
sense of aversion to the boy. As much as she cared for him his grip was like a
monkey upon her bark. Her niveous limbs just stood out awkwardly and she did
not know what to do. But where thawing caused snow and ice to crack and fall to
the ground, her thawing was a cold chill that caused her legs to begin to
shake. Her arms embraced him in the desperate clinging of love and she began to
cry. It was the first time she had cried since she was a little girl. It was
the first time she had ever cried according to her memory.

"So the darker reefer is richer?," she asked. "You got it, Mama." "I don't know
the difference really. Maybe you just better mix it all together and we'll hope
for the best." "Sounds sensible. All right, I can do but with a bunch of the
cheap stuff since you are getting a discount." "I want to know what is in this
drink." "That's abita' mountain dew with some lemon juice, abita' water, tad
bit of urine, and some truth serum. You feel that you want to tell the truth?"
She was picked up and lifted off by a wind and it took him several minutes to
call her back. "Gabriele? Gabriele? Gabriele?" "Who?" "You. I was wantin' to
know if you are wantin' to be truthful and tell me your dark secrets. "Okay,"
she said. "Okay, start talking." "Okay, she said. "He slapped her cheeks with
his fingertips. "Do you want to tell me all your secrets and be truthful with
me?" His hands were now in her shirt unbuttoning the remaining buttons. "I am
so inclined but have found the necessity of a facade." "Keep your dictionary
closed, sister, and talk straight talk." "I like being honest even when it gets
me into trouble unless I think it might be too disadvantageous. When I was a
little girl I witnessed a beheading of a Turk in Istanbul." "Turk?" "In
Turkey—the country…not the bird. Everyone was clapping and my parents were glad
that justice had happened. I knew that justice was savagery and that crying
about it wouldn't accomplish anything but just get people to loathe me. Loathe
meaning hate and not love. I decided that if I asked questions and looked like
I wasn't bothered by it all I would be left alone with my sensitivities intact.
I did my consummate performance to look like an adult and appear as if I did
not need them." "What would they have done to you if you cried?" "As I've said,
they would have looked on it as weakness and they would have despised it. I
didn't want to be hated or loved. I wanted to be a graduate from childhood that
could only come from an adult action of pompous stoicism. You don't
understand?" "Why did you become a whore with such fancy- dancy words?" "I
wanted to know fancy-dancy words but I didn't want to get a job using
fancy-dancy words. I didn't want to be one of those professional bureaucratic
slaves. I decided that everything was a form of prostitution and that bodily
prostitution was quicker than mental prostitution and with bodily prostitution
I would never have to relinquish my thoughts. Does that make sense?" "Weird,
Sister, but go on." " I didn't want to be there behind a desk working for an
agency that represented societal interests. If all of society's institutions
were a refined form of atavistic savagery I didn't want to be there
contributing to any bit of it: writing documentation, red tape, bureaucracy of
this and that sucking up my ideas." "You are one heavy, twisted sister."
"You've got that right Candyman." The two began to kiss to et cetera.

Candyman, to his own astonishment and hers, got a second erection a minute
after their intimacies were completed; and so Gabriele went to the car for her
sketchbook, and drew him nude. A few minutes after she was done she was again
in a confused state of not knowing if she had flown to Ithaca or had driven
there. She was fading fast. All earlier utterances that she had to make to
Candyman, where she had to pull down some ethereal sense of self in order to
have some coherent conversation and some degree of rationality behind her
situation, had exhausted her more than the sex act itself. She fell asleep. And
when she woke up she smelled cooking and went into the kitchen. Candyman was
frying bacon in the skillet and she knew that he was thinking about their
experience together as he watched the hardening bacon shrink on a paper towel
bedding.. "Well, I guess I need to pay you, Candyman." "Yeah, what'd we
say—forty so that you could have ten bucks for gas money." "That's what was
said." "I'm wondering something there, Husky. Why'd you come all this ways when
you could get drugs anyplace." "Didn't know where to go there, Candyman, and I
needed to get out and think about things, you know."

She paid Candy Man his forty dollars — a discount price for the sexual services
she rendered unto him, and the two shook hands. "Going back to your son?" "Oh,
did I tell you about him?" "Sure — you were tellin' to me lots you don't know
nothin' about. One time you were spacing out and talkin' 'bout your son and a
Russian boy, packing and coming here." She remembered: shortly before she went
to bed last night, Nathaniel came into her room. She was packing at the time.
He looked at her maliciously.

"You bored?" she asked.

"Maybe," he said.

"Do you miss Rick?" she asked. He didn't answer. "Will you sleep with Cat
tonight?"

"I hate the smell of that dog."

"Hmm…maybe you should give a friend a call."

"I don't have any. I don't like people and they don't like me."

"I can't believe that. Is there no one at St. Michaels whom you play with?"

"It isn't called St. Michaels."

"Whatever. Answer my question."

"There is a Russian kid who pesters me."

"Well, don't look at it as pestering. I'd say that since his language is
different than yours and the nuance of the meanings of words would be different
he might make a good friend. I don't know him but as nerdy as he might be, his
perspective of life would be slightly different than an American and so you
might learn about the world anew through exchanging ideas with him. Do the two
of you do anything together?"

"He plays in the same baseball team."

"What's his name?"

"Don't know. It is too hard to remember."

"A Russian boy with an unmemorable name?"

"Yes."

"Do you have his telephone number?"

"No. I want to know were you are going.."

"Don't know. I won't leave for anyplace far away. I think I'll go to Ithaca for
a day or two and see a friend."

"Rita/Lily?"

"No, not her."

"Who?"

"You don't know him. Candyman is his nickname."

"A boyfriend?"

"No. He is a potential customer — maybe he will buy a painting." She threw in
some lies. "I'll be back in a few days. Don't worry."

"I'm not worried about you," he said in an indifferent tone with a sotto voce
of disgust.

"When is your game?"

"Tomorrow"

"What time?"

"6:30."

"You and Betty can take a taxi there; but you'll see me on the bleachers when
the balls start flying."

She remembered her promise because of the serendipitous ramblings of Candyman;
and vomiting once on the edge of the road, she journeyed back to Albany. Sick
to her stomach and dazed when she arrived back at her home, she went to sleep
on the nearest couch for a half hour before going out to buy some groceries.
She spent an hour or two of the afternoon interminably lost in aisles of food.
She kept thinking about Rick and how the two of them used to bump their carts
into each other as they raced through the aisles. It depressed her to think
that this would never happen again, and yet she didn't see why relationships
should end in such an all or nothing cessation as if differences in outlook
among changing beings meant a broken contract of quid pro quo. Had their
relationship been nothing but a bartering of services the whole time. She
supposed that this was the concept of a relationship to most people.

At this moment her life was a foolish quandary of being unable to figure out if
there was more salience in trying to reestablish family ties or independent
strivings at all cost. She filled her cart, took out items, and then replaced
them with others of different labels and equivalent prices. She couldn't figure
out how many people she should be shopping for even though she had each
person's tastes in mind in making selections. The closer she got to the cash
register the more exacerbated were her doubts about buying most of her
products, so before she purchased anything she abandoned most of it in a vacant
cart and shoved it off once into the oblivion. When she got to the trunk of her
car she had only one meager bag of groceries. She thrust it into the trunk,
slammed down the lid of the trunk in vexation, and then buckled herself into
the coolness of the vinyl seat. She passed a bridal boutique many times in the
car and then spontaneously parked in front of the building that she had been
rotating around. The saleswomen there could not find happiness in dressing the
strangely sullen woman with monosyllabic mendacities of date and place for this
celebratory solemnization. Under the lattice inside the store, staring at
herself in a tripartite mirror, she didn't like the trains of the wedding
dresses she was trying on. They were too short, florid to the point of gaudy,
or not as ornate as she thought they should be. When she drove down to the end
of the drive at the junction of the house she noticed that Nathaniel's dog was
the only one that was chained up on the side of the house and that Michael's
sailboat and motorcycle were conspicuously missing. She wasn't sure how she
felt. In her room she took off some expensive, gaudy earrings and slipped out
of her dress. The closet was now hers. His clothes were missing. Only the toes
of her myriad shoes were within this capsule confronting her naked feet.
Gracefully, with the highest poise, she swaggered from room to room to counter
an inclination to stagger. Rick's room was vacuous space making her life
unbearably vapid. She mourned the loss of her other son before going to the
ball game.

She was spread out on a bleacher resting her eyes into the intricate mosaic of
the silhouette of leaves and taking a break from her sketch (myriad tiny nude
candymen having sex with various women, the women having candymen babies in
their arms, and each copulation and baby scene wrapped in its own circle or
monad; these monads making up total planets, and ultimately the planets
composing the cellular outline of a long fanged beast that was the lonely
universe) when the man with the unmemorable name looked down upon her.

"Hello, Gabriele, do you remember me?"

Startled, she turned to him. "Yes, but I'd never be able to say your name."

He laughed. No one outside of the immediate family would be able to do that.
What an intricate sketch!"

"Do you like art?"

"I love it." He said it so simply with such sincerity that the breath of his
idea went up her nostrils titillating her with pleasure. "After you finish your
sketch I think you should paint it onto an enormous canvas with a dismal red
and black background."

"Yes, I like that idea, even if being so large it is never sold."

"Oh, it would fit over the staircase of a millionaire's old home perfectly.
You'll sell it in time."

"I was sitting here not knowing how to apply this thing really and was becoming
annoyed at myself on different levels."

"For what reason?"

"For lots of reasons: a personal life that is shit, an idea I wasn't sure what
to do with until you came along, annoyed at being annoyed by this large crowd
as if they need to be quiet for me."


Sang Huin had been on the bleachers at a stadium with his new Pocket PC when a
foreigner looked down upon him.

"Anyong Haseyo," said the man.

"English, please. I'm an American still getting used to kimchee with every
meal."

The man chuckled. "So am I. From what state?"

"The Midwest mostly but I've been all over — born in Missouri but my father had
to travel a lot."

"You look a bit agitated."

"I'm trying to write on my book. I guess I am annoyed at feeling annoyed."

"About what?

"The noise, I guess. I was trying to get away from noise. That's why I came
here initially."

"To a ball game?"

"Strange, huh? Well the bleachers weren't full when I came."

"It isn't exactly a library. So are you saying that your feelings are mostly
agitation or being agitated about being agitated?"

"The latter. Have you ever felt that mood where you just want to slap total
strangers on their heads for not being introverts. There are just too many of
them and none of them are doing anything constructive with their time. And then
you sit there in this crazy mood you begin to blame them for being a bunch of
mice breeding in a small cage and causing everybody to walk on top of each
other."

He laughed. "Well, nothing exactly like that but we all have weird ideas going
through our heads."

"That's exactly right. One minute a guy might see a woman in red pass by and
for some reason he doesn't like her because she is wearing red. It is really
pathetic. It is like a given guy is built with a primitive impulse to judge
people instantly and to dislike someone for not being more like himself lest
they be of a different belligerent tribe. I imagine the Lees and the Parks in
ancient Korean history hated each other and back then they would be able to
distinguish physical traits that were the least little bit different and judge
friend or foe instantly."

"Maybe back then there was a use for that type of thinking but now belligerent
ideas just come and go if we don't try to catch them. If you just let them pass
they won't define you."

"I like that. Thanks. Maybe it is from not knowing the Korean language well
enough. I hear their babble and it sometimes sounds like a drill in my
eardrums."

The man laughed. "You are cute."

"Thanks. So are you."

"What do you do here?"

"Just teach English."

"What about you."

"Work for the Korean Herald."




Chapter Thirty-Four


Candymen copulating everywhere, their women and their offspring rife, each
family wrapped in its monad, and each monad making up the celled outline of the
lonely fervor of the monstrous universe as her febrile imagination
conceptualized it; and there she was defying her wish to run away from an
obsession to paint something seemingly important that was as enzymes on the
hours of her life. She stood on a small ladder slavishly painting on the
gigantic canvas in her garage as if this one obsessive idea could finally hold
the elusive truth once and for all on why she, her 6 billion contemporaries,
and all previous generations had bodies so easily worn away and existed so
briefly within this recycling of life and as to why they rotated about the sun
like hostages in a driverless bus that incessantly moved around the city square
without any purpose. As she stared at her creation she ruminated that nature
was so foolishly wasteful in formulating these tenuous beings who spent a
fourth or more of their lives trying to acquire sufficient knowledge so that
they could begin to think for themselves, and thereafter most of their energies
in copulatory obsessions so that they could replicate new know-nothings. And
yet if we were just cells in this mad, growing universe, she thought, none of
it mattered anyway.

But at 2:30 p.m. she took her usual respite from her creative labors to meet
the man with the unmemorable name at one of the less bourgeois coffee shops,
not within the Starbuck franchise. She knew that in part she came here
regularly not so much because she wanted to understand a Russian man's
mentality or friendship, but to summersault from the diving board of another's
ideas. For it was by this that she could free herself from lonely stagnation
and the frustration of attempting to find genius from within. This sense of
being alive was only possible when two or more were present (action being the
body of all things) and so she came here to spring into life that was only in
consort with another. After sipping her marginally bourgeois coffee gained from
the exploitation of poor South American mountain farmers and their factory
worker counterparts, she showed him a slide that she had taken of her inchoate
work but then interrupted him as he tried to view it against the brightest part
of the shop's light. "Do you think Michael knows you meet me here?" she asked
sheepishly. They had been meeting there for a month without straying away from
issues but now here she was focusing on their friendship like a weak female who
went under the label of a woman. She felt that her question was a petty one
formed by those who could not see themselves beyond their relationships and,
embarrassed by inclinations that lowered her to mere mortals, she had been
barely able to ask her question.

"Do you want him to not know?" he asked.

Her face cringed. "You mean, would I care to keep him from knowing this. Oh, I
don't know." She shook her head indifferently and then smiled. "It isn't an
issue for me -- just wondering."

"It's not, it isn't important for me either. I'm nobody -- just an investor. I
didn't even invest all that much. I only go to his fitness center to lift
weights. I am -- how do you say -- one of his more silent of silent partners;
and I involve myself -- I don't involve myself in his business or his personal
business and hope he isn't involving himself in mine. My life for now is a lot
of books in my graduate studies and not so many dates. "

"Good for you -- I mean for both things" she said. "Women and business might
make a man look good on the outside but it's cancer on the real human being
inside. You don't need a woman."

He was sullen for a moment. "You and I are just friends anyway," he said
irritably and avoided looking into her face.

"Yes, but there is no 'just.' Friendship is the only thing that has the
possibility of being pure--people who enjoy being in each other's company and
admire each other without thinking about the advantages and opportunities to be
gained in a merger, people who aren't needing the presence of some partner to
get the addictive high of this love rush, and all the rest of it." She looked
toward the front of the coffee shop where a teenager was squeaking the soles of
his tennis shoes against the floor while he waited for his order.

"That's a god awful sound," she said.

"Do you think God is awful?" he asked.

"I said that the squeaking sound that guy is making is god awful- 'God awful'
is a colloquial expression. It just means very bad. The noise of those shoes is
incessant." She smiled awkwardly at her irascibility, her innate peculiarities
that weren't so pleasant and difficult to part from. "I'll turn the tables on
you if I can. Do you think God is awful?"

"I do, if He exists!"

"You go to church."

"With my sister, brother-in-law, and their family. We go on occasion. We aren't
believers. Catholic Mass is similar to Russian Orthodox services and it makes
my sister feel like she is back in St. Petersburg."

"Not Christian or atheist, but a devout church going non-believer." She
inadvertently mumbled the assessment of the man that she had meant to be an
internal summary. She paused for a second and then decided to disclose the
rest. "And one with a penchant for investments despite being one of the last
vestiges of Russian communism."

He didn't grasp her concept since it was muddled in large vocabulary that he
did not understand; but he felt that he was being criticized. "Do you not like
something about me?"

"No, why would you think I'd feel that way? I like the mix. Still, let me be
the Devil's advocate and ask what right you, a man, have in judging this
potential God."

"What?"

"You said that you think God is awful if he exists. Tell me, now that you are
in this one nation under god, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all and
the rest of this gunk how you, a mortal, indict this god. I mean you are a
myopic person as we all are so what right have you or I to judge this bigger
entity whom we presume to have created the two of us and everything else.
Surely this God envisions a greater picture? Am I making sense--what right has
a little man in judging a God who might understand the bigger picture on why
things are the way that they are. Also, as a sociable animal, don't you feel
the need to follow the herd? In this country the herd eats from the
Christianity trough-- the Bible is like ground up bone marrow and the least
edible parts of already decayed carcasses but these Americans devour it
nonetheless. Don't you want to follow this God unquestioningly and eat the
fables that are thrown in your trough?"

He guessed what she meant and laughed. "Not really. I am a human being, a
rational creature, a creature that looks at evidence and thinks about it...I
assess it."

"Yes, yes; I agree. Only by turning off our intelligence do we actually believe
in such things."

"I don't understand. Are you a believer or a non-believer?"

"Well, certainly a non-believer; but I don't adhere to anything including
non-believing. I let ideas whisk across me, weathering my obdurate convictions.
What I am today is me now and what I am tomorrow is me then. There may be a God
that is the cause of it all or some large thing that a human brain can't
conceptualize enough to peg it with a label and if so I want an impression of
the real one as much as I can and not the anthropomorphic god that society is
trying to install into my head."

"I see," he said.

"Do you?" She giggled.

He smiled and then sunk morosely within deep contemplation. "I was quickly
looking through a Newsweek at a newsstand while I came here -- sorry, while I
was coming here. Let me start again. While I was coming here I glanced at a
Newsweek."

"Bravo. Finally, good grammar!," she bantered.

He smiled morosely. "The article said that in the Democratic Republic of Congo
a door of a cargo plane fell open. The article said that most of the soldiers
and their families who were inside were-" He could not think of the words so he
used a gesture.

"Sucked out?" said Gabriele colloquially.

"Did you learn of it?"

She thought of it for a few seconds: the consternation and yet cognizant beings
nonetheless understanding what was happening to them and their families as they
freefell into the abyss, the wailing and the flailing of limbs, the sense of
being a morsel swallowed into an atmosphere that was so smothering in its
vastness, the sense of complete hopelessness, the horrific winds, the passing
through layers of clouds with the specious illusion of nets, falling concurrent
with the rain, each human being hopefully experiencing a heart attack or stroke
before the stroke of death, and the plops of red raindrops flying into the air
at impact. She knew that the world had not been gently patted together and
shaped like a piece of clay. It had been smelted in violence and chance. This
being so, so it was with an individual life. "How horrible!" she gasped. "No, I
didn't read anything about it." She slowly lifted her face and resurrected her
sunken eyes. She even feigned a smile. "I am bad that way: I'd rather listen to
classical music and read a book than know the news. Knowing how violent the
world is does violence to one's need to believe that life is essentially good."

"If God didn't care about those people why should I think that he cares about
me?"

"Absolutely. I agree." She tried to extricate herself from morbid thoughts by
altering back to a more frivolous topic. "Do you agree that that squeaking is
God awful!"

"I do. My nephew does that all the time, you know, squeaking his tennis shoes.
You can scold him but he doesn't stop it. Squeaking tennis shoes, playing with
balls all day and most of the night, running around -- I think motion gives him
and all boys self-confidence."

"So this kid is squeaking -- "

"To prove to himself that he exists."

"Yes; but if a boy never stands still -- and this one would annoy virtually
anyone he encounters with feet like fingernails on a blackboard -- he will
never think beyond his own little movements in the movements and changes of
this world. Furthermore he'll never conceptualize permanence and truth and his
ideas will be myopic and short term. Even if there aren't solid Platonic ideas
out in Never- Never land and all ideas are just attempts at understanding what
passes through the senses, standing back and contemplating life at least allows
a person to think about the various perspectives of an issue before making a
decision. It improves the ability to make good decisions. My theory is that for
every twenty minutes of inordinate movement that a boy or a teenage boy carries
out he should be put in shackles and fetters in a closet for the other forty."

He smiled admiringly at her words despite not understanding many of them.

She simplified her flurry of words. "Maybe movement gives a boy self-confidence
that he exists but unless he is put in chains and kept in a closet half the
day, he will think that there is nothing else beyond movement."

"Is there?" he asked.

"I don't know," she confessed.

"Do you do that to your son -- put him in chains?" He chuckled.

"Coming soon," she kidded. "Aren't I right to contain males and movement?" she
nudged him with her fist and then tucked his hand into her own.

"As our Russian poet, Alexander Pushkin says it -- if I can quote what I
memorized in an English translation, 'How smoothly, rapidly, and freely the
sleigh glides in the moonlight when you are with a friend and when, warm and
fresh beneath her sable fur, flushed and trembling, she squeezes your hand.'"

"Lovely sweet talk but it won't help you. You know what I want to do? I want to
put you in chains too. Come on." She put their mugs into his hands and led him
to an outside table. There, she had him put the mugs down and led him into a
luscious and verdant yard mixed with yellow dandelions. Even though it was late
autumn, the climate was arraying the landscape with warm rains and the
dandelions of April. Seated on the ground she tied together a makeshift flower
bracelet that soon became handcuffs.

"And what is that supposed to do to me," he asked

"Maybe slow you down a bit. Nothing much since it is made from flowers. It is
just a reminder that there are flowers out there to be seen."

"As Dostoevsky's character, Razumikhin says 'You can talk the most mistaken
rubbish to me and if it is your own, I will embrace it. It is better to tell
your own lies than somebody else's truth.'"

She laughed, put the back of her hand thoughtfully under her chin, and
compressed her lips into a smile. She felt rejuvenated in this exchange of
ideas that were as tangible, palpable, and succulent as sucking on lemon drops.
They left and walked into a nearby park where the fountains splashed water into
the air making a rainbow.

"Are you still planning to go back to St. Petersburg?" she asked.

"Yes, just for a couple months."

"Are you still planning to go back next week?"

"Actually, I changed the date to tomorrow."

"So soon? Well, I'm sure you will be glad to see your family."

Yes, but I'll miss our times together. I'll hurry back as quickly as I can."

When she finally left the coffee shop she headed toward the nearest Wal-Mart,
the shopping oasis for the underdeveloped bourgeois. Within this desert oasis
she bought some sheets and, in an aisle for Halloween products, a witch's hat
and some green gunk from which to soil her face. In the car she applied the
paint and cut holes in one of the sheets. When she drove up to the house, she
honked on the horn repeatedly until the boy finally came out of the house
begrudgingly.

She rolled down the window. "Did you lock the door?" she asked.

"Yeah," he said, and got in the car lethargically.

"All of them?"

"All of them. They're locked," he said petulantly.

"Do I need to check?"

"No, quit bothering me!" he said insolently.

"Poor Mr. Petulant--always doubted and examined in these unjust inquisitions.
Okay, I won't doubt you this time; but I must tell you this: in the event that
we are robbed I will hand you over to the man with the unmemorable name with an
unburdened conscience. He has connections with slave labor camps in Siberia
from the way I understand things."

"I know that you don't understand anything. You are lying. There aren't any of
these connections."

"Lying, never! Fibbing, maybe or maybe not. How do you, Mr. Petulant, know what
I know?"

"How do you know that I don't know what you know?" he countered. It was an old
argument that she had excavated from one of the many miscellaneous parables in
the thickets of pages that comprised a Chinese literature anthology; however,
she had never radiated the enlightenment of her findings onto him. Such was the
brilliance of an original thought; and so her hope for him was restored.
Strangely, this argument seemed like a means to a new dimension albeit a golden
key to the nihilistic abyss; and she was a radiating mommy for the fact that he
had coughed up such an instrument out of the static charge of one thought
banging against another one--the being incessantly comparing, contrasting, and
categorizing various thoughts silently inside itself. "To think that Benjamin
Franklin brought down lightning with a key and Nathaniel has made a key out of
lightening!" she thought facetiously. She smiled and reprimanded him
banteringly. "Well, Adagio, you didn't tell me what you wanted to be or I would
have bought a costume."

"I don't want to BE anything. Trick or treating is for kids and I don't want
any of that stuff anymore."

"So, because you didn't make your request, all we have for you is a tacky
sheet. You will be a ghost; and you see that I'm a witch--always have been and
always will be." She ignored his complaint. She knew that a ten year old stood
on the back of his nine year old carcass and that a being's development
involved using all former selves of earlier ages as steps toward these adult
pleasures of lust, greed, movement, and conquest. She knew that condemning the
innate discontent within her son, society, or to some degree within herself
seemed as mad and railing ramblings of a madwoman and so she chose to have no
reaction whatsoever. As an artist she believed that her mission was to thread a
new logical relationship of old ideas or facts if not formulate new ideas
themselves, and to add some flash and color to the ordinary. Whether or not she
was marginally successful at altering perspectives, one thing was certainly not
within her power at all. She could never adjust the base instincts of one's
physiognomy. All she could do with the latter would be to accept it as if it
were the third, dragging leg. Cutting off this limb, with its major artery,
would be certain death if done to another or society at large. Base instincts
were the guardians of the species. Selfishness to suck out the bone marrow of
life, survive, and fulfill one's pleasures were the means by which this species
perpetuated.

"I just want to finish my video game."

"Your brain will do some serious rotting with much more of that shoot and kill
stuff. With this outing only your teeth will rot."

She was reminded of a few weeks ago when she had taken him to a professional
baseball game which Michael had promised to him before this dissolution of
family. She barely managed to acquire tickets by offering to pay exorbitant
sums if the ticket office were able to get them into a couple seats; and yet
this Adagio, Nathaniel, this Mr. Petulant, was saturnine the whole time.
"What's your problem?" she asked as they were leaving the parking lot following
the game. "You shouldn't be the one I go with. You don't even like these
games," he said; and, true as it was, there was nothing for her to do but stuff
the remainder of the hot dog into her mouth and drive home.

She drove him into more affluent areas and took him from door to door as if he
were five years old, and as if she were trying to make herself that age in the
process. She too had a plastic jack-o-lantern pail. She too got chocolate
thrust into the pile within her pail. Experiences accompanying him in a
childhood that had been robbed from her, for whatever embarrassment they caused
him, were a million times better than being a mother waiting on the sidelines
with vicarious yearnings. The quest of a chocolate mendicant, a ghoulish monk
seeking alms, was leading her into the simple pleasures that were the
foundation for appreciating life, from disengaging out of one's limited
perspectives and hopeful adult futuristic conquests, and to be in awe of the
entity. And yet with each new house his aversion to say, "Trick or treat?"
increased as with his tacit animadversion of his mother. House after house
there were chocolate benefactors and benefactresses with similar wisecracks:
"You are a little big and old to be trick or treating, aren't you -- I can't
see how old your ghost friend is but he seems a bit tall too." As much as he
tried to suppress it, his loathing of her was ready to disgorge from his mouth
like vomit.

An hour into this childish foray, she still did not have any Reese's Peanut
Butter Cups and so she told him that with ten or fifteen more houses there
would be a probability of acquiring her favorite brand of candy. Somewhere
after the fifth extra house he felt a full abhorrence for the witch who put
spells on men, drank their pee, had men, lost men, made a family by abandoning
him when she went off to Europe, lost a family, found him an irritant when she
was acting the part of the artist, suffocated him in embarrassments like this
when she was trying to act the part of a mother, who never connected him to
outside relatives like his real father or Peggy, and when he finally had some
semblance of a father she caused his departure.

"I'm sick of you," he said. I want to go someplace else but I don't have an
aunt, an uncle, or anybody to go to. Nobody cares about me."

"What is your problem?" she asked.

"You taking me to trick or treating like I am six years old is pathetic. That's
my problem. Pull it over. I'm getting out and walking home."

"Christ, why can't you just be happy?"

"Don't take the Lord's name in vain," he said.

"Don't bore me in Michaelish babble," she told him.

"I want to go see Aunt Peggy."

"Go then," she told him. "She's in Kansas. The walk should be good for you. Be
careful not to take the detour to Timbuktu." She pulled off the side of the
road and let him out; waited in dismay for a while as he went some blocks
within a premature bout of independence; and then stalked him for another six
blocks despite the fact that he was trying to make himself stealth through the
yards of homeowners. At last, tiring, he got inside the car. She laughed
hysterically, slipped a wad of chewing tobacco into her mouth, and continued on
her quest for Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.

Despite genuinely believing that his sullen hatred toward her would go on
forever in obdurate wordlessness, the need to dig himself out of the coffin and
dirt of silence exhumed him. "I want to go see Aunt Peggy," he said in an
exasperated monotone.

"Well, you see her every time you open those Christmas cards of hers and those
scary photographs of her fall from her flowery notes of love as well as all
those exotic European stamps and paper currency from her trips here and there."

"I never meet her. She wants to meet me and yet I never meet her."

"We live kind of far away."

"You have money. I want you to put me on an airplane and fly me to Kansas."

"I don't have much money anymore. I won't until I sell some paintings; but you
are a child. What do you know of any of that? Your concerns are keeping a kite
sailing in the breeze. What do you know of finances and paying bills? What do
you care about it?"

"I want to go there for Thanksgiving."

"You, my dear, are free to want whatever you please but getting it is another
matter."

He fell into his morose ruminations. "What about my father?"

"I wouldn't know anything of him." It was a preposterous claim; and to think
that such an easily scaled wall would stop the besiegement was even more
absurd. Quickly recognizing her underestimate she fortified the wall. "Some
cowboy intellectual who mounted me or I mounted him one time. I don't remember
which. I don't remember anything about him."

"Mounted?"

"Sex. Do you understand what sex is?"

"Of course."

"You know only the word--you can't define it and have yet to experience it."

"I know more than the word--a guy wanting some fun from rubbing his smelly
penis against somebody else's naked body--white liquid comes out."

She was surprised to hear such a perfectly barbaric definition that few adults
would care to espouse and she looked on him admiringly. "Did one of your
friends say that?"

"Yes," he lied.

"Out of the mouths of babes," she said. "Come on. Just cheer up and let's enjoy
our time together."

"Where are you going?" he demanded.

"I don't know. I'm just looking at houses. If there is one shaped like a
Reese's Peanut Butter Cup let me know and we'll go inside."

As she began to hum a tune on the radio random ideas pillaged through her
perspectives like unwanted guests her belongings: she wondered why it had so
far been a futile prospect to get her son to befriend the boy with the
unmemorable name; she thought that since both boys were champion sneaker
squeakers little else was needed beyond imagination and good will for children
to declare friendship; she pondered how despite the disposition of Mr. Petulant
and the forthcoming departure of the man with the unmemorable name, she was
still glowing from her time in the coffee shop; how her painting needed some
feral red brush strokes to increase its beauty and complexity; how each night
her exalted ideas imploded to recurrent nightly dreams of Candyman riding in
the white silk of her bare skin; how her recurrent dreams of Candyman were not
only of his physical touch but ones in which he made her perceptions coruscate
in the gleam of moonlight; mornings wondering whether the real truth of her
life was just those meager sordid yearnings for sexual intimacies; that
potential conclusion that intellectualism was nothing but one's own pretentious
wish to appear to herself as more than motion and rampageous sexual urgings,
hatreds, and fears that were vital to the survival of the species -- this all
flitted through her mind a second before she struggled to regain control of her
car.

Nathaniel's hands were grasping the steering wheel and there she was trying to
counter this jerk of the car to the right and contend against his Freudian
death wish. The memories of the many versions of Nathaniel at various ages
fleeted through her mind. What he was doing now was clear. Why he was doing it
was unfathomable in her consternation. A couple of seconds later the car darted
over a triangular cement slab and onto a yield sign. Like the car beaten down
in inertia, they were as sedentary as death and as inanimate as rocks. They
stayed this way for half a moment and then, when meaning to ask him if he was
all right, she reached over and slammed him hard on his face with one of her
strong German polar bear paws and his head slammed against the door. He took
the knock with tacit defiance and locked in whatever whimpering existed within.
It was one of his last Halloweens as a boy and perhaps his last time dressed
for trick or treat and it had come to this.

With the car towed off to the mechanic, she hated him for a week and then it
slowly abated, lost and tangled within new neurons, new electronic circuits
with thoughts successfully attempting to understand his bitterness, and with
new emphasis to forgive and forget. But he, on the other hand, hated her for
her 7 days of cold Antarctic ponderings at the dining room table and in her
director's chair. Betty wouldn't even talk to him by the orders of General
Sangfroid and, finding it hard to swallow food or understand anything on the
television beside images running amuck, he hated his mother with incremental
emphasis and duration. Knowing this, she began to consider taking him to the
airport to send him away.

One cold day she was on the roof nailing a border for the wires of Christmas
lights to lean on securely. She was looking out over her acres of land like a
lonely Martha Stewart when she felt the need to stretch her cramped legs. She
tried to call him on her cellular telephone to have him come out and hold the
ladder so that she could get down. It was only after the fourth time that he
bothered to answer. "Is Betty busy cooking lunch?"

"Yeah, shit on a shingle."

"Could you ask her to come out and hold the ladder?"

"No, I couldn't. I don't want my food burnt."

"You don't want your food burnt," she mocked.

"That's what she was hired for: to keep my food from burning."

"Your food?"

"Yours too."

"Well, there's got to be a reason for me having your ass around so you come out
here and help me get down from here," she said. But when he finally came out
and she looked down upon him she saw virulence in his sunken eyes and she
wondered if he could be trusted to hold the ladder safely. She wanted to call
Betty to have her come out but she knew that she would never pick up a
telephone no matter how many times it rang.

"Get Betty over here to hold the ladder."

"No, she's busy," he said. She was surprised that he was impudent enough to
address her this way in person.

"Get her now!" she commanded. "Get her and then, maybe…maybe I'll come down to
get you your airline ticket to Kansas."

"You'll buy one?"

"It is already bought. If you are eager to get rid of me I am eager to get rid
of you."

"Okay," he said happily.

"Sure," she said acrimoniously, "if that is what you want. And if that is what
you want why should I put these lights up for you?"

"Yes, why do it when I don't care," he said.

"Well good we agree on something. I'll look forward to hearing the results of
the experiment: paradise or penitentiary in Kansas. Feel free to email me
through the process. Go on and get Betty." As he left she knew that fear had
motivated her to mention the plane ticket. The thought of cajoling a response
from a child by appeasing him, and doing it from a legitimate fear or, worse,
perhaps a baseless one, appalled her. Her will and her foundation of motherhood
seemed to be collapsing. She could no longer move him by her words any more
than an old woman could twist a lid off of a jar; and for the first time in her
life she was losing confidence in her own will.

Betty came out to her.

"You gotted all of the lights up there, Miss?"

"Yeah, well...enough. I guess too much, Hispanic Betty. Todo las luces para
esto ano de navidad estara poco y yo tengo miedo que poco esta desmasiado. We
will be the only people who will enjoy them. Nathaniel is going to visit his
aunt in a few days."

"Miss, we need to talk orita. You pay for me for to have my own apartment but I
never go there. Nunca, nunca! No tengo una vida. I'm illegal but I should not a
slave. There should more to my life than the two of you. Quiero permiso para un
vacacion pagado para dos meses."

"Dos meses? Do I look mad? Dos semanas okay."

"And where you will get other slave? There are many masters to be gotted and
not many slaves." Gabriele thought about this crucial fact: Indeed, there were
many masters to be had but few slaves. The idea resonated off the inner walls
of her brain.

"Y entonces tu volveres a nuestra hogar?"

"Si."

"Okay, Hispanic Betty, stay until Christmas Eve and then you are free as a bird
hasta luego Febrero. 2 months of paid vacation. Here, hold the ladder so that I
can get down."

Soon Nathaniel, as well as the man with the unmemorable name, was gone; and
seeing the vacuous ruts that they had made in spinning away from her she was
reminded of the fact that the outside world was changeable and that only
weaklings and fools placed happiness on others. And yet with Michael out of her
life, and worse, Rick and Nathaniel who were as much as lost to her now, her
world was unsettled in a four-fold loss.

She tried to avoid this feeling of loss for as long as she could. She first
coerced an interest in Russian literature to be interested in something. She
became fixated on drawing two sketches each morning and two each evening as if
the world required myriad more still lives of apples in charcoal; and as if all
that paper for the redundant work in drawing her owls was justified by the
infinite variety of their poses. She suddenly became preoccupied with the
pleasure and health of her hound. She felt that by feeding, walking, and
washing it with more responsibility and care she could extend the life of this
big German shepherd that they still called "Cat." She occupied herself with its
pleasure (an ice cube habitually given for it to munch on as she was preparing
breakfast, and an extra dog walk in the mid-afternoon). She viewed her actions
as a humane gesture as if from the first attempts to domesticate the canine,
securing the contentment or felicity of so many temporary generations of dying
beasts, had been a constructive use of their masters' precious moments of life.

And yet as buried as she was in the rubble of family, where shoddy and
experimental construction was done without the mathematical formulas of
engineers, her hobbies were natural. They were diversions and she knew that her
diversions were a means to stop the pain.

Suffocating as she was in that rubble, she could have come alive in a
diminished form like all other creatures of chemosynthesis. Such translucent
beings never considered their unhappiness. They never considered anything at
all but just engaged in their habits, instincts, preoccupation, and general
movement. She was just beginning to get the knack of avoiding her stray
thoughts through Gin Rummy games, and winning some of them too, but then
Hispanic Betty also left. Gabriele was surprised that she, an anti-social
person who had mixed, gyrated, and blended with such aversion, had become such
mush. She was a bit like one of the herd. She did not know fully what to do
with herself or who she was. Most people might be that way indefinitely, but
for her the few days that this lasted was an appalling time. It was made all
the worse by a temptation to find herself in her former boyfriend within
fantasies of him running toward her and sheltering her under his umbrella and
within one of his arms. Eager for sanity, she decided upon another trip abroad.

At first she yearned to return to Buddhism and saffron or deep dirt-orange
robed monks to find an equilibrium and harmony within herself. She thought
about going to Laos. From photographs on the Internet it looked like a little
bit of Paris and a lot of dirt. She believed that its simplicity would be to
her liking. She was eager to visit its communist museum and experience its
photographs denouncing the French and American imperialists (the former having
recuperated from the fever that caused delusions of grandeur, but the latter so
delusional to think that it was God that granted such dominion). But as she was
sitting in the travel agency ready to buy a ticket to Bangkok with the
expectation of taking the train to Nongkai, the sister city of Vientiane Laos,
she suddenly changed her mind and decided to buy an airline ticket to Jakarta.

Arriving on a garuda (GA flight 543), she ensconced herself in a hotel room
long enough to take a shower for five minutes and look presentable with an
additional three. Then she wandered streets like a dog following novel scents,
and quickly became elated in a puff of sound and sight of hawkers stretching
out into a street and causing the traffic to squeeze through a narrow area that
was still not annexed under their squalid occupation. In a little park where
all areas of grass were fenced off, near Pasaraya Grande, the shopping mall of
he truly affluent on Blok M, she sketched Moslem women wearing their Haji or
jilbab and glossed in beautiful makeup or not wearing headscarves and makeup at
all but allowed to toss long and beautiful hair. She contrasted the two and was
fascinated by this attempt of Indonesian society to allow women to be modern as
long as they stayed demure, and how an individual was dangled by the invisible
gossamer strings of this great puppeteer, society. Maybe, she thought, when
encountered anew most cultural traits were romantically virtuous. She also
sketched conservative men wearing their little oval shaped hats called kopias
as they went to a little mosque near the department store; but mostly she
sketched the throngs of park people whom she mingled with: guitar boys who,
when not on buses, practiced versions of their beggarly tunes in the concrete
park; a transsexual dancer with bizarre movements; the umbrella shelterers who
eagerly extended an aegis against celestial darts; and that area seen with
myriad candles from the nighttime hawkers who sold their goods on blankets and
sheets, each with its own candle.

Finally finding her way back to her hotel room, she was amused and puzzled by
this Christopher Columbus syndrome of adoration toward her white flesh. Had she
been a superstar instead of an obscure artist, she told herself, she would not
have been accosted any more than this. Having a good night's sleep, she woke
ready to start it all again. On buses that took her through the streets of
Jakarta and in the company of the musician/beggars who always boarded for a
couple minutes, she was impressed by how remarkably talented some of them were
even though the majority were as discordant as the howling of wolves. She
almost wished that she were a talent scout to deliver the best of them from the
streets. Then it occurred to her that by choosing winners for prizes she would
be as vile as nature itself with its stance of survival of the fittest. She saw
a 5 and 6 year old brother and sister team--the girl doing the most sensuous
dance and then her brother turning off the tape recorder and collecting the
Rupiah after the dance. In all, the children might have collected a tiny 500
Rupiah in loose change no differently than the guitar boys or the adult poetic
orators who gave renditions of their tragic lives to extort sympathy and a bit
of loose change. 8000 Rupiah were equivalent to a dollar and those who sold
drinks and pens could at least get this sum if assiduous for a period of hours.

Over a period of weeks she became enamored of long back-alley vegetable markets
and ghettos of the night. Here, like in Thailand, it seemed that those who had
little resources were more interconnected and, from their makeshift huts they
would smile to just see the presence of her makeshift life. And yet the
Christopher Columbus syndrome was from a discontent and an eagerness to pass
out of one's own domain to that archetype of American wealth and prowess that
bedazzled the entire denizens of the world no matter how much they hated the
hegemony of the American government and its people. Even here, she thought,
children probably yearned to grow out of their age and adults dreamed of
business empires, a corporate legacy from which to defy mortality. She knew
that in this sense it was probably no different than anyplace else for even
here discontent had to be in everything since all were creatures of movement.
These ghettoers in particular were spewed around bridges and railroad tracks;
and she boldly walked into their throngs in the fullness of night, intrigued
and enticed within the mysteries of life, that black and white which were the
rich hue of gray enlightenment. And, were it not for the serendipitous
beckoning of two hedonistic smiles, she would have foolishly continued this way
(potentially to a lethal end as a mugged and raped female lying bludgeoned
along the train tracks, obscure in the thickets of an oblique area of weeds).
This dual smiling was too conspicuous. With one man's smile an ordinary woman
might fall prey but never with two of them; and she was tiers beyond the
ordinary.

