"Oh, all right. Just trying to get your attention." She had to muster up all

her strength to make her ideas cohesive and sensible. She smiled with the full

manipulation of her white fangs. "Please go after some asprin. I swear I can't

take much more of this without some relief. El dolor esta desmasiado. Por favor

compreme unos asprina a la 7-11 convenience tienda." She closed her eyes. Words

were arduous feats.

"Esta usted enferma otra vez?"

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

"Purse. La otra noche perdi mi monedero."

"Yeah, I saw your purse, tu bolsa upstairs--arriba la escalera; but run to the

convenience store or the grocery store for the asprin-- whatever is quickest.

Rapidamente!"

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

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

floja-lazy."

"I'm not none floja, please Miss. I'm your good illegal trabajadora. Don't

throw me in the streets."

Gabriele again thought of having figuratively tossed the carcass of Rita/Lily

into the thickets of weeds on the embankment."Please, Hispanic Betty, as one of

our family go out to get it and then you can have the day off hasta cinco por

la tarde."

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

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

After she took the asprin she got some relief. She had Hispanic Betty get

Nathaniel ready for summer school and then she sent him off in a taxi herself.

When both were gone she ate a little something. When she recovered more of her

strength her mind was still very groggy and painting was far removed from the

agenda of the day. Since there was no painting there was no agenda and so she

began to clean the house. Inaction, she thought, might lead to a void. A void

in the proper state of mind could lead a strong person to philosophic

discoveries and a strengthening of one's fortitude; but in weakness a void

required energy to escape, and so it was best to keep busy. She saw that a

string of cobwebs was dangling from one of the elements of the chandalier. She

looked at it, and not knowing how to get up there she decided that this was not

a good place to start on a day when one happened to be sick; and so she went

into Nathaniel's room.

In the room she dusted everything from the little volkswagon that ran on D

batteries to the breeches of the stuffed animal, Pluto. When she opened one of

his desk drawers she discovered a child's book called "Heroes of the Bible." It

was published by the Latter Day Saints. She wondered whether these dragon flies

were so insecure that they even needed children to validate the stories they

projected into their minds. Religious minds not only projected such stories

onto all the walls of their brains but cast themselves as more Disney

characters into this metaphysical film within the most salient roles. God that

destroyed humanity in the flood so that something "good" might generate from

it; Abraham who was ready to sacrifice his son to any arbitrary and barbaric

whim that this godly tyrant entertained--the Bible was camauflaged brutality as

was this book that catalogued Joseph to Joseph Smith. Plato would call it more

misrepresentation of the gods and yet she couldn't call it libel, slander, or

misrepresentation if there was no god and nothing to misrepresent. She took a

break and had some bread and grape juice like one more cannibal eating Jesus'

2000 year old body and drinking the virulent tonic of his 2000 year old blood.

She resented the Mormon flies for having given her son that book and yet she

knew that sometimes people could be positively influenced by something at a

certain stage that years later would be beneath them.

She told herself that since Hispanic Betty would be back at 5:00 she could

spend the day recuperating in a park. She would not be missed. When he needed

his bicycle fixed it was Hispanic Betty whom he turned to. Just the other

evening she saw him drag a tent out of the garage. She asked if she could help

him. "Hispanic'll do it," he said.

"Well, I'm rather good at such things--repelling, camping, and you name it as

long as its outside the house."

"S'not an issue. She's good at everything. You're not needed," he said and the

words resonated deep into the far reaches of herself where she remembered Peggy

saying, "They don't want you so they pawned you here so quit blubbering for

them. I opened our door to you; fought with my husband when I didn't want you

here either--and look what you did to me. Look again! Pen marks on this

upholstery.You ruined the sofa--a two hundred year old piece of furniture

because you don't have sense enough to take pens out of your pants." She

remembered all those years where she was this pariah absconding into her room.

She remembered this second war where they laughed and ridiculed her every move

and how Peggy never acknowledged it was happening. She remembered how Peggy's

husband had one day come to her and tried to undress her and that she bit him

which invited his fullest hatred of her. From that day onward there wasn't a

comfortable moment. Even at Christmas this "uncle" excoriated her for sitting

with the rest. She had to sit in a corner of the room and hide in books and

distant places. She wanted to tell Peggy about how he had drooled over her with

his wet slobbering eyes and then tried to undress her, the biting, and how the

biting had led to more contempt. But she was wise. She knew that there was no

use broaching this subject any more than shedding any feelings over the

decapitation of the Turk. She was all alone in the world and the choices were

to kill herself or to become immune to others and not let them affect her and

she chose the latter path.

At the park she swam for a short time in the swimming pool. Gleaming studfish

of the Spandex species were everywhere and their gleaming bodies magically

invoked within her sexual feelings--each in his own way. Then she sat along a

lake watching row boats stir the waters that were turned to silver in the

sunlight and joggers running on a road that was to her right. Her womanly

instincts wondered what life would be like to be involved with one of such

studly apparitions. She disregarded such lowly inclinations by walking around

the park. She followed loud pop music and then with a hundred others she did

some aerobics according to the movements of the teacher on his wooden platform

and then, exhausted, she lay in the shade of the trees. She became aware of

feathery leaves, angular leaves, paddle shaped leaves and the fronds of palms

and ferns. She briefly fell asleep and when she awoke those leaves had become a

silhouette. She felt blessed to be in such beautiful variety and the ostensible

plan that went into it, or at any rate, "one hell of a variety from

adaptation"; and this healed and restored her. As she watched runners also fade

into silhouettes she yearned for the mystery of their movement. She wanted to

run to foreign countries and escape this God sanctioned superpower that school

children were brainwashed into believing as better than all other countires.

She wanted to peak inside these foreign lands and say "Hi" to its denizens.

She went into a bathroom in a McDonald's restaurant and changed into more

formal clothes. Then she went shopping at Sax. The outlandish prices to the

clothing of super rich snobs appealed to her, as it had before, but when she

got back to her car she was reminded that they were just foder for covering

nakedness.

By chance she saw that a travel agency was still open and she stepped into it.

Photographs of Peru, Mexico, Egypt, Italy, and China graced her. Where would

she go? Should she take her son with her as part of his education? No, she told

herself. This would be a contemplative retreat.

A week later she went from New York to San Fransisco; San Fransisco to Tokyo;

and then Tokyo to Bangkok. She took in temples and Buddhas via the river boat

bus, the Chao Phraya Express. She saw opulent skyscrapers and she meandered

through labyrinths of tackey tin and wooden cobbled shacks along the river. She

saw two young boys with Butch haircuts in dark blue shorts and light blue

shirts embracing each other as they walked closer than lovers, emaciated and

fur-lost dogs beaten with sticks and then shoved into large racket and burlap

bag instruments like butterfly nets. She watched the dog catchers dump the

hounds into wooden crates, uniformed teenagers in sidewalk restaurants enjoying

the process, coconut tonic vendors putting straws in the cut cocunut shells and

fruit on a stick salesmen pushing their glass ice and fruit carts. She spent

most of her time downtown. On the sidewalk she saw men's underwear sprawled on

a table top that was balanced by one of those plastic stools used as chairs at

sidewalk restaurants or those for tired sidewalk salesmen. "I wish I had the

man in the undies" she said aloud to her amusement. Then she passed containers

of raw fish on ice next to the sharkfin restaurant. A young man who gained a

commission from bringing in the masses into the restaurant said, "Fish! good!"

He was so palpable and so much in her reach. She turned toward him and stopped.

She put her hand on his chest and slid it down to his waist. "Fish good, you

say?" she asked and then giggled like an embarrassed school girl for she was

embarrassed by her own temerity. "Fish very good!" said the google and glaze

eyed fish salesmen. He put his fingers into the waste line of his pants and

jiggled them in a couple seductive bounces. Outside of the fomenting of her own

sensuality, she felt the imagined spirit of Buddha permeating everything like a

warm wind.

After three days here she went from Bangkok to Rome. Her world was that other

world, that etheral world consisting of the highest apogee of man, that which

was least in his making and yet here it was manifest in tangible objects from

one museum to another. This was her idea of heaven: to be fully in that small

realm of one's mind where true beauty existed and within a city where others,

some living and most dead, had also engaged in that area of the brain and

produced objects so splendid. At a Burger King a block away from such a museum

she bought a couple vegie-burgers, an apple pie turnover, and a chocolate

shake. When they were deposited on her tray she turned and walked to an empty

table. Near it she stopped with mouth agape. There at an adjacent table were

Rick and his father, MF.

Chapter Twenty-Seven

In Burger King words ensnared the artistic ascetic for she too succumbed to

polite requests and smiles. For whatever chimerical ideas she had about

isolation in Antarctica she knew that too little society, as too much of it,

would be deleterious. She too would have been an incontrovertible loose canon

had she not maintained some sociable traits; and so she sat down at their table

despite not wanting to do so. "Rick, if you weren't seated with your father I

wouldn't have recognized you. Heavens!" Heaven--it was a word that nobody

believed in and everybody used. She put her elbow on the table, chin in a palm.

Then she focused her intensity sociably, basking him with it gently in the rays

of her orbs. She knew that her gesture was probably an affected one, oblivious

to the fact as father and son might be, but she did not think its contrived

essence as being all that important. Hers was like one of Peggy's few favorable

gestures, only she had improved upon it. Instead of using this gesture for

situations where there was an affinity of values she used it, on occasion, to

further rapport. By pretending to care more than one actually did one couldn't

help but emulate and believe in the skit, making the dubiously real in fact

real. With a deep albeit contrived sense of caring, she said, "I haven't seen

you for so long. Are you still friends with Nathaniel?"

"So-so," said the boy ruefully.

"Well, don't worry. Everybody meets new people and are attracted to those new

influences for a time which help them grow. I'm sure you and Adagio will be

friends again. I bet he likes you very much. I know I do." Then to MF she said,

"So you guys are taking in Rome?"

"Yes and other bits here and there. We were in Venice a couple days ago.

Nice--well worth seeing as I'm sure Florence would be. The problem is that a

man can spend the whole trip traveling from one city to the next. So...I've

decided that I and this big guy will just stay here in Rome for the rest of the

time. Are you here all by yourself?"

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

somewhere here in Rome."

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

She guessed that the widower was being faithful to the memory of his wife by

not pursuing any other relationship outside of an occasional sexual liaison

with a whore like herself. She liked the assumption and it made her feel closer

to him. To some degree she wanted to ferret out the truth on this matter but

the assumption gave her such a warm feeling and she too liked her endorphins

and dopamine. "Nathaniel is at home staying with Hispanic Betty."

"Hispanic who?" He chuckled.

"Hispanic Betty. Well, that's my name for her. My assistant -- a lovely person

in her own way. She's illiterate in both languages but again in her own unique

way a lovely enough character. I give nicknames to everything. Nathaniel is

Adagio and my cat, Friskie, is Mouse. Nathaniel will be fine with Hispanic

Betty. Did you guys just come from the museum?"

"No, we've been sitting here waiting for you for days. Finally we can go into

the museum now that we have an expert to show us around. It's been rough

sitting."

She laughed. "Wow, Michael! You knew I'd be on this very speck of the planet

within this time and space. Handsome and charming as well as psychic. I'm

impressed." She laughed again as she glanced at his playful smile. It occurred

to her how much of a human's life was consumed in frivolous exchanges of happy

feelings. There was really no substance in it at all. She turned back to Rick

who was as yet free from being overwhelmed in the sensual impulses that created

the libidinous ego, lascivious sociability, and the lustful lies of human will

that willed the stimulation of the pleasure receptors of the brain at all

times. "You and your father will have your eyeballs shooting out of your

sockets when you begin the art tour in this beautiful city, I promise."

