"Is that a fact? Well, you haven't seen your mother play racket ball before. It

isn't exactly Olympic material but it's close. Hmm...oh, my, we got so carried

away with God only knows what and it looks like we've missed the first day of

classes once again. Mama Gabriele would teach you herself through all your

twelve or thirteen years if she didn't have to make a living. Well, I don't

know. Let's ponder this situation a bit longer." She stared at the yellow bus

through her little kitchen window. She abhorred it. She stared at it with the

intensity of a female version of Zeus wanting to strike it with lightning but

the lightning backfired. She felt a migraine headache coming on. "Honey, do me

a favor and share some of this soup with Mouse. The two of you can eat outside.

Then take mouse for a walk in the trailer park. Go talk to the little Girl and

see what she's up to. All alone, not knowing anybody in the trailer park, you

should say hello." Her sentences were dangling modifiers; but she did not care

about grammar since she had a headache. "Most people if left all alone will

come to no good so go talk to her and save civilization." This idea went

contrary to her life's model but she didn't care about the contradiction. She

just wanted to stop the headache. "Mommy's got to think now. Okay, scoot,

scoot. Take the bottle of water with you. It will be like a picnic." She handed

him the leash for the cat. When he was outside she locked the door. She felt

the migraine intensifying like the footsteps of a wrathful god incrementally

approaching her. She went into the bathroom and lit a joint. She watched a

cloud of smoke rise into the fan that had been installed in the door. She

inhaled her cannabis again and again.

"Miss Sangfroid--yes, you," said the higher authority with a sound and derision

of her Aunt Peggy's voice, "look at yourself cowering in a toilet." The form

was inconsistent. It subtly wavered between an appearance similar to that of

Peggy from long ago and her own ideal form.

"Motherhood was giving me an excruciating headache." Gabriele chuckled at

herself like a bashful girl and smiled painfully. "So I took a sabbatical where

I could get one--the little girl's room. I'm sorry." She felt as if she were

apologizing to her aunt for running away to Ithaca and not letting her see

Nathaniel.

"You're sorry. You have your son walk the streets so you can cower in here

smoking pot on the pot and you are sorry. Is that the only thing you can say?"

Gabriele chuckled at the dual meaning of the word, pot, but she was finding it

more difficult to concentrate and she was beginning to feel guilty for being,

or at least being perceived as being, a negligent mother. She, the

philosophical dictator of herself, was unlike her hero, President Clinton. She

inhaled before Puritanical scrutiny and admitted the inhalation. "Sometimes the

pot works better than the pills at stopping the migraines, and sometimes as a

mommy, a female needs to get high wherever and whenever she can. Please try to

understand. Don't be so critical--not now. If you could speak less loudly, I'd

appreciate it. I'm in pain here."

"Gabriele, such a lone soldier and yet so vulnerable," said the form gently.

The form had become less blurry. The higher authority was now more distinct and

Peggy was fading fast. This goddess or extraterrestrial of some kind had more

of a peaceful countenance and a more self-confident temerity than before. Also,

there was a halo about her head since sick people needed their mothers, gods,

and saints.

"Poor, Gaby, time has run by like a shell shocked soldier, and she's

accomplished nothing in her life but a bit of whoredom to keep body and spirit

together. She wanted to be a revolutionary but has only followed the natural

course of having gotten older."

"I became a mother. I can't call that nothing. There is some premature gray in

my family but that isn't until one's late thirties-- early forties. It won't

happen to me. I'll have beautiful dark hair until they carry me off in a

coffin--strike that, an urn for I will be cremated to go back to the elements

immediately."

"Look at that once stalwart face in the mirror--is this a human face or a

sponge that has sucked up too much water?" The ET's tone of voice was nurturing

in spite of her words.

"I don't feel well."

"You've been overtaken by the mundane. Look out of the window at the volant

clouds. Any frothy and floating substance natural or artificial will do: an

ocean, trees waving in the winds, passing clouds, soap spinning around in a

washer. Watching clouds in particular is instrumental to appreciate the

infinite possibilities of colliding atoms in creation or the infinite

possibilities of an unburdened life. Now look down at your mundane and

sedentary world so bereft of possibilities, so insalubrious, so sickening. See

your son on the steps. There he is with fingers of one hand down the cat's

throat, and the other hand pinning it down. Hmm...now he's spoon feeding it

something."

"Vegetable soup."

"Something. There's a bowl, a spoon, and something that looks like mud but

okay, vegetable soup, " said the ET. "Vegetables for a cat? Strange! Well, even

though your son is outside, his presence is still here. It permeates everything

in the trailer, doesn't it? You couldn't walk a minute from one room to the

next without thinking of him: his smell, his things, and messes are everywhere.

His storybooks and color books are the only things neatly on his shelf because

he doesn't like them. They aren't animated."

"He's always been partial to movement just like any boy." She paused and

thought. "Yeah, even when he goes out to play he is still everywhere in

here--every room. It was just a few years ago, sitting on this very pot, when

he was yelling, 'Mommy come wipe me' or 'Gabey, come wipe me'--something like

that."

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

authority indifferently.

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

"I dare say. Never part from your better instincts as they say. You have, I

must tell you my dear girl, failed your ideals. The big toy car running on D

batteries, the matchbox cars he crashes into walls, and that gun that shoots

out big plunger shaped bullets that stick onto car windows--all of these items

you have succumbed to buying for him even though initially you said that you

wouldn't. Yes, he is a creature of movement. You've known this all along. And

yet, choosing to ignore the fact that he goes through such tirades in favor of

thinking him as a partner leading you to the entity, you have succumbed to his

tantrums and tears in supermarkets and five & dime stores. You continually buy

him toys that aggravate his worse propensities and all those chocolate

pacifiers."

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

"He is a demanding, egocentric creature of movement far from the worlds of

contemplation and you give into his extortion. He gives ultimatums and runs

away from you at the drop of a hat only to be hugged later. What sort of

graduate psychology classes at Rice University taught you parenting techniques

like that?"

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

"It's inane: a woman like you limiting herself to reproducing and rearing young

.You do this as though you can't find more purpose to life than this...someone

like you deigning to define herself in mortal roles of birth, reproduction, and

death to have someone to succeed you. Have you succumbed to being a woman, lost

without a mommy role. Fool, experience your contumely now...Feel those wings

that no one else has. You are innately volant if left to yourself. Cast him

away. Let him fend for himself." All the time the higher authority was smiling

and talking mildly like a mother reading a bedtime story.

"It isn't like that. I brought him into the world. I am responsible for him.

Besides that, he has led me into--"

"Into leaves"

"Okay, into leaves; but now I have decided. There will be no school for this

boy. I'll keep him here with me."

"You silly bitch!" yelled her higher authority vehemently. "I have better

things to do than argue with you about things so boring and irrelevant to the

scheme of things. The boy's already one year behind his peers. Being led to the

entity is well and good but if the kid's your crutch you've got serious mental

problems."

As if not hearing a word the higher authority was saying, Gabriele mumbled to

herself, "Maybe I could avoid putting him into kindergarten again this year.

Matter of fact, I'll teach him everything he needs to know throughout grade

school and then he can go to school with his peers when he is 13. He wouldn't

like being in kindergarten as the oldest one in the class anyway. I can't

imagine it to be a kinder garden than what I have here in this home. Likewise,

he wouldn't like first grade a year later because he'd be older than the other

kids, or second grade, or the third--" The higher authority did not answer. She

had vanished with the inhaling, coughing, and exhaling of a big puff of smoke;

and meanwhile Gabriele was high and smiling widely. She was vertiginous with so

much life running through her veins that she did not want to waste. It, like

the atoms of the cosmos, was pouring, clotting, recycling, breaking up, and

then flushing out into something new within her.

The marijuana had relaxed her and she was taking a piggy back ride on the

shoulders of a Heraclitus shaped cloud. Opaque questions seemed interlinked and

mysteriously solved: of motion versus contemplation; Parmenides versus

Heraclitus; being the warm, soft, cuddly mother depicted in Harlow's monkey

experiments so as to not have a traumatized monkey on her hands versus finding

more purpose to life than reering one's young; attachment versus independence;

and the containment of her son versus the release of him. What solved these

questions was the analogy that just as solar systems in the spilling universe

rarely have planets capable of sustaining life, few are the contemplatives in

the movements of sociable and voracious man. She told herself that she had only

one life and she would not dilute it for any "kid ." She thought, "I'll do my

thing and let him do his" but what she really meant was that she doubted that

she was capable of making him into a better person if she isolated him. With

the exception of creative goddesses like herself, a mind was a photocopy

machine and a file cabinet. Her son needed to go to school and copy external

forces for good or for bad and she needed to pull away from motherhood to

contemplate and create even if it meant going back to her lonely solitary ways.

He felt as if he were extirpated and then without roots replanted in foreign

soil; but at the same time as if he were something less than a boy and

shrinking exponentially every moment he was in school. Like any kindergartner,

daily he yearned for the mother he departed from and could not understand why

he was ushered so much of the week into a bus that took him away from her. He

didn't protest despite being tearful. He went like any semi-cognizant lamb and

camouflaged himself shyly in the thickets and brambles of himself. Mrs. Graham

told them to drink their pints of milk and eat their graham crackers, pledge

allegiance to the flag, skip around her desk happily or not, draw the lines

that were the parameters of form and create form by means of color, bang sticks

and rattles rhythmically like African Pygmies, lace and tie shoes neatly, say

their ABCs and the sounds they symbolized, listen to stories and articulate

questions about them, obey calls for mandated naps on mats where one could

never sleep, and try not to interrupt these activities with requests to go to

the bathroom while at the same time not wetting one's pants. Two years went by.

He was in his second year.

Touch football, soccer, gymnastics, and all realms of movement in PE class

helped to compensate for this institutionalized life. The discomforts of

confinement were also assuaged with the help of homeroom mothers like his who

brought in treats. Gabriele's cheese and cracker concoctions once each month

were woefully inadequate in comparison to preceding days of cupcakes; and

cognizant of this she all the more emoted a self-confident poise in the

distribution of her crackers. She was certain that no one yearned for things

but experiences; and by believing in the pleasures he and his classmates would

get from her little efforts, she made it so. Her presence was a lesson on the

quintessence of reality where successful emulation in superficial ways could be

bypassed if done confidently. He was glad for anything that would stifle the

unpleasant but pervading shadow of Mrs. Dinosaur who often forced him to stand

under a coat rack with his nose against the wall as coats and the shortage of

breathable air encased him. These episodes happened for letting his imagination

stow away on passing vehicles he could see from the window. She alone was not

the gravamen of his long list of grievances. He hated having to keep track of

paper and pens, Little Orphan Annie with her preponderance of fat who aimed

dodge balls toward boys' balls, and Shirley and her hitgirls who, during

recesses, would often pin him down on the merry-go-round for the smothering of

kisses.

One day he was sitting in the classroom dreading another time of having his

energy subjugated to the mat when out of nowhere came a mathematical question

aimed and moving toward him as an arrow. He felt the sting, fidgeted worse than

ever, perspired heavily, and began to blush. The corollary of looking stupid,

he knew, would be his inevitable smothering within the heavy coats of the

clothes rack for not being able to give an answer. He would be standing with

his nose pressed against a wall while his classmates took their naps. He wanted

to answer the question and yet he couldn't see how he could do this if he

hadn't heard it. He was at a loss and he resented his predicament. He wanted

both to cry and put more holes into the pothole-faced teacher with the aid of

his rarely forsaken tools of rubber bands and quickly manufactured spit wads.