Self-declared as a female who was not a woman, Gabriele was a hard block of ice
to thaw. Even an exceptional Adonis with a coruscating and speciously ingenuous
smile did not have a chance with her. Only such an Adonis as Michael, with a
familiar and sweet son whom she had already thought of fondly, had the
potential to do the worst damage to her pristine Antarctic surface; but such
happenings were rare indeed. The two strangers instantly made her circumspect
and guarded by accosting her with their sexual innuendos, which she did not
even have to understand in words. The nuances were rife like the sounds of
locusts in the unfolding and draping blanket of night. They were there to be
extrapolated in the intensity of lust-filled, hungry-hound looks and the
flippant glances and general levity of the two males toward each other. And she
knew that, as adept as she might be at defending herself with a bit of judo and
karate, that she could never ward off an army of rapists. That being the case,
she backed away to belong only to the day.

By day she was enamored by all of the mom-and-pop shops cobbled together from
wood and tin and the activity that was bustling around them including the
orange cockroach tricycle motor taxis a bit like Thailand's tuc tucs. She
wanted to sink into the skin of those whom she encountered and to know of their
lives intimately. The thought even occurred to her that she should get her boy
from the provincial rednecks of Kansas and transform him with exposure to the
world; and she would have done just that had there not been such a cloying and
bitter after- taste to all this enlightenment amassing itself within her. It
was a sickeningly aggrandizing clump that was exacerbating itself within her
stomach; and it made her doubt the efficacy of the plan. It was getting so
large that she, who grazed on the weeds and fodder of stark reality like a wild
mare, was finding what she saw and her ruminations of it virtually unbearable.

In Buddhism good actions perpetuated good outcomes for the giver and motivated
goodness in the receiver. And yet as important as it was for fools and the
ignorant to believe in this replicating of virtue when with each new century
mankind moved the world closer to the abyss, the reality was that they who had
education and wealth gave both to their children for that accrued competitive
advantage, that the poor floundered about trying to free themselves from a
vortex, that suffering did not propitiate any god, that the meek did not
inherit anything, and that they who were literal throwaways as children would
sell themselves as prostitutes, get AIDS, and die hideously in the streets,
emaciated incrementally like starving dogs. She could see the prostitutes near
the National Monument with its hard rockish flame like the torch of the Statue
of Liberty. She felt empathy for them as deep as the gods and it was a
torturous perspective indeed. When she saw a bare-breasted homeless woman
running down the sidewalk outside the monument, all depraved from wandering
around aimlessly, screaming and looking behind her as if chased, Gabriele had a
mixed reaction. In a small way, she saw sanity in this defying of convention
that a woman's boobs were erotic armaments which, unless locked away in a
blouse and a brassiere, would thwart assiduous man to recidivistic patterns
where his amorous instincts would cause him to malinger from work. But there
was nothing sane in this woman's plight, and any thought suggesting that there
was such had been from a desire to fortify herself from the perspective that
the world was a bad place. She imagined her face on this woman and wanted to
abscond from Jakarta and life as a whole. She just wanted to rest her head
thoughtlessly against a man's chest. She wanted to close her eyes to the
injustices and the inequality of life and to float in the levity of dreams this
way. Lonely as she was, the net was pulling her back home to America and New
York State.

Left in the discontent of her own thoughts and finding the gift of solitude
equivalent with insanity, she sensed a major polarization of her ideas and she
knew that her own civil war was in the making. Two opposing armies were
deployed around the frontline under the scalp of her own head, and each was
trying to intimidate the other in the hope of gaining a painless victory within
the dominion of thoughts. Either from consciousness absconding in a
self-imposed exile in order to avoid conflict, or from finding her true self
usurped by impulses, willessly she drove up to the home of Michael's parents as
lovingly as a Moony. She told them that she was Michael's girlfriend even
though she could have as easily meant the man with the unmemorable name. After
requesting to see Michael, she awkwardly offered the whole family her love even
though none had wished for it. The sentiment had been contrived for the purpose
of breaking the cold silence but thinking onto it now with chagrin she felt
that this foolishness had surpassed any she had done in the past. By her own
estimation she hadn't been foolish since early childhood and the consternation
of it all seemed like being tortured in the pits of hell. This torture lasted
for a couple minutes and then she didn't care about what others had thought or
were now thinking about her. Her life, she told herself, was her own and poised
or plodding, flying or floundering it was her own and no one was worthy of
scrutinizing it. She waited in their living room for nearly two hours until he
at last drove in.

"This woman wants to talk with you Michael," said his mother.

"I know. You called me."

"She wouldn't leave. I didn't want to call the police. I didn't want a scene."

"You told me that," said Michael. "That's fine. Can we have some privacy?"

"Well -- " She then spoke fervently in Italian.

"That's not going to happen," he said in English and then switched to Italian.
Gabriele had already understood little words from the entreaty of Michae'ls
mother like "money" and "bad women" and could extrapolate that mama was worried
about a potential extortion and blackmail of her baby.

"Whatever! I give up," said the exasperated woman in English and then started
to leave.

"I'm pleased to have met you," said Gabriele. "I hope that we can become
further acquainted and that I may one day secure your trust." Her words were
formal and archaic like a nineteenth century novel. If subconsciously done to
impress others, they impressed no one. The woman stared at her with that
apathetic and supercilious hardness that they, who identified wealth as a
unique DNA of a more developed species, always did.

When his mother had left the room he closed the door, and then tried to
camouflage the obdurate hardness of his apathetic eyes with a contrived smile.
Closure was nonetheless in those eyes. They were hard and hallowed and they
were permanently enclosed like tinctured and opaque glass windows. How, she
remonstrated against herself, had she debased herself by knocking on a door of
this family home and why did she stay here with him whose orbs were like
slammed doors in one's face. How was it that she continued to knock? He smiled
since there was every chance that she could rectify herself in his eyes through
discomfort and contrition. Seated with this nemesis, he gained pleasure at the
thought that she had been allowed to squirm in a seat for over an hour the way
her son had waited and squirmed in the principal's office while dreading the
forthcoming paddling.

"I tried to call you," said Gabriele, "but I think you were trying to avoid
me."

"Possibly," he said. He could have told her lies that his mobile telephone was
not functional or he could have prevaricated beyond the emphatic use of
perhaps. Instead, he had made a truthful statement. She thought that she had to
give him points for at least that; but as she pondered this he pulled out a
cigar, lit it, and blew the smoldering flames into her face. That face turned
red in anger and hate. It just bit a lower lip as an arm fanned away the smoke.
These were hard gestures that were in part flailing against the personal life
sucking her into its vortex of winds, and in part a protest of a man's
insolence toward this womanly weakness that he correctly presumed to ooze
within her. He saw hate in eyes harder than his own and finding not only them
erotic but also the breath that was trying to extricate itself from the
inhalation of smoke, he wanted to exercise against her will. He wanted to use
her as if she were the gravity and the bar by which he might do pull-ups to
claim masculine strength and virile complacency. He wanted to toss her onto a
mattress and rape her like any gentleman.

She feigned a smile unsuccessfully. It was a hateful smile of hubris against
him and all his male counterparts to whom a woman, and a female to a lesser
degree, supplicated herself. Even more, it was a hateful distorted smile
against herself who, no matter how hard she tried, could not fully exit the
trivial sphere of the personal domain any more than an obese woman could easily
leave her apartment.

"Monogamy, what a premier virtue, it is!" she thought sardonically. This
denunciation was a defense against her feelings of guilt over the sexcapade
with Candyman. She knew that it was so, for the guilt was spraying out onto
consciousness with that constancy of a fizz of breakers on a beach. She knew
that it was so, for there was a feeling disgorging within her that was a nasty
flair of a warm shaken can of beer oozing from between the closed tab.

She wasn't married or engaged to Michael--matter of fact, hating her as she
knew that he no doubt did, she wasn't in any type of relationship with him
unless that envisaged by an overactive imagination off and spinning downhill
like a rolling wheel of a flipped car-- and yet society's prudish stipulation
that a woman be faithful to the partner she was with, or had been with,
nonetheless had some sway of her movement and thought as it had at previous
times when they lived together. Back then she would always try to restrain
herself from those cans of beer that preceded her chewing tobacco snacks in
order to be spared from his scowling, to continue to seem attractive to him,
and to appear less extreme and headstrong than what she really was. Such was
the influence of this mixing intimately: this blending of pathos and petulance
blurring boundaries; this nastiness of prudish society inflicting one with
guilt for pursuing more than the allotted share of the love it had espoused;
and these incessant compromises of herself in order to keep a relationship with
a man.

She was but a tiny shadow of original and independent thought that was dwarfed
and absorbed by the massive conservative shadow of America. Her shadow was
poised like the Statue of Liberty -- the liberty which had inadvertently
created her unorthodox perspectives, but hers was an inconsequential
adumbration. Americans were a provincial people as all bullies of the world
were provincial, and the thought of mixing with an American (even one as
Italian as Michael) seemed nasty indeed. The nastiness of being here in his
home came upon her like the sticky wetness of a man's semen. The nastiness of
debasing herself from loneliness by coming here was to walk on the same spit
and urine evaporating pavements within the swaths of mankind.

Her ideas rambled on fervently. "The whole thing is a laugh. If where one aims
body fluids determines a relationship and love, this sorry world is in for more
gory times....How on Earth is being faithful or not being faithful a
measurement of this amorphous, multi-definable emotion called 'love?' How is
it, or lack of it, relevant to anything at all? Hedonism causes one to
accidentally fall into the obligations of child rearing and a marriage
certificate is society's glossy endorsement of contained hedonism to perpetuate
the species....Confinement is not compassion; hunger for that other one to stop
the pangs of loneliness is no different than a hunger compelling one to
eat...any hunger really-- hunger is just there to motivate one to clog an
emptiness....Empty heads need to be filled with empty people. Even if they are
only speciously tangible and as impermanent as gusts of wind, they need them
like the air they breathe....Mortal bits of dust feel more solid in a family
unit.... And although I don't believe in being faithful as the measurement of a
caring relationship I can't see what I'd replace it with. I'm not even sold
that love exists...I mean outside of compassion and this nurturing-of-the-young
thing, I think that this medley of different selfish emotions hiding themselves
under the guise of love don't have anything good in them. And if I can't
believe in the measurement of love as being faithful or that the thing proposed
for measurement is lovely I might as well shoot for the moon by denouncing
relationships altogether. This adulteration of oneself in these incessant
compromises and mixing never enlarge a person. They mitigate a being." She was
thinking about her tree planting days with particular abhorrence, and hardly
thought of the old duties of being a home teacher, an errand wife/mom, and a
wall decorator for Michael's school since now, when assessed from a distance,
they were trivial discomforts by comparison. "Infatuations in fatuous humans
foster the illusion that great things can come from human coupling as if
hitching can concoct the Orient Express...Am I the only person who believes
this way? I am. It is no wonder that most people I encounter think of me as a
bitch.... Can't blame it on menstruation every day of the month. No, I take
pride in my bitchiness. I relish having such an accolade. No, I can't blame it
on a period every day of the month.... What am I doing here? Am I just wanting
to wear a white wedding dress with my tampon the way little girls are
conditioned to believe that marriage in a white dress is the portal to an
epiphany? This ceremony of holy matrimony is ludicrous as if a god, if He were
to exist, didn't have bigger things on his agenda than to sanctify the act of
disgorging liquids on this one spouse....this crazy aiming of body fluids at
this targeted spouse...Oh, this monogamy is sickeningly unnatural! As if
signing a name on a piece of paper can contain or clean out the filth of a
thousand daily fantasies and instinctual hungers....And then there are all
these primitive jealousies to this pleasure bonding: monkey woman not wanting
to lose her hunter who brings her and the children their meat; and monkey man
needing to ensure that there is a female possession as loyal as a domesticated
hound to satisfy him on evenings when his erotic hunts have eluded him, and
that one who would not burden him with caring for children not of his own
genetic transfer."

He had gone into the kitchen to fix some coffee so, alone, her ideas spun
quickly on the axial of ruminations.

"Love, love--the means to everything! The things we are taught in music
television videos and Hollywood movies. And then we emulate them in monkey see,
monkey do....Okay, my perspective is strange but strange things have half a
chance of being right. At least it isn't the stuff of idiotic masses. Am I such
a libertine--I don't really think so--well, probably not. I am just an old
fashioned, conventional girl who believes that sex only happens on a mattress
of a bed and have never once used a car's gearshift as a dill-dough--I cannot
even spell the word."

For all her cynicism that long-term relationships were of individuals who
stymied and quelled their thoughts to live numbly with their partners and took
on joint tree growing activities to have something in common with them, she did
know that there were some happy marriages out there. Such marriages were unions
of individuals who sought to edify the world meaningfully with their
contributions and admired this trait in their partners. They were more than
ordinary but not as extraordinary or extraordinarily peculiar in quite the way
that she was. She felt that she was without a similar peer in the world and
that from some snowy mountaintop closer to the sun she was peering onto the
world and deigning her thoughts upon those who were less peculiar than she was.
Her weirdness droned on: "For those less extraordinary/more than ordinary
couples who believe in their oxymoron of a happy monogamy, I tell them it can
only be had provided they do a bit of front seat/back seat sexcrobatics in a
car and some rape role playing once or twice each week within the comforts of
their bedrooms. Excitement allows for longevity--it isn't the love of Buddha
that the better-than-the-masses (hereafter called the Betthams) are after, but
excitement. They, the Betthams, are no different than any of the wallowing pigs
in that respect."

Only briefly did it fleet through her mind how ludicrous it was for the damaged
monkey that she was to define love at all. With not even a residue of "real
love" there to her observation early in life, these speculations now were
merely word play in her brain. They were the mere friction of cold, solid
sounds and the static of them slapping against each other in their empty
abstractions as she juggled them in her ennui and rained her sour stoic
perspective down on them like tears of knives. To her she was a bored goddess
making lightning and her unique take on love was the rightful striking of Zeus.

Still there were doubts. She did wonder whether the smudge of light penetrating
her consciousness was enlightenment or peering onto the stars with damaged
retinas. To be laconic, she wondered if her judgment calls were merely the
moody caprices of her imagination. For in Houston, that Houston of long ago
with a Gabriele that was a spasm then of myriad spasms in the lost dimensions
of a changing life, hadn't she seen a fellow student as small as a boy and as
limp as a sack of potatoes being picked up by his father, taken from his
classroom at Rice University, lowered into a wheelchair, pushed toward a
vehicle, and then driven off to the next classroom in a different part of the
campus? She had; and it was only from her own obdurate bitchinesss that she
concocted a barrier to keep herself from consciously recalling this father's
spending of money and time to enlighten the dying. It was love in the best
gesture mortals could do, and it went contrary to her assumption that human
society was a loveless "hell-hole" that was beneath her.

Yearning to depart from the bathos of contemporary society for the sublime
colors of Titian, the circular idealism of Raphael, the ugly angular and
emaciated forms of El Greco in that complex inner intensity that rendered
beauty, the mysterious shaded faces of Caravaggio, and the true internal lives
captured in the words of Shakespeare and Hardy, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy,
Melville and James, Plato, Parmenides, and all dead contemplatives, she
snobbishly wished to remove herself from the masses of men. Her contemporaries
seemed to be moving like that loose downward tire of a flipped car and she
seemed to only favor the stagnancy of deceased enlightenment. For a moment, she
was as much as wishing to die to be raptured into their thoughts, and they into
hers, the way a normal person yearned for shared physical and emotional
intimacies. Dying young might be preferable to decades of being pinned into a
stall hearing the shallow grunting of one of those male members of the porcine
herd. Isolation in Antarctica without seals and penguins would be a hundred
times better than that indelible connection of producing for him more grunting
piglets; however death was not rapture but rupture.

"How is Rick?" she asked after he was seated and she had sipped a bit of the
coffee that he had prepared for them.

"The same. Growing."

"And the dog?"

"Growing more quickly. He shits a lot, too. Thanks for asking. What do you
want?"

She smiled bashfully as if she were an errant child whose laziness or
mischievousness had been exposed. She noted the peculiarity of her erroneous
reaction: a fixated response that she had comported in girlhood. Back then it
had always preceded an impetus to be diligent so that she might propitiate a
teacher's wrath and regain favor with one of those rare individuals whom she
admired in her more credulous days. "I hate how this ended," she suddenly
confessed in womanly neediness. "I don't know why you just pulled out like
that."

"Pulled out like what? I proposed and you said no, so that was it. I decided I
needed a wife who would be supportive and that you were right all along: it
wasn't you."

"I think I was supportive."

"Why would you think that? You were never interested in any of my plans--at
least not in the later stage of things. Maybe you just aren't interested in the
business aspects of life, although I at least thought you were about selling
those paintings of yours--at least at the beginning of knowing you. Maybe
nobody changes. It is just what we know of them at different stages of
expressing themselves--that changes. Just ideas of people at different
stages...ideas changing."

She now felt that being here had not been such a mistake after all. Even though
she repudiated superstition in all of it derivative forms from anthropomorphism
to destined fate still she couldn't help but feel that she was meant to be here
hearing his profound utterances and perceiving him anew.

"Yes, how can it be anything else? An individual is too large. So what were
these ideas of yours about me in my many stages?" She really meant, "...my many
stages as perceived by you in your stages" but she cut it short.

"I don't know. At the time I admired your ability to rise up in the world...the
business savvy to do that, and how people were interested in your strangeness.
Before that I thought of you as a caring mother and before that -- "

"A disgusting whore?"

"No, not disgusting."

"Why not?"

"I liked it -- the thought of you with many men. I imagined the smell of your
skin afterwards ...I don't know. It was sexy."

"Hmm," she thought, "latent homosexuality. His river is not damned for it flows
both ways." She spoke, "What am I now -- this sexy art mom weirdo -- this idea
of yours now at this stage?"

"I don't know that I have one. I don't know who you are now."

"No, you don't know who you are being without a woman all these months. Men
need women, you know." The words belied the womanly slime oozing within her.
"They put on women. Just like you needing symbols of importance as that attachZ
case of yours, those flashing appointments in that PDA of yours, and that
cellular telephone of yours. If you did not have money and things to flash at
others how different would you be from any naked Etruscan savage apart from not
being dead and living in America?"

" I don't need a damn thing," he said coldly. "You are the one who's here. You
are the needy one." He laughed at her. She knew that to him she looked foolish
even though that time of the Turk's execution in early girlhood had made her
immune to the opinions of others.

"You're here," he repeated.

"So I am," she said in her cold hubris.

He blew his smoke into her face. "Well, with the gender factor alone no man and
woman are interested in the same things nor are they all that compatible.
That's for sure." His voice drifted slowly on the stream of smoke flowing from
his mouth and from the effluvia of his lackadaisical scorn. "But to make any
type of relationship work -- even the most pathetic -- neither of them can just
stare at the walls day-in and day-out. One has to be interested in something --
business, rearing kids, teaching, arts and crafts stuff, something. I'd say it
was me, that you didn't care to live with me, and that's what made you so moody
and useless in a sense; but it wouldn't explain your unwillingness to paint,
would it? -- You who just sort of sit around claiming that you are an artist
all hours. I guess you can sell some of that stuff -- what little you do so I
guess somebody likes it. It is a shame that you don't draw more still life.
Your artsiness was really beginning to have something in it." He stopped for he
knew that he had run over her with maximum efficacy since gratuitous plowing
through flesh and blood would not make it any more contrite.

Knowing how a hurt, rejected, and emasculated ego sought to maim others in
speech, wisps of air, like a diffident eunuch brandishing a butcher knife, she
let him disgorge his acrimonious sound. What was it to her? It was an amusing
psychological study and only this. The petty utterances he would try to use to
inflict misery commensurate with a rejected proposal intrigued her. He was no
more dangerous than a child running around in an Indian costume and brandishing
his rubber blade.

"Go on. No need to be bashful. We can't work on problems if we are ignorant of
them." She meant "Go on. No need to be civil, you hateful bastard." But this
would be repressed to a dream and there it would be in the flames of enactment
and reenactment until the combustion was complete.

He continued. "Anyhow, you just looked bored all the time toward everyone
including your own son. We were your headaches; and I looked like I was wasting
my time with you."

The trivial bits and pieces of a personal life projected in acrimonious speech
were often expressions of anger toward that other one whom these intense shared
pleasures were dependent and the whole thing disgusted her. Cast from the two
parties, the personal life was not merely a mosaic of selfish inconsequentials
of bad off-moments nor a heavy shadow of two lighter shadows but, together,
were the adumbration of the entire scaffolding of a being: the contorted and
disgusting skeleton of instinctual drives to gain pleasure, to hate those who
might hinder pleasure, to hunt, to harm, to eat, and to possess. This was the
personal domain and as disgusted as she was with it, her disgust was not as
solid as she had wished it to be. It was weakened and attenuated by the
pleasure of having a significant other know insignificant things about her like
where she hung her bra. To have him know such things made her feel a little
less cryptic. She had scoffed at his proposal so it was no wonder that his
bitterness disgorged upon her. She understood male pride and excused his
caustic utterances. "I think I put aside myself for everyone," she said. "It
was all new to me, you know, and it took some adjusting. I've always been a
rather independent being. Still the family that we were was the only family I
and Nat have had besides each other. I even went to your church, you know. How
supportive did you want me to be outside of becoming you? As you say, no two
people are alike--not even if you were to meet some docile little Betty Crocker
Helen homemaker type with her certificates in cooking and ductility."

"Ductility? No woman could ever come as well prepared in big word armament as
you. You are one of a kind for sure."

She smiled. It was the first dubious compliment that he had extended to her for
so long.

" As for Mass, it is is important to Italian American families and you only
went when you were forced to go--those times that it was too apparent that
there were none of these headaches of yours and that faking one at the last
moment would have looked ridiculous." She tightened her lips in consternation.
His ignorance was that of the droves of men who believed that migraines were
feigned. Even if she were to enlighten him there would be myriad others yet to
step out of themselves. She couldn't change them all. She told herself that
society's reaction to those like herself was no different than how the
government treated Gulf War veterans. But in fact there was a major difference:
when it came to going to church, those headaches were really feigned unless all
unpleasant situations were headaches, which they were in a sense. He went on:
"I wouldn't know. Maybe you did go once in a while and maybe you did help me
plant a tree or two. Still that doesn't exactly make or break a relationship,
does it?" She would have reminded him of their bedroom intimacies but she knew
that he, a man, was already thinking of that which he most revered; and by
mentioning it she would be opening herself up to a comment that one couldn't
expect anything else from a professional. She nearly reminded him of those
intimacies anyway just to taunt a response from him and thus free the hubris
that she was barely able to contain within her. "-- You know, there is no point
in going into any of this."

"I'm beginning to draw again. I believe I'm painting some works that will outdo
anything I've accomplished before. I feel so creative now like I'm about ready
to produce something that could be my magnum opus. Before, I was just going
through a phase where I couldn't draw and didn't know what I was all about. It
wasn't you. It was me."

"I don't know that we are a good match, to tell you the truth."

"Why do people have to match? Why can't they just love each other and
appreciate their differences?" She said this while knowing that finding a
perfect match for herself might be impossible and that in her present mood any
man was better than none. Now with her youth waning she knew that sexual
liaisons with beautiful forms would become more and more like hunting for
mushrooms in an area with a worsening annual rainfall. "I don't know if you
have a new girlfriend now but -- "

"I don't have one."

He blew more smoke into her face. "So what are you wanting?"

"Let's do it now, Sweetheart. Let's just get married -- no fancy, pretentious
stuff, just a quick run to the justice of the peace …maybe today or
tomorrow…the sooner the better."

They were married in the early afternoon and a day later he moved many of his
things back into her home. Since the wedding had been as bland as she had
requested it (a justice of the peace and a couple of Michael's employees who
acted the part of witnesses), she told herself that a permanently delayed
honeymoon would be a matchingly dull complement. To her this honey and moon
composed a word that was no misnomer: it implied a bee addicted to a
nectar-induced high and she knew that even a minute of that unreality would
have cloyed her sanity. Being with that same man 24 hours a day at a Kentucky
Derby, an Indianapolis 500 or other non-Parmenidetian activity that was
paradise to the masses and vile to philosophers and contemplatives would have
caused her to grab the nearest Time or Newsweek as quickly as most women
reached for sanitary napkins. Still the human goddess who once dressed Barbie
dolls for imaginary weddings couldn't help but yearn for a honeymoon all the
same. She was mystified why Michael did not move Rick's belongings with his
own; and yet partly assuming that this would happen after the honeymoon and
partly from a desire to not know, she did not ask. Then the saturnine groom
took her to the airport to watch the airplanes come and go. They looked through
the glass cages at these volant pterosaurs with American Airlines branded on
their skins. At first she thought that he who was so parsimonious about the
amount of water that could flow from a tap had decided upon this watching of
the airplanes as the honeymoon but then he left and came back with something
worse than nothing: tickets to Little Rock, Arkansas. She had no luggage but he
told her that they would pick up some clothes in the capital city and she
smiled. She told him that it had been a long time since she had flown in a
plane as if Jakarta had been nothing but a dream.

The first day after their arrival they took a small plane to Bentonville,
Arkansas and then walked through the Wal-Mart museum witnessing different
possessions of Sam Walton's humble beginnings and listening to the story of his
ambition to become a multimillionaire. She disparaged her disparaging thoughts.
She blocked the formulation of negative ideas and smiled at each new exhibit.

"To think that he addressed the first consumer inquiries on a manual typewriter
like this," she said at the typewriter exhibit.

"Isn't that the truth," he told her. "A man who in later life could have bought
a factory to manufacture the most sophisticated supercomputers used by the
government and here he was in younger days pecking on that old thing."

They spent the second day of the honeymoon in a rented car going up snowy,
mountainous hills through forests of dangling icicles as thick as stalactites
and as lush as its lost verdant facade, traveling by the most winding and
treacherous roads until they were at last in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.

On the third day of Christmas he gave to her the reverberating cacophony of
country music, torturing an already queasy stomach that had just experienced
car-sickness earlier that afternoon. From the front row of the concert she
managed to smile without wincing noticeably from this howling through nostrils
via song. The discomfort from her own disingenuousness in maintaining this
coerced smile was as reprehensible as the sound; and yet it was nothing to her
who had seen a decapitation in early girlhood and spoke of it like an
inquisitive little scholar. The bombardment of senseless noise was the stuff
migraines were made of; although fortunately for her none ensued.

On the fourth day of Christmas they were at this new business "of his." There
was a ribbon cutting for this international gourmet supermarket which would
soon be replicated in Japan. He showed her through the aisles and pointed out
every item on the shelves as if the stuff one crammed down his or her gullet
needed such elaboration.

On the fifth day it was Christmas and so they decided to travel around the area
of Eureka Springs. They drove up and down the niveous and tortuous hills in and
out of the town. Tree gazing from the more scenic back roads was his truth
beyond the corporeal greed and ambition of financial enterprises (this world)
and unempirical religion (the make believe world), and she was pleased that he
had it. As his woman, she wanted to nurture a greater purpose in him. As a
somewhat solipsistic being she wanted to stake a purpose in being with him
beyond more intense pleasures of shared experiences which she knew were
erroneously pinned on mutable others instead of the constancy of self. During
this car-bound time she held her loose stomach successfully, stifling its
rebellion through the exertion of will. She again smiled: It was a complaisant
facade of any common soldier.

Then he took her to the town's shoddy replica of the statue of Jesus that was
meant to duplicate the one that stood over Rio de Janeiro. The diminished
Christ didn't have the efficacy of the original since it lacked omnipotent and
sturdy immutability over the natural world and beauty. Still, with a hand
pressed into his, she couldn't help but feel that specious illusion of God
being up there in the sky caring about the ethical decisions of her little
life. Of course, it was all conditioning: the warmth and strength of a man's
hand being transmitted into her own, the sun upon her skin, and, from them, a
glazed, ethereal staring at the statue as if it were radiating blessings upon
her.

Side by side with her man in their warm winter coats, both like little furry
animals against the kneecaps of this stone or fiberglass man-god, she did not
mind succumbing to religious delusions. She was married now and all other
suppositions and attempts to make her stance, her sense of the world, were
nothing. All ideas that went contrary to his expectations were dust that her
mind needed to sweep away. Marriage was reality. It was the psychological and
physiological completeness of two people, and as such there was a necessity for
compromise no differently than the appetites of the body being catered to by
the brain that developed pleasure receptors to tolerate this incompatible
coexistence. She argued to herself that it was an incontrovertible truth that a
man's bedtime dominion transferred to all else. A woman, by getting married,
either gave her tacit approval of this natural inclination or gained enjoyment
from the ongoing challenge to minimize it.

An idea trespassed through the meadows of her mind that he had taken her here
to force upon her a spiritual awakening and to test her obsequiousness to him
and his god in action if not thought (she who, when logic domineered over all
else was a lone, frigid polar bear who didn't even care that much for the
sexual awakenings). Then another idea encroached upon her. She wondered whether
having been awakened so often sexually had put her in a coma to all other forms
of awakening. She disparaged the fleeting thought. It was a mere caprice, she
argued, like disliking a passing woman for wearing the color, pink, or wanting
to make love to all sailors for wearing their clean, white, and neatly pressed
uniforms. Heretofore such whims had not defined her despite the harmony of her
solitary meadow being continually littered in the blowing of these deciduous
scraps. Heretofore she had been able to find that higher authority that willed
to know a self outside of winds and blowing rubbish; a self that would gain
immediate and indelible awareness from the cookie cutter of his or her
experience, and only this. Heretofore she had been impervious to the intensity
of the hot sandstorms of raw emotion and the blizzards of refined emotion,
thought.

But now all was different. She, an American, had knocked off her insular
American shell (the little she had possessed) while in Jakarta. She had gone
there thinking, according to her culture, that Moslems were extremists who
hated Americans; but never believing the ideas that she was brought up with or
the ones spewing out of this invisible mouth, society, she had disregarded the
idiocy of fear and bias for the splendor of reviving truth. There she had met a
gentle people; there she had been naked with easily torn skin; and there she
had felt the hurt and the injustice of the masses, compassion and enlightenment
seeming a great and insufferable travail. Then and now she needed to go to him
in the hope of forgetting life's injustices within the softness of his skin
massaging her own.

Since, subtly within her compromises, she was now emulating him for an
"understanding" of religion and was now beginning to reflect upon her Aunt
Peggy as a paragon of marital sustainability, somehow following the herd seemed
less reprehensible. A being was born, grew up to reproduce, and then died. How
could she, the maverick that she might be, add more purpose to the state of
mankind than this? Could she be so supercilious as to think that the common
experiences of those normal or normal acting people counted for nothing? These
actions existed since the beginning of time so who was she to disabuse
pragmatic, time-tested ideas that were passed down through the generations?

She maintained her glazed, ethereal stare at the statue; wanted to rapture
herself from discomfort equivalent to those pews in a chapel; felt the mistake
of being here with him bury her in the fragments of herself like the rubble of
the Afghan Buddha; and yet feigned a glowing ember of yearning within this
contrived display of contentment. She played the part well enough to believe it
herself. She did not want to upset him as she had before, for not only would it
suggest to him that he should not have married her but it would aver to herself
her own intransigence and a social ineptness that was of damaged whores and
spinsters. She argued that marriage was a union built on incessant compromise
and flexibility and that she wanted to be as adroit at it as she was in
spitting chewing tobacco. She could have gone through a ceremony of marrying
herself as the more outlandish Dutch women did. She could have rented out a
large area for the ceremony and paid for a lavish, catered banquet, a wedding
dress, and confetti. The recurrent idea of it was tantalizing. Even if marriage
to oneself would lack some sexual exhilaration it would be a singular form of
epiphany. The publicity would have been good for the sales of her art and there
were days, upon her return from Jakarta that she taunted herself with this
possibility as a viable way to keep herself from showing up onto the doorstep
at the home of Michael's parents. But she ended up telling herself that she
wasn't Dutch enough for such libertine experiments.

And so she believed in a religious delusion that was no different than all
other delusional zealots. She believed the way one might well believe that
cavemen were devoured by dinosaurs, that Shirley McClain was god as proven by
having written it in a book, that out-of-body experiences for near-deathors
were proof that there was a soul, and that people were actually napped by
aliens into these fancy UFO space shuttles.

In a cheap hotel room in Eureka Springs, they sat on a bed and watched
television. Sedentary as he was staring into the box, he was animated in his
mesmerized state. But for her, it almost seemed that he and his television
gained their animation from sapping away her energy. Boredom was so enervating
that it wouldn't have been preposterous to think of one's energy being snatched
and diverted elsewhere. Money, ownership, tax loopholes, investments, televised
games, tree planting, and this, watching the Tonight Show, were the same
recurrent life themes of this man.

She sat there as listlessly as a catatonic. Images from the television trodden
here and there on the surface of her brain but the earth underneath did not
register the burden of these fleeting forms. Looking at the cramped room, which
exacerbated her discomfort, she tried the best that she could to wrestle and
pin to the floor her critical thoughts. She was married now so surely she
should try. Still, she couldn't help but think that he was just an ordinary
male in his obsession with ownership, his unwavering interest in action or
jokes in a box, and his pursuit of other innocuous pleasures that became the
man. Furthermore, she couldn't help but think that he was parsimonious, like
now as evident by the cheap hotel room, and thriftless like in Rome, all at the
wrong times. But for a year now she accepted the inevitable conclusion that
showing to him her books on art or dragging him to symphonies or exhibitions
would never deliver him to urbane habits that could be mutually shared. If he
dabbled with the arts enough to attend an exhibition it was as one of the rich
who gained an enhanced status from rubbing against its colors. He did not gain
it by being a patron of artistic merit through a scholarship or foundation in
his name or by spending inordinate sums at art auctions (after all, as rich as
his family was, it was not as rich as this) but by copulating with an artist
and owning one in marriage. And yet he was the person that he was, and, within
the little womanly weakness she possessed (this love/this neediness that flared
up in even females like her to entice breeding) she half believed that true
love was accepting him for better or for worse because this was who he was. She
no longer believed that changing someone was love or that the environmental
spark of love (in her case going with him through art museums in Rome or
witnessing his bold reflection come into the bathroom of her hotel room and
urinate as she was applying makeup in front of a mirror) had much legitimacy.
Love was a commitment toward compromise and sacrifice.

So, while the thick cloud of his flatulent odor was beginning to dissipate and
a steak sauce commercial was interrupting the Tonight Show, she became drowsy.
At one moment she heard him say, "That steak sure looks good on the TV, doesn't
it Honey?" and then in the next she fell off a precipice into a vacuum of wind
that made up dreams. Like women who when experiencing prenuptial jitters have
nightmares of their wedding ceremonies being interrupted by dark revelations,
she dreamed something similar to this belatedly. She dreamed that she and
Michael were at a diner in the John F Kennedy International Airport. They were
getting married there before departing to Tokyo. Suddenly the airport security
guards, all of whom were Japanese, interrupted the ceremony, whispered
something to the potential groom, and gave Polaroid photographs to the Catholic
priest. She wasn't sure what they said but she did hear the words "airport
bathroom graffiti" which made her grimace not for the ignorance of those who
were part of this consensus (she didn't "give a flying fuck" about what they
thought in the slightest) but that these bereft hollow heads epitomized what
the droves of men would think. It didn't depress or upset her: it was just like
being a sole life form on Mars. It was uncomfortable as hell but she was quite
used to it. MF, after being shown the photographs, asked the priest if he
should go through with a marriage to a woman who had drawn such unregenerate
images on the doors of the women's toilet but the priest ignored his maudlin
whining as if annoyed by any distraction that would delay his inquisition.
Gabriele could sense this priest's yearning to put his fangs into her for she
knew that the taste of blood was sweet and that the blood of a unique being
would be envisaged by such savages as the sweetest yet. "Tell me, did you do
this?" he asked the dark veiled woman but he did not give her time to respond.
"Who is this black man that makes up the face and body of a savage God in this
grotesque and blasphemous mural?" demanded the priest.

Gabriele lifted the veil on her burka. "There isn't anything depraved or
unregenerate in it," she averred. "I don't know who he is. It is just my
imagination." Her lie was phlegmatic. She would have willingly given the truth
but she wouldn't be goaded into it or humble herself to such pernicious and
puritanical Taleban. She wouldn't even humble herself to God if she were to see
him. She and God would just have to introduce themselves as two strangers,
neither one better or worse than the other. "The larger image is whatever one
wishes the larger image to be, I suppose."

"What I want it to be?" mocked the priest acrimoniously. So, I suppose, if I
want it to be the Virgin, Mary -- "

"Then it is Mary."

"Mary sure has a lot of naked images of black men with grotesquely large
genitalia running through her head," said the priest.

She smiled. "Of course she does, as all women do. Have you never heard of
Masters and Johnson? Surely Kinsey could not have eluded a person of your type.
If I were to dig up the foundation under that hairy grandfatherly veneer of
yours who knows what I'd find."

"Aren't you smart? To think that we could have naively put your name in holy
matrimony. But do tell me, now that God is generously revealing all of your
perverted ideas, what you think is in my heart!"

"I wouldn't know. I don't read minds or hearts. I imagine it is the same stinky
muck that is in all men's cravings. If you pay me money, I wouldn't oppose
letting you confess your sins to me. Now the price to absolve sins and blowjobs
are both the same: 500 dollars -- US, of course. With handsome Adonises, it is
a packaged set but not with old goats like you."

He shook his head. "To think that I would have married this fine gentleman to
such a blasphemous whore."

"Maybe I can read minds, hearts, or what-not. I'm reading big breasted women
there washing each other's bodies as they do onstage in makeshift showers at
Go-go bars in Bangkok; but only because you are too scared of burning in hell
for your homosexual inclinations. Rivers run both ways, you know, but
socialization on a teenager can alter how it flows. For old goats like you,
nobody built your dam when you were young so now there is only cobbled will.
Your will tries to redirect the flow since. You know that you cannot stop it
entirely. Say 100 Haila Gabrielas and pay me my money."

The priest shook his head at the foul fiend and turned away. "Bangkok?" asked
the priest. He was directing his question to Michael.

"She went there once," he told the priest. "She is always making contrasts of
Thailand to Western civilization."

"Did she meet this black man there?"

"Who knows?" said Michael.

Gabriele guffawed. "Why not address me?" she asked.

"Then answer for yourself, you disgusting tramp," said Michael.

"Maybe I did or didn't," she prevaricated. "Maybe I don't need to meet anyone
or do anything. I witness life. If I read something or see something that is
happening in my world (even if from a distance) it touches me and I'm inspired
by it. I'm not afraid of it no matter what it is."

"She's your betrothed," said the priest. "What do you want done."

"Let His will be done. She hides her profanity, promiscuity, and obscenities
behind art. She never admits anything," he whined sobbingly. "I don't know what
to do with her."

"Apple her?" asked the security guards.

"Apple her!" reiterated the priest.

The cooking staff, under their burkas, began to fire apples and soon everyone
within the room appled her skull.

"Why couldn't you have just drawn still-life or landscapes?" whined Michael.

"Join your Turkish friend from long ago!" shouted the Ayatollah- garbed priest.

Gabriele was now lying on the floor with her forehead bleeding profusely. Still
she could eke out faint utterances and so she projected her words like a song.
"You wouldn't have loved me if I hadn't been somebody-- you thought it was a
thrill to see one of whoredom reach stardom. It was like being in the
Astrodome. Like any carnal male, a woman's glitter is to your liking--it is
your pleasure dome but to me it is not striking."

Then she dreamed that there was an anniversary party, which Michael held to
commemorate himself and the longevity of his schools and stores. There, in her
home on the day of the party, she noticed that blonde-headed, frosty-pigmented
man with the unmemorable name sitting there in his own separate space within
her living room. He had large, thoughtful, eyes; and to her he was exotic and
unpretentiously wholesome like latent mushrooms in a vast field. He was silent
in the noise; and she loved this superhuman trait as she had loved it of her
father--he who used to part from her on the beach and pursue the silent wading
of his nothingness into the vastness of the entity, he who had been her
Parmenides despite having long ago abandoned her as one who had indifferently
tossed out grass seed. Having fought in war and having foolishly devoted his
life to contrived ideals of patriotism, these life scatterings nonetheless made
her father into the pensive German that he was. She had silently abhorred him
all these years for his neglect and for severing her innocence in the coerced
witnessing of the Turk's execution; and yet everyday she was grateful to him.
Not only had her time in Turkey made her a snug albeit hurting occupant of
self- containment within Fort Gabriele but his hard high browed arrogance had
inspired the high stain glass windows of her facade from which she observed all
earthly creatures below. Also it was from him that these sanguine
characteristics had been hers. As she looked over the guests to that serene bit
of nature within the smoke and voices, she saw eccentric greatness within him.
She knew that his philosophy was hers: for those individuals who could accept
silence and not cling to others they would never be lost from themselves; and
that whoever gained the bliss that was there in solitude, descending within
one's own fathoms without inordinate hungers and movement, he or she would be
one of the savants who moved perception. An insect moving on an ambulatory man
in ignorance of his movements; a moving universe that does not jolt the
self-centered movement of its ignorant beings--so the savants seemed not to
move while they carried all these insectual entities with them.

She dreamed that because of the potential inaccuracy of first impressions, she
was reluctant to instantly accept her own favorable preliminary conclusions and
yet the frosty man with the unmemorable name seemed to her as so ingenuous.
Within the cigarette smoke, the wine, and the smiles, he was not eager to take
his turn in the continual sallies of one monkey-man attempting to conquer
another one by being the wittiest of all Neanderthals. He just smiled a
contrived smile onto the games that these barbarians played with each other. He
smiled the way all brilliant people had to do.

While she was stripping a head of lettuce he escaped to the kitchen and got
some fresh air on the balcony. She pulled him in to chop carrots. She asked
where he was from initially. He told her that he was from everywhere. She
probed this concept of an everywhere man in German but then changed to Spanish.
In both languages he told her that everywhere was a concept that wasn't
necessarily linked to a place. Later on in the evening when everyone had gone
she found a note on top of a stack of dishes that he had washed for her. She
looked at the scribble of a telephone number. "Please, my Miss, call my mobile
or send me an SMS." She did, and then they met at the zoo in front of the
spider monkeys. From there they went to the ballet. At the ballet he spoke to
her in Russian. She thought of it as the preferred world language because it
was nonsense to her. Had it been sensible it no doubt would have reflected a
language of ordinary minds and so she preferred languages of the nonsensical
variety.