The boy laughed with a feral, garrulous confidence. "Now it's my eyes out.

Before it was gettin' hair on my chest if I ate your stuff."

She smiled. "You remember. It was called 'Shit on a Shingle.' To MF she

explained, "That's a nickname for one of my domestic dishes. It's also known as

beef and gravy on toast." To Rick she added, "And given time it will grow hair

on your chest. I promise." She began eating her veggie burger.

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

She looked at the edge of her burger. "More like raw sienna, golden ochre,

cadmium yellow, and goldenrod dark...hard to explain the color. Saffron the

closer you dig into the corn. This vegetarian hamburger probably isn't all that

nutritious fried with hamburgers but here we are as guinea pigs within modern

existence."

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

"Well, I mean that we don't grow our own food so we are reliant on what others

present to us as good and we follow the masses into places like this out of

convenience and laziness. We are like cognizant teddy bears on an assembly line

to have our apertures plugged up with plastic eyes but there is nothing we can

do about it. Anyhow, two cheers for Burger King. Hip hip hurray! Hip hip

hurray!" She laughed, more amused and interested in herself than anyone else.

"You don't eat meat, Gabriele?"

"Not much," she said.

"Okay," MF said disapprovingly.

"Whether or not animals have any value outside of becoming a product to serve

to us doesn't matter so much to me. I think what I think but you can't prove it

one way or the other. I just feel that having the attitude that everything

exists to serve human pleasures and appetites stunts any enlightenment one

might hope to get on this planet. It's not the animal rights perspective but my

own."

"Good for you. I admire that," he lied. Their conversation paused and she saw

that MF had removed both onions and pickles from his hamburger. She watched

both males sink their fangs into the aesthetic round bits of carcass. She told

herself that there was indeed something atavistic about it.

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

"Is that a fact!" said Gabriele.

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

"We never have tomatoes in the refrigerator."

"We have Ketchup. It is tomatoes plus."

Gabriele laughed. She as marginally enthralled with the charm of their

bantering. Then, like the sound of crickets, the human noise became monotonous.

Still, it was better than being deaf, and it bedizened her ears like large

cheap earrings containing bogus stones.

"I saw you when you gave your lecture in Albany," said MF to Gabriele as if

wanting to change the topic.

"I know. I saw you there. I wanted to catch you but there were droves of people

and one reporter swarming all over the place."

"I understood that. It's okay."

"Did you drive up just for that?"

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

you."

"Wow, thank you" she said humbly.

When they finished eating and were walking to the museum he said, "So, you were

in Thailand before coming here. What were your impressions of it?"

"Hmm...I guess that before I went there I half-way wondered if it would be

comprised of people without wills the way the Buddha rejected self saying it

was an illusion--but no; it was full of mall hoppers and people pacing here and

there anxiously with their cellular telephones, eyes glazed over, totally

self-absorbed like in the states although perhaps less of them...a lot of poor

seeming so quaint from my vantage point but probably not from theirs. What's

your impression of Italy so far?"

"Well, it is hard to say with so many tourists. If they get rid of the tourists

one can have an impression."

She laughed. She liked that answer. It seemed to her the correct answer; and

since he seemed to her a conduit of reality, she felt that he was enmeshed with

her somehow. She did not want to believe in fate but here they were together in

such an unexpected place. The strangeness made her a bit superstitious. "How

long will you be here?"

"Maybe a week. And you?"

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

email so that troubles me."

"Anything wrong?"

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

"Won't Hispanic Betty answer the telephone?"

"Are you kidding? No, she refuses. She dusts around a telephone like it's a

snake and moves to a different room when it rings." He laughed.

She led them into color, perspective, and forms of Masters who had died long

ago. They led her to a planetarium, the coliseum, and then a small amusement

park on the outskirts of Rome. After Ferris wheel and a roller coaster rides

she and they were addicted to motion and so they went on the water log ride as

well. As they came down a miniature waterfall they were drenched. From these

rides she knew that she was thrust into further action. Without consciously

choosing it, she was now on a womanly ride of feeling great pleasure in the

company of a man and something resembling family. It occurred to her that this

was the ride that all broken adults with battered children inside them went on.

From love and establishing a family of one's own one could break from the

wretched past. One could remove the glass fragments from the exploding glass

house of family, bandage wounded childhood, and could at last distance oneself

from memories of the guardians of hell. The ride would be that of a new family

and beginning, a type of forgetfulness.

All this time had gone by and still Sang Huin woke up from nightmares with a

sweat glazing his forehead. He could not help but remember driving his battered

sister to her lover's mansion, dragging her up to the door, watching her faint

on the stoop as he pushed the doorbell, and then watching from his car as the

wife discovered his delivery.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Sang Huin had a very strange dream one night. It was a night in which he had

experienced a cancellation of a lesson and instead of returning home he had

gone toward the Myong Dong area of Seoul to a gay Turkish bath, which he hoped

would exorcise him of the void.

Like any explosive, the chemicals for the detonation were inside the container

(himself); and all it required was a small sensation as its spark. It always

struck him as peculiar and intriguing how a sexual feeling that was so internal

should be linked so indelibly with the external like a woman's ability to

produce milk, which required birth and a baby to suckle if it were to not dry

up.

There, once again in the Turkish bath (as if this time would be a less specious

form of intimacy than all others), he had sought excitement -- fireworks of

sensation within a dark room for orgies. There, like a balloon, he had blown

his body in titillations and desire only to be deflated to a moment or two of

tameness and godhood and then an equilibrium -- this concoction of a little god

and a lot of animal called a human being.

And when he returned home to Seong Seob, there was a contrived inflation and

deflation of the phallus in the ersatz of coerced will. Then he lay there like

a squeezed orange, albeit a discontent one. He was unable to sleep for

countless minutes that seemed as hours. And when he did go to sleep he dreamed

strange and erratic things. At worst these images burst and burned against the

walls of his brain like jets against the World Trade Center. At best they

expanded and contracted nerves in his brain like the coldness of an ice cream

headache. Accelerated by too many graphic CNN reports and satiated in anxieties

and guilt within his own life, he dreamed that Gabriele was living in an

isolated area in Pakistan with her cat, Mouse. One evening there was knocking

on her door and when she answered it a stoic Rita/Lily with obdurate,

mechanical, and glazed eyes injected a drug into her arm. When Gabriele woke up

she was staring into the face of Osama Bin Laden. "Where am I?" she asked as

she lifted her head and wiped the pallid dirt from hair and face. A translator

relayed her voice to Osama Bin Laden. She recognized him too. He was Khalid

Shaik Mohammed. Osama said something and the translation was "Al Qaiida Hills

in what people wrong to call Afghanistan behind Tora Bora. You relatives must

pay big ransom or we cut off you head."

"Relatives?" said Gabriele. " If you mean Peggy, you inane turbaned bearded

little freaks, she wouldn't give you a nickel or a dime to save my head. She

wants every cent to go to Wal-Mart to buy toys for her beloved grandbabies so

they will smile at her and reach for her before they do their own mommies. She

likes babies: the thought of them fills her with dopamines and endorphins; and

the inveterate shopper that she is, buying for them couldn't make her much

higher. Such neurotransmitters run amuck in her. Mama bird must do what she is

created for. Anyhow, nobody's getting rich off of my head and I want -- no

demand -- I demand to know how I got here and I further demand that l be

transported back immediately."

"Remember Rita/Lily, devout Moslem sister: she inject you with tranquilizers,

give you swallow sleepy pills, and then put you in trunk of you car. There she

drive across border," said Khalid Sheik Mohammed."

"Thanks for the info, Shake!" said Gabriele. "She always was a crazy; and

crazies are always religious--no offense." Gabriele heard Osama's palaver in

Arabic."

"Osama wants to know if you play volleyball with us." said Khalid Sheik

Mohammed. Khalid Sheik Mohamed smiled widely with his fangs.

"Volleyball?" asked Gabriele. "It's a bit strange, but what the fuck. Will it

expedite me getting out of here?"

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

with you."

"All right, if I must."

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

Osama slapped a desert mosquito that kept circling around his big nose. He

flattened it on his face. Then his large tongue came out with the twitch of his

face and the mosquito fell onto its waterbed coffin. No sooner had the Al

Quaida mastermind eaten it than the Taleban cleric, Mullah Mohammed Omar, snuck

up like Death in a brown hood and robe. The one eyed reptile then cut off

Gabriele's head with his hatchet. Osama Bin Laden and Khalid Sheik Mohammed

then began their game of volleyball. Mullah Mohammed Omar stood at the side of

an invisible net counting score as the two other men volleyed the head over the

line which he had dug into the dirt with a stick. There was talk of getting

access to North Korean nuclear fuel rods, a strange epidemic that they had

manufactured and proliferated in East Asia, and assassination plans for George

Bush. The face of Gabriele's head kept staring at them while she volleyed

about. Gabriele thought, "Talking politics and playing ball: these inane

turbaned bearded little freaks can walk and chew gum at the same time."

Sang Huin suddenly woke up and went into the bathroom where he splashed some

water on his face. His face looked heavier when he stared at it in the mirror.

He realized that as much as he had hoped to hold onto youth, it was already

shed and blowing around like fragile leaves within another time and space. He

chastised himself. He was getting older by the hour and yet he had no career

aspirations. His Bachelor's degree in music history was worthless. He probably

had no special aptitude for teaching and even if he did, he doubted that being

this native gypsy who appeared on people's doorsteps at their request counted

him within the ranks of teachers. What did he know that he could teach? There

was nothing he was trained for, he had no competitive strife, and he did not

know of anything worth doing.

He heard the sound of rain and so he went to a window but could not see the

substance of this harmonic pattering in external darkness. He listened to its

orphic sounds, inventing reasons to go into this gentle falling of sky: milk

for his cornflakes or batteries for his Walkman that he could purchase at the

AM/PM or the 7-11.

He wrote: Gabriele put on her hat and sunglasses and went into the rain with a

bag carrying her keys, passport, wallet, sketchbook, and charcoal pencil as

well as makeup and a bottle of this newly acquired substance, perfume. She had

been told that there was a park near her hotel where she could see the ruins

but, despite floating on cloud nine, when she arrived there all she could see

were the ruins of her own life.

Michael was lovingly amuck in her thoughts and since she would see him in a few

hours she was in a heavenly abyss greater than having the license to do some

Italian stud fishing in the pool of her hotel. She loathed how the chemicals of

this infatuation had been detonated in the Leaning Tower of Gabriele causing

major structural damage. Furthermore, the smoke of the aftermath distorted the

world in such a fervent red mist. If she hadn't been on her guard or had been

born a half-wit she could have easily believed in love and bliss at every turn.

She, the master of reality, guessed that she was walking on a precipice: that

very soon if she were to part with him for a week she would be there in the

pangs of the travail of loneliness -- a most lost and forlorn creature and an

ignominy to herself.

And yet despite her higher authority and monitor wanting her to discard this

man sooner rather than later, she regretted that she had resisted the idea of

him getting a room in the same hotel where she was staying. She could have made

his trip less lordly and more "in touch" with the common man if he had stayed

with her instead of ensconcing himself in four-star hotels. Also she would have

saved him money, not that saving money was so essential if he were indeed part

of the wealthy Quest family of Albany.

