Chapter 7

Tokyo To Tijuana: Gabriele Departing America By Steven Sills

Book One: Sang Huin

"It is probable, then, that if a man should arrive in our city, so clever as

to be able to assume any character and imitate any object, and should propose

to make a public display of his talents and his productions, we shall pay him

reverence as a sacred, admirable, and charming personage, but we shall tell

him that in our state there is no one like him, and that our law excludes

such characters, and we shall send him away to another city after pouring

perfumed oil upon his head and crowning him with woolen fillets; but for

ourselves, we shall employ, for the sake of our real good, that more austere

and less fascinating poet and legend-writer, who will imitate for us the

style of the virtuous man." Plato (Republic)

Chapter One

At Toksugum Palace in Chongno of Seoul Sang Huin (known by his friends in the

states as Shawn) felt an empathy as deep as the gods; and the reconstructed

walls of ancient buildings that he could see into and imagine long deceased

emperors in coronation ceremonies or reading their mandates became irrelevant.

Yang Lin, parting from their movement toward the steps that led toward the

Royal Museum, began to walk to a distant place where a woman in a western

wedding dress stood at a pond posing for a picture with her groom. Near earlier

buildings Sang Huin had noticed him looking at them questioningly. He had seen

a sad and innocent yearning in Yang Lin as if, after a long search, that

creature had found his alter ego in the woman and would not let it go.

After five minutes of waiting alone, sitting on those steps and letting a

cigarette dangle limp in a frown, Sang Huin realized that this new friend of

his was not just straying off briefly, so he gradually went over there in a

circuitous and jaunty stroll as if other things had gained his attention and

only by accident was he moving there. Yang Lin told Sang Huin that he longed

for her: longed for himself within her beautiful clothes, within her

commitment, and within her sex. He had been so sincere. Sang Huin felt a worse

form of compassion for him. It was sorrow, the enlightening, sweet venom, and

it sank into him. It was deep empathy. It was God. It was definitely something

that was not wanted. It stayed with him on the bus.

On a ride from the Nambu Bus Terminal to Chongju, Sang Huin's sleep was spastic

like a nervous twitch that would every now and then startle him into

wakefulness and he would wonder where he was: Muguk, Chongju, Seoul, or

"Miguk." Sometimes at the primary school in Muguk he would ask, "Where are you

from?" Then once, in a coaching effort for the pitch of a complete sentence, he

had made the mistake of "Miguk...Miguk" ("America...America") and the class was

in an uproar. He thought of this in one of his startled awakenings. He looked

from the window to flat patches of skimpy forest that most Koreans thought of

as so beautiful. The way was straight, south and barren and made him almost

yearn for the tortuous roads that appeared near Umsong to be rid of scenery so

bland. Although the bus traveled down the highway as a solid, jitterless mass,

he jittered into more drowsiness. The contents of his head shook and his

mother's voice cried out to him like locusts from the branches of trees. There

was a hot sticky childish oozing within him. Within dreams his fortitude was

like marshmallows when pulled off of sticks after roasting in a bonfire. He

heard voices of he and his sister counting 7 o'clock, 8 o'clock, 9 o'clock

rock. 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock, twelve o'clock rock - Ghosts won't find me. Ready

or not we'll find you.

Then there were those macabre photographs, at the trial in Houston, of his

grown sister's skeleton. The police had looked for his sister's body in the

park but obviously not thoroughly in the ravine. In one year they had only

searched that park once and in the meantime her body had decomposed. He dreamed

of those photographs of skeletal remains and the other photographs of more than

a few bones that had gone off from the rest. They were marred too but by the

fangs of dogs or other beasts dragging them around before dumping them away

from the rest of the remains. He dreamt of these photographs exactly as they

appeared from the slide projector and in that sequence as one of those most

godless days of that long trial when one's whole body trembled in continuum

through bits of the hours with stolid, cadaverous expressions throughout the

ordeal. He assumed his parents had also behaved the same. Before the real

confirmation of her death, all three had been functioning with such dead but

hopeful words and perfunctory gestures which were then ripped out of them as

the program, memory, and energy cells can be pulled out of robots and soon they

were thrust in their own personal black abyss with none of the three able to

see outside of blackness and pain as much as they might have wanted to offer

solace to each other.

Who could offer solace when the conclusion of life as an evil and godless place

had solidified into consciousness like Death etching her name in wet cement?

Back then, it had been obvious that the trial, a pantomime of the mute for

justice, could never be allocated to the dead under the best circumstances, and

this particular trial was going nowhere. The conclusiveness of the evidence and

motive had been defaced with time that had entirely decomposed her form. There

had been theories. Plenty of circumstantial evidence had been presented. Her

employer had done it to her as conclusively as a feeling could testify. Then

and now there was plenty of indication that she had been pregnant with his

child. Twenty years ago Sang Huin (Shawn then) had swung a golf club into her

eye and the blood had splattered everywhere. On that day, as a boy, he had

thought nothing could happen worse than that; but back then there was blood and

back then there was composition. He woke up and once again knew that even in

sleep there wasn't always repose. Sometimes, without finding a way of sealing

memories in tidy body bags, one's inner voice was as active in sleep. He said

to himself that he shouldn't be surprised by such restlessness when life's

conundrums were so horrific. The passage of a few years, and the passage

through a thousand times of falling asleep could not even restore one's

equilibrium in something so horrific. He shook off his sleep like a dog its

wetness. He tried to think of Yang Lin whom he had left: that mild voice so

slow and deliberate in its intensity, the morbid and thoughtful eyes like an

ocean containing its ecosystem, the muscular young body that had an orange hue

like a Chinamen who had sucked up too much sun.

After the revelation he had listened to him repeatedly talk about wishing that

he had been born a woman; and except for once of saying, "Well...I understand,

but" (and stopping not knowing what to throw in as the "but"), he had been

silent with eyes of empathy. It was painful to see a perspective; and Sang Huin

broke out of his skin like a reluctant and tortured snake but accepting the

inevitability. He just stared at the fountain for many uncomfortable minutes

hoping that the mouth of the fountain could articulate a statement that would

solve the situation as well as ease his discomfort.

At the fountain, in silence, he had thought of rigid Texan horses and the lazy

meditative cows of his home state in warm fields at mid- afternoon--creatures

of the gods with no sense of the vile practicalities behind their domesticated

state. During his times of stress long ago they had often seemed to Sang Huin

as so aesthetic that one could wish to slip within them for an hour or a bit of

the day; and surely after having done it one might instantaneously wish for the

freedom of whatever was beyond the fence. Maybe, he had thought to himself,

something like this was how Yang Lin felt.

He had suddenly blurted out, "You commented that the pigeons and the fountain

in the pond are beautiful. Maybe they are." He had hesitated feebly. The coarse

words and tone had surprised both of them. "I hear that doctors can now make a

man half pigeon if he dares to have a mixture of pubic hairs and pubic

feathers; or if you prefer a beautiful fountain-surgery a continual waterfall

can come from your ass." Sang Huin had not known where the words came from. His

gentle imagination had rarely formed such an aggressive flare of thoughts and

yet he had felt that he could not let this stranger--this recent buddy-- this

someone he had slept with--save up money on the assumption that he could be

made into a beautiful woman. Twenty years from now he did not want him to be

made into a hybrid mess from a lifetime of painful surgeries... hormonal

confusion...mutilations.

But had he not mutilated four months earlier? A video "pang" girl [the clerk at

the video room where he had watched a movie with his friend, Yang Kwam] tracked

down the friend's license number, and then the friend's telephone number, and

began to inundate him with a flood of messages. It was quite flattering and

Sang Huin finally returned the calls. He was curious. At that time he wanted a

girlfriend. From an erection, a yearning, an ejaculation, and more than he

wished, knowledge of his own virility by the conception, he proved the very

essence of manhood. She aborted at his request but nature aborted and

mutilated: still-death, genetic defects, and miscarriages. Human beings were

rifted apart from each other by circumstances of separation and death despite

love. The life of a being, itself, was nothing but different transparencies

miscellaneously tossed onto an overhead projector. No, he thought, maybe that

was just his own life. The transparencies of most humans were in order--the

last of which would be old age and decay but what was written on them was

meaningless. His transparency recently had been to prove his manhood by having

sex with a woman and it had all gone awry.

Sang Huin sighed. He took off his shoes in the bus. He stroked his feet, in

short white sports socks, across the vinyl of the back of the chair before him

as if he were giving a massage to the person seated there. He needed sex. He

needed to lose himself in a pleasure that would reduce his headache and release

him from worries even if it was an illogical frenzy far removed from reality

and only lasted for a few minutes.

He tried to rest comfortably in his seat, absorbing himself in Time and

Newsweek. Then someone yelped at him in Korean, pushing him out of his

sympathies toward the bondage of the Afghan population under the theocracy of

the Taleban and the tattered infrastructure of the country. There was no way to

catch even a word or two of it and this balding and middle aged man gave Sang

Huin a look as if he had wasted his time talking to the world's biggest dummy.

Sang Huin gave his typical defense of "Miguk sarem" ("American") which would

bring on a confused and critical look--in this case, it was a closer

examination of Sang Huin and a slanting of the man's face as if he were ready

to give Sang Huin a big fat kiss. Sang Huin picked up his book bag on the spare

seat near the window and sat there.

It was complicated, in a sense. If he had been less temerarious perhaps to not

have the support system of this whole chain--family, city, state, nation, and

racial identification-- might have posed a problem. To have lived all but the

first few years in America, and so existing as a Korean only by birth and race

definitely made him American in every way but a legal one. Most persons under

such a scenario would have clung to the country that had made up nearly all of

his experience. At least that was what he told himself. Effrontery and

cowardice were two sides of the same coin. He loved his mother and she was

alone on the American continent as he was in Asia. They were indeed alone in

the world.

Even though he cared about family (what was left of it with both his father and

sister now dead) it did not deter him from leaving America. To be on a

traveler's visa with his own Korean passport did, however, seem to be a bit

strange but he could not think of a situation in life that was not confusing.

Relationships were confusing although he had never possessed one for very long.

When he had the ineluctable sympathy for another person, it deflated all the

romance. He didn't mind that so much. To embark on a deep friendship with

strong personal commitment and devoid of the bouts of infatuation and frenzy

like seasickness seemed the right course; but all partners of the past seemed

to him to have wanted only to cast a romantic aura around him as if scared to

see the real person inside, and scared to look at beings that were also banal

and in continual suffering. Reflexively jumping into pleasure like a lifebuoy,

as a human did, what could one expect? One thing was sure: he had experienced a

deep pain that his fellow humans wouldn't even give the briefest of stares if

they could avoid it. Besides, no one wanted his enlightenment that the world

was a bad place when each was trying as best as he could to find an entrance

into Disneyland to which there where no security guards to force a departure.

He searched though his billfold for a calling card. He went to the front of

this high-tech bus and made a call.

"Yoboseyo."

"Yoboseyo. Yang Lin bakwa chuseyo."

Silence.

"Yang Lin or Antonio. Ku nun manhi irum ul cajigo isumnita. I sarem i

wanhamnita." He threw in both names that the little guy went by and the

telephone clicked off.

He called again.

"Yoboseyo."

"Yoboseyo. Yang--"

"What do you want with him?"

"I'd like to talk with your son. I am an acquaintance of his. He helped me to

get to Toksugum Palace. I want to thank him. I'd like to talk to him again."

Yang Lin had told him that his father suspected all male callers and that Sang

Huin would have to give a defense of his acquaintanceship but Sang Huin felt

awkward in his misrepresentation. Here he was playing with a man's reality

concerning his son. He did not feel good about himself.

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

The telephone clicked off. Sang Huin felt hurt. He felt a morbid clarity behind

how people always left his life. He thought about what he "knew" of this

Chinese friend, Yang Lin, if he knew anything at all: he was adopted and lived

in America; that those parents died-- his mother first and then the father in a

drunk driving accident; that he was readopted by Korean parents; that his

father despised him and suspected his son was gay; and that Yang Lin felt that

his English level was the same as his Korean. Abstract ideas must not have

existed in his head at all. In short, he "knew " very little and the scanty but

pathetic information he received might, for what he knew, have been nothing but

a mendacity. Sang Huin had a great empathy; but now another friendship had just

bit the dust.

Had it been a month ago that Sung Ki had left him. Sung Ki: even now the name

sounded musical. After the video pang girl's attempt at marital entrapment,

this neighbor boy had been most alluring in their nightly rendezvous of two

months. The sister who fed him rice and Korean pizza and the father who wanted

to introduce him to his native country by teaching him the sounds of Korean

letters were glad to get the youngest child an English teacher. Little did they

know of the pleasurable respites from pain Sang Huin was getting in the back

bedroom. Homosexuality was so taboo there that nobody believed in its

existence. In that respect, free of discrimination, one was free to be gay in

Korea. Then the18 year-old boy was told to meet the masculine and the vicious

just as his country dictated. Right after getting his letter from the military,

Sung Ki laid out Sang Huin's blanket in a different room. He talked of needing

a girlfriend. It hurt; but, Sang Huin rationalized it was what Sung Ki needed

so why shouldn't he talk about it? Superiors in the military often beat a man

if they felt that he didn't have a girlfriend evidenced when no letters and

photographs were forthcoming. Then one day he was gone and soon thereafter Sang

Huin lost the address book and key chain from the souvenir shop at the history

museum Sung Ki had given to him. He lost both by leaving them in the locker at

the mokotang (bathhouse ). "We lose our friends," thought Sang Huin, "and then

we lose the things that our friends give to us." It felt less harsh to make the

idea applicable for all mankind.

There had been no real reason for him to go to Seoul this time. There were no

private lessons there. His reactions toward Umsong also did not have much of a

rationale. Occasionally, even when there were no private lessons in that area

he sometimes got up around 4 a.m nonetheless; took an hour long bus ride to

that small town he had once lived in; walked near bowing rice and corn; crossed

the bridge around a thin circular lake at a small park; and stared at the

Korean moon bolted tightly against the Korean sky. He wanted for the night to

capture him somehow--for a drunk motorcyclist or a lazy trucker to whisk a wild

adventure and physical intimacies upon him and yet, in full wistful innocence,

he equally wanted what he would always go there for: to hear nothing but birds

and a whisk of wind in the tranquility of that sleepy town in one of its most

tranquil hours. Nothing of the former ever happened and he would always come

from the impulse to a feeling of loss. His impetus to go to Seoul this week had

come from a dominant feeling of disconnection experienced by one who knew the

extreme violence of the world, who knew the madness of hope for anyone, and

felt being buried alive in that one perspective that the world was an evil

place-a perspective that was not ethereal but solid as a coffin even if it did

spill over into other things. A further disconnection of any significance would

cause such an individual to let a numbness and deadening of the concept of self

to take place. The day before his fleeing to Seoul, his platonic friendship

with Kim Yang Kwam had gone awry and he found himself floundering in

suffocating despair as that time years earlier at the trial. Yang Kwam was

asleep with his hand in his underwear when Sang Huin awakened. Sang Huin

touched him. It was the end of the closest Korean friendship that had been his

life support in the six months he resided in this foreign country, South Korea,

which was his birth home and the source of his nationality.

Now it was Kim Yang Kwam he kept thinking about in the bus. Sang Huin was

labeled as dirty a few nights ago: the way he walked on the floor with his

shoes instead of taking them off at the door; the half open window that allowed

any insect an easy passage; the fact that he didn't have any rubbing alcohol to

cleanse the mosquito bites that his friend gained while sleeping in Sang Huin's

room; the fattening mess of pancakes with half burnt ridges in place of rice

which Sang Huin prepared for him despite the criticism; and then came questions

about the nature of his relationship with Sung Ki.

Glancing out of the window, he pulled out a pint of "ooyoo" (milk) from his

sack. His throat was not dry or hurting but for some reason he felt the need to

caress it with what he drank as well as with his fingertips. He drank his milk,

attempted memorizing a few words of Korean, and then went back to sleep. He had

a strange dream of some inconsequential happening in Seoul. The dream was not

much different than reality. In the dream the subway (Orange Line, number

three) stopped and he noticed a young blind man with a dog getting into one of

the cars. Sang Huin quickly moved toward that door. Then he found himself

walking through one car after another since the blind man and the dog passed

through the inside doors. He woke up and thought of the dream in the context of

himself. He was drawn to beauty and carnal activity but also to those captive

in some imperfection for within them sensitivity, existential and knowledgeable

of suffering, would be complete. He yearned for the deep intelligence that knew

such things. His imagination swelled with the thought of this individual just

as it had when he actually encountered him in Soul. Sang Huin was always

traveling--especially when he was in the States. He was discontent and was

seeing himself falling further and further away from the normal path. He had

nothing but a college degree, no specialty, no ambition for money, he couldn't

really think of a field or discipline for himself, family was a deep life

altering wound that made the thought of gravitating himself around a wife and

children unbearable, and even his hobby of playing a cello was as a musical

dilettante. He looked out of the window and smoothed out his hair. The bus was

becoming full now. Still, no one was standing.

Maybe, he thought, he should have been proud at the restaurant. Instead, when

Yang Kwam said that he never wanted to see him again Sang Huin said, "I

understand," but was thinking "Well, then why are we eating together?" Yang

Kwam's eyes were stern. Indeed, it was the end. He felt stunned at that table:

to lead a person to a restaurant so that he could not talk to him and then at

the inquiry on if he was upset-- Oh, what did it matter? Sang Huin's head hurt

thinking about it. He put his hand on his forehead and looked out of the

window. Sang Huin said nothing to the statement of "Don't ever call me." They

both ate sparsely in thorough silence, Yang Kwam paid the bill, and then he was

gone. Sang Huin's instinct was to follow his former friend to the ends of the

earth on the public bus system and to harass him in the bus by making him feel

miserable for his declaration that he was a dirty person. No, he told himself,

he had handled the situation the best that he could. After sitting at the table

for a while, he had withdrawn to his home passively. On what seemed like an

eternal trip, cramped on a seat in the bus, disconnection was making his mind

jittery, soft, and rolling like a ball away from him. He tried sleeping but his

mind kept trying to imagine what really took place between his sister and her

boss at the park if indeed it had been really him at all. The jury years ago

had not thought of the evidence as being conclusive. In sentencing a man to a

life of imprisonment it couldn't be done on a feeling.

He felt lost and loose. He still felt stunned. He remembered that he had only

touched him by barely stroking his hair and his hand and then touching his

underwear. It only lasted a minute and then he turned on his side away from him

and his own instincts. It was an insignificant minute in one's life and he

could not figure out why it became such evidence of the accuser that he was

dirty-the charge of homosexuality not being directly stated. He asked himself

why, even now, he was staring at moving forest and long stretches of road with

this yearning for love. He opened another pint of milk. He sipped and then

rested its opening to his bottom lip. Why did human beings end in such closure?

Why did they gain worth and awareness of their being only in personal

interactions? Was he nothing but the composite of other people's impressions of

him? These impressions--these judgments-- could not be real. They were based on

brief outward gestures and the judges had nothing but their own usual

experiences of their petty and selfish lives to compare others with. In Japan

women who left their children locked up in hot cars were rarely accused of the

crime of manslaughter; and in Korea the handicapped, he had seen, were left to

crawl like worms, pushing their carts and singing their songs as traditional

music blared forth. He died every time he saw one of them. He yearned for the

love and the language where he could befriend someone who was handicapped and

he chastised himself for only being able to lay money in some of their cans.

Once he put his hand into the hair of such a man. He stroked the hair around

his face. The gesture lasted only a couple seconds. The man screamed out

something and a security guard began moving toward them. Sang Huin placed money

in the can and went away. Then he began to question himself. Maybe it was

loneliness that had compelled him to do that. After all, the action was

undoubtedly bizarre in the sense that no one else did such things. He was not

wearing a monk's robe. Another man's fate was none of his business. This type

of action just was not done; and yet, he was not the same as others. Suffering

the paralysis that would not allow him to make a full smile and finding the

eyes x- rays that could go, for the most part, beyond pleasant countenances to

a suffering innate in other beings, it was no wonder that he was peculiar. It

was no wonder that at Christmas parties or barrooms he sat and drank in silence

feeling like a buffoon for not acting like one. In ways he was a buffoon: his

taciturn ways that thwarted the lighthearted frivolity of a world conceived out

of motion was the substance that often caused contemptuous laughs.

What did it matter? What did any of his actions towards others matter? Everyone

came and left him. He was dizzy on a merry-go-round.

"You must all eat," said Sung Ki as he poured water into the remaining rice in

Sang Huin's bowl. He had heard it so many times. How they had carried on an

affair with the sister staying there and the overnight visits of Sung Ki's

father was a mystery.

They had met in the park in Umsong. Sang Huin was memorizing words in his

textbook entitled Let's Speak Korean. Sung Ki spoke something to him in Korean.

"Miguk Sarem imnidad" responded Sang Huin (I am an American). Sung Ki,

accompanied by a high school friend, took him to eat kimbop (a Korean version

of sushi). He spoke in English the entire time neglecting his school friend

from the conversation. After visiting a couple museums, Sung Ki gave Sang Huin

his beeper number. Sang Huin invited him to a Christmas party held for students

at a language institute but stayed contained to his own students and his new

friend, Sung Ki. That night they slept together; and the boy that had stroked

Sang Huin's leg with his foot when they were eating kimbop wanted to hold hands

while the two of them lay next to each other. Sung Ki, soon afterwards, began

to plan out their time together. Sang Huin did what he requested: touring the

Independence Museum; mountain climbing; free English lessons, and visits to his

Buddhist temple and congregation. Soon Sang Huin was spending every night at

Sung Ki's apartment and a month later their relationship was a sexual one.

Sang Huin thought about how Sung Ki cleaned the apartment by putting a wet

towel under one of his bare feet and sliding across the floor with it; how he

used to go into the bathroom with his newspaper and would not come out for over

an hour; and that sentence he would always say, "you must all eat" meaning that

every speck of rice left in the bowl should be mixed with hot water into a soup

so that nothing was wasted. On the day that he learned that Sung Ki was going

away he came to his apartment and asked if there was anything he could do or

get him. There wasn't. He sat on the sofa, cold and pierced, as Sung Ki ignored

him, cleaning one thing or another and then reading something or another. Sung

Ki lit a cigarette and sat on a balcony that overlooked the mountains and rice

patties of Umsong. After a few more moments of silence, Sang Huin went to him.

His voice was shaky like a faltering foundation. He cried. It wasn't so much in

reference to him as it was his sister. It was his first tears for her. It was

in reference to non-ending perpetual loss. He knew that Sung Ki would construe

it as solely for him. He felt embarrassed and the embarrassment increased as

the two men hugged. Sung Ki began to cry. Sang Huin said, "I want to apologize.

I'm sorry if I did something wrong. You wanted a girlfriend and my friendship

and I made you have a boyfriend."