His ethereal dreaminess, moving and emblazoned with the sun, was an

unrecognized form of experience. Experience was knowledge as intangible and

ineffable as daydreams probably were; and yet this dreaminess was being

indicted by Mrs. Dinosaur and usurped by her mathematical abstractions. "I

don't give a flying fuck about numbers" he told her with the honesty Gabriele

extolled and espoused as well as her word choice. His two front teeth were

missing at the time so as he literally spit out the opinion in a lisped and

retarded noise the teacher was stunned to hear profanity of the worse kind not

only coming from a boy that was her pupil but in the tone of Daffy Duck. Words,

wisps of vibrating air, which should have been as fleetingly unreal as any

passing wind, were such indelible things. They couldn't be dropped into one's

shoes like doodled parodies of the teacher that he and his classmates often

exchanged so that they could be perused later in the toilet and flushed away

invisibly with urine and excrement. In ways, an idea in sound permeated another

being immediately and non- retractably like a noxious gas.

Before school had started it was as if Gabriele and Nathaniel were completely

alone except for the clients. It was as if in her remote choice for a home she

had the idea that she could plant a society like a garden, water it nicely, and

extirpate it of weedy or symbiotic associations. It was as if she believed that

when left to her guidance, allowed to spin around happily in play according to

his own benign whims, and following nothing but the occasional orphic music of

the ice- cream truck, her son would be a self-contained paradigm of happiness.

Back then when he was four and five she had two years of really believing that

such bliss would go on perpetually and she half dreamed that if she succeeded

with him, she could advocate Gabrieleism everywhere. It would be her

movement--a philosophy of self-containment and human empowerment to ward off

loneliness, curiosity, and hormones that always stunted intelligent beings from

pushing onto the next species. Guarding against these foibles, according to

her, would make one less of a sociable and hedonistic monster than he or she

would be otherwise.

And yet, despite her conviction that her strange life was the way of truth, she

had her misgivings about it. There were times she hated clients who had banged

forcefully within her; and that tacit hate shot out like lasers from her eyes.

It would be directed toward situations such as loud cellular telephone

conversationalists interrupting her contemplative sketches in the park, and

bank tellers who closed the counters to go to lunch once she arrived at the

head of the queue with her non-taxable, ill-gotten gain. With the bank tellers

in particular she wanted to snap off their noses like the ends of green beans.

Also, there were times within her migraines when her stalwart ship felt puny

and spun around in waves with all abilities to track its coordinates failing to

operate. In illness she often wondered if her ideas about life were nothing but

rabid madness. She wondered, at times, if denuding a human with her Gabrielism

was like picking off the meat of the man or woman to get to the real human; and

since she was smart enough to have reservations about her logic, everyday she

continued to put her son on the yellow school bus. "Anyhow," she thought many

times through these three years, "rightfully, there are laws against keeping

children out of schools and breaking laws to live with an ignorant savage is

more trouble than its worth." She was just sorry that she couldn't afford the

time to home school him herself or send him to a private school.

From imagined ideas of Rita/Lily seemingly more real than the carbon-flesh

copy, Gabriele drew her sitting on a bench in the mall admiring all the smiling

facades of sociable creatures. According to Gabrielish logic, mall shoppers had

such hobbies as retribution for having to prostitute a living and having to

forsake the slow contemplation of truth and goodness in the fast pace monster

called society. Gabriele drew anxious and hurried desperation in the smiles of

her mallhoppers, depicting them with the rectangular forms of grasshoppers. She

thought about the fact that, outside of clients, Lily was always her family's

only peripheral link to society. She wondered if it had been for the fact that

in her confused state and the changing labels that doctors pinned her with,

Lily was a society that was not part of the society at large.

Gabriele was not intrigued with other people since she found herself to be her

main subject of interest and wonder. Riding into the depths of herself was

oceanic but floating on the rivers of others in conversation was like having to

carry the raft half of the time because the river consisted mostly of nothing

but sledge and rocks. Many were the years in which she preferred the

companionship of herself; and from childhood her eyes became incrementally hard

and cold to others. She had to admit that having a hard haughtiness did nothing

to make the world into a gentler and more affable place. If one could shop for

a character before acquiring it she knew that hers would not be her first

choice; and yet she had it because it was the natural consequence of a military

family. From her mother and then Peggy and her husband she had been assailed

with criticism (where she sat, where she stood, how she sat, how she stood,

what she put on her plate, why the quantity she put on the plate, the time she

spent in her room, the antisociable tendencies that had to be inherent for

anyone to go into a bedroom as much as she did, how she parted her hair, whose

comb she had used to part it even though it was always her comb, what she wore,

how she shouldn't be wearing it since she shouldn't be acting like a princess

or a tomboy, why she chose idiots to associate with as friends...). Still, it

had been to the glory of herself. She told herself that the war games within

the boot camp of family had made her fortified. She did not need people in her

life. There might be some level of social interaction that was psychologically

indispensable but even this sustenance of sociability could be breathed in and

released as air. She would cling to no one; and she continually told herself

that one day she would go to Antarctica.

Gabriele thought again about her interaction with this woman, Rita/Lily,

Lily/Rita, Rita/Rita, or whatever. Sometimes she was truly empathic with her.

For the most part, she used her as that extra person out there with whom she

and Nathaniel could mention from time to time. Mostly she didn't give a damn

about her one way or the other. Gabriele rued and ruminated about this fact.

"Oh well, it's the human condition," she told herself as if she had the perfect

excuse. She wondered if Rita and all isolated halfwits needed to imagine

someone as caring about them even if such people really did not care. Just by

being that imagined benefactress, she argued to herself, she helped the girl

without even having to do it in reality. As she was thinking this she heard

knocking on the door.

She put a wad of tobacco into her mouth. "Who is it?" asked Gabriele as if

there could be infinite possibilities. "G-a-b-r-i-e-l- e," sang Rita. It was a

sing-songey, monotonous, and lethargic tune. "Identify yourself," said Gabriele

and then quickly began to move the canvas, tripod, brushes, and paint into her

bedroom. The painting wasn't completed and she didn't want to respond to

questions about it. More importantly, she did not want to be made to feel that

she owed the painting or a replica of it to the unwitting model. "I'm Lily."

"Lily who?"

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

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

"Nothing special. Just Smith."

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

politicians?"

"No, nothing special. Hardware store."

"A hardware tycoon."

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

"I think that is special." She opened the door. "Come in, Miss Kennedy Smith.

Sit down over there while I pour you whiskey and cola without the whiskey." She

had to admit to herself that she found her little friendship with Rita/Lily

rather amusing. What more could one want from a friendship? It was fresh air in

the stale cellar of one's mind.

As she took a bottle out of the refrigerator and poured the content into

glasses on the counter, she looked onto this pathetic society that was hers.

Rita/Lily's feigned smile was lasting an abnormally long time and waxed and

waned awkwardly. "Man problems?" asked Gabriele.

"Sort of," she giggled bashfully. "Really, it's not having one. I feel lonely.

I don't know what to do with myself."

"You're not supposed to date anyhow. Didn't you say that the group home got you

a job waiting on tables in the concession area of the skating rink?"

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

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

"I feel alone in the evenings."

"Read a book."

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

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

"I'd need a boyfriend first." She wondered if she had one, a hundred, or zero.

She wasn't exactly sure what constituted a relationship with a man.

Furthermore, she wasn't even remotely sure what a marriage was either: a couple

of signatures on a sheet of paper, matching bath towels that said his and hers,

or a declaration of two people as a unit which would then be naively believed

and acknowledged by outsiders as having legitimacy.

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

you."

"What would I want with a man, Lily? I've already got the kid and he would

fritter away my time every chance he could if he weren't in school. My god,

after being a masseuse all day, it's bad enough to have one more male around

here let alone two. I don't want to devote the time Adagio doesn't extract from

me to fulfill more male demands. Then there are all those womanly things: to

continually ask myself if some guy really loves me and how I can become slimmer

and more desirable for him and all that crap. Worst of it all would be jealousy

when he sleeps with someone else on a bad hair day. It always happens. I'd be

eroded away and then I'd start asking myself who the hell I was"

"But love--not being alone."

"Perfect equation. Love is many selfish equations like that. I don't know. A

female has to be a puppet taking back her own gossamer strings or she will

follow the movements of love into the abyss. As for being alone, it is the only

time to be free to sail in oneself without having to answer to anybody. A

relationship is like trying to put on some fashionable pants that are a size

too small with him trying to get into them too. No thanks." She spit out her

tobacco in the trashcan and then drank the cola.

"Is that stuff good?" asked Lily.

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

"No...that is I don't think so...well, maybe a little." She laughed. Gabriele

shared the substance. Lily began to chew for a few seconds and then reached her

finger in to extract it from the crevices of her teeth.

"Do you have an empty beer can?" she panicked. She began to gag. Gabriele moved

the trashcan near Lily and bent her face. She spit it out but didn't vomit.

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

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

with water and then with mouthwash.

"That minty stuff sure has a good taste, Rita," yelled Gabriele toward the

bathroom. "Make sure you don't swallow the damned stuff or we'll be doing this

again."

Lily gargled, spat, repeated the process, and then yelled back toward

Gabriele,"Do you miss Nathaniel, your Adagio?"

"Lily, you ask the same old questions again and again forcing me to come up

with new answers to everything from why I don't have a boyfriend to if I take a

crap when I get up in the mornings."

Rita laughed awkwardly for both were subjects she often asked about. "I

want..." She gargled again and spat the mouthwash out. "I like to find out if

people's ideas change."

"This people doesn't change. I'm glad the little--" She was going to say

"little fucker" but she censored it out. "...guy is in school as I've said for

the umpteenth time."

Gabriele chortled when Rita/Lily came back looking battered and weakened from

her experience with tobacco. "Rita," she said, "It will take practice but

before long you'll get the hang of it. You'll be chewing tobacco just like one

of the boys. Then after more years of experience...if you practice...you'll be

a pro' like me. You might even begin to condition American Barbie dames in the

proper ways to spit it out like a cannon."

Lily laughed diffidently since she was in a depressed state and words were

running about nonsensibly in her head like the yelping cries of wild savages.

She sat down stiff as lead and Gabriele could see the terror of visceral

loneliness in her face. She was afraid that the girl would be anchored like

that during the rest of the day as a hindrance of her painting. "Oh," said

Rita/Lily suddenly out of her saturnine depths, "I nearly forgot. The call. In

my room."

"What call?"

"Huh?" asked the obtuse girl

"What call?"

Rita tried to reign in her thoughts and focus on where she was at and her

relationship with Gabriele. "The school couldn't reach you. You've got to call

them. They said it was really important." From her pocket she pulled out a slip

of paper that had a phone number on it and gave it to Gabriele.

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

in the phone jack.

When she arrived at the door of the home room with a bag of treats dangling

inside a fist, her son's teacher told her that she had go go to the principal's

office. The word, "must," took some swallowing but she accepted it

magnanimously. She could see that the teacher, Mrs. Recla, found her daunting.