She thought it was noble that he, a member of the wealthy class, had chosen to

be a mere educator to help young minds. " In a sense," she thought, "we are

both educators but he has chosen to not make business and money a priority

whereas I yearn for money and things. I am just a fool who has gone from being

impecunious to an upper middleclass snob -- okay, a bitch with a servant even

if I call her my assistant. And I am not free. I'm always fettered to canvas."

She meant that as free as she was she always had to be unique, clever, and

technically masterful at all times to have a reputation and to pay her

bills--one of which was her tuition. She could have gained a "scholarship" but

she did not care to have strings attached. She did not want to teach pathetic

dilettantes in some basic class what a paintbrush and pallet looked like. She

didn't want to sing to them, "This is the way we paint a pig, paint a pig,

paint a pig. This is the way we paint a pig so early in the morning."

Perambulating through the park, attempting to conceptualize the internal and

external reality she wanted to transpose to canvas, she became distracted by

Italian lovers. Strangely, for her, she looked on them in joyful awe. Unlike in

America when she had wanted to roller- blade through their interlinked arms or

sweep away these lovers who littered the world with their specious illusions,

she now appreciated them. These Italian couples abetted her fantasies of she

and Michael strolling together under one umbrella instead of the solo half

being under there now. She could sense that her rule in the crumbling and

further leaning tower of Gabriele was faltering, floundering, and foundering.

This, while she walked, was evident by her sporadic humming of Joni Mitchell's

"Michael from Mountains."

Sitting on a bench in the gentle rain, she watched the heavy traffic and the

shuffling array of Italians through the iron bars of one of the many walls that

went around the park. It seemed to her that it all had the splendor and

significance of love. She was not at ease in this rosy/fiery way of looking at

all things and yet she couldn't quite see the harm in such elated perspectives.

If all people were like Moonie cult members avoiding negativity wouldn't the

illusion transform reality? If love were an illusion, she couldn't see how it

was different from anything else. Each generation of people were passing

shadows thrust out at dusk before being swept into darkness. Everything was an

illusion although it seemed to her that some things were more real than others

or at least less illusionary. Shadows were illusions of tangible things and

perhaps these blocked rays of light or diminished forms were of something

bigger. Was life just a pale version of what was really out there? She did not

know. She was still waiting to get an email from God.

This inchoate friendship/ relationship was releasing her from the manacles of

heavy, oppressive, and dragging thoughts and so in certain moments she couldn't

see any reason to oppose it. Did she care to be as dour and sour as a spinster?

Such women became more acrimonious with each new birthday.

Before she had time to go back to her hotel room with only a couple rough

drafts to show for her efforts, they came for her in the park. Although he,

like his son, preferred motion, Michael had persuaded his son to sacrifice a

bit more of their time before her beloved alter of art. The taxi's meter was

aggrandizing numbers for some time when they finally found her and took her

away with them.

He believed that his closeness to Gabriele would increase if he showed himself

as someone willing to enter her hallowed institutions -- institutions he came

here to see but on the fifth or sixth time these buildings were like visits to

a mausoleum.

Only as they were trudging up more concrete steps did it occur to him that he

should have asked her if she wanted to do something different. And yet when he

looked at her smile that was so radiant from being linked to art and linking it

to them he could tell that she would never find art museums boring let alone

cloying the soul. He was the deferential gentleman, and his inveterately shy

son tolerated the museums with little fidgetiness.

After they were inside for an hour she began to lean on him the way he liked

women to do even though he had not let them do it for many years. But he

detested how she was dressed. Like at the park, she was still wearing

sunglasses and a hat that coaxed upon itself and draped down as if it had been

thrown into the wash too many times. She would pull the glasses down to the tip

of her nose when they came to a work of art, talk about it and what she knew

about the artist (if anything), and then move them up her nose. He did not

understand this flagrant violation of femininity. It was as if she wanted to be

as inconspicuous and stealth as a bag lady for fear of being mistaken for

Michelangelo. He had avoided the subject in the taxi under the belief that she

would remove them once they were in the building.

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

"Oh," she interjected and acquiesced wordlessly as she smoothed out her hair.

He was pleased. She was transforming from a sallow and destitute street person

back to an image more suited to be loved. Within the machinations of

self-centered man, each saw the other as an "opportunity" and each one

contemplated and re-contemplated what that opportunity was in vain.

He wanted to move about and change visual images as if he were in front of the

television with his remote control, but she wanted to stare for a few moments

at these portals into the entity.

When they were outside again she put on her sunglasses so as to counter these

feelings of "tenderness" which could misdirect her down a long and dark

labyrinth of tight one-way back-alley actions leading further into her own

obscurity and to prostate positions at a man-god's feet. For he was already

becoming a bit of an extension of her own little life and a medium for more

intense pleasures that she could not reach alone, and so she put on glasses

that he disapproved of so that she would not lose herself to him even in the

most miniscule way.

As with the brain that made deals and compromises to reconcile contradictory

opinions within itself, she knew that a woman would need to be deferential in a

relationship that was that extension of herself. She told herself that she

would try to be as little accommodating as possible. She smiled as if ready to

laugh for the two of them at this stage were nothing. They were merely

accidental traveling companions. She thought that even if they did become

involved with each other the myopic perspective of a personal life and love

might be nothing in reality but attempts at cell replication in this organ of

the Earth in this organism of the universe. Such was the human predicament of

not knowing anything of reality but one's own caprices. Her levity was

transient. She became serious.

"Why do you wear those things?" He smiled. His tone was more bantering than

condemning. If it had been altogether condemning she in her moody caprice would

have walked away proudly, severing him without saying a word in that behavior

typical to those whose youth had been besieged in the worst of ridicule.

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

gives me a headache."

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

"No."

"Then take them off."

"Ask me in a nice way."

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

Her womanliness flowed in and she took them off, begrudgingly eager to please

and a little excited that someone should take an interest-- even a critical

interest-- in the mundane aspects of her life. She felt sexual energy hit her

in a large wave since two wills clashing against each other was a sexy thing.

They followed Rick who had run toward a hotdog stand.

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

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

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

than his hominoid predecessors."

"I doubt that much evolution can come from a corndog. And if I had a bigger

head it would probably explode all over the place. Wouldn't that be a pretty

sight?"

" Maybe your grandpa slaughtered your pet pig at his farm-- something made you

this sensitive. I wouldn't know about that but I do know that as long as the

killing isn't man to man it's just nature's checks and balances." She saw that

truth lay there and not wishing to dismiss it , she nodded. She wondered if he

had put too many limits on his theme. Maybe murder and wars were checks and

balances of man on man too. He smiled with a flippant boyish mischievousness.

"You know, by walking from the museum you have squashed at least a thousand

ants and other creepy things, but you haven't given up walking from what I see.

Survival of the fittest, Gabriele; and the fittest animal is the one with the

most bills in his wallet. If the pig had come with a wallet and could out-spend

me I'd be the one on the stick. Come on. Haven't you ever eaten a corndog

before?"

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

"That's probably the best life gets as an adult: secondhand experiences,

reliving childhood." He ordered three corndogs and soft drinks from the vender

and gave each their share. "Here!" She took the corndog and began to eat with

them. She imagined the corndog as a vegetable. She imagined it as an important

experience.

"Good?"

"Yes."

"More ketchup?"

"No."

"Rick?"

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

symbol.

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

next. Associationism."

"David Hume?" she chuckled.

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

Rick had to go to the toilet and so Gabriele was left in awkwardness at being

with Michael all alone. He grabbed her hand and led her to a bench. He kissed

her and she liked it even though the nearness of him felt as if she were being

stung by Houston fire ants. It was a sweet inimical sting. It was a contract of

mouths and joint breath, of two becoming one but not of equal parts--more of a

stronger company forcing a large competitor in a merger.

And the days of the week proceeded on--that day closing most eventfully on a

surrey, a four seated bicycle, peddling and encircling Roman sculpture at the

Borghese Garden, and then watching a mock chariot match in a field known as the

Circus Maximus. The ensuing days were of seeing the bones of 400 monks at the

Cappuchin Cemetery, going to the ancient Pantheon temple of the gods with its

open portal to the sky, sitting in outdoor restaurants near fountains still

spurting from ancient aqueducts, St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City, and the

catacombs. Their final whole day was filled with Etruscan art, a return to the

Coliseum, another meandering around the ancient statues at the Borghese Garden,

and back to Laneur Parco di Luna amusement park for a ferris wheel ride and

trampolines. For all her brooding on life she realized that such contemplation

was just hiding from it. She thought that motion and community were natural and

having opposed them all along had been foolish. Like diving into a pile of

leaves, these simple pleasures were transcendence into the entity. When she was

again alone at the airport showing her boarding pass she walked to the plane

like a propped up cadaver.

Chapter Twenty-nine

Lightning flashed into Hispanic Betty's makeshift bedroom and she woke up to

the artificiality of her life ensconced in a room that was not her own with

things in it that she was a little uncomfortable to touch even with a dust rag.

She was here and off the streets but the glitter of being such seemed dimmer as

she woke up in the flashes of lightning.

Her first self-coerced thought was of Nathaniel and needing to be responsible

for him. She was compelled to perform her newly delegated responsibilities of

guardian despite not really knowing what they should consist of. This role of

guardian, as she saw it, consisted of the same cooking, shopping, and cleaning

she always did plus maternal functions that varied with each woman like

checking on him at strange hours even if, fettered in language barriers and

stumbling about in her illegality, she might not know what to do if something

were really wrong.

Resenting the fact that this had been thrust upon her, she nonetheless was able

to drag herself out of bed to see if he was okay for the maternal instinct to

attend to the young during a storm was in the collective consciousness of all

female fauna. She knew that the true challenge would be for her, who had no

family or friends in this country, to perform this maternal role without caring

for him inordinately. She put on a bathrobe and snuck down the hall to his door

where light slid under the crack like an urgent note.

He was chatting with one of his Internet friends, seeking an affinity with

those acrimonious others who construed themselves as being abandoned and

neglected but hid it in cynicism of all other matters. But to her who knew

nothing of chat rooms or anything in particular about computers the boy was

simply writing a report for a class and so she was hesitant to knock on his

door and tell him to go to bed.

Hearing the pecked tapping of the keyboard, she imagined the sliver of light at

her feet as a computer printed note that said, "Mind your own business, Betty,

and go back to bed"; and, smiling from an amusing end to her ambivalence, that

was exactly what she did. From her bed, her lair (if she could call it hers),

she ruminated about what had happened to her recently: Gabriele having picked

her out of the homeless shelter from the other strays; the proud and sagacious

confidence, if not hubris, which Gabriele possessed in bringing her into this

home without even asking her to forfeit her passport; the loyalty generated

from such trust; fear that the ringing of the telephone was the attempted

connection of immigration authorities; barely getting around on the crutches of

the English language, which she had ineptly cobbled together from scraps; the

fear of the six and sometimes seven day a week servitude in this remote home

diminishing what little chance she, a homely 22 year old, might have of

creating her own family; this fear motivating her to get a cheap efficiency

downtown although she was rarely ever there; and how the imposition of taking

care of someone else's child was a calamity waiting to happen.

Over the course of the week she worried excessively. She worried that she

hadn't heard from Gabriele to know when she would return. She worried about

having this awkward tenderness for the child (this wanton thought of him)

caused by having to care for him and make him her exclusive concern and

pleasure. And she worried that she would resent Gabriele's return since it

would inevitably pry away this maternal fusion. She also had specific worries

of the present day: that this act of absconding in his room, not wanting to

play cards or board games like Checkers and Monopoly, meant that he might not

like her anymore; and that he was now in his room for two hours and she wasn't

exactly sure what he was doing in there.