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

Right before the bus came to a stop, he fell into a dream where there was a

dust storm in Pyongyang. He ran through one dong (neighborhood) to another

lost, looking for distinguishable signs, shapes in buildings, and widths of

streets. Everything from the thin dust-sheathed roads to the hangul (Korean

language) on the signs, looked as identical as the occasional mom and pop

stores and it was all indistinguishable from what he saw minutes and hours

earlier. He ran into no one since the streets were empty. Then he became

careful of where he stepped. "The dust storm," he argued, "could have slid land

mines up from the thirty eighth parallel." The more he thought about it the

more nervous he became and the more hurried. When he became breathless, he sat

on a rock and drank the last of his bottled water. The taste of sauerkraut and

hot dogs was in his thoughts and the boiling, bubbling surge of his saliva but

he would have eaten kimchee or someone's dog being as hungry as he was. It

became fully dark and he would have known entire blackness were it not for the

speckling of stars, the moon, and a fire at a distance. He walked over to the

fire. He saw four whores seated around a bonfire. He recognized different

buildings, and the curves of the street near a hard dirt tennis court. This was

Ne Doc Dong. "Do you want me," said one, "or do you want another?" Sang Huin's

face turned a bright red like it did with drinking a bottle of beer. He smiled

and looked toward the sidewalk in his embarrassment. He said, "No, I wouldn't;

but would you have a brother?"

When he arrived in Chongju from the desolation of what was in between Seoul and

it, the population and activity of this small city recreated an insatiable

yearning for Seoul, which to him was a storehouse of all extraordinary venues

to the mind (encounters both sexual and cultural). Large buildings were like

the small mountains of Umsong with a topping of cloud on a rainy day--monuments

of beauty welcoming him to its domain that edified and exhilarated his

appetites and his love. The mountains, until recently, transported his

imagination to green blankets of waving rice, and from there to farmers'

markets and rural parades celebrating the farmer, the daily appreciation of the

faces he saw, and the monotonous sounds of "Hello" from children and high

school students who knew of him. Those students always made him seem retarded

when he couldn't communicate to their Korean rambling but when he spoke to them

in English with the same stream of words they became giddy and the outcome was

usually a positive one from his perspective. That was before he decided to sue

his boss for the 10 million won that was owed to him. At that time he lost

faith in the man's decency and began to find the countryside monotonous even

though the continual exposure to greenery and remoteness had been healing to

his soul.

He left the bus in Chongju (where he was more or less residing) and walked to

the bathhouse called a mokotong. The day was fiercely hot and he wondered if it

would be better to jump on a city bus since he had experienced heat exhaustion

a week earlier and had to be put on an IV to replenish his system. He pulled

out some bottled water and crackers for countering any remaining potassium

deficiency. He needed a walk and was not willing to be impeded by a weakly

cowardice in broken manhood that was contrary to his muscular form. He passed

coffee shops, Samsung stores, a convenience store called Lawsons, and one

called Best Store. Even though he could read some of the signs in Hangul he did

not know what he was reading for the most part. He wished that his family had

taught him his native language. Here he often felt like a handicapped moron. If

he were an Anglo-Saxon, a blue-eyed Miguk sarem English teacher, spending 6

months in the host country without learning much of anything about the Korean

language, it wouldn't have been even a minor offense. To most he was a retarded

Hanguk sarem. He chuckled and then smiled at the faces he took in.

He waited at a red light with other pedestrians. He sifted out bodies and

faces. For a few seconds he appreciated the old and the young whom he saw. It

was an unselfish sensation. It was spiritual and he liked it. Then he lusted

after the young men. He had hardly looked at them lustfully while in America.

Occasionally Korean women also got his attention but not as much as American

women. He had trouble believing that such predilections were a summary of a

man. In fact they seemed to him a cathartic release of energy that blocked

manhood if manhood was gaining equilibrium when coming up from the punches or

finding a positive expression of himself and the world, and even a pride in

both, within adversities. Since he quit his job following the suit and the loss

of Sung Ki from his life he went to Seoul often more for sex than anything

else. How easy it was. All he had to do was put his eyes on someone at a bar

called "Trance," around Pagoda Park, or at the movie theatre behind it and off

they went to his hotel room. What was it? A strong yearning for his native land

and the man he might have been had he not been replanted in America, an

over-identification with his own sex, or fragmentation from violence that had

disgorged a close family and made him distrustful of those bindings and

obligations that could go awry. He did not know. He did not know that it

mattered. Anyhow, here his lusts were pursued cathartically in part and

lovingly in that addictive clinging in part but always he was falling free and

naked into their pools of sensation.

He did not think that he was all that bored. He had around fifteen hours of

classes a week and was able, with that, to gain a salary commensurate to what

he should have received monthly from his former employer. It turned out to be

perfectly legal. After all, he was a Korean citizen, albeit one on a traveler's

visa, and so he did not have to work for anyone but himself. He didn't have to

do all that much but be able to speak English. He went to museums in Seoul on

his free time even though the experience was a bit redundant since there

weren't enough temporary exhibitions to entertain and enlighten him for long.

The period after sex cloyed empty into the night like a finished game of

solitaire. He knew that reality whenever he chose to engage in it and yet he

did it nonetheless. He wanted an exchange of higher and lower energies (or at

least thought he did), but men throughout the world were afraid of anything but

the latter. Reality was as it dictated: and for the most part he did not want

to make a seedy experience into something transformational by exchanging names

and telephone numbers, and making subsequent calls although that was what he

secretly wished-the tattered man that he was.

He entered the mokotong. He picked up a key, a toothbrush, and a razor at the

counter. He took off his shoes and left them with the worker who deposited them

into a small shoe locker; and then he went to his clothes locker. He took off

all of his clothes except for his underwear. He locked them in. Then he went to

the toilet. He put on the typical bathroom slippers made of plastic that were

used in toilets because they were often wet and dirty. He went back, after

urinating, and reopened his locker. He took off his underwear and deposited it

there. He had become so socialized to the need of a beeper (not that he ever

got any calls apart from students needing to re-change their hours of study)

that he hated to keep it there suffocating under his socks. It was an inanimate

object but, instrument that it was, it was a source for possible connectedness.

Like a child, in his more subconscious thoughts, it was his friend. Still,

Koreans, as addicted as they were to pagers and the new popularity of cellular

telephones, could not easily dangle them from their penises at a mokotong. He

locked the locker and felt "Honja" ("alone). Even among large groups of people

he was alone. When he went to restaurants he was usually "honja," and had to

declare it. When he studied Korean, read great literature, went to a museum,

saw a video at the video pang, or went to a mokotang he was alone and often

questioning how anything could be enjoyable in such remoteness. There was pain

in it but like any adaptive mammal choosing one lesser pain to the greater one

(in his case choosing the aloneness of his thoughts to the sociability of the

masses) there were times when he wasn't even aware of how alone he really was.

Everything was measured by its impact on others but the pre-adolescent, found

buried deep in the man, could always play alone. When violence was really known

and the world was conclusively bad in one's perspective one could go at it

alone.

In the shower he used a type of dual washcloth connected together like a

mitten. He put his hand inside of it and used its abrasive side to scour his

body. He tried not to stare at all of the bodies doing the same. He spent just

a few minutes in a whirlpool because of the intensity of the heat and then

dived into the extremely cold waters of the pool. His heart raced and coldness

tingled through his body. Koreans believed in the salubrious qualities of

ginseng, dog meat, and sudden exposure to extreme heat and cold. Besides him,

there were only two boys and a young man with a rubber ball within the cold

pool, but only he swam circularly enjoying the solitude as much as one could.

Every now and then, by his lack of focus, he swallowed water in his lust for a

man or two lying on the edge of the pool where the heat of the whirlpools in

the adjacent room entered and hypnotized them dozingly. He concentrated on the

steam that rose above his head, exhausted itself on the mirrors, the waves that

he had created which massaged his psyche in sight, feel and sound, and the

three figures that enjoyed the water with him at a distance.

It had been disconnection that had brought him here to the mokotong, as it had

to Seoul or even to South Korea itself. People had come and gone out of his

life in such a storm, and he was in an existence floundering on something

without a stable foundation. It was a miracle, to him, that he had been able to

finish his studies at the University of Houston following his sister's death.

Back then while students paraded themselves in the insouciance of sociable

gestures reflecting their sexual rhythms he had dangled alone like a skeleton

in a neurosurgeon's office. He liked the flexibility of his schedule here in

Korea. He needed plenty of free time to think his weird thoughts and

reconstruct himself as long as his thoughts did not collapse onto him, burying

him alive.

At the least provocation, in late August, he began to come to her, his favorite

city, lost and uncertain with eyes somewhat wild and fearful but yearning and

believing in Seoul's power to provide him with experiences that would thrust

him into a better knowledge of himself and the world. She would reflect onto

him a more refined and loving being (or, at a lower stage, a loved one since he

knew that it might be true that he was one of those tattered souls who weren't

needing to learn how to be loving at this point but just needing to feel

loved).

Four or five times around the pool were enough to tire him to a respite of ten

minutes sitting on its edge and contemplating the movements of the people

around him. Their forms transcribed into ideas concerning what he thought their

lives might be like; and from there, feeling and the musical notes encroached

from distant spaces within his imagination.

There had been a time when the whole world seemed to him full of connections.

Perhaps that is what made his childhood memories so special: as a child he

believed that their meaning would go on forever. The temporary nature of family

marshmallow roasts and monopoly games with his father; tire swings and

neighbor's tree houses; bicycle radios fastened to handlebars; selling snow

cones to passing cars; bicycle routes; meatloaves, potatoes, and onion rings;

bi bi bop and kimchi chige; that trip to Arkansas at a distant relative's house

and how he and his sister had played in the snow with a "cousin" the whole day;

his sister....

Oh, how painful! He didn't want to think of that ever. He wanted to find the

beauty of the present moment. How good it was to stretch out into motion; to

feel the power of his arms; and the embrace of water.

He thought about how on his walk here an ordinary happening had touched him

without even then being aware of it. A young boy standing at a curb with other

pedestrians waiting for the light to change rocked a metal, rectangular trash

container, which swung back and forth on a hinge. Sang Huin put his hand on his

head in passing; and the world could not have seemed more rich and connected by

this impersonal incident than if Sung Ki's Buddha had manifested himself

supplying answers to every question that Sang Huin had ever had in his head.

This contentment and absorption in the poetic qualities of the present moment

lasted only that long: a moment. He told himself that he continually wanted to

be in the present moment as fully as this no matter how banal or what lonely

patterns it consisted of. It was better than searching through memories of

people long gone who had no capability of returning to him again.

He pulled his dangling legs from the pool. So much came and went. It was

hideous in a way: he could not determine who or what was important. He wasn't

even sure how much people were supposed to mean to him, if anything at all. Of

his friend, Yang Kwam, what importance to the long- term aspect of his life did

this man make? Disconnection ran amuck looting the benign corpses of good

memories. After sitting himself on a bench in front of the pool, a sadness at

the loss of his friendship with Yang Kwam made him feel age that he did not

possess.

He watched a couple young men stretch out in motion. He watched their

splashing, their excitement, and their frenzying limbs with the awareness that

this tousling around had no higher significance. He got a vision in his mind.

It was a feeling with musical notes. He got his underwear and his book bag from

the locker and dressed himself marginally. In the dark sleeping room of the

mokotang, where many businessmen got their only bit of relaxation from the

week, he sat in a reclining chair near the window and began writing down notes

but he felt that he was dabbling. He deluded himself that an ability to record

notes on a staff would tranform him from an amateur cello performer and general

musical dilettante to a composer. it was a dream for dreams meant that he was

more than amarginally educated professionless clod kicked by circumstances to

job, residence, and sexual orientation. Dreams meant that he was more than a

mere carbon organism jilted around by electrical activity in the circuitry

within the result of hornomal activity and the results of genetics. Dreams

deluded him with a sense of purpose that would be mroe pleasant than reality.

One man's long and thick penis throbbed up and down on its own volition by the

impetus of dreams. Sang Huin tried not to stare but he could not help it. His

eyes, still getting over an eye virus, began to hurt and he felt tired. He put

away his composition and then put his hands over his eyelids.

He went to sleep. He dreamed of a woman named Gabriele driving down a country

road in Arkansas. She reached for a can of snuff that was on her dashboard. The

roads she chose were random and she kept yearning to move southwest until she

was out of America to that neighboring country of Mexico so different than the

homogonous American model that was rife the world over. He saw into her mind

and her hopes to cross over the Mexican border and veer off the main road

through adobe hamlets, and cacti and past Mexican Indians.

When he woke from his epiphany he wasn't sure what to do with it so he returned

to the pool only to find it had been drained. Seven streams of water gushed

from spouts at the bottom of the pool and three young boys were running around

in the collecting waters--one kicking water up to the lower parts of the mirror

that covered the walls. It all reminded him of his mother blowing up a plastic

pool for he and his sister and how she ran the hose over to the pool to fill it

with water. He could remember how the two of them had splashed freely inside it

for hours but were so prudishly careful that neighbors hosed off their grassy

feet before entering with them. He remembered telling one neighbor boy to get

out after he had disregarded the rule, soiling their clean waters, and when he,

"Shawn," wouldn't leave he got out to tell his mother only to gain the

enflaming sting of Texan fire ants on the souls of his feet. He could remember

his screams more than the sting. He looked toward his reflection on the nearest

part of the mirrored wall, but still steamed, it wasn't there.

His thoughts crumbled like Graham crackers and spilled like pints of milk that

Mrs. Ghrame, the kindergarten teacher, had given to each class member as they

watched Winnie the Pooh and Piglet on television before being made to sleep on

mats for a nap. He felt lost childhood with so many forgotten memories sucking

him into an invisible vortex of dust. He was running around with a cowboy hat,

a play gun, and a holster. He was running around in his own wayward thoughts

before adolescence created a hunger for beautiful bodies and a neediness that

he would never be able to shake.

He jolted up and went where there was more light. He seated himself on a bench

near a row of lockers believing that what he had was some story unrestrained by

notes but when he put the pen to paper notes exuded there. He sensed the

brilliance that came to him and felt awe toward the paper that could magically

reflect the mood and full realm of his mind. He yearned to embrace his cello

and to practice the notes of a Gabriele symphony that he was composing.

Chapter Two

He dressed himself. As he put on his socks, he did it with the mentality of a

small child who still felt newness in the sensation. Sexual glutton of adult

games, introvert, a man perpetually weakened and wary in ways unbecoming to a

man, he still was a little wiser than most on a couple issues. He was cognizant

that as an effect of adolescent awakenings an adult often was so obsessed with

being in the company of others that finding any degree of happiness could not

occur without them. He was a lot different in that respect: influences by

hormones to sociability were thwarted by his wariness that gave him back his

childhood innocence. Although he was an adult he could still play alone albeit

uneasily. Also they, the unwary ones, were so fixated on gaining bigger and

more complex pleasures in their gross gluttony to have everything before death

that the marvel of air rushing into one's lungs or the feel of a spring breeze

brushing against one's face was lost to them entirely. He wanted the remnant of

early childhood--the memories of strong aromas, sights, and sounds as his

senses depicted them-- to live in him and not be the cause of mourning. He

wanted to find the traces of deceased family in those early days and be able to

glance back onto those tenuous decaying remnants of memory with a sense of

happiness at what was once there. Still, even with the earliest and most benign

memories furthest removed from the tragic end, such a feat was difficult to

master. Everything in the mind of a 5-year-old from the smells of greased

telephone polls to the sounds of the school bus that picked up his older

7-year-old sister, and everything in the mind of a 10-year-old from getting his

first b-b gun to spending his first time away from family at a summer camp was

like walking barefoot on sharp gravel. This, however, was better than having

his entrails hacked out of him in that shock of finding his father dangling

from a noose in the workroom of his basement. Thinking that early memories were

even more benign than the present, he knew that it was only his thinking that

made them painful. He judged that he was the source of his misery and with

application he would find a way to plant himself in their fecund topsoil and

burgeon into the future. His childhood memories were mostly American in origin

although it was difficult to isolate the Korean episodes from that of the

latter. After the school bus would rush in front of a road near the trailer

park and whisk his sister away, his mother would pursue her early morning

exercises in front of the television and he would emulate her movements. He

remembered loving the thought of catching lightning bugs like his sister and

the neighbor children and his repulsion towards it when his mother stated that

they were "God's little creatures." He remembered getting lost in a store,

feeling tiny among lady mannequins, and being nearly hit by a car as he played

in the street. A man yelled at his mother for letting her child run around

unrestrained in the streets. Humiliated, she sent him to the bedroom of the

trailer. The radio on the mantle of the bed was playing "Raindrops keep falling

on my head" and other lugubrious folk melodies. He listened. He cried on her

white blanket as if she had banished him forever. He remembered that his father

came home on that occasion and took him to the Orbit Inn for a coca cola. He

twirled around on a stool restored to his euphoria as his father strutted his

work talk to men his age seated on other stools.

Walking from the mokotong he thought of a story that he often read to the

children in Kwang Sook's kindergarten in Chongju, a place where he often worked

for a few hours each week. But his mind distorted it as the benign and

innocuous innocence of childhood is mutilated and the mutilation calcified by

experience. Seoul Tiger gets on a plane. He waves goodbye to his mother and

father from the window. He feels the plane move and rise in the air. He shuts

his eyes briefly. Then he opens them widely in amazement. Seoul Tiger looks

through the window. He sees a valley of clouds below him. Then he looks down

further and he sees Sri Lanka. The plane lands. Seoul Tiger gets out of the

plane. He gives the deferential slight bow and says hello to Tamil Tiger. Tamil

Tiger picks up his suitcase and takes it to a car. Tamil Tiger's mother is in

the car. She says, 'Hello' to Seoul Tiger. They all go to the home of Tamil

Tiger's family. Tamil Tiger's mother slaughters a pig and boils it in her stew

while her husband brandishes a machete playfully. Then they all eat at the

table. 'Do you eat rice?' asks Seoul Tiger. 'No, I eat unleavened bread,' says

Tamil Tiger. 'Here are some Rotis.' Tamil Tiger passes him the plate. The plate

has rotis on it. Seoul Tiger holds the unleavened bread in his palm wondering

how to eat it. Then a stew, called a curry, is put upon his plate. 'Do you eat

kimchee?' asks Tamil Tiger. 'What is kimchee?" asks Tamil Tiger.

Again he was bouncing around in a bus without time to rush back to the yangwam,

the room he rented outside of an old woman's home. He questioned himself on why

he had agreed to give private lessons in various places outside of Chongju. He

answered to himself that the strung out schedule and the long rides matched his

disorganized, wayward thoughts. It felt comfortable to bounce around in the

similar movements of his circumambulatory personal life. He hoped that the bus

would arrive in time so that he could eat a meal before going into those

lessons. People in these small towns would not acknowledge his handicap of

linguistic ignorance. They demanded more than his short, concrete, and

ungrammatical utterances. If he had been an Anglo-Saxon he would have been

served in restaurants with simple statements like "Chop che bop, chushipshio"

(chop che bop, please). But in small towns even a waitress who had experienced

him before would come forth with entire paragraphs to serve onto him and then

would stand there bewildered that paragraphs of reciprocal eloquence would not

be returned by someone clearly of her nationality. At last she would go away

and the dinner would come for the retard. This time, as always, he ate quickly

and then waited for some woman's children to get him at the bus terminal. He

did not know the woman's name even though he taught there and she gave him

money and he did not know her children's names even though he taught them. They

were just his "little tongmuls" (little animals). Sang Huin did not like the

difficulty of memorizing Korean names so he did it seldom.

Inside the bus station he changed to a different bench. A two or three year old

girl, chastised by her mother, sought refuge between his legs and would not

come out. She closed the legs like an iron gate. The mother did not seem to

demand that she leave the fortress; and he enjoyed the fact that she seemed to

gain comfort from his presence even though his face expressed the awkwardness

of having her there.

He missed childhood. Surely all people did. Was it so awful to admit this? No

one that he had ever known had spoken of his or her loss. Granted, one could

not stay comatose in innocence--the delight of pulling some trivial plastic or

paper objects from cereal boxes; Halloween costumes; or the Christmas

togetherness. The newness of running around trying to beat the clouds or run

barefoot after balls in the ecstasy of just being alive ended quickly to girl

chases, obligations, family, and all of such dead weight. He couldn't have

stayed with his mother forever. If he could have remained steady on the

American continent he would have needed more than just her; and so alone, with

a sense that he would never find family or closeness again, he had ventured

here to another continent that was and wasn't his home, and where he did not

speak a language that was and wasn't his. Still, coming here was not entirely

bereft of positive notions. Being an innocent, a childish perspective

prevailed.

He wanted to once again hold something tenuous and fragile in the palm of his

hand as a child would a tinctured caterpillar, the butterfly. He wanted to be

there with it innocuously in awe of something that really had no use to him. He

loathed this interaction, this anathema of the soul so intertwined in

insatiable and wanton selfishness. He wanted to be Seoul Tiger once again but

such was not in the survivalist impulses of man. Such was not destiny. Hadn't

there been numerous times when as a boy he would sit hours with a stray dog

that was needing to claim a gentle master, scared to take it home and yet, like

a true friend, sensitive most to creatures that could not articulate themselves

in any other way than in the eyes. The eyes, that dilated neediness to be in

the presence of a friend in a hostile world where being born was not a sanction

to live well or live long. One's innocence ran by like a shell-shocked soldier;

circumventing normal sexual drive by being gay would not free him to an

innocence that was forlorn. Now there was just the wistful need for family,

children he helped to say small things, and his strange obsession with empty

physical connections he could depart from easily. He preferred young students

because they did not make him uncomfortable by pressing the issue that a man in

his early twenties should be planning to have a family. His private domain

consisted of a blessed, taciturn instrument called a cello that required no

words to say something deep. He had dragged it on the plane and had paid an

astronomical fee to get it onto the airlines. What a burden it had been to him

lugging the thing around and yet, dilettante that he was, he needed some beauty

to exude out of his hardened mud. He needed reverberating notes to sink into

the plaster cast around his mind, which had the signature of the world as an

evil place upon it , and caress his soft and lonely brain.

Finally, the two or three-year-old parted one of the kneecaps and the mother

pushed candy bribes before her nose to keep her quiet and contained. Soon they

bought a ticket in the Chinchon station and boarded a bus. All bus terminals in

cities under a million people had cement floors and were dark and dirty like a

cellar. Just like he had seen in myriad other terminals, here a man came along

with a plastic watering bucket with a nozzle used for watering plants. He

rinsed the floor with the water contained in it but did not follow that with

either a mop or a broom. A few minutes later, two boys came into the terminal.

One had a basketball in his hands. The other one stood a few feet behind him.

He looked bored and fat.

"Anyong Haseyo" (Peace you do)

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

the basketball.

"Uri-tul nun taxi ul sayang hata?" (We taxi to use?) He knew it was as

ungrammatical as a pig. He knew that again there would be no taxi. Again they

would be walking. Still it was his way of saying something. The one with the

basketball who could figure it out shook his head.

They walked down the sidewalks. The two boys lead the way. Sang Huin felt that

the roles had been inverted and he felt a twinge of resentment that he was a

child or a retard in his own native country and that children were dragging him

about. The three of them moved down sidewalks like window-shopping loiterers

looking into every mom and pop store along the way. "Ilchik tangshin-tul rul

basketball ul hayoshimnita kachi?" (Early you basketball did?) The fat boy

nodded his head silently. The boy knew his genius in interpretive skills. A

sense of pride exuded over his face in a white light but the flush of

expression was extremely ephemeral. It came upon him and vanished in just a few

seconds.

"Who won?" asked Sang Huin in English.

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

sort of bored way.

Then they opened a gate and they went into what looked like a house only it was

separated into two apartments.

