He blew his smoke into her face. "Well, with the gender factor alone no man and

woman are interested in the same things nor are they all that compatible.

That's for sure." His voice drifted slowly on the stream of smoke flowing from

his mouth and from the effluvia of his lackadaisical scorn. "But to make any

type of relationship work -- even the most pathetic -- neither of them can just

stare at the walls day-in and day-out. One has to be interested in something --

business, rearing kids, teaching, arts and crafts stuff, something. I'd say it

was me, that you didn't care to live with me, and that's what made you so moody

and useless in a sense; but it wouldn't explain your unwillingness to paint,

would it? -- You who just sort of sit around claiming that you are an artist

all hours. I guess you can sell some of that stuff -- what little you do so I

guess somebody likes it. It is a shame that you don't draw more still life.

Your artsiness was really beginning to have something in it." He stopped for he

knew that he had run over her with maximum efficacy since gratuitous plowing

through flesh and blood would not make it any more contrite.

Knowing how a hurt, rejected, and emasculated ego sought to maim others in

speech, wisps of air, like a diffident eunuch brandishing a butcher knife, she

let him disgorge his acrimonious sound. What was it to her? It was an amusing

psychological study and only this. The petty utterances he would try to use to

inflict misery commensurate with a rejected proposal intrigued her. He was no

more dangerous than a child running around in an Indian costume and brandishing

his rubber blade.

"Go on. No need to be bashful. We can't work on problems if we are ignorant of

them." She meant "Go on. No need to be civil, you hateful bastard." But this

would be repressed to a dream and there it would be in the flames of enactment

and reenactment until the combustion was complete.

He continued. "Anyhow, you just looked bored all the time toward everyone

including your own son. We were your headaches; and I looked like I was wasting

my time with you."

The trivial bits and pieces of a personal life projected in acrimonious speech

were often expressions of anger toward that other one whom these intense shared

pleasures were dependent and the whole thing disgusted her. Cast from the two

parties, the personal life was not merely a mosaic of selfish inconsequentials

of bad off-moments nor a heavy shadow of two lighter shadows but, together,

were the adumbration of the entire scaffolding of a being: the contorted and

disgusting skeleton of instinctual drives to gain pleasure, to hate those who

might hinder pleasure, to hunt, to harm, to eat, and to possess. This was the

personal domain and as disgusted as she was with it, her disgust was not as

solid as she had wished it to be. It was weakened and attenuated by the

pleasure of having a significant other know insignificant things about her like

where she hung her bra. To have him know such things made her feel a little

less cryptic. She had scoffed at his proposal so it was no wonder that his

bitterness disgorged upon her. She understood male pride and excused his

caustic utterances. "I think I put aside myself for everyone," she said. "It

was all new to me, you know, and it took some adjusting. I've always been a

rather independent being. Still the family that we were was the only family I

and Nat have had besides each other. I even went to your church, you know. How

supportive did you want me to be outside of becoming you? As you say, no two

people are alike--not even if you were to meet some docile little Betty Crocker

Helen homemaker type with her certificates in cooking and ductility."

"Ductility? No woman could ever come as well prepared in big word armament as

you. You are one of a kind for sure."

She smiled. It was the first dubious compliment that he had extended to her for

so long.

" As for Mass, it is is important to Italian American families and you only

went when you were forced to go--those times that it was too apparent that

there were none of these headaches of yours and that faking one at the last

moment would have looked ridiculous." She tightened her lips in consternation.

His ignorance was that of the droves of men who believed that migraines were

feigned. Even if she were to enlighten him there would be myriad others yet to

step out of themselves. She couldn't change them all. She told herself that

society's reaction to those like herself was no different than how the

government treated Gulf War veterans. But in fact there was a major difference:

when it came to going to church, those headaches were really feigned unless all

unpleasant situations were headaches, which they were in a sense. He went on:

"I wouldn't know. Maybe you did go once in a while and maybe you did help me

plant a tree or two. Still that doesn't exactly make or break a relationship,

does it?" She would have reminded him of their bedroom intimacies but she knew

that he, a man, was already thinking of that which he most revered; and by

mentioning it she would be opening herself up to a comment that one couldn't

expect anything else from a professional. She nearly reminded him of those

intimacies anyway just to taunt a response from him and thus free the hubris

that she was barely able to contain within her. "-- You know, there is no point

in going into any of this."