Then came more of those ideas that self-flagellated her flaccid mental skin

throughout the week: if something bad were to happen to him she might not know

about it or have the vocabulary to ask about it; if she were aware of it that

she might not be able to explain it; and if she could explain it she might

prevaricate or become twisted in mendacities since she would not know how to

explain her connection to this Sangfroid family.

Still, no matter if these nightly ruminations made her placid or just got her

stuck in rehashing the same worries, she was glad to have them. They

resuscitated a self-concept that languished each day in being cognizant of her

own babbling in this north-of-the-border language.

She heard Nathaniel's footsteps in the hall. She wanted to open her door and

call to him and yet she knew it wasn't so much for him as for herself. For she

was feeling the travail of loneliness and it was not imagined suffering but a

physical assault on the body of the mind.

She did not want him to think that she was spying on him or that she, a

servant, would have the effrontery or impertinence to tell him what he could

and couldn't do in his own home; but still, she told herself, she needed to

monitor him. She once again diffidently walked into the hall and sought the

traces of the boy. He was downstairs in the kitchen as evident by the light.

Listening closely from the stairs, she could hear the refrigerator door open

and a pitcher of milk being drained.

Had she not felt like a florid group of cells shot out like random shells into

the void that made up the cosmos, she would have been satisfied by this and she

would have gone to bed and slept soundly. Instead, she went down the steps and

into the kitchen.

"Knock, knock, Nathaniel."

"Oh, hi there, Hispanic Betty."

"You no can sleep none?"

"Haven't tried."

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

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

here."

"Es verdad?"

"You bet."

"Pobrecito. Well, your mother is smart, brilliant, wonderful artist. Everybody

has something good they can do and some things they can't do none."

"You could put these cookies in packages and sell them," said Nathaniel. "You'd

get more than working here for my stingy old mother." She smiled. She had been

random matter rolling about in empty space moments earlier and now she was put

safely back to earth snapped into society like an instrumental piece of life's

daily puzzle.

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

"What?."

"I mean good for some people and not others."

"So-so. Your madre, Gabriela, may probably kill me for saying it but I think

you're right. I mean you need kid school and teenager school. Nobody should to

be a dummy--but some maybe they find that special thing not in classes. You go

to bed soon?"

"Pronto."

"Pronto. Excelente. Necesitas dormir las horas bastante para tener un dia

grande por la manana. I go to bed now. You do it too after to eat your Betty

cookies."

"Hey, Hispanic Betty, why do you have two names?"

She laughed. "Because of Santa Gabriela. Como se dice? Nickname- -it's a

nickname. Your mother has told you when she comes back?"

"I don't know" the glutton said evasively as he devoured a cookie. "Buenos

noches."

"Buenos noches, Nathaniel."

In the morning Nathaniel took a bus to the facade of the school and then

meandered downtown as obscurely as he could. His virtual friend twenty years

his senior had told him that summer school wasn't "all that important" and

since this reinforced his own ideas about the matter, there was a guilt-ridden

conviction in his movements as he splashed through puddles in effusive kicks of

vexation. Nathaniel, who was less than a decade from the womb, had his mother

as his conscience; and this conscience chastised his every deviation. And yet

it was she who had made herself inaccessible. And when she had the chance to

make it up to him with a summer trip abroad it was she who had departed alone.

For a couple hours in front of a computer he used a joystick as an extension of

the arms of virtual boxers, and the flights of airplane bombers. With it he

could also maneuver entire armies according to his sense of viable strategies

not that his age and turbid thoughts at present could offer much beyond the

contribution of his reflexes. When his body felt stiff he paid, left, and then

lit a cigarette in the back alley. Stealth in front of the back wall of the

internet cafe and computer game arcade and crouched behind a trash barrel, he

tried to release clouds of smoke in various shapes the way in earlier years he

had blown bubbles of various sizes into the air. He coughed as much as he

smoked and the shapes of his smoke were nebulous; but his cigarettes were a

self-taught rebellion in back alleys like this one and lacking male influences

both good and bad maleness was an awkward stumbling of trial and error.

Coughing inordinately, not able to master smoking a cigarette with that

insouciant fortitude and confidence seen in movies, he went into a Ben Franklin

dime store. There he twirled the plastic sunglass rack.

"Hey kid, stop that," said a clerk "It's not a merry-go-round." But in fact he

had been imagining it as such and his mother strapped there by the clasp of

Lilliputian schoolboys the way Shirley and her friends had fettered him on

merry-go-rounds and besieged him with kisses. Only in this daydream there were

classmate enemies from a couple years earlier accosting Gabriele directly with

their ridicule. Simultaneously they reviled, scoffed, and guffawed the culprit

instead of her son with, "Dirty lady bringing men to your trailer drinking

their pee like a toilet. Our fathers know of you personally. In the Laundromats

our mothers talk of rationing water because one of your spells has caused the

lack of rain. "

"Kid!"

"I'm buying," said the boy with his mother's contumely. He pulled out a

twenty-dollar bill waving its voluble greenness as the true emblem that

conveyed everything about his country and his world. Restricted from spinning

the rack, he sought less mindless thrills. He tried on various pairs of

sunglasses before slipping one pair in his underwear and then walking up to the

cash register to pay for the other pair. It was a test of nonchalance and

despite palpitation and sweaty palms he passed it successfully.

He waited at the movie theater for the form behind the emailed image to come to

him.

"Nathaniel?" asked the man.

"Yeah," said the boy.

"Hi, I'm Tom." The boy began to reach out his hand toward this urbane form of

manhood he wistfully hoped would befriend him. A handshake was a guise of

strangers with amicable intentions; but he had to withdraw his hand awkwardly

when the man did not reciprocate. "Hope you haven't been waiting long--I went

to get some snacks for us. Every boy likes chocolate." He smiled but it waned

insincerely as he guardedly looked around the empty parking lot. "So you ran

away from school?" He bantered and then shoved a cigarette in his mouth. It

jiggled in his chuckle.

" Sort of. So, you ran away from work?"

"Sort of." Tom grinned sheepishly. "We've still got a few minutes until the

movie. I'd offer you a smoke but I probably shouldn't out here."

"I had one a few minutes ago."

"Oh, okay-- take off the sunglasses. Can't use them in there." Nathaniel pulled

them up on his head. "You look just like your photo minus the glasses. What

about me?"

"Older in person," said the boy.

"Oh," said the man. His tone, as his word choice, was vapid as life, to him,

was vapid. The thought of age slowly gnawing on him while he engaged in life

unawares made him want to evade conversation and entomb himself with youth in

the movement on a screen in a dark room.

"Let's go in if we can. I've got the tickets already. You sure you can get into

something R-rated this way?"

"I've done it before. Here: I bought you a gift." He took them from his

underwear.

"Ah...Children's sunglasses with a ninety nine cent price tag on them. You

shouldn't have." He sniffed them. "Although I do love the smell."

The boy gave a full hearty laugh.

"Do you always keep things in there like that?" He was careful about his words

and glanced around the sidewalk. The boy did not understand him and said

nothing. "What do I do with these things?"

"Give them to your son."

"I don't have one."

"When you have one"

"I won't have one," he mumbled evasively. He opened the door and they went in.

Seated together, they consumed contraband chocolate peanut butter cups and cola

that the man pulled out of his bag. The man told himself that the boy was like

a nephew. He did this to allay guilt that was burdening his positive self-image

and so that he might restrain himself from a touch that could cause him to lose

his prey so soon. His hormones boiled and steamed like the rolling levity of

atoms and yet he did not reach for the succulent young flesh there beside him.

The boy told himself that the stranger was like an uncle for there was a dull

aching within him of one needing to believe that somewhere he would find a

man's interest in him -- one who would take him to baseball games and whom he

could confide in, one who could teach him how to become a man.

When the movie ended the man said he had a better film in his apartment and

they went away together to his furtive domain.

On his sofa bed, which had not been pushed back into a sofa, they were propped

up on pillows. They were half sitting and half lying on a bed watching a movie

and eating grilled cheese sandwiches and potato chips. Somewhere into the video

was a car chase. Apoplectic expletives of the driver being chased--words that

were part of the lexicon of American culture but ones to which he did not

understand fully — puzzled and intrigued him. He was eager to know jargon that

he assumed was linked to this thing called sex (whatever it was) and

abbreviations like S&M and MF that were stranger yet. The ideas within these

abbreviations were so hidden there that he got a sense that they were the

conduit for experiencing great things. He felt that by cogitating all of these

mysterious words and abbreviations long enough he would be able to transcribe

them as if the English that was chiseled on the walls of his brain were a

Rosetta stone. As he was pondering this Morse code of the adult cabal, there

was a feeling of a hand under his buttocks -- a hand that then passed through

the border of the elasticity of his underwear to direct contact with his flesh.

Nonplussed, he turned to the trespasser and saw for the first time an erection

that seemed such a freakish abnormality (here it was poking out of jogging

pants that had been slid down to his hips). Even more fey was that mesmerized

and fixated look of yearning for absolute pleasure on the face of this stranger

called Tom. Nathaniel removed the hand.

" What are you doing?"

" Can you help me? Pull down your underwear. "

"Why?"

"Don't worry. I won't tell anyone you came here to my apartment—you won't get

punished if only you help me a little. Put your mouth on it or let me enter."

"Enter?"

"Your butt hole."

He asked himself it this was sex. He had assumed that it was a moonstruck look

and a bewitched yearning of adult lunatics for kisses from the opposite sex.

He wanted to scream, "No!" and to whine that he wanted to go home. He was

hurting and feeling diminished in years and he wanted to cry. He was scared

despite his interest in how this freakish penis augmentation was linked to sex.

He wished that he had never been so foolish as to come here or even gone to the

movie theatre with this stranger. And yet he tried to hold onto his senses. He

realized that to oppose a man trying to get his fix of exhilaration might be

risky. He tried to figure out the most innocuous or least deleterious path that

his childish mind could concoct. It was mostly a feeling since he was not all

that logical. He remembered that mesmerized and fixated look of yearning for

absolute pleasure on the face of this stranger. It was proof that although sex

was linked to another person, it was mostly an internal function. To disengage

himself and yet fulfill his curiosity, he returned one of the stranger's hands

on his buttocks and placed the other long hand onto the stranger himself. Then

he watched the stroking and pumping that lead to a whitish disgorging. With its

passing the stranger went into the bathroom to urinate. A few seconds later,

Nathaniel quietly exited the apartment for the first city bus he was able to

descry. He kept wistfully hoping for his mother's return. He missed her.

With all windows open and at top legal speed, the wind dishevels his hair .His

sunglasses are so dark that they make the day into dusk. His car is strewn with

myriad CDs but he repeats the same song from one that belongs to his mother. He

sings along with Led Zepplin.

"I've made up my mind to make a new start./ I'm going to California with an

aching in my heart./ Someone told me there is a girl out there/ with love in

her eyes and flowers in her ha-ir./ La la la la/ I took my chances on a big jet

plane./ Never let them tell you that they are a-l-l the same."