Sang Huin used his photograph cards like magic tricks to get them to practice

tenses and syntax. He liked seeing their tiny house and thinking how his life

might have been--for better or for worse--within the childhood of his race. He

loved English as he loved music; and sometimes he combined the two in such

classes, but with a small feeling of resentment (to which his smile and gentle

nature gave no indication) as if his time was sodden in musical doggerel that

defiled him like a solecism when he might well be playing Haydn and Boccherini.

He wondered about the girl dressed in the dumpy blue skirt of her school

uniform, and the boys in jeans. Were they content to be Koreans or did they

yearn for bigger and better things seduced by the American culture that came to

them through the cinema and the music and through his presence as well as the

English that they studied. If they weren't content, he thought, it wasn't for

him to say they were wrong. It was a globalized world and America was the power

and the standard that was the impetus for its formation. That was why he was

here with his English. He couldn't have gotten any other job in Korea when he

couldn't master the simplest of sentences in the native language. He didn't

like the sour perceptions that he had of America. It was home. It was still

home.

In Umsong, during those times he had waited in the office of the kindergarten

for his class to begin, the children would always see him through the window.

They knew at that point that he didn't speak Korean and wasn't one of them and

for that reason they were attracted to him. They would bang and climb on the

window in their eagerness to be near him; and some, using a runny nose as an

excuse, would be permitted to go into the hall. To the side of a fish aquarium

hung a roll of toilet tissue. They would wipe their noses and peak into the

office. They would squeal. He liked it. He liked being an American--sometimes.

He looked more intensely at these Chinchon students. Who would they become? As

they begin to feel hormones, the adrenaline of the four-year high called love,

and the frenzy of sex luring them into steady relationships and accompanying

obligations, would they have moments where they too yearned to be in a hammock

under their Grandma Lee's cherry trees? In his case he could recall the image

of a photograph of a neighbor his family had labeled as "Grandma" Vera with her

black dress rustling in the wind carrying him in her arms. Would they think

upon theirs-something similar to Vera frying hamburgers on the grill as the

scents of angel-food cakes came from the windows of her kitchen? He chastised

himself. He told himself that only broken people looked back on childish

irrelevance. The rest looked to the future in their insatiable hungers for

bigger pleasures and their present connections that they might use to secure

their hedonistic whims. But he was a "broken" person and the thought of Vera

returned to him. When he thought of her intensely the image emblazoned in

memory shook him and it was hard to think that it could not make her alive

again. And yet to have had a connection (and the most unfortunate of lives

surely have had many) would justify everything. A personal contact in the past

or when the wind...or the sun...or the rain touched him, that alone would

justify a life of barren prospects.

"Unto us a child is born. Unto us a child is given." He thought of the words of

the composer, Handel. Yes, he thought, he had done a horrible thing by

encouraging his girlfriend to abort their child. It was wrong to have robbed a

being of life and any connections the fetus might have had beyond its own cell

divisions. Secondly, this cynicism that a woman, spellbound in romance, robbed

a man of his sperm to produce a baby by which to devote herself and obtain a

purpose in life while thrusting him into the financial maintenance of this

prize had caused him to abort major connections in his own life. Now, apart

from his mother, there were no connections. There were only phantoms of people

flitting through ethereal consciousness, and by coming here to find his land he

had parted from her. When his sister was murdered, he was just beginning his

studies at the university. When his father committed suicide, Sang Huin's

cadaverous numbness was on fire and he felt that any trace of himself was being

incinerated. Mentally, he was running to and fro in the hope of retarding the

flames that were eating him for their fuel. Back then the thought of his father

dangling from the noose recurred to him every few moments. At that time he

wanted to check himself into a hospital for he felt a loss of sanity. His world

was three dimensional but totally impersonal and wobbling. After months of

virtual silence and the icy stares of his mother through the most enervated and

perfunctory movements of planting flowers and trees no different than what she

had or stripping wallpaper and putting up patterns that were nearly identical

to the old ones, he spent a month in Galveston. A month watching waves dash

against the shore was enough to make him see that being one of a billion waves

dashed into the sands was a pattern engrained into life that he must not take

personally; and so he returned to school. By will and discipline in reigning in

his thoughts he made it through college and a year of graduate school. But he

could not take the stagnation that scholarly pursuits forced him to endure and

became the animated billiard ball being shot from one area of the table to the

next--one part of the country to the next--falling homeless into dark holes.

Sadness punched him in the stomach. It was enough--"nomu" (too much). He

frowned. He didn't care. Six or seven minutes early--who would mark the time

especially when he traveled such a distance to give them these lessons. He told

them that the session had ended and they got an envelope of money from their

mother, which they brought to him. The session didn't seem as if it had begun.

It all was a vacuum--a void. He untied the double knots that were contained on

his shoes and put them on. Korean people were so quick at slipping on shoes,

and he assumed that anytime someone waited for him to leave it was a complete

aggravation for them. His mother had spent so much time teaching him to tie and

then double-tie. He had been such an ignorant and inept child. The habit was

deeply engrained in his psyche. The students stared and waited at his childish

wrestling with his shoes. He knew that he needed slip-ons that would foster a

quick exodus after he had taken them off at the door.

He stepped out over the crevice of a yard. A light sprinkling or heavy mist was

falling upon him. Past the gate and into the street the generalized memories of

a hundred such days with a hundred similar rains came to him. Rain was for him

only a baptism of emancipation. From a glance up at the clouds he was compelled

to acknowledge realities outside his own thoughts--and indeed Sang Huin needed

the rain of Noah to get out of his own ruminations. Yet, a foreigner's

experience was indeed like no others' and he was an introverted being

traumatized by the great chasm of the murder of a sibling and finding the blue

dangling body of his father. At 24, any man's boyhood was buried under only a

shallow layer of dirt and for one with maimed manhood the clay was never solid,

was partially washed away, and boyhood often resurfaced. He was a runaway from

the American experience and his thoughts, when not able to do it in deeds,

almost always ran to Seoul. The rural areas where he worked and at one time had

lived gave him the solitude and the meditative power to think his weird

thoughts as he tried to reconstruct his manhood but the problem was that he did

it too much. Seoul was felicity, the exhilarating movements, the museums, the

symphonies, and the sexual bliss. Within it the hurt was diffused and boyhood

was gagged and he was rarely cognizant of its screams. At the bus station it

began to rain heavily. A few years ago, he thought, the sun had droned on with

the days of the trial and the rare rain had been his only comfort.

In an hour's time, during the bus ride, each of these students would be

completely gone from his mind exuded like the entangling conundrums of feeling,

ideas, and senses in sleep. If all people were shadows of this realm in the

flickering of light, what solid entity cast the shadow? Was it God? Was there a

god? If the shadows were more concrete than the light, what would this say

about life? He decided to stop thinking such things. Myriad complex and morbid

thoughts, profound or inane, would not raise him to a wiser man. They would

just get him stuck in their muddy ruts.

Back in a bus, he thought about how much of his life was dragged about in

transportation here and there for a Korean buck. He didn't know anybody in

Chongju but a simple advertisement in the paper would have been enough to solve

his dilemma in providing him with private lessons near his home for needed

South Korean Won. Still, if his whole life was spent in these bus rides, fate

was not bad. He could be a starving North Korean or one of the dead soldiers

who got their submarine trapped on a reef in the South Korean jurisdiction of

the ocean and had been hunted down by the South Korean soldiers. He had a South

Korean passport and an American residency. He was single and free to see the

world. He didn't do that much and had lots of time and some money to spend.

He had little mastery over his thinking. Since he was a creative person it

often went running wild through meadows with the gods. He knew there was genius

to be gained in the company of deities so wild. He had left his mother's home

and his mother country to find manhood- perverse, greedy, manhood with its

insatiable wants, its selfish calculating plans, and its grandiose desire to

find its own unique adventures and habits. She, his mother, would meanwhile be

re-planning and redecorating rooms. He loved her deeply but she was not

everything. He needed more connections to keep himself from rising like a

balloon and going adrift; and lacking them, looking onto his life from the

clouds, he could see the obvious: that this mortal would not be there when he

became much older. For all of his life there was only one claim to be made and

that was upon himself. In this respect he was quite American.

Chapter Three

Traditional homes often had extra guesthouses as an extension to the main unit

and it was within this "yogwam" in Chongju that he more or less had residence.

Luckily for him, during summers these outdoor rooms were not so horrible but in

winters the cold snuffed the residents out of sleep in early mornings as

animals from forest fires and the mostly aged tenants, before finding warmth

elsewhere, would individually go to splash their bodies and faces in a shared

bathroom not much different than the ones bears use in zoos. One low faucet fed

the cement creek, which had a plastic bowl floating in it. No different than

one's paws, the bowl was the means of obtaining a bath.

It was in a bland closet sized room that his cello was in one corner and he, a

laptop computer, a short wave radio, and his stack of clothes were at the other

end. When he arrived there after teaching in Chinchon, the ride made him feel

exhausted; and after an hour of work, his notebook paper with the Gabriele

symphony was under the sweaty socks of his feet, the Voice of America news

broadcast became nothing but static, and he was asleep.

A person remembers his last dream if awakened in a specific stage of dreaming,

if the mind is devising some way to startle the dreamer into going to the

bathroom, or if the examination of present problems in a skit becomes violent

images running amuck. Unrepressed wishes, and rehearsing events before they

actually take place to gain some sense of how to respond before they occur are

the ideas most often given for dreaming but the brain is a revelatory organ not

of future events but of present realities; and so it was with him.

He dreamt it was Buddha's birthday and that Yang Kwam was under a huge canvas

canopy on a university campus where the ground was a hard sandless desert.

Those under the canvas were resting and drinking as the others played soccer;

but Sang Huin was alone on a dry and grassless bluff that overlooked the

activity. He was drifting on and off in sleep; and although a bit conscious of

being alone and feeling reluctant to have Yang Kwam involved in a host of other

lives in his absence, he was unwilling to tamper with fate or reduce his

exposure to the sun, shaped with divine human limbs like Aten himself, that

kept putting him to sleep.

A man came up to him. He first spoke in Hanguk mal (Korean), but upon getting

no acknowledgment of having been understood, he changed to English.

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

Sang Huin sat up.

"Let me introduce myself. My name is Kim Jin Huan. My major is tourism. I study

here at Chongju University and I'm part of the English club here among other

things. I'm very pleased to meet you. You can teach me lots of things and we

can become friends but I can't learn at this altitude--not even of you. I think

it is best to come down below where the sun is not so hot. You are surely

thirsty."

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

pillow.

"I came up here to ask you if you would like to come down and join everyone

else although it was suggested that it would not be an easy task. Sung Ki [the

dream now made Yang Kwam Sung Ki] was saying that you like dirt. He said--I

don't know why-- that the floor of your apartment was dirty and that there were

lots of mosquitoes there. He said that is why he tells you to stay with him. He

said that I'd have trouble getting you out of the dirt. I don't know that this

is all true but you surely know by now that dirty rooms, dirty plates, and

dirty dogs--Koreans have no tolerance for these things. You really should not

be lying in the dirt like this. I know you don't know me but that is my

advice." Then he smiled ingenuously.

Sang Huin knew the man's snobbishness showed that he was ignorant of suffering

and deliberately ignored the dirt from whence all carbon molecules spring into

life. "Koreans--North Koreans or South Koreans?" asked Sang Huin as he propped

part of his upper body with the use of his elbows.

"South Koreans, of course."

Sang Huin didn't say anything. He was from the greatest and most powerful

nation on the Earth (at least it was at the present date if the European Union

"stayed out of things"-a common idea of his father's that made him smile) and,

in his perceptions, it was being equated with dirt the way Americans envisioned

most all other countries including those in Western Europe.

"Everyone wants to talk to you in English."

"But I don't want to," said Sang Huin kindly. "I'm tired of saying little

things and hearing little things. I don't mean to be rude."

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

"Yes. You know..." he paused. He had trouble getting out words that would

refute the visual evidence of him lying in the dirt. Such words had to be

special if they were to vindicate a nation and its people not to mention

himself and all physical evidence. There were no words that he possessed for

such a feat so he reverted to attitudes fixated in his childhood and thus

became childish in the process. "You know, Americans think that South Korea is

a little third world country composed of nothing but dirty people."

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

"No," he said sullenly as he shook his head, not knowing who his people were.

"I have to think out here in the dirt. I know it is strange. You don't know me.

Of course you think I'm strange. I just enjoy seeing insects crawling around in

the dirt and the dirt itself- everything that comes from it is inspirationally

calm." He laughed. "I guess I like playing in the dirt like a child." He knew

that he must be an amusing caricature for them.

"You don't have to do much. It is kind of hard to fail. Just drink a beer and

ask them little things. 'What is your name? Where do you live? How many people

are in your family?' They can't interact with tape recorders. Can't you do

that?" Sang Huin ignored him.

"Don't you have any goals?"

"No, not really." He sat up as if he were taking a defensive posture within the

limits of his personality. He spoke with mild sincerity squeezed in with a bit

of sarcasm, giving the depths and secrets of his being in a laconic paragraph

to this stranger. "No, I have come to the conclusion that doing nothing in a

bad world is improving it so I want to contribute in this way. You know, maybe

there are people out there who do nothing but lie around in the dirt. I don't

know that they are any worse off to be dirty. I don't know that I'm better than

they are by usually preferring not to act that way. I'm just another creature

out there with microorganisms in my body helping to clear out my intestines."

He felt his warm burning face. "I guess I am getting a little sun burnt out

here but so far it has been a good experience." Around him little pieces of

trash were dancing around circuitously. He heard the sound of a vehicle he

could not see since it was at a distance. The world was alive.

"Suit yourself," said the man.

Upon awakening and sitting up in his blanket and futon on the floor, there was

such a clear image erect and tilted in the forefront of his mind that it almost

seemed to be registered in his perceptions as reality and not a part of his

dreams. It was of a German American woman in a Volkswagen driving southwest

through America's heartland to the destination of Mexico but driven insatiably

to an isolated state as if the car could take her straight into Antarctica.

She, Gabriele, spit her snuff into an empty beer can as she drove. This odd and

unusable vision was not, to his knowledge, reflective of any psychological

state of his own, and yet it somehow seized him. She was broad and burly,

isolated and insulated but worldly and perceptive. Sang Huin sensed a story

within her. It was not music. She had too many notes. The stagnation of the

room, however, pushed him into the drone of movement and this movement

flattened this vision and made him the doormat under the weight of the day.

He got dressed. He felt agitation at the idea of having to go all the way out

to Muguk for his doctor's class but at 4:00 A.M. he slipped on his pants,

regardless, and walked outside to the bathroom. He would have to get in a taxi

by 4:30; be on the bus by 5:00; and travel an hour and twenty minutes all for a

class that lasted less than an hour. The class was composed of psychiatrists,

surgeons, and those practicing internal medicine but they were on a soldier's

salary and the payment he got for the class was paltry. Still, he said that he

would do it. They had lost money for classes they did not receive at Shin Se

Gye when he quit there.

Near Muguk, from the bus, he saw farmers of the dawn planting their weedy rice

patties by hand. They were dressed in baggy shirts and rolled up pants and

pointed straw hats covered their heads. Their long boots were entrenched in

mud. According to his romantic perceptions of them, each one was august,

unpretentious, and melting into the morning sun. Those rags they wore were more

patriotic than flags and more majestic than King Sejong the Great's crown. Once

their farms had been irrigated into ponds and frogs croaked within the allure

of their enclave they would have sewn not only rice but the continuation of

civilization. Their footprints in mud were ephemeral, but they had their

eternity in their families. He asked himself what eternity he would have in

such a decadent and disconcerted existence that was obsessed by this mixing of

people in an emotion of love that brought the selfish and altruistic splashing

of the other in one's container and he or she into theirs. Love still was

something that he hadn't really experienced and he hadn't experienced it

because of his greater obsession with carnal devouring.

What made him attack himself so? It was obvious. As a gay man he reshaped

perception in an uncomfortable way (although undoubtedly he was not the first):

his life became an admission that there was no operator's manual for any man's

life; but when he saw couples with their babies he believed, in contrary to

this, that a natural course in a man's life had been severed or abducted from

him and so life became all the more confusing. He could not do otherwise than

to feel sad and insecure. It was a loss in his life and he did not deny that it

was such. He was not really envious when he saw them. It made him pleased to

see them even though in such occurrences he felt empty and stunted at best.

It made him sick to think that--oh, the same old disconcerted thoughts spun

around and around in his head like when a bad tune by its prevalence repeats

itself over and over in the tape recorder of the psyche and the repetition

feels like drudgery. It made him sick to think that he had caused a woman to

conceive and then had not been forceful enough with his will to ensure that the

child would be born--no, that was just a fantasy albeit a partially believed

one. Really he had insisted on the abortion but as time went on the perception

changed with the neurons and the desire to have a good self-image. But this was

the past: immobile, irrelevant, and except for occasional lesions that opened

up the bleeding of memory, forgotten by all. The future was anxiousness where

hopes of happiness were thoughtlessly draped against despair.

In the doctors' class, held at Dr. Lee's breakfast table, he brought up

articles and political cartoons for discussions. Everything from the continuing

menace of Saddam Husein, incursions into the demilitarized zone by North Korea,

the Yonsei University student demonstrations, the convictions of the

ex-presidents, and all of the most newsworthy of the world's unhappy events

were there for the probing. But today, upon leaving, he remembered an article

he had forgotten to bring to them: the Taliban's restraint of war ravaged

widows from work. The doctors liked such things. As Dr. Lee had pointed out,

even happenings in the most remote parts of the world often spread amuck like

an oil spill in a global community. He remembered having forgotten this article

when he was walking out the door and then it slid from and fell off his memory

altogether.

After walking to the Muguk bus depot he had second thoughts about going back to

Chongju. He got in a taxicab. That was the easy part. He said, "Anyong

Hashimnika?" and then probed his mind. "Odie ka?," (where you go?) asked the

taxi driver sharply. The word, "kang," meant river and "mul" meant water. What,

he thought to himself, was the word for lake? "Kun mul? (big water)...no, that

would never work!" Somehow he found it and got out a coherent sentence. The

taxi took him there leaving him on the shoulder of the road. He got out. The

highway that was the main road of the town was sandwiched between a bluff and a

lake reflecting the marginal space of the Korean landscape. There were no

classes for a while and the day was there to celebrate like the disrobing and

denuding of a goddess--or in his case, a god. Sang Huin pulled off his shirt

and rolled up his slacks. He sat down under a small pavilion. Near it weeds

grew. He plucked one and put it into his mouth. He chewed it and sprawled

himself on the bench thinking himself as a more worldly version of Huckleberry

Finn. Looking down at the waters and the small fishing crafts that were tied to

a few docks at a distance, he thought about the Korean landscape in general

images: the croaking of frogs in the irrigated rice fields near the apartment

that he once had in Umsong; the farmers ("nongmin") who would insert each

individual plant as painstakingly as a plastic surgeon grated each item of

hair. In galoshes, they would trudge into the depths of mud to sow, reap, and

thresh the rice. The moon above the empty Umsong stadium was a lambent glow

over the rice and gave a slight visibility to the forest that interconnected a

nearby field to the stadium. None of it was all that spectacular when compared

to the variety and splendor of the vast country, America, that was and wasn't

his country; but still it was new and he sometimes liked it.

Then, in full broadness, he saw Gabriele. There she was in a tight t-shirt and

wholly jeans. Hail beat upon the tin can of a trailer where she lived with an

infant and a cat. The hail seemed to her like the bullets that she imagined

from the distant war that America wedged against Iraq. Then he saw the

antithesis of this: big diamond earrings dangling from her lobes and that she

wore the most expensive fashions of the elite that gave her broad and muscular

German frame elegance as she got ready to take her son to galleries, temporary

exhibits, and then to have him sit alone in a corner at these art parties where

cheques were often signed. He saw him sitting in those strangers' homes as Sang

Huin himself had sat on the bleachers during his sister's basketball games. He

saw him taking umbrage with the gods (the sun god in particular if He existed)

for they had bore him in the suffocation of her gray colors that sprayed out

onto the world like a mist that none of his friends went through. For them it

was sunny picnics of complete families, weenie roasts, and marshmallow burnings

over bonfires. And there she was again a younger entity, youth asphyxiating in

the dust storm of talcum powder that, in her trailer, she swept across the

hills of his buttocks, wishing to walk across hills and depart from family. .

He felt her true, committed, objection to everything in her big lonely home and

with everything consisting of so much it stayed latent in the confines of her

leaden eyes. He pulled out a notebook and sketched her different varieties.

Underneath her image, he began to cluster a second draft of words and notes. He

didn't know what he was doing.

Chapter Four

Having had no book to sink into when he arrived at an apartment in Umsong

months earlier, he (this new arrival from America) must have seemed like a bird

trying to build a nest with two or three sticks. It had been an insane episode

for the scrutiny of his roommate-coworkers: the way he had organized and

reorganized his few things in the loosely partitioned area of the living room

and how he had been so reluctant to speak. Hadn't he, in his disconnection,

looked like a man suffering from some neuron-entangled nervousness, heavy

neurosis, or a bad prion making the holes in his head to match the holes of his

being.

His sister had been raped and mutilated. At least that was the theory-as much

as one could assess from skeletal remains. The prosecution wanted to horrify

the jury with photographs. Maybe they had succeeded inordinately disconcerting

the jury so that it couldn't ascertain the facts and probabilities. The only

measurable impact that he knew of were ramifications of deep, paralyzing

shadows that the three of them fell into--so far and so eternal had been the

abyss. "Were the perpetrators human or hominids? If they were human, what did

that say about being human?" It had been their first unshared question easily

sensed in the eyes of each other. "Are all Americans like this?" they had all

silently thought. No one would have said such a thing. "Was all humanity this

way?" It was in their eyes--that and the wish to escape the species. They were

there: in this word "hell" that all had talked of and few had ever gone into.

Hell was full meaninglessness and savagery without rationale and with a

judicial system forcing the mutilated further into unprecedented horrors.

Pusillanimous and cowering in fetal positions within themselves, limping around

the days with perfunctory and lifeless movements, his father had nonetheless

spoken of "getting on" with things although he couldn't define what one was

supposed to get on with or what was worthy of getting on to. They all could

perceive the horror of everybody and everything so no matter what they

did--even killing themselves--it would all be equivalent to meaningless and

savagery.

It was good to have this hour of complete silence near the lake without any

sound but the rushing of cars, which also came in inundated waves, peaked, and

died. Still, one would have to hear a language sooner or later. At times if

only he could have a silence, a respite, from his thoughts to go with his free

time to think his recovery would be expedited. He thought of his sister. She

had kept her Korean. Occasionally, even as a teenager, she would mutter off

some idea in Korean to which his mother returned some reply. He had always felt

jealous of this secret language and here he was in Korea but the language was

still a secret to him.

Chapter Five

The social creature that even he was, if he were not to hear a voice for long

even those boats in the lake would have been a discomfiting

image--interspersing his conceptualization of them in depersonalized momentum.

He wanted to call Kwang Sook to hear her voice but also to cancel his classes.

He didn't need so much money. His former boss had deposited some of the owed

money after the issue had gone to the Department of Labor. He wanted to go back

to Seoul but classes were his equanimity. They personalized his world in a

professional and impersonal manner that gave him fortitude to float through the

expanse of his existential turns where it seemed that there were no other

sailors.

