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by Steven Sills


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Title: Tokyo to Tijuana: Gabriele Departing America

Author: Steven Sills

Release Date: June 25, 2004  [eBook #12733]

Language: English

Character set encoding: Latin1


***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TOKYO TO TIJUANA: GABRIELE
DEPARTING AMERICA***


Copyright (C) 2004 by Steven Sills.




            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�Eno,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�Eall those mysterious words in all the
pages from the books created from previous centuries and shipped to
Atlantis�Eall 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�Enow, 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�E 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�Ethat person who will love me for just that." She further
thought, "I shouldn't have had this accident of conceiving a child�Ethis
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�E"

"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�Eyour 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�Eand 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�E" 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�Eand 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�Ewe are still going, aren't we to�E"

"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�Egood 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�Ewhat do you call them�Eoh, 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�Ewhat do you say�Eflirting -- 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�Ejust 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 �N 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�Ethat'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�Eif 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 grandp