The proof was in the face that was being taxed by not being able to frown. She

knew that she was emoting a more civil aversion than the teacher could muster.

As Gabriele tried not to conceptualize her as "the dinosaur" or "Reclasaur,"

demeaning second grader terminology, there was a subtle smile on her

countenance (feigned or not). In part, it was amusement about the word,

Reclasaur, but it was mostly of one who was valiently beyond worldly matters.

With her equanimity she also displayed an obdurate, formidable haughtiness no

different than any engraving or statue from Akhenaten to Lincoln, or Joan of

Ark to Eleanor Roosevelt.

Indifferent to the fact that this was not her appointed time for being a

homeroom mother and by the disposition of a teacher who was usually more

affable (feigned or not), Gabriele officiously submitted her treats. Like a

poorly written essay, they were glanced at and rejected snobbishly. She wanted

to check up on her son who often sat in the back row but she was prohibited

from looking into the room. She wanted to ask the Reclasaur what he had done to

make her so "uptight" but Gabriele changed her mind. She decided that unless it

were an emergency (and the teacher would have undoubtedly given the details of

an emergency) she should defer knowledge as long as she could. She imagined

that once she returned home there would be more to swallow than just cheese and

crackers.

In the girl's room Gabriele lit a cigarette and stared at herself in a mirror.

She didn't care what others thought of her but in a world where only

appearances mattered she thought that wrapping up what little beauty she did

posess would go further with a female principal. She did not believe in

appearances but she was pragmatic enough to realize that appearances had their

uses. Eyeglasses would make her look more intellectual if not outright erudite

and opaque. Her turgid opinions would have more merit in such a look. She

pinned her hair up into a bun and put on some tinted glasses that she rarely

ever used. She smoked for a few minutes, staring in awe at this formidable

higher authority being reflected from the mirror. Smoking like this in front of

a mirror in the girl's room reminded her of her actions from the age of ten and

as she chuckled inwardly to herself she then lifted the plug in the sink and

lodged the cigarette down the drain untracably. In the principal's office she

scanned an issue of Jack and Jill for 45 minutes. Then she became irascible and

restless.

"Miss," said Gabriele with contumely toward the secretary who was the only

visible party responsible for making her wait, "will it be much longer? I do

have things to do and I can pretty well tell at this point that Jack and Jill

is not very good reading--not for me, it isn't."

The secretary smiled painfully. "I'm sure that you won't have to wait much

longer. I'm sure Mr. Quest will be with you shortly."

She wondered about waiting like this. Did authority figures believe that making

others wait aggrandized their influence? For her, it lessened it. If such a

person was not readily available to cater to her high ideals she assumed that

he or she was a derelict in a back office playing solitaire or a lascivious

Neanderthal playing footsie with one of the office staff. "Mr. Quest? Aren't I

supposed to see Mrs. Simmons?" asked Gabriele.

"No," said the secretary.

"Who is this Mr. Quest?"

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

"Of course," she told the secretary. "Who else better to handle vice" Now she

knew for sure that being invited here as this less than honorary guest would

involve disciplinary matters. Quest's guest: there would probably be the

abrading of both the son and the caregiver. She wondered whether this was about

her son at all. Perhaps it was an inquest probing into her personal life to

which she alone would be excoriated. It was a rather enticing thought to be

under the spotlight as the pillory of ignorant people. It would give her the

chance to refute their ideas to make these authorities realize that they were

the ones strumpeting themselves as loud as trumpets. It was she who did it

softly in her own little massage parlor in a trailer and only when in need of

money and for as brief a time as she could manage. How many wives and husbands

(wives most saliently) became such all of their lives to better their own

fortunes: this was the idea that she wanted to haunt the corridors of their

minds. If it would not besmirch her son and had no bearing on him, she would

air her dirty laundry. She would submit a slutty biographical profile that

would leave them irrevocably in a state of shock and awe but this would not be

the case. She knew that this misbehavior (misbehavior being defined as action

that was not sensitive to the feelings of others) would be detrimental to her

son and so she did not want to go into the school to be scrutinized by these

creatures.

"No," she thought again, "even if they have found out what I do for a living

they wouldn't have arranged a meeting to confront me directly about it. The

matter would go through social services." She foolishly released some of her

desultory thoughts to the secretary as she stared at the Jack and Jill

magazine. "How strange," she said, "that someone should wind up with such a

grandiose name, but I guess it wasn't his choice to be named Quest. Good god,

the images in Jack and Jill are so violent. What with little children waiting

all morning for the inevitable paddling and picking up magazines which have

cartoons catered to Charles Manson it is a wonder that there aren't more school

shootings. Wouldn't you say so, Mrs....I'm sorry, I didn't get your name."

The vice-principal opened the door. If it hadn't been for the obscurity of her

eyes behind her glasses it would have seemed that he was penetrating her eyes

with intimate familiarity.

"Mrs. Sangfroid?"

"Yes, something like that," she said.

"That's not right?"

"Miss, if you don't mind; and even though I am a disciple of Freud, as much as

I can be a disciple of anything, the pronounciation is "fraw" and not "Freud."

"Sorry."

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

"Would you care to come into my office?"

"Sure," said Gabriele with a smile. She walked into Spiderman's web with great

insouciance and sat down. "Hmm...I haven't been in one of these rooms since I

was a little girl and got paddlings."

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

Gabriele smiled at his boldness. She again thought it had a familiar warmth to

it. "Not so bad. Actually, I was diligent enough. I just stayed to myself a bit

much -- a very German characteristic but kids hate that sort of thing--maybe

not in Germany. Who knows? Hating my stand-offishness they blamed me for what

they did. Well," she interjected with a laugh, "I was a bit of a rascal too. I

didn't squeal on them but got even -- putting bubble gum in girl's braids and

things like that. I got the paddle on many occasions. I never cried

though...but you don't want to hear about me way back then."

"No, it's okay. You don't have to stop so quickly for me. Learning about

children's behavior is part of my job besides reinforcing student codes and the

curriculum--understanding them--even kids as big as you with kids of her own--

and making policies suited to them...being flexible. Paddling too if needed."

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

"Yes, right."

"Concerning Nathaniel?"

"Yes, in a way. As you know, Miss Sangfroid, children aren't sheltered from

violence in images or words any longer. The effects of television violence are

debated year after year and nobody does anything about it. The way children

behave today at this school is the way they might have behaved in Harlem or the

Bronx ten years ago. I see more and more children who aren't sheltered from

baseness. It's more than just catching a couple older children smoking in the

bathroom once every few months: drug addiction, brawls, foul mouths--fouler

than anything I would ever have imagined. These base influences make the

children something different than children and I suspect that not being allowed

to be innocent they won't see anything good in themselves or the world when

they are adults -- just the baseness. Wouldn't you think so? They would become

full of rage."

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

talking about Nathaniel."

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

front of you--"

"He does sometimes."

"Okay," he reaffirmed mildly. He found some satisfaction in the honesty. "Then

maybe there are too many R-rated videos being played at home or other media

where he might be hearing words like--"

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

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

"I don't like the pejorative way you said the word, "lady." She stood up. She

couldn't imagine being called a more vulgar word."

"I think we should talk about this. Sorry, I didn't mean to be disrespectful.

You are obviously highly educated and I want to hear what you have to say. If

we don't talk about it now sooner or later he'll get into trouble even if we

ignore it this time."

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

often?"

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

of our teachers."

"Nathaniel's home room teacher?"

"Yes."

"The one who puts him in the coats with his nose against the wall-- the one

they call the Reclasaur. Yes, I've heard about her. As a homeroom mother I've

witnessed her. Matter of fact, I was planning to come to see the principal

about this Mrs. Recla. You just gave me the incentive. Do you approve of

teachers doing that to students?"

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

"Who would, with violence being perpetrated in the classroom. Would you pay

attention to this discussion if I threw coffee in your lap? Of course, not.

You'd be concerned about how you feel from coffee being spilt on you. We learn

what we have to to learn to survive in our environment but if the environment

is all bad than we withdraw from it. Daydreaming is one of many defense

mechanisms not listed in psychology texts. It's used by children when old

things like Recla don't know how to make them enjoy learning. It's used to

escape if confined in violent environments. If he is stripped of daydreaming

and is being coerced back into an unfriendly environment he'll use words--any

words violently. Sure, with enough words being used violently as a teenager one

then moves them into the concrete realm of actions. I really should remove him

from school altogether. This is not the road I want him traveling on."

"I'll ask Mrs. Recla to not use him as an example in front of the class.

Discipline like that can be humiliating to a boy."

"Damned right it can."

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

"I sometimes do. I like to feel free to let words gush out but I'm careful not

to use them in violent ways."

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

"No, I don't," she said. "Words aren't innately bad." She knew. The big bang

was violent. Movement was violent. She knew too well that any sexual act was a

violent shot at conception wrapped in pleasurable hallucinogenics. Virtually

all music, movies, and other forms of popular culture were the celebration of

sex, a celebration lasting much longer and more indeliably than the act being

celebrated; and so culture was violent. Commerce was definitely strife. It was

a competitive attempt to get the goods in a world of limited resources. A world

with people tripping over each other in their competetive movements flooded

one's senses. Noise was continually interrupting the contemplative assessment

of what one has taken in with the senses or invented in the sacred domain of

the mind. Movement and noise were the real culprits; and yet humans, sociable

creatures of movement, would never indict them. Such beloved villians that

brought them titilation were always allowed to go free. "Again, you seem to

think that violence or love for that matter is in words instead of the love and

hate moving them about. That is ludicrous especially with small children who

experiment with language and haven't learned the appropriateness of words for

various situations. When Nancy Sinatra sang, 'One of these days these boots are

going to walk all over you' the word boot changed--maybe not indeliably but at

least during the year of the popularity of the song. All words are sounds.

Negative and positive connotations to words are constantly changing.

'Conversation' meant sexual intercourse in the seventeenth century and

'intercourse' meant conversation. Haven't you ever been on the bleachers at a

great baseball game and yelled out, "What a fucking great hit."

The vice-principal laughed. "Well, all right, maybe well-meaning men with cans

of beer in their hands might slip on occasion and say such things but again

that is adults. I guess you don't see the problem."

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

"Michael."

"Do you have a middle name?"

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

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

"Frasier."

"Well, Michael Frasier Quest, I apologize that my son said the F word to his

teacher. All right? This was disrespectful and I'll talk with him gently, nose

free and out of the coat rack, and we'll see if we can calmly detach this word

from his lexicon. And I guess you will have a talk with his homeroom teacher

about proper ways to discipline a child that can be reprimanding but

reassuring. Now, do I think that being playful with the English language is a

bad reflection on my son, no I don't. Creative people find creative and

positive ways to use words. Still, as I said, I'll remind him that the use of

this one in particular has its limitations in society...that it can be

offensive in most situations. Children are intelligent creatures. They seek

approval. If you explain the reality to them, they tend to emulate the

instruction."

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

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

"Oh, it isn't really anything. Just some information I found-- merely notes--to

help me know you a little bit before you came here."

"May I look?"

"Well, okay. I guess that would be fine." She could see that his thoughts sank

back with his eyes. She knew that he did not want her to see these notes and so

she wanted to see them with more yearning.