"I'm beginning to draw again. I believe I'm painting some works that will outdo

anything I've accomplished before. I feel so creative now like I'm about ready

to produce something that could be my magnum opus. Before, I was just going

through a phase where I couldn't draw and didn't know what I was all about. It

wasn't you. It was me."

"I don't know that we are a good match, to tell you the truth."

"Why do people have to match? Why can't they just love each other and

appreciate their differences?" She said this while knowing that finding a

perfect match for herself might be impossible and that in her present mood any

man was better than none. Now with her youth waning she knew that sexual

liaisons with beautiful forms would become more and more like hunting for

mushrooms in an area with a worsening annual rainfall. "I don't know if you

have a new girlfriend now but -- "

"I don't have one."

He blew more smoke into her face. "So what are you wanting?"

"Let's do it now, Sweetheart. Let's just get married -- no fancy, pretentious

stuff, just a quick run to the justice of the peace …maybe today or

tomorrow…the sooner the better."

They were married in the early afternoon and a day later he moved many of his

things back into her home. Since the wedding had been as bland as she had

requested it (a justice of the peace and a couple of Michael's employees who

acted the part of witnesses), she told herself that a permanently delayed

honeymoon would be a matchingly dull complement. To her this honey and moon

composed a word that was no misnomer: it implied a bee addicted to a

nectar-induced high and she knew that even a minute of that unreality would

have cloyed her sanity. Being with that same man 24 hours a day at a Kentucky

Derby, an Indianapolis 500 or other non-Parmenidetian activity that was

paradise to the masses and vile to philosophers and contemplatives would have

caused her to grab the nearest Time or Newsweek as quickly as most women

reached for sanitary napkins. Still the human goddess who once dressed Barbie

dolls for imaginary weddings couldn't help but yearn for a honeymoon all the

same. She was mystified why Michael did not move Rick's belongings with his

own; and yet partly assuming that this would happen after the honeymoon and

partly from a desire to not know, she did not ask. Then the saturnine groom

took her to the airport to watch the airplanes come and go. They looked through

the glass cages at these volant pterosaurs with American Airlines branded on

their skins. At first she thought that he who was so parsimonious about the

amount of water that could flow from a tap had decided upon this watching of

the airplanes as the honeymoon but then he left and came back with something

worse than nothing: tickets to Little Rock, Arkansas. She had no luggage but he

told her that they would pick up some clothes in the capital city and she

smiled. She told him that it had been a long time since she had flown in a

plane as if Jakarta had been nothing but a dream.

The first day after their arrival they took a small plane to Bentonville,

Arkansas and then walked through the Wal-Mart museum witnessing different

possessions of Sam Walton's humble beginnings and listening to the story of his

ambition to become a multimillionaire. She disparaged her disparaging thoughts.

She blocked the formulation of negative ideas and smiled at each new exhibit.

"To think that he addressed the first consumer inquiries on a manual typewriter

like this," she said at the typewriter exhibit.

"Isn't that the truth," he told her. "A man who in later life could have bought

a factory to manufacture the most sophisticated supercomputers used by the

government and here he was in younger days pecking on that old thing."

They spent the second day of the honeymoon in a rented car going up snowy,

mountainous hills through forests of dangling icicles as thick as stalactites

and as lush as its lost verdant facade, traveling by the most winding and

treacherous roads until they were at last in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.

On the third day of Christmas he gave to her the reverberating cacophony of

country music, torturing an already queasy stomach that had just experienced

car-sickness earlier that afternoon. From the front row of the concert she

managed to smile without wincing noticeably from this howling through nostrils

via song. The discomfort from her own disingenuousness in maintaining this

coerced smile was as reprehensible as the sound; and yet it was nothing to her

who had seen a decapitation in early girlhood and spoke of it like an

inquisitive little scholar. The bombardment of senseless noise was the stuff

migraines were made of; although fortunately for her none ensued.

On the fourth day of Christmas they were at this new business "of his." There

was a ribbon cutting for this international gourmet supermarket which would

soon be replicated in Japan. He showed her through the aisles and pointed out

every item on the shelves as if the stuff one crammed down his or her gullet

needed such elaboration.