Maybe, he thought to himself, he would go into a video pang later and let drama

absorb him in a personal intimacy with a fictional entity of depth and

substance. He had no misgivings. His life was a stunted one. Still, back in

Chongju, he made the call and cancelled his classes. Then, near the bus

terminal, he went to a restaurant. He ordered some bogum bop, a thick mixture

of rice and vegetables that one mixed into a thick brown gravy that stood off

aside on the plate and the appetizer of kimchee maundu. Alone, eating and

reading a Newsweek he pulled out of his bag, he began to wonder of the lives of

those that owned or managed the restaurant. Their area was shielded only behind

sliding doors. Behind the tables and the chairs, their living area consisted of

just one space. A girl came out and he could see within it clothes drying on a

plastic rack and a small television that was on the floor. Then a man came out

with a baby in his arms. He wore an undershirt and boxer underwear. The women

cooked. Then, after they served Sang Huin a second helping of kimchee maundoo,

they put breakfast on a table for the family. They all ate together. Like Yang

Lin at Toksugum Palace seeing newlyweds and the wife he should have been, Sang

Huin saw his alter ego in the man. His life was probably limited. A wife and

children pinned him into a small existence with family commotion and

responsibilities. It floated in non-ambitious swaying like a plastic boat on

ripples in a bathtub. It probably droned on in its unaware and insignificant

tedium through the years, but it had its connections.

Chapter Six

Attempting to thwart his primitive hungers for sex and socialization

(synonymous words of civilization's shaping, but base nonetheless), and sensing

the true vacuous abyss that would exist without learning or creating, he went

into a park that was near the bus station. There, he worked on his amorphously

wordy musical composition that was a bit of everything and nothing. Still, he

told himself that this potpourri was worthwhile even though really he had his

misgivings about it. He told himself that he needed to test the musical aspects

of it on his cello later that day when he returned to the yogwam. It was a plan

of a return "home"(whatever that word meant) and a means to contravene his

deviance to Seoul. It was a self-created urgency to repress his sexual

obsessions and to clothe the animalistic movements and hunger of his naked

soul. To his delight, from previous recitals of Hayden at the yogwam, it would

probably bring to his door an audience of elderly tenants and one of his more

fulfilling connections.

He came upon a crowd of people clustered around an elderly man. The man was a

governmental employee paid as a teacher of Korean traditional dance. He was

promoting the program by a slow and illustrious dance. He wore the traditional

hanbok of the paji and chogori. Sang Huin was inveigled by the dance but the

sun god was putting him to sleep and 15 minutes into the performance he was on

a park bench fast asleep. When he awoke, the crowd that had gathered around the

dancer and the dancer himself were no longer there. Just as Sang Huin, the boy,

had skipped around the kindergarten teacher's desk, sat down to drink his

chocolate milk with his Graham crackers, and found himself a grown man

listening to a university professor's lecture on biology, so the sunlight of

this day's slight 2:00 descent vaporized the people he had been witnessing no

differently than it had vaporized the dinosaurs myriad afternoons of myriad

centuries ago or the body of his sister that had decomposed in a park. It had

all gone-gone but where it had gone he couldn't say.

Like a 5 year old, he rubbed his eyes to wake up. Following an instinctive

response that was a yearning overwhelming his common sense, he felt the impulse

to stretch forth toward Seoul: toward adventure in the masses and bathing the

rational mind in sensual massage. He wanted meretricious sex. Young men

encroached on his mind in droves. Maybe this obsession, if it were such, was

from an inability to communicate in any other way. He did not mind--well, he

did, but what could he do, he argued, when the irrationality of pleasure

seeking sedated one as he journeyed around alone on the rugged terrain of the

Earth. He did not believe in much platonic constraint. When his hormones were

boiling to overflow he "hauled [his] ass" to Seoul. There, a theatre existed

for meeting and touching men near Chongno Samga Road and he had been told that

there was a gay Turkish bath in the area of Myong Dong. Too much creative

energy would be depleted if he were to lasso the wild bore for long. Too much

craziness would go into creating sense in insensible passions. Wasn't marriage

created to give sense to such passions? Hadn't this lifetime contract that his

parents signed in their marital vows caught two of life's myriad souls in the

idea that they could defy a changing universe and be as non-changeable as

rocks? Hadn't their confinement of each other in this materialistic American

dream become the incommunicable cries of two strangers tied back to back by

weeds from their many parcels of land after all substantial conversation had

been exhausted? Yet, his liaisons were not exactly more viable versions of

relationships. He did not want to talk to these men nor, as he knew, would they

to him. Ideally he did; but it was just a fleeting expression or whim. Reality

sang another tune. There was this day's ticket to a symphony in Seoul that

Kwang Sook had given to him because she couldn't go. He had taken it. He loved

symphonies and there were parts of this day when he told himself that he would

go to Seoul for that purpose. Really, however, he wouldn't have bothered at all

had it not been for the urges of his body anxiously nudging him northward.

He bought another ticket to Seoul and drank milk he obtained from the bus

station vendor while waiting for his designated departure. The noxious smell of

bus exhausts filled the open cavities of the bus station. A torn back on a

plastic seat seemed to snag his shirt more than once like a cat's claws. The

wait was not long since a half hour later he was part of a line to get on

board. This particular flatulent bus seemed to say his name, Sang Huin, as a

feces colored gas, carbon, exuded from its rear. Strange ideas like the talking

bus and the clawing chair, in the back regions of the mind, were only

experienced by the lonely and the isolated. He knew this. Those who were

isolated were such out of their contempt for the sadistic and hedonistic

impulses that were hidden in smiles. They were such to protect their own

ingenuous vulnerabilities despite being sociable human creatures; and they

weren't always so firmly in their right minds. The landscape seen from the

moving bus was unremarkable but still the beauty that was there dazed him into

self-reflections. More than the physical response what did he crave? To be

loved and to love was like a dog chasing its tail; and if his tail were long

enough he would have it in the mouth. He would have it there in his mouth if

the mouth liked the taste of the tail and the tail the feel of the mouth.

Foolish as he was going to Seoul once again for his fun, he wasn't a fool. Most

people obeyed their sexual inclinations as if they were great oracles of wisdom

that would broaden them beyond the limits of themselves in such a primitive

interaction. He couldn't say that he wasn't as they were, but unlike them, he

knew that the whole thing was a mirage for those who couldn't or didn't know

how to build worlds within themselves. A Newsweek article had proven to his

satisfaction that love was not a splendid thing. It was just a four-year

addiction at best. The article had theorized that primitive man needed to stay

with the woman long enough to help with the child's welfare by feeding the

creature and its mother during those years when the baby encumbered the woman

from hunting on her own. He didn't need more than that.

In Kwang Sook's school, Sang Huin had asked the children to draw verbs next to

a series of words they found from his handout. When this was finished, he would

read sentences with those vocabulary words like "A tall boy hits a ball in the

air." "How many people are there?" "There is one person," they would say. "What

does he do?" "He hits?" "What does he hit?" "He hits a ball." "Where is the

ball?" "It is in the sky." "What does he look like?" "He is tall." The younger

ones were so competitive with each other in the games he devised for them as if

beating others in the game of survival were entrenched in human curiosities.

They had also done English exercises together on the roof where he had been the

military sergeant giving peremptory whims and they had to jump, run, go to the

right, go to the left, etc. at his command.

The boys had been especially fond of him chasing them around trying to eat them

on the roof as he sang, "This is the way we kill a pig, kill a pig, kill a pig.

This is the way we kill a pig so early in the morning." This play-acting and

making the brutal world seem as nothing but an innocuous frivolity caused them

to squeal like piglets. It was insignificant wrestling around with the children

in a job that did not take too much talent or knowledge but it was a silly

example of love. He wanted to give that spark of imagination and knowledge just

because it seemed right to give it. Weren't more altruistic connections really

what life was about? And yet if this were the true form of love, he often asked

himself, wouldn't it be so fulfilling that he would give himself to it

completely?

When he arrived at the express bus terminal, he took the subway to Chongno.

Near Pagoda Park, he went to Hardee's . The break from Hanguk food

(particularly kimchee) he found nourishing to his imagination that craved

variety. He wanted to be a vegetarian but at times he thought that he almost

lapped up the grease like a starving dog. When he finished, he found himself on

one of his first safaris to a gay sauna. He was still unsure how to get there

and so he looked down at the "chito" (map) a fellow hunter at the theatre had

drawn for him on the back cover of his "Expatriate In Korea" resource book one

time when he was at the theater.

Once there, he took off his shoes at the front desk and collected a key and a

toothbrush. Then he went upstairs. After his shower, a brief phase in the hot

whirlpool, and a second cool shower, he put on a robe from those that were on

hangers and went to a hallway of rooms where orgies were in progress. Some men

in the hallway wandered from room to room, selective of that which most excited

them on the tatami mats of the floors. Others joined shadows of faintly visible

figures groping around in a state of almost complete darkness. For him only

lighter rooms were an option since less illusionary beings were the only meat

and grease he could stomach. With the barrage of his passions released in one

of those rooms, he became a perfect receiver of transmission. There was no

interference from either psyche or physique. He relaxed on one of the leather

sofas in the lounge with other smokers and those limp individuals in between

engagements. Visions came unto him and he almost felt holy writing out aspects

of Gabriele's life within the fog of his smoke. Naked bodies in contrast to

his, that was now clothed in underwear, did not distract him. In the next room

men bathed themselves in the whirlpool or heated themselves in the sauna and

behind him were others engaging in what he had done. If human beings were only

shadows passing in and out of memory, which was nothing but the night sky for

such ghosts, what then, he asked himself, were one's dreams? The fantasies and

emotion propelled thought; and thought propelled action. Surely action was more

real and tangible than the hopes and dreams and yet how could it be such if

dreams and emotion conceived action.

Ideas of Gabriele grasped him as if she were more real than he was. Pages of

words created themselves on his lap while above the couch was a television

showing a drama of an ancient Korean period linked with reverberating

melancholic Buddhist melodies. Toward 6 o'clock, he was still there--and for

his excesses his underwear was stolen off of his body when he was performing on

someone else. He wasn't sure exactly how it happened. His head hurt; and he

felt a nausea concerning his life. He left wishing that he were ten again

gaining the rapture of a millefleur morning of dandelions patterned into a

greener fabric of grass after the evening's rain and exploring a more oceanic

landscape with his sister as they splashed through an alien terrain in their

rain boots. He wished for the time when she existed long before her attraction

to older married men like her boss-long before her attraction to men at all. He

reassured himself that he wasn't completely bad, that he was a caring person

who did not harm others even with the knowledge that there was no real right or

wrong on the planet, and that innocence hadn't left him entirely. He told

himself that he was innocent in many ways, if not an outright fool, since he

had shown himself to be kind and easily taken advantage of in business (he

would have continued to tolerate only getting two-thirds of his salary so that

the other teachers would get paid had it not been for the fact that he stopped

paying his secretaries as well and began to rehire new ones when the old ones

quit). When he arrived in Chongno Samga again his pain did not abate. He went

to a pharmacy. The woman at the pharmacy was a grandmotherly type and a little

boy sat on a stool in front of him. She asked what he wanted. He told her in

his babyish Korean. She asked how many aspirin he wanted. He told her six. She

asked him other things. He told her that he was an American and could not say

much anything in Korean. When he was leaving the boy told him, "Good-by" in

English. The Grandmother laughed warmly. Sang Huin felt pleasure from this

little minute of his life as if all sweet and little moments were not gone

altogether; and his nausea from believing that all human beings perceived each

other as a voracious fulfilling of appetites diminished.

From the cannibalism of sexual excess, he ate a salad at Wendy's restaurant

despite its exorbitant price and the one plate serving rule. It was a nice

respite from eating too much of the dumpling snack of kimchee maundoo. The

thought of eating meat did not agree with him. He shoved down some aspirin with

his chocolate frosty and stared out of the window. It was past 6:30 and this

area of Chongno Samga was already riveting in youthful crowds. In a few hours

young men would bee vomiting on the sidewalk for their alcoholic excess as he

had done on Uchiro Samga after coming out of the sauna. He hurryingly got a

yogwam. He turned on AFKN, the American military channel and saw a bit of a

movie on Franklin Delano Roosevelt while he pulled out a suit jacket and a tie

that he had folded away in his book bag. Then he got into a taxi and went to

the Sejong Cultural Center. His seat was located in the middle of the

auditorium. As he sat down his cigarettes fell out of his front pocket and as

he picked them up he noticed the blind man he had seen before in the subway

seated with his dog in the same row. Time had made him think that the person

had just been a flitting fantasy but there he was. It was a basic instinct of

the lonely human psyche to wish for meaning and connection in such events as if

God would move heaven and hell to give him a companion. He put the cigarettes

into the slit of his pack and then glanced over to his left in the hope that no

one had noticed his clumsiness. A man that looked like his sister's boss was

seated next to him. It was a slight resemblance but still it horrified him.

When that "thing" had been declared "not guilty" in reference to his sister's

murder despite all the evidence that the prosecution had brought forward, he

had fainted for a few seconds. Then, in a slow dizziness, some feelings had

assembled themselves and then he had begun to think that he wanted death; and

then he had just wanted out of America.

Chapter 7

During an intermission, while others were leaving, the stranger got up and left

with his dog. Sang Huin, on impulse, followed. Without yearning for a

cigarette, he lit one in the lobby and waited at the entry of the bathroom. If

he were troubled by the peculiarity of his actions, he was only marginally

reassured by the fact that they were not witnessed. His actions seemed that of

a stalker although this seeming, this appearance, was only ruminated on by

himself. His motives, however, were nebulous in this desire; and this inability

to understand why he was seeking this individual was a troubling factor. It was

the impulsiveness of one lacking social skills who suddenly drives up to a

school playground to form intimacies, discards the body in abhorrence and

disbelief over being the perpetrator of the crime, and in a half hour finds

himself to be a pedophile and a murderer. And yet he wasn't stalking a child

but a man and he wasn't running on the energy of sexual conquest and hate, but

just running away from loneliness. If this innocuous action were stalking, all

humans, he told himself, were stalkers. Without question, he was so desperate

to disrupt his isolation like the pensive ruminations of a mute circus gypsy

alone in the back of his tent. He was so anxious to escape his incommunicable

thoughts through friendship, or the hope of it, that he was ready to shoot it

out randomly to whomever caught his eye. Many selfish whims constituted an

attraction, but he told himself that this was not the making of a stalker. Then

the stranger and his dog came out.

"Anyong hashimnika," greeted Sang Huin as he touched the man's arm so that he

would know he was addressing him.

"Anyong haseyo" (informal: peace, you do). They spoke loudly because of the

noise of the crowds loitering and coming and going from the restrooms.

"Yongo mal ha su isumnika?"

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

It was interesting for him to be thought of as an American instantaneously.

Sang Huin found it refreshing to not have someone give him that surprise and

grimace for being a Korean without a language.

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

"Rimsky-Korsakov. Yes, not all of the music is Rimsky's but they were playing

music from that composer earlier. He is Russian, one of the best, I think."

Sang Huin smiled at the acquaintance and then realized that his smile wouldn't

pierce through the sunglasses. Unable to let his benign nature penetrate

through the plastic, he again thought of himself as somewhat equivalent to a

stalker. He felt nervous.

""Would you like a cigarette? We've got ten minutes." He thought of the words

and instruments which human beings employed to break from their innate states

of emptiness; and the connections sought from attractions that would be

forsaken if the experiences seemed shallow and there was an assumption that no

major connections would evolve from them.

Sang Huin crunched the pack for a bit of noise and the stranger took one of the

cigarettes which he then aimed toward the hiss of the emerging flame that Sang

Huin provided with the click of his lighter. The blind man inhaled a couple

times but then coughed in perpetual rhythms like the beats of a drum. The

seeing-eye dog gnarled its mouth the best it was able to do and growled

importunely. "He doesn't like," said the blind man barely able to get out his

idea from his stanched breath. Sang Huin thought of Sungki's syntax which also

lacked object pronouns in "You must all eat."

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

man.

"No problem," said Sang Huin as he took the cigarette and smashed it into an

ashtray a few feet away and then walked back to where he was. "I feel a bit

foolish." He chortled for a couple of seconds nervously. "I was seated alone,

really, not liking that feeling as much as I thought I would; and then I

noticed you. I've seen you before on a subway: you and your dog. It was a few

days ago. You got out shortly after I did in Tonggyo-dong."

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

"No, but a few times when there were demonstrations at Yongsei University I

went there and watched the police and the tear gas from the fourth floor of a

building that has a pastry shop. I guess that is a bit strange, huh?" The

stranger filled air and space with a feigned smile and a nod, not knowing what

to say. "No; I live in Chongju," continued Sang Huin, "but I come to Seoul as

often as I can. I'm American. At least I say I am. My friends call me Shawn in

America but my friends here call me by my real name, Beck Sang Huin." He knew

that he didn't really have friends in either place.

"Saeng Sob," said the acquaintance. They shook hands although both were

doubtful that they could concatenate a conversation. When the man said his

name, Saeng Seob, Sang Huin thought of the boy in Kwang Sook's school who also

had this name. He was in his class; but Kwang Sook said that the last year he

had to drop out of her school completely after going through more surgeries

from being hit by a truck. That accident had happened a year earlier. Even

during the brief months Sang Huin was familiar with him there was yet another

surgery for his legs and feet. Sang Huin brought him toys every few days.

During this time he hated having the poor boy languish in the bed--skin from

his buttocks used to supplement the thin blackish skin of his legs and the pins

in his toes. It was the least he could do.

Hadn't there been a time when he and his sister were driven to the home of

their Grandma Vera and rather than connecting to her chose to run across the

street to a nearby park and feel alive with the swing against the winds as

their parents socialized? Hadn't there been a time when he knew the brilliance

of grass poking through the crevices of his bare feet? Then puberty came and

there was an aching need for other people. The aching was incessant.

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

them and the performance."

"We're here alone," said Saeng Sob, " but I guess we should go back in before

the second part begins." Sang Huin did not know if he was included in the

conceptualization of "we."

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

stop the closure.

" No, but I work and study at the university." He paused and then filled in the

silence. "My cousin is a dean in the mathematics department. I work part-time

at Yongsei as his receptionist so that is probably why you saw us there," said

the man speaking of himself in plurality.

"And you take classes?" asked Sang Huin.

"Sometimes," said Saeng Sob.

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

said Sang Huin.

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

returned to their seats.

Then, after the performance, he cornered him in the ambiguity of a "maybe"

which a strong will could distort to affirmation. Such enthusiasm could not

easily be negated especially if it came from an American and soon he was with

the blind Seong Seob answering questions about his life in the US and eating

some cold noodles in soup that was as flavorless as water. The meal tasted like

a cold and bland version of Ramen noodles ("Ramyen" in Korean) but he was told

that it was not Ramyen. He didn't like the food and yet his closed lips

twitched up smilingly as if the opposite were true. Deferential deception

seemed the most cordial solution. Through children observing it in his society

in various forms it was passed down through the generations by imitation. And

as humans had and in interactions proliferated these tactics of coexistence to

the young that were successful enough to keep the species, so far, from

self-destruction, what did he in his short life know that was a better

substitute? In reinventing etiquette, it was hard to know if the new behavior

was better or worse than the old one in the abstract. The only measurement

would be the reaction of others. To eat and smile while hating what was being

eaten and to succeed at it pleased him. It made him feel that he was a decent

person. In that minute it picked him up on a wave of optimism that distracted

the lonely, mundane, and stunted life that he chartered for himself. Sang Huin

spoke frankly about why he had come to Korea. He had been so lost after his

sister's death, his father's suicide, and the exacerbated disconnection from

the robotic and perfunctory movements and rambling of his mother month after

month. He had to break away and become acquainted with his heritage the way

Seong Seob, as much as he was capable of, had to flee from the cousin and then

him, as perverted as he was, to end those 20+ years of disparaged containment.

Both had to chart independent lives exempt of family and without the

possibility of ever having one; but really was that so bad - to be ungrounded

and to float on winds of circumstance. In the right perspective it was

liberation.

Sang Huin wondered what this name, Seng Seob, meant (not that he knew the

meaning of his own) and why he was so excited to be with him. They agreed that

they would just be together for an hour. That hour became two and then it was

the rest of the evening. They drank soju, a mild equivalent of sake. Late into

the evening Sang Huin had the waiter calculate the tab and then suggested that

they continue drinking elsewhere. Both were drunk at this time and drunkenness

was making them thirsty. He and Saeng Sob returned to the yogwam with a case of

beer they purchased at a convenience store.

They slept together. Naked and awakening from sleep, Sang Huin listened to the

breathing of his friend. For the first time since his sister's death he did not

feel alone. Later on in the morning when the light began to shine into the room

he continued his prose, every now and then looking at the presence that slept

there as well as the imposition of his dog.

Book Two:

The Book of Gabriele and Sang Huin

"Thought is the idea of extension and extension the embodiment of thought"

--Baruch Spinzoa

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

Chapter Eight

Hunched over a TV tray, with the baby locked into her lap in one hand and snuff

locked into a cheek, she wrote her story. Occasionally she would write while

dribbling brown into the open portal of her empty beer can. She needed her

portals for they led her, like a child, into animistic realms far from the

mundane of soiled diapers or the powdering of a bottom as repulsive, to her, as

perfume scented women. She was dressed in nothing but a dark bathrobe of a

bosky fabric and like a soldier in military fatigues, she blended in with the

subdued light of a tepid morning, which stumbled onto the floor of her trailer

like a collapsing drunk. Every few moments while she wrote, her thoughts became

distracted by the hail that besieged the roof and walls or by the screams of

the baby which made her glower whenever he spat out his pacifier to become the

self-centered squealer that she knew to be the base nature propelling human

actions and society's disarray. Richard Dawkins' idea that one was born selfish

but did not have to stay that way was an adage that, with the energy she had in

her glowering eyes, she wanted to etch onto him if only her eyes were lasers

where her commandments could cauterize the human brain. It seemed to her that

Jehovah, had he existed, would have glowering eyes no different than hers and

such lasers would have gone simply into the malleable substance of the human

brain instead of searing it into stone. With aversion to reading anything

printed on paper let alone etched in stone so acute it would be more sensible.

Had Piaget really studied beings such as this, she thought, he would have seen

them as the making of Wall Street and the thunder of armies. She listened more

intensely to the hail that was like a machine gun with rubber coated pellets.

She imagined herself riding on a tank through a desert and into Baghdad

half-naked and exposed, waving her red white and blue brassiere from the opened

hatch of the tank. Yes, she admitted, she needed portals. She needed her exits.