She took out a sheet of paper. She was relieved that there was just one. She

read: Gabriele Isabella Sangfroid — 32 -- graduate of the University of Kansas;

a Master's degree in criminology at Emporia State; a Master's degree in

psychology at Rice University; worked for the state prison system in Kansas;

and although not currently on public assistance such as food stamps and AFDC

gained Federal Emergency Monetary Aid, FEMA, to pay utility expenses in January

of last year; foodstamps once one month in 1990; no criminal record." She

looked at him sternly. "This information is that obtainable?" she asked.

"Between state authorities and schools, it is."

"I don't care," she said indifferently but with a sotto voce of acerbity. "Make

your little notes; type them up; publish them. People are amused by so little."

"It's just a note."

She nodded. "I know that but I'm not noteworthy." Even though she proudly

scorned this bit of voyerism, she again felt relieved that there wasn't more.

She could imagine him having asked her how she supported herself and her child

financially. This question would have forced her to explain how she had

considered all prostitution that every human did in life and had chosen the

physical version to be the most honorable. It would have brought her such

sadistic pleasure to watch him squirm around in iconoclastic ideas the way a

convict had to adapt to prison or a mouth to the wiggling substance of hideous

tasting Jello. Fortunately for both of them, he did not ask. She got up from

her seat thinking how ignorant he was of the earliest essays and arguments

about education. Even centuries ago intellectuals believed that education

should not be indoctrination or to learn a practical skill, but exposure to

important ideas that would help to guide an individual's perceptions. "Well,

Mr. Quest, it's been a pleasure," she said as she shook his hand. "Just

remember that if you soften Recla's approach toward Nathaniel I can't exactly

guarantee what he will say to her at all times but I can guarantee that the

vowels and syllables he uses will be benign. They will be creative and not

hateful. Please talk to this easily offended teacher and remind her not to put

him in with the coats anymore. That is if she wants to not deal with me in any

other way than with a smile on my face and cheese and crackers in my hands."

Chapter Twenty-Two

He had assumed the continuum of excitement in the exotic anomaly of living

together with a man. In the first month of living with Seong Seob he believed

(as much as his ruminations allowed) that a union with a man would be perennial

splendor. Back then he thought it would be more emotionally and intellectually

superior to what his parents felt toward each other. There would be no transfer

of a wife's affections to the children; and not having shared property,

lackadaisical rose, shrub, and tree plantings and the conversations thereof

would not bury him alive in a landslide of the mundane.

One night in particular Sang Huin was bored with love making toward his friend.

Love was yearning for what one lacked and now, with all this time of having

him, he could not sense that wish to possess what he had months earlier

obtained. And yet like all other times they nonetheless climaxed to sleep the

way one might eat some leftover pie to wash a pan.

Somewhere into 2:00 in the morning the ghost of his sister, Jun Jin, eclipsed

over his brain and he woke in the shadow and heat of its passing. He was

thinking of her progressively less all the time. Indeed, she was passing into a

realm no different than nameless, traceless ancestors diffusing out and away

like the molecules that once composed a mist. But still she did not go easily.

If not clasping onto him chokingly as one who, dead, was nonetheless drowning,

she would slam him against the internal walls of his brain for trying to

relegate her into oblivion. She would definitely not go easily.

He felt a headache and imagined Gabriele's as well. He tried to shrug off both

but was only able to dismiss what he imagined hers as being. He looked at the

rising and falling of Seong Seob's chest within the silvery tinted shadows of

twilight that fell through the curtain of their bedroom. The breathing of this

friend was harmonic beauty and, at that moment, he halfway yearned for him.

Evading Gabriele motioning for him in the hallway as if he were supposed to go

into the bathroom to help her vomit, he went into the living room and turned on

the American military station, AFKN. New divisions of soldiers were being sent

to Kuwaiti bases for another confrontation with Iraq. Pyongyang had recently

dismissed nuclear monitors. The troops at the Itaewon base and at the DMZ were

on a heightened alert to North Korean actions. They were the same old

unresolved conflicts. "Feelin' good," said a soldier in military uniform before

a television camera. "Feelin' the adrenaline. Glad I'm here to serve American

interests and the people of South Korea, practicing war games and the like. I

and my unit - all these great men from every division - are ready to go into

action any minute we're requested to fight." Peace, thought Sang Huin, was not

the natural state. Being titillated by the infinite possibilities in sexual

liaisons with strangers and a propensity for violence were both the natural

state.

Sang Huin turned on his computer. He could only jot down Nathaniel's thoughts.

"The car is hot. He feels the burning sensation of his legs against the

upholstery. He likes the heat. It prompts him to not delay by thinking, but

just to move quickly. There is something pleasing in the car passing the world

as wind. It almost makes him feel that he can pass through anything: through

another car, or through the side of an embankment. He does not know where he is

going." Sang Huin stopped. He was being taken downstream with his memories.

They pulled him into them because they were the substance of who he was. As the

founder of philosophy, Thales, stated, everything was made of water.

Sang Huin, this Shawn or Sean depending on how he spelled his nickname, had

returned home from one of his last days of his senior year in high school to

find his sister, Jun Jin, crying on the bottom step of the staircase. Her eyes

were black and swollen and they were as dark as marble. She didn't seem real.

"Who did this to you?" he demanded, although he believed that he knew. He

approached her slowly and solemnly. He pulled the strap of his book bag beyond

his clavicle and allowed it to slide down his arm. He propped the bag against

the side of the first step. It wasted a minute. He wanted to avoid this

situation and a protective, invisible wall was around him. He felt as if he

were watching a movie of quasi- real beings in an unusually personal situation

that was just somewhat believable. He felt that both he and his sister were

unreal just like the unreal situation he was facing. He was reluctant to broach

the subject and he found his voice faltering when he repeated the question for

a second time. The softness of an uncertain voice awakened her from the

withdrawal in a capsule of non-being. She responded for she knew uncertainty

and to hear it in another being coaxed her to come out of her own protective

shell to acknowledge his suffering as well as her own.

"Help me," she said.

"How?" he asked.

"I don't know -- I don't -- just be with me now…that's all," she whispered. She

gave to him what she had: a bit of a morose smile. But, water to cement, his

expressions were hardening from it. She could see this and again crawled up

into herself. She was languid and bent despite her stiffness but her feet were

tilted to the floor and suctioned into the frontal base of the step like an

upside down insect. One of her hands had such a firm tightness as if enmeshed

in the railing and the other one dangled without movement.

There was a child within him who was uncertain, who would placate and comfort

those in distress from the knowledge of distress himself; and thus for a

splendid moment he wavered non-judgmentally. And yet it was his father's tone

he wanted to emulate. Shawn was now the representative of family with its

senior members away at work. He could listen, comfort this stiff battered being

who like him was a puppet being pulled from all directions, fragmenting,

searching for truth in void, and at a loss with radically different thoughts,

feelings, and probable outcomes. And yet there was the tone he started from, a

tone he could not diverge from now that his face was stern, the gift was

despised, and she, this older sister was absconding into herself once again. He

had to stay on one track if he wanted to be a man at all. He reinforced his

earlier words, the words of manhood.

"Whoever did this to you -- I'll kill him. You tell me now!" He blared his

visceral rage. Alien manhood was disgorging out of him like a geyser as it did

in all males when forced to forfeit being human for being men. The compounds

being disgorged were obdurate, callous, and hard.

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

"They'll see! Look at you!"

"I know." She pierced him with being lost. He was lost too but resented having

it being mirrored onto him. It wasn't the model for being a man that he could

pass onto his sons should he have sons, and he felt that he should have sons no

matter what his sexual feelings were.

"What's happened to you?" he asked mildly. "For one year you've been a

stranger. I can guess. I'm always left guessing."

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

"Ill?" He wanted to believe her. Strangely, he wanted to believe in viruses

that blackened eyes. He wanted to believe in physical sickness, which often had

cures. It wasn't a major divergence: sickness meant being overtaken by a virus

that was alien and so with love it could be as unwanted as this. One could be

inundated with pleasure- neurotransmitters like anyone whose consciousness

succumbs to a knockout gas. This was his subconscious association; and yet

consciously he wanted to believe that she was literally ill and despised her

for not being so.

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

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

"No! Mom, Dad, and I will help you to become well…if you're sick." He

emphasized "if you're sick" doubtfully. Then he became aware of the fact that

he was playing a game the way he had always been led around by childish games

when he was a naive and gullible boy. He hated her for making him look foolish

once again. "Go up, June!"

"Sang Huin, if I go to my bedroom I'll slit my wrist. I'll jump from the window

headfirst. I don't know. I'll end it somehow."

"What are you saying?"

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

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

grimaced.

"You're pregnant with a guy that gives you this!" He lifted her lowered face in

his palm. "What's the name of this guy?" he demanded. He knew and it wasn't

just a guy whom she had bred with but the adrenaline of being with one who had

power, the glitter of being with one who had money and influence, the love of a

body, and the friendship with this man who was her boss. She had been seduced

by the demonstration that some male birds give to prospective mates when

dangling worms from their mouths. It was the American dream. He had always

believed that womanhood and prostitution were the same thing. "Release your

hand from the railing."

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

"Who's to say anything about going up. We're going down, down to him. I'll give

you to him since you are his second marriage. He signed it with that thing

growing inside you. Maybe you'll be his wife's servant. You're definitely his

whore. You've seen this home for the last time."

Chapter Twenty-Three

Absent of Christ, this Easter morning began like many of those secular Easters

of earlier years: getting up to fix some scrambled eggs in her bosky bath robe

only to find her attempts at providing a substance of animal protein/vitamin

B12 rejected for the chocolate effigy of a rabbit in the refrigerator, feeding

him more chocolate than he typically got on a given day, and fixing dye in

bowls so that he could color his eggs. She fixed some breakfast for herself. It

was a self-made Eucharist of thickly burnt whole wheat toast, some beer, and a

grapefruit. When he finished dabbing eggs in various dyes and giving to each a

distinct design, she poured out some cereal for him.

He sat down with his usual fidgetiness at having to sit at all and let his

cornflakes get soggy as he picked at them with his spoon. Easters were for him

like walking about mesmerized in a choclatey mist. He was preoccupied with

catching the ethereal on his tongue; and Gabriele's bottle of beer looked more

ethereal than the rabbit. His incessant whining for some of her beer caused her

to doctor a bit of his orange juice in the hope that he would be satisfied if

not happy in the last vestige of pure childhood.

As they consumed the putrid and execrable half-baked scramble of her macabre

sense of a meal they heard church bells ringing superfluously at a distance in

downtown Ithaca. Church bells were the metallic clanging for the assembly of

superstitious tribes. Still, because she always heard more of them each Easter,

they seemed melodious the way simple Christmas music fused with the happiness

of being with family members while decorating a tree. And yet she knew that

once he disregarded eggs, chocolate rabbits, and store-bought sugar cookies for

more selfish pleasures, her Easters would entirely vanish. A child grew out of

pleasures the way he grew out of his britches; and once this happened such

clanging church bells would no longer have anything musical within them. They

would only be noise. She sighed, thinking that all benevolent myths washed away

like the sandcastle he had made for the sun long ago.

It was just a little over a year ago, while pinning damp clothes onto the

clothes line, that he wanted to know the truth as to why his friends were

repudiating Santa Claus. She explained that they were right in what they said;

and that in a world such as this, what one saw was pretty much what one got. It

was a testament in favor of empirical evidence. It was a statement that ideas

were sometimes the copies instead of physical reality being copies of ideas.