Then she dreamed that she and Michael had never been linked together, and as
such neither union nor separation with and from each other was engraved
indelibly upon either of their brains. As such, she was an enlarging puddle
being fed the rain. She was an innocent girl in goulashes feeling the
vibrations of ripples and stir caused by her feet, and watching the ambulatory
movements of birds feeding in the respites of a shower. She was all of these
birds scavenging in the dirt for their prey for she herself had scavenged in
demeaning mental and physical prostitution before becoming one of the rare
goddesses of men whose novel ideas were a commodity.

The dream became one of a Gabriele who was an even younger girl. Enthralled
with the rain, the rainbow, and the reflections of branches in the puddles, she
was nonetheless distraught over not finding the cracks of ant corridors in what
was once the parched earth. It did not occur to her that avalanche and drowning
were the natural order imposed by merciless creation against these superfluous
breeders. She kept looking for the cracks within the dirt but it was to no
avail.

Since she did not know many words, she didn't have any critical judgments and,
inept at linking words together, she was not thrust on that one-way track of
probable outcomes for the future. Still free from being socialized and not
having sexual drive that equated being with others as appetites, she was more
inclined to mourn a few days of not climbing trees than someone's absence from
her life. Cared for, she was not fixated on survival so she stayed in the
present moment where smallness percolated through the orifices and oracles of
the senses. Scavenging on pink and yellow-stick legs like the birds, and
flooded out with stunned worms and insects, she was these things. She was a
Piaget child. Then she was as an adult form. The man with the unmemorable name
was posing nude for her paintings; and when she was ready to pack up the canvas
and paints one evening, he brooded charmingly. "When will I see you again?" he
asked like a pensive and hurt child at the thought of her leaving him.

She felt irritated that he could ask such a question even if the female within
her coruscated within a man's neediness for a woman no differently than it
would within the light of flattery.

"When?" he asked again.

"When Russia becomes a member of NATO or returns into the Soviet Union."

"Why don't you stay?"

"Why? It is a loaded question. Why?" and she kissed him and sucked in his
breath as if it were needed more than her own. Then she pulled away. She
thought, "To never know how to marry oneself in ideas and endeavors that bring
new ideas into existence, to just claim another person's rotting flesh to not
wander around lost and vertiginous--no I'm not one of the sorry herd!"

"You really won't stay?" he asked.

She was tempted. She thought about staying like a fat woman would chocolate in
a grocery store. She rejoiced in the fact that she did not need to be any man's
woman. Sex could be obtained without actually living with someone. Matter of
fact it could be obtained all alone and she would have opted for it done in
this solitary manner within her own privacy if fantasies could be developed for
oneself and a fuller pleasure could be gained in masturbation.

"No, I'm afraid not," she replied. I want to think of things other than you.
Besides, I sleep better alone. After all, sleep is a solo activity."

"Other men?"

"Probably," she chortled. I'll see you tomorrow," she said.

"Meet me at the zoo and then we will walk over here--Meet me in front of the
cage of the spider monkeys like before. Be prepared to know every obscure zoo
animal by its scientific jargon in the Russian language," he told her.

And then the dream had her meeting him the next day near a baboons' cage. She
could tell that her profound buffoon had only feigned this drowning in a
sensitive abyss. There were no complaints, there was no rehashing of
insignificant past events, and no attempt to demand more from her within a
jealous male atavism that was instinct. They just touched each other's bodies
like children the feel of their grandmothers' panty hose.

She woke up, startled to find herself with Michael in a strange bed. She
propped up her pillow and sat up. She thought about where she was at: here in
this poorly paved state of Arkansas a little south of the middle of nowhere,
the yodeling of bluegrass and country music reverberating off the Ozark
mountains. Ensconced with her man in a blanket that had southern flowers on it,
she still felt cold; and part of the blanket was wrapped about her like a
southern damsel's dress. "Good lord," she thought as she looked at her thick
makeshift dress, "aren't I the Great Motel Lady, Belle Gaw-brE- el." She picked
up her purse from the end table, took out some snuff, and lodged it into a
cheek. "Belle Gabriele," she mumbled aloud, "the motel Belle."

"What'd you say?" he asked.

"Are you awake?" she prevaricated.

"Sort of," he said. "What time is it?"

"Five."

"You said something?"

"Huh? Oh yeah, it was nothing. Sorry, I guess I woke you--mumbling aloud as I
was like an old woman."

"Wake me in a half hour. I forgot to set my alarm."

"PLEASE wake me up, don't you mean?"

He chuckled sleepily on the border of wakefulness. "Don't go back to sleep and
forget." He rolled onto his side in a solitary departure, and now it was just a
back that was before her. It didn't even seem to be his. It was just a man's
back and it didn't have an owner.

She pushed back the curtains of the window and watched the heavy traffic moving
along a narrow stretch of road. She knew that she was also just one of the
horde moving up and down the streets searching for something while, in arrant
foolishness or within august foibles, claiming others and being claimed by
them.

She deliberated on sleep and dreams, that mysterious enigma which she had
wondered about so often. It dawned on her that sleep was the burning of
subconscious fuel--it was the burning of myriad crowding and conflicting whims
within the confines of the brain so that some type of civil existence might
prevail.

She thought of her dream in which she waited for the Russian near the monkeys.
She wondered if she was like the specimens in Harlow's monkey experiments. From
a German upbringing, had she not become the misfit monkey--the one that had
been denied the touch of a mother or surrogate mother and so always kept
herself at a distance in the social world. But she did not abuse her offspring
like the misfit monkey. No, she had given to her child adequate enough touch
even though touch, in her younger days had been so repugnant when imposed upon
her without payment. She took a shower and went to work like all other mental
prostitutes.

It was her sixth day as a replacement for a cashier in the foreign food store.
The other cashier had been fired because of three consecutive days in which she
had attended to a sick child instead of coming to work. Gabriele did this for
12 hours and then around 9:30 p.m. as she began to close down her cash register
in the habitual manner of ringing up all sales Michael began to engage in small
talk to pacify the other cashiers. He thanked them for their hard work. He told
them that as indispensable as they were to the Arkansas mother company they
were always welcome to be with the sprawling newborn in Sapporo. He said that
the store in Sapporo would never shut down and it would eventually become
triple the size of this one.

After the store was closed he and Gabriele were driving back to the hotel room
when they stopped for a few minutes in a McDonald's Drive- thru. There, waiting
at the window for their Big Macs, Michael asked her if she could mortgage her
house and sell "that nude thing" in the garage to "offset" the expenses of the
new business. For some seconds she was discomfited if not dumbfounded, and then
she scowled at the thought of having been dumb enough to marry him.

For a moment, the consternation was incommunicable. All that she could do was
to turn her high head away from him, and allow her neck to remain stiffly
turned. She smiled contortedly in nominal pain before releasing it in a guffaw.
She faced him directly. His absurdity as a being seemed to exist for her
insolent jeering and only this.

"What are you laughing that way for?" he asked. She stared into his eyes rudely
and laughed contemptuously at the absurd monkey that was sitting next to her.
She knew: every relationship was a self-interested transaction. There was
nothing new to her in this assessment. She had known it since early childhood
when she found out that her aunt was being paid by her parents, and that this
was the impetus for the love and generosity of letting her stay with this
second family. Maybe recently she had pretended to not know. For a while there
had been that repudiation, that obfuscation of self, so that she might fit into
a wedding dress as well as marriage. But now she was back home within the real
perceptions of her brain.

She again deigned the hard plastic eyes of her stuffed polar bear countenance
down upon him. They glittered a hardness that was like those of sapphires.
"When is this Sapporo thing going to happen?" she spitefully abraded the
contumacious Earthling coldly.

"Well, soon," he said mildly. He feigned a diffident smile as if he should not
be asking for such a favor but would do it nonetheless. She, the new wife, took
notice of this. He almost seemed contrite and she wondered if his bashfulness
was less contrived than what she might suppose. Soon her insular hubris of
indomitability began to thaw like Arctic permafrost. Then he went on. "There
won't be any difficulty in expediting this from what I see. I mean an agent
could sell your paintings. One of my assistants could have power of attorney to
go to the bank and try to obtain a mortgage--I mean if you want to help in that
way. I know it is a lot to ask. Of course it is your choice. The way I see it
we'll need that money as living expenses for a short while until everything
starts moving. The cost of living in Honshu is notorious but it is worse on the
northern Japanese islands like Hokkaido."

"Well, I'll give it some thought. I'll decide when Nathaniel gets back." She
stressed "I'll decide" obdurately but she had in principle made up her mind.
She had in theory (there was nothing but theory in this interrelating) decided
that if she were to go with him she could sell off her Jakarta paintings as
well as the huge one in the garage but this would be all. There was an
institution called a bank and to her it should not be a spouse no matter what
self-interested gunk was naturally in a man's calculative logic of advantageous
maneuvers when proposing to a woman -- in this case an interest free loan to
which even the capital amount might well be neglected; and in this case she had
made the proposal.

"I was thinking that we might fly from Little Rock to San Francisco and then
over that way." His hand pointed to the McDonalds arch and she smiled
good-humoredly, careful not to insult the phlegmatic one by laughing at him
because he just might scowl at her. "I mean without going back. Betty of course
would pick up Nathaniel from the airport and she could help take care of both
boys at my sister's estate. It might be better this way."

"Not see Nathaniel and Rick?" she roared incredulously.

"Good byes are messy," he said.

She thought for a moment. What did she know: Rick was well mannered and
Nathaniel was restive if not intractable. Maybe Michael with his quick draw of
the belt and his willingness to take his son on trips abroad was a better
parent. A caring albeit phlegmatic male disciplinarian seemed to play the notes
of fear and respect in male children with a greater sense of harmony if
obedience to adult might were that one important anthem. She had to admit to
herself that a sudden departure wasn't nonsense for she was ready to listen to
the proposals of abandonment by a father of a well brought up boy when her own
experiments in child rearing seemed effete and unsuccessful. She did not, for
all her education, know anything much more than the average parent and what
little she knew was theoretical. Ideas of child psychologists like Piaget were
mere abstractions, premises like ghosts without flesh. Maybe, she thought to
herself, Nathaniel needed a different influence since she was apparently not
much of a role model. Maybe pursuing a floundering maternal role for the sake
of a child, who would in a short space of years be engaged fully in instinctual
and hedonistic pursuits, was foolishly myopic at best. At worst it might stunt
her from any form of enlightenment and she would appear foolishly gauche and
inept to herself. Was her reasoning so fallible? She knew that it was. She
wondered whether she was just trying to justify the desire to jump on a tank
with her mate and roll off into the sunset. Maybe she would be running over her
child no differently than her craven and neglectful parents except that their
rationale was to fulfill duties whereas hers would be less definable.

"But Rick is with your parents."

"They got fed up with him. Now he is with my sis."

"Fed up with gentle Rick?"

"Kids are dirty."

"We should take them with us." Her thought was of rescuing her favorite from
such in-laws to her and laws to him.

"Honey, we can't afford them initially. Do you know how much international
schools cost?" She at last saw his point. She felt apologetic. Maybe his reason
for this marriage had not been to get her money after all. "Besides," she
thought, "whatever dilemma he might have in obtaining liquid assets, I'm a
pauper in contrast. Maybe there is nothing to it at all but my own overactive
imagination." She looked at him again. She saw the eyes of a man who yearned
for money. She saw the eyes of Venus who would have said anything to woo
Adonis, and she felt that his love for her, if it existed, was not good.

"Go by yourself then. I'll stay with the boys. When I sell what I have painted
-- I can pull in 20,000 more or less--I'll send it to you. However, regarding
the mortgage of my house you can get that out of your thoughts! The day I'm
expected to mortgage my house is the day I file the divorce papers." She smiled
malevolently.

"Of course. I shouldn't have asked that. Please come to Sapporo with me. It
might be your only time to actually live outside America."

He was putting the taste for new experiences back within her palate, and to her
the taste of it was uniquely tactile and sweet like a wad of chewing tobacco.
The possibility of going elsewhere potentially out of the reach of America's
long shadow made her soar as invincibly as an archaeopteryx departing from a
tyrannosaurus, if indeed these two creatures were coeval.

Like a massive billowing wave of dark cloud overtaking the top stories of a
skyscraper, the prospect of opaque drama in unknown foreign adventures animated
her lofty imagination. She half believed that a time in Hokkaido would send a
beautiful mix of color rushing like a torrent from her pallet. It would
coruscate her in warm intimacy the way, to a swimmer, the 5:30 sun appears to
immerse itself whole in a pool of water. America exported greed and violence in
cinematography, had sovereignty in technological exports, dictated world
affairs, overthrew leaders, craved for energy to give to its race horse economy
despite its havoc on the environment, and believed with certainty that God gave
hegemony in this superpower status to they who relentlessly pursued gluttonous
freedoms in a world of misery ridden masses. If she were to live elsewhere
experiencing other cultures fully she felt that the inhabitants would be a
"totally different fish;" and being exposed to a different fish would be her
mutation into something higher.

The idea kept reoccurring to her that children were temporary objects in her
domain but experiences of this kind were transformational. For so long she had
wistful thoughts of departing from America in a more permanent way than one
could do as a mere tourist. She yearned to abscond from this country of
sensationalized serial killers, child abductors, murderers in school yards,
random shooters, Al Queida and Timothy McVeigh car bombers, and America's
obsession with those of fame and power who lusted for more and more until
plunging so fully in their passionate energies fell into jealous fits, white
color crimes, or murder related to that above. Already the enemies were
gathered outside the American gates and at any moment they would storm the
Bastille. A war with such poor masses would siphon away the coffers of the US
treasury to the point where the superpower status would be gone. There would
just be mountainous rubble of debt on the great debtor country.

There came a day somewhere in the middle part of January when she called the
man with the unmemorable name from Arkansas. She did not tell him of her
marriage but she did tell him that Michael had asked her to go to Japan with
him. He told her to go. He said that one should always use any opportunity that
came along to be exposed to a new culture although both of them knew that there
was little else in the world but America's capitalistic shadow and that little
enlightenment could be gained from any other source than stagnant words and
pages of the books written by the dead masters. He said this with such
conviction that she almost loved him for not holding onto her.


Tijuana, Mexico September 17, 2001

It would be 90 degrees later that day and she had come to do her laundry
earlier than usual. Her mind swished like her frothy socks that foamed and
compressed, were locked in and were often lost. Somewhere, on one continent or
another, something severed within her. She told herself that she would not
blame Atsushi Kato, and especially at this late date. She tried not to think of
this matter by watching the diving dances of her laundry, but it was not at all
helpful. She imagined two men's socks of different colors and sizes
intertwining within the fast movements of her wash. No, she again reminded
herself as if needing to reiterate a truth so that feelings did not overtake
her with their mendacities, Kato was not the source of her disconnection. He
had merely been a stock boy for the foreign food store that was partially owned
by her husband. Perhaps he was that still. Certainly he was more than that
role.

His face always smiled widely when he saw her or her husband. He had an
affinity for foreigners and she, in particular, needed his friendship. His
English was excellent; and he finally brought life to their stagnation by
getting them involved in an understanding of Oriental antiquities.

The weather was inordinately cold, and the city was so large and congested; but
they nonetheless needed their outings, and he took them to museums and Japanese
theatres within the inner city of Sapporo. He was so eager to use his English.
He translated the signs under the artifacts and became aware of the styles of
Japanese calligraphy. When they pelted snow from the soles of their shoes
before entering the theaters, he seemed grateful that such experiences were
resuscitating him from the continual repetition of counting and stocking
inventory. From these invitations to escort the couple he began to see a
newness within his ancient and isolated people on this one of myriad islands.
He said that he studied the English language and had kept it within himself for
so long; but it was really perceiving his race and culture anew that seemed to
revive him with a real personality. Michael was not inclined to befriend a
Buddhist this lifelessly innocuous and bereft of money and status so she pushed
on her husband's association with him, this "subordinate. " She asked Kato to
accompany her husband in the barroom business meetings. He would just be a
human speck in these overcrowded places. His shyness with those of his own race
made them not pay attention to him. He would understand the implications to the
meetings that her husband found opaque. She would not blame Kato. He might even
be doing Michael's laundry right now as she pursued her own, but he was not her
disconnection -- not really.

What did her disconnection matter at all in the scheme of things, anyway? When
she asked this question she was not able to concoct a truthful answer that was
at all savory. In the scheme of things her disconnection was just more
worthless tripe as insignificant as a gum wrapper blowing on a sidewalk. As
intangible as a "state of mind" was, she knew that for all its intricate and
fascinating complexity it was less significant to the outside world than a gum
wrapper.

Thousands had lost their lives in the World Trade Center towers in New York
City just days earlier. No one could ever know the panic and hopelessness that
they felt at the travail of being cognizant and on fire or seeing someone else
who was ablaze and being unable to do anything. If there were any continual
evidence of those who had become a gas it would be the sounds of their panicked
utterances of love and farewell or the light that made visible those horrified
countenances leaning their ears as hard as they could into their cellular
telephones. By this time, she supposed, those sights and sounds would be at the
edges of the Milky Way before moving further into deeper space, the gray matter
of this black god. She still thought about September Eleventh every few
minutes: those repeating images of the two jets flying into the skyscrapers and
people jumping from the upper stories. What did her disconnection matter to the
gods, who if they existed at all, despised life?

She remembered: on the Eleventh (9-11) she sat on the bed in her little room. A
bowl of vegetable soup from her crockpot was on an end table and a tofu taco
was on a plate that was on her lap. She was just about ready to put some food
in her mouth when she used the remote control to turn on the television. For a
few moments she was incredulous and just stared motionlessly aghast. Then she
suddenly stood up from the precipice of the mattress and rushed to the
telephone to call Michael's sister. The line was disconnected as it had been
the past few times she tried to call. She tried email but again her letters to
her son came back to her. Nathaniel ("Adagio") still had too much email clogged
into his Yahoo account--no doubt all the unopened letters she had emailed to
him from Sapporo.

Somewhere something had severed. Was it here in Tijuana, in Tokyo or Hong Kong,
Seoul or Sapporo, or a mezcla (mixture)? It was a gradual harvest of
disconnection invisibly sewn and its fulfillment placed in her hands. She had
accepted her divorce stunned and numb, but not disbelieving. She had been there
throughout his travels. Her mind had been scrambled in different languages and
her environment splintered like Kanji, Hirigana, and Katakana.

She was lost then, and she was lost now. People were temporary entities
flitting around in her imagination as solid substance but it had been an
illusion. Why she had come to Tijuana was even more difficult to isolate. It
had less shape and size than even the divorce of intimate parties. It was a
shirt of a distorted form. Here, she could more easily stretch the money that
she had fully withdrawn from the "grocery and household account" which Michael
had put in her name at Daiko Ginko (Daiko Bank). It was around 3000 dollars.
Within Albany she had her real money and property but she had not seriously
thought about those resources for nearly a year. The passbook and ATM were lost
to her now and she could never access those resources from here.

It was a most mortifying fact that upon telling her he had filed for divorce
and his reason for doing such that she just stood there so numbly like a driver
witnessing a falling bridge. She had not laughed or accepted it with a smile,
which would have been her typical reaction--a reaction she had toward all
absurd caprices of a human race that she still believed was beneath her. But
within the daily work at managing the store and fighting along with him to
secure a profit, she had unwittingly married him in her heart; and all those
outings with Kato sealed the three in work and pleasure. It was her first time
of really feeling as if she belonged to a group and the explosion of it wounded
her in shrapnel.

Upon entering the states she was too fragile and too mortified by all that she
had abandoned to go back to her son in New York State. She spent a few days in
Los Angeles and a few more in San Diego. Then she pushed the rotating gate in
San Ysidro and found herself in Tijuana. She had always wanted the chance to
recall her college Spanish and to somehow use it. American cities seemed so
large and so full of violent accosting figures; but she did not reason that
this large south-of-the- border city that she had chosen to reside in, which
had its toddler days as American military barrooms, had the crime level of LA
and Chicago combined. She didn't really have a reason for her inability to
acclimate. She told herself that Ithaca was too cold but Sapporo had been
colder yet. The bench at the zoo before the spider monkeys had been her
favorite spot in San Diego but the monkeys reminded her of the man with the
unmemorable name.

For a few moments she hypnotically watched her towels and clothes through the
window of the double-load machine. Washing clothes was a dollar and sixty-five
cents per load. Most of the customers paid in dollars, but not all of them; so
the machines needed special tokens to fall into the slots. To her knowledge
doing laundry here was the only thing that was more expensive than in the
states. A teenager was seated in a laundry cart. Her hand leaned on the lever
of the dryer and she pulled and pushed herself in a gentle swinging movement as
if it were a hammock. Two children on roller skates created a roller derby for
themselves but they walked and stumbled more than they rolled and the force in
which they ran into people was nominal.

Just as she was glad that her ex-lover, Candyman, had not been allowed into her
body during one of her more fertile dates and had been kept as syrup on her
tongue, she was glad that throughout the time of living together with Michael
as lovers and then as husband and wife, that no daughter or son was concieved
(for once concieved the embryo never would have been aborted since her
principle of being humane would have been the overriding consideration at the
expense of all else). She was also glad that she and her husband had not
amassed any common property within their nine months of marriage. She liked a
disconnection--a dismembering--that was made neatly in one quick motion of the
knife. She felt that it was good even when the knife was not sterile.

She thought of the salient, life-changing conversation that she should have
laughed off with the frivolity worthy of all human considerations. At the door
of their room in the lodge Michael said to her, "Yesterday while we were snow
skiing and Kato broke his foot, I lifted it and touched him in front of you
without wanting to hide anything. Do you remember? You stood above us. You were
wearing a cap and your bangs were in your eyes; still I could see that you
understood fully. I knew that you had known all along. Can you really say that
you haven't known anything all these months?" He asked her this as if she were
the one who was culpable. He asked her this as if she were the one who made him
feel guilty by this contrived performance of consternation and shattered
innocence.

The stoic that she was, she had not created a dramatic or melodramatic
spectacle unless an ingenuous sense of confusion was a spectacle. There, in the
hallway outside their rooms at the lodge, he condemned her, the victim. That
which preceded it had been Michael rummaging through his pockets, handing her
their key, and then announcing that he would stay with Kato. Naturally, she had
been disconcerted; her feelings had been dominant and ineffable; and the
scenario of them talking like this with their friend on his crutches gazing at
them both in a horrified expression had been so surreal. Her true self would
have laughed and relinquished him. She would have even bought the gay couple a
housewarming gift of his and her bathrobes (maybe just his and his) with
minimal bitterness that would have animated her in light-hearted
mischief-making. Instead a bomb detonated.

Time moved by like a shell-shocked soldier and it dragged her along as a war
prisoner tripping recklessly over landmines. She was battered in shrapnel but
she knew that her wounds were figments of the imagination since they were
merely psychological ones. With the right idea she knew that she could wedge
herself from the microcosm of being a casualty of an imaginary war, escape from
its hatch, and be herself once again. If she were just to open the hatch she
would be out of jealous instincts and the pettiness of a personal life.

Whenever she got bored with reading Mexican newspapers and memorizing new
Spanish vocabulary she would go into San Diego and take bus #9 from Broadway
Avenue until she was in Old Town. Her favorite building was Casa De Miguel
Pedona y Maria Antonia Estudillo. Maybe it had been restored long ago, but now
it retained its tattered walls once again and no refurbished items cluttered
the dense emptiness. It was time: empty and tattering. She felt less alone
seeing it exhibit that, which in an abstract way, was in her own heart. To her
the dilapidated structure was good.

She could easily enough replace a husband. When she was in Asia she had often
sent e-mail to some of those whom she met in chat rooms. There were lonely
males out there just as there were lonely females. She might find an
exceptionally attractive man with responsibility, status, and initiative who
would infatuate her and, if she were lucky, seem like a comfortable friend.
Perhaps they would have a rapport even if their hobbies were different and the
degree of seriousness that she gave her art disconcerted the domineering male
who could not understand the independent fullness of self in ideas. She could
find a man just as she could get rid of her old clothes and replace them with
new ones.

She hadn't bought many new clothes for some time. Her budget wouldn't permit
such purchases now--not even here. She could, however, give some English
classes and with a few hundred dollars each month she could have been one of
those common consumers in outdoor markets, the real people. However, it all,
seemed as if it were clutter (tangible things like clothes and the intangible
things of the mind like relationships).

Once, a musical group from Ecuador was playing in Old Town in front of the
historic buildings, where inside them everything was sold from candles to
homemade fudge. Three old ladies ran up to them before leaving. They stood
beside the musicians who were dressed in red and blue ponchos so that someone
could take their photographs with them. They did not stay for here was proof
that they had encountered another culture in passing. The picture was solid:
more solid than months of experiences in a culture.

Two days before she left Sapparo, she spent hours in an exhausting search for
her son, Nathaniel, the best one could from a distant continent. She called
Michael's sister, Janet, several times but that line was disconnected. A couple
of operators reaffirmed this fact. She went through people search engines for
her ex-sister-in-law whom she never met but whom she believed to be keeping her
son. Still these attempts were futile. She called the numbers of myriad
businesses owned by Michael's parents in the hope that the managers and
directors there might link her to these unlisted, affluent proprietors; but
once she got the directors or operational managers of these organizations on
the phone with trying effort, they would never disclose any information on the
owners who had been her in-laws. She used email search engines in the hope that
Nathaniel had a second account but all those individuals with his name lived in
states other than New York and Kansas. At last she called her Aunt Peggy.

"Peggy, this is Gabriele. How are you?"

"What? Where have you been? We haven't been able to reach you for nearly a
year."

"I have been living in Japan but I'm coming back home soon."

"How long have you been over there?"

"For nine months or so."

"Doing what?"

"Painting."

"Is Nathaniel with you?"

"No." Gabriele was disappointed.

"You haven't contacted that boy in all this time?"

"No. I've tried so many times but it gets me nowhere. I was hoping he would
contact me on his own. Obviously he is not there with you, but maybe he has
given you Janet's number."

"Janet?"

"It's a long story." This call was another dead end.

"He set fire to the house. We sent him back two weeks after he came. We don't
want to see him back here again. I don't know where he is at--Janet or whoever
he is with. No wonder he hates everybody with a mother abandoning him."

"I didn't abandon him; but since when were you so worried about condemning
abandonment. My parents just went on a working trip forever and to you they are
remarkable people; I was shipped off to you, and your old fart of a husband."

"What did you call him?"

Gabriele laughed. "Let's forget the past. It shapes us but doesn't behead us,
so to speak. You clothed me, sheltered me, and gave me food."

"That's right. We bothered with you when no one else would so how dare you call
your uncle a bad name. We loved you."

"Your love for me, your niece, was to approach me like a servant girl. I dare
because it is my telephone call at my expense and I'll call anyone I want and
remind him, her, or them that they are old farts if they are indeed old farts."
Gabriele chuckled. So easily did she amuse herself and how little did anyone
else move her. "And if anyone tries to finger my clit the way your husband did
they should be happy to be called old farts."

"Shut up! Shut up now! Shut that wicked mouth! This is my telephone and you
talk to me respectfully or I'll hang up on you right now. Your son hates you,
you know. Always talks of hating you everyday -- sickening but probably for
good reason; and we got the effects of your unwed mothering experiment -- a
kitchen in flames and one wall in the living room --"

Gabriele hung up the phone and paced the floors like a mad woman. She was
infuriated and yet ecstatic to have at last treated her aunt to the contempt of
words. Virtually all other times had merely been cold and supercilious looks.
Still it was a hollow victory so she set about destroying all of her
photographs--those that she had with her and those that she pulled out of a
lock box at Daiko Ginko. She stripped away each plastic sheet that contained
them -- relating to Michael and Nathaniel or not -- and threw them away. She
did that for all but one. The exception was a close-up of herself and her
mother. Her mother's eyes were sparkling and, within the middle-aged face,
decades earlier could be seen. Gabriele, who was three, was standing next to
her near their home in Bucyrus, Missouri. It was a link. It was a connection.
It didn't exist any longer but she couldn't release it any more than if she had
been an immortal proprietor of the heavens.

The washer began to spin and kick like a drowning animal caught and fighting to
get out. Its squeaking was wild with its vibration but in tone alone it was
similar to the calm, mechanical chirping sounds of pedestrian streetlights in
Sapporo.

She had a child and yet a whole realm of connectedness had escaped her. There
were only failed possibilities now. Nathaniel hated her throughout most of the
year before she "abandoned" him. She had felt it. Now, he had all the reason in
the world to hate her. She looked out to the distant machines--the medley of
Mexican people folding dry clothes; putting wet ones in their carts, seated and
bored; reading newspapers; watching the television that beamed over their heads
or falling into the rhythms of dives that their clothes made in the dryers; and
those purchasing the tokens, soap, and bleach that they would put into their
washers. How human and divine they were! She felt cheered and soothed to see
their distinct faces. They wandered around lost, too. They yearned for
something more, as she did, if only an empty dryer. They yearned to hear the
morning buses that would excrete their dark toxins and take them to their
agendas. They yearned to see the morning sun and the little barefoot boy in one
of the distant colonias staring as the calafia (mini-bus) and the water truck
with its men yelling "El Vagon!" moved up a gigantic hill in a pueblo of polvo
and desert. They yearned for the exchange of ideas that would pull them out of
the sense of being vanquished to the misery that was part of one's fate. But
they were also, in their own limited ways, capable of being Bin Ladens
responsible and exuberant about killing thousands of Americans. Maybe in just a
thousand angry looks toward gringos who purportedly had better lives than
themselves there might be something destructively vile in them. They, like all
perfidious males, no doubt followed feelings of love (homosexual or
heterosexual bliss) abandoning earlier partners who were no longer exotic
dopamine inducers. Maybe, she thought, the vile was inside herself. If the
English language had a word for hating men she felt it now and she knew it was
vile.

She tried the best that she could to pull out of herself but the self needed to
burn away both the past and the pain. Still she tried to ameliorate these
feelings in reason. "So, my Ex has a gay lover...So I am dismissed...What of
it?...The marriage wasn't real anyway; and Michael does not belong less to Kato
just because I once had a signature on a marriage certificate." She couldn't
see how anyone belonged to anyone else, anyhow; and recalled that throughout
most of her life she had been glad it was that way. She tried to let the
morning grace her with its fullness of life. She thought of Tijuana's tamale
and hot chocolate vendors of early morning, the restaurant workers and the
newsstand operators, the pharmacy managers and the street salesmen. They did
not insatiably yearn for more to make themselves happy. They accepted reality's
mandate that there would be no aspirations, no prosperity, and no urgency.
There would just be standing alone seven days a week allowing the stimulus of
sights, sounds, and smells to fill the senses and rescue the mind that tortured
itself from the knowledge that there was deterioration and death, brutality and
natural disasters, apathy and injustice, personal defects that were both mental
and physical, and yearnings for closeness and permanency in the midst of void.
She did not want to think of her husband--her ex-husband, the fact that she did
not feel as if she had a last name (Quest or Sangfroid no longer suiting her,
and "Bassete," the surname of Michael's family before his legal change of it
for himself, not doing anything for her either), and that she was now ripped
from the life of Kato and the imagery of the Orient.

She put her clothes in a cart; and then following her feelings of hunger, she
pushed the cart in front of the row of stools that were near a counter. She
ordered a quesadilla and glanced at the cylindrical twisting carcass on a spit
that would be used for tacos. She listened to the sizzling savagery of pieces
of meat dying a second death within their own grease and slow Mexican music
that moved her like the blowing fronds of palms.

Still her redundant thoughts reeled across the screen of her brain like the
repeated broadcasts of the two jets crashing into the towers. She had gone with
him to Japan on the assumption that the boys would soon follow. She even made
up her mind numerous times that she would obtain them regardless of Michael's
objections and put them in an international school. She was planning to contact
Rick's sister but the months went by so fast. It wasn't much of an excuse. She
had to admit that. Had the two of them really neglected to contact the boys all
this time --she with hers and he with his? They had; for they wanted to find a
part of themselves not linked to them. For him it was the success of this
business enterprise and obviously to engage in the taunting of his untapped
homosexual fantasies toward these boyish Asians. Such was done within this nice
ostensible marriage and partnership with his wife. And for her it was the
specious believability of that rush of energy that was the suppliant groping of
love and to find a less lonely version of happiness in a group which together
were humanity's greatest bondage. Such abandonment was done under the
ostensible label of "demonstrating a creative and independent existence" to her
son.

Seated at the counter she felt a contentedness in being near a beautiful woman
around her age. She even found a contentedness in hearing the meat crackle as
if behind the apparent truth of the injustice of the powerful overtaking the
less-abled in the slaughtering of its life there was another truth that this
was the design and essence of life with a cryptic purpose that perhaps she
would know with a little bit more age and maturity.

The warmth of her mother's kitchen when she was a child as snow pelted against
the windows; the smell of bacon in the skillet; the smell of coffee and the
sight of her mother in a thin nightgown before the stove while her father
coughed away, distant and withdrawn behind a newspaper--how beautiful her
mother was in so many ways in that short time together. Her eyes watered
slightly, and then she had control and the present moment. She excoriated her
maudlin, womanly tendencies and worried that her refusal to fall apart in front
of Michael was catching up with her now. Could the cold tacit hubris that she
superciliously blasted onto Michael a day after the shock dissipated have just
been the facade of a woman ready for a nervous breakdown?

She avoided such thoughts by telling the woman drinking coffee at the counter
some jovial comment of how at this corner of the room the scent was a
combination of soap and bleach blended with those of tortas and tacos. It was
an introductory comment of the environment similar to parties experiencing it,
and as she wished it, it invited a smile of that one individual. Certainly a
conversation beginning with "Hello; how are you?" might die at the first moment
of life. The woman responded with a trivial comment that such smells might help
in digesting the barely digestible.

"I am a bit surprised by the amount of meat that is part of the Mexican diet.
One torta has more meat than I could think of eating for a full month, although
I have to admit I do have a grease addiction for the quesadillas." Aware that,
in bits, her conversation was like an American snob who could not stand
anything other than her own quick, thoughtless tripe of a culture, she wished
that she had said something that was different than this. Then a minute later
she didn't care quite as much. She told herself that having spoken her partial
gripe in Spanish instead of English might have ameliorated any negative
interpretation of her critique to some degree. As she was thinking this she
suddenly realized that she had just taken a glimpse of this woman's larger
breasts that bounced around in a V-neck shirt. She had done this in a
subconscious but still intentional manner the way Kato might in the comparison
of his penis size to that of his new husband whenever they were side by side at
urinals in a public bathroom. Then she looked down at a plate with some
leftover food on it from a previous customer. She scooted it away and then did
not look up for some moments. She was amused and a little embarrassed by her
earlier action. She tried to hide her latent grin. Had her repugnance for men
caused this? She would not be surprised if it were true: sexuality was just a
river of energy that would move in areas where it was less impeded.

A minute later she was still concerned that she had come across as another
snobbish American passing through one of the few cultures left that, for the
most part, retained its essence despite being so near the superpower. She
didn't give a damn what this stranger thought of her but the last thing that
Americans needed were more people hating them.

"What does the H.E. Stand for?" Gabriele continued on to rectify what might
have been a negative impression. She was making reference to the initials on
the woman's blouse.

"Hilda Estrella." The stranger said her last name like she was a glamorous
movie star.

"Are you a star?"

"In everything I do in my small way."

"In a family of stars or with a husband who is a star?"

"My husband is a fizzled firecracker with no bang. It is his name though. I
robbed it from him. It should only belong to me. Don't you think so?" Gabriele
laughed.

"American?"

"No, Gringo," said Gabriele.

Hilda laughed. "Your Spanish is excellent, as it is my English," said the woman
in the world language that had been tossed from American hands out onto the
denizens of the world like a net so as to pull all in one direction. She spoke
in English because, although Gabriele's Spanish was functional, her vocabulary
was callow with a thick American accent.

Gabriele introduced herself as Gabriela and the Mexican lady introduced herself
as Hilda...de da la de Estrella. The whole name flashed before Gabriele like a
Japanese bullet train (or Shinkansen). She couldn't catch much of it.

"Mucho gusto," said Gabriela.

"It's a pleasure to meet you," said Hilda.

"You are the first person in T.J. to speak to me in English.

"They don't know it very well. Most of them are poor so they don't go to
universities none and English isn't taught so often in high schools--not well
and nobody wants to learn it none. They want to know it and not know it. They
don't want to lose their ways. Culture is language and they don't want Spanish
to collapse like a pi-ata. In their ideas of things, the Gringos took away
enough of their land--they don't want the culture to go--out would go mariachi,
bull fights, Juarez Day with children in Indian feathers, Cinco de Mayo
celebrations, and traditional Mexican ballads. In would come George Bush Jr.
signs and the American navy ships. It is a choice like the people in Paris,
France." Gabriele didn't think that there was much of a similarity between the
urbane Parisians and the dust city dwellers of Tijuana but what did she know?
There might be some truth to it so she kept her opinion sealed.

Hilda explained the education which allowed for her fluency in a second
language. Her father, a poorly paid public defender, didn't have the money to
send the youngest to college so he paid for her to study at a language school.

"Did you resent your sister getting what you couldn't have?"

"No, I was very muy muy glad for her. She felt more bad than I did about it so
she introduced me to her boss's bear friend--an old bear who was a friend of
her boss--how ever you say it. That is another story. Where did you study
Spanish?" Gabriele just said that she had dabbled in a few Spanish classes long
ago in school but that she was now living here to give the language a try.

"An American living in Tijuana, asked Hilda.

"Stranger things have rocked the planet, I'm sure," said Gabriele coldly. She
then ordered two quesadillas and two cokes for herself and her friend.

"You Americans are lucky. You can go here and there and stay as long as you
want-- wherever you dream. Most Americans just step into Tijuana just to say
they have been in Mexico but you dream about studying here and do it. It isn't
much of a paradise--this place. Maybe you have gone to other places." Gabriele
gave an abridged account of the places where she had lived.

"To travel is good; but if it was me to do something as this I think I would be
dizzy to stay a long time in one place and then another place to meet and to
lose people."

"Strangely, it has made me dizzy; but not from the travels really. Maybe a bit
from the travels -- a combination of things. Before this I never needed anyone.
I had my own convictions, my own ways, and my own mode of life. When I was
younger I removed men like ticks a lot of the time, screwed and bit off their
heads some of the time--not really but metaphorically, and thought of them --
everybody really -- as unwanted distractions on my studies and independence
most of the time. I never felt lost and lonely until I was married and was
living in Japan."

"There isn't a more lonely thing than this to live together with someone,"
commented Hilda. She changed to Spanish. "People don't grow together. They grow
apart if they are capable of any growth at all-- especially if they started out
as strangers." To Gabriele nothing could be said that was any truer. These
ideas were identical to her own even if hers were as yet kept confined into the
cellar of her thoughts (a place she restrained all ideas until they seemed more
incontrovertible). To hear these secret ideas that still had not dispersed
widely in her own brain come from someone else's mouth was startling. So rarely
did Gabriele hear truth that she often imagined it as something that only she
conceptualized or fabricated. Her muddy puddles of cynicism were evaporating
under the light of the sun. Gabriele smiled her first real smile in months.

Hilda elaborated that this friend of the sister's boss, Stranger X, also from
Guadalajara like her family, promised to her father that if married to Hilda he
would contribute to the family's household expenses and pay for Hilda' s
education. The father told him that if Hilda consented so would he.

"It was a practical decision, really."

Gabriele nodded distastefully. The calculative and the irrational were always
in a woman's head when entertaining marriage. All people had to prostitute
themselves a little to make a living but, according to Gabriele's assessment,
women who contemplated marriage were complete whores. She almost felt sorry for
men if it were not for loathing them so much. Hilda was a whore for knowledge
and so this got Gabriele's approval. "Go on. I'm listening," said Gabriele.

Hilda told her that she had majored in health and physical fitness at the
community college. She graduated but any plans to teach went awry in a
pregnancy, a miscarriage, and then some years of housekeeping. But when her
husband lost interest in her for her infertility and inability to carry a child
when they had undergone such expense and effort to conceive one through a
fertility clinic, she stopped taking care of the house and got a servant. This
allowed her to teach aerobics.

Gabriele listened intensely while her eyes glanced at the cart of wet clothes,
which seemed to her like the great hills of Tijuana dirt but in a medley of
colors and fabrics.

"Why are you really living here in Tijuana? Why not Puerta Vallerta or Mexico
City?" Hilda suddenly asked.

Gabriele began spacing her words into fragments and some of the fragments
contained space as if her mind were moving up and down those hills across all
of the distant colonias, the ocean, and into the past. She said that for a few
weeks, now, she had been staying in a room of a house owned by a "nice woman."
She just wanted to learn her Spanish here and she wanted to learn of
simplicity. "I thought moving here would improve me somehow-- Suppose it
hasn't," she prevaricated. Hilda, who now doubted the sincerity of the
conversation, was beginning to withdraw her attention; so sensing this Gabriele
confessed. "The truth is that when I got married I lost myself to a wifely role
— domesticated Betty Crocker crap and being an unpaid cashier/assistant manager
for my husband's business. When I wasn't at my shift I was learning how to cook
regular western food since he hated Japanese food--sushi, mizu soup, soba, and
all that stuff. Of course, washing his clothes and ironing his shirts. In the
meantime he was seeing someone--a friend...an employee who was dear to us." She
chuckled. "Not someone but the same gender -- a man. He was seeing a man. After
the divorce I came back to the states. I didn't know where to go so I followed
my own shadow and came here."

Hilda looked at her empathetically. She spoke softly. "So many people come to
this ugly place for one reason or another. Some work in the American and
Japanese factories. They often live in groups so they can afford rent. They
earn 150 pesos each week, but what can they do? They tell themselves that a job
like this is better than none. For others Tijuana is a place to sell souvenirs
to the American gringos. They sell this and that on cardboard tables and they
survive. It is a place for a young woman to hope that one of the American naval
officers that she sells herself to will actually want more than a...como se
dice... Anyhow, not being used for sex -- a real relationship. It is where
those lacking emotional resources can recover."