On the fifth day it was Christmas and so they decided to travel around the area

of Eureka Springs. They drove up and down the niveous and tortuous hills in and

out of the town. Tree gazing from the more scenic back roads was his truth

beyond the corporeal greed and ambition of financial enterprises (this world)

and unempirical religion (the make believe world), and she was pleased that he

had it. As his woman, she wanted to nurture a greater purpose in him. As a

somewhat solipsistic being she wanted to stake a purpose in being with him

beyond more intense pleasures of shared experiences which she knew were

erroneously pinned on mutable others instead of the constancy of self. During

this car-bound time she held her loose stomach successfully, stifling its

rebellion through the exertion of will. She again smiled: It was a complaisant

facade of any common soldier.

Then he took her to the town's shoddy replica of the statue of Jesus that was

meant to duplicate the one that stood over Rio de Janeiro. The diminished

Christ didn't have the efficacy of the original since it lacked omnipotent and

sturdy immutability over the natural world and beauty. Still, with a hand

pressed into his, she couldn't help but feel that specious illusion of God

being up there in the sky caring about the ethical decisions of her little

life. Of course, it was all conditioning: the warmth and strength of a man's

hand being transmitted into her own, the sun upon her skin, and, from them, a

glazed, ethereal staring at the statue as if it were radiating blessings upon

her.

Side by side with her man in their warm winter coats, both like little furry

animals against the kneecaps of this stone or fiberglass man-god, she did not

mind succumbing to religious delusions. She was married now and all other

suppositions and attempts to make her stance, her sense of the world, were

nothing. All ideas that went contrary to his expectations were dust that her

mind needed to sweep away. Marriage was reality. It was the psychological and

physiological completeness of two people, and as such there was a necessity for

compromise no differently than the appetites of the body being catered to by

the brain that developed pleasure receptors to tolerate this incompatible

coexistence. She argued to herself that it was an incontrovertible truth that a

man's bedtime dominion transferred to all else. A woman, by getting married,

either gave her tacit approval of this natural inclination or gained enjoyment

from the ongoing challenge to minimize it.

An idea trespassed through the meadows of her mind that he had taken her here

to force upon her a spiritual awakening and to test her obsequiousness to him

and his god in action if not thought (she who, when logic domineered over all

else was a lone, frigid polar bear who didn't even care that much for the

sexual awakenings). Then another idea encroached upon her. She wondered whether

having been awakened so often sexually had put her in a coma to all other forms

of awakening. She disparaged the fleeting thought. It was a mere caprice, she

argued, like disliking a passing woman for wearing the color, pink, or wanting

to make love to all sailors for wearing their clean, white, and neatly pressed

uniforms. Heretofore such whims had not defined her despite the harmony of her

solitary meadow being continually littered in the blowing of these deciduous

scraps. Heretofore she had been able to find that higher authority that willed

to know a self outside of winds and blowing rubbish; a self that would gain

immediate and indelible awareness from the cookie cutter of his or her

experience, and only this. Heretofore she had been impervious to the intensity

of the hot sandstorms of raw emotion and the blizzards of refined emotion,

thought.

But now all was different. She, an American, had knocked off her insular

American shell (the little she had possessed) while in Jakarta. She had gone

there thinking, according to her culture, that Moslems were extremists who

hated Americans; but never believing the ideas that she was brought up with or

the ones spewing out of this invisible mouth, society, she had disregarded the

idiocy of fear and bias for the splendor of reviving truth. There she had met a

gentle people; there she had been naked with easily torn skin; and there she

had felt the hurt and the injustice of the masses, compassion and enlightenment

seeming a great and insufferable travail. Then and now she needed to go to him

in the hope of forgetting life's injustices within the softness of his skin

massaging her own.

Since, subtly within her compromises, she was now emulating him for an

"understanding" of religion and was now beginning to reflect upon her Aunt

Peggy as a paragon of marital sustainability, somehow following the herd seemed

less reprehensible. A being was born, grew up to reproduce, and then died. How

could she, the maverick that she might be, add more purpose to the state of

mankind than this? Could she be so supercilious as to think that the common

experiences of those normal or normal acting people counted for nothing? These

actions existed since the beginning of time so who was she to disabuse

pragmatic, time-tested ideas that were passed down through the generations?