He beats the steering wheel to the remainder of the tune until he glances at

the gauge and decides to pull into the next gas station that he encounters . He

has to laugh and that laugh comes out in a bitter and cyical drool. He wipes

his mouth with his sleeve. His California girl lives in Sante Fe, New Mexico

where her husband recently divorced her. She isn't a girl but a woman who last

week, after recuperating from her face lift, emailed a photograph of her new

face. She is just Hispanic Betty but he doesn't mind. Older women are more

appealing to him and this one has always cared about him. He will use whatever

she has to give to him. He has no compunction.

Chapter Thirty

And for those who never had epileptic seizures or other afflictions as young

children and never witnessed their weaknesses mocked by cousins or other

"family," their blessings were to be content to emulate others in their society

and to follow the desires that were innate in human instincts.

But for outsiders like Gabriele, who when very young survived their mothers and

fathers running over them in tanks and their forging of mutinous lives in the

distant east only to then briefly succumb to spells of seizures following the

witnessing of state sanctioned and individual applauded barbarity (in her case

a couple weeks after the Turkish man's decapitation), their only blessing was a

key to the discontent of their days.

Abhorring the cold and cruel functioning of Turkey's legal system and the world

at large, this little Kansas girl, Gabriele, became sick upon her return to the

States. When her sickness and flaccid sensitivities were vehemently ridiculed

by "family," it was through the determination of her will that she willed

herself well; and the seizures that mysteriously came mysteriously vanished.

Realizing that she had gone from one group of belligerents to another, and that

this particular family was no less akin to war than the other one, she tried to

think how best to survive being in her aunt and uncle's domain. This family's

attempts to hurt her could not be controlled but being hurt resided in her

domain. The latter was her choice. She told herself (it was really more of a

feeling since, as precocious as she was she could not reason so well) that she

would not allow herself to be destroyed in deliberately planted psychological

landmines in this temporary coming together of family. In her own way, despite

her young age, she felt the equivalent of "Why should I be a casualty in a

make-believe war when the real landmines are real indeed and wide-spread in far

reaches of the planet." And so she walked through back corridors of herself

until at last she was in the outside world staring back at a gigantic cage. All

alone in the outside domain she read her books like a good scholar, and watched

some of the six billion spider monkeys within that cage. She saw how they

obeyed their hungers to eat and so they did some tricks to get their food,

hungers for sex and so they stole monkey mates which looked similar to

themselves (monkeys were notorious xenophobes who only desired non- threatening

monkey mates from nearby trees), hungers for stability so they clung to the

same sets of branches and ate the same brands of bananas, made sacrosanct rules

for themselves like never defecating on a tree, and developed little routines

for themselves as to when one must eat (the arbitrary concoction of breakfast,

lunch, and supper given appointed times) and when to swing to a new branch. So,

it was with true chagrin that despite her obdurate snobbery at having to live

beside such opprobrious creatures that she should find herself as one of the

myriad monkeys.

The four of them had just returned from an American football game and she was

still numb all over like someone who had been kidnapped, blindfolded, and

finally freed with no explanation. She would have been less discontent to sit

in a world football game (this thing Americans referred to as soccer). When

young, she liked playing the game herself so sitting through continual action,

even if it were continually boring, would not have been so bad. Better, she

would have eagerly challenged Michael to a racket ball or tennis competition or

played badminton or croquet with the whole family. Instead, like Patty Hearst

taken from relaxation in front of her TV at gunpoint, she had been carried off

and put on bleachers at an American football game. The boys, whom she nicknamed

Mr. Placid and Mr. Petulant (Michael, formerly MF, being Mr. Phlegmatic), had

willed this to happen. She couldn't have opposed them. It was her son's tenth

birthday. It was one of her presents to Adagio that she should sit there on the

bleachers stuffing these frankfurters or weenies into her mouth and staring

onto this little sea of intermittent tackle and throw action (the object being

thrown like an irregular, phallic weenie). There were crueler fates than the

desire to jump out of one's skull. She had to continually remind herself that

it was her son's tenth birthday and that she was doing this for him. These

reminders helped her to construct a florid and baroque facade of smiles and

chatter. Her chatter was a repetition of their ideas about the players and the

plays. Since she hadn't really observed a thing and they seemed to like womanly

creatures who would parrot their ideas, parrot them she did. The game being one

and then two hours relegated to the past, it still seemed to go on incessantly

in their imaginations.

Here she and Nathaniel were 8 years removed from patty cake. Here they were now

nestled together for his blowing out of the candles on the Betty Cake made from

a Betty Crocker cake mix. Here they were as part of something larger--four

birdies and a Betty in the nest. Because of the random bird droppings of fate

these people were somehow hers (or at least it seemed so according to her

feelings).

She told herself that in her promiscuous years in Houston she had been a crazy

woman defying her repugnance of physical touch to play seductress games, half

wanting to conceive a clump of clay in whom she could shape her animadversion

of life, her gentle contemplative preoccupation, and her glint of disdain.

However, these two--father and son-- were born through the sanity of her head

in a feeling of love. These relationships conceived in the art and beauty of

Rome were of friendship and a shared exploration.

In both how she conceived Nathaniel and how she had auspiciously gained the

other two she had to applaud the unconventional way it all came about. It was

much better than boy meets girl, boy and girl hunger for each other, boy and

girl claim each other to have something solid in a world of passing shadows,

boy and girl in part briefly dream up a romance for themselves to escape their

solitary enclosures, and boy and girl in part become victims of a delusive mist

the making of one's selfish genes which say, "Mortals, reproduce so that we,

the genes may go on in perpetuity."

As Nathaniel blew out the candles, Michael began to cut the cake. He did so

within the last remnant of light within dusk while obtruding a cloud of cigar

smoke into the room. Cigar smoke and clouds of it over her food was especially

loathsome to Gabriele; and yet she didn't say anything. She bit her tongue and

ruminated on what this thing called a relationship was. Her higher authority

said, "It is an intangible bridge of one person to another that seems more real

than the people who make up the relationship. It is keeping one's opinions

concerning a man's nasty habits in shackles."

"Fire! Something burns in the kitchen," said Hispanic Betty as she returned

into the darkness of the dining room after going to the bathroom. She had a

handkerchief half wadded up in her hands but bits of it still fluttered in her

gestures.

"No, he's puffing on an old man's turd." Gabriele's wanton words galloped away

like a wild stallion.

"Gabriele, why don't you try to be a little more crude if you can," Michael

interjected. "Betty, hit the lights if you will."

"Turn?" Betty saw the cigar as she turned on the lights. "Turd. Oh!" She

realized that which was spoken about was "turd" and not "turn."

"Sorry, Hispanic Betty," said Gabriele. "Nathaniel didn't want to wait for you.

He had to blow out the candles immediately so that he could inhale his cake."

"I waited ten minutes, Betty. How long does it take to piss, anyhow?"

"Adagio, women don't just lift the lid and spray. There is delicacy in it."

Gabriele hoped to break him of his misconception.

"Well, she doesn't make a trickle. I think she puts TP in there to clog up what

she thinks is bad sound because I don't hear nothing and we're always running

out of toilet paper."

Gabriele laughed. "Double negatives are for Spanish, dear heart."

Michael said, "My mother would have taken dish soap and washed my mouth out

with it if I had said something like that."

"Would have?" Gabriele laughed derisively. "Either she did or didn't. If she

didn't clean your mouth you wouldn't know that she was a profanity policewoman

ready to strike you with her bottle of Ivory dish soap. Am I right? To say

'Would' you would need to know about her doing it so that's proof of you saying

something wrong to provoke her to do that outrageous action. What did you do?"

"All right, Smarty. Once—just once and I learned my lesson; and no, I'm not

telling it."

"Scared that Mom might come over with the Ivory soap once again, eh?"

"Maybe."

"Please get that smoking turd out of my face."

"Gabriele, you are going to stop that crudeness right now! Here, give Betty

some Betty cake!"

"Que cosas oir! What things to hear." She sat down between Nathaniel and

Michael. "And smell."

"Betty," said Nathaniel, " Put your snot rags up your holes and you won't need

to know we are around."

"I taked care of you when tu madre was not here and this--you dices cosas

malvados a mi." Betty got up with her Betty cake and moved to a chair near Rick

who just ate and withdrew from the world of commotion.

Gabriele hit him on the head. "You. Apologize."

"Sorry, Hispanic Betty."

She hit him harder on the head and the smack made his ear burn.

"Sorry, Betty." True repentance, Gabriele assessed, was such a coerced thing. A

person naturally saw only his own perspective. To have empathy for others was

such a chore and in some cases was only gained with the crack of a whip.

Here he was at ten with at least a tenth of his life completed. Once an infant

content to have his feet played with, each year he needed more explosive

pleasures and a larger array of them and this would continue into insatiable

hungers of money, power, property, sex, and love. But she knew discontent was

in all things -- When she had picked up Mouse from the inhumanity of the Humane

Society it --

She could feel a nascent migraine swelling within her, and like Betty and her

allergies, she absconded to the bathroom.

A few minutes later Michael knocked on the bathroom door. She wanted him to go

away but at the same time she wanted him inside to hold her head and to pin her

hair back from the rim of the toilet. She wanted him to understand her pain and

console her in empathy.

"What's wrong? You alright in there?"

"Sure."

But he heard her strenuous efforts to vomit like the cries of stretched

muscles. They were as empty as yawns. "You're sick. Are you sick? What am I

smelling in there"

She turned on the fan.

"Smelling?" she asked idiotically.

"Open up the door."

She opened it and smiled painfully. "Don't freak out. It's a joint."

"It's illegal."

"It's necessary. It's preventive pot—sometimes when used responsibly. See, once

in a while, I feel a migraine coming on. Michael, darling, it isn't homeopathy

but it relieves symptoms for lots of illnesses and migraines too."

"Flush it down the toilet. What if the boys were to see you smoking that?"

"What if they did?"

"Flush it down the toilet," he commanded. She did as she was told. She watched

her tiny higher authority wave goodbye to her sadly as she was sucked into the

whirlpool with her ship.

Chapter Thirty-One

15 years ago when receiving her graduate degree in criminology at Emporia State

University Gabriele got cards of congratulations that were not at all palatable

to her. Reading the writing on these weighty bits of paper should have been

just more insipid clogging of one's time and shouldn't have made much of an

impression on her unfavorably and yet she couldn't help resenting this

intrusive attitude of "Read me! Read me! Take moments of your life and read

me!" She believed that the factory produced clichZs contained therein were not

congratulations of past academic accomplishments but more the prompting of

those who advocated that post-graduates utilize ideas for pragmatic pursuits.

These were mass produced clichZs of ignorant professionals in bondage to the

idea that worth was wealth secured in slavish development of commodities or

services, which were the means of affluence. Such people erroneously believed

that, if well compensated financially, a life spent planning a product to

develop an artificial and insatiable thirst or governing men so that they did

not founder totally in their base instincts, as all earlier predecessors had

done, was a constructive engagement of one's hours on the planet.

Among others, there was a card from her aunt and uncle and another one from her

perfidious and mutinous parents. She opened and read the other rubbish before

putting it in the rightful place but she let these particular envelopes lay on

the counter, near her toaster, for a day or two before stabbing her foot

against the ribbed lever and guiltlessly opening the trash can's jaws.

"Saccharine for the alligator--gotta feed 'gator," she thought and then pitched

the envelopes and their unopened content into the trash. It was such an

American gesture, which was an alloy of a disposable culture and the

independence by which one might extricate herself from the visceral, vitriolic

virulence of a dysfunctional family.