She needed a change, a respite, from the monotony of motherhood that was

sinking her into it like a hole. The baby was a gift, and more a choice and for

these points a sacred responsibility to which, she told herself, she would

rectify past grievances that her parents, and even Aunt Peggy herself, had done

to her. She would never engage in the treachery that had flattened her out

under its tank when she was so young (although, she had to admit, the demise of

early sensitivities had made her, in such early childhood, reconstruct a new

and indomitable self). As she thought this she noticed a spider crawling onto

her hand, which held the pen. When the hurricane of all the air from her lungs

was not enough to release it from her palm, she did not drop the pen. She

decided to look on the intruder as a lecturer on persistency and to gain

inspiration from it. She knew that once she finished writing her piece, the

spider would be smashed, but she believed that the act should be performed with

conscience. Gabriele did not subscribe to the idea of civilized man that life

was ranked into a hierarchy of importance. A human certainly could not get by

without killing, or picking up killed produce from a grocery shelf, but the

idea that there should be a real distinction between a can of beans and the

entrails of a local senator seemed absurd, although she did not think that

being put in an electric chair for having eaten her local senator ranked very

high up there in the chances of probability. Yes, she again told herself, the

child was a gift and a responsibility but she would not dote him. The world

flattered itself that doting mothers carrying their worms to the baby birds

exuded such a profound love by this thoughtless emotional instinct of proud and

adoring pampering. They thought that pampering the pleasure-seeking savage was

the acme of nurturing motherhood and the making of good human beings. She

thought to herself that such mindless bitches, doting as Aunt Peggy had done

with her children, were an embarrassment to this word love. Love in its purest

sense (what little one was humanly capable of) would be a selfless caring of

another without such instincts to keep one's genes replicating for all

eternity. It was not suffocating one's children in dependency so that one could

have the role of mommy to avoid rolelessness and void. It was not needing a

child. Being a doting mother was as far from her instinctually as those bizarre

apathetic ones who could toss a child on a relative or an ex-husband himself

before joining the military. The other day, on page 2 of the Ithaca Times she

saw that there was an article on some such oddity although much bigger stories

with more bizarre and sadistic ramifications were buried each day on page 1,999

of the New York Times. She would always read voraciously and thereby find their

cadavers. "Piaget, Piaget, go away, go away," she mumbled inaudibly to herself

slurring and babbling the consonants and vowels as if she were now beginning to

imitate the language of her son atavistically.

Her calligraphy was composed of letters that were large, circular, and loosely

connected. The sentences contained at least one or two words scratched out with

others sustained above them. She considered herself a scholar when it came to

writing and so imaginative works, in such a medium, did not come easily. Still

she could not fathom in herself such a shallow stream of sentiments that would

actually cause her to repeat the words of the lullaby, "Rock a by, baby, in a

tree top" nor hum even the notes of the lullaby symphony of Brahms. For this

reason, she allowed her back to ache and a slow-moving spider to climb along

her hand to finish an alternative lullaby--a truth beyond a myth although she

did not delude herself by thinking it other than her own personal concoction at

a different mythology the way Psalm 104 might have seemed original long after

the Great Hymn of Aten was written in Ancient Egypt. In constructing another

paragraph she began to ask herself whether or not she had ended the story. She

wasn't sure how one would know about such things that were so lacking of

scientific or mathematic certainties. Then she began to wonder if she should

have written it with a zoomorphic emphasis (maybe a bovine God standing there

in its pasture cognizant of nothing, wholly holy in the innocence of stupidity

and lack of aggressive tendencies--great virtues to which no other gods

comported). She stretched her large muscular framed back; heard a thump on the

bookshelf but, in her state of concentration, she dismissed it; dropped the

baby back into its crib, and took the top of a TV tray off its legs. In place

of the baby, she sat the tray upon her lap providing a close-up foundation for

her manuscript.

The hailstorm that was once like artillery against her flimsy enclave now

seemed a milder sleet tapping and scraping the ceiling and walls. This type of

weather was a bit like the tapping and scraping of her cat, Mouse, clinging and

banging its body on the screen of the door in the hope of getting in during the

times she threw him out, and she imagined that it would go on this way 1990

times. She listened intensely to some of its 1990 scraping taps, tapings of

"the year of our lord" which also happened to be the year of the American war

against Mesopotamia. The sleet was mixed in the wind; and for those who resided

in warmth and even those who ran through it in the hope of finding shelter such

falling crystal, that was once an ethereal gas, couldn't have been anything

other than splendor. At least, in a diminished way, it was for her who could

only hear and imagine it within the ruminations of her cynicism and maternal

gloom.

For a couple of distracted seconds she contemplated her isolated existence in

an obscure trailer park in Ithaca, New York within the middle of winter in

contrast to the crowds of Iraqi and American soldiers ready to ignite the

deserts the way crowded rats, too overpopulated, too irascible, and too

conscious of the movements of other rats, kill each other off. The whole thing

should have made her feel leery: a single woman near the outskirts of the city

limits all alone with a baby, hearing banging against her home and listening

intermittingly to the news on her radio about the Persian Gulf War. She did

have knowledge of Judo and fully believed that any violent intruders would

regret trespassing on her space but she knew that it did not protect her from

the fact that she was a tenuous mortal, a woman with a baby in a flimsy

trailer, and that this trailer was in an inauspicious location in one of the

more violent countries on the planet. To compound matters, she didn't have any

friends or much society except for her bovine-thinking neighbor, Rita. That

woman, who called herself Lily, was like a lackadaisical grass-snacking cow

right before slaughter time. She had been a former group-home girl at a home

for schizophrenics and manic-depressives although she recently graduated to

semi-independent living. For Gabriele, her intrusive presence often cut through

the black gauze of isolation that could cover every aperture of one's senses

prompting her to feel an extreme numbness. But, apart from this mental

sustenance, isolation was something that she thrived on like a light hating

moss deep in damp and obscure crevices. The walls seemed to shudder in the

winds but she did not mind the cold. She felt that it was comforting and when

it crept in it seemed to be tangible and come through the cracks around the

windows and the door like waves. The baby, however, was another matter. It

sneezed out into the cold.

The previous day he was crying in part from the cold and the need to be

suckled. And she did suckle him occasionally although, less euphemistically,

she saw it as him being allowed to devour her. She did this to pass on her

nutrients and antibodies, although giving milk and having a child use her for

her tit repulsed and stiffened her posture at times like a soldier at a machine

gun in a trench and at other times like a soldier in a queue waiting for

inspection. This act more than any other was a reminder of the fact that she

was a bit like all other women: a female animal there to be bred and to nurture

the continuum of her breed. She fed him and dressed him even more warmly, then,

but it was to no avail. Lacking options, she repelled her repulsion toward the

rock-a-by song by telling herself that it was the collective culture in the

earliest of all primitive American, if not western minds, and so inescapable in

a sense. On that day she brought herself to hum a few bars while rocking him

according to the melody of the song; but he frowned and looked at her

skeptically if babies were capable of skepticism, and so she had to speed up

the movement. The faster and harder she rocked him the more he seemed to enjoy

it, baby-laughing that one monotone squeal and slobbering all over her. At that

time of such Pavlovian drooling she wondered to herself belatedly if having him

there to seize her day was worthwhile but the squealing gave her a sense that

it was. This roller-rocking of her arms was at first enjoyable because his

squeals of euphoria were delightful to listen to but soon she found them to be

a tiring repetition and so she gently tossed him back into the crib which

inadvertently caused him to cry once again.

This was a new approach following a few minutes of having him "swig [his]

bottle." "Unlike present day Ithaca, in the land of Ancient Atlantis," she read

after raising the baby up to the tray like a cold piece of meat and then

squashing the insect into her composition, "there was harmony;" and even when

he "puked"-she would never say 'spit-up' because it was not so--she recited a

few paragraphs of what she had written while the vomit seeped into her

bathrobe. Her bold attempt to be indifferent to such an inauspicious start to

the morning was becoming a poorly constructed fa?ade for her determination was

crumbling like a desiccating sand castle. The smell of the vomit and all of the

baby smells bothered her. As her body fidgeted, which in turn caused the cat to

bury itself behind the lowest area of the bookshelf (although this time

avoiding the tripping on a ceramic dish) she contemplated this euphemism,

"spit-up." The term didn't matter in public, she argued; but to oneself, she

thought, one had to be honest. Puke was puke, and she had a tale to tell, and

her child needed to listen and she needed to resist shoving her child back into

the crib to change out of her bathrobe.

As one of her long arms stretched and she grabbed one of his baby bibs that was

folded on an end table, dabbing herself with it, she thought about how the two

of them were family because of a sexual indiscretion. Fate had backed into her

earlier thinking that family was nothing but war games. At one time she

believed that husband and wife soldiers of the same side often acted as if they

were enemies; and as they played with each other they often forgot about the

children, inadvertently or deliberately rolled their tanks over them, or

abandoned them entirely to pursue a second honeymoon. At one time she believed

that all good soldiers (all military families) did the same thing as this. Her

pregnancy (fate) had flattened her notion that an individual only had herself

in this world. It had rolled over her idea that a collective unit was a

neurotic delusion like the concept of God. She had been rolled on by a tank a

second time and had been forced to reassess earlier conclusions. Motherhood was

beginning to make her fully aware of the extent by which there was an

interdependence of the social members of society and she was beginning to think

of her son as a gift from God since the birth of a baby was such a miracle. And

here they were tucked away in their home in a scantily lit morning. The trailer

was the fortress from artillery shells, taps, and scrapes. For a moment she

listened to its splendor with her usual intensity: the taping of it, the

refrigerator mysteriously clicking into life with a hum slightly like a ticking

heart of a great body in hibernation, and the heater that didn't work so well

exhaling in dreaming snores through the mouths of floor vents. She listened

until it all abruptly ended by his cries. She then thought that she was

becoming overly sentimental if not completely and loathsomely maudlin in the

scramble of impressions that spewed out from her subconscious. She wondered if

she could shut him up in time to perform aerobics with the television

instructor.

The child she had given birth to had been like a dragon of the womb, pushing

its young being of fiery hell out of her. This was an image that Gabriele

conjured up in her imagination as the bathrobe, that was the only thing

separating her from complete nakedness, began to have such an acrid and fetid

stench. She changed his diaper and lodged a pacifier into his mouth. "Unlike

present day Ithaca, in the land of Ancient Atlantis, which the residents of

this small island called Antinomy, there was harmony." She again recited and

adlibbed the beginning of her story as a wild idea of cracking her inattentive

child's head like a nut crazily passed through her consciousness, quickly

diffusing and departing like a bad smell. "Once upon a time they were the

happiest of people glowing from ear to ear almost as cute as you do, Adagio, on

those rare times that you actually do smile. Their smiles were not inane and

senseless as giddy American teenagers…no,no-Americans as a whole really before

they have their heart attacks from the stress of competing for more and more or

the greasy food they clog into their blood vessels or from fright at possibly

being blown away when some stressed out nut comes into a fast food joint with a

semi-automatic. Their kindness was genuine because valuing their link to the

energy that radiated into them, competing for conveniences and pleasures was

not their priority. And they weren't just happy and nice but these residents of

Atlantis or Antinomy (I give you, Mr. Adagio, permission to use either

word---either word depending on Adagio's silly whims). And they weren't just

happy and nice but they were also resourceful. The Antinomians when they took a

crap did not have diapers to catch it. They preferred the natural way of

letting it drop, and dry out a bit under the sun god, so that they could make

bowls and pitchers from the dung heap. When they climbed coconut trees for the

fruit, they could get up the trees in three seconds. Likewise when they hunted

their wild boars they didn't need spears, little man. They just ran and pounced

on the animals. Now you may ask how they did such things so well so let me

answer the query of your inquisitive mind. These superhuman people were

everything good: kind and gentle, strong and smart because they weren't

arrogant. They had no civilization that told them to flush dung down the

toilet, and no amicable smiles that are part of business transactions. They

were natural, ingenuous people who meditated on the energy emanated by the sun

and this link of themselves to natural forces prompted them to be more than

ordinary men. The sun god liked those who meditated on the energy he supplied

them so he gave them a boost-a bit of caffeine if you will. That's the way it

was, Little Man, in maybe the 8th century B.C." She knew that if he were to

squeal during the story this behavior would be most inhospitable to the story

telling host, and so as a preemptive move she used crazed gestures that would

get his attention. By getting his attention she could lure him into a story

that had the potential of putting him to sleep. The name on his birth

certificate was Nathaniel, a name she liked but regretted having given to him.

It was her hope that the nickname, "Adagio," would, like magic, get him to be

calm if not elicit from the child a rather scholastic attentiveness within his

infantile limitations. She often played for him the classical music,

"Scaramouche-modere" by Darius Milhaud. It was her favorite adagio if indeed it

was an adagio at all. It was adagio enough for her and she believed that was

all that mattered.

She was seated on a director's chair looking at the slight movements of her

child's body and wondering why its mouth could not be equally delicate. She

silently called it the Spanish word of "criatura." Her extended family had been

a mixture of Germans and German-Argentineans, a passionate and passionless

crowd who often did not know if they should call her Gabriela or Gabriele and

so they had been reluctant to say anything at all to her. She kissed her son on

the forehead but this action provoked vehement cries of cacophony. Assessing

that her son had reactions no different than any hard Visigoth, she ignored his

bellowing voice and continued the story. "Listen to this, little man.

Concentrate. Scream as you will, but concentrate! They, the Antinomians of

Atlantis, considered themselves a loose conglomeration of a tribe and did not

have any inclination for a central government for governments are only needed

to control malevolent men. When the scattered men unified for monthly

reproductive sessions with their estranged spouses to ravage their fluids on

their--quote- unquote 'their'--women, they were not protected under roofs from

the elements but did the banging on the backs of horses. Uncomfortable, you

say. I'd agree: uncomfortable but quick and quick ejaculations were what they

wanted. This doing it in the open was a rather brave act, wouldn't you say,

considering that they could be struck down by lightning should the sun god deem

them as gaining more hedonistic pleasure, or spending too much of their

thoughts in activities not suited to gentle, uncivilized men. They did not

marry in the auspices of a sacrament-oriented fiend from the heavens but

acknowledged the vulgarity of their intersections not in affected guilt but by

cleansing and anointing their horses afterward. They weren't selfish creatures

apart from those 15-minute rides and so they didn't have this wish to hide

themselves in the affectation of matrimony and love like modern men and they

did not need to hide themselves in clothes. The land of Antinomy was warm, you

know. There would have been a different reality if Antinomy had been a little

island off of our beloved motherland of Antarctica. Anyhow, in the land of

Atlantis or Antinomy a child was born in this manner and grew up not with

Mother or Father but in independence and its relationship with the Earth and

the sun. She, the Earth, would find him. She would tell him that he was hers.

He would know that there was no purpose to being alive other than living and

being grateful for life. Of course, in modern societies like Ithaca, Adagio,

you have no merit at all-you aren't even thought as worthy of the respect of an

insect-unless you have a job and are in one way or another part of the Great

Factory but not in Atlantis, my little buddy. No, not there. There, to be

without aim was accepted since the meaning of life was in life itself: vibrant

energy for no reason bursting forth for no reason as fireworks in a desert."

For a couple seconds she thought about how any common criminal or intruder to

her domain would be immediately repelled from trespassing by her strange oral

dissertations. Perhaps he or she would find himself discomfited to find logic

and honesty in such an eccentric array and wouldn't know what to make of it:

Mother Teresa of Calcutta or Marquis de Sade of Paris. Such a person would

assume that she had been dropped on her head as an infant in a most dramatic

way not knowing the reality that, in early girlhood, she had been flattened by

a tank.

"The skies clothed the babies of these ingenuous savages just as it did their

naked mothers and fathers. As I said before, no clothes and no shame for them

for they were kind and their consciences were pure. They spoke the truth as

they perceived it at the moment they spoke it and no- one resented each other

because they understood that each was just trying to assemble ideas together

the way prisoners in a dungeon used anything as platforms that would edge them

closer to the window." At this point she did not understand her own writing so

she adlibbed entirely. "A given baby had the world as his own. He did not cry

in the night like a baby in need of a night light since all the books created

from previous centuries…all those mysterious words in all the pages from the

books created from previous centuries and shipped to Atlantis…all those

mysterious words in all the pages from the books of 'truth' since the beginning

of time (books seen as irrelevantly reverent, and maliciously deceiving fables)

were burnt each night in his world; and this did add a small twinkle in his

eyes. Yet it was Mother Earth who cradled him, after his abandonment at birth

and nourished him- -" Composed pell-mell and visibly entangled in nonsense, she

felt that the latter part of her myth was ruined in sententiousness and knew

that she was no longer believing that their words had any truth whatsoever.

That being the case, she stopped babbling. When she saw that the baby was

asleep she put him in the crib, disrobed, took a shower, and got dressed. She

turned on the television but realizing it was Sunday and that church

programming had usurped her exorcise regimen she felt disappointed. Not knowing

what to do with the day, she looked out of the window for a period of minutes

that seemed like hours. A car came through the trailer park lot mixing the

water with dirt. One nearby puddle looked like chocolate milk. She thought to

herself that she needed to warm some baby formula. Instead, she sat down in her

director's chair, stared out into nothingness, and listened to tapping that

seemed more like rain. Her thoughts rambled on: "800,000 African children die

from dysentery each year and yet the news is about the continuing air strikes

against Iraq as if American victory were something other than a foregone

conclusion." At least, the bully that it was, America was a democracy and

Gabriele, as hard as she tried, could not keep herself from feeling a bit

fortunate to live there. She found it somewhat comforting that the murky

morality of such engagements was debated by senators and talk show hosts.

Protecting Kuwait or securing the free flow of oil seemed an easy riddle to

figure out. Prior to the war, what American had ever known of the existence of

Kuwait outside of geography teachers? Her idea was not so novel. It was the

same type of thought of commonplace dissenters but, after examining the idea,

it was also that of her own. This was her last thought as she fell asleep.

She dreamed that her son was the neighbor woman, Rita (who thought of herself

as Lily), with blonde hair and glasses, and that a nuclear bomb had gone off

somewhere nearby Ithaca--maybe Salem for the strangers on the street,

bewildered and whispering to themselves, kept mentioning the name of that city.

The city of Ithaca was filled with rumors that the event had occurred and the

rumors were loud in an atmosphere where everything else was silent and seemed

to take on a texture of emptiness. The rumors seemed tactile and to have a

visible substance that was ochre but thick as a heavy fog. Although they were

no louder than whispers, these whispers were cries of bewilderment albeit

softer than agony since they could not be fully articulated for lack of any

definite knowledge.

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

"Sure," said a man with an Appalachian draw. "The damn people up there higher

than God! They don't want us to know what has happened for fear that we'll fear

others are comun'... maybe make some phone calls!"

"Are we to believe this craziness we are hearing? We live in civilized times.

This can not be," said another female voice. Her accent was of a New Jerseyite.

A red headed woman, next to Gabriele on a street corner, said to a grayish

woman that looked like a cat, "If the president is with them on this it is

true." The words in the typical New York accent for some reason seemed the most

tangible element of the dream, greater than its visionary components, and the

most worthy truth. Gabriele backed away from the cat, and wished for death

rather than to bear this horror where not even the surety of the death of

thousands or millions could be known, whether or not the people of Ithaca would

eventually be radiated, or whether or not there was indeed a conspiracy to keep

them ignorant that more missiles were coming. "Let others die but not me; let

other cities perish but not ours" was a dominant thought in everyone's head. It

was so loud and everyone could hear it no matter how hard they pretended

otherwise. She loathed that wretched instinct of self-interest that was innate

in a being to make it survive, prosper, and propagate dynastically. She thought

to herself that survival of the fittest truly played out in all things and

selfishness was its impetus. The meek, when not uneducated and famished, were

so sensitive to injustice and disparity that they became neurotic and

disturbed. The truly meek were too gentle and reticent to muster the

selfishness to bring forth offspring, and they inherited nothing outside of

their own coffins. She also loathed that small portion of her sociable will,

which stooped to what they were saying, now, with complete conviction in the

streets. She heard one elderly man in particular. He was like an older version

of someone in her past but the dream, which was a reality of its own, did not

directly make that correlation. "Come on now. Let's not panic. It's been hot in

Salem with no wind. Maybe the radiation will just stay there. What little

breeze there is probably is just in the upper stratosphere. My son's a

weatherman, you know." The elderly man in thick glasses pointed out Gabriele's

Lily shaped son as his own. "He says that not feeling a breeze means no breeze

at all except way up there in the stratosphere. The radiation is below that. If

it moves slightly it will go to New York City. It will never come this way. You

can count on it so let's not panic." It was a hope for self- preservation. It

was a hope of the deaths of millions of people rather than themselves who

resided in Ithaca. She saw the cat woman crying and a man petting her back. He

was comforting her compassionately; but like one who does not wish to spend

resources on exploratory surgery to find out whether or not the lymphatic

cancer had spread in an aging pet, the man turned away from the woman. Gabriele

could see him pursuing his own private minutes of self-pity and rage deep in

lost, silent eyes.

Then the cat rubbed itself against her face and she awakened, recalling that

the elderly man in the dream was a distorted version of the lover who had made

her into this child's mother. She had not been meek when she went to Houston to

pursue a graduate degree. She had hungered after the assistant professor

because he had been as inaccessible as Antarctica. She had successfully

obtained him and this was due to the fact that people loved those of a strong

will who seemed immortal in inexhaustible energy, swinging their machetes

beyond diffidence and forging paths and realities boldly. This sort of energy

being erotic to them, they were attracted, mesmerized, and orphic to the id?e

fixe, which was nothing other than everlasting youthful vigor. The assistant

professor, yearning for immorality, had coupled with her. It had been a

successful wish and a successful coupling because from it she had gotten

pregnant. With her sleeve, she wiped her face that sparkled in greasy sweat,

and then gently cradled the cat to her face. The cat scratched her and leaped

away to where it once again hid itself behind the books.

Gabriele's cheek bled but still she did not kill the cat. She didn't know the

reason her hands, pulsating in rushes of vengeful energy, did not catch it and

crush it in her fingertips. At that moment she did not know her reasons for

anything. She tried to stop the bleeding with the back of her hand, for the bib

near her feet was unusable since it was fuming in vomit. As she looked at the

swab of blood that was there on her hand she felt a void careen into her (or

herself careening into the void), heard a parents' declaration to depart from

her, and again felt the impact of being rolled on by a tank. She imagined the

cat deliberately paralyzing itself in the actions of the prey it had often

witnessed. She imagined it praying to the earth for a delay of its execution

and subsequent decomposition by having the earth force compassion on Gabriele,

the executioner. She imagined it praying to the earth that magically brought it

into life to shrink its size into something so much smaller than a cat in order

to be at all. She did not know why it happened. She just did not kill the cat

but instead watched it masquerade itself as dead. Gabriele picked up the cat by

the neck and the four eyes met. The cat did not swipe. It concentrated on

cowardly prayers and of remaining limp. Gabriele tossed this other "criatura."

It landed on top of a book on Freud on the lowest part of her bookshelf.

Chapter Nine

The reasons for the specific elements of a myth (the cryptic reason why a given

culture might have chosen a serpent god or the son of god over the sun god) are

ineffable, and all attempted explanations of a myth are mythical. Scholars of

myths compare religions to find that spiritual element that links and validates

the human search (that search to find that which is everlasting within the

brevity of a human's lifespan); and historians of recorded cultures thread

together implication, meaning, and motive from a few tangible and often random

happenings.

The myth of Aten came from the Eighteenth Dynasty of Ancient Egypt. For over

1500 years Ancient Egypt practiced polytheism with each town having its own

god. Usually such gods were animal gods as was the case with the cat-goddess,

Bast of Bubastis, but many of the towns found that once they attached the word

"Re," the commonest name for the sun god, it enhanced the denotation so that

local gods became more ubiquitous and more deserving of reverence. In the case

of the falcon god, Re-Harakhti, a name change was given to It (the great It)

that contained more overt connotations. Not only was the word, "Re" put before

the regular name of the falcon-god, but engravings depicted It with the sun god

above It's head.