Gabriele caught the air before it came out of her mouth as rude chortling.
"Lacking emotional resources" …th she hadn't heard a more apt and erroneous
phrase to describe herself; but she liked how artfully Hilda used such laconic
sentences to show understanding, to make the two women's experiences cognate,
and to pull the conversation out of the dead-end of the personal domain.

Gabriele smiled thoughtfully with her closed lips. She was pleased that the
serendipitous heat so early in the morning had carried her here the way birds,
without having to flap their wings, soared on waves of solar energy that were
refracted from the ground. She now felt that she was soaring away from the
flares of tortured memories--memories that if personified, seemed to think that
she could somehow rescue them when the only rescue to be had was their own
burial. She was at last leaving the pine trees and the snowy slopes where she
had once skied with Kato and her husband. She was razing that raised foot to
its burial pit and raising herself out of the inundations of yearning in the
pools of Michael's retinas. She was no longer drowning in the deprivations that
had fathered his unfulfilled pent-up yearnings or trapped in her own eyes and
ideas for witnessing what she didn't care to see and, at that point, couldn't
conclusively know. She was demolishing the ski lodge where her former self
stood in front of that door of what was their room with mouth agape, key
tightly clutched, and thoughts wandering lost here and there but aggravating
her with recurrent questions of where she would "fit into the picture" should
her husband's homosexual liaisons be more than a temporary and belated
experimentation. For the first time in so long she no longer felt the
inclination to pull a ski cap down over her face.

For Hilda sentiment had risen the previous year for warmth and stability and
she clung to her husband's side, the old ogre that he was. She begged him to
not leave each night and see this other woman or to see her but to not treat
their marriage with such total indifference and contempt. If she had not loved
him before she loved him desperately then; for to be rejected by an ogre made
her feel uglier than the one rejecting her. She pontificated that love was a
shared experience that could not be dropped one rainy Sunday when it was
apparent from the first ten minutes of the televised soccer game who would be
the winners, clearing the way for daily habitual liaisons thereafter.

She told Gabriele that, while they were living together that last year, she
never knew who her husband saw. "It was probably a woman. I don't know. A
Mexican man, when he is horny and bored, would get off in a hollow log but
never his wife if she has disappointed him."

One night on the Guadalajara beltway, while she was returning to her empty home
with her bags of groceries, there among distant lights in clusters like
grounded stars, Hilda's headlights beamed on the sign "Tijuana." She felt that
second where the new could not be avoided and that out there might be a little
compassion toward her. She headed north to Baja California and then got a job
as an aerobics teacher for the Municipal Sports and Cultural Center of Tijuana.

When their clothes were dry Gabriele invited Hilda to go to the movies. There
in the darkness of the theatre she felt happy but uncomfortably pinned in by
the wistful desire to touch the leathery silk of her friend's skin and this
sense that to do so might bring on the demise of the friendship. As strange as
this yearning, the fear, and the polarity of these opposites experienced
together, was this peculiar sensation of needing to be embraced in the cocoon
of Hilda's arms whereby she might, in this unconditional love of compassion and
understanding, more smoothly reconnect the ridged pieces of self that she had
cobbled together from a fragmented state early in life. She did not know if
clasping her hand would endanger the friendship so she sat there and sweated
with her hand in between both seats. And yet, strangely somewhere in the middle
of the movie she coalesced Gabrielishly. She was restored in shared experience
and understanding and this was all that she required.

She had felt similar emotions of physical repugnance toward Michael. Often, in
their bed, with the enjoyment of feeling her body again after sex as his
motives, she shunned him like a picnic that was infested with ants. The need
for autonomy, hegemony, and harmony that comprised self-containment became her.

Still, in the last moments of the movie she curled her hand on her chin,
smiled, and absorbed herself in light and sound presented as form. She thought
about how Hilda had waited around for her clothes to dry and had helped her put
them in the back of her car. The mystery of possibilities and implications to
subtle gestures dangled above her like a toy of a musical crib.




Chapter Thirty-Five


When considering how marginally educated he was ("bare-assed with a tie within
this professional world of masters and doctors" as the words of such
deliberations), Sang Huin would succumb to the undertow and founder in the
myriad oceanic fathoms of the lugubrious self. Each of those times descending
deep in this silent abyss, he would remember those times of being in his
parents' garage. There as a boy with his broken bicycle, he, the maladroit,
could only fumble a feigned semblance of competence with the alien tools of his
father's screwdriver and wrench. Mixed in smells of oil stained concrete there
would be a feeling of ineptitude slowly trickling through him like the numbing
poison of hemlock. Then there would come those excoriations of his father
telling him that his inability to fix things made him good for nothing and this
poison would dart through the ventricles of his heart and finish what the
subtleties of drowning in oily, nebulous despair could not immediately do. Now,
as back then, he believed that the comments of him being good for nothing were
true even if now the negative judgment calls were for a litany of other
unrelated issues.

Lackadaisical or indifferent (the intense, wanton drifter never even insouciant
when going on rendezvous with his true decadent cravings), the hours of his
days were often extended no further than going from one private lesson to
another, to one gay sauna or another, and then back home to Saeng Seob within a
somewhat hidden malaise. Still they were nexuses; and as fulsomely
inconsequential as they might seem to others if they were able to peer into his
sordid domain and not be repulsed by these orgies on tatami mats, still they
were human connections; and it was human connections that were a man's life
raft and dinghy when floating in the empty effluvia of self, water, space, and
time. For they who were endowed with the ability to see ideas, sense an
endeavor within them, and not only know a reality beyond the personal domain
but experience a personal genius in the mission of transferring ideas to the
world, they were their own buoyancy. And although Sang Huin could see that
truth he was not of such an excellent make. His destiny would not be like those
who were truly happy, they who knew felicity in themselves and that the outside
world was inconsequential.

In meaning-seeking respites no different than at any other time of his Korean
sojourn, he dabbled and danced with his Gabriele and, from buses, taxis, and
subways, read the news about the U.S.A. (now in the thickets of guerrilla
attacks from these liberated Iraqis who loathed the American intruders and
devastators). He contemplated Americans' free expression of violent
inclinations in movies, books, and life -- violent inclinations clearly within
the self or at least in himself, and dwelled in a lonely neediness that was
still motivating him to seek out others in a neediness more akin to ductility
than deference.

He got a part-time job as a sales representative at Rosemary Cosmetics since
his mind still yearned to give the amorphous blob contained therein form,
purpose, vocation, and meaning which still eluded him. His life in its quest
for meaning was like the Bush administration's groping for these weapons of
mass destruction to disprove the obvious: that Bush's hallucinated epiphany was
similar to the sun stroked and deranged Akhenaten. As this "Shawn" needed
secular meaning not in the material world, they needed to believe that the
bushes were God's executioners in Iraq and elsewhere.

Like all dirty bluish-white collared Koreans in search of a vocation as well as
a job, he wanted to work for a big firm: the bigger the company the less small
he would seem to others and himself. This was a typical East Asian reaction;
and the concept that a man was no more than who he associated himself with was
applicable even to one like Sang Huin ("Shawn"), as queer as he was. Rosemary
Cosmetics was no Samsung in size nor did it have much merit in global commerce;
but this was his only opportunity at present and from it he hoped it would be
his mold making him into something solid and patterned or at least not a
deciduous, tenuous leaf tossed erratically with every breeze. He wanted to be
connected and to no longer be tortured by those discombobulated seconds when
his self did not register itself-- a time (in his case usually on the bus
between private lessons) when one's consciousness had a rupture, thoughts
seemed even more evanescent, remembered heads of the people of the past
(including his deceased father and sister) got tangled up on the wrong bodies
or the features of those faces became effaced or alloyed with others' features,
and not having the destination of meaning, the self thus tripped over itself
directionlessly.

But a week into contacting long-term overseas customers to advertise new
cosmetics, reestablish relationships by offering a substantial supply of free
samples, and processing orders on the telephone in a rather menial position
that had no guarantee of leading to something bigger he became less hopeful.
Early into the job he knew that he was just one more cog in one more machine.
Early into the job he knew that it would not make him into this vague, nebulous
concept of a man that he only half-sensed even if fully and wistfully desired;
so he was lost now as he was lost then. But, fortunately for him he was not
entirely lost--almost entirely lost and ineluctably if not indelibly so but not
entirely lost in the complex labyrinth of the thickets of darkness that was in
society and nature as well as one's human nature.

He had his hallowed hobbies which always kept him from wanting to slit his
wrist--solitary hobbies that in one form or another had saved the oversensitive
boy who had felt that his father was afraid of one-on- one contact with him
just as they saved him now. Now the cello was abandoned for the melancholic
sounds of the shokohachi but Gabriele remained steadfast. She was his attempt
to find simple and innocuous pleasure and lasting truths that were not in
sordid and temporarily enflaming raptures of ecstasy. She was his higher
consciousness, his higher authority.

Sang Huin was a city boy designed for Seoul. He liked seeing dual soldiers
guarding each portal of every underpass; the dark green military buses that
waited in Chongno Sam Ga, at Yongsei University, and no doubt in countless
sectors of this sprawling mega city; he liked the drama of tall skyscrapers
undaunted by besieging clouds, traffic rushing here and there as if to foment
the provincial sleepiness of Hanguk society, the variety of people he would
encounter in what was on whole a rather homogenous group of kimchee-eating,
child-rearing, follow-the- leader advocates, and especially passing belatedly
through the remnants of tear gas that had been targeted on boisterous anti-US
troop demonstrations. He liked window shopping through stores that had Buddhist
icons; the sexy galaxy of city lights scintillating like stars; being in a city
where differences were as inconspicuous as rolling pebbles in an avalanche; the
random subway passengers who sometimes, after buying their tickets, would see
him using an English map and ask him in English if he were lost; the
exhilaration of speaking in English with a probable chance that someone in the
immediate area would understand him; and the many American alternatives to
Korean restaurants (shiktangs). He liked buying groceries--those few he
got--beneath department stores; purchasing expensive clothes for Seong Seob who
still resonated as his makeshift family even if he could not relate to him any
more than anyone else; the big supply of English books in various bookstores;
sex and deodorant. The sex was self- explanatory: he had a true weakness to
touch beautiful things the way he used to stroke the legged panty-hose of his
grandmother when sitting on her lap so as to feel the friction and static
against his fingers. As much as he not only wanted to end his promiscuity but
sever sexuality completely for the rationale that pleasure bonding was a
selfish love that stunted his ability to care for someone altruistically, he
was unable or unwilling to do it. The touch, smell, and taste of human flesh
were inordinate delights that bypassed his abstemious and acetic intentions.
And as for deodorant, he, a Korean, did not sweat much, but he, an American,
needed it to feel as if he were not entirely naked. In Seoul, at least,
deodorant was not impossible to find.

Maybe having lived in Umsong for half a year contributed to his metropolitan
enthusiasm since there he was miserable with a malaise ameliorated a little
only on rare occasions of discovering M&M chocolate candies, pancake mixes,
Fruit Loops, and Fruit-of-the-Looms on store shelves. His stay in Umsong had
been like a fearful boy scout in a tent on a camping expedition--a child
looking at black clouds from his small portal, and wishing to again restake his
homestead in the less ominous domain of his parents' back yard. Still, the
isolation had its beauty: mountainous green hills near lush, green rice fields,
and some good times such as when he and Yang Kwam made their way down a trail
in the forest and then spent the night at the Umsong Stadium sleeping on the
vast green Astroturf in the midst of empty yellow seats and stars.


For some brief minutes one Saturday after waking in darkness Sang Huin did not
know where he was at. He could not get his baring. He was still in the dream
remake of an incident that happened to him immediately before he began to write
Gabriele--a haunting memory in a dreamonized state. It was not unlike others he
had experienced such as those of his mother's aloneness when going from the
need to water one plant and then the next (an idea extrapolated consciously and
repressed to his subconscious from the letters she sent to him), or dragging
his sister by the hair and into a forest so that he could stand there and watch
as she was gang raped to death. Dreams were, of many things, seeing the self's
place in the environment and judging of itself as one cloud or part of the
function of a group of clouds.

The dream of his sister was a major literal distortion of the reality it was
based upon, but that was not the case with this one that he had just awakened
from. It, like the plant-watering dream, had more of a literal base. It
pertained to the Korean girlfriend whom he was involved with when he first came
to Chongju. In the dream, as in reality, she said, "You can get a good job
teaching at a private high school--I don't understand why you won't. If you do
this, then with your money and my money we could have a good life together. We
could make a family." He sensed that she would use him the way any woman
studded pregnancies from infatuated man for children who would be her, the
woman's, happiness. He sensed how a male slave was compelled to toil as a
provider to an early demise because of the allure of a woman; and then he told
her, "Living petty selfish lives tree hunting, investing money, house
remodeling, complaining about taxes and the kids' dental bills. No thanks." It
was the first time a thought so critical of his parents had materialized in his
mind from all those repressed feelings that had been smashed under filial
respect in accordance with Korean etiquette. If it weren't for this calculating
feminine conniving, the thought of a normal life with her would have seemed at
certain moments as pleasurable as having one's tongue slicing through ice
cream. The sensation of eating the vanilla of a woman's cold skin might have
obfuscated the knowledge of the forthcoming tonsillectomy. Her eyes were
drawing him in. They were like the placid Great Lakes at night and they
sparkled like the surface of the waters at the occasional passing of boats. The
light from the traffic was her scheming thoughts. "I'm going to have your
baby," she averred as if this solidified the relationship. "Abort it," he
demanded. He hadn't been effete on that real occasion but the dream that
awakened him had a more masculine firmness of will that was not his own; and
hers was a mellifluous, inveigling sound surreal and harmonious as waves
brushing against the beach. "Abort it!" he reiterated, "or I'll - - "

Not able to shake off the dream for a few minutes it was as if he were a very
old and one night the sleep that was supposed to sort his thoughts, feelings,
and sensory details into files of meaning and dates of occurrence had been
ransacked and here he was on his hands and knees groping about the room trying
to pick up scattered paper that had once been the files of himself. It was as
if he were crawling around scavenging for bits of himself, not heeding the
horrified calls of his old wife who nervously maundered her concerns to him
from the bed.

People had come and gone incessantly from his life (the most important being
his sister--taken from him by American violence not the least of which was his
own). Recently Sang Ki and Yang Kwam vanished from his life; but in all, these
phantoms appeared and disappeared without rhyme or reason like the changeable
fish in the small aquarium belonging to Seong Seob's cousin--there at a given
time and then gone. He sat up in his bed only to become instantaneously albeit
vaguely cognizant that he was at home in Seoul even if he was not really sure
what home was. He stared at that body next to him. It was the same body that
was always there. In ways this gentle and cautious being of a few mundane
habits was so known and yet it was alien in most respects. Sometimes he thought
that Saeng Seob elected to be part of this relationship and sometimes it seemed
as if this friend thought of himself as a victimized participant. The latter
could be sensed there amidst tacit clues: a despondent sigh, a pleasant tone of
voice belied by pressed angry lips, indifference to sexual pursuits, or
rehashing his wish to study English literature in America if only he had the
money to do it. The tacit, when discerned, was Saeng Seob's coming to terms
with antithetical summations of the relationship. The compromise was a
suggestion that when choosing between two disagreeable choices he preferred an
unconventional relationship with Sang Huin to the weathering of belittling
comments from the cousin. It wasn't much of a compliment for in all it was a
complement that this relationship existed for whatever time it might last and
nothing more than this. Also Saeng Seob's tepidity did not exactly engender
within Sang Huin the wish to possess another: this "virtue" that was monogamy.

The water of his saliva -- warm, wet, and active -- barely squeezed down the
empty hollows of a constricted area of his parched throat. He put on his
bathrobe and went to the bathroom sink. He sipped some bottled water that was
on the counter and splashed cold water across his face. He looked at his
handsome face in the mirror. It was so fervid in its seriousness and intensity.
Anything that bright had to go out fast. The idea of getting to be an old gay
man like a crumbled old leaf scooting around aimlessly in the breezes was a
thought hideous enough to trigger off random suicidal aspirations. He doubted
that any man's life near completion constituted much but to be an old faggot
without family and rootedness seemed to him a horror that he did not want to
imagine. He was young now but he knew that the jesters of the years stuck their
tongues out at mortality and ran off quickly to hide someplace. His childhood
had absconded this way.

He remembered wishing to cut his wrist during the trial of his sister's
murderer. The unwitting accomplice that he was, his body (even more then now)
had ached in burdensome guilt. Now, with hindsight, he firmly believed that she
would have run back to the power and virility of this successful, married man
no matter what he would have done. Back then she plead for a sanctuary from the
one who owned her in the pleasure of love; but even if he had locked her in her
room, instead of dragging her back to him, on her own she would have gone to
the greed, lust, and ambition that were her interpretation of the American
dream. He knew this at the trial but it did not mitigate his guilt. Back then
the horror, the senselessness, the rape and the slaughtering that were alleged
but unproven with the rotting and effacing of time, the acquittal, and the
general emptiness carried him off to a horror and disconcerted void worse than
death. It was a disconcerted space of months as a walking mannequin with that
one keen perception of seeing how the darkness of selfishness and destruction
were there in all human pursuits. He walked around the living room. He looked
at the clock. It was now 5:30. He stared out of the window onto the traffic of
Seoul. He hoped that Seong Seob did not hate his life with him. He prayed that
he didn't. There was no indication that he did although he was not blind to
Sang Huin's promiscuity. Maybe, he thought, he should release Seong Seob: first
experiences did not make any man entrapped in an embedded pattern. What they
had was innocuous to him but to pursue it any further might distort the man
that Seong Seob might become. Sang Huin sighed and went back to their bedroom.
His fingers slid through a lock of hair on his friend's head. After much effort
he went to sleep.

There in his dreams was this Yang Lin/Shang Ah/"Lucky" character (He never knew
what his name really was) whom he had met that time in Seoul. In ways it was
him, that one who wanted to become a woman and had been envious of a bride
posing for pictures at Toksugum Palace in the Chongno Sam-ga area of Seoul, but
his features were more spread out, his nose more like a pig, and he had a dark
brown Southeast Asian pigment. He was an emaciated "money boy" with a book bag
swung onto a bony shoulder; and he was wearing torn jeans, a grey t-shirt and
the rife stink of his rotting skin. He saw him but in Gabriele's eyes. He
accosted her timidly as she was drawing the reflection of Wat Phra Kaeo (the
Grand Palace): its golden cupolas, stupas, and high triangular roofs shimmering
silver in a fountain that pigeons were using as a bath. She knew his and her
plight instantly: suffering was there, pulling decades from his skin and misery
was intruding on her contemplation of beauty. It was often that way for
artists, for the jungle, beautiful as it might seem from the external view of
its thickets, was a truculent horror for those with no special skills or who
possessed unappreciated uniqueness; and she smiled painfully at ineluctable
fate with its ensuing moral obligations. She asked if he would allow her to
sketch him and he agreed. He said that he had been living on the streets for
one year; that his mother and brother were living in Rattchaburi; that his
father died when he was nine years old; that sleeping on the streets was
"danger"; and that sometimes "nice" people would talk with him when he walked
around the park, but not often.

This was all she knew of him from dearth, shaky, timid words of clogged
superfluous emotion and the deep swallows of his saliva. She fed him and this
ductile creature began to follow her from a distance after they said their
goodbyes as if repudiating the meaning of the word lest it be too
disconcerting. She had guessed that it would probably be as this. Repressing
her contempt for Catholicism, she took him to St. Joseph's High School on
Convent Road and the scrutinizing hope-builder of a nun there referred her to
the Holy Redeemers and the hope-builder of a priest there re-inquisitioned him
and told her to come the following day at 2:00 when the St. Vincent volunteers
would arrive. The priest was unwilling to even give him a corner of a room for
some hours leading to the interview so after taking him to Big C to buy him
some clothes she then took him to her hotel room for she did not want to lose
him to the streets. She mothered him to compensate for the lack of mothering
she had done with her own son. He gave her the gesture of the "wai" [wh-I] and
stammered his gentle "thank you very much" with every glass of water that she
poured for him, the soap and towel which she handed to him, and the cushions
and blankets that she laid out for him. The St. Vincent De Paul volunteers
re-reinquisitioned him at the church but through polite reticence, a taciturn
distrust of social services, or saturnine despondency from so much time alone
on the streets he continued his polite statements that he didn't want any help.
But she insisted that he did and went with him two hours through congested
traffic, the bane of Bangkok, to this referral. When the Maryknoll brothers in
the migrant workers' office reneged on their promise, they went the two hour
ride back from whence they came even though she just wanted to reject the
fragile creature into the thickets of buses, cars, motorcycles, tuc tucs,
buses, and the heavy black trails of carbon monoxide. Tired and sick from a
migraine, she returned to the priest at Holy Redeemer who had indifferently
volleyed her to the St. Vincent charities. In the priest's office at the
rectory she was supercilious and fulminated her derision of those whose
organizational name was a misnomer, they whose congregations were foreign
capitalists whom the church establishment would never alienate, and they, these
emissaries of the Pope, whose ideas of human worth was just the mimicking of
their donors. She felt anguish for this Thai boy and all of the myriad
throwaways of the planet who were volleyed here and there indiscriminately and
if she had been more like a woman she would have cried even if the anguish was
beyond tears. She decided to redeem him herself with her consistent presence
even if he was AIDS ridden (a distinct possibility), their conversation was
palaver (a certainty), and even if she had to stay in Bangkok another month or
two for his sake (an inevitability). But one day at the swimming pool he stood
there looking wistfully at those his age without stepping into the water. She
saw what she had seen when she sketched him that day at the Grand Palace. Then,
his wistful stare was directed toward untainted soccer players engaged, as
boys, in simple pleasures which he would never be able to partake in. He
twitched and stammered out to her that he needed drugs, men, and money, that
the bruise on his arm wasn't really from a dog as if she had believed that it
was, and that she should let him go. Fervent vacuums of passion were sucking
him into the black hole within but when he packed his things he wouldn't leave.
He just sat there on the floor near some rolled-up blankets in incessant dazed
ambivalence until she at last told him to unpack. The next morning, from being
weakened by the evening's migraine or from the restoration of common sense, she
was insistent that he go begging like a monk and leave her alone. He kow- towed
to her myriad times, began to cry, and said that she was too good for him. He
averred that he would not return. She told him that was fine and that she
wished him good luck but when he was gone she blamed herself for not giving him
a few days of complete sanctuary from the streets. That evening, after a
passing thunderstorm, he knocked and anxiously slid a card under the door. When
she opened the door the elevator door had closed.

When he woke up again he could hear the gusts of wind and the movement of
traffic through the open window. There were the smells of dogs beneath the
tattered screen--the living as opposed to the cooked version thought by Koreans
to rejuvenate the body as much as ginseng. There was also that peculiar
amalgamation of odors which was of evaporating urine-on-sidewalk particles, and
the faint exhaust of cars. There was the light of early morning and it all
excited him. He became conscious of the slight snoring of his special friend
and he knew that this sound was beautiful because he cared about him for
otherwise it would have been an unbearable annoyance.

In mid-afternoon they went swimming. He watched Saeng Seob's dives which were
more complex and aesthetic than any he would have been able to do. They were
Saeng Seob's one action of bold maneuvers that always renewed Sang Huin's
interest in him for creatures of motion like himself, he knew, could only
admire base kinetic movements of the outside world. Movement outside moved the
being within: fervid movement that flourished pleasurably in one's loins,
harmonized with hormones amuck in the bloodstream, and revived dopamine that
was to be as lightning through neurons and pleasure receptors of the brain.

When they returned the mail had come. The envelope of one letter had been
forwarded from Chongju to Umsong and then Umsong to Seoul. It was from his
mother who kept forgetting his address just as she forgot that he was living
with a man to have a semblance of family the best that he was able to do. She
wrote that she called the office of Shin Se Gue in Chongju but the telephone
line was disconnected. He knew that she was not thinking either that it had
moved to Umsong or that he was now in Seoul. Small ideas seemed to easily blow
from the posting on the surface of her memory. She was suppressed in busy
habitual action in which thoughts would have trouble permeating through her
hardened, desiccated surface. Her daughter and concept of the world at large
had been mauled by the hungers of the night so of course she was not alive -
-just a hollow ambulatory thing like the swift moving cockroach. There was no
real content in the letter apart from the lack of content itself: a patio table
and a hummingbird feeder that she had bought, the wallpapering of another room
for the umpteenth time, trees, roses, and tree roses which she had planted. He
kept folding, unfolding, and refolding the empty envelope into and from smaller
rectangles, felt warm and flushed, and could only think how there were not any
relatives for the two of them apart from each other. There never would be more
than this; and there would be nothing at all of family with her passing. In a
flare of emotions that were sensitive but callow he wanted to "go home"- -to
abandon every reality that he knew here by jumping through a child's portal.

He couldn't think what to say when he tried to write back to her so he went
with Saeng Seob and his dog for a walk. In a park at dusk they heard the sounds
of birds and crickets and they felt the majestically warm day trail and descend
into a gentle cloak of coolness.

"Did you write your mother?" asked Saeng Seob.

"Didn't know what to say. I'll mail a traditional Korean doll to her or
something. Where would I find something like that?"

"Wouldn't know," said Saeng Seob. The world was America now so why would he.

"Something. It doesn't matter what it is. Some type of clutter-- things: she
likes that sort of thing."




Chapter Thirty-Six


In one perspective she believed that these circumstances not so much governed
by choice turned out to be quite liberating: the lackadaisical dereliction of
motherhood which came about from that love of a man, and the divestiture of her
life in Sapporo the result of a divorce from him. Within that perspective she
was a child humbling herself to circumstance as if it were the mandate of a
parent or god who would supply routine to process her directionless whims. In
such a frame of mind she would think thoughts similar to this: "It doesn't have
to be seen that way -- as child abandonment--that sort of thing. Only
simpletons would judge me or any other thoughtful woman considering and doing
the same. This taking off of a role that does not fit me is just a disrobing in
dawn to take a shower -- and who is to say that my departure is not a
predestined conclusion? I really didn't take off anything. Adagio is the one
who took me off and took off to Kansas. Then I took the flight to Tokyo and
then -- What does any of it matter anyway? I haven't bothered to put on the
mother garb equating it as garbled garbage but who is to say that it is not
better for the boy in the long term? I would need a lower IQ to constrict
myself in instinctual roles like a content biological robot. It is no more
preposterous to believe in fate allowing me this contemplative time than it is
to think that slipping $50.00 in a homeless person's cup would release him from
pain and vice, that altruism perpetuates good, or that a loving god allows
planes to slam into the World Trade Center Towers. If I am bad the creator of
time and the universe is worse. Maybe any being that thinks outside the box
would be perceived as bad by these simpletons -- even God were these simpletons
not so simple as to fear thinking Him evil." The failure of Her Vastness, Ms.
Sangfroid, in motherhood and marriage the result of an adulteration in mixing,
had been more than a bit discombobulating at the times when they occurred and
they were even discombobulating now; but then and now she tried to address them
as external details like an uncomfortable raincoat that she would wear for a
time during a storm which she wouldn't be able to wait out. Since that time
when she was a girl watching her reticent father's rejuvenation from a commune
with himself in his solitary walks on the beach she had sought this acme of
aloneness. Here it was, albeit in a warmer environment than the Antarctic camp
she envisaged for herself, and she shouldn't have been happier.

In a sense this disconnection that had her abscond across the border like a
fugitive at large was as harmonious as the breakers which she would watch for
an hour each late afternoon on the Tijuana beach: harmonic and not missing a
beat; the mesmerizing splashes cleansing the conscience; the optimistic fizz;
and the inconsequence of her seemingly insouciant or reckless actions when
measured against this seemingly infinite and permanent body of water. The
solitary disconnection of the lonely sea was the reflection of her self and
together they whispered inscrutable truths to her consciousness; and surely if
she needed anything to comfort her, she needed the Pacific Ocean. But storm
clouds often coalesced around her diurnal sunsets on the beach before
dissipating into the desert city's heat, seagulls seemed to have a wailingly
ominous sotto voce as they spiraled about in the winds, and her thoughts
dwelled on this Berlin wall which sliced through the Mexican-American shore.
The drab wall with its painted words of "El Mundo partido" reinforced by a
picture of the broken egg shell of a world became uglier and more piercing as
gigantic stakes or prison bars standing out of the water. Each time that she
saw these divided territorial waters they constantly reminded her that the city
and her departure -- really her quasi-belief that circumstances dictated her
withdrawal -- were far from an oasis. She would recall the words of Herodotus
that "No man steps into the same water twice" and this would aggravate a
restlessness in her restfulness prompting her to arrange more frequent meetings
with Hilda than she would have done otherwise. Through socializing, she hoped
to get a reprieve from the bites of conscience that came upon her as stealth as
a vampire.

Certainly Tokyo to Tijuana hadn't been a gentle transition with serendipitous
fate disgorging onto a life the way that it did. The molten heat had changed
the landscape of the self and as its only cartographer she, a divorcee who
regretted having ever mixed with a man, was now beginning to map out who she
was and it wasn't easy.

Now with Hilda at an outdoor table of a lesbian pub, both eating their nachos
and cheese and drinking their tequila diluted in Sprite, her happy demeanor was
a little bit affected. As Hilda renamed the food ("tomales" henceforth to be
called "tofemales") it bordered on giddiness. Happy as she was or was not on
this day of her birth, she could not deny the fact that the ineluctable
stirring of memory was scathing her. Some late nights in her solitary bed it
was more of a lacerating pierce of claws. Before the divorce she would at times
wake up from a dream of a tank running down her son and pulverizing him into
layers of permafrost. After the divorce there were these same dreams but with
him pulverized into dust; and they were mixed with those of finding herself
naked in Isetan Department Store -- Japanese clerks, doormen, and beautiful
bowing welcome-ladies all staring at her in consternation until an Ikebana
instructor in the flower shop threw a blanket over her that was woven in
American dandelions.

The dreams were not from guilt -- or at any rate not much conscious guilt. She
told herself that a little responsible compunction was fine for it reminded her
of others' unfulfilled wishes that in an ideal world she would have liked to
see herself obtain for them but further guilt was unwarranted. She didn't even
believe in guilt -- a goddess balancing so many perspectives and antithesis
perspectives as she was. Sure, the ideal for her son would have been for her to
be a Betty Crocker/Dr. Spock hybrid and to give herself exclusively to
motherhood and child development. However, responsible as one should be to
others how could she have disregarded the strange novel sounds that splashed in
her imagination? If happiness was not in devouring sensual experiences that
brought about pleasure but being a kind, contemplative juggler of human
perspectives (watching, meditating, and loving all passerby) surely this realm
of the divine that separated gods from self-centered beasts could not be
willfully disregarded. Still, even she was a social creature. Despite her cold
independent aloofness she could have had a self easily demarcated by others --
a self that to ever be real at all needed to see itself beyond others' use of
it. For someone like her who was infinite and without parameters, pinning
oneself onto a man's last name was the action of being Mrs. Nobody and so this
Kato and Michael relationship had been the magic pill restoring her to herself
after a bout of a needy illness called love.

That being the case she shouldn't have been happier. So the envisaged Antarctic
seals and walruses were really myriad Mexicans wallowing languishingly in
another overpopulated city. So, the only penguin she saw from the outdoor table
of the lesbian pub was a green uniformed motorcycle cop trudging as quickly as
he could in his boots toward a public restroom where he might lawfully urinate.
So the unadulterated snowy landscape, untouched and untainted by human hands,
was lucky to have very few palm trees as deeply rooted in hard clay soil as it
was -- soil arid as desert sand. And peaceful Camp Gabriele in Antarctica
turned out to be TJ, a city filled with drug addicts, drug lords and perhaps
one or two intoxicated goddesses like herself.

Tonight with Hilda, shaking her booty in the pub's adjacent lesbo- disco hall
as if both had anything outside of contempt for men in their minds, She drank
more booze like all goddess predecessors from Hera and Aphrodite to Shirley
McClain.

Her afternoon had been spent depicting miscellaneous individuals waiting in a
queue in front of the immigration building which was the portal to their jobs
in San Ysidro or San Diego; and from there, like a beggarly Indonesian
caricature artist instead of the successful artist that she was, she would sell
her paintings on the street "for nickels and dimes," (each a hundred pesos or
some such sum if subtraction for policemen extorting money were figured into
the calculation). She addressed such policemen in a taciturn manner with hard
stony supercilious eyes made all the harder by that male look of wanting to
fuck the Gringa with the attitude.

Head and body spinning separately on the dance floor with a shot of pure
tequila in her hands ready to be devoured so she could be devoured in its fire
(the base instincts of mankind wanting to mutate an individual into flames), in
one moment she was telling herself how relieved she was to no longer be the
inane thing in this little box of the personal life and the next moment she was
reminiscing about the past foolishly. She thought of romantic walks with
Michael through cherry orchards; their long hours in partnership at the store;
she, her husband, and Atsushi Kato eating sushi, soba, mizu soup, and
okanimiyaki in museum restaurants; she and Kato making deformed sumo wrestlers
out of ice; she and Kato's sister scrubbing each other's backs in a sento; and
of course Kato leading them to sites and to her newly founded interest in the
native people of Japan, the Ainu.

But her best memories of then, as with all sundry memories in general, were of
being alone for she was always trying to squeeze her head and neck through a
small portal to the entity. She was always trying to glimpse ideas and still
depth beyond this world and deep within the self. Back then there were solitary
ponderings in summer walks along the coast of the Sea of Japan. There, walking
on prodigious cement slabs shaped like tacks, which stopped the erosion of the
beach by high tide, she turned toward ocean pointing to America and
contemplated all. She took long walks in street markets and along shipyards,
each street of the metropolis smelling like fish. She was alone then and it had
been good. Now it was dirt and pinatas; colina deserts and an eternal sun; and
Mexican drunks, beggars, and vendors along the bridge that went over the
contaminated river. As the cool air seductively concealed the breadth of its
heat in the dirty desert called Tijuana, so she shrouded herself in a sense
that she was free from the powers of men, sexuality, mythology, motherhood, and
all human concern that gnawed into one's entrails.

They were returning to their apartments with the expectation that Hilda would,
by tradition, dunk Gabriele 's face in a birthday cake. In the car she thought
of Nathaniel and her property with deep homesickness. She thought of her liquid
assets that were mostly embezzled by her ex-husband but were in part tied up in
stocks and bonds. Something was amiss.




Chapter 37


Her ongoing separation from her house, land, and financial resources could have
made her succumb to an emotionally mutable perspective of feeling, for a time,
as if she had lost everything and then to a feeling that she needed to hurry
back to New York State before what little she had was all lost to her. She
didn't even know for sure the name of this lawyer of the ex-in-laws--in-laws
who in their own elusive way were also nebulous figures. This lawyer of these
Bassetes (ex-husband going under the name of Quest) supposedly diverted some of
the interest of her savings to property tax, the maintenance of the house, and
no doubt whatever the legal expenses were. It was property that, by now, could
be razed to the ground and paved with a highway for what she knew of it; and
such neglect at being responsible for herself, an aberration from who she was,
kept disturbing her equanimity.

Her placid state of mind could have easily been ravaged by maudlin brooding,
homesickness, maternal stirrings of instinct, and multifarious emotionally
fueled reasons to return to Albany. And it would have been so without
determined supercilious will that rebounded her back to her stoic, rational,
and insular existence. There in her supercilious brain, amidst the endless
walls of tidy, barren, and ostensibly eternal gray matter, she would soar
within curtailed bounty and the journey within would seem as an ongoing
discovery on the edge of a non-spherical universe. But sometimes without
warning the eternity would become a constricted little room and then she would
be nothing but a claustrophobic black bird that one day years ago got trapped
in the living room of her trailer in Ithaca when she was cleaning a window.
Like that sight-trusting bird ready to window-bang itself into oblivion rather
than accept the conclusion of pain, obsessed with thought she would crash
repeatedly against the walls of her brain. In such migraines she almost felt
locked away in her cold, impersonal thoughts-- locked away behind walls bigger
than any the American government could envisage against Mexico. She would seem
locked away in thoughts and only this, unable to conceptualize a higher and
more unfathomable wall than this. Would not Parmenides have been abhorred to
hear the "nous" so defiled. She didn't care. Heraclitus was now her unsung
hero; and not even Plato or God himself, if there were one (which there
wasn't), understood migraines except those who experienced them. And sicknesses
of all types were exacerbated all the more in foreign countries even if one
were lucky enough to have a native friend like Ms. Quest's Hilda who had held
her head steady and tilted to the toilet on a couple occasions.

Property: she would define it as that claim on a person or thing to seem to
oneself to be. It was like that idiot, Alan Shepard, putting an American flag
on the moon; but it was from that idiot, Shepard, that, in girlhood one of her
more original ideas was reinforced enough to become a calcified decision or at
least a determined perpetual caprice. At the age of eight, seeing those rerun
black and white images of this so- called "groovy" astronaut as he bounced
around the moon with the stars and stripes (these declarative bounces of
ownership and half expectations to encounter a whole host of mooners to pose
his symbol to), and recently having learnt of a place on Earth not rife in
human herds, she decided to stake her flag on Camp Gabriele, Antarctica in that
self-declared city of one. Now, as then, she knew that she had never had
anything but herself to begin with and that this was as she liked it.

Being divorced, she could have clung to these things that were hers, declaring
them as such in her own mind to reiterate that she was a separate being from
what was once her husband or was once believed to be her husband. She could
have felt victimized and vulnerable from this chemical volatility of mixing
with people and men, these two species that she might have enjoyed had she
thought of them as pets. An emotional neediness could have rushed her back to
motherhood and attempts at freshly burnt chocolate chip cookies. With less
intelligence she might have even thought of it as her maternal calling to
nurture him, her ungrateful son, and cater to his selfish whims under the guise
of love and doing good. She could have feigned a contentment within the narrow
parameters of this easily made/easily fumbled role without noting the
hypocritical and selfish neediness that would have been therein especially for
a woman like her, a returning child deserter. It would have been so had she
believed in feeling something about anything and to allow feelings to drag her
around; but for her even succumbing to numbness was a very peculiar state to be
shaken off like a lint-ridden blouse.

She was the one who had been barely able to embrace the favored one, Rick, on
that first severing of Michael and herself. On that day of the first, less
consummated, closure to specious romance she had, in a sense, embraced him
albeit no differently than the fall of a metal bar at a toll road. Parting from
Rick on that day, internally she had been more like the lachrymose stirring of
a statue of Mary, Mother of God, but the boy would not have known that. For
him, who had lost his first mother to breast cancer, he would only have that
memory that her arms came down on him and then raised up like that bar at a
tollbooth.

And if she were to continue in this quest to remove herself from this ownership
mania of this self-proclaimed American brand of the common herd, she would
continue to do so with the same dry, permanent logic. If the means of defining
ownership of property were a mutual claim of ownership by the person to the
land and the land to the person the most recent contracts would have taken
place in the 19th century when the deceased was united in the ultimate act of
consummation: the decay into that plot of land which had sustained him or her.
That being true, she reasoned, she owned nothing. It seemed to her that if it
were true of the land the mutuality of the contract would be even more of an
imperative condition in human relations.

On weekends in Japan such an enormous exodus of people would come out to do
their shopping; whereas for her, having had no firmly set schedule that
enslaved her and not needing to release an enslaved being in the unbound
weekend freedoms of malls, she had found a more internal brooding in the
Hokkaido cold. She had feasted on poets and philosophers. She had learnt of
Japanese history, art, and traditional mask carvings.

Here in TJ, impecunious as she was, she couldn't have bought anything major had
she wanted to. A portable black and white television, which she aptly called
the "noise box" or "noise companion," had been her most expensive purchase. But
this matching of circumstances to a repudiation of ownership, far from being a
grievance against fate, was liberation like that felt at being naked and under
a hot shower. It was an ablution from soiled things sticking onto her and she
was glad it was that way.

She found great creative energy from being here transposing the new environment
to the permanency of color and theme that man's impermanent and mundane
movements seemed to lack; and she almost believed that creativity lay within
this country and culture instead of the omnipotent Self. It seemed to be there
in this defiant city that despite being conjoined to San Ysidro, California,
nonetheless maintained its distinct character: brains as blank slates to
English, pinatas dangling from store awnings, and children wearing Indian
feathers in celebrations of Juarez Day or running around in scanty rags in
celebration of the day itself. But really TJ was not the cause of her
creativity. It was just a reminder of her own defiance of stale, patterned
existence--a defiance that expected and demanded novelty in Tijuana's warm sun
and cool, piercing shadows. But it was more than the connection of land,
artist, and paint. Here, within, was a tame volcanic oozing, frothy as waves,
reshaping her clay landscape apposite to her liking. To wake up each morning
anew in being exhilarated her: now an artist of a new land; recently a
Spanish-babbling pseudo-lesbian consummated once via Hilda if sex were a
consummation of anything; immediately upon arriving in TJ she had been a
remover of old bourgeois skin and a student of Spanish; and before that, she
had been a ripped rag doll in such consternation about the "Kato thing"--that
"kato thing" tearing out the seams of the fabric enclosing her stuffing in such
apposite serendipity.

There on the city bus, her seated stiffness jiggling like jello no differently
than the tacky homemade sign of " La Playa/Calle Linda Vista" dangling from its
windshield, Gabriele again recalled the delusionary socialized will that had
possessed her. She reassessed her time in Japan with the same results. She
surmised once more that the doll that she had been or had pretended to be
deserved to be unthreaded, destuffed, and remade. With her detached eyes
ensconced in sunglasses, she glanced at the rear of the bus where Hilda sat.
They had been separated at the time of stepping into it by a sparse
availability of seats so now she could not see her very well in the throngs of
those who were standing. Still there a corner of her was, a conspicuous being
with quasi-blonde hair and an aloofness no less "unfriendly," as Michael spoke
of her own "bitchiness," than herself.

Seated alone, she discerned that the separation at present was good for both of
them. Earlier, when on the beach that they were now returning from, Gabriele
had smote her friend with a cold stare. Considering that Hilda had repeatedly
served the volleyball on the beach as if she were trying to make a slam dunk
with it, of course this desperate attempt to win the game had annoyed and
amused Gabriele. She would have laughed at the quasi-volley morality that
defied the spirit of the game and she would have congratulated her, more or
less, had a larger issue not preceded it.