And when she got her Master's degree in psychology in Houston there was a

pleasant absence of this driest of sentimental tripe until one day Peggy sent a

belated card and letter with "Urgent" marked on the envelope. Gabriele opened

it begrudgingly. It was one of those half- hearted apologies of "If I've done

anything that has made you wrongly perceive..." or "If I've done anything that

has made you believe..." with something like "that you are unloved" or "that

you weren't wanted." Now she couldn't remember the exact details even if there

was that indelible impression of one who would never apologize or admit that

there was anything to be sorry about.

Still, it wasn't an unpleasant letter (she had had worse) and her vantage point

when she read it from a lawn chair on the deck brought a happy serenity even

onto it. A humming bird was boldly drinking from its feeder of nectar, a

butterfly was fluttering above a potted plant, a young boy who was running for

his ball was casting such an elongated shadow in the morning sunlight, and this

vertical shadow was appearing somewhat three dimensional from her aerial

perspective.

Furthermore, while concentrating on this invisible bombardment of molecules

rife in the verdant yard she was also trying to figure out how best to sketch

the atoms of fragrance and how this burgeoning dotty texture of atomism, rather

than impressionism, could be extended to the sketching of the boy, his shadow,

the butterfly, the humming bird, and a pensive woman looking out of the window

to avoid packing her things.

So, reading the letter and not being of a mood to demand contrition of one who

had never been contrite, she was not disappointed even though as an

undergraduate she had unwittingly expected a metamorphosis of contrition to

manifest itself in her aunt's sloppy handwriting. A more salient fact was that

this particular letter accompanied with a greeting card of congratulations was

a pensive deliberation on their relationship. That being the case, she kept it

for a couple weeks before at last passing it into the jaws of the trashcan. If

not a tacit apology this less than insipid letter was a wistful yearning to

reestablish the relationship and from it she felt deep sympathy for her aunt.

Hundreds of times anew from childhood, Gabriele was unable to even go back for

a day under the roof of an uncle whom she had successfully fought off from

attempted molestation countless selves ago. Gabriele never mentioned this

incident to anyone. Although in early childhood she was able to pinpoint it as

the catalyst of their vehemence toward her she never said a word. So her uncle

and male cousins disparaged her for what time she got up, how she combed her

hair, for being left- handed, how she held her fork, the amount of time that

she spent in the bathroom, where she sat, the position she sat in, why she read

so much, why she was spending so much time reading in her "cage," that she was

probably shedding hair on the living room sofa, why she put her legs together

so prim and proper at the supper table, and why she opened her legs like a

tomboy or a lesbian cunt. She told herself that childhood would not last

forever and that this was something that she would pass through without

crumbling to pieces. "Matter of fact," said the voice within her, "you will get

through it all unscathed." And throughout each day of each year she remained

sangfroid, believing that a relentless cold stare would attenuate their

cruelty, and yet no battles did she win with the Antarctic blasts that she sent

their way unabatedly. And years later she never mentioned it in her letters to

Peggy. Why would she with reality not being an external phenomenon but pictures

rendered by the brain that were unavoidably reworked to justify certain ugly

scenes ("Why don't you want to go with your uncle and cousins to the

lake-really Gabriele, you need to work on your disposition - no man would have

you the way you are becoming"). And yet her aunt sensed this absolute inability

to return to Kansas in their communication so she wrote that she would fly in

to see her. Gabriele agreed but looked at her coming with dread. Removed,

reshaped, and orbiting around other things in the depths of space, Gabriele was

a distant star. A connection back to Peggy, she then reasoned, would take

enormous energy in a sustained sympathy and it was doubtful that even with the

best effort, anything good could be gained from it.

The meeting happened. The aunt, who was usually such a martinet, asked about

her niece's weight gain as if it could be anything other than pregnancy.

Choosing chocolate as a more viable lie than a tumor Gabriele lied in speech

but Peggy lied in belief. Worse, when pressed on the issue, Gabriele promised

that she would come back for a visit and seek employment in Kansas. It was a

successful meeting of active but coerced lies and passive, cajoled mendacities.

There was a facade of feigned smiles throughout the day despite a sense of

consternation and loss. It was a day of many awkward and reticent moments of

not knowing quite what to say.

Now she was to be awarded a Master's degree in art history. For her it was an

eventless day without ceremony. It was a normal day of putting up new wallpaper

in one bedroom and then cleaning up to help Hispanic Betty with dinner but

interrupting the latter task from incompetence and the need to drive the boys

to little league practice. Even until now there were no cards or special

letters sent to her, and this was as she liked it. She did not need anyone to

congratulate her because she did not feel that there was anything to be praised

for. She might have learned the history of art but she had lost the sense of

herself as an artist. The cracks of her damp coldness had been filled as

complacently as a warm moss. In family there was no discontent with the world

and within these heavenly cellars all else seemed musty and art the specious

delusions of crack addicts.

Heretofore most of her paintings had such a still contemplative depth within

the glint of the eyes of prostitutes and street people who could pull down

lightning; movement had the fading lines of ripples in a pond; hard movements

belied the simple pleasures; pallid colors delineated the richness of form in a

world of vanquished color; friendship was portrayed with discomfited and

inexplicable sense of betrayal; people were stoic mannequins straining about in

contorted action and exhibiting eyes of consternation at being in ceremony and

societal roles that were not what they had imagined them to be; Antarctica was

a resplendent distant background in contrast to the war ravaged Middle East

with its oil wells ablaze; and in stores where customers headed for scanners

with an incessant array of things, these people were as blue as waves, curled

and dashing as foaming breakers, in movement seemingly happy but in practice

discontent. Sometimes the dominant colors were tawny but pert, ruddy and pale,

and recalcitrant but with lament. Often her protagonists possessed the ideal

curves of Raphael paintings and her antagonists had the angled linear depth of

El Greco portraits or of distant cars. Her protagonists had a resistance

against the social instinct; but she had succumbed to its truth like an insect

to the light of a lamp. She was flitting from one specious light bulb to that

of another: now not able to contemplate and finding sitting still to paint a

torturous sensory deprivation; and now with endorphins and dopamines uncorked,

she was oozing in the unbearable lightness of being.

Chapter Thirty-Two

By night she would lie with him in this hunger of flesh, pleasure, and merger;

and after the cessation of sexual intimacies she would still feel undulations.

She would snuggle up to his body and drowsily sink onto his chest while his

head turned away from her, parting to other dreams and other illusions since

the fire for this one had burnt itself out. The odors of his body would merge

into her, and they furthered her illusions of a metamorphosis into something

greater than the concoction of reason and the attempts at making sense of the

world, which had to be done alone --a sense that she engraved onto the interior

walls of her brain the way the ancient Egyptians chiseled eulogies in the tombs

of the pharaohs. The smells of his body brought to her a pleasant titillation

if not love of all things that were caught randomly by the magnet of her

pondering. As she snuggled there she was reassured that there were

possibilities of loving the world in ways she had never imagined by extending

herself to him and becoming something different than a stuffed polar bear with

the stiff arms that the factory of the human race mutantly created.

Then they would sleep some moments and his chest would no longer be her life

buoy at all but a magic carpet ride or a Shuttle flight as gentle for her as if

she were an insect on an eagle. She would be taken to where one's head might

brush against the stratosphere before descending in an arch back into

wakefulness. Upon them both awakening there would be frivolous pillow talk. He

would sometimes narrate snippets of his life in a cathartic random response to

whatever idea preceded it. In some ways he was like those who could not

tolerate the impersonal aspects of self-consuming jobs and would affirm their

existence to a psychologist or a priest at a confessional. She learned of the

attitudes that drove his interaction with the world--a family's overemphasis of

money, which made him become an educator, and yet a belief that owning and

operating a business was one's only means of success. He was cognizant how the

force of one's family caused one to emulate and oppose its attitudes and had a

sense of humor about this, which she admired.

Often these talks were of irrelevant and petty matters that were amusing on the

pillow but so easily forgotten off of it. One time he asked her what she would

be doing the following day; she told him that she had to go to Wal-Mart to buy

the boys some underwear and socks and some paint for the deck, and that she

might look around for some clothes for herself at a mall; and then he expressed

how once a cleaning lady who was doing her work in the men's bathroom in the

mall had caused him to be unable to relieve himself. She giggled like a

schoolgirl at a slumber party. She reciprocated by telling him that in

"Bang-COCK" cleaning ladies "go in and out of bathrooms with their mops with

impunity." She teased him that maybe there were these ostensible cleaning

ladies everywhere whose real duties were to cause inhibition, clogging, and

insecurity within the male gender. From this her mind took a tortuous and

serious linking of ideas. She began to ruminate that society was upside down.

Cleaning ladies in men's bathrooms, forced to smell urine, soap, and bleach all

day should be paid the most and that they who were the benefactors of the world

like presidents and prime ministers should be paid the least. She argued that

only then, when equality was gained and each person given either money or

admiration as compensation for their work, would the world be a just and

harmonious place. He laughed, thinking it was another joke, but she was deadly

serious.

And yet once he told her something significant. He told her that his mother was

not his mother at all but his aunt; that his real mother, suffering from post

partum depression, suffocated his baby brother in the bath water, dumped him,

Michael, in the bracken waters of an abandoned well at her parents' farm, and

hung herself in a shed. After the funeral, his aunt was urged to come to them

from her home in a small Italian town. Gabriele felt an empathy as deep as the

gods for she too had been run over in family which for her made hugging,

touching and feeling emotions such an alien plain to this date. She too had

been recalcitrant and had done antipodal actions to thwart this Aunt Peggy and

Uncle Jake but for all her freedom the actions had been emulation or rebellions

against this absurd, vague memory of family. Thinking of him at the age of

three clinging to rope and pail she knew that she loved him.

Hate was everywhere. It was the striving to exist and to have a dominant

importance in the inconsequential affairs of man. Just as the provincial Korean

bravado within Sang Huin or Shawn had made him so mercilessly obdurate in

administering justice against his sister and her pregnancy, so the Americans

camouflaged innate aggression behind terms like axis of evil, rogue country

harboring weapons of mass destruction, links to Al Queida, and liberation for

the Iraqi people. They and their preemptive strikes, they and their selective

targeting with improved smart bombs, were killing and harming thousands of

civilians after evoking psychological trauma in this failed shock and awe

campaign. They, by heat and explosion, decimated myriad soldiers who either

chose to be such to secure a decent livelihood or were conscripted with

threats; and yet the Americans melted their bodies in this internecine campaign

sending them up amongst the other gasses the way thousands of their civilians

had been melted within the World Trade Center towers. The Saddam Hussein

regime, for all its internal atrocities, had posed no new threat to the world.

It just had the potential for potential and this was enough because the days

were dark indeed. One group of tyrants and their sadistic entourage holding a

nation hostage for decades had to be the example for the capabilities of their

virulence was greater than that envisaged by Al Queida -- at least so the

George Jr. administration, for all its cowboy stuttering, still glibly and

volubly conveyed.

He thought this as Saeng Seob sat down in the living room and said, "Can you

really think with that thing on?" Sang Huin knew that he couldn't--at least not

well--but the television was their child from which conversation was begotten

and extant. Without it their intimacy would have exhausted their conversation

long ago.

"Turn it off if you want."

"It isn't bothering me. I'm used to AFKN by now."

"Well, sometimes AFKN has movies about American history but I guess not with

the war. I needed a break from CNN. An hour ago CNN reported that we--I mean

the Americans-- bombed a residence where they think Saddam Hussein was staying

at. Four two-thousand pound bombs. They thought that killing the innocent

people of that block was nothing next to the chance of him being there-- he and

his sadistic sons. Who knows how many innocent people were collateral damage."