The pharaoh, Akhenaten, in his quest for the one sun god, Aten, disliked

focusing all of his energies toward military ventures that would have decimated

the bellicose Nubian-like creatures and stray Hittites that fell onto his

shores like waves. He knew that he could decimate them if continual efforts

were applied the way one wipes away a group of ants again and again. He hadn't

even considered that it would wipe out his nation's treasury not to mention his

own personal coffers. He didn't want to give himself to anti-terrorist

strategies and 24 hour a day campaigns that would have sustained his empire but

buried him in lonely problematic calculations, hypotheses about the thinking of

some elusive enemy, and general logic (not that the President Bushes used any

of the above). He was reluctant to part from continual dreaminess and to end

the world of the child that saw magic in a waving leaf on a branch of a tree.

He didn't want tedium that was as long as the sentences of this prose. The only

military ventures he envisioned for himself were preemptive and bloody

executions of the more vocally intransigent non-believers who would diminish

the ubiquitousness of his own god and challenge his animistic thinking of

nature as being linked to man by their harping on animal gods. For his eternal

link to the sun was more essential and part of himself than any of his arms or

legs. And so, reluctant to part from dreaminess, he built a new capital city

for Egypt that he devoted to the worship of Aten. The city, Amarna, was created

to be Aten's sacrosanct home. As for the crusades to extirpate all memory of

any gods other than Aten through the destruction of temples and relieves

(particularly the temples and reliefs of gods that had a "Re" attached to their

names), none of it would have been so bloody had the believers allowed him to

clean away their chiseled nonsense the way one would the crayon happy markings

of children on the walls of the family home.

Gabriele's motives for creating a non-melodic lullaby about a god that had been

extinct for thousands of years were even a little unclear unto her. Perhaps the

reasons for the avant-garde lullaby could have come from that one afternoon

when she was four. On that day she had become less interested in nursing a

wounded bird and so began to play with her tiny plastic toy soldiers beside her

mother who was clipping wet shirts and military trousers on the clothesline.

The noon sun was slapping both their faces the way the heat from an oven

evaporates the grease put on two baked potatoes. Gabriele, bothered by the

heat, turned away from the soldiers and then took a glance at the sun. She

turned toward her mother and mentioned some eagerness for Christmas. Her mother

turned toward Gabriele with stoic facial expressions and then crassly spoke in

German that Gabriele should stop thinking about Christmas since it was a long

way off. The mother snapped the clothes on the line with more forceful pinches

and then asked her daughter if she didn't think she was a bit old to pursue

such nonsense as Christmas. Gabriele said that she didn't understand and so her

mother unhesitatingly told her that there was no such thing as Santa Claus.

Gabriele saw her mother smile sadly. She sensed a kindness in this smashing of

ignorance and innocence the way she had seen Aunt Peggy smash a horse fly on

one of her uncle's stallions.

"In a way, I am glad you brought this up," continued Gabriele's mother in

German. "There are some things that will be changing soon." A cloud ran by the

sun and in its shadow Gabriele glanced up at a frothy blob that looked like the

form of an old man in ancient garb. At the age of four she could not recognize

the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus sculpted into the cloud or a cloud shaped or

sculpted into Heraclitus. "There is some early news I should tell you. I really

should but it is a little hard to get it out. You are such a baby, you are, but

now you are a bit wiser, eh? You know the situation with Santa. Life is going

to be full of sobering face slappings like that .I am very glad that you are

clogging your tears like a good girl. I'm proud of that fact. I was a little

worried that you would be bawling like stupid little thing. Crying about such

things like this would be bad, bad behavior when there are so many bigger

things one shouldn't cry about either." The girl couldn't help having watery

eyes even though she did not release the tears and soon mucus began to run from

her nostrils. She wiped it onto the back of her hand. "Heavens, Gabriele,

that's nasty. Remember to not get into the cookie jar without scrubbing those

hands of yours thoroughly. Well…now, you are wiser for knowing the situation

with Santa so I can tell you things, eh? You have a wiser and smarter brain

than any other 4 year old who has ever walked the planet, don't you think so?

Now I can tell you things because there won't be any damage, eh? Oh, why won't

my mouth work right at getting this out? " Gabriele stood stiff. Questions were

piercing into her as if she were target practice but she stood stiffly not

feeling a thing accept the demise of Santa Claus. "Christmas is so lovely with

everyone being together, don't you think so? Still that doesn't always happen,

eh? When this doesn't happen there is no weeping. In this case, there will just

be smiles on the kitten's face, eh? I'm sorry but we will not all be together

this Christmas. We are parting our ways. Your father and I will be experiencing

something new and you will be experiencing a different thing that is something

new. In experiencing something new, you've got to be bold and take one's stance

with a smile on the kitten's face. Some things are the way they are. No wishing

will bring Santa Claus into existence and wishing won't stop new things from

happening. You will soon go live with your Aunt Peggy. Your father and I are

going back to Germany. He is going to be stationed there again. Your father is

a great American patriot and has been asked to return to our motherland of

Germany on important duties. You like your father's sister so much. Am I right?

Your aunt Peggy: we are lucky to have her. Really, we are. Strange lady though;

but with all those horses, maybe she'll take you for a ride sometime. Horses

have ponies. They could give you one. You never know. She will have a tutor to

help you to read and do math and will let you play sports in her yard under the

supervision of an athletic trainer. The yard is large and fenced in nice. You

know that. You will be happy there. The house is near a Catholic school. You

will go there each day with those monkeys of hers. Much better than being here

and there with us; and with this plan, you get two mommies instead of just one.

That makes you better than the stupid little rascals your age."

If the little girl within Gabriele had been born a boy and that boy hadn't

slipped away from the influence of the mother toward a male role model, she

would have been branded a homosexual by one impact of the brain onto another.

It would have been a gradual but ineluctable branding within a few critical

years. But these few minutes of a girl's life at the clothesline with her

mother made her into a misogynist, a stoic and an atheist. From this time at

the clothesline she learned that everything was a myth or prevarication and the

only kind of reality that existed was her own self and the natural forces that

beamed onto her. Romanticizing the sun that burnt her face and could end up

giving her skin cancer was better than the self-defeating flames of hate that

might have been a force inside her consuming what could have been her. This

silly, and barely believed myth gave grace to her infrequent social

interactions and regulated her sleep patterns.

Chapter Ten

(1989: Houston)

Turning away from the cooked bacon strips dripping grease on their paper towel

bedding, he walked to the bathroom. He hoped that she would come into the

kitchen while he was away. He hoped that she would swig her juice in one gulp

and quickly eat her share of the bacon and toast; and once finished, that she

would quickly go out with the garbage of the early morning that would soon be

picked up by the sanitation workers whom people crudely referred to as garbage

men. He hoped that this could be done while he was in the bathroom and while

his new bacon began to sizzle in the skillet. She knew this as much as one knew

anything. She believed that it came to her intuitively without the use of her

faulty senses that were capable of adulterating reality; or, if sensed, that it

entered her consciousness ineffably similar to the passing dog that recognizes

the pheromone spray of a much earlier dog. She did not mind. Non-romantic

conclusions were non-confining. They were spring breeze declaring the end of

winter. This was a beginning and an ending of a relationship within the space

of 6 or 7 hours and she did not mind that at all. All relationships were the

beginning of an end and the quicker expedited the better off she thought she

would be.

She was in the bedroom dressing herself in a very faint light of early morning

and she could not see him return from the bathroom to cook the last of his

bacon where the strips shrank phallically in the heat. But from the smell she,

of course, knew that was happening and she could imagine that he was analyzing

their experience together in front of his skillet, and sinking into a void. She

could guess this because he, like all humans, was incapable of reliving the

frenzy through a precise memory of it; and he was now trying to find some

sensibility in his voracious, self-consuming frenzy. She wanted to laugh out

loud the way she had laughed out when they were in bed together and she seeing

his body, less real in the darkness, become wholly stiff before her. Yes, she

thought then scoffingly, he was a holy stiff. Now, kitchen-bound, he was no

doubt using logic to create a sententious wallowing where the act was more

hallowed in the past. She presumed that he was thinking back on his experiences

with his wife and comparing this one without "love" to the separated wife's

loving caresses. She thought about the way he looked ten minutes earlier

scrambling around for his clothes that were by his bed in almost arthritic

movements. Even as she slipped on her skirt, she still felt the same repulsion

and indifference toward him because of this action. Certainly no friendship

could ensue from this intimacy with the young assistant professor. It was

always a bit disappointing for her, really, that physical intimacies were so

gluttonously selfish and fully incompatible for caring relationships. She knew

that reality every time she engaged in such activities and yet she somewhat

inaccurately told herself that with each new sexual experience she acted like

an innocent girl in her first sexual foray. Following a mirage, she told

herself, was just an inane pitfall to being human, and only a fool was

disappointed in human vulnerabilities-as slight as she told herself hers were.

She hadn't run over him with a car to create those arthritic movements in the

bedroom nor had she cast some spell on him although she was loosely affiliated

with bewitching organizations like WICCA despite their ecclesiastic and

congregational ambiance. His pathetic reaction was strange although undoubtedly

provoked. Sure, in bed together she had guffawed at his ridiculous post-sexual

statement that he could not leave his wife as if women could not have sex with

handsome men for pleasure. She apologized to him immediately afterward for this

egregious chortling. After all, he wasn't so mistaken. Most women were there to

mate with a man for the purpose of perpetuating their selfish genes by

breeding. Most could not sense themselves beyond that feeling, that rush of

love, that dopamine addiction that was cajoling them to breed. In fact, she had

to admit that she had never met a woman who was not like that; but then,

unbeknown to him, she never categorized herself as a woman. She was a female

with nothing womanly inside of her. To her knowledge, there was no pathetic

lonely neediness or "womanity" that brewed within her. Hearing her guffaw in

bed an hour earlier and her bashful apology afterward, he probably did not

think about anything in particular except how best to create an amicable

departure. But then, still in bed, she made an analogy of sex to stale potato

chips, which upon occasion she did not mind eating for the salt that was

contained there. This faux paus must have made him feel as if he had had

intercourse with a cannibal for soon there was that arthritic rustling with his

clothes. The corollary of seeing him look for his clothes feebly was the

igniting of her "miso-him-ony" (a word that she coined gabrielishly).

She went into the kitchen and to her satisfaction she found the man transformed

into bacon. Anyhow, he wasn't there so she ate her breakfast snack, went to the

bathroom, and then came out only to imagine that she heard him crying in the

closet between the muffling of jackets, with empty hangers lightly clanging

against each other. She felt a sorrow for him and took on his mental void. She

saw, however, that he was outside and felt foolish. Had her senses been more

astute than her cognition? It sometimes happened. From the window she saw him

in the tiny park swinging alone with the full moon diluted by the rising sun.

Sex, she thought, as she watched his body hit the winds, was being massaged by

one's own hormones, turned on by oneself, or more accurately one's sense of

pleasure, and making love to fantasies of one's mind rather than the individual

locked into one's body. Yet she was titillated if not inveigled by such

physical pleasures that kept her imagination more bound than what she would

have liked. Sensate hungers of animals and men were ineluctable but

inconsequential "things" that she would not allow to be the synopsis of herself

even if upon occasion she explored these appetites fully. This night was more

than just diving into sensual experiences when she could no longer stay logical

without slipping into a philosophical void: it had been a sociological

experiment of seducing the opposite sex in a gay bar called "Heaven" more from

compassionate and empathic dialogue than sexual ploys; it had been because of

the humidity of Houston; it had been...she was not sure what it was. She,

having gone with some of her gay friends to "Heaven," had become one of those

"fag hags" that such non-lesbian gay bar-going women are often called.

Ostensibly, the night had been so different and so speciously amusing but

really any nightclub was the same: that same loneliness and that same sense

that appetites were fueling a human form like a smart bomb that was out of

control. She scorned having had sympathy for him. She rebuked herself for

having sympathy for situations that did not exist, which was so much worse. To

think that he had been in a closet crying was worse than insane for one who was

so proud of her logical skills, and so believing that she could stare down the

eyes of wild leopards and not shirk from the eyes of lepers. Sorrow for him,

she told herself, was a brief misfiring of neurons in an awkward situation that

brought on a second of a brief hallucination and an emotional barricade that

she now had to scurry around.

Gabriele ate a piece of cold toast abandoned near the bacon. She did not delude

herself: he had prepared this meal (such as it was) to minimize his feelings

that he had used her, although really she had used him. She was hungry so she

ate. The fact that it was cold showed his hostility toward her. She knew this

but ate the toast with a smirk on her face. A minute later, she took out some

snuff from her purse and a cold beer from the refrigerator and then went onto

the porch. Outside, the wind was still bringing the coolness of winter nights

that the sun beat down with the days. She drank and watched him. She felt

repulsion for her one-night stand and wanted to get into her car, which would

move her to her apartment, exclusive to herself and her logic. The impulse to

play, however, was too much; so after mildly draining the tobacco-saliva from

her mouth into the beer can, she crossed Dunlavy street to join him on the

swing set.

"Y-e-s!" said Gabriele in a tone of affected romanticism of the trivial,

kicking the air beneath her as his swing lost momentum. She giggled like a

schoolgirl. She reduced her swinging gradually to cessation careful to not just

stop because he had done so. After her feet were dragging and cutting into the

dirt, he pulled out a cigarette to hang in his face.

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

inert.

"So you did," she responded less zealously.

He didn't say anything but she could read it all the same. He didn't say, "I'm

sorry, but could you go?" He didn't say, "We enjoyed each other's company, I

think." He didn't say, "I've got a relationship, more or less, with my wife

although she doesn't know my other side." He didn't say, "I thought being with

you might make me feel more desire for women, be more romantic, and get her

back into my life again. I hope you don't think I've used you." He did not say

that predominant thought that was in his eyes, "I'm sorry, but could you go,

please?" There would have been a pleading "please" in it if he had been able to

"find the backbone" to articulate his request. There was none of that "stuff"

said among nearly all men from one generation to the next with a few extra

contemporary novelties that saved men from being completely trite. She liked

wordless empathy. It could be shut off at any second like tap water."

"Relationships: they are plural, complicated, and opposing for you, it seems."

Gabriele said this with her hand under her chin as if her lover were an

interview for a dissertation. "Don't be so worried." She smiled. "My fear of

you hunting me down has more merit than any fears you might have of me." She

chuckled at herself. Her mind repeated his laconic words: "I fixed you some

bacon." They began to echo in her mind. "What is this?" she thought. "Does he

want me to think this breakfast of his is my reward for this bit of a roll in

the hay?" She snickered to avoid piercing him with dilating eyes of hate. Then

she smiled at her former professor. It was a contrived smile and although she

hated artifice, in a world of getting one's needs met one needed to behave

insincerely.

"Complicated and opposing, are they? Okay, if you want to look at it that way,"

he retorted. "Well, you can't exactly say that you weren't in Heaven, can you?"

"Si' estaba alli tambien. Eso es innegable"("Yes, I was there also. This fact

is indisputable"). She spoke to his dark Brazilian skin. She spoke to all of

his Morris codes and secret languages that she understood all and had contempt

for everything that he was. She wanted to speak to her former psychology

professor as a cheerful therapist but such nascent words when she tried to

formulate them in her mouth became dying winds over the rubble reef of her

tongue and the sea of her saliva. Still she smiled although a supercilious

undertone tried to gain beastly dominion. "The sport of seduction was all I had

in mind, Mr., and then you went ahead and gave me more. You cooked some bacon

and toast. I thank you." When his face again fell, as she wanted it to fall,

she raised herself from the swing. The tree limbs seemed to wave goodbye to

him. Then they bent as she walked away from him; and as she, on reflex, glanced

back, they ricocheted and then folded back like a curtain which had material

composed of the darkness of the limbs and the sketchy sunlight. She could not

see him, and she appreciated this fact. The vinyl and its coolness, within the

car, made her upper body shiver--how she sank into it and felt soothed. She

thought of the waves of the Gulf, at Galveston Bay, pulling at her legs with

cool and non- scathing talons. Although she was attracted to the Gulf of

Mexico, and felt befriended by an identity of its vastness synonymous to her

own, at this moment she preferred how she felt from the vinyl, which was

limited and all encompassing. It snuggled around the back of her throbbing head

and body.

The accelerator, firm and responsive to pressure, was freedom that the social

instinct (what little she had) and society at large robbed from her. It moved

to the embodiment of her will, propelling her from anything she chose to

disregard. She turned onto Westheimer Street. She had gone as far as the

thirteen-thousand block once, a year ago, after enrolling at Rice University to

pursue her graduate studies. Someone had told her that Westheimer finally

turned into a farm road, but back then she decided to let her experience

testify otherwise by choosing to not go that far.

She drove on and on and soon she could see the roof of a church. In an hour,

she thought, there would be the culmination of activity from the followers (the

sheep) and the fully arrayed morning. Inside the cathedral of Santa Anna, which

she was now approaching, a priest would soon begin to prepare himself for an

early mass after the golden curved roof began to reflect the sunlight in a

seductive glare. The marble walls would seem steady to these followers as if

prayers said within these corridors would cause one to be as steady and

seemingly everlasting as those very walls. The church would shelter the

convictions of the myth reinforcers who actively promoted their religion so

that anxieties of injustice, the vulnerability of the human form, the madness

of a violent world and violent thoughts and feelings from within, and the issue

of mortality could be eased. In the face of challenges from other ideologies,

Christians protected their God and religion with defensive armament of an

anxiety-ridden people. It wasn't so hard to keep an individual-caring God

inculpable of genocide, typhoons, and plagues. In modern times, those issues

occurred in underdeveloped foreign countries among heathen populations. But car

accidents, cancer, high mortgage payments, a fire gutting a family home, and

stock market decline made the firm arms of a loving god into a tenuous thing.

It shook the marble walls of the church. Further, made insecure by the

believability of alternative religions with scriptures or some dogmatic

premises that were also claimed as infallible, the Buddhist and the Moslem were

threats for an American Christian no less than the witch. She wondered why she

did not hate religion more than what she did. She asked herself why she did not

circle around the block for an hour and then grind a soul or two to the

pavement. Now that she was thinking such peculiar things she continued with

them. She assumed that driving through a crowd of people was a lot like bowling

only the pins weren't stationary. Actually, she thought, it did sound more of a

sport than bowling ever did. However, the thought of doing such things out of

the context of her playful inner world was so repugnant to her that it struck a

chill down her spine. Only an unequivocal nervous breakdown would cause her to

obey the savage and crazed thoughts that ran amuck in one's head. Like any

German dam, such energy was a trickling stream next to the mammoth structure

that contained and regulated it. She not only was her own effective dam and

continually building upon it, but she constructed worlds of ideas there. From

the mammoth height of intellectualism, her turbid passionate waters seemed

almost puny. German people, she thought, did not camouflage their barbarity in

"goodness." Early in history, except for notable flare- ups, Germans were aware

of their barbaric impulses so, like Nietzsche, they coldly refined all emotions

into philosophic rationales.

The idea of wanting to preserve oneself in the spirit made her face cringe. She

had often felt this way throughout her life, and it seemed so alien to her that

those people who could not create their own sense of truth regardless of man's

basic purpose (which was never known), desperately sought immortality.

Myths, themselves, would give half-rational women and men artificially solved

philosophical truths that would ease their minds into their jobs, their

families, their adultery, their small capitalistic ventures with large levels

of greed, and their soap opera, small-life concerns; but she could not

conceptualize why their myths had the element of self-preservation. She did not

care to preserve herself. Just in dying, and letting microorganisms rot her

body away, she would give her energy back to the world that would radiate it

again elsewhere in another form. If she had a child, she thought, she or he

would not be allowed to be subject to this Christianity, which had the

plagiarism of Ancient Egyptian Literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Plato,

Confucius, and God knows what as scripture. Still, there was no escape from the

West for fresher lies. The whole world was western now. All that was possible

was to abscond from it as much as possible.

Friendship, as that with her roommate, Betty, would be plugged up in smiles and

feigned promises to write. A day earlier she was folding, sealing away, and

throwing away material things and now it would be states of mind. It was very

exciting-more than even a racket ball game with Betty whose African American

skin, muscular physique, and strong competitive strife got her equated as the

sister of many famous sports legends. This bantering was a subject for mutual

scowling since both wanted "female" sports to be "on an equal footing" and for

races and genders to not be stereotyped to certain activities. With a thesis

accepted, the fourth largest city in America was to be nothing but a folded map

forgotten in the outside pocket of one's suitcase. What would she do now that

her graduate studies had ended? She did not know. She had gained the knowledge

by which to do nothing with complete confidence and so taking it into a PHD

level seemed redundant. As much as a human could be free, she was now free.

She wondered if the homosexuals at the bar last night were free. She had

enjoyed the men in colorful briefs-some who had danced on wooden platforms

covering two juxtaposed pool tables to be more into the crowd. When someone of

her own sex had introduced herself with lust in her eyes, Gabriele had wanted

to sprint a quick exit through the wall but, instead of cowardice, gave her a

quick kiss on one of her cheeks and declared, in her giggling, that this would

be as far as she would go in that type of liaison. At the same time she

wondered a little whether that woman felt more free by subconsciously choosing

the type of sex she wanted to copulate and then following the dictates of her

own hormones instead of having hormones dictated by social mores.

She was almost at her apartment when she consciously noticed Betty's cigarette

butts in her car ashtray. She chastised such vile and unaesthetic habits, but

really it was her own maudlin oozing that she despised. Needing some time alone

to sink into herself, she decided to procrastinate packing and her last meeting

with Betty by going to Allen Parkway. She parked her car in a lot nearby and

told herself it was time for her one-person celebration and to ensure that the

past would not be left in abeyance suffocating her in sentimental mush. She

wanted people of the fading present to depart from her like releasing a deep

breath. She sat in an obscure area of the Buffalo Bayou away from the bike

trail and a herd of morning bicyclists approaching the fountain. She sat in the

grass and allowed her body to be prey to fire ants, which, like a goddess, she

would then smash with her fingertips or gently remove to blades of grass. She

meditated on the theme of chance that was so intricate in the fabric of all

things. She picked clover and dismembered their leaves, gladdened that the

little girl flattened out as she had been by the tank, still floated like a

ghost in the ethereal parts of her imagination. She told herself that she would

be an empty shell of an adult to be bereft of her.

She again thought of the go-go boys dancing both on stage and on pool tables.

They had been such titillation but as different as they were, she doubted that

they were free. By their freedoms, they were imploding into their own hungers

just as she was imploding in memories of last night that she couldn't quite

shake. She remembered how with each beer her mind lost the paralysis of logic

and she began to be more sociable and pay less attention to the flickering

icon, on the wall, that was shaped like a wine glass; the queer associations of

social butterflies known as transvestites; the mirror which gave a blurred

version of this other part of humanity; and of course the dancers, who were

rather boring after a few minutes of seeing the ends of their briefs sag from

being paid for non-sexual tricks. Except for glances at the surreal mosaic

fragments of commercials and video music that played on television sets, which

were on the far corners of the walls, she sometimes stared at men throughout

the night with a specific intention of wanting to copulate with one or all of

them, but enjoying the aspect of feeling sensual regardless. It was there that

she met her professor. He was someone who, according to her friends, often came

to the bar, and yet he looked lost. The seduction was easy. She asked if he

wanted to go with her, and he said that he did. Nothing was simpler and more

exempt from life's energy consuming, cat and mouse games. She thought about the

butts in her ashtray. She wasn't sure the reason. Maybe the thought of the

smoke filled bar triggered this memory. Betty should have cleaned out those

cigarette butts, she thought. What an ugly reminder of herself. She looked at

the grass all around her and then at the traffic speeding by. The creation was

sublime and chaotic. She pondered how simplistic human logic was: the eyes

taking in the light, the image of the object refracted on the retina, the

mental image playing in the brain, recent memories regarding that object, and

an abstract idea. She didn't want to think of anything. She just wanted to

watch the early morning sunrise over the bayou.