"Fuck, don't tell me that little swim has pooped you out already, Hilda."

"No," said Hilda as if she were not sure whether to make her monosyllable into
a statement or a question; nor if it should be positive or negative.

"We've just put up the net. Serve the fucking ball! "

"Gabriela, I was just thinking that -- "

" A positive thought or something quite negative?"

"My own brilliance. I can't see that it is either one."

"But, unlike you I foresee storm clouds ahead -- clouds of my friend's own
making." Gabriele chortled but Hilda smiled malevolently, moved a few feet
back, and sat on the sand to tie her loose shoelaces.

Hilda was feeling too loose (either too dissolute or too unwed and so not
dissolute enough in the apparent absence of romance and absence of belonging
that was part of a couple's merry-making), and this manifested itself to
Gabriele's sagacious discernment. "You know, you should not laugh at your own
jokes," Hilda criticized her. "You can be amused by yourself -- God knows you
are so good at that anyhow, playing alone in your sterile ideas -- but that is
as far as it should go."

"What is your problem?"

"I don't have any--just yours--what you don't concern yourself with."

"Oh? Sorry. Like what? What don't I concern myself with? You?"

"No, not me. I don't need anyone. Forget it. None of it is my business."

Gabriele stuffed some snuff into her pallet and then scratched her head for a
few seconds. "It's a beautiful late Monday morn, Hilda," she said in the hope
that from placating words and prevarications the noxious mood would disperse
and vanish into air like smoke. " I for one want to seize the day. All the
mental prostitutes are being exploited, except for you and I who have some
sense about such things and will probably live to be 120 years old as a
consequence, God forbid! " She pulled out two cans of beer from a cooler and
spit out the dark tactile saliva that had been littering her mouth in senseless
mass and clutter no differently than planets in the void of space. As
perspectives were always dictated by the demands of the body in those who were
not in full control of their minds, Gabriele had a hunch that Hilda was
experiencing menstruation and feeling resentful that their physical encounter
was not followed by redundant ones. If so, she surmised, Hilda's mood was a
combination of hormonal imbalances and withdrawal symptoms from dopamine not
arriving in the pleasure receptors of her brain in quantities commensurate with
that earlier experience.

Hilda feigned a more pleasant smile despite herself. "Engaged as we are in
contemplative leisure." These were words she often heard from Gabriele and her
bantering mocked them good-naturedly.

"Well said, and in English to boot." They had departed from the world of
stress-ridden fools shifting their needs for pretty escape art and aerobic
therapy onto them. They had departed from the imaginary world of believing
oneself to have importance catering to others' wishes and had submitted
themselves over to the salt inundations of the Pacific Ocean. They had
submitted themselves over to the entity as much as tepid will allowed. For at
present neither of them would drown themselves to be fully and foolishly part
of the entity.

Seated beside her friend, Gabriele incrementally shaped a harder replica of her
from the mold of the subject and the plaster of the dampened sand. In part it
no longer looked like Hilda but an effigy of Akhenaten.

"So, what about me don't I take responsibility for? What is the source of this
anxiety for my sake?"

"How am I to tell if you suffocate me?"

"I'll be extraordinarily careful when I get up to the face. Don't worry."

"I've rested enough. Let the games begin," Hilda giggled.

"Not right yet. Give me the answer to my query and this stiff mummy will rise
again."

"I was thinking at the time that you shouldn't be with me. It isn't like we are
a couple. I was thinking to myself that you should be playing volleyball with
your son. I worry about him not having a mother."

"Do you want me to leave you, Hilda?" Despite the withdrawn and impassive eyes
her lips were compressed into a smile and she was ready for any answer. Any
answer would have amused her, but she was betting on a particular muddled
response. Having a keen enough discernment of human behavior that she could be
flawlessly "scientific" in predictions remained Gabriele's goal, and she wanted
it to be ongoing unlike all other forms of epiphany.

"I don't own you. Come, go, or stay for life. It's all the same to me. Well,
all right not fully. Maybe I care some but to tell you the truth, I don't know
what you think of me or what you want; and the reality is that you are a mother
-- I'm not -- so do what you have to do."

Gabriele had predicted each meandering and sinuous thought with accuracy. Still
she said, "No prevarications. Frankness, feeling comfortable to be such, doing
it in respect, and measuring in other realities in as objective manner as
possible -- a relationship is relating and we do it with the perfection that
only goddesses can do in such matters." She knew that her positive summary was
from the overall relationship rather than this moment in time. A more myopic
perspective would not have produced a full rendering of truth. Reality in any
sense was more than any conscious registering of it. It was more convoluted.
Although perhaps no different than the jealous remarks of Hera to Zeus, Hilda's
acrimonious tone seemed boringly uncelestial. She was to some degree saying
that if it were the ending of their intimacy then she, Gabriele, might as well
head across the border back to the wealthy of San Diego. One aspect of their
relationship had been an appreciation of self-containment, but here Hilda was
jealous of it. "About my son, I don't know where he is."

"That's never made any sense to me."

"Either he's still with my aunt and she doesn't want to admit this fact or he's
with my untraceable sister-in-law in the domain of her maternal possessiveness;
but he is okay wherever he is at, and by now not so keen to play games with
me."

Gabriele had not been able to concentrate on the volleyball game with Hilda
from thinking of her son; and exploiting this weakness through unscrupulous
serves, Hilda had won the game. Now, riding on the bus, she was no less
irritated than before. It was an irritation at being reminded of her own
negligence. By bringing a being into the world one was contractually obligated
to nature to care for him and to see that his life came to good. Such a woman
was obligated to forfeit her own growth to grow offspring. This was her own
moral code gained from contemplative reason and she had violated it.

Gabriele stared at a couple of college students dressed in their uniforms. The
male was comparing his large dark hand to the female's smaller and lighter one.
This hand-play caused Gabriele's face to cringe in repulsion. This rapacious
need to extend beyond oneself in mergers with other persons violated human
decency. To want to know more, be more, in all life's activities was the
precept of Aristotle; and certainly this girl wanted to know what it would be
like to wear the man, to share his thoughts, and to merge with him. And her
body was telling her there was intimacy in this most intense lowly pleasure and
pain of him riding within her. Still, the lesser knowledge that it was, it was
repugnant by being so void of anything wise. These human beings linked their
cars so as to be declared a train as if a car alone really were so small. The
linking of a series of defective cars running along on a defective track surely
was not a successful attempt at extension; and from now on, she vowed, her
caboose would not be banged into such links.

A woman who was standing with her child moved up to the front of the bus and
sat the child on a padded hump of the transmission near the bus driver's gear
shift. It was obviously difficult for her to keep the girl seated and the
mother applied reasoning with admirable patience and self-restraint. Although
Gabriele could not hear what the mother was whispering to the fidgeting child,
she heard the child's responses of "Si" and this appeal to reason seemed
lovely. It was the length of the talk and the delicacy by which the woman
addressed the child's sensitivities that saturated Gabriele in beauty. She was
beginning to see motherhood in a new light. She was beginning to think that
these preconceived notions that housed her were houses of straw and could
easily be blown away.

Perhaps, she thought, beyond conveniences, vaccines, and modern gadgets that
often reduced "mental prostitution" to a 5 day affair, on rare occasions one
stumbled across enlightenment in modern society that heretofore rested in
voluminous, rarely read publications of deceased sages. Perhaps "God," this
unfathomable entity who reacted indifferently to human affairs including
thousands perishing hideously in the World Trade Center, was now sticking his
tongue out at her and calling her a "know-it-all" in such an invigorating
event; but it defied logic that a deity who would smash entire civilizations in
the palms of its hands as if humans were mosquitoes would think her, this lone
individual, worthy of the contempt and enlightenment of the tongue gesture.
Even more, why should she believe that God sat her on the bus to see this
mother and child as if she were the honored guest in the audience of a great
symposium. Not being satisfied with her atheistic conclusions in this strange
world, she was again left with the conclusion that something did exist out
there, that permanent substance that was the entity or the prime mover, and it
existed outside human logic.

A couple hours later, still in shorts and sunglasses (bathing suits worn
underneath), she and Hilda sat down at an outdoor table of the lesbian pub.
They were in the middle of dinner and a fourth shot of undiluted tequila when a
woman uneventfully passed by their table and went inside. "Nice ass!" said
Hilda.

"Huh? For Heaven's sake it is a padded seat and tool for excrement. Really,
Hilda, is there nice and mean, nice and ugly, nice and not useful to such
things unless a fluke happens where one was born without an ass." It was then
that she decided to return to America.


In her sleep on an American Airlines flight from San Diego to Albany Gabriele
dreamed that she was with Hilda once again on the beach. They were in front of
a volleyball net witnessing the descending sun when Hilda broke the ineffable
silence.

"You say bullshit all the time. The things you say are so true and so false.
You are so profound about temporary families, selfish children, marriage as
weak people running away from the solitude that is part of inhabiting one's
head, that work is prostitution, things as ball and chains to carry around,
claiming one's essence, blah blah, but life isn't objective. It is subjective
-- so you miss your husband, son, and things because being without them would
make you naked."

Gabriele then took off her shirt in protest. With icy eyes, and bouncing boobs,
she attempted successful counter maneuvers against Hilda' slam dunk serves. Her
hardness crackled through the air beyond an impassively proud countenance; but
she justified it in her own mind, the only mind that mattered in such petty but
necessary judgment calls. She told herself that even if this wariness of social
situations were an imperfect instinct of primitive man to quickly assess the
danger of a given social situation its having persisted to present to free one
of her social instinct was to its merit.

She woke up from a tray of food being passed unto her. She felt a peculiar
sense of being unsettled and wanting to know what was real and what was unreal.
She wanted to find out how to keep from being swept up into one illusion or
another--she who in recreation flitted facts in her imagination from
biographical profiles of the cabinet members of Germany and the names of
successive presidents of Moldavia to the characteristics of albino frogs,
myriad owls, and Henry and William James. Was the present moment best
celebrated in thought and contemplation, in action, in study, a shot of tequila
and glib, frivolous talk with Hilda at the lesbian pub, a swim, and a movement
of limbs? Was it possible to live life without being in its illusions? Hilda
began to fade away and Nathaniel ("Adagio") and the Man With the Unmemorable
Name became stronger.




Chapter 38


When lacking that introspection which might conjure bits of a "real"
destination and purpose little related to the external factors surrounding a
life, a self can only seem to be such in its incessant spinning and
preoccupation with movement. And so it is for him, glutton that he is for
movement in his Fiat Coupe with its turbo engine, vibrating phallus of a
gearshift, maximum legal carbon emissions spat into the chaotic world, the
bruit of rap music (his reflection) blaring from the CD player, and the motor's
cacophony flooding him with the sexual rhythms that cascade in his veins.
Together the man and the machine are Descarte's concept of dualism. Together
they are an expenditure of energy and only this.

That is not to say that Nathaniel has been without any contrived sense of
destination and purpose in all these months of itinerant wandering. With the
need to concoct reasons to justify one's movements as a condition of
consciousness, he has feigned his share of plans, purposes, and agendas. The
easiest contrived sense of destination compelled him to travel to San Antonio.
There, for five months, he easily imposed himself into the bed in Hispanic
Betty's one room efficiency since the need for enflaming pleasure and extension
was so pivotal in both the callow man and the older woman. With Betty
perfecting the role of sycophant, being there could have remained exciting to
him for a few more months and tolerable for a great many more had she not
absconded into the battered women's shelter leaving him to face the landlady
and the unpaid rent on that emptied efficiency.

Now there is the long drive to Kansas, but it is only in having come so close
to its borders that the idea of destination seems to be the spurious murmurings
of a self-needing to aver its existence. It is in going so far, so close, that
his mother's relative seems so unrelated to his life. He has no one. He feels
that it has always been this way and that it has been good.

He turns off the engine and places the nozzle in the aperture of the gas tank
triggering certain sexual associations that are part of his adolescent
susceptibilities. Vague impressions of the violence he has imagined himself
capable of perpetrating amalgamate loosely with others he has in fact
perpetrated, making the distinctions less obvious than they should be. In his
naps in the car earlier this day (naps on the side of the road the result of
mesmerizing taps of rain on the car's face and chaise as well as the monotonous
drag of the windshield wipers) both what happened and what could have happened
connected together fully and strangely. Then what might have been was no
different than what was. Each time waking up in his car he was startled by a
fiendish nightmare of himself that was worse than he was; and he wondered if he
could be a less deleterious force if he were to channel his misogyny in small
actions against a woman, any marginally attractive woman, who would think of an
occasional slap as a chastening tool and an aphrodisiac. To subtly ooze out
caustic contempt on a tolerant loving woman instead of allowing it to be
repressed and to foment underground like molten rock ready to disgorge seemed
the kindest thing to do.

There in the rain he stares at a Laundromat, which is adjacent to the
convenience store and the filling station. As he removes the nozzle the nerves
in his neck begin to twitch like the bodies of crawdads when he used to snap
off their heads. He remembers being in such a Laundromat as a young boy: there
with his mother, both eating the French Cream sandwiches that she would order,
and riding around in a cart. Having made the simile of his nerves being as
decapitated crawdads, he remembers scoffing at Rick's horrified and demurred
expressions to the point where the boy, who also had been cornered by
circumstance into a cobbled family structured from two lone adults with their
sexual urgencies and agendas, began to immolate Nathaniel's actions. He
remembers his mother witnessing this snapping of the crawdad heads, and this,
his corruptive influence on the favored one. He recalls how she attempted to
embrace this lachrymose Rick in as much as she was capable of embracing
anything in her hardened hubris walls, the merciless beatings of him alone with
those bear paws of hers, and then taking that favored one shopping without him.
He tries to stop himself from thinking of her, which is difficult for him since
all his years are in some respect intertwined around her.


Gabriele sat at the computer in the bedroom of her house writing email. She had
been in that house for nearly two months and had rarely communicated with
anyone until the change that took place two weeks earlier. As laid back as she
was in her lazy-boy recliner of solitude she was like any couch potato who had
too much of a good thing and it had been like that for a score of days. She
needed to stretch. She needed to extend outward.

Dear Hilda:

 Hmm, blisters, cold sores and the like. Gee god. I'm no nurse so what would I
 know? Iodine for the former and staying off your feet would be my only
 recommendation. Yes, I espouse the same anti-work themes intractably. Work
 less and contemplate more and then you can say that you actually lived some
 moments of each day instead of this unreal incessant moving, futuresque
 planning, and, akin to slavery, catering to the wishes of others to have a few
 pesos in one's pockets. All of it thwarts the present moment

 Regarding this guy who asked you to the bullfight at the stadium a las playas
 you don't need my permission. You are my moon but I'm not Alan Shepherd
 staking my flag into your heart. I'm glad the pendulum swing to the same sex
 is now over and a more subtle and neutral momentum is beginning. Still if you
 are going to give up women why stop there? What's more revolting than a man?
 And not to deliberately make you happy, which it will, I am jealous albeit on
 a nominal scale as anchored as I am in reason. I must tell you that my happy
 month and a half of self-containment in my home, following my politely rude
 expulsion of the tenants, ended in a sojourn through hell as one might expect.
 This sister in law, Sharon is--well, I don't want to say anything negative.
 She has bona fide reasons to hate me so who am I to stop her? Needless to say
 I didn't score any points on the phone asking that she give me Rick too. She
 was justifiably irate and although the door did not slam in my face when I
 finally did go there (unlike the phone fiasco with the receiver slammed into
 my ear) being there was unpleasant. When I came there I didn't know whether I
 should play the disoriented ex-wife and the contrite transgressor as an
 expedient so I just stayed me throughout my time there opting for being true
 to myself and to let the dominoes fall all around me. It seems to me that all
 noble people project an image of a given thing to a listening recipient which
 shows it to be the way the thing really is regardless of the consequences. A
 cat can pretend to be stealth and invisible, but does that mean it is smart?
 How clever are disingenuous actions really? Aren't most problems on this
 planet due to this animalistic self-preserving cleverness? I think so.

 The last thing I wanted to do was to score points with that snobbish hag ("My
 family often goes to art auctions to buy real modern European art") or to pull
 the kid into the car with sympathy. The idea of being contrite and
 ingratiating myself to a child for adult choices that are never ideal is not
 my way of spending a day.

 Sharon was half way entertaining when it came to talking about Michael
 --parents pushing him into a marriage so he ran off to marry this old hag,
 yours truly. She thought it would disconcert me but I can't think of anything
 more intriguing--nay, not life on Mars or cosmology--nay, nay, nay, nay, but
 knowing an ex husband's petty psychological profile and dirty laundry. I asked
 her if Michael was always running around with his male friends a lot prior to
 my marriage. This shut her up.

 She seems to take on and off men like her panties--now with a black candyman.
 They are the best sexually. I'd know. Seems to be searching for that man who
 will help her define herself and needing the consistency of 2 boys not her own
 in the meantime. Now as then I feel sorry for her. She was so lugubrious the
 whole time like taking Nathaniel would devastate her world. I told her that we
 would often arrange get-togethers with the two boys but this worsened things
 by making her despondent.

 About Nathaniel, in this room of his with all its rebellious musical noise and
 pop culture clutter in accordance with Maslow's hierarchy for adjusted and
 less well adjusted children alike, he just stared at me with dead eyes like a
 Jew about ready to be gassed. Then, he said, "One bitch is about the same as
 another." I had to laugh at first and then I grimaced. When I removed the
 arrow from my heart (pardon the clichZ) I almost felt relieved to not be
 declared a "f-- bitch" although he is quite young and surely with time this
 will no doubt be a forthcoming utterance of his lexicon. After all, boys are
 known for their ingenuity. I told him he could choose and once chosen he
 needed to own up to his choice like a man and make the best out of it. He said
 he hated Rick and for this reason he would go back with me. So this is my fate
 granted unto me for wanting a connection, my version of family, and yet not
 wanting its obligations to domineer over me. --Always, your friend, Gabriele.

She deleted "always." It was a ludicrous word when probably the universe itself
was temporary as all things within it that were unequivocally temporary. She
changed it to " --your friend, Gabriele." But were they friends, more than
friends, or less than friends? She couldn't decide so she made another deletion
in favor of "--yours intractably, Gabriele."

 P. S. Cold sores be dammed should a person keep his/her own tongue in the
 happy domicile of his/her own mouth

 P.S.S. (not piss even if it pisses you off, and I hope it doesn't) Do you
 remember me mentioning the man with an unmemorable name who wired me that
 money for my plane ticket? Well, of course I paid him back on the first day
 with interest (a 50 percent Gabriele gratuity), but a funny thing happened. I
 married him. Don't worry though. It means little beyond spilled ink. So, what
 then does it mean? It means what? It means that a child needs the specious
 illusion of permanency in family and an adult needs a friendship on paper that
 states a committed level of consistency beyond casual friendship. If women
 could sign an equivalent document I'd sign one with you, my beloved Hilda.
 Both of you are important to me in your own distinct ways.

She remembered an incident from a few days ago:

"Why should this be any different: this Unmemorable Russian guy, Michael, me,
and even the favored one. You push us aside like crumbs on a table."

She laughed. "Crumbs you are not; and there has never been what you claim as
the favored one unless it is you."

"That's a lie."

"No, it isn't. You've always said he is nicer than you so sometimes it is more
pleasant to be with those who aren't so temperamental. But you are my son, and
you are the favored one."

"'Have always.' You haven't seen me for two years so how would you know?"

"At least you used to admit that he was nicer than you are."

"You often took the favored one places."

"To the grocery store to pick out cereal and pop tarts. Unlike you he would
never grab an item of canned food that was stacked like a pyramid. He would
never cause an avalanche in a grocery store. I never had to worry about taking
him anyplace."

"And Rita/Lily Lily/Rita?"

"Was that a question? What about her?"

"Yes, what about her?"

She could have said, "She was too crazy" or "She was too far way" but she opted
for the largest acknowledgement of what seemed to her to be true. "I did care
about her but I guess I did sweep her under her welcome mat."




Chapter 39


You are the favored one: this was what she had told her son. But the mendacity,
now reverberating in memory, seemed more spurious than it had two weeks earlier
when she had articulated it sotto voce within the wisps of her breath. Still it
was true in the sense that most things were true in a sense, for in her malaise
on that cold Christmas morning, shuddering before a vapid wall of canvas, she
guessed that multifarious and antithetical points to propositions of truth were
all there was.

A child, even this one, was a sensitive creature whom she, an adult, needed to
emphasize certain points to while tiptoeing away from others. But, she argued
in solitary inward dialogues within herself, which she found to be the most
engaging form of companionship, that did not necessarily mean that her quiet
tiptoeing prevarications were lies.

With words as the most viable means of projecting a given concept of one mind
onto another and with them having to permeate the dense grey matter, unchanged,
through the hard surface of experience and preference, it was a wonder that
misunderstandings did not rule fully in all human concerns. A small lie here
and there in place of misunderstood truth, she argued, was the expedient of
presidents and kings. Even this Texan hick, George Jr., who seemed to her as
abhorrent as a president was likely to become, was marginally justified in
misleading the American populace the way she had been forced to deviate from
truth for the sake of her son. The apocryphal president could not have averred
his wish to contrive a war against any rogue state for any random reason even
though that was his intention. He could not have declared that North Korea, the
desired bombing target for setting this example of what hegemony could do, had
been spared from war by Seoul's proximity to the DMZ and that Iraq had been
chosen to be the favored ersatz. He needed an imminent threat to sell his war:
these elusive weapons of mass destruction, which could always be argued as "out
there," present but obscure.

Just as she could not have admitted to Nathaniel that Rick had been the favored
one all along, now she was still reluctant to admit to herself that on that
night when she brought him home she had fallen into such a deep depression.
Only in her sleep were fictional distortions of this mortification sometimes
coerced onto her memory. And every time that this happened she would wake up,
get out of bed, and immediately engage herself in sundry activities which busy
people devised to fortify themselves from wild, disturbing thoughts that they
were not able to successfully corral (of course always going to the bathroom
first but you don't really need to know those specifics, do you?) Among them
would be attempting to bake edible cookies and cakes which still had the hope
of ingratiating herself to her son without making the obdurate Gabriele look
repentant. Unorthodox she might be, the former whore, witch, and child deserter
with her cookie stained hands, but she was not a propitiatory type. After
considering the pros and cons of a given issue in its probable impact on others
she executed her decisions as she should and never revisited them repentantly.

No one had witnessed her behavior at the blighted homecoming and yet she was
mortified by her conduct all the same: the quick turning off of the engine; the
turning of the house key to barricade herself from the lugubrious stillness of
the car so that she might depart into the intimacy of ideas in a book read
under the sheets; watching Nathaniel, an icy stranger to her, turn on lights in
his descent into the pit of his bedroom; sensing an effete adumbration of
herself, detached from her body, as it ascended the staircase to her bedroom
pulling along a body that was as weak as an old woman; and then lifelessly
collapsing onto her bed still in this out-of-body sensation.

Inanimate being that she was, for a minute she found peace. But then the next
moment she was a petrous rural landscape shaking from a tremor and then there
was this inexplicable tsunami of tears slapping against the rubble of her
cheeks. She weltered her face in a pillow on her bed in the hope of suffocating
her sobs and burying her tears that were shed for the loss of the favored son
who had not come from her womb and from being hated by the other one who was
supposed to be her and yet wasn't.

The melancholy that had overtaken her, replicated itself in the cracks of her
rocks, and for a time fed off her tears, lived even when the water was
exhausted. For a couple hours after her tears were all used up the thought that
she hadn't even been allowed to see Rick for a few minutes continued to torture
her as she lay immobile on her bed. But at last she was able to summon her
strength: she was able to repudiate the nadir by attaching herself to objective
philosophic wisdom that rejected any attachment to earthly ephemeral creatures
in this mixing and diluting of herself.

Was the Earth a good place? For the species, man, who suffered the least it was
for a good many and for most others it was not. Whether or not it was an
efficacious use of stardust was both unknown and irrelevant when any assessment
was stuck in the confines of changing perspectives influenced by innumerable
combinations of travail and felicity in each moment of life. Was she right to
have traveled the world, sought enlightenment, and shunned being in the
confines of an ongoing maternal role and its ensuing responsibilities? It too
was hard to measure. Her peregrinations were done quickly but with proper
consideration so it never seemed to her that she should be apologetic.

But certainly she now had a belligerent child on her hands. Already she was
attempting to counter his truancy, smoking habits, his returning home late into
the early evenings, and his refusals to offer explanations for any of it. Early
into his contempt she assumed that her failure at explaining herself to him had
been the source of the problem; and so seeking a bridge of minds she once
delineated a biographical profile of herself to him: her soldier-parents'
dereliction of duties, the Turkish beheading, the church-going uncle and male
cousins who tried "to finger" her in Peggy's home, her untoward will that
shunned lies of family, God, and nation, her desire to raise a son who would be
better than the herds of men, and her maternal neglect so that she might study,
contemplate, and travel so as not to neglect herself. This only intensified his
cold stares and these ideas, her profile, sank like an irrelevant stone that he
threw into a lake. Eleven days into the reunion with no sign that the contempt
would burn out, in her exasperation she began floggings with a belt the way
Michael had done; and for this pain to both parent and child all that she got
for it was his contrived grinning and her chagrin that she had succumbed to
barbaric, frustrated impulses and bullying savagery. Still, she could not be
the contrite and effete parent who allowed a child's helter-skelter whims and
contempt of the parent to tread victoriously onto the agenda of the day.
Lacking the practice of self-discipline such a savage, when grown, would
justifiably loathe the parent for not having gained that which would provide
him with happiness.

Had she been there for him, fully engaged in motherhood from the beginning, she
believed that his personality would not have been so recalcitrant and his
behavior would not have been so petulant and flighty. Maybe, she fretted, her
past peregrinations would aggravate the rest of her days in an opaque fog and
malaise of her own making.


Instinct and social norm prompted her cousin in Kansas to become a statistic in
suburbia: to get married immediately after high school; to have her 2.4 kids
and a car in the garage; to daily doubt whether the 0.4 kid would "ever amount
to anything;" to return from work at the cosmetic counter of Dillards to greet
her cat with "Are-U-Hungary" and laugh at the pseudo nation; and to darn her
husband's underwear and iron his socks (items that should have been done with
reverse actions).

Really Gabriele knew nothing about this cousin of hers. For her own agenda she
continually relegated her to a theory. She enjoyed the caprice, which if not
true of her cousin (and it probably was), was true of this bored housewifey
type. And she wondered if this vaguely remembered woman might right now be
opening the refrigerator door and envisaging probable dates of her demise —
sometimes right side up and sometimes upside down — printed on milk cartons;
who, finding her conversations with her spouse stale was nonetheless
considering them an indispensable part of the routine of her perfunctory
movements; and who was probably returning from the kitchen to watch most of the
Rosanne or Cosby show before collapsing into sleep. Gabriele imagined that each
night this cousin would wake up and realize that it was time to go to bed so
that she could repeat the day's failure again. The true reality of her cousin's
felicity or estranged plight was not anything Gabriele knew or cared to know.
It seemed an apposite probability and this was the only thing about her that
Gabriele cared to contemplate.

So sitting in her studio (now with the prostitute paintings of the "Women at
Work" series of the burgeoning Thai artist, Nawin Biadklang, on her walls —
paintings that she had put away and forgotten following her involvement with
Michael), she painted her cousin, albeit of a Mexican appearance and something
more like a mannequin than a human being, while her thoughts continued to run
rampant.

Dream after dream; illusion upon illusion; everyone was forced to play the game
of musical chairs in which the people changed as well as the chairs but they
all pretended that it was not happening — that everyone was stable and on
stable ground. She did not want to rebel against the game. It was the indelible
rules of nature thrust on man (this thing called change), and for most it was
instrumental to their evolvement. Most people would be worse than the
complacent and mostly non-changeable rock of her Aunt Peggy unless shaken up a
bit.

"What's 'dead' mean?" Nathaniel had asked on that inauspicious day years ago
when Michael had run over the neighbor's child in the trailer park — one of
many odd coincidences that had engendered their union. It was a day that was as
inauspicious as having given birth to Nathaniel in the first Gulf War and then
returning to him in the sequel. Inauspicious events often seemed as a plan to
rock the baby out of his cradle and then as now she vaguely sensed that
something akin to doom would one day toss her from this bearable normalcy of a
new husband and an old son that she seemed to return to like all other lost and
clinging females. Was this malevolent rocker of the baby's body and soul God?
Well, it certainly was not the gentle parental god devised by religion but
there was indeed some coercer of change like Aristotle's concept of god without
the god.

"Non-being. We wear our clothes for a time. Then they unravel and are made into
something different."

"And heaven?"

"God, no! — a make believe story for reality dodgers. When you play dodge ball
you run away from being hit by the ball, don't you? It is the same for heaven
believers. The neighbor boy, I am dreadfully sorry to say, is dead as a
doornail and his body and brain are unraveling. You don't need to think twice
about it. Trust me on this one. But if that is too much reality to swallow, and
it is for almost everyone I guess, it is better to live in your own lie than
live in someone else's. What if we were to say that he is like a beautiful leaf
skidding on the sidewalk because of a breeze; but he is not the leaf anymore
but the breeze. You can feel him but you will never see him again…unless — "

"Unless what?"

"A possibility out of science but seeming as magical to us in our primitive
time."

"Witches' magic?"

"No, superstitions and hocus pocus aren't in our lexicon. We are beyond that.
Einstein's idea that time is relative…Anyhow, we will be wind long before a
means of traveling or transporting ourselves near the speed of light is
devised."

Lost in all these thoughts she added onto the canvas a bit of vermilion, a
color that may or may not have been that of the old Soviet flag, now fading
from collective memory, but was the color of the bathrobe and lingerie that she
was now wearing to appeal to his leftist tendencies. She stuffed some chewing
tobacco into her mouth and entertained whimsical ideas of him, her husband. She
and the man with the unmemorable name, as she still called him (sometimes
Andrew), would in time live in different places. They would not be separated in
the traditional sense of indifference or economic necessity but by the two
having their own interests (he undoubtedly having a job as a UN official if not
assistant to the Secretary General within five or six years). They would live
separately because they had been born into the world separately. Their union,
their contract, would not be the floundering neediness of two minds who feared
standing alone to face mortality in one's thoughts nor would it be like
American soldiers guarding Iraqi oil pipelines — the jealous sentinels over the
source of a dopamine rush, that lover who gave to many their only defining
component of themselves. It would be — she stopped herself not knowing what it
would be. She was not sure whether or not to call such a freakish thing a
marriage. If she had used this man by marrying him in the hope that he would be
a male role model for her son wouldn't she be the same as one of the
solipsistic herd. She hoped that her actions were not as calculating as this.

Putting away her paints, she then went into the bathroom to fall like a child
through specious mountains and plains of crackling soap bubbles. There she
would allow the steam to relax her to minimal consciousness of a self-contained
Nirvana that could be gained in virtually no other way than in the bathtub. But
as the hot water was falling into the tub filling it into a lake she changed
her mind, turned off the tab, and went to him to seek Nirvana down and dirty.

Riveted in the carnal skin friction of sexual gluttony for the meat of human
flesh, youth, and beauty, she climaxed with her man; and free — totally free of
all gnawing miscellaneous hungers outside of needing to urinate — the couple
smoked marijuana on the bed to elongate their brief, ethereal stay. They were
silently watching clouds of smoke stretch out like steamers of confetti until
silence broke like an old woman's hip.

He said, "I might get this one. It would be on a temporary basis — just the
extra sections that don't have teachers — I guess benefits and full time status
after probation if someone resigns — little pay now. But maybe I should just
stay here until I exhaust my possibilities."

She sensed how the petty and the mundane in the personal domain interfered, if
not totally countered, any fulfillment of intimacy. This vexed her
conceptualization of life; but for she who was so amused by grave ideas it was
just one more intriguing fact to contemplate. "It's all exhausted," she at last
responded. "There's nothing much here. You've gone to the first job interview
at City College. You might as well see it through the second. Obviously they
are interested in you if they want you to be interviewed twice. It's up to you
but if it were me I would put my oars in the first wave that comes along."

"Yes, maybe."

"Out of curiosity, I've been wondering why you again made reservations in that
hotel where the bellboys are the rats."

"Because hotels aren't cheap anywhere in New York City except exceptional ones"

"Exceptional? I was there, man — one glorious night. Okay, marginally better
than back packer guest houses in Bangkok and Jakarta with bare bunk mattresses
and table fans without any tables in something less than closets. This one's
more of a spacious closet --American style for beggars and Bolsheviks." She
knew that her bantering had some snobbishness in it as if she had never lived
in a tiny little room with a crock-pot on the floor in Tijuana. She noted how
perception was ensconced in one's environment and lifestyle and that an
ensconced thing became the thing it was ensconced in. Even now, naked like she
was, ostentatious diamond earrings bounced from her earlobes—an extreme
pendulum shift from the days of painting caricatures for extra pesos in the
pure dirt colonias and the man made waste of downtown "centro" Tijuana (TJ).

"I've offered to give you — lend you, however you care to think of it — any
money you need for expenses in the Big Apple."

"Thanks but I really didn't mind that room we stayed in last time."

"Okay," she sighed and threw up her hands. "But I can't see how that is
possible."

"A little possible — like the sign in the bathroom. Remember? It said, 'Dear
guests, detergent harms the environment by going down the drain and ultimately
killing the sea life of our oceans. Use fewer towels.' The message is warm like
being with a beautiful woman." His mouth dived into her neck like a toothless
vampire.

"God, I have married an imbecile," said Gabriele. She giggled in the sexual
giddiness of a woman when intimate with a man; and yet thinking that the body
was merely the crucible of feelings, and that thoughts, a refined and
distancing appraisal of reality, were nonetheless feelings in origin, and that
this was all there was.

"None of that baloney would work with me. I would only scoff at it —
capitalists caring about the fishies of the sea. Give me a break! Give me
brutal honesty anytime rather than tactics like this. If a business is honest,
I might continue my patronage regardless of the type of service they provide
or, in this case, the type of rat hole it is—honesty being in such short supply
in the world that when someone gives it to me—even in rude doses—I am grateful
for it. They would just need to say, "You wasteful fucks, we are niggardly
corporate bastards eager to hoard any red cent we can get our hands on. Please
note that we have a one shower a day policy here. Extra showers will incur
extra charges should we see dripping from the shower nozzle. That being said,
you will see that there are fewer towels on the rack. Don't make phone calls to
the front desk demanding more towels and do not bribe cleaning ladies or make
any sexual advances toward them. If you slyly take an extra shower at 2 a.m. or
such ungodly times you will have to dry your wet butts by hanging them out the
window.' Now if they conveyed this maybe—"

They heard two shells of petrous, ice-glazed snow simultaneously strike into a
lower part of the faade of the house unlike a one-time thud of a bird or the
distinct sounds of thawing ice when falling from the roof and gutter. The man
with the unmemorable name got up, drew the curtain, and opened the window. Then
he, the nude, dangled there staring at his stepson who sat on a limb in a tree
that was a hundred yards from the house. The boy was holding a brassiere as his
slingshot.


As more of a recurrent feeling rather than a philosophic framework, which he
had constructed for himself on that silent car ride from Sharon's home to his
own, he believed that subtle inconclusive looks could help him extort that
which he knew could never be gained in compensation, and that by it being
something that could never be compensated and extorting it all the same, he had
found the means to achieve power. Without really thinking so much as feeling
it, for the past two weeks there was this notion that subtle looks without
hostile words would make the hated propitiate to him with expensive gifts or at
least a willingness to please him whereas to hate a person with the more
conclusive medium of words would make the anathema hate him, and hate was a
weapon that he did not care to hand over to his enemies. He cared to keep it in
his domain.

The circumstances behind the slingshot were a peculiar thing: apprehension
about knocking on their bedroom door for fear that his knocking would become
pounding which might cause them to withhold his gifts; still early and no
movement from above, the discarded black sheep, the piqued shadow, the cast
away reunited with she who cast him out, leaving the clock and going into the
yard to waste some time; the hunting of birds with a bb gun, feeling bored, and
in places stomping out the obscene whiteness of the snow by grating it black,
ever so often, with the heel of a boot; the return to the kitchen to again
watch the incessantly slow turn of the second hand of the clock; still no
sounds from above so deciding to burn bacon and to turn down the furnace in the
hope of smoking or freezing them out; the pacing around a gigantic Christmas
tree barren of gifts underneath; and then going into one of the bathrooms.
Frustrated while "taking a leak" it was there that the brassier hanging on the
wall had seemed like an unpatented snow boomerang there to show his misogyny.

"Comrade Sangfroid?" yelled the man into the tree. "What do you want?"

The boy put his hands around his mouth like a megaphone to facilitate the
sound. "The queen of Antarctica, Comrade," he said. "Her gifts."

"Comrade of crude weapons," yelled the man. His voice was indistinct and
garbled by the cough of saliva having rushed down his throat in his laughter.
"Why shoot they who give freely?"

Gabriele nudged herself between the man and the window, dangling hers as the
man did his. She saw the boy and the bra there at a bit of a distance. "Yes?"
she yelled. She was amused, puzzled, and a little annoyed by the sight. She
waited for words from a specimen unwilling to give them. Obviously, she noted
to herself, smirking and laughter at the absurdity of talking to one's nude
parents one Christmas morning from a tree would have been a natural proclivity
for such a refreshingly or embarrassingly peculiar situation; but this smirking
seemed a calm sadistic enjoyment of what she believed to seem to him as
perverse. An enjoyment of the perverse seemed to drool in all orifices and he
stared at them with virulent intensity. Didn't those eyes say, "What are you
doing with that whore?" Didn't it bang around his mouth and peek loosely from
his lips? She did not know. No, she told herself, this idea was perverse. Her
imagination was a viral infection on her sound judgments and she told herself
that she should be ashamed of her thoughts.

On this branch he once sat to gain a reprieve from Sharon and Rick and to make
the former tenants of the house uncomfortable his composure was unperturbed.
Having lived in Gabriele's experiment once before, it was not new to him now.
To be the specimen of her scrutinizing gaze was once an ossified aspect of his
daily existence. Once the specifics of what it was like to be her son had been
forgotten for a generalized feeling of revulsion; but now that he was here the
forgetting was being forgotten and the revulsion was replaced by the need to
adapt and thrive within his circumstances. Not wishing to provoke her to hate
him, he put the brazier in his coat pocket and then descended from the tree.

And like any goddess from Hera to Athena she knew the sweet venom of empathy,
could see the corroding batteries of Her specimen's heart without wincing, and
would have stared that way indefatigably until he at last fell from the tree.
But once he absconded she just returned to her side of the bed. She wanted to
cry mutely into the pillow but her man was there so she stoically absconded
into a book on Asian owls.




Chapter 40


Without much regard as to where he should sit, he just sat. It was a more
remote spot in Seoul Grand Park that seemed to be directly under a kite slapped
by distant winds. For he who sought to circumvent the scrutiny of others to
pursue his strange stern ruminations his only wish was to be seated in
solitude; and not having it, he accepted a more remote variation. Frustrated by
his writing and unable to believe that he was doing anything but spinning
around in his head, he tried to relax in the sunlight and within a Valium of
smells such as the very dirt and weeds beneath him. He stared at the kite and
the peculiar shaped clouds emerging into the sky until becoming bored with
both, he turned to the ground. Withdrawn into nature and himself, he felt his
energy and peace of mind begin to replenish. It fluttered weakly as the gray
moth that he was watching; and it seemed to him that this spasm of optimism was
as lithe as a soul was capable of being were one to have such a thing instead
of damnable memories and words like walls in a maze of the mind which deluded
one into thinking that he was advancing to someplace or another.

He imagined himself at a convocation of words in which he designated where each
word should sit within the weeds and clumps of dirt. He imagined that when he
did not like their arrangement, or their bickering amongst themselves, each
obsequious word eagerly got up and changed to a different seat of his choosing
with the snap of his fingers unlike their real obstinate and disgruntled
nature; and when he said their names numerically according to their rows an
invocation of truth would ensue. The guidebook, written by the subconscious,
would have enough veracity to be a prototype for they who also squatted on the
outskirts of normal existence, or at least a means for him to lose himself --if
not find himself—there, within his prose.

Writing granted a purpose, a connection beyond breeding to defy death for he
who would never breed, he who would never be enslaved for ephemeral "family"
and provide for children who were only a woman's pleasure—he who for not
breeding had life and breath relegated to blowing dirt.

The word, "friendship" sat down beside him when the futile meeting was
disbanded and all words were sent home; and as it sat there, it transformed
itself into human form.

"Are you familiar with Camille Saint-Saens — his Macabre Dance?" said the word.
It was Kim Yang Kwam, the friend who had labeled him as dirty and had abandoned
him for that one touch, that one weak moment of wanting to celebrate the beauty
of the friendship and the beauty of the man to its fruition. The two were in
the bedroom of that apartment in Umsong as they had been before, and Yang Kwam
was pulling out a CD from its plastic holder.

"Yes, lovely. I don't have any from that composer. Let's hear it. He is one of
my favorites, you know. Well, you don't know. That is why it is so special.
What are the chances of you liking it, liking the cello above other
instruments, favoring your philosophic ponderings above everything, and now
telling me that you are okay with me being gay."

"I'm here for you, Shawn."

"I'm living with someone now — maybe not long. He vitiates his mind with a
Braille version of comics. They have Braille comics, you know. I mean, that is
his business but he is so reticent to talk with anyone and I can't reach him
much of the time. He is blind and seems content to cower himself in a corner
someplace, pleased to have made it through another day — well, not always. I
met him in a concert hall. I thought he liked classical music. I guess he does
but not as much. He turns on too much pop music. I don't like it. It gives me
headaches."

"It isn't important."

"Strange that I should be here without him."

"We are where we want to be in all things."

"There was another thing I was scared to tell you. I'm not sure how — listen, I
killed my sister, my father hung himself, and I was struck down into such a
depression like being slapped into a tsunami. Ever since this I've been
drifting into the Pacific like a corpse."

"You want to eat salami?"

"No, are you listening to me?"