She maintained her glazed, ethereal stare at the statue; wanted to rapture

herself from discomfort equivalent to those pews in a chapel; felt the mistake

of being here with him bury her in the fragments of herself like the rubble of

the Afghan Buddha; and yet feigned a glowing ember of yearning within this

contrived display of contentment. She played the part well enough to believe it

herself. She did not want to upset him as she had before, for not only would it

suggest to him that he should not have married her but it would aver to herself

her own intransigence and a social ineptness that was of damaged whores and

spinsters. She argued that marriage was a union built on incessant compromise

and flexibility and that she wanted to be as adroit at it as she was in

spitting chewing tobacco. She could have gone through a ceremony of marrying

herself as the more outlandish Dutch women did. She could have rented out a

large area for the ceremony and paid for a lavish, catered banquet, a wedding

dress, and confetti. The recurrent idea of it was tantalizing. Even if marriage

to oneself would lack some sexual exhilaration it would be a singular form of

epiphany. The publicity would have been good for the sales of her art and there

were days, upon her return from Jakarta that she taunted herself with this

possibility as a viable way to keep herself from showing up onto the doorstep

at the home of Michael's parents. But she ended up telling herself that she

wasn't Dutch enough for such libertine experiments.

And so she believed in a religious delusion that was no different than all

other delusional zealots. She believed the way one might well believe that

cavemen were devoured by dinosaurs, that Shirley McClain was god as proven by

having written it in a book, that out-of-body experiences for near-deathors

were proof that there was a soul, and that people were actually napped by

aliens into these fancy UFO space shuttles.

In a cheap hotel room in Eureka Springs, they sat on a bed and watched

television. Sedentary as he was staring into the box, he was animated in his

mesmerized state. But for her, it almost seemed that he and his television

gained their animation from sapping away her energy. Boredom was so enervating

that it wouldn't have been preposterous to think of one's energy being snatched

and diverted elsewhere. Money, ownership, tax loopholes, investments, televised

games, tree planting, and this, watching the Tonight Show, were the same

recurrent life themes of this man.

She sat there as listlessly as a catatonic. Images from the television trodden

here and there on the surface of her brain but the earth underneath did not

register the burden of these fleeting forms. Looking at the cramped room, which

exacerbated her discomfort, she tried the best that she could to wrestle and

pin to the floor her critical thoughts. She was married now so surely she

should try. Still, she couldn't help but think that he was just an ordinary

male in his obsession with ownership, his unwavering interest in action or

jokes in a box, and his pursuit of other innocuous pleasures that became the

man. Furthermore, she couldn't help but think that he was parsimonious, like

now as evident by the cheap hotel room, and thriftless like in Rome, all at the

wrong times. But for a year now she accepted the inevitable conclusion that

showing to him her books on art or dragging him to symphonies or exhibitions

would never deliver him to urbane habits that could be mutually shared. If he

dabbled with the arts enough to attend an exhibition it was as one of the rich

who gained an enhanced status from rubbing against its colors. He did not gain

it by being a patron of artistic merit through a scholarship or foundation in

his name or by spending inordinate sums at art auctions (after all, as rich as

his family was, it was not as rich as this) but by copulating with an artist

and owning one in marriage. And yet he was the person that he was, and, within

the little womanly weakness she possessed (this love/this neediness that flared

up in even females like her to entice breeding) she half believed that true

love was accepting him for better or for worse because this was who he was. She

no longer believed that changing someone was love or that the environmental

spark of love (in her case going with him through art museums in Rome or

witnessing his bold reflection come into the bathroom of her hotel room and

urinate as she was applying makeup in front of a mirror) had much legitimacy.

Love was a commitment toward compromise and sacrifice.

So, while the thick cloud of his flatulent odor was beginning to dissipate and

a steak sauce commercial was interrupting the Tonight Show, she became drowsy.

At one moment she heard him say, "That steak sure looks good on the TV, doesn't

it Honey?" and then in the next she fell off a precipice into a vacuum of wind

that made up dreams. Like women who when experiencing prenuptial jitters have

nightmares of their wedding ceremonies being interrupted by dark revelations,

she dreamed something similar to this belatedly. She dreamed that she and

Michael were at a diner in the John F Kennedy International Airport. They were

getting married there before departing to Tokyo. Suddenly the airport security

guards, all of whom were Japanese, interrupted the ceremony, whispered

something to the potential groom, and gave Polaroid photographs to the Catholic

priest. She wasn't sure what they said but she did hear the words "airport

bathroom graffiti" which made her grimace not for the ignorance of those who

were part of this consensus (she didn't "give a flying fuck" about what they

thought in the slightest) but that these bereft hollow heads epitomized what

the droves of men would think. It didn't depress or upset her: it was just like

being a sole life form on Mars. It was uncomfortable as hell but she was quite

used to it. MF, after being shown the photographs, asked the priest if he

should go through with a marriage to a woman who had drawn such unregenerate

images on the doors of the women's toilet but the priest ignored his maudlin

whining as if annoyed by any distraction that would delay his inquisition.