She told him, "Reindeer flying from house to house in a population of 6 billion

people in 6 habitable continents just doesn't cut the mustard." Now she

regretted that she had said it.

When they finished eating, she sent him out to play in the streets while she

fornicated with a couple newly arrived clients. Following such extroverted

activities that required all her acting abilities and social skills to be on

target, she sank back into her hallowed, private domain. She drew a few

freelance sketches for a local card company, cleaned the trailer hurriedly, and

then began preparing lunch. It would be little bits of beef in gravy to be put

on toast, which she so aptly and succinctly labeled as "shit on a shingle;" but

for now it was butter in a skillet spewing anew in streams of orangish yellow

sizzlings and sputterings like early components of galaxies swirling out into

open space.

"Over here, Miss Gabriele. Howdy and top of the morning to you!" She looked

toward this strange Southern and Irish sound and saw her son walking back and

forth on stilts before the kitchen window. She looked at this freakishly

elongated creature of ostentatious movements doing its dance. In ways she was

envious of his sense of celebration in the moments, hours, and days of being

but she couldn't help asking herself if this gyrating form had actually come

from her although indeed it had.

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

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

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

"Lasagna."

"Lasagna--always lasagna if not goulash. Well, we tried that last night." She

thought of that mildly humiliating moment when his face had wrinkled and

cringed. The face had crinkled like an old newspaper in the muscles of a palm.

She, his heroine of all these years, had been regarded with disapproval. Sure,

the pasta had been overcooked and the starch had dripped from it but she

couldn't see that this was any more repugnant than a juicy hamburger. His

repugnance had surprised her and his exaggerated expressions had not seemed a

commensurate reaction.

Yesterday the behavior struck her with its impudence. Even more, she was struck

that just by living together as they did, she could feel a twinge of pain so

easily and so preposterously. She was worried then that she was becoming as

ridiculous a human being as everyone else. It was just a twinge of pain lasting

a moment but it was too much. The whole foray into obeying a cookbook was an

unsuccessful attempt at imitating school cuisine which she dumped in the trash

in a choleric gesture lasting no longer than his facial grimace. She took the

plate from him, removed her own as well, and scraped the contents away in five

seconds. It had been a little thing but it was hard for her to forget it now

that she was cooking another meal for him.

"Rick's gonna come."

"Who's that?" she asked as she stirred her concoction while picking at the meat

the way one might kick away dead bodies littering the street." She turned back

to the window but he was no longer in that frame. Already the stilts were

forsaken action and he was going off somewhere else on a bicycle. She could

only see this diminishing figure from behind. She was irritated that so much of

the time he went off without permission and yet she did not feel that she could

chastise him for what she had done when she was his age. Even now she was doing

it: she was dragging him into a shiftless domain of a trailer-whore hoping that

something extraordinarily advante garde would happen to him here. Maybe she had

a moral obligation to take care of one whom she had brought into the world but

his coming from her womb did not mean a claim to him. At least, this was what

she told herself. She could guide him the best that she was able but if he

wanted to jump fifty feet from a top branch of a tree or ride on a bicycle head

first into a bus it was his choice. If he wanted to run off without permission,

she told herself, why should she feel any pang from it; and yet, like a

ridiculous human being, she did.

Phallicly shaking out some Worchestershire sauce into a big black tempest, she

wondered how the sanctity of monogamy existed with the tenet to be fruitful and

multiply. If promiscuity were the natural order, monogamy had to be the

unnatural one: and yet, paradoxically, monogamy had become a revered moral code

of conduct. It was no wonder, she thought to herself, that people were

frustrated and confused. She told herself that there had to be a reason for

monogamy to be such a sacrosanct striving although she was having trouble

figuring out what that reason could be. The tenet existed but within it most

men were given the wink for indiscretions while some women were stoned to death

for them. They were stoned, she theorized, for making other men question

whether or not the children within their own homes contained someone else's

peculiar genetic codes. They were stoned for implanting anxieties in the piece

of mind that man had. They were stoned because of this competitive need

engrained in the human psyche to survive as long as one could and to pass one's

genetic codes to the next generation. The tendentious rationalist further

theorized that if one were to live in a remote rural town he or she would not

make compatability an issue. Knowing that there was no chance of finding anyone

better than the person one was with, such a couple would grow apart, stay

together, and plant trees. She couldn't prove it; and if she could it would be

just one more empty fact. And yet now it was an empty theory. Sometimes it

struck her how this dance with ideas was like awakening to the fact that one

was all alone dancing in an empty room of a lunatic asylum.

The quantum theory of her life -- the forces that drove her away from humanity

(perhaps some inherent German characteristics, although she was but half

German) and the circumstances that drove her back to humanity, the inherent

need to be a social creature and the need for self-preservation within her own

cloistered domain-- were the making of a dilemma; and being in a dilemma (a

soap opera of one's making) was like finding oneself in a beautiful garden of

undiscovered geysers. A dilemma was the air of Thales, the water of Anaximenes,

and the fire of Heraclitus.

These forces of withdrawing and shunning but needing people were like the

peculiar components of atoms. They bounced off each other and made her. At

times the atoms pushed away from society: and then they oscillated back,

compacting her to the world of selfish people with their insatiable

movements...cats with their insatiable movements...insatiable cries.

The cat had once again dragged its prey to the metal steps that went up to the

door of the trailer. She could hear that specific songish whine that it

repeated for the acknowledgement of having made its capture. She looked out the

window and saw her son and another boy standing there listening to these cries.

The cat was wanting their praise for its work. From the cat she realized what

work was: it was feeling self-worth from believing that one had gained

something special in one's movements and demanding that other's acknowledge

these captures for to not do so would relegate them back to the insignificance

of just movement.

All creatures needed some type of work and yet she had none and she wanted

none. Outside of the obligation of motherhood, all that she engaged in were art

and prostitution. Neither one of them were movement in the strictest sense and

so as such they were not work: the former was not action but contemplation and

the latter one involved lying on a bed. In both art and prostitution she did

not need or want praise from others for she had nothing to capture in movement

since she was not moving. Even in motherhood, she was not trying to obtain some

being to fill a void in her life. There was no void. She had been accepted as

an FBI profiler prior to finding herself pregnant. She could have gone to that

or to nothingness; and with the obligations of motherhood she had slowly

chartered a path into nothingness. She did not need anyone telling her that she

was beautiful or that her art work was worthwhile. Matter of fact, she did not

need them at all. Others could come and go from her life through the revolving

door in her castle if anyone had the power to budge it after crossing her moat.

They could come and go and she would inhale and exhale them like respiration so

long as they made no claim on her as she made no claim on them. Breaking

definitions of work, how to make a living, and sociability, she told herself

that she was a macro- human living with mere earthlings she could not fully

identify with. Her mind was a bit scrambled in what she was thinking. Maybe she

was saying that she was pure contemplation--someting like that. She wasn't a

hundred percent sure of any of her ideas. They changed with the moment even

though ideas should be permanent and immutable when the physical world was

neither. Being profound was like driving one's car through potholes for the

hell of it and hoping to not get a flat. Maybe contemplation was movement.

If the cat wanted to follow its instincts, contribute to her pathetic meals,

and gain a bit of praise, she did not mind. She or Nathaniel could praise it;

but this sport of playing with one's eventual meal, however, was loathsome. It

was hard to revere Mother Earth and Father Sky, or nature as a whole, when it

was essentially barbaric. She hated Mouse when it allowed its half dead prey to

escape so that it could recapture it again and slap it around with the stiff

rackets of its paws. She opened the window.

"Who are you?," she asked.

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

"Do you have a last name?"

"Quest," said Rick.

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

"One and the same," said Nathaniel.

"What's with the cat?" she asked

"It got a black bird."

"Not the owl?" She was anxious that it not be the owl that had nested itself in

a wooden flower pot that hung beneath her window.

"No, your owl is okay I guess."

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

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

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

For a few seconds he hesitated fearfully but he pushed himself and let his

temerity ooze out. "I don't want anybody to get sick eating it!" Her eyes

became hard and haughty. She smiled a hateful smile for that son of hers "had

balls." Gabriele shut the window on the opinions and personality formulating

within this son of hers. With the window fully closed, she could still hear

that whining of the cat wanting the payment of praise for having made its

capture. "God," she thought. "Why does it have to play with its prey? If

society is barbaric, the nature of an individual is worse." She wondered where

she could move under the sun without projecting a shadow. She wondered if by

finding a mission in life for the benefit of herself and others in the hope of

making the world a less obscene place she would become more indecent than what

she was. She wondered if she could even learn anything from a world where the

nature of things wasn't exactly evil but was definitely cold, crude,

self-centered, and merciless. She supposed that this question was the

predominant experiment of her life, and it incorporated Nathaniel into it. The

redundancy of the cat's disharmonious songish cries grated her gray matter. She

filled up a bucket with water and threw it onto the steps to cause Mouse to

abscond to happier fields.

As if both were very young boys, she wanted to make playdough for her son and

this other little entity that he had dragged back with him. She yearned to

foster in a small way those who could still mingle within the solitary

wanderings of the mind. From this malleable substance of flour children could

be encouraged to continue as solitary units of the present moment where just

the peculiar aspect of being alive would be enough to totally enthrall them.

And yet she realized that she would be fostering that which was tepid in all of

them for boys grew older and more sociable by the day and she, a maimed and

hurting soul, was sour to the world. This sour quality ricocheted its dour

force on her inner harmony forcing cynical ruminations and recondite

perspectives. The railing, in her own head, about "the prostitution of work"

was merely an excuse for not being more contemplative and productive. The

reality was that she could not reside comfortably in the inner world even if

she had all the time in the world. All that she could do would be to conjure

oil paints and malleable pottery clay if not playdough in the hope of retaining

an inner depth in a child capable of perceiving the entity in a unique way.

Maybe the wish to make him once again interested in playdough was from the

yearning to retain the earliest aspects of him. Through him she could have a

childhood vicariously. After all, with Mother and Father riding off into the

sunset in a tank, the beheading, and the disparaging comments by the Peggyites

in the bootcamp of Peggy's Kansas home, she still needed innocence vicariously.

She rejected the idea of making playdough. "I don't want to confuse the

playdough with the meal," she told herself but really she didn't want to feel

that malaise of one foolish enough to have a 7 and 8 year old do activities

that they had outgrown. Her grandmother still thought that Peggy's thirty year

old children collected coins and she still sent commemorative coins from every

new state that she visited. After so many years Gabriele still felt blessed to

be out of that fray because nothing was worse than trying to feel close to a

bunch of hostile strangers whose only closeness was proximity and blood.

Glancing from the window at these boys competing with each other in a game of

soccer, she was reminded even more of the way things were. Her son was a social

animal now and all meaning would be in others. She tossed a salad.

Unfortunately, as she was reaching for the burning toast she set the bowl on

the bar with a bit too much thrust of the wrist, tossing it everywhere. She

cleaned up her mess, raised the window, and tried to avoid being controlled by

the roaring negative irascibility that strummed discordantly within her.

Restraining herself, she said mildly, "Okay fellows, better put the game aside

and eat this stuff or I'll feed it to the Mouse." Nathaniel picked up his ball

and raced his friend to the door. The meal might have made him procrastinate

were it not for hungers and thoughts of a chocolatey allure.