Chapter Eleven

Jiffypop popcorn leaping over the heat of the stove's burner, the expanding of

the aluminum foil cover into a crown, and his sister, Jung- Jun (that girl

sister as dead and yet phantomesque as the murdered adult) tacit and waiting

anxiously to be the first to pierce into the crown to obtain its edible jewels

-the early days of her teaching him how to catch a baseball, how to tie his tie

before they went off to Sunday school… He woke up from some forgotten but

unsettling dream with a few thoughts of her trickling into his consciousness.

His thoughts were uninvited and he tried to shake them off like a wet dog. As

much as they were the past, they materialized through distant, sealed corridors

to haunt him. Anything could be remembered. One thought slapped into another in

a restrained domino effect in the primitive human psyche. Human will was like

meat skewered and cooked on the rotisserie.

He had only recently moved to Seoul. Desperate for work, English had delivered

and cursed him once again; although this time he had become a clerk in a

convenience store in the American military sector of Itaewan. He had a room in

the back area. It was really an extra stock room. The owner had been so

insistent in the interview that any employee he chose would need to live in the

back area as an extra security precaution. Sang Huin didn't have the inordinate

money required to obtain an apartment since in Korea deposits on apartments

were like the purchases of condominiums and so, not wanting to live in a

yongwam, he had agreed. So upon waking this night, he did not immediately

recognize where he was. Waking in darkness and wondering where he was at, it

was Gabriele who dominated over his thoughts of Jung-Jun.

Gabriele's mind was sticky in malaise. The child that she had had not grounded

her. It's crying was without rhyme or reason. It spouted out vehement, hellish,

and non-stoppable roars like a locomotive. The malaise was hot and sticky. It

was as if all of his insatiable needs were like a vomit-smelling glue and it

was in her hair, on her face, and in her clothes. She could not escape. Her

intellectualism was being stunted to this exclusive task of being an infant's

caretaker. "I will surely snap like a twig on a crisp winter morning if I do

not leave this trailer," she thought to herself although she did not completely

believe it since solitude did not have much of an effect on her. In this moment

of weakness where she did feel the need to depart from all the responsibilities

and the cacophony that was her son, she looked at him disconcertedly. He was no

more family than the one she had come out of. "I am like this lone soul that is

forever seeking, although not expecting, the one true friend that wants nothing

from me other than to be with me…that person who will love me for just that."

She further thought, "I shouldn't have had this accident of conceiving a

child…this mistake of giving birth to one. However, here he is. I can't exactly

return him." Sang Huin recollected where he was. He got up and opened his door.

He saw the aisles of groceries. Living here, he thought, was like living in a

storage area or a gigantic pantry. He sighed. He grabbed some milk and a

package of Oreo cookies that he would have to pay for later. Then he sat on his

bed and took notes on what he had been thinking concerning Gabriele.

But it was his sister who haunted him more. As teenagers, they would jog

together at the high school track and in school she looked so beautiful wearing

a skirt and her hair in a bun. She was experimenting with makeup at the age of

14. She never did like it, dabbing it timidly over her beautiful face. She

didn't need it any more in her late twenties. With their mother she would

continue to talk in that mysterious language of Korean (Hangkuk-mal) that he

did not understand. It was their secret language. It was their girlish society

that he had been excluded from. As a family they functioned fine. However, he

and his father never had connected personally when they were apart from the

others. The man had always absconded from him. He had been aloof. Both of his

parents were so aloof and so aged during the 14 months of Jun-Jung's

disappearance and seemingly elderly at the discovery of the skeletal remains

and the ensuing trial.

Gabriele felt as if she were at an amusement park and that her own little world

were nothing but a house of mirrors. Each subsequent mirror (despite her youth)

cast an impression of more furrowed wrinkles on her forehead, seemed to expand

the appearance of bags under her eyes, and made her hair look increasingly

gray. Life was nothing but a bottle, a diaper, burping, feeding, and washing.

The robotic movements he demanded her to do to take care of him went on

perpetually. His crying went on perpetually.

Like with other late evenings that week, at 11:30 p.m. Saeng Seob and his

seeing-eye dog took the 40-minute subway ride over to meet him, who would be

waiting there in the terminal. Saeng Seob resented him some for quaking and

thwarting the direction of his passionate river that most men felt, rode, and

defined themselves from. Still, he kept the resentment mute. Being corrupted

was a marginal thing when confronted daily with oceans of loneliness.

Consciousness needed an object and he needed a consciousness that wasn't always

disconcerted, diffident, and being thrust about like a lost, lonely man sucked

up in the waves. When he finished dabbling in some work for his cousin at the

university it was good to go someplace where he was wanted-someplace away from

the campus where friendship gave him identity that an indifferent cousin

cajoled or coerced into helping him failed to do. Sang Huin had the need to

impress him with the material that he had written from the previous day or two.

For Seng Seob, listening had become a means of inveigling those who needed to

feel that someone cared to hear them-a lifebuoy that he could embrace around

himself when encountering the waves. Sang Huin was not frightened away by his

dead orbs and so Saeng Seob let swimming, eating together, listening to the

recitation, giving Sang Huin brief tutorials in Korean, and this peculiar

sleeping together become the activities that bonded them. Each needed to chisel

his name on the other one's brain in a city of ten million strangers. In a

world of 6 billion people, each one needed a special lure, and for him it was

listening intensely to others. He saw himself as a demure epicure with no

published writing and nothing outwardly erudite to show for it. He in his

reserve believed that in a world of nonsense spoken by barbarians little

outside of human culture had a positive worth except for friendship, and if he

needed to listen all night to someone he cared for, he would do just that.

In the back of the convenience store it was hard for him to critique Sang

Huin's prose. After all, it was a foreign language being read to him but

despite its blur to his mind it dazzled him in new vocabulary that he would

look up in his dictionary later. The role of boyfriend to Seong Seob was

peculiar but the human gourmandized touch above all ambrosia. It was a special

sensory input to the reticular formation of the brain. Touch gave a

consciousness of relationship and belonging that were the highest goals of all

such humans, hominids, and primates creeping their way to godhood. He hadn't

felt particularly inclined to be homosexual and yet that had little meaning

when one needed touch and friendship. Being blind made touch even more of an

instrument of knowing something although all grabbled around in darkness.

The next morning was Sang Huin's bit of a weekend and so Seong Seob feigned

sickness in a phone call to his cousin. The cousin was indifferent and if he

questioned the logic of calling in sick while being absent from the home that

both of them shared, he did not mention it. So Seong Seob and Sang Huin went

out to experience the changing of the guard ceremony at Toksugum Palace: the

soldiers in their colorful ancient garb and round black brimmed hats, the

horns, the drums and the changing staffs. At first they went to Lawson's

convenience store and bought some kim bop (a Korean version of sushi), potato

chips, and cola. They took the food to a stack of lumber that had been piled to

the area opposite of the ticket counter and, for some minutes, plopped

themselves on top of it and witnessed what their senses allotted. Later, they

went to the amusement park, Lotte World. For each ride they stood in line over

half an hour. Once, as they were going into the bathroom, Sang Huin kissed

Seong Seob hurriedly before more men entered. Saeng Seob disliked the intrusive

act that brought the acknowledgement of his aberration if not perversion into

the light of day but the hot mouth was full of molecules and passing of

molecules in a kiss was an intoxicating thing that took one away from the

mundane aspects of reality. Further, he knew that the only wrong was in judging

one Epicurean quest over that of another. It was an inconsequential thing.

Chapter Twelve

Gabriele smashed a corpulent ant into her second composition when neither

flicking it away with her fingertips nor blowing it off her paper was

successful. She was writing a second story to put her son to sleep after

finding the first composition ridiculous. From this action the insect was

nothing but a brownish green blotch on her new work. "Thai Tiger," she rewrote

after scratching out the earlier paragraph that had the blotch in it, "waved

goodbye to his mother and father from the window of the plane. He was both sad

and happy because he was leaving one thing he loved and going to another. The

plane went into the clouds and came down in Sri Lanka. Tamil Tiger was waiting

for him. Tamil Tiger's mother took Tamil Tiger and Thai Tiger to her home in

downtown Colombo. What is Colombo like, asked Thai Tiger from the backseat of

the car where he sat with Tamil Tiger. It is full of wars, said Tamil Tiger.

What are wars, asked Thai Tiger. Let's change the subject, retorted Tamil

Tiger."

Gabriele paused from her writing and remembered her time in a Moslem country.

For three months, when she was almost 6, she was in Turkey. She remembered that

day when her mother suddenly came to Kansas for her. It had been nearly a year

since she had seen her and she felt a mixture of fear, surprise, and happiness

at the thought of having the fragmented pieces of her life reassembled. She did

not know if this interruption of her adaptation to her aunt, uncle, and cousins

had some permanency. She was already speculating that there was no permanency-

only being banged in the buttocks with bumper cars or being run over by tanks.

She was only told that they would be going on a trip to the other side of the

world. The potential of seeing something outside of Kansas made her very happy.

Like any child, the discovery of flight was a marvel and she stared out of the

window as much as she could. It was a subject of curiosity that the clouds she

had always looked up to (a good many in the shape of the philosopher,

Heraclitus) had really been nothing but footstools with wooly sheepskins on

them all along. It was quite a surprise and shook her hypothesis that her

mother was mistaken in saying that there wasn't a Santa Claus. She had

formulated this hypothesis erroneously by the evidence of some irregular clouds

that seemed as if they were Santa's frothy sugar castles.

In Istanbul she became reacquainted with her father again. Like in olden times

when she was four, he began to take her on trips to the beach to pick up

seashells or shop for groceries. Once they were shopping for some vegetables in

a tight labyrinth of a crowded and dusty outdoor market when suddenly they

heard the sound of that Moslem call to worship (a hybrid sound like of an

instrument and a human voice) but the call was at the irregular time of 3:00 on

a Friday afternoon. Pandemonium was in the streets, but everyone was going in

the same direction so actually Istanbul was less helter-skelter than usual.

Pushed with the herds, she and her father walked 5 blocks to an ornate mosque.

She wanted to know what was "going on" so her father put her on his shoulders

and told her that a special Turkish custom of a beheading was to begin shortly.

"Beheading?" she asked. "Yes," he said with a wry and troubled smile. "To be

without a head like the headless horseman although I suppose a less animated

one." For a moment she was so pleased and excited that she would witness such a

splendor until she saw a man with a bag over his face dragged up against his

will onto the marble stairs leading to the temple and a third man with a huge

scythe in his hands. A second later she witnessed the burly third man swing,

with all his round, bulging, muscular might in one fail swoop and the head part

from the shoulders which the second man placed in a basket. There was

surprisingly little blood at first. Then the arteries disgorged their content

while the body fidgeted a few times on the holy marble.

She suddenly knew that adults were monsters and that they ran amuck in the

world inimical to human decency. In deep pain of one fragmented and grieving

for this man and the human race, she nonetheless controlled her urge to cry.

She assessed her situation. If indeed she were in a land of adult monsters,

outwardly she had to acclimate to their mores and yet do the best she could,

while growing up, to refrain from becoming a monster herself. If one couldn't

withdraw from a situation, she felt more than thought, a girl must play the

game. If she were to leak out her pain by blubbering, they would hate her and

she would be perceived as foolish and weak. Crying would never help. It would

only get her into trouble. She asked herself how best to achieve this

ostensible aim and she told herself that she should be inquisitive. She calmly

asked why the beheading had occurred, the reason for the timing of the

occurrence, the exact nature of the crime, if beheadings were permitted in

America, and the final resting place for a 2 part individual. The questions

made her father, a USAF officer for NATO, and her mother, a USAF soldier's

housewife, so happy. The next day as her mother was with curlers in her hair

and her head in tact and under the dryer at the beauty parlor, the young mother

pointed out her daughter and boasted about all the questions she had posed

regarding the beheading the previous night. They boasted about her often;

however, two more months passed and the clarity of the ephemeral nature of the

reunion with her parents became clear. After her summer holiday was over and

their honeymoon reunion with their child had ended, Gabriele was sent back all

alone in a jet to New York City and then a second connecting flight that would

lead her back to her aunt in Kansas.

Chapter Thirteen

It is 2008 and he, sometimes Adagio and sometimes Nathaniel or various

nicknames, still doesn't even have a consistent label for himself. Not even a

consistent name has stuck on him all these 18 years; and the half hour that he

has sat in the library there is that same mental numbness of all other previous

half hours. It is numbness as empty as a pit in the mouth from an extracted

tooth. He knows that most men wander around the world untouched, unknown, not

touching, and not known or knowing. He knows that such men use girlfriends to

prop themselves up in order to feel fortified outwardly in 6 billion mostly

"nobodies" within a universe of continual flux. He knows the selfish jaundice

of both men and women in a relationship and how with any length of time it

inflicts the relationship with the disease that is an extension of the two. He

has been there and done that. He had one steady girlfriend but the relationship

was hard to maintain when swirling colorful treats in many edible shapes,

smells, and voices of varying feminine nectar fell through the orifices of his

senses. It does not bother him to be no one special. It does not bother him to

be the same as "regular guys" although most of them have consistent names,

nicknames, or aliases they do not cower from. They make up the masses; and the

masses are a brute force to which he is one of the billions. When a thing or a

way of being exists in large numbers, he supposes, it is bound to be right. At

a large table in front of an open book, with fingertips he grazes an area of

skin above his upper lip. The facial stubble, when he rubs it, gives him extra

reinforcement in his vain embellishment of masculinity. It is a vain

reinforcement that the litter of pornography he perused like a philomath in his

car a few minutes before entering the library did not do. Even the insouciance

that he artificially concocted there with the puff of a cigarette while waiting

for the rain to soften enough to drive did not make him more conscious of his

male vigor than a brief feel of facial stubble. There is little beyond sexual

energy to define him. No fields, no disciplines, have awakened an internal

voice. Not yet, not ever, he thinks. He is a man without a voice and such a man

is most conscious of the primordial emotions of hating those who bar his

pleasure and love toward those who facilitate it. Adagio-it was a somewhat

forgotten word, which once popped into his head for the creation of an email

address. The word has inadvertently been a perfect epitome of his slow mental

activity for books. Slow in that respect, academics with their words and

numbers in infinity have stood out like the awkward anachronisms of hieroglyphs

chiseled into stone. It would seem ironic that someone who perceives books to

be as lifeless as stones should be in a library watching the pages of a book

occasionally turn under the draft of the ceiling fan when not under the

directive of his own will. The book is of 20th century American art and

contains a few examples of his mother's work. Only pleasures from pictures have

had some vague calling or tugging; but then it has been pictures that have

composed so much of his existence.

He had detoured from the interstate and came into the town to buy a sandwich

and cola at a convenience store, which fostered the purchase of the newest

issues of Playboy and Hustler as well. He is downtown because the heavy

diluting of rain in this small town necessitated him to pull over to the side

of the road and park his car. He is in the library because it was a two-block

run from where he parked his car. The continual pounding of rain caused him to

have to go to the bathroom sooner than what he would have done otherwise, for

he is in all respects a follower of nature's suggestions. The bathroom was his

impetus for entering the library. In the process of staring up at the fan to

focus a second of hate toward it he sees a woman straightening her body after

rising off the seat. She is at a table around 50 feet from that of his own. Her

table is near a small wall of books. He regrets that he has not seen her legs

slide on the shiny wood of the chair or her thighs rising up to him although

imagined action can be continually repeated and he continually repeats it.

Bound in black stockings, the legs go to the front desk where some hands scan

titles of her videos.

"It seems nobody checks out books any longer. We've had to restrict the kids

use of the internet upstairs. They'll do nothing but chat the whole day if

nobody catches them and then before they leave they check out videos to take

back home."

"Well, guess I should feel honored to be thought of as a kid when I'm nearly

42. I am really in a hurry so could you please…"

"All right."

For a minute if not longer there is a momentary lapse in the present before he

becomes conscious of it again. Fueled on adrenalin and hunger, he finds himself

walking behind her in the rain. He imagines himself catching up and offering

his umbrella to her but she has one of her own and so he timidly tracks her

from a distance. He imagines her dropping the keys to her car but the fates

also do not allow him this prop. He sees her get in but imagines her already

seated with the door shut but unable to start the car. This does not happen

either. He is unable to monitor himself. Like a child he distances himself from

his actions. He is feeling the movements of someone else's body. Will has been

frozen in time. There is a cold frozen constancy in his consciousness of the

present moment. He finds himself knocking on the window. She rolls it down. He

does not know what to say. She hasn't dropped one of her videos in the rain. He

is as if naked and without a gift or prop with which to make a confidence. He

stares at her mature beauty.

"Yes?" she asks.

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

"Oh. That shouldn't be the case. I filled them up yesterday. Do you..." She

hesitates. "Do you think I need to come out and look?" Her words are

circumspect. They are of one who does not trust his intentions. If only she

could have said this with confidence, he thinks. He means that then he could

have gotten the opportunity to have her outside. He could have pushed her under

the car and accosted her with his body.

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

looked down a little."

She smiles. "Maybe because I am sitting here. Don't you think so? - Or maybe

not." Her tone reflects more confidence in him and she treats his ideas with

deference. She defers all mechanical judgments to men whom she supposes to have

such genetic predispositions.

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

put air in it."

"Thanks so much. Okay." She pushes the button to roll up the window. He wants

to stop its progression. He wants to put his hands in what is left of the

closing hole and break out the window. He wants to shove himself on top of her,

slap her down onto the passenger seat, and have his pleasure. As strong as that

urge is, he is too socialized and can't break in. He retreats to his car. He

subconsciously pushes in the lever of his umbrella and carries it, compacted,

within his hands despite being drenched by rain. He feels the tightening of his

sinuses. He is getting ill but he isn't aware of this. He passes a music store.

He notices that his shoestring, to the left, is dragging onto the wet pavement

like broken strings of a guitar. Passing an alley he envisions her there to be

grasped like a guitar's case; yanking the instrument from its case; and letting

his tongue strum. He feels incontinent and he notices his erection. He imagines

her without ablution, naked to smell, touch, sight, and taste. He gets into his

car, ties his shoe, pulls a handkerchief out of the glove compartment, and

wipes the sweat and rain from his forehead and face. For a moment he rests his

aching forehead against the rim of the steering wheel.

Chapter Fourteen

(1989: Houston)

Back from Allen Parkway, Gabriele pulled into the driveway of the house she and

Betty rented. She drove beside three black girls at an adjacent property who

were tilting back a large stone. As Gabriele opened her car door, she wondered

what was underneath that had gotten their attention. It had to be a salamander,

a gecko, or a swarm of large fire ants. A two-part skeleton of a midget in a

partially underground ossuary wasn't in the realm of possibility; but whatever

existed there, it caused their squeamish giggling. She felt a little squeamish,

herself, at the thought of children grotesquely disgorging into her senses.

What made it worse was the fact that they were there doing this when she was in

such a need of finally reaching her home-her sanctuary. She thought about the

Turk that had been decapitated twenty- three years earlier, although it seemed

only days ago. Back then she had been as young as the youngest of the three

girls whom she was now looking at.

She remembered how one of those bedeviled executioners let the head roll out of

the bag, took it by the hair, and displayed it to the crowd before returning it

to its basket-a basket that looked to the very young Gabriele as if it should

be used for apples. Even so long ago she tacitly condemned the adult monsters

that enjoyed the macabre and applauded such savagery in the name of justice.

Still her monstrous father, her teacher, had inadvertently led her into that

large life- changing enlightenment that was always arrived at from a corridor

through the darkest abyss. Partially from being pushed along with the crowd and

partially from human curiosity, he had shown her the loss of innocence through

the realization that society, that lovely refinement of conveniences and kind

neighboring policemen, was a horror. Even when so young, she intuitively

guessed that Turkey was just an outward display of a refined and obscure

savagery that had to be in all adult institutions regardless of what they were

or the nations they were in. She didn't exactly think it but she felt it all

the same. With tears that she could never shed and by grief, full empathy, and

comradery for this unknown individual, she had walked into the full darkness of

enlightenment. The sentiments for the slain man would remain dormant and mute

in her thoughts all the rest of her life but the enlightenment, the darkness,

would be more active in its behavioral influence.

Twenty-three years ago she imagined all children as the good and the innocent

as she believed herself to be back then. That was before she went to school and

learned what egocentric sadists they really were. For they, the masses, enjoyed

the ruthlessness of the name callers whose arrows and vitriol of "Four eyes!

Four eyes!" and "Piggy! Piggy!" toward two of her classmates was inexorable.

How deeply ingrained was the hunter and the competitor in every child. She

could see it in the sports they played together. She could see it in the

spelling bees. She could see it in the name-calling, which was an aversion

toward anybody who was different. Differences might be deleterious to the

concept of the tribe. It was the corollary of the need to survive that existed

atavistically and came about instinctually as a response passed on from the

youngest of the earliest Homo sapiens. It was they who, as sexually

reproductive adults, passed on the knowledge of their inner children. Gabriele

was so fortified that attempts at name-calling directed toward her personally

did not even scathe her. But when the name callers and all their tacit

accomplices shot their arrows and threw buckets of vitriol at the fat girl and

the girl with glasses, her wrath was also implacable. She would beat up the

worst of these tiny savages. Innocent expressions and gauche interactions of

ostensibly pure children belied what the offspring of these adult monsters were

really like; and as if misogyny and mis-himony were not enough, such incidents

caused both mis- girlony and mis-boyany. Normally such an abnormality of four

misses would constitute the misanthropy of serial or spree killers but Gabriele

did not feel much misanthropy.

Her ideas, she knew, were as rare as a Tennessee Coneflower or a Black Outhouse

Hollyhock-both of which bordered on extinction. They were as ineffable as the

very universe she resided in and as pessimistic as Hobbes' social contract

theory (although to her who often liked dressing up in black, black was not

pessimistic being the color of intrigue and enlightenment). She believed that

Hobbes was somewhat wrong in thinking that humans suppressed their own savagery

through the common necessity of not wanting to be murdered in their beds. The

contract wasn't as simple as that alone. The adult Gabriele thought that

through society small doses of competitive cunning could be exuded in basic

business competition and politics for the whole duration of one's long life.

The common workers left out of both, if given a high enough salary, would not

be anarchists or proletariat revolutionaries if they had enough money to go to

action packed movies or sports stadiums, buy whores once in a while, or other

benign conduits of savagery. In short, she believed that society came about for

the purpose of giving its members a long lifetime of small doses of savagery

instead of a few episodes of gluttonous devouring that could cause one to be

murdered rather easily. She wasn't sure of the specifics. She hadn't thought it

worthy of her time to think them out in an obscure philosophical treatise.

Besides, figuring out why the dog bit the bone wouldn't stop the biting.

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

stone.