"Do Americans think it was right?"

"I don't know."

"Was it right?"

"I don't know." It was a cold calculation, a moral choice that was not meant to

be that of humans; and yet someone behind a desk had made this one to have a

chance of reducing the length of the war and its casualties. He had never been

good at modern math so his studies were centered innocuously in musicology.

"What do I know about this?" he asked himself. "What do I know about anything?"

"Will they do that to the North Koreans?"

"I don't know. Don't know--hope not. What are you reading?"

"Nothing."

"What's nothing?"

"Comics."

"In Braille?"

"Yes."

"You can't see the pictures. There are no pictures in that book, are there?

There are words. I guess being blind makes you have to develop a vivid

imagination." Seong Seob did not say anything. "Comics about what?" He was

trying to control this disapproving undertone that often crept into his voice.

He disliked wasted leisure. It did not seem to him that leisure should be such

a frivolous pastime with the few when the many were so needy. He also did not

like Saeng Seob's lack of motivation; and it was only because of his friend's

blindness and knowledge that his mother had thrown him like a coin into a

wishing well of death that Sang Huin managed to stay mute about this issue. For

the first time a better reason for not judging others formulated in his head:

he who was a promiscuous homosexual, an unfaithful partner to his friend, one

who had urged the abortion of his former girl friend's embryo, and had by his

Puritanical Korean values been an inadvertent abettor of the crime against his

sister, Jun Jin, had no moral authority to state an opinion about anything.

Even if Saeng Seob at times exhibited double his own reticence making

conversation short of impossible, he knew that this was even less of a reason

to judge him than the fact that he was such an unmotivated sloth. Still it was

natural to think that one's own introverted character was right in being such

and that someone else who was sometimes even more reticent, was abnormal. He

thought, "So this guy has a part time job with his cousin and no real hobbies

outside of strumming on a guitar and light reading-- these are innocuous

pursuits in one who from his pain could have become a hardened criminal. Surely

there are blind bad guys in penitentiaries; and who am I to judge him?" . "A

cat"

"Garfield?"

"Yes."

"In a book?"

"A collection."

Relinquishing the idea of having a meaningful conversation, Sang Huin changed

the channel to CNN and got his fix of war updates; but a half hour later it

became an overdose. He turned down the macabre sounds and returned to his

computer.

By day Gabriele would make calls to her beloved so that she could get that rush

in the pleasure receptors of her brain. Then, when warranted, she would go over

to the site of the future school and Michael would always ask her what she

thought of the construction up to that point. She would say her unvaried line

of "It sure is coming along well," which of course it was invariably.

Occasionally she would sketch her ideas of the interiors of faculty lounges,

secretary offices, and other miscellaneous rooms. She would submit them to his

blank stares and then she would have to admit that she did not "know the first

thing about interior design." And yet the same aversion that she had toward

holding hands in the day was making her into less of an active lover at night.

Grateful to be made real by being pulled out of the stuffy chamber of her head,

still it was sometimes difficult to repeat the same half hour rapture each

night as if this hunger for merger and thoughtless ecstasy were to bring on

intimacies and awareness that the previous night's half hour failed to do. This

perspective was exacerbated all the more when she considered the fact that the

urges had been no less poignant during all their other times together. Each

night there was his hard thumping to please himself fully with little regard,

now, for the best means of her arousal. Although still pleasurable, and even

more of a gyrating release from thoughts, it now seemed more like being tossed

in a blender, and each night her embraces became more like frozen fruit.

On weekends they often went to nurseries to buy shrubs and trees for the

landscape of her home as well as that of the school; but one Saturday morning

he got her to acquiesce to this yearning to find one's maker that was there in

the collective consciousness of primordial modern man. At Mass she fidgeted

with some beads in her lap and chanted Hail Marries. She chanted these archaic

trifles although, tacit and hidden away amongst her private thoughts, she had

her own version of a Hail Mary: "Hell Mary Juana, full of recalcitrance, the

Lordess, Santa Gabriela, be with thee. Blessed art thou in the salubrious realm

of illegal substances and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, beer and chewing

tobacco. Hell Mary Juana, servant of the Gabriele goddess and her partner, the

sun god, give us something sweet to hallucinate now and at the hour of our

death. Amen." She looked over at Nathaniel there in her pew. He was barely able

to keep himself from launching through the roof. This sententiousness and pomp

was too much poop for him too. For the first time in months she felt a special

cognate affection for her son that excluded the others. Feigning smiles only

when cognizant of Michael glancing toward her and silent as death, she tacitly

spoke to Nathaniel in an imaginary utterance, "I'll make this up to you--we

must all play with the tinker toys of language in thought to have some degree

of meaning within our petty lives; but God and heaven are empty make believe

words of a feeble animal. They are a feeble species who need to look for

external meaning and finding only tragic random chance within the mortality of

the family and friends that have given them pleasure, and then their own

mortality as well, resort to storybook scripture, churches, and chants. Their

jargon of God, heaven, hell, and sin don't refer to anything-- totally empty

words--and to have to forfeit running around, celebrating life to sit

uncomfortably in this dark Saddam Husseinish torture chamber--I'll make up for

this. What can I give you? What about a dog or a gift certificate to Swenson's

Ice Cream parlor? No, too much sugar. I wouldn't want you bouncing off the

walls any more than usual."

Following the service the boys were sent to a Catholic version of Sunday school

and she was paraded in front of a bunch of stiff strangers with eyes euthanized

by talk of the heavens. He introduced her to various people but the

introductions were an awkward mix. She was given their names with little else

and they were given this spiel that she was an artist who had become his

girlfriend and was now contributing some ideas for the interior design for his

school, whose beauty was distracting him from building his version of a loosely

affiliated Catholic school, and who might draw some "pictures" of the school's

patron saint. He said it in various ways but each time she felt flaunted like a

woman seeing the image of herself in a bra on a lit billboard in front of a

bench at a bus stop only in her case bust size and her ability to wear lingerie

beautifully did not matter. It seemed to her that he was trying to boast a

vague connection of an artist to the school, which she couldn't quite figure

out unless he had the idea that she would teach art there. The stout and husky

figure that she was, she couldn't see that his introducing her as if she were

Helen of Troy would grant him a lot more customers. A half hour into being

introduced and memorizing names that she would forget once out of there (one

young Russian who exercised with Michael at a fitness center and had the most

forgettable name of all) she told herself that she did not want the four of

them to stay there a minute longer. She used English like a crowbar, demanding

that he remove the boys so that they could enjoy the remainder of the day; and

from his saturnine expressions she could see that she was the condemned one. As

the condemned one she knew that she would be free to implement whatever she

pleased since he would be too sullen to have it any other way. She knew this

for she had been condemned before.

Not needing to worry about being condemned since she was already such, she went

ahead and argued that the boys should be left with Hispanic Betty if the two of

them were still planning to go to the nursery. She didn't want to see them

dragged through flowers, trees, and shrubs (Nathaniel spilling his incessant

complaints and disturbing big Mr. Phlegmatic by making him morose) or kept in

the hot truck the way they were on the previous Saturday. To be in the truck

all alone with nothing to do but slap one another and pull each other's hair

while she and Michael were plant hunting for verdant plantings, they would be

nothing but prisoners and their apoplexy from incarceration would probably

cause severe fraternal loathing. If nothing else, their whole day would be

constricted by adults' self-centered preoccupation with contrived

accomplishments since it was adults who ruled over them -- adults who went

contrary to the senses which implored that through contemplation one might

celebrate the day.

Gabriele and Michael returned with two German Shepherds as well as five or six

tree roses in the back of the pickup. Caring less about the plants, Gabriele

was eager to witness dog meets boy and boy makes dog into a friend but the joy

was stymied in stepping inside the house. When they went in they saw mercurial

Mr. Petulant executing punishment against the son of Mr. Phlegmatic. Nathaniel

had Rick's head under the running water of the faucet. The crime was spilling a

glass of milk; the punishment was a near drowning; and the perspective she

chose to take for a fuller understanding of this situation, as Michael pulled

off his belt, was Piaget's idea of the moral absolutist. As the brazen non-

flinching boy was being whipped, she thought to herself that she would need

Betty to monitor their every move from now on for children's system of

government was more procrustean and draconian than that devised by adults in

most, but not all, areas of the global jungle.

On a Monday built vapidly on the vacuous graves of wasted hours, she heard the

school bus return and the barking of the two hounds. Curious about how

Nathaniel related to his dog when she was not around, she went to the studio

window to witness this interaction of dog and boy inconspicuously.

Outside the window there was the same rectangular wooden container where, at

the trailer, she had planted a flowerbed which an owl then used as a domicile.

Now it was fastened under the studio window with a different choice of flowers.

She remembered the days preceding that move to Ithaca: having climbed onto a

tree, which had been the umbrage of the trailer, with slow, surreptitious

movements, shooting the owl with a tranquilizer gun, and pulling its body into

a laundry bag without falling from the limbs of the tree. It had been a time

consuming undertaking and at the time she had doubted whether it would actually

succeed; and yet here the owl was well acclimated to its setting. Looking onto

the bird now she was pleased: it had succumbed to the belief that the trailer

had been nothing but a dream just as she had awakened or succumbed to the

belief that her arduous efforts to paint visions imagined in her head had no

substance and that only filling one's mind in the clutter of activity that

involved others did one actually live at all. After all, contemplation involved

having to contemplate something and what else was there but this ball, this

planet of movement? A racket ball player was called such because she played

racket ball and a rebel because she rebelled--all people had self-worth by

defining themselves in words of action.

From the window she noticed that Nathaniel played with his dog when she was not

around. He actually had some affection for it. Had she bought at least one of

these dogs for the experiment of discovering his ability to care or to prompt

that attribute? Was it for the companionship of both boys or was it for her own

companionship? Maybe the dogs were bought to fill the hours when she wasn't

taking the boys to their scout meetings, buying clothes for them, rooting for

them on bleachers at baseball games (she had tried rooting for them as a

voluntary concession stand worker, but her tacit words and supercilious

coldness to the inconsequential and insufferable gossip of these motherly peers

brought her a flurry of unfriendly glances not all that different than what she

received in all the other days in the years of her life), tree planting, or

going to the site of the school to say, "It looks like its really coming along

well." It was all of this and more. So much that was selfish, altruistic,

curious, and indifferent went into the simplest of acts.

She could see there, in this dog centering its actions on her boy and her boy

responding by throwing out a shoe for him to fetch, a reason for all this

carbon to be divided into so many organisms. Looking through the window at this

interaction (saliva drooling from the mouth of one and smiling fangs from the

other) she saw that the universe communicated with itself and that it's self

responded in a distinctly varied perspective. It was by doing so that the

universe was at last real. There was no doubt that there were other worlds like

the Earth throughout the cosmos. Simple pleasures, simple interactions, were

the entity, and she knew that the whole thing was good. She knew that this

overlapping of the universe in carbon beings interacting with each other in

their distinct ways were the talking heads that made the universe real. The

sight of forty-dollar sneakers there in the drooling waterfalls of the dog's

mouth caused her consternation. Still she did nothing. She just watched and

recalled what had occurred yesterday.