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

kitchen.

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

Gabriele interjected, "I take it that the 'her' might be in reference to me,

your mother. And as for Mouse, what other name has it ever had? I wouldn't call

it old either if it is still able to hunt." She disliked her son's disparaging

tone towards a member of her family that had been with her longer than he had.

She thought that the words were rather treacherous and scowled; and yet she was

cognizant that gender neutral pronouns akin to a chair and having thrown water

at her furry child weren't outward symbols of love although they might be

equivalent to how she was treated in Peggy's home as one of their family. "Are

you hungry, Rick?" she asked.

"Yes, please."

"Good." She scooped up some lettuce, apple sauce, and cottage cheese and put

them on a plate for him next to the shit on a shingle. "Here, Rick. This'll put

some hair on your chest. "Tell me, with Easter and all, don't you and your

family go to church?"

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

"I see. No mom?"

"Dead."

"Oh." Her interjection was lucid but sympathetic. She thought it the right

combination for matters like this. She admired his strong and unambiguous

declaration. He knew that death was death and for one so young not to fudge

when saying it gave her newly found respect for this widower, Mr. Quest, as

well as his son. Was there really a realm where ideas were the true form? She

was certain that Plato was right in thinking that there was. We were all

imitations of ideas. But she was equally certain that no one returned to the

realm of ideas once they were dead. Death was death. It sometimes occurred to

her that if humans weren't honest about the tenants for the parameters of birth

and death (sex and closure) they would lie about everything else within those

parameters. If she could only get through the factory of life without becoming

a defective misanthrope she knew this to be the highest measurement of success.

She listened to their kid talk for half an hour: some other kid who couldn't

catch baseballs and whom they attributed as the culprit in losing a game; those

who were successes and failures in a broad jump; teachers who reprimanded them;

wretched gossip about poor Little Orphan Annie and her continual penchant for

launching her cannon balls at male genitalia; action packed television movies

they had seen; popular cartoons on lunch boxes; and sardonic complaints from

the deprived Adagio for only getting to watch TV three days per week. She did

find the food jolting around their mouths as they spoke rather amusing; but on

whole it was dreary conversation and it began to give her a headache.

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

She excused herself and retreated into the bedroom while they ran to the

refrigerator to put their ravenous fangs into the carcass of the chocolate

bunny.

In her bedroom she listened for the door of scurrying boys to open and close.

Then she began to smoke her cannabis like Shakespeare and let words in thoughts

rise from the ashes of the mundane. As they rose in a cani-beer cloud with the

levity of laughing gas, she stayed in the bedroom and began to write. She did

not feel sick enough to go to the bathroom this time. She thought that she

should really lock the door of the trailer but she knew that the Nathaniel

would stay outside busy unto himself or with his friend. Less and less would

her company be needed. She wrote: "Dear journal, I've been thinking that the

personal life should be banned. This socializing and lovey-doving just slows

down society's progress. Everywhere, clogging sidewalks, there are these

Cornell University girls holding hands with their guys. Makes me sick. If I go

to a waterfall or a park to paint or pick up some milk at the 7-11 I have to

wave my hand and shoo them away like pesky flies. And you know that each of

them is thinking about what he's thinking about her. So apparent! They are

orbiting around their guys at all moments of the hours. They are everywhere

subservient to chemicals of love in their heads that make them subservient to

his whims; and I want to be the demolition of those ties. I see my vocation as

roller blading down sidewalks through those linked hands while I get to my

destination. I see myself on sidewalks leading to the grocery store. I'm on

roller blades and I'm breaking a few arms and blading a few lovey-dovey hearts.

Sometimes I dream of shouting through a megaphone, 'About relationships and

needing people I caution everyone to be circumspect. Can another be water or

oxygen? Can another one be your sustenance? Stop this delusional MTV thinking!

You are letting one simple neurotransmitter banging against a pleasure receptor

control you. Females, don't be foolish enough to be women! What are you doing

wasting all the minutes of your life trying to get someone to be with you? What

on Earth makes you want to block off your own thoughts this way? A man won't

stay with you forever. They never do and sooner or later you must confront your

own inane foolish selves that have been underdeveloped and unchartered all this

time. Find a deeper awareness than the personal life. Find a vocation that will

allow you to tap into the entity. Tap, tap to not be the whimsical dictates of

a selfish man. Tap and confront one's real aloneness. Be intrepid by aloneness

for from it one finds oneself. It is by being gregarious that you lose yourself

. Befriend your aloneness. To do otherwise makes men think that your highest

duty is to be ridden in like riding on a horse. Tap Tap. Buck the man from

vaginal penetration. Watch him run away like a horse slapped on its side. Plug

into your special talent that links you to the entity and you will never be

lost again. You will be part of the new invincible species.' Still, what can I

do? I'm just a mere me. I mailed some photographs of Adagio to Peggy and her

gang. Sort of appearance only. Decided it was best to keep up their interest in

him. Promised that someday they would not only see him but keep him for a

while. Don't know why -- True, I don't like them despite that they are his his

godparents and all--but sometimes the idea of a hiatus from this Mommy game is

a bit tempting. I could dump him on them. Antarctica -- Antarctica. It's still

in my dreams --"

"What about me? Willya' take me with you when you go off to the seventh

continent?" The voice was that of Smokey-The-Bear in the "Don't start forest

fires" advertisements.

"Up here, youn' lady."

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

"No, youn' lady, I'm not. He's just a distant cousin." Gabriele looked at the

foot long stuffed polar bear sitting on a man's handkerchief on a shelf above

the dresser. She had bought him one time when she went to Buffalo, New York.

"Poor Gabey, nobody loves ya' 'cause ya' don't love 'em. Going to restaurants

all alone isn't no fun. Parks alone, waterfalls and painting with your paint

brush, even fornicating alone. Even when you are with people you are separate.

Poor Gabey." Suddenly the polar bear began to change into the higher authority.

"Gabriele, it is me" said the higher authority. " Look at yourself, held

together by the stitching of hate-the plastic-eyed polar bear with the stiff

arms that the factory of the human race mutantly created -- it will be you who

shall feel the walls of artificial fur ripped from its threads, and your

stuffing falling out. For a little beer on top of four joints makes a person

see the unsealed human fragments that had been smoothed over in time. Come on

Gabriele, the gal who still chews tobacco and spits it into an empty beer

can...the gal with the deep dark-ocean eyes...the gal bereft of what the normal

means, grip that other beer bottle now. Together with the joints, this is the

only medicine devised to rebreak the strangely concocted pieces that have been

glued into the broken you. Drink and smoke! Become fragmented again with the

hope that you will heal and be normal. A 17 year old girl goes to eat a meal in

her boyfriend's home and a wife to her in-laws. How is it that such simple

pleasures continually elude you? How is it that you have made such cynical and

erroneous views of the world?" No sooner had her higher authority spoken then

Gabriele heard a skid of a fast moving car suddenly stop and a child scream.

The polar bear and the handkerchief with the initials embroidered on it tumbled

from the shelf. Gabriele quickly stabbed the marijuana to its ashtray of death

and flew out the door.

"Who is this mother fucker?" she mumbled to herself. Then she knew. Here was

MF, the vice principal of her son, her former client, shouted at hysterically

by the mother of the dead little girl. Gabriele held the woman who was deranged

in bereavement and sunk into gravel and dust of the trailer park. She was her

bulwark.

"So, he will be her lover -- this MF?" scoffed Saeng Seob in their bed upon

hearing his last chapter.

Sang Huin regretted having begrudgingly read him this chapter. He only read

parts of the manuscript when asked to do so. Seong Seob could only understand

the superficial aspects of the story at best and he only asked to hear those

bits of it read out when Sang Huin seemed to preoccupied with writing it. Sang

Huin supposed it gave them something in common. "Maybe. I don't know, really,"

he said evasively. He removed his computer to a table that was adjacent to the

bed and picked up a magazine. His eyes began to peruse the photographs of male

models in Gentleman's Quarterly who if known and involved in his life would

pull him out of his numb abyss of insipid days into the vibrancy of desire in

nightly embraces.

"And become pregnant?"

"I don't think so. I don't know at this point." He yawned. "I wouldn't know

what to do with that. I need some believable drama in it." And yet he felt that

there was no drama within his own life. Giving private lessons to children he

didn't particularly care for, his days were missionless clutter that exhausted

what little extroverted characteristics were within him; and coming home to

Seong Seob with a lack of sexual variety in that domain was flattening him in

the malaise of inordinate boredom. He was certain that there was no drama in

his life; and yet paradoxically he knew that drama was inherent even in rocks

that weathered away in time. Drama was change and it was in all things. If

drama were in the rocks, it too was there in a simple life. His was laden in

resentment over the idea of returning home to this blind lover who couldn't see

that the two of them living together was inhibiting the progress of his

manuscript. "Any ideas," he asked.

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

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

"It's not unbelievable. It happened?"

"Huh?"

"To me. Postpartum depression. I'm told that a few weeks after my brother was

born my mother became depressed. She wouldn't eat very much. She wouldn't leave

her room except to go to the temple. One day she wanted to go to the temple and

she couldn't find my brother's shoes. When the servants couldn't find them

either, she dismissed the servants. She told them to not come back. When they

were gone she made a bath for my brother and drowned him. My family says that

maybe I fought back and it was too much trouble for her in the bathtub. Anyhow,

she decided to drive me to an old contaminated well on my grandmother's estate,

pried the boards loose that covered what was left of it, and dumped me in.

There wasn't much water in it so I didn't drown, but I lost my eyesight. " Sang

Huin felt an empathy as deep as the gods while he listened to the wind howling

through the crack of the window. It was a barely audible murmuring of ineffable

pain. It was palaver but it called to him somehow, pushing him from his malaise

to the malaise of it all.

Chapter Twenty-Four

She could guess that the quick entrance into the trailer park, if it were such,

was a reaction to her, the nefarious whore, whom he had ridden in sync to a

female's need for pleasure many years earlier. Maybe as an afterthought to the

decision of allowing his son to go off with Nathaniel, Rick's father recognized

the address his son had gone to. If that were the case she supposed that she

was in some way culpable for him driving quickly, if it were indeed done

quickly, to remove his son. The inescapable fact zipped her up into its body

bag: the removal had lead to the neighbor girl's ill fate and early demise.

She wasn't sure who was to blame. Perhaps it was fate itself. She parsed this

concept of fate. She asked herself what it was and it seemed to her that in

most situations it was the selfishness of myriad individuals who, together at a

convergence, unintentionally brought about another person's harm. She rued over

the unfairness of those who thrived for a time and those who seemed bound to

perish from their inception. She could become engrossed in her own

quasi-pleasant little world and not think about the bigger picture. By

comparison to many others suffering from starvation, disease, war, and menial

labor her life was that of a contumacious child who refused to leave the

amusement park for fear of no longer having such a dizzy perspective of it all.

She could become a bit religious (anything from a witch to a Christian) and

further the vertigo. Within the lotusland of America, so removed from intense

pain and hunger, she could hide to have a brighter perspective where some god

or another was still keeping the whole creation, if not each and every

individual, safely in his pocket. She did not, however, want self-deception. As

much as she was able to do so, she wanted to know reality. Justice was equity

but equity was not in the natural order and so the natural order was unjust.