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

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

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

"Wer' gonna open these lizzardheads like coconuts and pull out the brains and

give'em to you, Lady, so that you can have breakfast," elucidated the second

one.

They laughed and Gabriele smiled widely, fully amused by their non- feminine

creative play. "My ladies, methinks thou art so nice, but unfortunately I've

already had breakfast."

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

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

"Yeah, it's the Shakespeare language," continued the first, "But I'm good at

figerin'out Morse code so I can do this. There's more English in Shakespeare

than in Morse code. She's meanin' she already had breakfast but I don't think

that matters none. It ain't an issue."

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

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

"Pootit in your 'frigerator" said the third and smallest of the girls. The two

eldest girls laughed at her intrusion into the conversation. Everybody began to

laugh including Gabriele.

"No," Gabriele said, "The refrigerator is full." She was quickly becoming

serious. She saw sharp little stones in the hands of the eldest one. Even a

child was a brutal force or, at any rate, immolated in play the brutality of

life on the planet. She sighed and took away their instruments of war. She

wanted to scold them but there was no way to scold all humanity of the past,

present, and future. Only a crazed individual would not be cognizant of their

limitations.

"Damned if she done takenway the lizzardknife," said the second one in

disbelief. To the luck of all concerned Gabriele didn't hear them and wasn't

even aware that one of them tried to spit at her from behind as she was walking

toward the house. She climbed up the stairs to where she and Betty were living.

She hoped that Betty would not be there. She needed some time alone to be in

that harmony within and to probe the endless fathoms of her probity and

intelligence without the intrusions of the outside world. Even in childhood,

Gabriele thought, she had projected an aloof quality of a stereotypical German.

A sotto voce current in her brain called "conscience" when in fact it was

nothing but a less dominant or minority opinion that was disgruntled at being

such chastised her for her "bitchiness" (an indifference that both barked and

bit). Still, she told herself, it did not matter. How was a self an extension

of others? When she was born did she bring them into existence, and when she

died would the human race cease to exist? People came and went as they should

and friendship was merely for those of feeble ideas needing to be reinforced by

the herd. For her whose ideas were such steady companions and was real within

herself without needing to be reflected in her associations with others what

need had she of the Betties of the world. She had never met a German whose

example confuted the stereotype. She remembered the few times that her father

took her to a beach along the East Coast and the myriad times when he took her

to the beaches in Turkey. She always wandered to one side of the beach, culling

certain miscellaneous seashells to examine as her father sojourned away from

her with pensive and hard expressions, sunk in his own mind. The expressions

told her that he savored the idea of being alone in his own cold, watery depth.

Despite the fact that he had taken her to the execution, she loved him most as

far as people were concerned.

She turned her key in the doorknob and opened her part of the house. She

thought, "The human mind when opened up has, at its crypt, humanity."

Particularly for herself she loathed the idea of being a social creature. She

often thought of her roommate each day of each semester, the homeless grass

chewing Filipino whom a woman at the Laundromat nicknamed the botanist,

professors, her family, and acquaintances: they all made up her reality. She

did forget about Betty during vacations and she forgot about her aunt, uncle,

and cousins except during the vacations but she couldn't quite escape thinking

about them altogether. Overall, she didn't have much sentiment toward anyone,

and they could easily be shaken and faded from her memory once she was away.

Betty was usually an early riser, but not hearing any noise in the kitchen or

living room, Gabriele at first assumed she was sleeping. She checked all the

rooms but they were empty except in sound, where a small television remained

turned on. A newscaster was discussing the economic powers of the East with

reference to the new economic experiments in the Soviet Union and China. "The

whole f-- world is West," thought Gabriele. She felt that democracy was as much

an experiment as communism: an experiment on how free to be greedy things could

get without entirely destroying the ecology that was the base of it all whereas

the original communism of Trotsky was an experiment on how equal life could get

and still be bearable in its world of frightened and impoverished clones. It

all missed the mark as far as she was concerned. If each and every person was

not granted food, shelter, and a profession by which to feel worthy (if indeed

there were worthy professions, a question that she posed to herself) all of

these socioeconomic systems were nothing to her but debauchery. She

contemplated the fate of the homeless Filipino: wasn't she quite the hypocrite

to say that the world was wretched to not offer him assistance that would pull

him from the streets and away from feeling disoriented and hearing voices in

his own head when she didn't care to bring him into her apartment. Still, she

didn't want him any more than she would want a tick, a cockroach, or a bedbug.

If he wanted to come into her apartment and be Betty's lover, after the last

bag was put into her car, that was another thing altogether.

The living room had the smell of light and stagnant smoke of Betty's cigars.

Betty, she thought, must have recently gone to another final examination. It

was best that way. With her gone Gabriele would not have to coerce some

giggling and mild sighs as she packed her racket ball paddle with other items.

There would be pleasant but vague and generalized memories of their racket ball

entertainment together but, to be sociable, she would have to affect some

maudlin sentiments of loss. She would need to feign loss particularly about

them living together as if it had made them conjoined spiritually although

obviously not Siamese twins. She would have to use the width of her arms to

symbolize an embrace (a real embrace would have been impossible when a sexual

embrace with a man was bad enough). She quickly entered the bathroom to take a

shower that might wash away any odor of the man she had slept with; packed more

of her things; saluted the new communism in her heart; snickered inside at the

thought that Japan had out-capitalized the West the way it tried to

out-imperialize the imperialists; turned off the television, and left with the

remaining two boxes. She swerved off the drive, veering somewhat near the girls

in her eagerness to leave.

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

"What's wrong with you, nigga" yelled the little black girl full of energy. The

girl did not know the full pejorative nature of the word nor the fact that

Gabriele, being white, could not be a Negro unless one were to label her such

for the black clothing she often wore. The other two stood with legs arched and

bulging hominid-like--the eldest with right arm erect and out from her body and

the hand half-clenched into a fist. Gabriele saw this from the mirror. She

hadn't driven that close to the girls so she thought their reaction was

unjustified. The fact that she thought they looked like hominoids had nothing

to do with their skin color nor their nonstandard use of language but her own

aversion toward children and adults based upon the sensitivities she had as a

young child and the fact that these girls were pelting the top of her car with

clods. She returned to the drive. "Hey!" she yelled from the window. "Your

mother's insurance is gonna pay for any damage. You are lucky that I'm not

opening my car door because if I were to get you I would -" she had to stop

herself. Whatever she said under these circumstances could only put violence

and hatred into their callow minds, exacerbating their nature as hers, so prone

to its aggressive flares. She could only make it worse than what it would be if

these children were merely left to glower and ponder in silence as she was now

doing. And yet there was little delectation in self-restraint. A fully sociable

being was one who liked to provoke responses positive or negative like billiard

balls banging against each other. One felt alive based upon the vibrations

gained from being knocked around; and as eremitic and misanthropic as she was,

Gabriele was a girl who liked her fun. She saw the clods of dirt in their hands

and the dirt on the windshield. She slowly got out of the door, which caused

them to back away a few steps. She didn't look at them but instead walked

around her car. Seeing that no damage had occured, she then returned to the

driver's seat. She decided to leave the matter alone so she spit a cannon ball

of chewing tobacco toward the girls and ventured onward. The cannon ball was

the penalty phase. After all, she did not want them to think that they could

pelt motorists with impunity. Still she imagined the sullied tribulation that

she must have caused the younger one. She could feel the devastating

humiliation that perhaps they all felt at a wad of snuff coming at them like a

projectile. She hoped that they would not interpret it as racial hatred. She

felt the horror behind what she had done and yet there was nothing she could

do. If she were to stop the car and return to them to apologize they would

probably pelt her and the car both with stones. She disliked egocentric

children. She even disliked the refugee children whom she worked with part-time

until two days ago although she camouflaged it in professionalism. She knew

that if only human beings were able to pierce their protective bubbles they

would find that one genuine love within, that innate tender need to be liked,

cared about, and have one's human worth confirmed and an identification of this

sentiment in other sentient beings. Still the world was what it was and she

told herself that if she were to return she would be stoned or clodded based

upon their whims.

In this odd corner behind the skyscrapers and away from the Houston Symphony,

the Meneil Collection with its engravings of Aten and Ptah, the Rothko Chapel,

the Astrodome, the Miller Theatre in Herman Park, the University of St. Thomas,

the University of Houston, and her Rice University, nothing touched her sense

of imagination so much as the ghettos strewn around them. She admired the

simple life burrowed away from the congested avarice of the city's center. She

felt compassion for the poorest of the poor who had to be in bleak

circumstances but she could not do anything in her two years in Houston but

take photographs of the infamy of the free enterprise system and continue with

her job working with refugees. She didn't do all that much. She sat with the

Ugandans and the Kenyans on the porches of refugee houses and with them looked

onto the skyscrapers at the approach of dusk. Driving in her car, she could

remember the Vietnamese families clogging the sinks of the refugee houses with

rice; the sight and smell of the blood of rotting vegetables in the

refrigerators of those houses; the fire ants that stung her around the refugee

houses; mowing the yards when she couldn't budge the refugees to do it; the

disputes over whose food was in the refrigerators or how much clothing she was

supposed to supply them with, and how the Ugandans tended to accumulate trash

without ever emptying it. She remembered Senor Sanchez. Making a detour back

into the city from the interstate, she decided to go to the refugee houses and

say "goodbye" even though a couple days ago she had chosen not to tell the

refugees that she was leaving in her usual obdurate opposition to sentiment.

She could imagine herself telling Senor Sanchez about her immediate departure

and him saying, "Heaven forbid, you are really leaving us now that you have a

Master's in psychology from a great university?." She would say, "Yes, I always

leave when I get Master's degrees. This one from a great university equalizes a

not so great one in criminology at Emporia University." "Do you have two

Master's degrees?" "Yes," she would say, "I collect them." "What will you do

with your knowledge?" he would ask. "Be a better person for it and that is all.

I'll sit on my butt in the future." "Oh, very good," he would say. "Maybe you

can put Fidel Castro on your lap while you sit and get him to purr like a

kitten." "Oh, what an excellent idea," she would say.

Senor Sanchez came from Havana. On that first day of their meeting she gave him

clothes from the Welcome Center, which he took. She put food in the

refrigerator and yet he would rarely eat it. "Necesito volver a Miami, orita!

Esta lugar"-and there he rambled off in passionate Cuban speed which she did

not understand. They sat on the porch to the Welcome Center. Gabriele handed

him a pen and paper but his calligraphy was not legible. "Orita? Que significa

"orita?" she asked. He snapped his fingers fiercely and then rambled

incommunicably. Her eyes became stiff and large in her detest of his

irascibility. Sanchez would always whistle for her attention. Then he would

laugh at her hating eyes; whistle again; look up in the air, and flap his arms

in an attempt to have her get him something. Partial or complete hunger

strikes, she told him in Spanish would not hasten his trip back to Miami but

only make his stay intolerable for everyone.

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

"I'd have trouble getting it down too," she admitted. "Suit yourself. If you

die defiantly you will be my personal hero but the carcass will stay in

Houston. We don't ship carcasses to Miami," she said. He was her personal

favorite.

The Cubans told her one time that the U.S. was responsible for putting Fidel

Castro into power since the Cuban masses needed to support any man whose

rhetoric condemned American investments and the American control of their

economy; and her response was, "Well, which is it-if you hate the guy so much

it seems ridiculous to use such an argument even though it does have some

truth. I know if I were to engage him he would be a pussycat purring on my lap

and you guys could make any political cartoon on him you pleased." The Africans

once said that the military cost of their civil wars were the result of Western

colonial boundaries fusing incompatible tribes into nations, keeping Africa

from being able to feed herself; and her response was, "Well, which is it-- If

you hate the idea of imperialism why are we speaking in English now; and why is

your government trying to lure in foreign investment?" When the older

Vietnamese individuals mentioned the war she listened to their stories

intensely through a rough translation. She listened to life's horror and the

ensuing trauma. That was all she could do. The past and the future did not

exist but traumas of the past went on perpetually. Once she had to translate

Thuc's "New House Rules for Immigrants" to the Latinos as they sat before her

on metal seats. They were lectured that the food given to them should be put in

boxes and set in the refrigerators so that they would know that the food was

being distributed equally and without a cause for bickering. Thuc nodded her

Vietnamese face at Gabriele's ostensible translations when really Gabriele was

only giving a synopsis of what was being said with commentary disparaging of

the YMCA treatment of its refugees and a system that was generally f--

There might have been poetic significance in having done this mundane job:

having taken the refugee children to the zoo with seventy year old Jesus and

the fifty year old Sanchez; having said the names of the animals in English and

the girls giving the Vietnamese equivalent; having taken them to the social

security office to get them cards with designated numbers; having taken the

Cambodian boy into the clothes room of the Welcome Center to try on pants of

various sizes but when he would not put them on and take them off with an adult

sense of speed, having performed the unzipping and zipping herself; having

taken the little Cuban girl to the Vietnamese doctor when she had a fever

although the doctor only gave Gabriele the suggestion of Gatorade and crackers;

and having often heard the little Laotian girl imitating Gabriele's growls

through the tattered 1screen of a window although Gabriele's growls toward the

girl were real ones. Still, all in all, she thought in the car, it had been a

waste of time to have prostituted herself to such an agency. She liked these

refugees for various reasons but one less altruistic reason was that she didn't

have any other people whom she liked and thus she needed to like them. She

chastised her maudlin disposition and returned to the interstate.

Chapter Fifteen

After washing her wounds and cursing the cat, she again picked it up by the

neck. But this time she threw it outside into a light surface of snow that had

fallen an hour earlier. Frothy top layers sometimes drifted about like desert

sands in the occasional strong gusts. They went here and there as directionless

as her mind that, in one respect, had become detached from traditional roles

and responsibilities, and in another had sunk into the mire of motherhood.

Inside closed doors, she was resistant against the cat's cries. Empathy, she

told herself, was not in her vocabulary. But when the cat, named Mouse, could

no longer be heard, she stood outside on the steps and called for it until it

at last appeared from under the trailer. She warmed a bottle in one large pan

and a bit of milk for the cat in a saucepan. She had never warmed milk for the

cat before; but she decided that if she was doing it for one she might as well

do it for the other particularly with the advent of the furriest one being

subjected to the cold. When both animals were fed she watched the television

but its senseless action and its fictitious and ludicrous sentimentalism were

putting her into a numb and depressed apathy. It was deflating her of all

energy to the point where she couldn't follow the characters or plot since the

figures were now helter-skelter in the meaninglessness that was rife in her own

mind.

To escape a stagnating and a somewhat discombobulating loss of herself, she

grabbed her sketchbook and drew the exact likeness of her child with little

time and effort. The book, like a photograph album, was filled with her

sketches in chronological order: stoic and erect poses of her parents based

more on childhood memories than some brief reunions when she was a teen-ager; a

13 year old friend in her bicycle club; the faces of drunken high school

classmates when she was bar- hopping and ignoring most mandates of her aunt and

uncle; some of a trip to Germany with her aunt; college friends; and yet some

of unknown Antarctica, a dreamy non-asthmatic land of ice mountains and

valleys. In such a place dreamed about and sketched from her asthmatic youth

onward neither rivers of flowing pollutants nor mountainous landfills existed.

Within its solitary and pristine nature, there would be no tacit or overt

pressures to get a job and become someone. In Antarctica an exceptionally aware

person would not have to go through the degradation of being compelled to

reinforce the rules and procedures of a business or organization in order to

have the income derived from a job. No professional, entrepreneurial, or common

slaves would exist here.

In this place, which she fabricated as being no less habitable than Greenland,

there would at least be a small ecosystem of fish and seaweed for food, and

societies of walruses, seals, and penguins which she could watch and record

their social interaction. Such a record would be exclusively for the one-person

audience of Gabriele. That being the case, the purpose of an article to which

author and reader were one person without the prospect of extending further

seemed a futile waste of time; and yet if meaning in a record of the habits of

species could only be gained by sharing this information with others or if the

whole essence of meaning existed in edifying others and by shared experiences

this would be the source of another research paper which she would conduct in

Antarctica.

Daydreams gave movement and stimulation to housewives standing in line at

supermarkets and provided an escape for mothers of infants who sat alone as

inert and purposeless as rocks until becoming instruments to be used by their

babies. To find the source of his discomfort and ease it was in a child's mind

a woman's only role; and this particular one also felt that his mother could

also be manipulated by slight smiles and the temporary end of tantrums. And in

a sense she was manipulated to toss him in the air, albeit only in the physical

gesture itself for only fools read expressions of love in these smiles and the

cessation of screams. Gabriele accommodated him beyond what was necessary for

his welfare only because of the horrendous nature of his cries if she didn't do

so. Throughout these months of care giving she did not have any other world

beyond the child. She tried to keep herself from being flattened by the

perfunctory role of bathing, feeding him, and changing his diapers by telling

herself that motherhood would pull her into the swathes of human experience and

its interconnectedness, that it would be a novel learning experience on

coexistence, that it might be a means of duplicating the ideas of respected

child development theorists so as to corroborate or discredit them, and that he

could be the specimen of an experiment on how the instincts and proclivities of

a male child might be altered into more ethical variations although she wasn't

quite able to isolate the exact nature of the experiment and its parameters.

But really these ideas did little to counter this pauper's version of ennui

that fogged over her perceptions. What sustained her were her daydreams and

art. Once she drew a surreal image of her baby in a business suit with an

attachZ case in his hand. It was a partially adult caricature of a being

standing proudly alone on an ice mountain. She drew its contumely as master of

itself in all of its avarice, ability to facilitate its own pleasures. It was a

fragmented child glued back together as an enraged whole and she accentuated

this by drawing myriad cracks within its porcelain skin. . When she finished

the sketch she knew that charcoal was an ineffective tool for the ideas and the

color that rushed inside of her. Still, the sketchbook was compact as an album,

and a bit of paper and charcoal were affordable.

Closing the sketchbook on a mental catharsis, she did pushups and situps beside

her director's chair and then aerobics to the televised instructors who glowed

in a little box in front of her. It all helped to extract her from malaise. She

really needed the physical exertion of games like racket ball, and in a very

self-centered way Betty began to permeate her thoughts. The idea of her

friendship became more palatable to reminisce over. Then she fell asleep with

the ideas of Antarctica in her mind. When she woke, her thoughts were

disconcerted and there was a forlorn neediness sticky as the baby's vomit. She

needed a break from solitude and an exit away from the obligations of

motherhood that tyrannized over her. For the first time in her months of doing

this she needed an adult presence in her life and she yearned for the

appearance of this Rita/Lily person who lived somewhat nearby and was adult in

the sense that she could be spoken to. Lily (she was mostly that and preferred

this label although she was really Rita) was supposed to have come earlier and

Gabriele wondered where this Rita/Lily person was. She heard the baby crying.

Maybe too much light in the trailer was irritating his eyes. A silver light

from the glare of the snow with its power to make objects (even the baby) seem

blindingly unreal was bleeding throughout the whole trailer. It captivated her

and made her think that the baby and its needs were nothing short of a dream.

She stared out of the window to confirm that an outside world did indeed exist.

She saw a neighbor's car pull out of a rocky driveway and one young boy

unsuccessfully trying to pull his brother on a sled in the superficial layer of

snow and left over hail. Too many weeds were blocking their progress. Too many

diapers were blocking her own.

She packed some baby food and disposable diapers in a bag. Imitating the

witch's dogma of the sanctity of the earth, for a few months after Nathaniel's

birth she had been adamant that she wouldn't use disposable diapers even though

she had yearned for their ease. Back then she saw mothers with money and

impunity buying boxes of them at the supermarket and she loathed these vile

mothers who degraded the environment. Once, however, when she had a migraine

headache while experiencing some asthma problems and he was suffering from

diarrhea she had trudged over to the store with him in her arms and bought a

box of diapers. From that point forward it became part of her habits. To not do

so now would only inconvenience her. Not even if thousands of mothers went back

to cloth diapers and their plastic over-panty counterparts would such

thoughtfulness save the environment. It would merely postpone the inevitable. A

slight postponement could not be achieved by one alone and, even if it could,

she didn't see that it would merit her discomfort.

Giving up on the idea of Rita coming to her home, she fixed a tuna sandwich for

herself and ate. Then she undressed the two of them; and they sank into a

soothing bubble bath. Gabriele made soap castles for her son, and smacked top

stories off of them, which caused his eyes to become wider with curiosity and

his mouth to become circular in the wonder of all things new. She slowly sang a

choral movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, emphasizing the accent of each

German vowel and syllable exaggeratedly. She internally debated the merit of

giving her child mendacities as she told him German nursery rhymes and lightly

washed his small body. She supposed that the sparked imagination that could

deliver him from being a somber, adult zombie, alive only in insatiable

hungers, was important enough that she didn't have to think of such lies as

bad. Besides, if reality and goodness were perceived differently by each

individual, she didn't want to rush toward an indictment even if she would be a

most willing judge in rendering a verdict in the Gabriele-made indictment of

the past 7000 to 10,000 years of civilization.

Drying herself and the baby in front of the window she put her fingers into the

crevices of the plastic blind. She pressed down on one rectangular piece of

this thing called a blind and wondered what piece, if any, her blind life had

in this thing called society. She looked at the outside world. From the

relatively quiet trailer park, it was hard to imagine how much all the

inhabitants of Ithaca spun around in life. As futile as it was to spin, she

thought, humans were not meant for thought. They were creatures meant to expend

energy and to overtake their world. Maybe this was needed for the evolution of

a higher species than man to exist on the planet. Sexual reproduction was not

thought but illusion and frenzy, which brought forth offspring. It was

overtaking women. A human (women included although she found them a bit more

repulsive than the average human) was mostly all energy conquering the planet,

making it subordinate to human will. If care was not given toward the

environment and humans overtook the planet too forcefully, the world would

expunge them from the list of species. Any caretaker of a child needed to spin

from time to time too and Gabriele needed to do this to fight off sensory

deprivation. She pulled up the blind. Naked, she was in a pillar of light the

way the so-called prophet, Joseph Smith had been-only, being atheist, her

pillar was only silver. She knew that a personification of the sun was absurd,

as was all religion, which she had dabbled in knowing about years earlier; and

yet she did not want to believe that this was all there was. Television,

movies, billboards, and music all recorded that the rich, and happy people who

played in this survival of the fittest game so successfully did so by following

their desires with confidence and unapologetic insouciance. These most capable

people monopolized over the world's resources leaving the vast majority of

humans destitute, hopeless, burdened by hard labor for sustenance, and in some

cases famished. They chased around like mad men trying to buy up the planet.

Some of the mad men did so while repudiating their own mortality. Others

acknowledged their mortality and so they told themselves they would gormandize

while the feast was on the table. There had to be more than this.

She dressed him and herself warmly and when she was outside she realized that

she had overdone it. The temperature was already above freezing and the traces

of snow were evaporating tracelessly, later to be sucked up into a Heraclitus

shaped cloud. The odd weather, which was becoming less odd annually, concerned

her especially after the United Nations report that the world temperature would

rise two degrees over the next three decades. She knew, however, that there

wasn't "a damned thing" she could do about it. She supposed that she might be

able to stand in front of Cornell University with placards advocating that

human beings go back to being the hunters and gatherers from whence they came.

She could stand there like a madwoman denouncing the past 7000-10,000 years.

Nothing would come out of it but 12 hours of sitting in a jailhouse and then

paying a fine.