Yesterday, Sunday, when she had approached this gathering of boy and dog

Nathaniel had shoved the animal away and when it still pounced on his legs as

he walked away from it, he kicked it on its belly. She didn't mind him showing

that he disliked her. She saw it as a passing stage: a diminishing but still

open animus toward her for the trip to Asia and Europe without him, resenting

this distribution of her attention to include two other males, taking umbrage

over her slight favoritism of the chosen over the natural members of family if

he did indeed perceive it (certainly he saw and resented the grocery shopping

with Rick that was done without him), this refurbishing of the whole of family

within contrived Friday night croquet games of bonding regardless of the mood

and wishes of individual family members at the time, and this slipping out of a

boy's closeness to his mother so that he might fit into himself. She did not

concern herself with that in the least. He could critically assess her and show

his dislike openly so long as it was done respectfully. True motherly love was

raising children and not needing to smother them in maternal, nurturing

instincts or expecting understanding that their egocentric beings could not

muster. The paddling yesterday was not as punishment for hostilities toward her

(hostilities that existed because of issues he was trying to resolve in

himself) or to oppose Skinner's belief that negative reinforcement accomplished

very little. It was done as justice for the dog and a statement on behalf of it

and all other animals that they weren't there to be targets of aggression. It

wasn't negative reinforcement per se for none of that could work with him. She

knew that skinned knees from bicycle accidents and the whippings he got from

Michael (Whippings she was beginning to resent) were proof that the boy was

somewhat stoic to pain. Outside of learning that Nathaniel did not dislike his

pooch (only herself) she lost herself in Internet articles on owls until she

and Rick began racing and banging their carts against each other down the

aisles of the grocery store, and Monday went by uneventfully.

On Thursday morning, when everyone had gone in accordance with their habits,

she ate some burnt toast with her grapefruit and for ten minutes stared at a

coffee pot with glazed eyes. There was a time when inanimate objects never

failed at reflecting the ennui by which she gazed at them, causing profound

ideas to be projected onto her consciousness like a great beacon of light shown

onto a screen in dark movie theatre --a filmed documentary of the entity and

its discoverer, Parmenides. Now meditation on a blank wall brought a sketch of

that wall within her memory and this was all.

So, from pure boredom, she decided to watch the dogs that were all alone and

unto themselves in the back yard. Since she wasn't exactly next door to

Antarctic penguins and these two specimens were infinitely more fascinating

than calculating the exact strands of gray hair in the underbrush that lay

fully on her scalp, she cast spells onto the dogs making these smelly bodies

with panting faces oozing out halitosis objects of mild curiosity. They were

certainly something to consider for those who had nothing better to do with

their time. Betty was busy behind the loud vacuum cleaner, and Gabriele could

hardly retreat into her bedroom to escape the noise since the fusillade of

Michael's flatulence a half hour earlier had been so rife that the air

freshener could not do much but dilute it in an equally reprehensible odor.

She went out on the deck and looked onto a world that was definitely for the

dogs. The German Shepherds moved in the yard unrestrained. In a more genuine

way they seemed happier to sniff and distinguish bits of the world instead of

this obsessive bliss of centering themselves on human masters. Much of the time

Nathaniel's anti-social dog growled when Rick's dog came near him; but,

depending on its mood, the two at times could play and wrestle with each other

amicably. Gabriele fed them Puppy Chow and watched how they relinquished their

freedom to instantly come for their meals. She pondered how all creatures were

always slaves to hunger and the desire to obtain more than their allotted

share--at least both characteristics were apparent in Nathaniel's dog.

Her thoughts echoed the breakfast talk a little over an hour ago. Rick had

wanted to bring his dog to school and had suggested that he could tie it to a

bicycle rack. Nathaniel had scoffed, "Right, ignoramus. D'you think Betty'll

come behind the two of you with a pooper-scooper to keep your ass from being

expelled. I think not!" Now, thinking of it, it still struck her as funny. It

hadn't bothered Rick. He had retained his placidity the way his dog was now

happily wagging its tail and looking up at her while its partner stole the food

that was in its dish. As agreeable as Rick's dog was, she could understand Mr.

Petulant's canine perfectly. Half-battered and half-loved even for a few days

in this thing called family, it was lost there in the bosky thickets of

confusion. Made to sleep with Nathaniel so that it might know him as master, it

could already sense that his love was tepid at best. Feeling inferior and

groping around in pleasurable associations so inextricably linked to pain it

was sometimes bumptious, aggressive, and striving to leave a concept of its

superiority onto the other dog's mind.

Months passed. She could not think anything in particular about the owl or the

dogs let alone anything else. They just existed along with her existence and as

incommunicably as her reticence. The late April rains were making shallow ponds

within her yard. Sodden as the mustard MF put on his eggs, or the streams

rolling across her sidewalk, the turgid sediment brought turgid sentiments of

desperation in her mind. Then out of nowhere came a chain of events as if a

blessing. They offered a respite from the void by the clogging of one's days in

myriad tasks. It was clutter devised by her bed partner's making and it beeped

according to the schedule in a PDA/ pocket computer that he lent to her. It all

started one numb day when Rick's dog was licking her face and she wasn't even

cognizant of it doing so and the telephone was ringing but she wasn't aware of

it either; a message on her old answering machine informing her about

Nathaniel's truancy; the imbroglio discussed in pillow talk; and the smell of

MF's breath cajoling her to withdraw the boys from public school and to home

teach them until the private school opened.

Eager to escape imprisonment in the void, her intransigence on the issue began

to break down and there she was arguing with him playfully, agreeing with him

silently, kissing him, needing the intoxication of his breath, and that

tendentious male assertiveness of that one right perspective. Her tenuous

arguments were playful and like any male he felt licentious flames from this

clashing of wills, this electric and sexy friction, and this knowledge that by

rubbing her in his arms and planting his seed in her he would conquer all

resistance.

The next morning she kissed her MF at the breakfast table in front of the

others without inhibitions, massaged the nape of his neck, and then sat there

holding his hand under the table as she bobbed on some type of cloud. Betty's

frying of bacon did not seem nauseating; the mustard Michael put on his eggs

radiated warmly like the sun god, Aten; and the flatulence of one or more males

at the breakfast table seemed aromatic. Convinced of her mission to be a

teacher, she was suddenly the indispensable cue ball setting others in motion

but being banged along with them. Her busy new life often involved the search

of the right books to purchase; the readings, the making of handouts and

worksheets; her impatient lectures, enforced homework, and administered tests;

her punishment for recesses of savagery when Mr. Placid's head of hair was

often pulled out of the sink like a fisherman's trophy; more lectures; taking

Mr. Placid--never Mr. Petulant-- with her grocery shopping or searching for

acceptable amateur art for the school lounge (a Gabriele Sangfroid deemed not

tame enough); sending another one of Mr. Phlegmatic's suits to the dry cleaner;

and then driving the boys to baseball practice, boy scouts meetings, or

swimming lessons. Her only contemplation during the first week of this teacher

act was to sit on the toilet to urinate and defecate. It brought not only to

her a physical catharsis but, from the bathroom window a view of Betty burning

raked grass and leaves in the yard. Smoke hovered over the tree limbs like a

thick massive spider web and she saw that the fire that was leaping and the

smoke that was hovering was her own life. She told herself that she loathed

contemplation. And so the months passed by in a vapid and dizzying succession

of things to do. Real existential pondering or the internal creation of meaning

within herself were troubles she did not need to ponder.

Sometimes she doubted herself and wondered whether motion had become an ersatz;

and this quandary was as pesky as a fly trying to land on the oils of her shiny

nose. She kept having a recurring dream of floating on the mattress of her bed

to undulations and the sounds of waves splashing against a wall. These bedroom

walls had old pallid- yellow wallpaper that was bubbled and flaking off and

patterned onto the strips of wallpaper there were hexagon shapes. Cartoon

versions of herself and her family were trapped in each hexagon like

semi-beings in monads that were unable to connect to the bigger picture, but

like the wallpaper they were fading away.

In a last exasperated appeal for her to apply for work at the school before it

opened, he reminded her that the boys wouldn't be there to teach any longer so

she would need to do something with herself. Ruminating would never succeed;

but an external activity like painting that was so outwardly self-absorbing

might be used to subtly reiterate to them who she was as if an action or a set

of actions were the summation of a being. By painting she could only thwart the

aspirations of others by making them realize that her own selfish agenda came

before theirs. Such an appearance would make her outwardly narcissistic and

impregnable in their perspectives. For otherwise they could take her apart

piece by piece the way souvenir hunters chipped off Teotihuac‡n or walked off

with the Petrified Forest.

He would perceive the less concrete images in her paintings to be feral, and

yet he would remain taciturn, scowling but leaving her to be herself. Maybe

there would be some of these bedtime reminders, although not so many as now.

Now there were these continual reminders of suits to have cleaned, grocery

items for his palate and pallet (colors for his mouth that she would be vile

and immoral to ignore) and reminders of what their boys needed, the agenda of

pleasure for these little monkeys whom she was meant to chauffeur from place to

place (a karate class for one, a baseball practice for another, a friend's

birthday party for one, a jean and shirt buying extravaganza for both).

But now, she would not paint for she did not need it to support and pull

herself back as if she were the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Her foundation, she told

herself, was not as tenuous as this. And even though she was a true woman for

him, catering to family matters and allowing herself to be his whore (he asking

her questions about men she slept with so that it would excite him enough to

maximize his pleasure when impaling within her) she told herself that she could

do it without needing art as a crutch. She was a true woman as he liked it and

yet had her own sense of being fully Gabriele within her own head. Painting

would merely be a prop of a weak feminist. Yes, she could have told him that

she had her art, that focus of the realm of ideas that had been her vocation

before he moved in with her, and he would have scowled discreetly, never

criticizing its odd feral qualities directly. But she would not have believed

herself to be an artist anyhow since expressions were being effaced in each new

day of life's mundane inconsequentiality.

She just gave him a wry smile and shrugged her shoulders. Too busy: the phrase

was air above her lips and it just hovered there like the gossamer smoke strewn

in the branches from Hispanic Betty's burning of leaves. She didn't dare say

anything. She just let off a whiff of air. With head in denial, she silently

repudiated that the school was even being constructed let alone finished, and

that the two pupils who put motion and a sense of being busy into her life

would soon be gone. She didn't want to discuss any of it. Still the school

opened, not being subservient to her solipsistic thoughts. Its opening brought

to her regret that she had chosen to not work there and that a role and an

interaction with others, which had so easily defined her, would no longer be

there to cling to. She had circumscribed her yearnings to go on with teaching,

was now miserable, but believed that not prostituting herself in high school

psychology classes or elementary school finger painting had been the right

choice. Wounded not by vacuous stretches of hours but by the severing of this

habit to place meaning and happiness on one's role and interaction with others,

hers was a battered retreat. She withdrew into her own books to not be entirely

lost unto herself and she knew that knowledge contained there was one step

toward building herself apart from the addiction to the chaos and motion of

others. She again returned to the nothingness from whence she came. She

sometimes sat in her studio with a carton of Swenson's ice cream on her lap

reading books on owls like any good ornithologist, got nebulous readings of

Tarot cards that she smacked into Celtic designs on her bed, or sometimes drew

funny faces on the patio with the chalky edges of rocks. Feeling discontent if

left alone for five minutes and incrementally disconcerted for every minute

beyond ten, she often interrupted Hispanic Betty to ask what she was doing as

if housework were pantomime and the gestures could only be guessed at. The days

were invariably long and despite their plodding movements they clunked into

each other like two emaciated furless dogs in Thailand that were enervated and

stupefied by starvation and blindness.