Gabriele could sense this priest's yearning to put his fangs into her for she

knew that the taste of blood was sweet and that the blood of a unique being

would be envisaged by such savages as the sweetest yet. "Tell me, did you do

this?" he asked the dark veiled woman but he did not give her time to respond.

"Who is this black man that makes up the face and body of a savage God in this

grotesque and blasphemous mural?" demanded the priest.

Gabriele lifted the veil on her burka. "There isn't anything depraved or

unregenerate in it," she averred. "I don't know who he is. It is just my

imagination." Her lie was phlegmatic. She would have willingly given the truth

but she wouldn't be goaded into it or humble herself to such pernicious and

puritanical Taleban. She wouldn't even humble herself to God if she were to see

him. She and God would just have to introduce themselves as two strangers,

neither one better or worse than the other. "The larger image is whatever one

wishes the larger image to be, I suppose."

"What I want it to be?" mocked the priest acrimoniously. So, I suppose, if I

want it to be the Virgin, Mary -- "

"Then it is Mary."

"Mary sure has a lot of naked images of black men with grotesquely large

genitalia running through her head," said the priest.

She smiled. "Of course she does, as all women do. Have you never heard of

Masters and Johnson? Surely Kinsey could not have eluded a person of your type.

If I were to dig up the foundation under that hairy grandfatherly veneer of

yours who knows what I'd find."

"Aren't you smart? To think that we could have naively put your name in holy

matrimony. But do tell me, now that God is generously revealing all of your

perverted ideas, what you think is in my heart!"

"I wouldn't know. I don't read minds or hearts. I imagine it is the same stinky

muck that is in all men's cravings. If you pay me money, I wouldn't oppose

letting you confess your sins to me. Now the price to absolve sins and blowjobs

are both the same: 500 dollars -- US, of course. With handsome Adonises, it is

a packaged set but not with old goats like you."

He shook his head. "To think that I would have married this fine gentleman to

such a blasphemous whore."

"Maybe I can read minds, hearts, or what-not. I'm reading big breasted women

there washing each other's bodies as they do onstage in makeshift showers at

Go-go bars in Bangkok; but only because you are too scared of burning in hell

for your homosexual inclinations. Rivers run both ways, you know, but

socialization on a teenager can alter how it flows. For old goats like you,

nobody built your dam when you were young so now there is only cobbled will.

Your will tries to redirect the flow since. You know that you cannot stop it

entirely. Say 100 Haila Gabrielas and pay me my money."

The priest shook his head at the foul fiend and turned away. "Bangkok?" asked

the priest. He was directing his question to Michael.

"She went there once," he told the priest. "She is always making contrasts of

Thailand to Western civilization."

"Did she meet this black man there?"

"Who knows?" said Michael.

Gabriele guffawed. "Why not address me?" she asked.

"Then answer for yourself, you disgusting tramp," said Michael.

"Maybe I did or didn't," she prevaricated. "Maybe I don't need to meet anyone

or do anything. I witness life. If I read something or see something that is

happening in my world (even if from a distance) it touches me and I'm inspired

by it. I'm not afraid of it no matter what it is."

"She's your betrothed," said the priest. "What do you want done."

"Let His will be done. She hides her profanity, promiscuity, and obscenities

behind art. She never admits anything," he whined sobbingly. "I don't know what

to do with her."

"Apple her?" asked the security guards.

"Apple her!" reiterated the priest.

The cooking staff, under their burkas, began to fire apples and soon everyone

within the room appled her skull.

"Why couldn't you have just drawn still-life or landscapes?" whined Michael.

"Join your Turkish friend from long ago!" shouted the Ayatollah- garbed priest.

Gabriele was now lying on the floor with her forehead bleeding profusely. Still

she could eke out faint utterances and so she projected her words like a song.

"You wouldn't have loved me if I hadn't been somebody-- you thought it was a

thrill to see one of whoredom reach stardom. It was like being in the

Astrodome. Like any carnal male, a woman's glitter is to your liking--it is

your pleasure dome but to me it is not striking."