What justice there was existed as the creation of man; and so, in ways, society

was more righteous than the natural order.

A day before the funeral she could sense a malaise so palpable it seemed to

flatten her under its foot like a bug. While her Adagio was at school (if he

were indeed hers, for she doubted the tenet of people belonging to each other

as it was action and clutter of small earthly creatures who needed to fill

their time and the vaccum of their minds no differently than her son and this

Rick when they had played with a soccer ball, plastic and air, to gain a

connection that bypassed one's lonely domain), she went into the bathroom. She

stared at the mountain of his and her clothing beside the washer, which she had

crowded into the stall of her shower. The molecules of their stink seemed to

bang against each other in the musical vibrations of Eric Satie's musical

composition, Gymnopedies; and with the dead heap of morose and musical laundry,

her lethargy, and the horror of being a domesticated woman as all womanly

slaves since the beginning of time, she couldn't bring herself to do the

laundry.

She told herself that she was indeed a silly woman. Nine years ago she had

entertained herself in this mental challenge of being desired by one whose

orientation was not so inclined to women, spun herself in a specious illusion

of intimacy when, in youth, sex was such a novel and believable medium of

intimacy, and given birth in the belief that aborting an embryo was barbaric.

Now she was struck by how this connection that she brought into the world would

be an ongoing frittering away of her days. She cachinnated at her absurdity,

which caused Mouse to jump on top of the washer and stare at this mad woman

inquisitively. "Hi there, Mouse. Haven't you ever seen a woman laugh while

doing the laundry before? You really must get a life." She chuckled at the cat.

She told herself that there were too many people in her life when really there

was just one. She told herself that contrary to her precept that people should

be breathed in and out she was cluttering up her life with them although really

a neatly isolated and Antarctic existence would have given her nothing to

contemplate. Still, she again entertained the idea of dumping her son at

Peggy's for he had become too indespensable to her life and this was a deep

vulnerability. Still the quandary persisted: there was no way that she could

allow him to be damaged by the disparaging animadversion of a family no

different than a "boot camp" or military training camp. The internecine war

games in this so called family of which she had extricated herself brought most

damage onto outsiders like herself and she did not want to perpetuate it to the

next generation.

Gabriele heard a thump in her mailbox. She received a letter telling her that

she was terminated from the local greeting card company. She rummaged though

her sketches and found one of her impish ones, less pertaining to social

etiquette, missing from the rest. She must have mailed it in by mistake. She

guessed that this was similar to what she might have done to be ignored by

Hallmark. With Hallmark she wasn't quite sure what she had done but this local

greeting cards publishing house was clearly piqued. Did the subconscious, like

an empress dowager, make its maneuvers on conscious reality behind the scenes?

She had played such games for so long. It was no great wonder they had

dismissed her. Only an idiot would have been surprised by this playing with the

fates. She also realized that she could not prostitute herself more in her

other occupation to rectify the lack of incoming finances. Sanity only allotted

so much prostitution per week. "Oh, well," she thought. "Maybe I could sell my

paintings."

The thought of herself as an artist the way some might proclaim the title as a

full summation of themselves was never something that Gabriele did. She could

admit, "I paint" to herself. This was an obvious fact, but she never went

beyond that. This added relevance of a bleak economic situation, however, made

her say, "I could possibly be an artist."

Evading the menace of time consuming laundry, she sat in front of her canvas

but found herself thinking about the neighbor woman and her deceased child.

That woman would have pillaged through hell for the opportunity to wash clothes

for her daughter. Gabriele felt ashamed of herself for groaning about domestic

chores and she felt deep empathy for her neighbor. She went to the grocery

store and then brought over a packaged basket of fruit for the grieving mother.

She knocked and the woman opened the door slightly.

"What?" she murmered numbly.

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

"They let him go, you know."

"Quest?"

She took the basket. "More food. People always give food, energy." She laughed

bitterly. "Yes, Quest, and I don't know why."

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

"It doesn't matter. Nothing matters now. If I'm alone for a minute I keep

hearing her everywhere I go but there-there just isn't anything. It doesn't

seem real. I don't seem real. I make movements but it doesn't seem like me. I'm

talking to you now but it seems like there is somebody else talking who isn't

me. You aren't you either. I'm just watching you like from a distant seat at a

movie theatre or something is watching that isn't me. "

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

it takes."

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

"I don't. I just imagine it is," Gabriele said softly. She did not want what

she knew to intrude. She just wanted to listen.

"The police say nobody saw him when he entered the trailer park. Nobody knows

if he was speeding. According to the police, Sally ran in front of him to get a

ball some boys threw to her." Gabriele couldn't imagine her boy wanting to play

with a girl. Then a cold feeling shot through her body: what if her son had

thrown the ball at the moment that the car was coming into the trailer park in

the hope that the girl would run after it and get killed. "What if this is a

reaction to Little Orphan Annie?" she thought. The idea was too chimerical and

grotesque to take seriously. She dismissed it but the cold still streaked

through her body.

"Have you had breakfast? I know it is the same food idea. It is an empty

gesture in an empty world. Would you like for me to stay with you for a while

and help you get something to eat - I'd stay for as long as you'd like."

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

"Sure, but take this" said Gabriele. She wrote down her telephone number on a

sheet of paper that she pulled out of a pocket. "Call me anytime, any hour, if

you need a listener."

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

Gabriele went back to bed. The sun dominated through the covering of the

drapes. She took her quilt and draped it from the curtain rod. She could not

see the point in anything other than sleep. The experience of the senselessness

of the girl's death had just fused into other elements of the void and stunted

her. If her son were here and continued to be absolutely unaffected by what had

occured she would have been tempted to allow him to bring in orange juice and

burnt poptarts to show sympathy for herself who was a woman in a philosophic

void. She might have done this despite knowing that he would never be empathic

to such philosophic quandaries. He was a product of motion and he hadn't

experienced enough of life to understand something like this. Like now, each

time when the void descended upon her she told herself that she could not fight

it off anymore than one could avoid inclement weather. She would just have to

ride through the fog that permeated it all. She let the void devour her energy,

and then she fell into the sleep that the Ancient Egyptians thought of as the

death of the soul. When the quilt fell from the curtain rod she woke up to a

tepid rejuvenation.

She got up to fix herself something to eat. The cat was on the table eating the

left-over pancakes that she had fixed for her son before he went off to school.

Instead of shaking the cat in the air, making it appear to be in the midst of

convulsions, she just sat down and watched it eat. Then she tossed the dirty

plates into the sink--a function that was not habitual to her, but one that she

didn't mind taking on this day when washing them would add to her mental void.

She didn't have him go into school for any part of the day even though the

funeral wouldn't take place until 5:00. Instead, long before sunrise she loaded

up kid and canvases into her old car. Then they began a long ride that would

take them briefly into Syracuse, into Albany, and then back to Ithaca in a

circuitious meandering of interstates and main streets. She had that pivotal

expectation that if she were able to find the addresses of art galleries the

curators there would guide her toward various amateur art fairs so that she

could sell her work. There was, however, that less realistic hope that they

would have customers who might like the "sui generis" of a Gabriele Sangfroid

enough to ferret out the libertine creator from obscurity with this needed

substance of money. For their purchases such members of the apparatchik would

find a link back to originality and freedom that would assuage their banal and

stressful existences.

However, in his untoward behavior characterized by argumentative

insubordination about getting in either the car or the school bus, restless

climbing over the front seat within the first 15 minutes into the ride, being

told to go to a theme park every ten minutes, and claims of car sickness, she

could not feel that anything auspicious would happen to her.

"I don't know why you dragged me here with you," he complained early into the

morning when they were approaching the city limits of Syracuse.

"Drag, my dear, would be to tie you to the back of the car and pull you on that

sweet behind of yours." She gave a wry but playful smile. "Would you like

that?"

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

She remembered the time that she had taken him to a lake along the Addrionick

Mountains to bring to him the entity, the best that she could, since jumping

into leaves had been construed as child's play. From a restricted area used for

paddle boats and used by swimmers they had rowed along and watched sailboats

and water skiers within a bloody orange sunset. She added,"Yes, but with no

water or skis--only hard pavement worse than being throttled by a vice

principal."

"Mr. Quest?" he asked.

She did not say anything. She no longer spoke of him. The police had not

charged him with manslaughter and as far as she knew, the boys had lost their

ball, the girl had gone after it, and MF had just turned into the trailer park

at a normal speed. She had tried several times to engage her son about his

feelings and experience being present at the girl's death and yet then and now

he did not seem particularly bothered by it. He never said anything depicting

blame and confusion over Mr. Quest's role in the tragic incident.

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

"Hmm," she said as she pulled out a bag of chocolate from her bookbag. In most

occasions she was so conspicuously purseless."Here, have some chocolate and

peanut butter things and eat them in the back seat-and be careful that you

don't drop part of one and sit on it. I don't want that stuff squashed into the

vinyl , or worse, to have to scrub it out of your clothes."

"You need a new car like Chuck's mom. She rides around in a shinny big red van

and not like this stinky old thing."

"That ostentatious woman again. Well, I'm delighted for her. I guess if her van

is not stinky she must have a son who is neat and doesn't smash chocolate and

peanut butter things into the vinyl."

"What is stinkiness?"

"What is stinkiness? I guess it's the decomposition of matter, molecules

dancing around in the air or beginning to come apart like the chocolate in

one's mouth. Chocolate, however, isn't stinky. Maybe the decomposition of

things falling apart and going back to elements like hydrogen, oxygen, and

carbon can either stink or be rather fragrant"

"Why isn't the chocolate stinky?"

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

thing."

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

from here."

"To each his own," she retorted.

"Why do they smell so bad."

"So that you won't eat them."

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

trash."

"No, you'd know better than that because you'd find yourself in the trash.We're

searching for buyers of these paintings so that way we won't offend that dainty

little princess nose of yours."

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

She smiled. She liked the bantering especially at times like this when it

wasn't a distraction from a higher contemplation but a distraction from a

monotonous one. The minutes went by and soon they were in Syracuse. She

presented some of her less preferred paintings and three of them were taken on

consignment. In Albany two of her best paintings were offered a showing this

way; but as she was insisting on cash, they aquiesced to a paltry pittance of

$300.00, which she, in her ignorance, was delighted to gain. She vowed to

attempt Rochester and New York City at a later date. After eating some

vegeburgers and hamburgers from a fast food restaurant, they returned to Ithaca

for the funeral.

During the funeral she saw that sadness had flattened over the bagginess of

MF's sleepless face. She felt sorry for him. She realized that he was a

sympathetic character who could not be made into the abhorred culprit. It

occured to her that the four of them were a microcosm of the human family-each

unwittingly doing its small part in the harm of others and each insecurely

cuddling in the blanket of themselves where they might dodge feelings of

compunction. They would not be alone: there too Little Orphan Annie, the

company of executives in charge of manufacturing dodge balls, and the males who

had harmed the poor girl, might also abscond.

Chapter Twenty-five

A couple years passed of being no one's whore. She just painted and studied

toward a Master's degree in art history, passively delegating the obstructive

clutter of motherhood and all other clutter to her assistant. Her work was

resplendent to few; and yet within the limited coterie of art enthusiasts and

modern art collectors searching for potential investments, she was a success.

They made her so for having one of her paintings on a wall was a portal out of

the mundane.