Yang Kwam chuckled. Then he looked at Sang Huin with intense confidence that
refracted into the latter's perceptions as compassion. "I know that you did not
do anything like this. You are a good person. You couldn't do something like
that."

"They look on me as if I did kill her, as if I don't feel guilty enough without
that. Well…I mean Dad is dead now so--anyhow, he looked at me like I murdered
her. They both did really…not really like a murderer but guilty of
manslaughter, which I guess in a way I am."

"How people look at you is not something that you can control. It resides in
them—when not true, it is a need to construct the world a certain way to remove
guilt or pain by projecting it on others. Your family did not get the murderer
and they blame you. Families often split up under such pressure."

"I took her there."

"You didn't know that he would kill her. Guilty of being too Puritanical or too
Korean, yes, but that is all."

"I want you as my best friend forever." There, the daydream, the word, the
connection vanished.

It seemed to him that every few minutes or so there were passersby (usually as
couples if not larger groups with civilization, merger, such an acute hunger in
these pathetic lonely herds) who were more scrutinizing than all the others.
These passersby saw the stationary posture of his body bereft of orders from
the brain for substantial movement, and in instantaneous judgment calls, they
believed, he supposed, that his mind was seemingly crazy or dysfunctional. They
construed him, or he believed that they construed him, as dirty,
unintelligible, and untoward. To them he was a homeless eyesore, a madman even
if he looked benign from a distance. After all, seated alone in a fetal
position as he was on a declivity of a hill sparse of grass, to them, he
believed, this proclivity for disoriented stares into the wind-grazed dirt and
inanimate purposelessness was an egregious aberration of being human. The fact
that no family members were able to keep him restrained in their homes gave
credence to the speculation that his intractability from psychosis had caused
his transience. Not eating one's kimchee, refusing to pour hot water into a
bowl to consume every grain of leftover rice in an insipid soup, or not taking
off one's shoes at the door: these were slight infractions of cultural norms.
The lone dirt-ridden stranger was prodigiously more repugnant than this for
even retards and mild madmen chose to be clean. For one of this ethnicity to
wallow his buttocks on a hill of dirt there could be no other rendered judgment
than that his behavior was tantamount to a rejection of Hanguk civilization
completely, which was indeed, to a Korean, a definite form of madness.

Sang Huin felt their cold Korean scrutiny excoriate him with their looks. The
long glances and brief stares seemed to burn through his flesh in thin, cold
lasers. And yet this Korean man, this American, continued nonetheless to sit on
his hill of dirt all alone and, for the most part, lost in thought. He was
pecking on a tiny virtual keyboard in his Pocket PC while reading aloud that
which he pecked as if he were not an oddity and all others carried out
activities like this.

He read out loud, "He was troubled by that one idea which kept running through
his mind days later: he had given to her a nominal token of Christmas (a
contemptuous one, perhaps, but a present nonetheless)—a plastic bag full of tea
towels, and yet she had not given him anything in return. Still he was pleased
that he had not mentioned anything about it and that his attempts at
indifference had not degenerated in weak sulking.

A day later, no longer caring to wonder, as he had, whether these entitlements
would at last be begrudgingly given to him should the walls of hubris fall from
the scaffolding of his eyes, he was tempted to inveigh her with his contempt
and be at last free; but throughout, he succeeded in occasional smiles and
benign albeit reticent exchanges of ideas when compelled to talk with these
parents (parents, or at any rate imposters claiming to be married, and were for
all he knew). If only, he told himself, he could continue to control those eyes
that he subconsciously wanted to impale into his mother in a long and
unequivocal stare of hate, then he would have self-mastery and power.

Without really thinking about all these specifics so much, he felt the need to
restrain himself to multi-interpretable stares that would be doors of opaque
translucency sealing off the fortress of his ideas while allowing shadows to
permeate outward. Still, keeping the door shut was a hard thing to do."

Thoughts of his own mother kept intruding on Sang Huin's work: the
mother/daughter sorority of Cathy and June (the American names that his mother
and sister gave themselves); cacophonous, cryptic collusion of conversation
that the two Korean sorority sisters had aside with each other in that damnable
Hanguk-mal; the mother who valued her tree planting and property ownership with
her husband as much as these feminine confidences with her daughter while he
was supposed to be quiet as a mouse at home and especially in every public
place so that she would not be ashamed of him; this woman who incessantly took
him to one hospital after another seeking to have more than manageable ailments
and who sat him on bleachers while the family went to June's basketball games.

"June" gave the Korean family a name, and the parents could now talk about
their daughter and be part of the Caucasian club. But sick as he sometimes was,
he gave them nothing and for it they relegated him to shadows — to shadows.

He thought of his childhood asthma. His father had the perception that the
enervating condition of asthma emasculated the son to the point of making him
"good for nothing." It was only a perception but no demon was harder to
exorcise than perception. Philistines had feelings embedded harder than teeth:
prejudices that were both intolerable and inextricable.

But then he checked himself and halted his thoughts about dead people and dead
happenings. His thoughts focused on that journalist whom he had met weeks
earlier at the sports stadium. "This guy could be the perfect one and yet I
have brushed him aside—I don't know why." He pondered some more. "But I am
involved with Saeng Seob and one doesn't just use someone until a better
prospect arrives." This was his argument to himself made more to excuse his
social ineptness than benevolence.

His queer relations were not affable and gay as withdrawn, anti- social, and
hell bound in being bedazzled in shadows as he was. Ensconced cleanly from
mixing thoughts with the physical realm it was shadows of texture he sought in
saunas and the bathroom of the dirty movie theatre near Pagoda Park in Chongno
Sam Ga. Clean of words, no hurt would ensue. The dirty movie theatre showed
only normal R-rated films and sexual activity was restricted to bathroom
stalls. Had it been otherwise it would have even seemed a major aberration to
the queer folk there. The queer folk of Korea were Koreans too and no one was
more conservative with cultural traditions than a Korean. The theatre people
consciously acknowledged sex in the seats as illegal and morally repugnant
albeit reprehensibly desired. "I could never do that to him." His thoughts were
of course about Saeng Seob. "As long as he wants the relationship it will be
there for him. I am many things but —" He was about to think, "but I don't hurt
vulnerable people" but he checked his thoughts with the memory of his sister
and how he had coerced his girlfriend into having an abortion. He told himself
that to claim that he would always be there for the hurting and the vulnerable
lacked veracity.

"He began to have a recurrent nightmare of sorts, replete in twisted skeletal
boughs; and there he saw something like himself in adult form trying to glean
movements of lissome shadows through the crevices around a board that went over
one window. Boards were nailed over all windows and entrances in the condemned
building that had been his home. Still, despite the sunrays of early morning
impaling through the thickets of branches and into his eyes, he could see the
copulative interlinking of shadows distinctly even though he could not see the
forms projecting the shadows because they had long ago turned into wind. He
shot a snowball and a sound of an owl screeching towards the woods flew past
him if not the form of the bird itself. He noted how strange it was that the
only snow was that on the tree and all other parts of his mother's acreage were
part of the verdure of early summer.

'My little comrade,' said the man to the boy although he was not a man any
longer but more like the murky translucency of a fog. As he flew near the tree
what was left of the old leaves rustled and flattened. 'The Bolsheviks have
won. You can go ahead and leave Petrograd and return home to your wives.'

'Comrade,' Nathaniel said, 'I have no wives and I don't want to abandon my
platoon.'

'The war is over. Everyone is dead and gone. They have been so for some time —
for years. You've done a find job, Comrade. Now go in peace.'

'I know who you are but — ' He swallowed deeply. 'I don't know what you are.'

'The opposite of what I was I suppose. When you figure out what life is go 180
degrees counter to it and there you will be at death. It isn't all that much
different — just different corners of the block.'

'Yes, I believe so Comrade Stalin.'

'Comrade Trotsky.'

'Yes, Comrade. Comrade Trotsky. Comrade Trotsky, I fear that the Queen of
Antarctica, angered at my conquering abilities of her homeland, will blockade
all supplies and let me perish out here with no Christmas.'

'Well, Adagio, at last here the two of us are all alone as you have always
wanted it, as you have dreamed it even if it is so late and with a
ghost...quality time we should have had more of if I hadn't been so preoccupied
with trying to understand this marriage of mine with a woman who did not want
to live with me. I think that she wanted me to be closer to you but how she
thought that was possible with a husband and wife having separate lives is
difficult to understand. She is difficult to understand but that is no excuse
for not forgiving her. We all deserve to be forgiven. All humans deserve that,
Adagio. Why can't you forgive her?'

'Because I hate her!'

'Hate? Here you are as a grown man and yet you sit in those branches as if
nothing has changed. A few sharp movements and you will fall off with the limbs
that once cradled the sport of a boy. You spied on us a lot in those branches,
if you remember. But now there is nothing to spy on. The house is old and in
decay. Boards are nailed over the windows. The naked dance of a man with his
wife that you thought was so intriguing has ended. The partners are separated
and have withdrawn--one into old age to begin her own descent to the earth and
me visiting you on top of a tree because of a Siberian wind happening to settle
me here. Nothing is there now so there is nothing to hate. What possibly can
you see up there at this point?'

'I see what I've always seen: shadows. Plenty of shadows—yours, hers, all the
men she was with.' He was meaning love making in its full-animated obscenity of
interlinked private parts and hedonism, the fundamentals of life."

Then in dreams like this he would wake up, think of this all too familiar
presence, and doubt if she were his mother at all. As far as he knew she could
just be an imposter after the other one's disappearance. And on his pillow he
would again think about the flashlight in the cave and the hotdog in the bun
jokes that he was beginning to hear in the locker rooms of adolescent and
pre-adolescent boys. Precocious as he was in firsthand knowledge of some sexual
issues he was still curious about more normal arenas.

Sang Huin told himself that incessantly telling himself things within the
contemplation of his creation was a bit strange; that the facile, tangible
thrusts of decadent titillation that he gained briefly in the shadows of the
dark corridors of saunas instead of more tangible long-term relationships--even
with their intangible emotions and invisible bridges of minds--was stranger
yet; but strangest of all was how instead of being with a girlfriend on a
roller coaster less than a kilometer away, he just stayed on his hill of dirt
like any transient, the luftmensch that he was. He looked at his feet, then the
dark approach of a mass of clouds and the kite. One chose any spot to sit in
based upon comfort and security, and to him remoteness was both. Like his
defunct father, who often sat silently in front of the Weather Channel, using
this favored television station to facilitate a comatose withdraw after his
daughter's death, so he watched the kite which seemed like a piece of himself
drifting further and further into the unobtainable. Its erratic movements and
the emergence of dark clouds with peculiar shapes seemed like a wordless
oracle.

'For six long months she sensed Nathaniel's stares as eerie as a lone plastic
cup rolling on an empty pavement in a breeze; and even when she went to sleep
it was with her, often setting her forehead into a seat as she slept. For her,
sometimes alone in her bed or with her man, it was an absurd and inexplicable
feeling. But it was easy to repudiate the indecipherable. It was easy to be
obtuse while pursuing her work and the occasional sZances with her higher
authority, who often played hide and seek through clouds of the smoke of her
burning weed. Furthermore, hostile glances and reticent words seemed of little
consequence when awakened daily, despite herself, to dwindled resources
dwindling further.

One morning at the dining room table, looking through the newly arrived mail
half blinded in the dappled sunlight, Gabriele saw the numbers of her worsening
fiscal state from a bank statement. The recent payments of her property tax and
the school enrollment were just larger costs of myriad that in all, in time,
would pillage a life; and her mind felt numb in the mundane. Knowing that she
had to do something, she approached the art museum of Albany that afternoon.
The director was willing enough to exhibit a retrospective of her work with a
few new paintings of Sapporo and Tijuana amalgamated into it all. The
isolationist declaring her own frigid country of one, the frigid rationalist
watching the movement of instinctual creatures of romance blowing like bits of
trash caught in vortexes of wind, the nighttime whore advocate as opposed to
the billions of daytime whores who espoused the Puritan work ethic: she was one
of their PT Barnum freaks at the circus museum and the director welcomed back
that which would spark a bit of public intrigue. The museum did not expedite
it. Two months of planning went into the temporary exhibit; and the financial
dilemma that seemed as potentially dire now shot within her more as flares of
panic. What heretofore lacked immediacy became an uppercase word in bold
letters, immediacy, spilling out and hardening as the black ink of the night.

At last it passed. And in the bathroom of a purchaser, at a party in his home,
which had been arranged for the celebration of this singular purchase, the
brief honeymoon period for the artist climaxed with a salient 15-minute
copulation against a wall near the toilet. She needed this release from
worries, this demonic sensation of pleasure that was the eddy contrary to what
was rational. She hoped that it was that, an eddy, but she knew base instincts
were the main force despite all her rational fortifications. From time to time
she needed to stop thinking and to run into the storm, allowing any large gust
to bang her.

"Can I see you again?" her partner, this black stranger, asked. Even now that
their intimacies had come and gone like all specious mad frenzies, like the
mating of dodo birds, she did not know his name, his connection to the
purchaser, or his purpose at the party unless it were in having mounted and
ridden her. Did man have a higher purpose than this? She had her doubts.

"Give me your address. I wanna see you again," he reiterated.

"Maybe in corners like this," she responded coldly. "Beyond that I think my
husband would have problems with it, and most importantly I would."

"You're a sassy one," said this other candyman. "Squeeze a man of his juice and
leave him dry." She knew that she was a sassy squeezer but she was hesitant to
say anything for she wanted him marooned in his own silent realm. This way she
could dress herself in peace and quickly abscond from sleazy predilections and
proclivities that might have made up the baser components of one's nature but
were puny in defining herself. She wanted to return to her paints in the hope
of developing a template that if not mass-produced at least could speed up her
production. The time of prolific painting from ideas sketched for so long had
passed. Now ideas needed to be pinched and coerced to inch forward.

In her ride back home in her Ferrari she postponed the inevitable by driving
further on the interstate than she needed to go. The goddess that she was, she
liked watching things come and go as well as how she felt superior in this
fancy moving shell. She thought of a new argument and she recited it in her
mind. 'I have decided to simplify our lives. What type of an example would I
set if I were to cling to things, to relationships, never knowing myself? Are
all people so at a loss of identity that they grope in front of anything that
has a chance of being less perishable than themselves? It is disgusting.
Anyhow, we need money and I'm selling everything off of value including the
house. We can live in cardboard shacks or tree houses but we don't need this
type of shit cluttering up space and time.' This was what she would say, or
something more simplified that was along these lines."

Frustrated again from not liking his ideas, he forfeited words. Resting on his
hill in the Valium of nature, it was as if he were coming down from all this
spinning around in his own head because of a heaviness of words coalescing and
jelling onto the walls of his brain. It seemed as though the twirling child
were landing dizzy and drunk on life despite his morbid disposition from
memories of family that scooted like a plastic cup blowing on an empty
pavement—abhorrent memories loving and still as a photograph.




Chapter 41


To the ancient Egyptians man died each night in this void absent of the sun god
and then each morning was resurrected in daybreak. She thought of this; and it
seemed to her as she was driving home at 3 a.m., hair blowing and mind
mesmerized in prevailing darkness, that this particular myth was as all
religious balderdash that justified one egregious proclivity or another in the
natural state. In Christianity this was myriad: everything from man's god-given
dominion over animals in any arbitrary whim to the Lord's omnipotent power to
part the Nile one moment and turn someone to stone the next (indiscriminate
aiding of some and annihilating others). As the deliverer who cared so much
about individual man as to intrusively know the amount of hair strands on each
head He was the perfect god; and his conspicuous absence or non- involvement on
9-11 and countless other occasions of inhumanity of man to man was merely his
allowing free will to command human affairs.

The ancient and relatively forgotten myth of the Egyptians explained man's
mysterious absconding from the night in seven or eight hours of sleep as a
partial death when apart from the vanquished sun. Its innocence had charmed her
for years, but now it just seemed as one more vapid fable with no redeeming
qualities. Going home circuitously, the idea of sleeping away one more night
seemed as a reprehensible closing of one's eyes to the night's gilded silence.
Long hours of atavistic sleep to keep the body still and hidden from barely
visible predators had been utile in prehistory but now it was an anachronistic
vestige of adaptation. Thwarting nocturnal consciousness of this fragile
animal, man, sleep inadvertently obstructed an appreciation for all that was
black — and she did want to appreciate all that was black.

Outside of bubbling in champagne and a bit of public relations to secure a sale
what had this party been, she asked herself, unless it were to reclaim the
night; and what had this bathroom rendezvous been but to cease to abscond from
that which was black? She laughed at her joke, which she mumbled aloud to
herself. Half drunk, she was inexplicably pleased with herself. She told
herself that her adulterous tryst with this twenty minute black friend had been
her refutation against the notion of ugly-bodied darkness. She inanely told
herself that by brushing naked against his skin this making herself one with
what was black had made the intimacy a higher accomplishment than mere banging.
She was even amused by how easily amused she was in her self- containment in
the car. For her, happiness was not dependent on external playmates although
something vaguely similar to happiness was sometimes facilitated by them.

There was nothing like back roads so bare of automobiles. Driving made her feel
as if she owned the night with the wide stretch of her headlights that were
only deferentially dimmed at the encroachment of other automobiles on her
terrain. She loved the peace and the vastness of these strips of road in the
heart of unpretentious night; and if she had her way about it the universe
would be purely black without the tawdry dappling of stars. It dawned on her
that moving through night at sixty miles per hour her very movement was in
opposition to what was splendid in the night. If Aristotle were right in saying
that happiness was greatest in contemplating this non-changeable entity that
had tossed the chemicals of inchoate matter, then cloistered artists,
philosophers, and other contemplatives would be the dominant force on the
planet. If contemplation were the highest pleasure in life wouldn't her canvas
be more eagerly sought than her hedonistic flings or that which she was now
pursuing: a sense of freedom by sipping a beer and riding around in a Ferrari.
Being blown in all directions from the open windows of her car, she was half
tempted to drive all the way into arctic Canada instead of returning to the
odious smells of her paint—chemicals that were no doubt carcinogens if the nose
were to express its opinion on the matter—paint once vibrant in her perceptions
but now the mental strain of attempting to reestablish success.

She again contemplated the night. If only man had not had this fear of being
eaten, sleep, if it were needed at all would be merely sporadic naps for the
restoration of energy instead of this long withdrawal from the black of night.
Then she thought about this twenty minute chocolate candyman, whom she named as
Candyman II (Roman numerals giving him a sense of eminence). She told herself
that she should have made him withdraw before being allowed to climax within
her. He had worn a condom but it was doubtful that condoms were meant to
stretch so far or be unbreakable when the long black horn was impaling with
such force. How would she know whether or not it had ruptured? She would only
know with the advent of symptoms from AIDS, syphilis, gonorrhea, and that whole
list of undesirables.

She and her husband had an "open" relationship so long as neither one of them
fell in love with someone else but she didn't want to die for the periodic
cravings of sex and more importantly she did not want to harm her husband with
a lethal touch. Like a postulant at a convent, she might well have relinquished
such meretricious spells of lust months ago had she not held two opinions in
favor of this "open relationship" remaining such. This sauntering away from
domestic life always brought newness to marital vows upon one's return; and
being shaken up in promiscuous rendezvous made the brain more lithe in
generating ideas. Ever so often a woman needed to remove a man like her dirty
panties for the required laundering. Ever so often a woman needed to put on
some fresh panties when allowing the old ones to spin around in the wash. It
was an ablution in a sense—this running barefoot in dirty fields to exorcise
her demons of passion. When the exercise or exorcism was completed it allowed
for domestic life there in its small space demarcated within drab walls. Sordid
nights were a bit like wallpapering anew the old shack. But she did not think
about the primary motivations for her adultery: the wish to not cling to this
concept of a relationship as if it were an actual reality, the wish to debunk
this notion of permanence in a mutable world, and that desperation to repudiate
her vulnerability as one who would like to cling to such things, to cling to
her man.

Guilt…there was none—not even when arriving at the house. She was, of course,
surprised to see her man's car parked in the drive but it was not a catalyst of
guilt per se. While the solitary newlywed was getting out of her car she
considered a half imagined societal measurement of her actions. It was from it
that there was a mordant gnawing within that might be labeled as compunction.
She doubted it at first, but then why should she doubt? She was not totally
immune to others. As much as she might claim that feelings were her own
self-manufactured car that she drove around in, she would be a veritable
lunatic were she to have feelings that were little else than her own imagined
whims. Also her art would not pertain to anyone if she were not to some degree
a product of her world, as repugnant as that thought was to her.

As she stepped into the parlor the compunction exacerbated exponentially.
Seeking to be unperturbed by conscience, she told herself that having sex with
a hundred men in a hundred days was no different than being loyal to one spouse
for a hundred and some odd days. She argued that one behavior was no more or
less slutty than the other. It was true in a rational context; but on the other
hand sexual loyalty was a way of discerning this feeling-based abstraction of a
relationship which otherwise would diffuse as a cloud of smoke. She went into
the family room where she saw a light ("family" seeming a misnomer since she
doubted that there was such a thing).

"Hey! You are here!" she called as she went through a hallway to this room
where her husband and son were standing at different sides of a billiard table.
Obviously they were there to play against each other but seemingly it was as if
they were together brandishing their cues, their phallic sticks, which would be
used for her flagellation. As titillation and inebriation were falling flat
with each passing moment, so her smile at imagining her forthcoming beating was
momentary.

"What are you smiling at?" the man with the unmemorable name asked.

"Nothing." Acerbic guilt was bubbling within her.

"I decided to come back this weekend," the man said.

"What a surprise. Grading completed?"

"Some of it. I guess you are okay. Why is your hair this way? What's the word?"
He said something in Russian that she did not understand.

"Disheveled. In the car-- windows down, me blowing in the wind. Guess I look a
mess. Don't worry. I wasn't in an accident."

"Okay, I'm not. I wasn't."

"Seems that a late night pool game has stretched into early morning," she said.
There was no response so she feigned a beautiful wide smile as she slouched
into a vinyl couch --vinyl like that she had withdrawn into when parting from
Nathaniel's father with his dividing cells within her—cells that were either
cancerous or salubrious divisions although now it was perhaps too early to
predict which or the denouement of this dabbled experiment. "Don't you think it
is a little bit late for my two boys to be playing billiards like they are at a
poker party?"

"No, I don't Gabriele; and do you want me to tell you why?"

"Please. More than anything else on the planet, I live for it."

"Both of us had to do something while we waited and waited for you, didn't we?
We couldn't stare at the door all night. Folk dancing to balalaika music seemed
out of place and we didn't know the phone numbers of hospital morgues to see if
you checked in with your bags."

She chortled. "Uh oh, facetious and angry. Looks like I've been grounded and
will have the car keys taken away." But grave memories were flung into her
consciousness that sobered her frivolity: she remembered being in Japan waiting
for Michael to return from his dates with Kato. Sitting on her futon on the
tatami of her living room, she would blow into the shakuhachi, that wailing
instrument that was the only thing she could communicate with in a grief so
tacit and incommunicable.

"Do you want me to not care?"

"Huh?" She was recovering from damnable memories that were running over her the
way swathes of the Earth's hardened vomit, continents, moved, reshaped
themselves, and demarcated anew its body of water. Then it occurred to her what
he said. "Sorry. I thank you for caring. I really do. You are a good guy."

"You left your son here all alone."

"Are you kidding? Hardly that! After hearing from Peggy about his penchant for
arson, I wouldn't be that crazy. Where is the babysitter, Nathaniel?"

"I didn't like her so I got rid of her," said the boy. "I fired her but I paid
her off first."

"With what?"

As she waited for him to speak she saw him scratch one of his earlobes. From
this she imagined him saying that he paid the babysitter with money he made
from selling earrings like the ones she was wearing. Then, in the daydream, she
demanded to know whether or not he had been pilfering bits of her jewelry all
along and what he did with the money once he sold them; but in the daydream he
did not answer either question leaving inconclusive speculation to run rife.

But she told herself that the daydream had no significance. Once in February
when not able to find various pairs of earrings and blaming herself for having
lost them somewhere between Tokyo to Tijuana she had engaged herself in comic
anecdotes of the boy sneaking into her bedroom in leather gloves and pajamas so
that he might mail some of her jewelry to Hispanic Betty before Valentine's
Day. She told herself that this daydream was merely the rebounding of her
dismissed caprices. And yet she couldn't help wondering if this particular
daydream was, as Freud would say, a resurfacing of repressed fears, unwanted
knowledge, or strong convictions about a given matter of importance.

She thought about how little of a human's mercurial life was grounded in the
present moment: an athlete was in the rush of his adrenalin, a conversation
consisted of past events and future expectations, and a current event was
impinged by pertinent hunches exhumed from the subconscious in daydreams. Even
if she were to have conclusive knowledge about her son's actions throughout
each and every day, and even if she were to find him as innocent as a babe, the
correct way of dealing with him would still be guesswork. Such was the
peculiarity of the human condition.

"With Monopoly money," he chuckled

"With what?" she repeated irascibly.

" Twenty bucks out of my allowance money. Are you going to take my head off for
that?"

"For twenty bucks, never. Thirty, maybe." She turned to her husband. "Didn't he
tell you where I was at?"

"He said that he didn't know."

"I don't know," said the boy.

"I told you."

"I wasn't listening. Was watching a movie. Didn't hear," he spoke with cold
indifference. Only his eyes were visceral and they were directed at the
billiard balls while he daydreamed phantasms of men and orgasms in which his
mother copulated with male partygoers in a back bedroom. Bending toward the
table and aiming his cue stick he murmured inaudibly, "I never listen to where
anyone is planning to cat around to. It's none of my business." Then he shot
the balls. "Your turn, Comrade."

"Cat around?" said Gabriele. "Is that what you said? I think it's time for you
to go to bed." Angry as she was, she laughed awkwardly to give the impression
that she construed it to be one more impertinent statement having as little
significance to her as others he had said previously.

"Go on! We'll finish in the morning, I promise," said the man.

"Game over permanently," said the boy in decisive coldness. He hastily garnered
the balls into a tray and then began to descend into his room. As he did so he
heard: "I want to know where you have been!" "I was just at a buyer's home. A
kind of show and tell party." "You hate going to those things." "Yeah but I
sometimes have to: smiles, and small talk. One has to suck up to these people
for cash. I don't have any money, you know — well, not completely that way but
coming soon. And if it gets any worse Adagio'll have to go to public schools
and I'll sell the house. Maybe go back to Mexico and this time live in an Adobe
hut." "Well, if that came from another person it would be a joke but since it
is coming from you it would not surprise me if you mean it. Remember that any
crazy action like that would be the end of us." "I'm joking. I don't want an
ending of us but a forever of us. I just mean that money has become an issue. I
have to rebuild my reputation — not from scratch, but still reestablishing it
is a struggle. It ain't easy." "Get a job." "No, I detest jobs — especially
professional jobs. I would rather be an automaton in a factory than a paper
pusher or a money hording entrepreneur. All of them have such wasted lives." He
laughed. "I have such a wasted life then."

The words did not fall into place so much as they just fell profusely like a
mist that kept her obscure from her spouse. By their mere arrangement, their
emphasis, and their plausibility, deceit was done without the need for
prevarications, obfuscations, mendacities, and outright lies. She felt
delivered from being thought of as the slut that she was beginning to feel that
she was.

Later, while the two were asleep and she was reading on her vinyl sofa and
occasionally peaking out of the curtain into the darkness, it seemed to her
that with sordid thoughts and deeds being such it was a good thing that
communication conveyed so little of life and reality. In her own brain there
were these incessant skirmishes to separate herself from her environment, the
tacit hostile intent toward others expressed in the coldness of her eyes, and
all these indefatigable hungers of base instinct. The loneliness of
philosophical ponderings, the ineffable brooding, and the meticulous details of
producing life and personal statements in her art forced her to take dives ever
so often into these wild sexcapades. Sometimes one needed to have those moments
of feeling, although never believing, the specious inebriation of mutually
shared physical intimacy.

She thought about telling him the truth. She believed in honesty but as she
pondered doing so honesty didn't seem to her as either all that pragmatic or
virtuous. If one were to convey her more carnal side to any of these judgmental
and precipitous creatures they would believe it to be the full summation of the
confessor. She was a faithful wife: faithful to her intent to care about a man,
and this faithfulness did not require ridiculous sexual fidelity as its
measurement. She told herself that a higher being, a licentious goddess, was
able to sculpt a higher authority within all this effluvium, this muck of
feelings and thought.

So, what if she were unfaithful in a sense? It was not she who had amended the
marital vows. His utterance was partially made in jest, but having made it
changed the nature of the contract. Being faithful was no longer an
indefeasible Claus. It was he who had begun it all. "So many beautiful women
are on campus. Sometimes they look like babies and sometimes they look so
ripe." "Well, don't famish yourself on account of me." "You wouldn't mind?" "I
guess not. Not if it didn't mean anything. If a man sits in a box for some
hours he would need exercise. If hungry enough you would chew on a shoe if
there weren't anything more edible in sight. What right would I have to stop
you?" "Good, that is what we should do if it becomes hard to control, and I
promise that it won't mean anything." "Fine," she had said; but surely he
wasn't so na•ve as to think that it would be an amendment giving privileges
that would be exclusively his own.

Then she went to bed. Not able to fall asleep for an hour, she just lay there
with her man. At certain moments she felt reassured to be there listening to
his breathing and at other moments it felt constricting to have the imposition
of a man share her space. And yet she too needed her contracts. She too needed
to cling to another person to seem to herself that she was more than dirt
blowing around in the impermanent streets of the city. Each minute hunted and
devoured its predecessor, and together all the minutes were this composite of
time as the replication to replace dying cells was a collection that was the
body. She listened to the clock. It too was an ephemeral device that seemed to
hum as incessantly as her breath. But both, she knew, were temporary devices.
The abstraction of time itself, the best a woman could conceptualize it, seemed
more "eternal" just as the life of any elderly woman would seem successfully
"immortal" when there among grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Still, in
the scheme of things all was blowing dust.

She did not blame her morbid disposition on the night. Nocturnal stillness
aided concentration and she sunk under it as if it were her grandmother's
quilt. It did not evoke a mood, for her saturnine thoughts came in part from
the slowing of spinning intoxication and a more sobering reality pressing upon
her: that she was a fraudulent wife, an adulterous bitch, and a woman wrestled
to the ground by the mundane of financial woes. How she could devise a viable,
commercial art that would be easily manufactured without having to forfeit her
role as a serious artist—this was her insoluble dilemma. Even though she sensed
the answer to be immediate and palpable, it kept eluding her nonetheless.
Seeing that her bedtime contemplations were circumgyratory spirals of thought
expended without even tiring her to the point where she could sleep, she
dressed and went outside.

A bike ride taking hours; hills beyond the city limits—hills gilded in sunrise;
hills like that picture in her son's Book of Mormon showing the Hill Cummorah
where, according to the myth, these imaginary plates were once buried; hills
like that idyllic Hill that recently provoked her to say that she would rather
have him study a dirty magazine than these man made scriptures; the idea, as
the wind blew through her hair and massaged her skin, that physical delusions
were less deleterious than mental ones; the coolness of wind blowing in her
face; the silent splendor of the ride; the hat blowing off her head; halted
peddling to find it; the potholes and sharp rocks of rural roads; running over
some type of shard; and then there was that flat tire. She walked the bicycle
for an hour before finally coming across a filling station. A worker told her
that he would patch her inner tube for twenty dollars. She called him a
capitalistic pig. He pointed to her long, ostentatious diamond earrings and
asked her what she thought that she was. Then there was an awareness that she
knew that she was that too. A fixed bicycle; slapping against the winds within
her movement; a new conviction to simplify her life; a rest at a convenience
store; coins into the slot of the newspaper vending machine; headlines of a man
in Albany who shot his wife's lover, his wife, the children, and then himself;
headlines of an overworked postal employee from Albany who began to shoot
people in the queue so as to reduce the amount of packages submitted into his
window; a nice elderly woman smiling at her like sunshine and asking how she
was but Gabriele's cold eyes turned her to ice; an awareness of having wronged
the woman, a compunction, and a recalled analogy that she was that stuffed
polar bear with the stiff arms that the factory of the human race mutantly
created; an elderly man wanting to change her quarter into two dimes and a
nickel for the newspaper vending machine but Gabriele's cold eyes turned him
into ice sculpture until he came to himself and quickly fled from the witch;
and then at last a return home. Her son was there, brandishing his BB gun in
late morning.

"Morning soldier! Aren't you a little old for this thing?" she asked as she got
off her bicycle.

"Yes. Give me the real thing and this kid's gun can go into the trash," he
said.

"No can do," she said, "or matches to an arsonist."

"I'm not an arsonist. It was an accident."

"I wouldn't know. I wasn't at your Aunt Peggy's."

"No, you were in Japan, weren't you? Where have you been?"

"Riding. It is a beautiful morning. Good exercise. And I was thinking: you
know, we are living beyond our means. I've decided to sell the house. We'll
look for a smaller place and we'll have money to travel around from time to
time. You'll get to see other places. Maybe you'll get to see Japan too."

"You do that and I'll be gone."

"Gone? Gone where? Peggy would never take you back."

"To Sharon's"

"You despise her."

"Yes," he said. He fired one shot and it went into the window. He fired a
second, and a third time at the fleeing owl and the bleeding corpse plumped
onto the earth like a water balloon.

Although he saw it flounder in the skies as he floundered around on the Earth,
Sang Huin was not exactly sure where the kite was struck to the ground. He
thought of how so many years of his life were struck down in silence. Only
June, the basketball star, had voice and opinions that could sway the parents.
He was inconsequential, relegated to shadows. He upbraided himself and stymied
his thoughts immediately. He didn't want to think any bad thoughts about his
sister. He had no right to think them. Instead, he desperately thought that he
should marry a woman and have a family of his own, thereby enveloping himself
in a world of forgetfulness. His buttocks were hurting from where he sat and
the wind was beginning to sweep down its polluted grit of rain. He got up. He
needed to go downtown to Myong Dong and try to find a birthday present for
Seong Seob, but first he needed to pick up an umbrella.




Chapter 42


"…No," she thought, "those disconcerting eyes would not leave…will not
leave…wouldn't want them to leave….He is here a part of my fate….Spots over my
eyes, hypersensitivity to sound as well as light…ideas so painful, and yet I
drag them about…pounding thoughts of raw sensitivity and I drag these sickly
bodies to have something to do…and to clog the empty space of the hours. Before
this I was thinking of my son and now I am thinking about my thoughts…a
concentration on anything to forefend this unreality of everything… every item
in this dark tomb, and the air and light within it are so distant like trying
to remember the details of a dream weeks earlier…brain insurrection, and
stomach like when I was carsick with Michael in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, sick
as when I was pregnant with Nathaniel Adagio Sangfroid…inert as if dead…dead as
the owl plopping onto the ground…lack of energy…enervation not of being drained
but like it just suddenly packed up its bags and went, leaving behind the
barren house, now looking like a dilapidating hut…Need to think of something
placid, pellucid, permanent." She meant that she needed to imagine a tranquil
and permanent entity, God, by which to ease her pain, and yet being an atheist
there was none. For atheists like her there were just ideas to be posited as if
raising these walls, these labyrinths of logic, and then running in them, would
lead her to some advanced destination. And so she posited that man, being such
a dodger of pain, would inevitably become religious within sickness. She
posited that even the most intransigent atheist was susceptible to the god of
his own making. But thinking about thoughts was making the migraine even worse.
Ideas were making the bulimic sick and she felt like she was ready to vomit
them up. She again tried to find a benign image exempt of painful words that
she could rest in while in these vapid hours.

And she could only think of her grandmother who, with Peggy, arrived that one
time at the Emporia Kansas bus terminal to pick her up. Those eyes were so
empathic to her, the young girl who was just beginning to recuperate from
having been run over by lieutenants Mom and Dad as they went off into the
sunset on their tank; and this grandmotherly empath could transmute pain and
make it her own better than any mood ring. She thought of the feel of her
grandmother's pantyhose when sitting in her lap and the appearance of that
ceramic cookie jar in the form of a piggy with a chipped ear and a vest. When
her grandmother removed his head all of those chocolate chip cookies that she
baked were there. Still, this sole, loving and loveable relative was not
permanent. She too was fleetingly mortal. Gabriele thought of a more permanent
entity, a tree, but its leaves were deciduous and it had no power to alter its
environment or to love selflessly. Then she thought of the sky: it was
permanently sky; but it was rarely placid and only pellucid to meteorologists,
and of empathy it had none. Men died in hurricanes, typhoons, lightning
strikes, floods, and heat strokes. She wondered if she was going mad. "Need to
go to the shop… I need to get off this sofa," she thought, but the thought was
barely pressed together under the butcher knife of the Migraine. Still she
thought it nonetheless, and others as well, to fill the stillness of the hours
of pain.

Alone: When not having a father or any type of a male role model the
"differentiation" of a boy in his stages of disengagement from his mother have
no other course but through these addictions to titillations which compel him
to climb each and every pleasure until at last falling into the crevasse of
family himself and all of its falling debris of obligations. This being such,
she knew that her time within her own crevasse would not last; and that to be
inextricably attached to these selfish and impermanent beings who had fallen in
with her would merely be a form of weak clinging. It was bad enough in
stability searching herds but for a goddess like herself it would be a
particular debasement.

Family: Her aunt had believed in it enough to take her into her home despite
the objections of her husband; but then she had also believed that Heaven was a
better place than the Earth without having gone to the former and rarely
getting out into the latter with Wal-Mart shopping centers so nearby, that
openly communicating one's filthy mind about misinterpreted gestures like
avuncular touch would be conclusive proof that one was a hateful girl indeed,
and that only within muteness locked in immeasurable and inconclusive memories
was one showing love toward all members of this sacrosanct organization. This,
the incommunicable utterance, was the only means to exist successfully for they
who, to acclimate, were ensconced in safe perfunctory movements within the
crevasse.

The mutability of family: Wasn't it apparent that her man had snagged himself
on his tree of recently ripened campus fruit and that this adulterous delay in
the Big Apple might go into a third week and beyond? And last week what had
been her role of chauffeuring Nathaniel and his giddy date to an amusement park
unless it were the beginning to that end? Evidence for both came in the form of
flinging more and more TV dinners into the oven and eating them saliently alone
in her dining room. Not that she felt uncomfortable uncovering the aluminum
foil and eating her food all alone. She loved her ruminations more than any
other earthling she encountered. So wondering what her man was uncovering and
putting into his mouth and what bimbo her son was chewing on like a chicken
bone as she removed the foil of the TV dinner was a very enjoyable activity. It
was enjoyable for she was intrigued with all of life's curiosities.

These stodgy thoughts: They encompassed the hours and moved at a dinosaur's
reptilian pace for they weren't fully the refinement of thought either but
callow half ideas shaped more of superfluous raw feelings than thought and
being newborn with eyes shut they staggered around..

Feeling: it came about from chemicals that surrounded an impression made in the
gel of memory, and if the impression was a good one, they tried to prompt a
being toward more of them, and if it was bad with less of such engagements.

Staggering, her stodgy physical being also had trouble moving. She went to the
bathroom with a belief that she would take a shower so that she could go to the
shop. She had opened a store that sold landscape paintings and posters from
various sources, picture frames, and in her partitioned backroom that she
called her gallery, paintings that she picked up from recent trips to Southeast
Asia. It was there, as the business was beginning to do well financially that
within her migraines she began to founder there in mundane numbers of dollars
and cents, abstractions that bored her beyond belief. The frequency of her
migraines augmented for, buoyant as she was, she was nonetheless tossed in the
undulations of the ennui. Sick at times like she was now, she did not feel like
a deity any longer but an effete, forlorn bastardess in this world.

The shop: It was a room by which bland lives from colorless walls could choose
from her insipid goods; and from it her monetary concerns were eased as she
prostituted the hours of her days.

The days: Already a year had passed away since the point where she wanted to
sell the house. It passed away as if it were a mere hour. It passed away as the
owl, the ball games of her two boys that had disturbed the bird, youthful
naivety that a child's bliss in the simple pleasures of the day (the only
happiness there was by her reckoning of the years of her life) would go on
forever, and that confidence that the unquestioning love of a child would never
alter into the adult judgment against an errant parent. It passed away as youth
itself no matter how many doses of Vitamin E and C, growth hormones, estrogen
and testosterone replacement, vegetarian meals of choices rich in antioxidants,
low fat foods high in carbohydrates, botox injections, wrinkle reducer creams,
and morning racket ball sessions with her employees that she implemented into
each day.

The house: They were still living there because less than a year ago no one
seemed likely to buy it to be of immediate help to her financially.

The boy: And she kept the boy, irate as he was about having a real estate
agent's sign in the front yard, since there was no other place for him to go.

She would have gone into the "gallery" to perform her perfunctory duties were
in not for the bathroom mirror reflecting a paler and more haggard visage than
what she cared to accept; and so, unable to let determination belie reality,
she returned to the cold embrace of her silk bed linen. She just lay there with
the hours until, puffing on some marijuana and dozing for a few minutes, she
awakened to her higher authority accosting her like a mosquito. Gabriele tried
to shoo her away with her hand.

"You can't get rid of me that easily," laughed the Higher Authority.

"Athena, sorry. I thought you were an insect."

The Higher Authority guffawed. "It is Athena, the insect, is it? I thought the
last time we were together I was Aten and you were Akhenaten, or was it the
other way around?"

"I've made you Athena this time. You have a body and garments that I would
ascribe as being Ancient Greek and godessesque. So, what is it?"

"So haughty and so cold. And I am your higher authority! You can freeze people
even in the most innocuous situations, Gabriele. It is pitiful; as your eyes
did to that Pizza Hut delivery creature who brought you a cheese instead of a
Bella Garden and with the extra thick crust instead of a thin crust in
violation of your strict adherence to a youth fulfillment diet. You can freeze
them all you like, but don't make the mistake that you have that impact on me."

"The pizza was too hot. I turned the delivery guy cold. It kept the world in an
equilibrium that way."