Then she dreamed that there was an anniversary party, which Michael held to

commemorate himself and the longevity of his schools and stores. There, in her

home on the day of the party, she noticed that blonde-headed, frosty-pigmented

man with the unmemorable name sitting there in his own separate space within

her living room. He had large, thoughtful, eyes; and to her he was exotic and

unpretentiously wholesome like latent mushrooms in a vast field. He was silent

in the noise; and she loved this superhuman trait as she had loved it of her

father--he who used to part from her on the beach and pursue the silent wading

of his nothingness into the vastness of the entity, he who had been her

Parmenides despite having long ago abandoned her as one who had indifferently

tossed out grass seed. Having fought in war and having foolishly devoted his

life to contrived ideals of patriotism, these life scatterings nonetheless made

her father into the pensive German that he was. She had silently abhorred him

all these years for his neglect and for severing her innocence in the coerced

witnessing of the Turk's execution; and yet everyday she was grateful to him.

Not only had her time in Turkey made her a snug albeit hurting occupant of

self- containment within Fort Gabriele but his hard high browed arrogance had

inspired the high stain glass windows of her facade from which she observed all

earthly creatures below. Also it was from him that these sanguine

characteristics had been hers. As she looked over the guests to that serene bit

of nature within the smoke and voices, she saw eccentric greatness within him.

She knew that his philosophy was hers: for those individuals who could accept

silence and not cling to others they would never be lost from themselves; and

that whoever gained the bliss that was there in solitude, descending within

one's own fathoms without inordinate hungers and movement, he or she would be

one of the savants who moved perception. An insect moving on an ambulatory man

in ignorance of his movements; a moving universe that does not jolt the

self-centered movement of its ignorant beings--so the savants seemed not to

move while they carried all these insectual entities with them.

She dreamed that because of the potential inaccuracy of first impressions, she

was reluctant to instantly accept her own favorable preliminary conclusions and

yet the frosty man with the unmemorable name seemed to her as so ingenuous.

Within the cigarette smoke, the wine, and the smiles, he was not eager to take

his turn in the continual sallies of one monkey-man attempting to conquer

another one by being the wittiest of all Neanderthals. He just smiled a

contrived smile onto the games that these barbarians played with each other. He

smiled the way all brilliant people had to do.

While she was stripping a head of lettuce he escaped to the kitchen and got

some fresh air on the balcony. She pulled him in to chop carrots. She asked

where he was from initially. He told her that he was from everywhere. She

probed this concept of an everywhere man in German but then changed to Spanish.

In both languages he told her that everywhere was a concept that wasn't

necessarily linked to a place. Later on in the evening when everyone had gone

she found a note on top of a stack of dishes that he had washed for her. She

looked at the scribble of a telephone number. "Please, my Miss, call my mobile

or send me an SMS." She did, and then they met at the zoo in front of the

spider monkeys. From there they went to the ballet. At the ballet he spoke to

her in Russian. She thought of it as the preferred world language because it

was nonsense to her. Had it been sensible it no doubt would have reflected a

language of ordinary minds and so she preferred languages of the nonsensical

variety.

Then she dreamed that she and Michael had never been linked together, and as

such neither union nor separation with and from each other was engraved

indelibly upon either of their brains. As such, she was an enlarging puddle

being fed the rain. She was an innocent girl in goulashes feeling the

vibrations of ripples and stir caused by her feet, and watching the ambulatory

movements of birds feeding in the respites of a shower. She was all of these

birds scavenging in the dirt for their prey for she herself had scavenged in

demeaning mental and physical prostitution before becoming one of the rare

goddesses of men whose novel ideas were a commodity.

The dream became one of a Gabriele who was an even younger girl. Enthralled

with the rain, the rainbow, and the reflections of branches in the puddles, she

was nonetheless distraught over not finding the cracks of ant corridors in what

was once the parched earth. It did not occur to her that avalanche and drowning

were the natural order imposed by merciless creation against these superfluous

breeders. She kept looking for the cracks within the dirt but it was to no

avail.

Since she did not know many words, she didn't have any critical judgments and,

inept at linking words together, she was not thrust on that one-way track of

probable outcomes for the future. Still free from being socialized and not

having sexual drive that equated being with others as appetites, she was more

inclined to mourn a few days of not climbing trees than someone's absence from

her life. Cared for, she was not fixated on survival so she stayed in the

present moment where smallness percolated through the orifices and oracles of

the senses. Scavenging on pink and yellow-stick legs like the birds, and

flooded out with stunned worms and insects, she was these things. She was a

Piaget child. Then she was as an adult form. The man with the unmemorable name

was posing nude for her paintings; and when she was ready to pack up the canvas

and paints one evening, he brooded charmingly. "When will I see you again?" he

asked like a pensive and hurt child at the thought of her leaving him.