She also believed that she had succeeded. To her, success was measured inwardly

but bolstered by things obtained with the purchasing power of money such as her

recently built home within an Albany suburb, a new van, and choosing to be

bedizen in some expensive jewelry that she wore repeatedly. More importantly,

she was bolstered by her freedom. She was now one of those rare birds under the

sun, free to explore her ethereal ideas and whims without any major economic

considerations. She was one of those rare birds left alone to grow fully within

herself.

Apart from beautifying herself unnaturally in the concrete of makeup and

displaying feigned smiles, which were done for potential art buyers and

Gabriele aficionados, no demands were put on her that she didn't choose to

place on herself. The house, the coruscating bits of rock that sometimes

dangled from ears and neck, and her new van would have meant little to her if

it weren't for how strangely unfettered this success was. It was exempt from

all forms of prostitution and she was C.E.O. of only herself. This C.E.O. had

no behemoth bureaucratic agency to feed, tame, and prod to a gallop at all

hours. She did not have to give her every conscious thought to it and every

unconscious thought trying to find some aspect of herself outside of the

dinosaur she rode upon and whose domineering presence enervated her when she

tried to control it. Instead, her success was full license to run around in the

thickets of herself. She was in that other garden of the barefoot child; and

she had arrived there on a magic carpet to which few adults could shrink and

reposition their limbs to sit comfortably enough to guide the flimsy rug

through the windy caprice of ideas.

No longer clinging to poverty as the savior of oneself from prostitution, she

was able to relinquish domestic womanly servitude by this appointee, Hispanic

Betty, as her housekeeper, cook, and office worker. From this faithful, illegal

worker she was able to relinquish soiled underwear, stubborn grass stained

pants, meals she was never able to master, buying multi-colored tissue paper

for decorating a Valentine's day box, exhorting him to do his homework, and a

host of trivial matters on a given day. Because of Hispanic Betty, who was ripe

for servitude no less than a virgin for plucking, she could dispense with such

trivial clutter. She could spend her time on the meditation of the entity,

which always gave her tokens of appreciation in the form of unique perspectives

concerning her world. In such a figurative and literal garden where she painted

behind her house, she was aided by the verdant colors of the yard half the year

and the snow and holly during the other half, the mellifluous smells of clean

cold air of winter or of neighbors burning grass or leaves, the winsome blowing

of the limbs of her trees, and the dulcet sounds of birds making their homes

within them.

With such an idyllic life she should have had headaches less frequently and yet

they came with more regularity and intensity, smacking her forehead from within

and dredging what was once pure and cloistered waters. With a temperature,

black spots filming over her vision, and the need to vomit on and off for a

period of hours, each time she experienced a migraine she would be thrust into

human vulnerabilities and find herself extremely perplexed as to why she should

be so diminished.

The previous day, February 12th, every small movement was exacting and she was

forced to go to the drugstore instead of a pot dealer's home since this inward

insurrection was so great. She suggested that Hispanic Betty drive her to the

doctor. When the woman kept trying to insert the key in the same wrong position

within the ignition and at last primed a bit of gas into the icy cold vehicle

with the accelerator instead of pumping on the brake peddle, she still had no

confidence in her. Lacking this confidence, they switched to a taxi. Throughout

that day she was vertiginous and lost, not knowing how to center herself or

what to center herself around. The day had been like walking around in an

eye-stinging blizzard.

Now it was February 13th and Gabriele was outside drawing the creatures of love

depicted by Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium: the hubris of whole beings that

Zeus was ready to slice in half and those already cut and diminished

desperately searching for their "better halves." She cynically snubbed love as

hungers for sex and that personal domain of wanting to love and be loved, which

were more hungers and more neediness. Then two things dawned on her. They were

opposing ideas that refused to be irrelevant. They refused to be vanquished

from the kingdom. They refused to stand outside begging like a Buddhist

mendicant at 6:00 a.m. in Laos. They were the making of a more self- actualized

Gabriele. She realized that there was great beauty in two people caring about

each other for it was nature's plan to use selfish hungers to create that

vulnerable spot within the human psyche that needed consistency and permanence

among other things; and that she too yearned for a studly apparition who would

touch her and by his touch make her real. She felt so empty within these past

two years of celibacy. There were days in which she felt that her pristine

intellectualism was an absolutely drab prison cell. If someone were to touch

her on her shoulder--just a simple human touch--she would not be wallowing in

the sludge of her thoughts. She would not be masticating them like a worm.

Taking a break on the porch, she began reading one of her textbooks but soon

she fell asleep because of the decongestant she had taken earlier for a cold.

For a minute she dreamed that the makeup on her face was an oddly pleasant

sensation like baby powder on an infant's buttocks and then the powder began to

constrict her face into feigned smiles. She ran into the kitchen and grabbed a

scouring pad to abrade away the stiffness before it all began to make her face

crack. When she woke up she saw the mail truck drive away. Then the door opened

and a woman stepped out with a stack of envelopes in her hands.

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

"Aqui esta, senora."

"Anything important?"

"No se nada acerca de esta asunta. I don't know nothing about it. I just get

it. Don't look at it." Gabriele didn't care what the woman purportedly hadn't

done. It seemed to her that anyone who did a family's laundry had to develop

some curiosity about them and she thought it would be rather unnatural to not

scan the addresses on envelopes. It irritated her that the woman was so

circumspect if not outright leery; and yet she was an illegal worker who needed

a job.

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

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

"Swell," said Gabriele indifferently as she perused each envelope. She mumbled

aloud. "Ah, not unexpected. A Valentine's card from Rita Lily and one for

Adagio from Peggy. Not unexpected there either." She sighed.

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

hacer."

"De acuerdo," said Gabriele and she watched the busy bee fly away from her cold

Antarctic garden. Given her new awareness that claiming others in a mutable

world was an innate human instinct whereas breathing people in and out of one's

life was just a defensive anchor keeping one from being carried away by an

instinctive reality to cling to someone, she felt regret that she hadn't taken

an interest in her son's construction of a Valentine's day box. She told

herself that that this year might be his last year of actually believing that

the world was full of beautiful cards and sentiment exchanged with one's peers.

She went inside to write letters of contrived gratitude to Rita/Lily and Peggy

the way her son and his classmates made Valentine's Day cards for a world of

virtual strangers. It wasn't totally contrived. She needed others. She loved

others.

Book Three: Alone

"No good can come from chilling tears. This is the fate the gods have spun

for poor mortal men, that we should live in misery, but they themselves have

no sorrows. There are two jars standing on Zeus' floor which hold the gifts

he gives us: one holds evils, the other blessings. When Zeus who delights in

thunder mixes his gifts to a man, he meets now with evil, and now with good.

But when Zeus gives from the jar of misery only, he brings a man to

degradation, and vile starvation drives him over the holy earth" --Iliad

Chapter Twenty-six

A colonial sofa with an arched wooden back; the dark drapes absorbing the light

that would have saturated the living room; Ravel's Bolero playing lightly from

her CD; and a fly above vher face...cacooning there, she could only focus on

little monads of reality at a time: now it was pulling back the hair out of the

face and toward her pillowed head; comparing her thoughts to the over-shuffling

of Tarot cards flying off in all directions, the choping of meat at a butcher's

shop, or the static of television stations intruding into each other; and the

recent and recurrent memory of MF (visibly older but obviously easily

recognizable when she saw him in the audience while making her address from the

podium). For ten or eleven hours now there was pain and the slow scattering of

her thoughts was as a child on a beach with a fist full of sand who discovers

his souvenir has been ebbing out of the cracks between his fingers.

She could not shoo away the pesty fly that was as pesty as Mormon flies (those

sententious dragon fly missionaries who had knocked on her door earlier that

week--Nauvoo, Illinois, Mormon flies so succulent and "so fuckable," whom she

had reluctantly rejected from her door). The migraine was intense and she could

only lay there in her tomb. Her sterile thoughts were filth. Her harmonic bliss

in aloneness was, in illness, devestating and lonely as one suffering in

solitary confinement. Within her sickness earlier suppositions about the world

discomfited her. They mutated into something less than worms and hid themselves

in her gray matter.

Powerless--she who years earlier had been an avid racketball player,

criminology and psychology scholar, and a forger of a new destiny, an

individual who had made a success by embellishing her inner self in marketable

products on canvas--here she was lying on a sofa unable to even successfully

shoo away a fly. The weak thing she had become, she tried to suck it into her

mouth. She tried to use the human mouth as a vaccum cleaner as this fly

incessantly tried to land on the contours of her face. She put a hand over her

face and turned on her side. "Come away with me!" she imagined MF as saying.

"Come away with me, the two of us out of this pase place!" And again, as

throughout her illness, the thought of him was as a light beyond the tunnel.

She did not know the reason for it. She had only spoken to him once beyond the

service she had initially given to the widower in her previous profession. They

hadn't spoken at the funeral. Even though she could have met him again through

parent teacher conferences she had delegated these sessions to Hispanic Betty.

The previous night had been an extroverted evening: a reception at a temporary

art exhibition where many of her works were on display and then a speech she

gave to art students, faculty, and others interested in her art at a university

in Albany. She told them that successful art could be a natural propensity or

from just learning to paint when not having a natural propensity for it at all

(usually something in between) + dispensing with any conventions that stifled

an unbiased and uninhibited desire to play in ideas and see the wonder of

everything anew. She supported her premise with quotations from Emerson,

Thoreau, and myriad artists. It was a typical speech presented and specifically

catered to those who yearned to hear motifs stressing independence even if it

bordered on the absurd. To her the self should be married and revered but

seeking uniqueness in a forest like a post Taoist or post Transcendentalist was

to seek it from an external force. Still such was her audience and she would

prostitute herself to them a little bit.

As she was listening to Ravel's "Pavane pour une Infante Defunte" she heard the

doorbell. She knew that she could not get up without the most trying effort so,

staring at the fire alarm some seconds, she finally raised herself briefly. She

pushed the "test" button and continued to press it for a long moment of a

sonorous outcry. Was her door unlocked? She hoped it was and wasn't. She heard

a door open and footsteps. She returned to the sofa. She wondered if it might

be a bill collector, a life insurance salesman, or a well endowed and handsome

rapist. A whole host of other possibilities entered her head. She told herself

that whoever it was, thief or saint, if this person weren't scared away by the

fire alarm, she would demand that he or she go buy her some asprin. Surely it

wasn't Lily. She hadn't spoken to her for so long and she would never be able

to figure out how to get to this city let alone her home. Was that it? Had she

used Rita/Lily to fulfill her limited social requirements and then dumped her,

figuratively, on the side of the freeway linking to Albany? Had she forgotten

about her when there were other people in her life? Were all humans this way?

Was there no such thing as caring? She heard further steps pursue the top

story...or was she imagining them? She wanted to push the fire alarm again--it

didn't make sense but in her pained mind the sound of the fire alarm would make

robbers leave and Zulu witch doctors with instantaneous and magical remedies

appear. She did not, however, have the energy and that fly kept buzzing around

her ears. She kept swatting it but missing it each time. The footsteps were

those of a man's. She heard boot soles clunking hurriedly up the stairs under

her miniature chandalier. Were they Michael's footsteps? No, surely not and yet

she hoped they were all the same. There before her, in leather boots,was

Hispanic Betty.

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

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

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