"And on that train trip from Bangkok to Changmai to acquire those Nawin
Biadklang paintings—"

"Not only those but others in Southeast Asia. What about it? You can't surely
scold me for my response to that jackass on the train. Well, Athena, I was
sketching that verdant green landscape and a train stop in a small town with
all of its myriad figures when this old jackass seated next to his wife said in
English, 'I would like to go to sleep now.' I said 'You are over there with
your wife so sleep there next to her. I don't want to be the instigator of
divorce proceedings. No need to cross the aisle and come over into these
seats.' He said, 'I have a ticket. I am over there. I have a lower.' I checked
my ticket. 'I sleep in the lower cot,' I said. 'It is marked on my ticket.'
'How much was your ticket?' asked the old gizzard, snatching my ticket out of
my hands. '1400 baht round trip,' I told the old gizzard. 'I paid 1600 baht for
mine and so I get the lower no matter what it says on your ticket. You get the
upper!' he told me. 'Listen, fuck head, I'm busy now,' I said as I took back my
ticket. 'Upper/lower — who gives a flying fuck. I suppose I can climb the bars
like a monkey and into this upper monkey coffin but it won't happen right away.
I'm busy, you see. I wasn't put on this planet to serve your whims. If you are
so tired take a nap in your present seat.' By this time he had uniformed
security guards and God knows who telling me I needed to go out with them as if
I were being arrested and he was gossiping full force to every Tom, Dick, and
Harry on the train making an embarrassing scene. Was I supposed to stop my work
because Old Gizzard wanted to go to sleep at 6 p.m. I am not that big of a
whore that I exist to please the whims of all old gizzards. So, he and his
brown suited thugs got the cold stare from beginning to the end when I sealed
myself up in my monkey coffin. I know I have a hard faade but that doesn't
mean I don't concern myself with others. If Old Gizzard were choking to death,
of course I would give him the Heimlich maneuver. If he were having a nervous
breakdown I would talk sweet logic to him to appease him throughout the hours
of illogical and troubled emotions. As it turned out, I think that he is lucky
I didn't climb down from the metallic limbs and clog his snoring with my dirty
socks choking off mouth and nostrils."

"You sound like a real bitch."

"People have had that impression of me. They have since I was a little girl. I
don't mind at all. Matter of fact I think of the word as a real compliment.
Your impression of me is all your own. Do what you will with it, and then bug
off."

The Higher authority guffawed once again. When she gained composure she asked,
"So then, should I say that you need no one?"

"Yes, you've got it—no one." Gabriele smiled complacently.

"Hmm…Maybe Antarctica would be the best choice for someone like you. I did come
here for a purpose but it seems that it would be futile in the present
attitude. You have gotten more cynical with the years, haven't you, Gabriele?"

"Perhaps. I don't paint any longer, you know. I just run a shop to keep my
family going. His tuition is rather expensive."

"That's love. It is nothing to be cynical about."

"And what is this grand purpose of yours?"

" I just wanted you to consider whether or not, at this point, you have been an
effective mother. You've done some things with good enough intentions, I know,
but overall Americans judge accomplishments in a very pragmatic perspective:
has it worked?"

"You've already reached your conclusion that it has not, so there isn't a lot
of purpose in the question unless you just like wasting my time. He's a
teenager now. It's a little late to go back in time, wouldn't you say? I doubt
that there is anything that needs to be undone, anyhow. Just as siblings
compete fiercely to get mamma bird's affections so that she will feed them the
biggest worms, an only child also uses his parents."

"And parents children."

Gabriele felt as if the words had smote her on her face. It stung but after a
gloomy and tacit withdrawal she looked onto her higher authority and smiled
gravely as one beginning to understand. Having failed her son was seeping into
all previous convictions and deep into old memories themselves. She was being
enlightened in a most acerbic way. It was unpleasant; but when anything came
along to make her more aware she did not want to shun it. She stayed silent for
a few minutes until words again bubbled up through the aperture of her mouth.

"Perhaps I did use him. By having a child I gained companionship on my journey
into aloneness—"

"And?"

"And maybe the wish to finish family completely by beginning one of my own. Not
good reasons I know."

"No. Keeping Peggy from seeing him—"

"Okay, it was spiteful. I'll grant you that one."

"Quite unseemly for a goddess."

"Okay…I suppose so. Still, realistically a bad family continues its
stranglehold on the errant child unless she brings closure on it by making her
own family. That is just the way it is. Anyhow, I attempted to fulfill my
duties to the world. I gave birth to a child and put him into an isolated area
of a small town to bring his formative years in harmony with classical music
and non-violent fables. But he was a child of impetus and not reflection. Born
in the Gulf War, the year of truculence, by his seventh year he had beaten up
some red headed girl for kissing him on the merry-go-round and had beaten the
shit out of some little fuck who made a crude comment about me casting spells
on men and eating their piss. School sucked him up to make him a member of
truculent society. Ball competition was preferred over looking at the
uniqueness of every blade of grass. What could I do? I did my best considering
the fact that I prioritized my own continuing evolvement."

"And what did you learn that was so instrumental to your personal development?"

"I learned to play a shokohachi, a Japanese musical instrument." She chuckled
embarrassingly.

"Your mouth always did like to go down on long instruments. Anything else?"

"I became a lesbian briefly."

"That's right. Hilda was her name. When did you last communicate with her?"

"I don't know. Four years ago, maybe."

"Forlorn Hilda. Not all that much different than Rita/Lily Lily/Rita. Das
stimmt, nitch wahr?" [That's so, isn't it?] spoke the Higher Authority, for a
moment changing the conversation into German.

"Oh, please, you got that from Adagio. He doesn't know what he is talking
about."

"Doesn't he? He knows. I know. You know. Dear, silly little Gabriele, you are
hallucinating desertions of mom and dad in all things. So you desert rather
than be deserted. Remember that with kings and paupers, with great and small
creatures, one can have such sweet connections, but you have to leave Fort
Gabriele first."

"This mixing is a diluting of potential. Most people don't know themselves and
have never had an interesting thought all their born days because they are
scared to sit down with themselves for a minute. They flit around as social
butterflies when they are gadflies to me. You make me sound as a nut with a
major behavioral disorder. I guess you would have more grounds to call me
autistic. I just don't have this strong yearning to drive myself into the thick
part of the herd. If one is such a deviant, they think she is crazy. Their
negative judgments are meant to pillory a person to drive him or her back into
the herd.

"Just because someone has gone from a person's life doesn't mean she cannot be
ebullient with that entity. The more beings that are there in the heart the
more alive he or she will be! It is that simple: love and be loved!"

"Oh, you sentimental creature. Heart-- is that the receptacle of these highly
prized human emotions for contemporary man? …th emotions that make humans
slaughter each other. The Egyptians thought this heart was the receptacle of
thought. You make me want to puke using such silly words frivolously to reflect
nothing. You talk abstractions of heart and love like such a sophist."

"Gabriele, dear stupid Gabriele of such wasted intelligence, were you really so
smashed by that tank which your parents drove off in? Has life really been so
flat ever since? Have you never considered that human relationships in
particular are like the beautiful scents of flowers and these scents are the
interaction with other entities."

"Nay, these scents as you call them are manipulative forces—the flower trying
to attract the bee to pollinate its kind, the gentleman wanting to get laid,
the smiling businessman trying to woo in the money. I am sick of this flowery
gunk. Matter of fact I'm damn sick and sick of you! Be gone with you,
Mosquito!" And so she shooed her Higher Authority away.

She thought about that time a year ago when her hubris was so indefatigable.
Hadn't she told herself back then that, should it take place, his return to
Sharon would be a detachment of no more sentimental value than an extracted
tooth? Then, visibly upset one given day, he announced to her that he really
meant it and would be leaving immediately. It was only in her phlegmatic
folding of his clothes, packing his bags, calling a taxi for him, and seeing
him go away in it, that she put consistent direction into the distraught boy's
ambivalent and floundering movements. Back then he couldn't even pack a
suitcase for himself, as discombobulated as his thoughts were. Back then she
was so dangerously obdurate as if she were not mortal at all and had no
connection to these lesser beings. Still she supposed that if he had not been
refused, and had not retreated home in that same taxi, she could not have
maintained her dignified stoicism indefinitely. Losing another boy to Sharon,
she might well have eventually fallen into a nadir or great depression like an
apoplexy felling her into a great sleep. Change, that tempest of discontent,
made deciduous waste of all this impermanence that always left a person long
before she would leave herself at her demise. Maybe it was auspicious that her
will had been thwarted. At the time she even sensed some external force upon
her that was trying to stymie her recalcitrant will. Were these the feelings of
a secondary will or was it the voice of God trying to choke deleterious
determination before she was choked by it? This too was an unknown. And time
went by like a shell-shocked soldier.


Sang Huin's interactions at a convenience store that he often frequented were
no different than at any other time. For the people whom he encountered he had,
at one moment, the pugnacious haughtiness of a bull ready to charge, the next
moment a conscientious withdrawal from this arrogant stance by awkward fumbling
glances and gestures, and lastly a shy retreat from human interaction. So as he
was at the 7- eleven at 2:00 in the morning buying some milk the same thing
occurred: bullish glances into the faces of the cashiers, awkwardly attempting
to locate his wallet from one of the pockets of his bag (money always having
been such a dismissed tool until that inevitability of having to use it), and a
hurried look of one wanting to abscond from having his fumbling interactions
with King Sejong notes scrutinized as much as a wish to avoid small talk with
the cashiers (Korean utterances or near utterances to which he would be as
ungrammatical as a pig or therein in his native English where a fuller exchange
and a denuding of himself would have to ensue).

This disorganization with Korean Won and money in general was what he knew to
be a microcosm of wanting to depart from all social situations. It was his
secret of dislike of humanity and feeling that he was wrong to feel this way
embarrassingly disclosed by the fumbling subconscious like the disrobing of
Janet Jackson's breasts. It was no wonder that the gentleman within him often
ran away in the midst of social encounters.

He was even a little annoyed that there was no one behind him waiting in line
and, in so doing, making his time with the cashiers a more professionally
expedited encounter. But this English speaking cashier would not have any more
of this being dismissed the way he had behaved unto her for months. She found
his pugnacious and haughty awkwardness such an eccentric mix against his
handsome backdrop. By her reasoning of things, not being so beautiful herself
his blighted character made him more obtainable.

In one quick gesture she snatched his Pocket PC out of his shirt pocket and
asked, "What is this?" He answered, "It is my pocket PC. Can I have it back?"
He was alarmed. It was no less than a kidnapping of Gabriele and his face
grimaced like an old man, making her chuckle. "No, she said. You will not get
it back. Well, maybe—but only if you send to me an SMS from your mobile phone
asking to have it returned." "Why do I need to do that when you understand what
I'm saying in person?" he asked. "Because I want to have your phone number in
my mobile." She quickly wrote down her phone number on a piece of paper and
handed it to him. There was little else he could do but to fulfill the
instructions of the ransom even though the obtuse man was totally baffled by
these actions. He needed the return of his beloved Gabriele, his image, his
truth. He sent to her this SMS: "I don't like it when people steal my things.
It isn't friendly." She read it and smiled widely for this was their first
substantive dialogue. "Okay," she said, "I will return your toy but I want you
to smile every time you see me from now on, and I want you to mean it." He felt
excited by her storming of the wall he had built around himself and smiled more
meaningfully than his usual genuine contrivances. She handed to him his change
and the plastic bag containing his carton of milk. "My shift ends now. You can
walk me home." She signed out of her cash register, and then winked at her
coworker who giggled as the couple left the convenience store. "What is your
friend amused about?" he asked. "You," she said. "Why do you want me to walk
you home? Seoul is such a safe city," he said. "Safe if you are a man," she
responded. He felt aroused by her. With Seong Seob no longer allowing him to
penetrate, her flesh seemed all the more sumptuous despite the effluvium of
cheap perfume that exuded from it. For he who lived so little in this world it
seemed that he needed the physical immersion, the pierce into another human's
skin, beyond all other creatures. At least it seemed to him as such; and he
would have gone with her into her apartment and its bedroom had she not stopped
him at the gate. This was Korea, and a Korean girl in the mainstream of the
thicket would consummate a relationship only after the marital vows were
declared. She kissed him. "I am free to see a late morning movie. Meet me in
front of the store at ten." "All right," he said.


Three years later another spell more debilitating than this migraine took
place. Whereas the other one, and ones like it, felt like the impact of being
smacked against some type of a wall, this one was a gradual crescendo of being
smashed into the abyss.

It was 6:00 and she was returning from a trip to New York City where she had
attended a symphony with her man when she missed an entrance to a roadside
park. Needing even more to stretch, she veered off the interstate to a small
town.

Although it was wintertime, a new brand of boy keen to play a global sport was
in a baseball diamond practicing a sundry of soccer maneuvers from kicks and
stops to stylized manipulations of balls. She parked outside the diamond and
got out. These male youths were kicking a mist of dust into the air in what at
first seemed like a purposeless expenditure of energy but when she thought
about it seemed more like a male initiation ceremony. All were so uniform in
their uniforms. It seemed to her that young men and boys in particular needed a
typical male activity with which to sense themselves. What they were and what
they were supposed to do with themselves from the events that should bring on
insouciance and imperturbability to appropriate times for masturbation would be
extrapolated in this ensemble of males. As her eyes followed the dust she felt
deep sympathy for these fragile creatures. Boys and their balls began to seem
like such a lugubrious theme and she wondered if it could be transferred to
canvas should she ever paint again. She scanned the field and its outskirts.
She saw some men who were no doubt watching their sons. If a boy were to not
have a father showing some interest in guiding him, if not to a positive
expression of manhood that most did not have a clue about, at least an
innocuous release of youthful energies on a ball, it seemed to her that he
would be lost forever. It seemed to her that he might not ever find a real
vocation for himself and he would not even know if he should look up a skirt or
pull on another man's zipper.

She called her man on her mobile phone. "Hi, it's me. Did you get back to your
apartment okay? Good. No, I'm just taking a break from driving. What? Oh, I
don't know exactly. Some little town. I'm near a ball diamond. Nothing really.
Stretching and thinking my weird thoughts. Yeah, I went through a Chinese fast
food drive-thru, thanks. What about you? Huh? You are breaking up a bit…. I
see…. Okay, I guess if you are with someone I should call you later…. Girl or
guy friend? Uh huh. No, I'm not jealous. That is an antediluvian instinct of
troglodytes…. Cavemen, my Russian friend. You learn so many new words from me
on a daily basis that I ought to charge you for the service. Antediluvian? —
old, out of date, ancient, prehistoric. Well, I guess you should get back to
your date. Better to ball a chick than play ball with a boy. No, nothing. Just
me and my weird thoughts… .Purpose? Well, again, thanks for the ticket to the
concert. I decided to call 'cause I wanted you to know that I was thinking of
you, although my timing seems to be all so wrong. What?… Why do I make jealousy
equated to primal drives of cavemen and cave mice, of mice and men? I think
that is what you are asking. Think of it, my love, it is just a way for a man
to make sure that he doesn't have to take care of babies that aren't his and
for a woman not to lose her hunter. Okay, so I can't prove it. I'm a bit like
Descartes that way despite my belief in scientific inquiry and methodology. But
still one can know lots that can't be proven. It is simple and base selfishness
that prompts humans to respond as they do. That is why I scorn the herds. One
of my other reasons for calling is thinking about both of you, you and
Nathaniel, and each of you needing each other no matter if you believe it or
not…. Of course. I'm not scolding you. No lectures. I agree. Yes, I know you
have been kind to him, but you haven't been close. A man needs to guide a boy
and a boy needs to be guided by a man. I know he is not your son, and he isn't
exactly the easiest person to deal with, but he has no other father….Yeah, I
know. You don't exactly live with us now. Forget it. I shouldn't have asked
that I suppose. What?… No. Okay, in part when I married you I thought that you
would be a positive influence on him. Is that so bad? Marriages are contracts
and people have expectations when they go into them. What did you expect?
(Laugh). Pussy, you say? You seem to be getting that without me. Is your friend
at the table with you? Oh, gone to the bathroom. That's good…. God, I don't
even know if you want to stay together. I know you think that friends should
marry and we did. What?… No, I don't want a divorce but we need to do more than
once a month of seeing each other….Yes, I know. It was my crazy idea. I'm full
of them. As an artist I need time alone but I'm not an artist now but a
businesswoman…. Yes, I'm sure I'm not jealous, as much as you might want me to
be. I'm beyond that. I'm beyond instinct, beyond societal influences, beyond
religion, beyond, beyond! Free to be a loose canon. Yes, I know I amuse you.
So, to better amuse you I think we should meet at least twice a month or our
signatures on a piece of paper will begin to seem like a distant dream…. Okay,
good. And could you call Nathaniel later this week just to ask him how he is?
Do you still have his mobile number? Good. Everybody needs to think that
someone cares for him a little no matter if he does or not (laugh)... I'm
joking. Of course I am…Yes, I know you do in your own way as me in my own ways.
We all have our ways."

A half hour later she got back into her car and drove into the embrace of
darkness. It was 3:34 in the morning when she first saw the roof of her
quasi-hermitage from a distance. At the first glimpse of it she released a long
exhalation as if, after a long exhausting journey, she needed to rest from
breathing itself within the comfort of her solitary bedroom. But then seeing
cars strewn on the edge of the road, she felt disconcerted as if she had driven
into the wrong place while knowing that she was back home.

She felt alarmed and her mind tried to conjure up scenarios that might explain
this emergency, if it were such. But upon advancing closer, she saw that there
were no emergency vehicles and merely more of these emptied shells of unwanted
strangers littering her drive. Unable to park there, she was forced into a
backward retreat.

She parked halfway into a ditch behind most of the others and turned off her
engine. There, she was stunned by loud music vibrating the windows, piercing
her ears with its pollutants of action usurping meditation, and weltering in
the hollows of her brain. She entered her hermitage whence all the noise
originated. Inside all was being barraged in the cacophony of rap, hip hop, or
some other artillery that she had neither knowledge of nor empty labels to
place on that which she was adverse to know anything about. She looked on her
surroundings with the consternation of one returning to charred and smoke
filled ruins still in the grip of war.

Then her mood changed into something entirely different: moralistic loathing.
She felt as an unwitting heterosexual man innocently defecating in a cubicle of
a restroom in a shopping mall who is startled and appalled to see from that
crevice interconnecting the adjacent cubicle to his own a hand one moment, a
face the next, and then that hand again as it trespasses with fingers wiggling
a "come to my stool and service me" gesture. For when the consternation had
worn off the former whore and Victorian adulteress was repulsed by the world
around her: repulsed by the nebulous clouds of smoke, the inebriating smells of
beer so potent as to be tactile and viscous enough to be a liquid pouring into
her lungs, this scene of teenage couples smooching and almost smooching as they
got stoned in her living room, and how this generation was caught up in the
same hungers making it no different from those which preceded it.

All compunction of her own interestingly varied if no more lascivious life than
other earthlings vanished from all conscious thought. Even if she had latent
ideas that Puritanical prudishness would be hypocritical, and even if she
doubted having the moral authority to be the guardian of youth since, according
to her there were no morals to guard, she intended to crash the party
nonetheless.

The indignation she, an American homeowner, experienced at such intruders
occupying and thereby desecrating "her" hallowed domain amalgamated with her
Puritanical eagerness to excoriate all moral unregenerates. For she too was an
American, that autocratic hybrid of conservative and liberal property owners,
espousers, and defenders of ownership who wanted to dictate moral rules
sententiously in accord with ownership agendas. As nature only had evolvement
from viable elements, energy, accident, and chance into its structure a person
with some financial means wanted to own and possess to be, and wanted the
trespassers of her property arrested. She thought of this peculiar sense of
ownership that flared within her; and although she would be amused by
ruminations of its senselessness in the immediate future, now she judged it was
time to be irate. It was time to act.

Disheveled angel on a loveseat: "Hello, you must be Mom." Beer bottle quaffer
on a newly upholstered chair (repeating mockingly):"Hi Mom." Androgynous purple
haired creature (disingenuous as a child waving at Mickey Mouse in Disneyland
but directed at her, this polar bear with the stiff arms who had been
mutilation at her inception, who trudged through the party): Merely waving.

The occupiers seemed to be everywhere. Some were rising from below or
descending from above to stare at her from a staircase while a good many of the
others were in the same room with her or waiting in the hall. As her house had
myriad rooms, so she assumed, would be the amount of trespassers

Gabriele (to all): "Who or what the hell are you?" Angel (as if the question
were directed to her alone): "I am an angel." Angel's partner on the loveseat:
"Angel of the streets. That would be more like it."

He was using his fingers to comb through her disheveled hair— hair that combed
or not was comely in youth— youths who were insouciant and free of financial
worries, nonchalant to the shadow of their adulthood of entrapment that they
were stepping into like a snare— shadows of ineluctable errors in the making of
one's own family that for now were not their own. She imagined the angel"
dirtying up" the back of her sofa with the hair fibers of her mop. Then she
surmised the dirty invaders as a whole. They were getting high on more than the
present moment. If they were still floating on a dispersed cloud of smoke they
would soon be seeking to inhale more to keep themselves high until the
inevitability of sleep would make them founder. If they had not already burnt a
whole or spilled beer onto any of her furniture they would have surely done so
had she kept her original plan of staying in New York City for the night. She
loathed them for being the dirty ravagers of her home that they were but, wise
to herself and the tricks therein, she knew that she loathed the occupiers more
from the envy of their youth than for any carnal carnival that they had imposed
upon her hermitage schemed together in the expectation of her absence.

Angel: "Okay, I'm a street angel." Laughter in the room to which Gabriele also
laughed albeit begrudgingly. Thick lips: "Call me Mr. P. How do you do, Mother?
Would you allow me to kiss your cheek?" More hysterical laughter. Was her role
as the mommy storming the party something so farcical? Was she such a farce as
a mother? If she were it was from the fact that her intelligence was greater
than the role. This was what she told herself. She grabbed thick lips by one of
his long ears and forced him to kneel. "Do you think I'd let an ugly dog like
you slobber on me?" she blared. There was more hysterical laughter. The room
itself seemed to scoff her pretension to motherhood within the sheer volume of
its cacophonous and sneering laughter. Her obdurate eyes fell as solid boulders
into his retina pools. Then suddenly, her cold eyes dismissed him as of having
no more importance than any insect, and she brushed him aside.

Weren't they impertinent? If it had been directed toward anyone else she would
have approved, but their impertinence to her was a contemptible act mocking the
authority she had to dismiss them with. Their sedentary refusal to leave her
immediately as she entered her domicile was a criminal action. "Party's over,
party's over!" she screamed six times into random faces that were seated in a
semicircle. But this only increased their laughter at the redundancies of the
mad mommy. For a year now there had been her own repudiation of the residual
smells of cocaine; briefly returning from the shop to find him lounging around
in the house in his underwear; music slaughtering her contemplations; sitting
languidly in meetings at the school to discuss his truancy and feeling as a
broken drum, a defunct instrument that could not obtain change; his running
away for days without her being able to fathom where he went; talks where,
without propitiating, she admitted having not been there as much as the
domestic sort, but cautioning him to secure his future by attending classes and
studying as diligently as he was able to do; scoldings and beatings that were
also to no avail; watching small but expensive items disappear from the home
and telling herself that she meant to get rid of them anyhow; and now this.

"Where is he!" she demanded to know from the sundry people who had risen from
the pit of the house to the parlor.

"Up!" said someone; and she found him in her bed copulating with his girl
beneath him. She grabbed him by the neck, dragging the naked body through the
frenetic crowds. With a burly frame kept muscular by her ritual of weekly if
not daily racket ball sessions, she was able to pull him around no differently
than she had when he was five years old. Enjoying his ride and his naked
exhibition beyond any pleasure he had ever felt before, he squealed with
laughter even unto being hurled into the snow.

"I love you Mom," he guffawed.

"I'll bring your bitch out next and you can do that in the streets." As she
turned to do just that someone brought out Nathaniel's clothes and the crowd
began to disperse from the house.

When he returned late in the afternoon she was on her deck. Like her migraine,
an unpredictable storm was coming upon her. Trees hurled their limbs at the
dusk because they themselves were being hurled. They were angered because they
were being angrily smote. It seemed to her that everything was smote in jilts
of unpredictable existence, and love itself was no guarantee of anything. It
was selfishly using a child and being used and merely this. Bland philistine
lives devoid of color and galleries in a marriage where two conventional
parents were always present could produce Klu Klux Klan members, Timothy
McVeighs, serial killers, snipers, child molesters, unibombers, or bigoted
bible thumpers blowing up abortion clinics. Weakened and in pain, she half way
yearned for a priest to hand her a round piece of unleavened bread to melt in
her mouth for a reduction of tension in her life, the melting of her
quandaries, and the belief that crucifixions and violence and those who were
born in the wrong socioeconomic state and whose short and painful lives were
consumed by hard labor and drudgery for survival in the injustices and
truculence that abound were all part of God's plan. She wistfully thought of
the statues of saints and patron saints that had their home warming
familiarity. Then he approached her.

"Hi. Sorry about everything. Teenagers, right? We like parties. I didn't have
permission and things got out of control. Are you angry?"

She noticed how muscular he now was. For the first time she felt intimidated by
it, seated there as weakened as she was. She cleared her throat and looked on
him like an object such as a wall that she would see and her hubris would
bypass as immaterial. He had felt it before and hated that look of hers beyond
all others. Her treatment of the dog, he assessed, was sometimes better than
this. "I think I'll try something," she mumbled aloud contemplatively. "When do
you think you'll be paid from that burger joint you work for?"

"Why?"

"Do you have money?"

"Some."

"I don't think I'll have you as a son any longer. Still, it's a little hard—not
impossible though —to throw you out. Stay as a tenant if you want. You can give
me half what you get. That way you can stay. We'll do this for a time and see
how it goes. And if it doesn't go then you can go. I'll ask you to leave if it
doesn't work. I'll force you out."

"You stopped the allowance. That is why I'm working there so much on the
weekends with so little pay when I should be studying "

"I didn't want it to go into dope."

"Oh, please. You are the one who smokes joints."

"Different. It is medicine for my migraines, and I don't take it often. Pay
half and then you can stay—in your area below, and only this. Half and you can
stay."

"All right," he said.

The next morning she woke up from a strange dream in which she was driving over
her son the way Michael had run over the Indian boy; and as she woke up
startled from the dream she was again startled in her awakened state. Nathaniel
was there smirking at her in a corner of her bedroom, crunching on a cup of
ice, and the shadow of his burly form was impinging on the edge of her bed. She
was mute in a cold chill. He was there for a few seconds and then he was gone.

She again stayed at home the next day since her headache was now fully a
migraine; but unable to concentrate on reading a book, she soon felt lonely and
bored with so much resting in bed. She brought in a stray cat that she had been
feeding for a month. It strangled her footsteps when she moved, cried if it
wasn't touched, and when she put it on her lap it tried to suck on the buttons
of her shirt as if it had regressed to the unopen-eyed newborn needing to be
nursed and to immerse itself in a mother. The behavior was strange and she was
half-tempted to throw it out had unwanted empathy not infected her thoughts.
Furthermore, it gave her subject for thought, which she liked so well; and
whenever an event or being provided her with a subject for rumination it gave
her a gift that superseded the pleasure or pain of the interaction. If she had
morality it was that of empathy and to measure a thing based upon it giving her
subject for rumination. It was from the cat that she garnered, from her
experience with it, that memories of traumatic events pressed into the actions
of all things. She was watching Star Trek reruns, and drooling chewing tobacco
into an aperture of a Coca Cola can when Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock and Dr. McCoy
were beaming up at the same time as her son. Obviously he didn't go to school.
She told herself that she didn't "give a damn" and this time it was essentially
true.

"Little pig, little pig, will you let me come in?" he asked from the doorway of
her bedroom.

"It all depends," she said stoically. "If you have money you can leave it and
go. If you don't have money you have broken two fundamental clauses in our
contract—one that forbids you from this area of the domicile and a second that
you have to pay what is owed to me." She was angry that even now, for his sake,
she threw away money on tuition and tutors, was living in a house that was
really beyond her means, and was a businesswoman, a lowly merchant, for his
sake. She had sacrificed for him and it had been a waste.

"I'm not paying anything to you," he said.

"Is that so," she asked calmly. "Then really there is no reason to be up here,
is there?"

"All right," he said and went away.

And then, in that evening of the third day of Migraines, her flow of energy was
now a desiccated bed of rock and soot. She merely lay on the sofa near the
billiard table with the cat sleeping on her lap and her eyes staring at the
individual and collective tiles of the ceiling. She too had regressed for like
a child she was afraid to make any movement lest the cat be disturbed; and this
pathos, like a child's, was from discerning the vulnerability of all things
that could only be peered from the scope of one's weakness. He again came to
her. He was grinning complacently. She wondered why he was now moving beyond
his boundary: and yet he was male, and no different than any Ghengis Khan who
conquered new turf and made foreign natures submissive.

She wanted to say, "Hello, honey, could you give me a wet washcloth" but she
did not want to approach him from weakness and so she said, "You've trespassed
the agreed boundaries."

"Uh uh!" he negated. "You're down here in the family room, and down here is
mine, isn't it? Maybe I should get the cops." He laughed. She didn't say
anything. "Whose car is in the drive?" he asked.

"It's your graduation present. I bought it months ago. I had them bring it out
today when I had a clear purpose."

"I'm not graduating."

"You are and I am," she said. "It is time."

"Time for what?"

"Time to leave. Time to end this state we have found ourselves in." Her heart
was beating rapidly and she could barely slur the words from her mouth by
imagining them to come from some source outside herself. "I've been waiting. I
wasn't sure the context of giving it to you: a birthday or Christmas gift, a
banana waved under your nose to get you through school, or to facilitate a
permanent departure."

"You're kicking me out?"

"Yes."

"Where would I go?"

"You just go. Just as I went to Ithaca. You just go, deciding that you will
suffer through anything so as to end it with people who failed you." Tiring,
she stopped and put her hands on her pounding head. Then seconds later she
continued. "Anyway you stop thinking about them. You will them into
non-existence, or as close as you can, because as cold as it is nothing else
works."

"What sort of a person tells her son to leave?" The reality of being cut off
with no one filled him with dread and his voice had a whining undertone for he
was questioning if the end of family had been his aim.

"You will them into non-existence," she murmured in a despondent redundancy,
"because to even take in one nice enough memory would bring in a stampede of
others to trample over you leaving you nothing but bitter in those memories,
never able to reestablish yourself anew. No need for sentimentality: will a
permanent end. Resurrecting yourself anew is only possible with the gates
closed." She was remembering that day she arrived in the airport visibly
pregnant and intent to move to the East Coast to begin family anew. They
inveighed the Rice University graduate school graduate with their artillery of
words: whore, loser, [bastardess] whom they had taken in, and not in [her]
right mind. She had been matched to an old doctor named Jerry, hand-Picked by
Peggy. Marriage to him and living the remainder of the myriad days of her life
in Emporia, Kansas would have been the payment for her indulgence in being
allowed to study abroad in that quasi-nation of Texas. Merging the more
affluent family to hers had been the price for Rice that Peggy had put on her
head. Standing there unwed and pregnant, the bulging belly an ignominy, they
saw her as ungrateful for their charity in taking her in. They believed that
her education had gone to her head, and that she was so unlike that little girl
they trained to be a housekeeper—the one who did her perfunctory duties even if
her eyes were hard and cold toward those who tried to finger her. Without words
those eyes had demanded all these males to get their fingers out of her and put
them into their own rectums but back then she had done it in wordless etiquette
as a respectful family member. But as a graduate she was releasing her latent
honest thoughts in contemptuous words. She was as a madwoman rebelling against
that designated role as a lesser family member by a pregnancy and a declaration
to leave them forever.

"Making oneself anew. It can be done if the gates are shut completely and the
herds of memories are kept at bay. Then there is no bitterness to poison the
present. But be forewarned that if one creates family of his own the new self
and the new life might go awry. Then he or she needs to fulfill the
expectations of the new family, needs to sacrifices himself for their sake,
perhaps is in a detestable job, and needs to raise children with only that
defunct model of a bad parent as the example of being a parent for oneself."
She saw his smirking and it aggravated her. "Don't be so amused by what you
don't understand."

"You always say weird shit all the time. What else can I do but laugh at it?
You aren't really kicking me out are you?" He asked this but she did not say
anything. "Are you in a lot of pain?"

"Some," she said. "My medicine is in the kitchen. Could you bring it to me, and
could you bring back a cold washcloth too?"

"You are kicking me out of the house and yet I should help you."

"You don't have to."

"Have to help you or have to leave?"

Either one was at her lips but she could not release that wisp of air and her
bottom lip began to tremble. She suddenly realized that she was not watching
someone else say these things that she thought should not have been said and
not say things that should have been said. "Help me. You don't have to, but you
do have to leave"

"No," he whined as tears weltered in the confines of his confused eyes. "You
can pain me but I wouldn't want to pain you." He said this in such dulcet
ingenuousness. He was like that child he once was-- the child who had taken an
empty tray of a TV dinner, filled it with water, and picked wild flowers to
bring to his beloved mother.

Going into the kitchen he tried to think, as he looked for the pills, what
words he might enchant to propitiate her, his sustenance; but his howling dog,
chained up near the swimming pool, kept destroying his concentration so he went
to the deck to silence it.

"Bitch," he yelled as he looked down from the balustrade, "shut your fucking
snout!" The dog continued to howl and so he repeated himself with a more
angered vehemence. Only after trudging halfway down the steps did the howling
stop. He bent down over the railing and looked at the dog again. His eyes
dropped into the dog's like stones and the animal began to whimper. He glanced
up at the darkening clouds, sighed, and sensed that he and the dog were the
same; and then a visceral malaise about the futility of all things began to
permeate all his thoughts and his vitriol mitigated. "Upset that she brought in
the cat instead of you? I'm sure you are but you're thrown your bones and are
nicely kept here ignored and forgotten. What's wrong with that? You're back
home after two weeks in the kennel. It seems you should be happy with that."

He sat down on one of the lower steps, whittling away an edge near his feet
with his pocketknife. At first he hoped to see answers in his current dilemma,
but then deciding that there were none unless that gained by time and obscurity
he thought, "Maybe she won't think like this in a few days. I'll keep out of
sight and ride it out—not look too anxious for the car. See how it goes. That's
the best thing to do."

He spoke to the dog. "Get back. Such stinking breath, bitch." The dog backed
away a few steps. "So, you were in a cage at the kennel. She knew that I'd
never take care of you when she made that trip to Thailand to buy paintings for
this so called gallery of hers--just a partitioned backroom, more like a
closet, that caused her to rename the store into 'The Gallery.' Me, the
arsonist, was in my own little kennel—a cheap hotel room. But then yours was a
little worse wasn't it? You did not get any money deposited into your bank
account from which to buy booze and a bitch. I never need a whore—just a
willing patron, but you have to take them to expensive restaurants and treat
them like they are the center of the universe, be soft to them. Takes up a lot
of time, so I'm always tempted to get more professional whores that you can buy
outright but sometimes they are too expensive. Not that I haven't had some. If
you pawned off something of hers, all things are possible."

Whittling the wood was more than merely the whittling of the minutes of life
but a wistful hope that time itself would carve a purpose to his days that no
patriarch had done. Expressed in the subliminal connotations of gestures
defacing property it was hope hopelessly rendered as boyhood tagged him and ran
off leaving the stark ogre of manhood overtaking and merging into him. The dog
came to him, ringing the saliva-drenched towel to dry on the rack of his face
like a gift. The unbidden intimate gesture of the dog was so repugnant that he
drove the knife into the bitch. He was startled by how the clay of flesh was so
easily pierced. Not wanting to hear the agonized yelping of the bitch he
re-obtained the knife from its sheath of flesh and cut the throat in one little
action that would end life suddenly.

He hated the bitch and the bitch who had given to him the bitch. By his mother
upsetting him terribly, she had thrust him into this role as slaughterer that
by the blood alone seemed as a vile and malicious rampage against life itself
that the killing of birds and crawdads had not done. Hating the bitch and the
bitch who had made him the breaker of the wine glass, he ascended to the
kitchen, pulled out a glass from the cupboard, and returned to the corpse
before all the blood had bled into the thin layer of snow. Finding when he
returned that it had mostly done so he scooped the reddened snow into his glass
and returned for the Imtrex and Topiramate.

As his mother drank the melted dog with her pills, he hated her even more for
dashing his innocence to pieces. He grabbed the glass out of her hands,
disgorged the contents into her face, raised her in his arms, and razed her
onto the billiard table. There he began to undress her. "No," she said weakly
but no utterance would have stopped it. He took down his pants. Banging and
piercing into her, within were the voices of childhood peers telling him that
his mother was a witch who put spells on men and drank their "pee." It was as
if her head detached itself from the body and was rolling, slamming into
billiard balls, and rebounding against the edges of the table only in reality
it was attached to the debased physical extension of herself that bumped
against a sundry of balls in the tossing of this world.




Chapter 43


The catalysts of a migraine being blood vessels that constrict blood flow as
they dilate externally, and the headaches themselves being the reduced
metabolism that is the consequence of the constriction and the dilation: she
knew them and their impact well. She was feeling unprecedented surges of pain
deeper than she ever had before; still they were nothing to her, catatonic and
naked as she was on a billiard table for a period of hours. Lying face forward
in a state of shock as the body cuddled to the clothing that was beneath
her—clothing that absorbed a bit of her blood and incontinent discharge while
the rest seeped into the fabric of the table—she was a veritable puddle there
unto herself, and her mental state was not much different than severed
consciousness. For the most part it skid like blowing trash that moved with the
elements and had no sense of itself in space and time. Occasionally there were
seconds of sensing something, or imagining herself sensing something. It was
some type of boxed light or illuminated squares like the pattern of her
grandmother's quilt and with it was static as a deafening cloud of locusts. She
was not trapped in the boxes because there was no she. Likewise, she was not
exactly listening to the sound for to do so would be to have intent and for
intention there would need to be a self that she did not have.

The monotony of the enclosure of boxed light compacted with that masticating
rumbling sound of the descent of insectual clouds: when seeming to be at all
this was all there was. And such seconds of coming to herself were as of
putting toes into the cold waters of a swimming pool and then suddenly pulling
out again.

Whereas a hallucination like the tunnel of light was an instrument of the
psyche to delude a dying soul that there was a positive within the termination
of being, hers, which she encountered in the third hour of her figurative
demise, was more like regeneration. To avoid more pain by accepting death was
the aim of the former but for the latter it was a time, a half-life, before
some renewal could begin. Then light and locusts were transmuted into balls and
banging.

The black ball and the myrmidons of the black ball were moving like the cars of
a train around the table with individual parts sometimes banging against the
edge and rebounding but always to return to that designated train in that
ineluctable orbit. The pull of the eight ball was gravity in a sense like a sun
moving ever so slightly in space and by its movements capturing smaller
entities or the whirlpool formed in the sinking of a ship. But why was the
larger black billiard ball moving to begin with? Inertia? What was the prime
mover of inertia? The answer she would not know even if she were aware of a she
to know something, which she didn't.

It seemed to her, if there were a her, which there was not in such a state,
that the moving train of balls sometimes slowed down and curved into letters as
if they meant to communicate something incommunicable, too painfully
incommunicable, like the image of a US soldier who had a hand hideously swollen
from the radiation he received from the A-bomb experiments on Bikini Island--
hideous images thumping consciousness until it became something other than
consciousness, something altogether surreal.. If there had been more of them
these billiard balls might have come together to spell out a message one letter
at a time. But these Pythagoreans had numbers tattooed to them as mute and
wordless as they were. Though numbers they nonetheless conveyed:

-- Andrei Linde began a paradigm shift in cosmology that allowed for theories
other than the Big Bang or Steady State theories when he proposed that the
universe or universes were self-replicating and inflationary.

--The mixture of hydrogen, methane, ammonia, and water vapor was bombarded with
lightning, and in the course of time generated amino acids that could produce
protein, but how a self-replicating organism of DNA sequences evolved from this
has no plausible theory.

--The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins was an original means of envisioning
organisms as temporary, reproductive homes existing solely for the purpose of
allowing genetic material to thrive eternally, and from it a new branch of
social sciences known as sociobiology emerged.

--Wild wheat and barley live naturally in the area between Eastern Turkey and
the Caspian Sea. Some time between 12,000 and 8,000 BC, women must have
discovered that by sowing the seeds of these grains they could reduce the
amount of time required to gather fruits and vegetables. In so doing they
allowed sedentary life in organized cities to emerge.

--Amonhotep IV (1353-1337 BC) changed his name to Akhenaten or Akhenaton, which
meant, "Aten is satisfied." Although unable to retain conquered lands like
Palestine or succeed very well in military campaigns, this pharaoh's emphasis
of the sun god, Aten, allowed a more naturalistic art to flourish.

--Cleopatra (69-30 BC) was the last ruler of the Ptolemaic dynasty which ruled
Egypt from 51-30 BC. As one of the strongest women in the ancient world, she
was idealized by her people as a reincarnation of Isis.

--Most owls are nocturnal and spend daytime in a quiet and inconspicuous roost.
Their activities consist of preening, combing plumage with their claws,
screeching, hooting, whistling and snorting

--When owls bob and weave their heads it can appear as if they are exhibiting
curiosity concerning the world around them in a humanoid gesture, but in fact
they are merely attempting to improve their three dimensional concept of
whatever it is that they are looking at. It is no wonder that people, such as
they are in readily subscribing to the superstitions of their brothers and
sisters in the herd, attributed wisdom, prophecy, and witchcraft to the bird.

--As a successful predator feared by the other birds, lone owls are sometimes
mobbed by flocks of rival birds and forced to depart from its roost because of
the harassment.

--In keeping with the first two laws of thermodynamics, organisms can neither
create nor destroy energy but can only transform it from one form to another.

What she was thinking curled there like an aborted fetus — there being in a
corner where she could see a beam of sunshine from a distant window as she
stayed hidden behind a large chair, obscure within its shadow — she did not
know. She did not even know how she got into her library, or even that she was
there.