She felt irritated that he could ask such a question even if the female within

her coruscated within a man's neediness for a woman no differently than it

would within the light of flattery.

"When?" he asked again.

"When Russia becomes a member of NATO or returns into the Soviet Union."

"Why don't you stay?"

"Why? It is a loaded question. Why?" and she kissed him and sucked in his

breath as if it were needed more than her own. Then she pulled away. She

thought, "To never know how to marry oneself in ideas and endeavors that bring

new ideas into existence, to just claim another person's rotting flesh to not

wander around lost and vertiginous--no I'm not one of the sorry herd!"

"You really won't stay?" he asked.

She was tempted. She thought about staying like a fat woman would chocolate in

a grocery store. She rejoiced in the fact that she did not need to be any man's

woman. Sex could be obtained without actually living with someone. Matter of

fact it could be obtained all alone and she would have opted for it done in

this solitary manner within her own privacy if fantasies could be developed for

oneself and a fuller pleasure could be gained in masturbation.

"No, I'm afraid not," she replied. I want to think of things other than you.

Besides, I sleep better alone. After all, sleep is a solo activity."

"Other men?"

"Probably," she chortled. I'll see you tomorrow," she said.

"Meet me at the zoo and then we will walk over here--Meet me in front of the

cage of the spider monkeys like before. Be prepared to know every obscure zoo

animal by its scientific jargon in the Russian language," he told her.

And then the dream had her meeting him the next day near a baboons' cage. She

could tell that her profound buffoon had only feigned this drowning in a

sensitive abyss. There were no complaints, there was no rehashing of

insignificant past events, and no attempt to demand more from her within a

jealous male atavism that was instinct. They just touched each other's bodies

like children the feel of their grandmothers' panty hose.

She woke up, startled to find herself with Michael in a strange bed. She

propped up her pillow and sat up. She thought about where she was at: here in

this poorly paved state of Arkansas a little south of the middle of nowhere,

the yodeling of bluegrass and country music reverberating off the Ozark

mountains. Ensconced with her man in a blanket that had southern flowers on it,

she still felt cold; and part of the blanket was wrapped about her like a

southern damsel's dress. "Good lord," she thought as she looked at her thick

makeshift dress, "aren't I the Great Motel Lady, Belle Gaw-brE- el." She picked

up her purse from the end table, took out some snuff, and lodged it into a

cheek. "Belle Gabriele," she mumbled aloud, "the motel Belle."

"What'd you say?" he asked.

"Are you awake?" she prevaricated.

"Sort of," he said. "What time is it?"

"Five."

"You said something?"

"Huh? Oh yeah, it was nothing. Sorry, I guess I woke you--mumbling aloud as I

was like an old woman."

"Wake me in a half hour. I forgot to set my alarm."

"PLEASE wake me up, don't you mean?"

He chuckled sleepily on the border of wakefulness. "Don't go back to sleep and

forget." He rolled onto his side in a solitary departure, and now it was just a

back that was before her. It didn't even seem to be his. It was just a man's

back and it didn't have an owner.

She pushed back the curtains of the window and watched the heavy traffic moving

along a narrow stretch of road. She knew that she was also just one of the

horde moving up and down the streets searching for something while, in arrant

foolishness or within august foibles, claiming others and being claimed by

them.

She deliberated on sleep and dreams, that mysterious enigma which she had

wondered about so often. It dawned on her that sleep was the burning of

subconscious fuel--it was the burning of myriad crowding and conflicting whims

within the confines of the brain so that some type of civil existence might

prevail.

She thought of her dream in which she waited for the Russian near the monkeys.

She wondered if she was like the specimens in Harlow's monkey experiments. From

a German upbringing, had she not become the misfit monkey--the one that had

been denied the touch of a mother or surrogate mother and so always kept

herself at a distance in the social world. But she did not abuse her offspring

like the misfit monkey. No, she had given to her child adequate enough touch

even though touch, in her younger days had been so repugnant when imposed upon

her without payment. She took a shower and went to work like all other mental

prostitutes.

It was her sixth day as a replacement for a cashier in the foreign food store.