There, in this fetal position on the floor, she was not as ingenuous as a child
for she was more innocent than this. An infant had its cries and smiles to
manipulate responses but only she, a non- lachrymose mute, timid and shaking
but with eyes open to any compassionate deity who might transcend from the
beam, had such ingenuousness. Had someone other than Nathaniel gotten beyond
the locked door she would have reached her hands out to the deliverer and the
deliverance unreservedly. Once she even slipped into the raiment of memories
where a self (presumably herself) interacted with another; and it was from it
that, all so briefly, she imagined herself there in human form feeling of Thai
silk with Hilda opening the door to find her. Behind the leather of that
antique and ostentatious, patriarchal chair that had become her protector and
shield she was a human being for the first time, needy, needing to be needed,
and enmeshed as a member of the herd. There was even a second where Hilda fused
into Rita/Lily and instead of coming to her, it was she, Gabriele, who came
into that apartment in Ithaca, embracing her friend in the joy of comforting
another being and just being there in the throngs of shared human thought and
feeling.

The hours led into dusk and the beam of sunlight floundered behind an opaque
screen and then withered into darkness. In that vacuous darkness within and
without she remained a convalescent to the impairment of memory which could not
be lobotomized no matter how much she yearned for it to be. As before, there
were some sane and enlightening ideas in her hallucinations, which had she been
able to record them in her madness, upon reflection might have shown a world
beyond Fort Gabriele. But all her thoughts were merely shards within the hours.
It did not even dawn on her to go to the bathroom. Without meaning to do so she
urinated where she sat and even this fetid puddle soaking into the carpet
seemed distant and detached as if not having been perpetrated by the self.

By this time truly crazy thoughts interacted with memory as if the mind were
attempting to cause her to recognize herself in the midst of absurd fantasy.
She believed that she was her Ferrari; that in each city where she drove the
traffic lights always turned green at her approach; that she, the car, often
reached into her window for the snuff on her dashboard which she would put into
the gas tank as she drove south; that she would have gone all the way into
Mexico, departing completely from the truculence of American society, were it
not for that red light in Fayetteville, Arkansas; that after five long minutes
she, that car, felt restless before the ongoing red, turned right, and moved up
a steep hill until she was at a Confederate cemetery; and that there on a
gravel road in the thickets of Elm trees, huge Evergreens, and weathered
tombstones she felt a kinship with these deceased secessionists grouped
according to states —

Legs on a bed (presumably her own) and ants on the sheets crawling upon those
legs -- empty cities and this feeling of being forlorn and banished in a world
of no people — an uninhabited White House where no flag blew — flaming World
Trade Center towers and her eyes looking up in horror — people falling
wordlessly out of hundred story windows and herself thinking that Aten, Athena,
Jehovah or some god outside of man's feeble conceptualizations of one would
surely deliver them by using clouds as baseball mitts but not feeling
surprised, only disappointed, to be living in such a godless realm — gluttonous
nations fighting for the free flow of oil, and herself seeing them on the
evening news — a maze of rooms in her home divided like Baltic states — wanting
something to impale into the concrete of her makeup when she went to galleries,
museums, and these art parties—herself, her complete self, with Nathaniel as
the two of them watched her cat, Mouse, sniff the room for bugs; herself, her
complete self, telling him that "all creatures need to feel industrious no
matter whether they accomplish anything or not," hoping that subtle clues would
inspire him to attempt his homework — the chest of her husband, the man with
the unmemorable name, inhaling and exhaling and herself floating on it in the
undulations of an ocean.

At this time she was not even aware that her fingers were pinching air as if a
brush lay between them or that she was tracing out owls with her hands as if
this was magically transmuting them onto the walls. Owls and more owls she
patterned out — not regular barn owls, and not saw-whet owls, but Arctic owls
living alone in cold snowy deserts. An hour into this some consciousness of
what she was doing took place and the word "Paint!" flashed over her mind in a
conflagration for she was afraid of falling into complete madness.

Opening the door, she crouched on her four legs as if in crawling through tall
grass she could extricate herself from the land of her enemies to a land of
lambent color. Scurrying from room to room, she at last found that which she
sought; but she became terrified at finding a photograph of Nathaniel on a
table near her paints and she retreated from it. She crawled into a corner and
for twenty minutes she kept her eyes closed and her body shook in chills of
terror before courage began to replenish within her. Reentering her fortress
with color and instruments, she stood on one of the upper bookshelves that
surrounded the whole room of the library. Dashing paint into solitary stoic
owls, in one moment she became cognizant enough to see that each one was
without any variation from the others because life was incessantly cruel
without variation. The room was in total darkness apart from a bit of moonlight
that kept her task possible. Then something divine came out of the moonlight.
It was not a deity for it was flesh and blood as she.

"Gabriele," sang Rita/Lily happily. Then, like an empath, her visage changed as
had the compassionate face of Gabriele's grandmother, and as had the mood ring
that Gabriele wore as a teenager. "What are you doing?… Are you okay?… Can you
understand me?"

Gabriele's bottom lip trembled and she dropped her paintbrush on the floor.
Then she accidentally tipped over the paint. "My friend, my friend," she
murmured.

"Yes, Gabriele, yes I am your friend. Don't be afraid. I am with you now." From
at first seeming to comport her usual uncertain hesitancy, Rita was now
appearing as a decisive voice according to the perspective of the child before
her.

Gabriele pulled back inside herself for a moment, uncertain about swapping
roles with the callow and manic-depressive neighbor whom she once cared about.
The idea of friendship was beginning to befuddle her and she looked dazed,
swept away in a mist of adult skepticism for that which was not in her
experience. But overall she was ingenuous, and as one who was ingenuous she
retained hope in foreign concepts. "Friendship. Really? I have existed all
these long 39 years without any."

"No, you only thought that you did not have them."

" I didn't forget you, you know. I haven't forgotten you."

"We are here together so we haven't forgotten each other."

"Together in a dream?" Gabriele asked.

"Sometimes dreams have a reality unto themselves."

"I wasn't good to you, I know. I'm so sorry."

" I cried for a week when you left. I cried because you did not tell me that
you were leaving. But it is okay now. I don't mind now. You are better and
brighter than me, and I understood that you weren't thinking of me then, that I
was nothing to you then. But it is all in the past. Now we just need to get you
well."

"Am I sick?"

"You will be well. You will be well soon."

"Rita/Lily, what has happened to me? I don't understand any of it!" she cried.

"Hold on, my dear. I'm afraid that you will fall."

"Please!"

"Be careful! Stay unperturbed. Look at the paint. It has splattered onto the
floor."

"What happened to me?"

"It is better to not think of it. Far worse things have happened, as bad as
this is or seems to be. They have, and they have been overcome by mere
mortals."

"Is he here?"

"No, he is gone. Didn't you hear the car drive away?"

"Yes."

"He'll be back, won't he?"

"No. You saw him with a suitcase in his hands."

"He spat in my face with that bag in his hands."

"Yes, my dear. Let it go from you. You are a goddess. You are beyond the
cruelty of this world."

"Oh, Rita!" she cried and fell into hysterical sobs.

"Stay calm, my dear. Don't fall from the bookshelf."

Gabriele regained her composure and smiled lugubriously at the moonlight as
well as at her friend of the moonlight. Even though nature was sometimes cruel
it was beautiful; and even if hallucinations were derangements this one was
kinder than any reality she had experienced.

"Maybe I should go somewhere else, Rita. I could go away into the northern
parts of Canada."

"Newfoundland?"

"Oh yes, Newfoundland! It sounds so beautiful."

"They cull seals there. They beat and impale them in the most inhumane manner.
It is better than American culling of its unique people but no, cruel places
like that are not for a goddess like you who has seen too much cruelty and pain
as is."

"Look at my paintings, Rita/Lily," said Gabriele in retaining the nine years
and deleting her thirty.

"Yes, beautiful my dear. You are so talented. What a beautiful artist you will
be."

"I think I was wanting to bring back the owl again."

"It is dead, as is the dog, as is so much. No, don't climb down. Not that way!"

"Which way? Oh, look, my vagina is bleeding profusely! This is not normal
bleeding. It's damaged! I'm damaged!"

"Yes."

"And the blood is on my hands."

"It will wash off. And you will get well. You are already better than you
were."

"Why is the blood on my hands and vagina?"

"You've been mixing some of the blood from your private area. You've been
putting it into your paint."

"That is strange, isn't it?"

"Yes my dear. It is part of the shock. Don't concern yourself with it. No one
has seen this—just you and I. Please do me a little favor. Can you? Are you
listening? The bookshelf on this side is not steady. I want you to slowly slide
down to the other part of the room."

"I don't feel real and my entire body feels numb like it doesn't belong to me."

"It is part of the shock but you are coming to yourself. You are."

"Are you real?"

"What's real? Will you be here in a hundred years? You need me, and that makes
you more real than you ever have been before. Come and slide down a little
further. Near the open window. That's it." Gabriele scooted carefully to the
other side of the room where the bookshelf went over the window. "Yes, good;
now crawl down onto a lower shelf and let me take you from this state."

"Yes," said Gabriele, and she swung down to the third shelf.

"Good my dear. Look, I am here too. Now we will dive together."

"Dive? But you don't want me to fall."

"Fall from the bookshelf, no." She hesitated as if not wanting to say anything
more.

"What is it, Rita/Lily? Tell me as a friend."

"If you were to go back you would be stone. There is no life in that. Really
there is no other choice. We will dive from the window."

"From the window? It is three stories high."

"Yes, if we just jump we might miss the exit. We will do it together and depart
from all of this death."




Chapter 44 Conclusion of Gabriele


Then she was looking up at the unhinged diagonal teetering of the bookshelf and
glancing back at this strewn rubble of books girded about her on the floor. She
judged that the bookshelf and the diagonal teetering of a mind were analogous
to each other not so much from what they lacked as from what they possessed.
Both were on one last hinge really, neither one was completely gone, and both
could continue on in this state for as long as the elements that made them did
not unravel by decay or degeneration.

She guffawed and the guffaw droned on monotonously into a dry acrimonious
hysteria precipitated by a need for relief from loss, lament, and this feeling
that she was vile for being violated in this most repugnant way; but this
laughter was essentially the revelatory irony that madness, in whole or in
part, was willed into existence, or at least hers was — she who was a
consummate actress unto herself.

She had missed her suicidal exit from sensing that the right bounce before the
leap would bring it all down, and it had, making the wish to live more dominant
than the wish to die. Now with bruised buttocks there in the rubble of ideas,
unable to think of any reason that she had averted her demise, pain tore at her
inside and out.

Conscious will had devised suicide that the instinct to live had thwarted.
Before this, somewhere early into the "madness" when the shock of this horror
had passed, her ongoing madness into the hours had been merely a conscious
choice. Both had been her own scheming, her own devising.

She got up in full recognition of herself, her surroundings, and the memory
that thumped inside her brain. This memory of the rape played over and over and
the monotony exacerbated the thumping. As a living entity, one lived without a
clue to the reason of it all. One rose in pain and moved as she was doing now,
for how could even a creature of contemplation contemplate without movement
away from the sedentary gaze of one specific thing? Did she really contemplate
more than others, and were here contemplations more trenchant than others? She
assumed so and that it was a mixture of her own genius and her obdurate wish to
not be one of the herds. It was her wish to be a unique person who was not
afraid of homesteading in the self and listened to and experimented with
original thoughts that a good intelligence removed of cacophony devised. It was
her belief that this was the only real life for it was beyond delegated roles
and instinct.

But as she went into the bathroom to vomit she thought such a reaction was as
feeble and absurd as homesteading within the herds. Should she throw up what
little energy she had? Would she let an external event discombobulate her in
such a nervous disorder? This thing that happened to her was repugnant rape
but, she argued, only societal norms made it viler than other forms of rape. It
had not harmed her irrevocably. Only the horrific memory would harm her and it,
memory, was within the self. Only she could create pain to herself. Only she
could continue self-flagellation lodged there in the brain whipping herself in
memory. No, she answered herself, she would not let memory maim her.

She filled up the tub with cold soapy water. Going to extremes by the attempt
at sterilizing herself in hot water would have been a natural response, and it
was in the fear of scolding herself that she avoided the tab controlling the
hot water altogether. She liked the coolness and the vibrant stimulation that
it saturated onto her body. In the frothy suds she tried to sculpt the rough
external shapes of the ice sculptures that she and Kato had made during the
snow festivals of Sapporo. With her fingers she traced these suds-sculptures
the way they once were as ice, but the suds only lasted for a moment, a
reminder that time went by like a shell-shocked soldier.

But there was only so much enjoyment that one could have in hell, and one
thought kept pecking like a vulture on the corpse of her brain: was she
cleansing it all away? The semen had gone to the uterus and then into the
oviduct or the fallopian tubes. How would she get it out now that it was there?
Menstruation and those hungry janitor cells called macrophages that were
responsible for dead cell removal would cleanse her of such things in the
course of time. She needed to wait without going out of her wits. This was what
he told herself, and yet still she poured half of a bottle of shampoo onto her
head and body and the rest she poured into her vagina and began to scrub. "If
only," she told herself, "I had a washcloth with that scouring side like those
one gets in a Japanese sento!" Having none, she scrubbed even harder. "Still,"
she said, "this is absurd. Nothing will get it out but natural processes over
the course of time. As repugnant as it is by instinct, it is no more repugnant
than him having grown in me to begin with. I must override instinct with logic.
Stay calm. Stay calm."

But one moment her equilibrium tilted and she found that the control of her
thoughts was slipping away. She thought of her mother braiding her hair when
she was a very young girl, and how Peggy had often taken her out for ice cream.
Were these women so unforgivable, so unreachable now? She just wanted to grab
them by the sleeves and yank them back to her but all had gone to the point of
no return and these situations of estrangement were, she believed, the
unparalleled human tragedy. And then she thought of how, after walking with
Nathaniel through Cornell University and eating ice cream sandwiches with him
one time, she took him to a mall to buy for him clothes that she could not
easily afford. She remembered how during this time she went with him into the
men's bathroom to get him started on his own "Go to urinal 425. It looks
lower." "Urinal 425" he repeated in delight as he read 425 from the wall.
"Lady, what the hell are you doing in a man's bathroom," demanded a uriner.
"Peeing," she told him coldly. "Zip it up, man. Zip it out, Adagio." Was the
boy too so unforgivable, so unreachable now? This sweet lost boy she too wanted
to take by the sleeves and yank back to her but he too had gone to this point
of no return. This estrangement was, she believed, the unparalleled human
tragedy of all unparalleled human tragedies.

At this time she picked up her mobile telephone and dialed Information to get
the number for a rape crisis hotline. However, as she was in the process of
making the call she could not think how mere mortals could guide the more
advanced creature, or perfected mutant, that she was. Assessing that it should
be she who should be giving crisis intervention to the herds it suddenly dawned
on her that working at some type of crisis hotline might be her part-time
vocation for the future. She would only need to pick up a telephone, reflect
feelings the way a calm stream might cast one's reflection, subtly throw in
ideas for them to ponder that would challenge them in new directions according
to her training as a counselor, and guide them to social work agencies and
resources in the community. She would never need to see the faces of fellow
counselors or fellow victims of abuse and madness; and furthermore her thoughts
would not be stymied within the paperwork of regular psychologist-prostitutes
by such a dabbling.

And yet it was an entirely different phone call that she made instead, and
after making it she then asked herself whether she should make another one. She
wondered if she should call the man with the unmemorable name. "No," she
thought. "There are realities that if words are used to describe them people
will sic the men in white coats with their strait jackets on the verbose
culprit." She didn't want her words to be mistaken as a source of mad delusion
as they no doubt would be.

She would just dress herself blandly after a time of soaking in the tub--not
that even hours spent there would make her feel clean unless she controlled her
feelings and willed concluded cleanliness into her thoughts. And after that she
did not know. She sliced off an ice cap of a mountain of soap and it flew
toward her like a garuda. Yes, she told herself, "I will fly on Garuda
Indonesia Airlines and mingle with common people of Jakarta -- paint the world
as it is." But as she thought about it, the subject seemed more of a distant
plan. "Before this I need to sell off this inane property that I have, but that
can't be done in a day. Maybe in the meantime I could go to the industrial
sector of the city and get a job in the new Tyson's tortilla factory stuffing
dough into the machines. They are hiring now. I could blow kisses to men in
hairnets. I've always been curious what these simple folk are like. Maybe their
lives are better. Anyhow, it would provide me with some experiences that I
could sketch. I need to practice sketching for a while and regain my talents,
anyway. Yes, I need to practice before I go off to Jakarta and do it for real.
Oh, and I would need to train someone else to be the slave manager of the shop.
I can't train any one of my employees immediately. It takes time and I would
need to witness them in action before I would ever sign someone over for such a
feat. I can't even go back to work until I recuperate. But no matter what, I
have to live here until I can sell this place off; so to make that bearable
there must be a great conflagration of all things that belonged to that devil.
There should be no reminder of him. Whatever can't burn can go to the Salvation
Army. And about this man with the unmemorable name, if I can't say the name by
this point, that should tell me something. And what good would he be, as a
husband, if I cannot tell him about any of this....well, maybe I can but I
presume that I can't--not to anyone. One is merely married to herself. That's
all there is."

She tore off the loose threads of her washcloth and tied them onto one of her
fingers. Then she loudly asked and proclaimed, "Do you take this woman to be
your lawful wedded wife to have and to hold until dead do you part? I do. And
do you take the same she, yourself, to be your wedded wife to have and to hold
until death do you part? I do! I, by the power vested in me proclaim you and
thee married until death do you part and a little time afterward when not all
cells have come to a cessation" She smiled and puckered her mouth into a kiss
toward her reflection in the mirror. And as she was playing in the suds,
singing the song, "Alone Again Naturally" by the Monkees the doorbell rang. She
got out of the tub, not bothering to take a towel to the frothy suds that were
still on her naked body, and went downstairs. She looked out the window and
then opened the door. The Pizza Hut delivery boy gasped.

He stuttered. "Ah-ah-I am su--supposed to da-da-deliver a pizza."

"Deliver it then," she said. Her eyes were like the coal of a snowman.

"You ha-ha-have to pay for it."

"Is that a fact? Have you always had this stuttering problem?"

"Ma-mu-ma'am, you are na--ked."

"I'm in my own home. Can't I be naked in my own home?"

He took in a deep breath. "Well, most people aren't when they come to the
door."

"Well, I'm not most people. What does it do to you to have to deliver a pizza
to someone not wearing any clothes?"

"It ba-bu-bothers me."

"It bothers you because you are revolted by it or because it excites you?"

"It's exciting."

"But I'm sure that if I were twenty years older it would be revolting to you,
wouldn't it?"

"Uh-uh-I don't know. I suppose so."

"And yet it would be the same body. The same type of replication of cells, just
not as beautifully rendered. Not worth stuttering over. If I were you I would
go to a speech therapist and get that cured.

"Yeah, maybe I will."

"Good. How much is it?"

"Seven dollars. Should I cu-cu-cu-come inside?"

"No one comes inside me, buddy. Wait there." She took her pizza and slammed the
door shut. When she returned to the door she only slid a ten-dollar bill
beneath it and fastened more of the locks.




Chapter 45


Conclusion of Sang Huin

Beyond his dabbled research on the subject, Sang Huin did not know much about
Jakarta …th its Rupiah coins as light as a child's play money; female
mendicants ever so often dancing seductively into the open doors of tiny shack
restaurants as their partners carried speakers and collected the money that
only rarely was given for these dances of desperation and futility; guitar
mendicants (usually children or teenagers performing in stalled buses);
Suharto's penchant for small gardens of ostentatious statues to beautify
Jakarta still his legacy; women free to let their long hair flow or to
constrain it under hijabs and jilbabs; blue bird/ white bird/black bird taxis;
oblong orange tuc tucs swarming the streets like cockroaches; Wartel phone
cafes on every corner for those without phones; photocopy shops for so many
businesses without photocopy machines; green and white city buses as
uncomfortable as a back of a pickup truck; graffiti on doors of businesses such
as that of "Fuck The System" somewhere between the train station and Jalan
Jaksa (Jaksa Road); 40 percent unemployment with panhandlers, newspaper boys,
and money boys on every street; train personnel giving out free condoms to all
of its customers; trains going through the middle of Jakarta linking its
disparate groups to other cities of Java — each with its own provincial
language; the provincial languages, Javanese, and Indonesian all spoken in
Java; those calls to prayer from distant mosques reverberating sotto voce as
slightly discordant echoes of the nearby mosque; that orphic song of a nearby
mosque thundering its plaintive notes; commerce and human activity stunned and
mesmerized by wailing notes ubiquitous to the human heart and experience but
still continuous; and the cacophonous cries of competing street merchants and
entrepreneurs all amalgamated into one chorus.

Sang Huin was not quite sure whether or not he had written his conclusion. It
was an open question whether chapters on Gabriele's life in Jakarta would add
much to the book. Regardless of having finished it or not, he would no doubt be
writing on something or another in the immediate future if nothing but the
unpublished musical notes of chamber music for the cello. For not having
connections of family dwarf his imagination in financial and emotional
obligations, his world was less myopic and this play with ideas was still rich
within him. It seemed to him that the fecundity of homosexuals in the
meaningful production of ideas came about from not lodging a foundation of
family within the sturdy earth. Instead, homosexuals blew with the top soil and
ideas shifted along with this drifting in the pensive ponderings of the
ephemeral nature of reality. He thought that it was true enough but his reason
for formulating the idea was more from a wish to see a positive within this
solitary blowing that became him than a belief so much in its veracity.

The antithesis of this, a woman, was a summation of an obsession with stability
and the characteristics of prostitution that entailed. At least it seemed to
him as such. Each woman was slightly different but in general they married to
have that exhilaration of raising little children and property to put their
nests on. To have this they would do anything: live years of indifference to a
man and hide the rift in meretricious tree planting with him; overmedicate a
boy and tell him what to do in all things; ignore that boy's need for a father
to suffocate him in her own need to nurture little beings to feel useful and
loved; and then suddenly ignore him when it is clear that the years had.mutated
him into ugly opinionated manhood. Landscape obsessions were his mother's
substitute for lack of stimulating conversation with a spouse but she got some
satisfaction in her active sorority with a daughter. Still both were
exponentially more important to her than him and yet both were deceased.

It was with a sense of relief that one day he found actual content in a letter
that his mother sent to him which went beyond planting roses and water
aerobics. It was a need to reconnect and his heart warmed like a child being
given a Valentine's Day card. He bought a plane ticket to St. Louis, at his
mother's quasi-request, which would allow him to see her once again and to
escape the imbroglio that he currently found himself in with a girlfriend, a
boyfriend, and bafflement what to do with any of it. The only thing so far to
come out of these dates with the convenience store girl at coffee shops and
cinemas in Seoul were her suspicious looks for of all these months that he
would he not invite her to his apartment or introduce her to his friends; and
this incessant returning home late without any inclination to touch his
boyfriend exacerbated that one's suspicions of disloyalty and infidelity.
Absconding into a plane seemed a natural course.

He found it odd that after so many letters where she told him that she was fine
and did not want him to return (letters that became increasingly blunt to the
point where in the previous one she said, "Frankly, I don't need you. You need
to get on in the world alone — start your own family") that she should aver the
opposite now. In the long flight to America he was preoccupied with this
subject and in his preoccupation he would frequently drift in and out of sleep.

-- My cousin is always wondering about you — What? — Well, why you left our
mother in a foreign country all alone. He thinks that you are a bad person but
I tell him that you aren't really that…that you are more like damaged goods —
Yes, I am that. Not bad, just damaged. Damaged goods, as you say.

--For her and everyone. Let people come and go like breathing. It is unnatural
to give it conscious significance.—Okay, Gabriele, I won't worry so much.
Whether she hates me or not, you can't go home again.—That's right; and it
makes the issue irrelevant.—Are you okay in Jakarta? I sort of left you there
—You left me positing the possibility of going there but now I am in Bandung
Indonesia and planning to go deep into the jungles. My choice only, as always.

His mother, a tall broad woman once beautiful but made haggard from tragedy was
wearing a scarf to cover hair loss and a feigned smile to get through the day.
The smile's lack of warmth could be measured in the inconsistency of its
flickers — Glad you could come, she said disingenuously — Anyong hashimnika,
Mama — Is that all the Korean you've learned? — Yes, he chuckled, not a lot
more than this. How have you been? — As well as someone like me in my
circumstances can. Put up an ad for your father's John Deer riding lawnmower
but there haven't been many callers to take a look at it — Well maybe you
priced it too high — What would you know about it? — Nothing -- I finally threw
away your sister's music box. I didn't want to go on year after year fighting
the temptation to wind it up and listen….Who is this with the dog? — Mama, this
is Seong Seob, my special friend. Seong Seob, this is my mother — Anyong
haseyo. — Special friend? What is that? No, sir; not under my roof. He can find
a hotel or the two of you can go back to wherever you came from.

It was in a descent to the San Francisco airport, when the seatbelt light went
on and the captain's voice awakened him from these latter dreams, that he
suddenly had an epiphany that there had been no request at all — that it was
merely a begrudging acceptance that sooner or later they would inevitably meet.
He cancelled St. Louis and boarded a flight to San Diego.

There, with his backpack, he wandered the streets of downtown San Diego,
ecstatic to be a pedestrian in this great cosmopolitan medley and to see all
signs in English. He wandered in this honeymoon some hours until he came to a
queue of miserable morning mendicants mingled in the malaise of having to be
minions for morsels of a blended meat and vegetable mush that was scooped into
Styrofoam cups by badged and indifferent scoopers. Stepping into lines
demarcated by ropes within this parking lot at St. Vincent de Paul he saw that
only some of these eager but patiently waiting eaters were badged and that the
scoopers wore badges with stars.

"Excuse me. Who are they?" asked Sang Huin to an old man in front of him.

"Who? Oh. Same as us all but residents—badgers are all Vinceteers, living here.
The ones scooping with the stars on their badges are the helper pigs, the
preferred pigs. For being allowed to wander the streets one or two nights a
month without losing their beds and real food that real people eat instead of
this trough stuff they would do anything: tell on masturbators, them that goes
into the showers at the wrong times, having to take a runny shit at 2 AM when
not able to hold it—things like that which can get someone thrown out of here.
Ain't Catholicism and Christianity pretty? That's why I sleep in my own little
hut in the woods of Balboa Park."

Sang Huin nodded painfully as if in derision of all things that were of pig
stardom in deference to the pig before him. In so doing he imagined Nathaniel
going into such a place expending his gregarious energy with the right people,
becoming a head pig, and for two nights each month having sex under bushes in
patches of greenery between highways. Then he thought of a new character,
Guillermo. "Guillermo walked the streets of San Diego partially earnest to find
a job."

Sang Huin took his Styrofoam cup of mush and a muffin and ate with the rest of
the scrawny, chilled pigs who would hours later sizzle in the sun's
reverberations of the pavement during lunch. He felt as if being here without
activities of distraction he was in the thickets of life that most were
cognizant of from birth to death. Within purposelessness, disorientation, and
futility in life's wanderings his was the global experience of the majority.

After breakfast he continued to erode and blow off life's embankment but he was
sanguine for here he was once again in America, the country that made up so
many of his years. Insular capsule that it was under the current chauvinistic
and militant regime, it was more or less his land as one of its class that was
entitled to permanent residency. Still he could envision a more preferable
state. It would be a UN government of the world mandating human affairs without
any member countries having the right to veto. It would have the best hope of
bringing financial equity and justice to the world, halt excessive military
spending and wars, slow down environmental degradation, and allow for an extra
millennium of life; but such a thing did not exist. Such a thing could not be
sought by sensitive souls as a refuge for hope, optimism, and an ongoing
positive perspective of life. Here he was in the embrace of the bully, and he
told himself that here in America he would stay. But then he thought that it
really was not his country anyhow as proven by how he had been treated at the
airport. The immigration officers had put him through an inquisition suited to
potential terrorist cells all because of his tourist visas at Vientiane and
Kuala Lumpur prior to his arrival in South Korea. His treatment had not exactly
been a welcome home placard; and of course having lost his residency card, that
laminated summation of himself, had not helped.

Guillermo decided, as night approached, to take the trolley into San Ysidro to
make his exit into Tijuana. He was not about to stay in a shelter. Unlike many
Mexicans, he could reenter America another day. His was a mostly legal journey
having obtained a passport years earlier for his military service, which
enabled these sojourns. Still he did not have much money so at the tiny train
stop, feeling that his monetary worth was no different than muffin crumbs
sustaining pigeons at St. Vincent, he stared at the large ticket machine with
awe and bewilderment and then spontaneously leaped into the sudden emergence of
the trolley with the automatic opening of its doors.

The doors closed and then reopened at the next stop. He breathed out, wondering
if he should get out quickly. His ambivalent finger remained pendent over a
button that would keep the nearest door open if pressed. A man entering the
back of the car with his back shoving and parting those that clogged a door was
not a trolley cop. His leather coat was a lighter brown than trolley trolls and
his entrance came backwards. A woman entered with her face forward. The face
lacked animation apart from a visible twitching or throbbing in her left
temple. Both of them carried a stroller. Guillermo looked again. No one else
was entering from the other end of the car. He was safe.

His eyes returned to them. The black woman was pregnant and in her early
thirties. She slowly seated herself, careful not to disturb the infant that she
now had pressed against her. She did not look at it nor at the man that had
helped her raise it here. The raising of the stroller, the folding of it, and
the child himself were the only evidence of the marriage of these heavily
withdrawn strangers who were forced to sit next to each other. The man's size
13 shoe was in the aisle pointing toward two black women in the passage
interlinking an adjacent car who danced long inundating rhythms reminiscent of
tribal heritage and sang a beautiful threnody together. He thought to himself
that if all marriages were what he witnessed he was lucky that experience had
mutilated his normal proclivities. As he saw them he felt the reality of what
he construed to be their life together. His mind began to refine some
philosophy or perspective from the raw material of his feeling and his whole
body tilted in their direction when he suddenly lost what was his focus for the
doors again opened.

Have your tickets out!" the trolley troll spoke generically from another door
in the car. His words were rough. He turned his head to the right. The trolley
train troll saw a little child around the age of six putting her hands in the
greasy KFC bag and pulling out a KFC bird. He watched her eat the meat as the
trolley recording said, "I would like to remind all passengers that there is no
smoking, eating, or drinking in the trolley; and please, out of consideration
for other passengers, do not put your feet upon the seats. Thank you." For a
second it seemed that the saliva lurched around the lips of the trolley train
troll like a lasso. He snatched away the bird from the child's fingers and the
entirety of the KFC bag causing the girl to cry. Then to Guillermo he said,
"Get out your ticket!" Guillermo gave an affected display of a search. He
hesitated, contemplated his situation for some seconds, and spoke.

"Listen, I am trying to get a job in San Diego. I only have $20.00 but I didn't
deliberately set out to avoid buying a ticket. Without thinking about it I just
jumped in. Maybe subconsciously I wanted to save money but I didn't plan it
that way. You are a brother. Surely you understand desperate situations cause
desperate actions."

"I'm not your brother," spoke the trolley troll in Spanish.

"You know the language of the Mexican brothers and your skin says that you are
south of the border."

"All skin, as you put it, can be American. An American is from everywhere."

"I know English well, and I am Latino so I guess I'm American as apple pie."

"You seem to think we have it in for foreigners. You can be Mexican, American,
or Martian for what I care. When you board this trolley you have to have a
ticket."

"Do you really give citations regardless of circumstances? Why can't you just
take me out and force me to buy a ticket? Why does it have to be written down
as a fine and a court appearance if I want to contest the fine? I was seeking a
job. I could work for my family but I want a respectable job and I don't care
if it is flipping burgers or sweeping sidewalks. Okay, I did something I
shouldn't have. Have a little bit of compassion toward those in desperate
situations from a land that was once the land of your ancestors in a land, as
so much of America, that was an illegal acquisition stolen from the Mexicans."

"Quit the BS, la caca, and get out with me at the next stop. Then you buy your
ticket at the machine in front of my eyes."

"Muchas gracias," said Guillermo.

"De nada," said the trolley troll.

Guillermo put a dollar and seventy-five cents into the machine and got a sheet
of paper as long and double the width of his little finger. Both waited for
another trolley on its way from El Cajon to come down the tracks; and when it
came they entered. The trolley troll bounced his pad against his left palm.
Guillermo saw a hungry and lustful madness for giving out citations once again
seep into the eyes of the troll from within. He imagined the trolley troll
rabidly looking at all people both rich and poor and searching for individuals
who looked afraid. The trolley troll knew that being dressed in fine clothing
precluded no one. Ticketless people were often camouflaged in rich clothes.

Through a gray wall like the back of a building was this portal leading from
San Ysidro to Tijuana. Inside it was like a corridor and in this mire spray
painted in Spanish graffiti he ascended and descended on pavement wreaking of
the effluvium of evaporating urine. Then at a rotating gate Guillermo returned
to Mexico. "Downtown for three dollars. Hey amigo, wanna go downtown?" he heard
Mexican taxi drivers accost Caucasian Americans. He saw city buses in the
distance. The taxis were often crowded station wagons where people sat in what
was the trunk. He saw men balancing suitcases on their heads without the aid of
hands as they went toward the USA border. He saw a gray headed lady with a pony
tail sitting behind a table of novelties and an Anglo-Saxon Navy officer
knocking over some of the statuettes and plaques in his vehement, drunk
theatrics to get the price reduced to two dollars. "Two dollars," he said.
"Three dollar," she retorted without the "s." It was just more of the same in
this overgrown US military tavern that had sprawled into the city known as
Tijuana and it made him want to return to his hometown of Ensenada.

Sang Huin avoided the three-dollar taxi rides and walked through various
shopping plazas with their myriad pharmacies. He passed a bridge that went over
a dried up river polluted with tires and less visible debris. Then he followed
signs leading to Avenida Revolucion.

Sang Huin passed a Bankoro bank; an idle man who yelled out to him as to other
foreigners, "Taxi cab! Border line, Mister!"; mariachi singers; zebra wagons
for tourist photos; Burger King; stores with rectangular mirrors on parts of
their facades; hot dog grills part of mobile kiosks; taco restaurants; tamale
carts; corn on the cob carts—some which baked corn on charcoal and others that
steamed it; police cars and policemen; and pi-ata shops and pharmacies in
abundance. Tijuana, a sprawling 2 million with its myriad colonias, was like a
ghetto of San Diego. According to the guidebook the sooty playas (beaches) were
somewhat agreeable because of their adjacent bullfight arena and Spanish
architecture. The unbearable dust colonias (poor suburbs) with the maquiladoras
were to the south, and the central city, where Sang Huin was at, had some
museums and art galleries displaying Mexican culture and of course the American
red light district that had given birth to it all. He walked to Juarez Street.
He saw an empty lot of grass where some fruit drink vendors had been throwing
out orange peels for a long period of time. He saw mounds of dirt and trash
that were in this street.

Guillermo turned to a pay phone that was on a side street. Not finding any
coins in his pockets he pushed "O" for the operator" and made a collect call.
He placed a call to what had recently been his estranged uncle. "Uncle this is
Guillermo."

"Yes, good Guillermo. Are you here now?"

"Yes."

"It has taken you long enough."

"Yes, I guess so."

"Why did it take you so long to get back?"

"To be honest, I wanted to look one more day for work in San Ysidro or San
Diego."

"Find any?"

"No."

"Have you decided that family loyalties are a bit more important than dabbling
in petty jobs on the outside?"

"Maybe. I need a job. I need money."

"You are here but your cousin has not gotten here yet. You'll have to wait for
her."

"Oh, I thought she would be in Tijuana by now."

"She should be here soon."

"I was told to come here."

"She's a little delayed."

"Can I wait at your place? How would I get there?"

"Guillermo, it is private residence and it's a little risky for us to be that
conspicuous. It isn't easy to get to anyway and you would have difficulty
getting through the guards. I'll make sure that she comes to you when she gets
here. Do you have a hotel room?"

"A room? Well, yes I guess I should or else go back to Ensenada."

"You don't have a job in Ensenada. You need to align yourself with family. The
loyalty of family members is the greatest of Mexican virtues."

"When is she coming? I don't even know why she needs to be smuggled through the
border to begin with."

"Well, anytime. I don't know the details. I suppose it will happen when she
finishes packing. She said that sometime this week she will have the money to
buy a bus ticket. Her mother wants her to be responsible and save the little
she gets here and there."

"You have an estate and guards and she is supposed to be some type of a beggar.
I don't understand any of this. I don't know why my aunt wants her in the
states after so long. I don't understand how I'm supposed to get her over the
border. She just said, 'Do it!' and gave me some money to come here."

"Watch your mouth. Be careful what you say to everyone. No tiene sentido? Maybe
it has a sense not so obvious to you. Maybe it has sense or doesn't have sense.
You know women, Guillermo. My wife's reasoning for things is why I stay
separated from her. Maybe she's got good reason for sending her to the states.
I wouldn't know."

"I thought that she did not have a job and that this was the primary reason for
getting her to the US."

"She doesn't. She dabbles around from time to time, drinks, and runs around
with the wrong types. I don't know many of the details, Guillermo. Well, I've
got to get busy. Did you find the contact man, Ricardo, waiting for you at the
shelter?"

"I don't understand. Contact for what? If you are needing a smuggler to get her
across why isn't that done in Tijuana?"

"Enough. There is always more at work than meets the eye. You just need to get
her to Ricardo."

"A transient?"

"A transient as rich as the US Treasury."

Sang Huin's backpack felt increasingly heavy and so he obtained a motel room in
"Centro" T.J. It had a barren mattress without sheets or blankets. The window
was nailed shut and there was no ventilation outside of what came around the
cracks of the door and a draft that swept through a crack in the wall. There
was no dresser and no furniture at all beyond a wooden chair. Outside the room
at the far end of the hall were the water cooler and the shared bathroom. When
the night clerk showed him this it baffled him why, when he was not given a
key, that they needed to photocopy his passport and needed him to sign his name
in a guest book.

"No tienes un llave?" he asked the clerk; but the man just scoffed at this
Asian attempt at Spanish. "No key, hombre." Sang Huin stayed in his room for
fifteen minutes but he felt a loneliness suffocate him worse than the musty
air. He needed out; and so he picked up his bag and drifted into the night.
Instead of providing him with space and movement to shed his morbid thoughts,
the night just impaled him with a vast darkness that seemed like endless meat
hooks in the cold meat locker of the universe. A sun, he told himself, was a
temporary thing and all temporary things gave off the illusion of animation and
illumination. Only the darkness was real and he decided to lose himself within
it.

It only took an hour more and he was lost in the rains that set dry dirt roads
on hills into mud streams sweeping down into the center of the city and could
quickly cook a brain into a fever with cold inundations. The rains drenched him
and he began to cough deeply. He found the city park that earlier had couples
courting each other under the eyes of chirping and squawking birds that
fastened onto each limb as thick as leaves; but now no one was there but a man
who collected cans from the garbage. Still this Sang Huin, this Sean, strolled
around as if it were a sunny day. He examined each corner of the park as of
someone in daylight enjoying the fauna for he was hoping that some queers would
not care about the rain and like him would be obsessed with the possibility of
being impaled in promiscuous activity. An hour passed this way and yet no one
came.

Finally he managed to find his way back to his room. He lay there making a
puddle upon the mattress until what appeared to be the night manager came into
his room.

"You can speak the Spanish a little," said the man,

"Prefiero Ingles porque mi sabio de Espanol esta limitado y despues de viviendo
en Korea mis vocabulario esta una mezcla del lenguas."

"Where you from?"

It was such a simple question and yet he did not know the exact answer. "I'm
Korean but I've lived most of my life in the states."

"A gringo?"

"Mas or menos."

"Want a towel, amigo?" Sang Huin sat up in the bed and looked toward the man
that was animation and illumination in his doorway.

"How much?"

"Depends," he said. "Were you looking for Mexican pussy out there?"

"No."

"Are you a gay?"

"Yeah,"

"You suck my dick."

"Yeah, maybe."

"Towel is free, then." The man came in and closed the door. The sexual activity
was enjoyable for a while but then it changed to being impaled "bareback" from
his rear end. He did not know if it was rape. It hurt him as if it were rape,
he hated it, his attempts to extricate himself caused more resistance, and yet
he wanted it nonetheless. He had never had someone insert himself into him
before and the rhythms seemed to slap over his consciousness until somewhere
into the pain he fell asleep in it. Asleep, he dreamed that Guillermo was
stopped by the police officers at the park.

"Dinero. One hundred dollars or a night in jail."

"I'm not giving you anything," said Guillermo. "What have I done?"

"Are you stupid? You can't walk the streets with an open beer can in your
hand."

"I've seen others do it. I'm not paying."

"Suit yourself.

They put him into the car and chased other criminals throughout the night. When
they had a couple more rounded up, including Sang Huin himself, they took all
three of them to the police office for paperwork and then far away into the
dusty bluffs where there was a jail. The cells were underground and they were
wet and cold like a cellar. The bunks were just metal without any mattresses,
sheets, or blankets and the prison guards inserted sharp instruments into the
rectums of the alleged culprits.

When he woke from a coughing fit, he noticed that all of his things were gone
including the little case that had his passport and the pocket pc that
contained his novel about Gabriele. "Dear God, no!" he thought. Only bits of
previous drafts were on diskettes in Seoul. His only copy of Gabriele was in
that pocket pc. He felt as if he were living in a shadowy nightmare as sharp as
a migraine. He quickly dressed himself and went into the lobby. When he saw
that same night attendant sleeping on his chair it suddenly occurred to him
that it had not been this man who had entered his room but someone else of
similar but not identical looks. He wasn't sure who it had been—so greedy had
been his need for blind sex. He went back into his room and beat on his head in
self-flagellation. He felt lost and dizzy. He felt as a lost speck of dust
blowing about in space and time. He curled up in a fetal position on the bed
and wept. His head ached and he fell asleep once again. He dreamed that won,
pesos, and dollars were freefalling from the skies and striking animals and
humans within the rain of capitalism. Then he dreamed that he was
dematerializing from one country and materializing into another. No sooner
would he be memorizing buildings and mapping out familiarities in his mind when
he would suddenly be someplace else. People in each of these countries would
ask him who he was and where he came from. He had amnesia and could not tell
them anything and they just looked at him with deep sympathy.

*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 12733 ***