The other cashier had been fired because of three consecutive days in which she

had attended to a sick child instead of coming to work. Gabriele did this for

12 hours and then around 9:30 p.m. as she began to close down her cash register

in the habitual manner of ringing up all sales Michael began to engage in small

talk to pacify the other cashiers. He thanked them for their hard work. He told

them that as indispensable as they were to the Arkansas mother company they

were always welcome to be with the sprawling newborn in Sapporo. He said that

the store in Sapporo would never shut down and it would eventually become

triple the size of this one.

After the store was closed he and Gabriele were driving back to the hotel room

when they stopped for a few minutes in a McDonald's Drive- thru. There, waiting

at the window for their Big Macs, Michael asked her if she could mortgage her

house and sell "that nude thing" in the garage to "offset" the expenses of the

new business. For some seconds she was discomfited if not dumbfounded, and then

she scowled at the thought of having been dumb enough to marry him.

For a moment, the consternation was incommunicable. All that she could do was

to turn her high head away from him, and allow her neck to remain stiffly

turned. She smiled contortedly in nominal pain before releasing it in a guffaw.

She faced him directly. His absurdity as a being seemed to exist for her

insolent jeering and only this.

"What are you laughing that way for?" he asked. She stared into his eyes rudely

and laughed contemptuously at the absurd monkey that was sitting next to her.

She knew: every relationship was a self-interested transaction. There was

nothing new to her in this assessment. She had known it since early childhood

when she found out that her aunt was being paid by her parents, and that this

was the impetus for the love and generosity of letting her stay with this

second family. Maybe recently she had pretended to not know. For a while there

had been that repudiation, that obfuscation of self, so that she might fit into

a wedding dress as well as marriage. But now she was back home within the real

perceptions of her brain.

She again deigned the hard plastic eyes of her stuffed polar bear countenance

down upon him. They glittered a hardness that was like those of sapphires.

"When is this Sapporo thing going to happen?" she spitefully abraded the

contumacious Earthling coldly.

"Well, soon," he said mildly. He feigned a diffident smile as if he should not

be asking for such a favor but would do it nonetheless. She, the new wife, took

notice of this. He almost seemed contrite and she wondered if his bashfulness

was less contrived than what she might suppose. Soon her insular hubris of

indomitability began to thaw like Arctic permafrost. Then he went on. "There

won't be any difficulty in expediting this from what I see. I mean an agent

could sell your paintings. One of my assistants could have power of attorney to

go to the bank and try to obtain a mortgage--I mean if you want to help in that

way. I know it is a lot to ask. Of course it is your choice. The way I see it

we'll need that money as living expenses for a short while until everything

starts moving. The cost of living in Honshu is notorious but it is worse on the

northern Japanese islands like Hokkaido."

"Well, I'll give it some thought. I'll decide when Nathaniel gets back." She

stressed "I'll decide" obdurately but she had in principle made up her mind.

She had in theory (there was nothing but theory in this interrelating) decided

that if she were to go with him she could sell off her Jakarta paintings as

well as the huge one in the garage but this would be all. There was an

institution called a bank and to her it should not be a spouse no matter what

self-interested gunk was naturally in a man's calculative logic of advantageous

maneuvers when proposing to a woman -- in this case an interest free loan to

which even the capital amount might well be neglected; and in this case she had

made the proposal.

"I was thinking that we might fly from Little Rock to San Francisco and then

over that way." His hand pointed to the McDonalds arch and she smiled

good-humoredly, careful not to insult the phlegmatic one by laughing at him

because he just might scowl at her. "I mean without going back. Betty of course

would pick up Nathaniel from the airport and she could help take care of both

boys at my sister's estate. It might be better this way."

"Not see Nathaniel and Rick?" she roared incredulously.

"Good byes are messy," he said.

She thought for a moment. What did she know: Rick was well mannered and

Nathaniel was restive if not intractable. Maybe Michael with his quick draw of

the belt and his willingness to take his son on trips abroad was a better

parent. A caring albeit phlegmatic male disciplinarian seemed to play the notes

of fear and respect in male children with a greater sense of harmony if

obedience to adult might were that one important anthem. She had to admit to

herself that a sudden departure wasn't nonsense for she was ready to listen to

the proposals of abandonment by a father of a well brought up boy when her own

experiments in child rearing seemed effete and unsuccessful. She did not, for

all her education, know anything much more than the average parent and what

little she knew was theoretical. Ideas of child psychologists like Piaget were

mere abstractions, premises like ghosts without flesh. Maybe, she thought to

herself, Nathaniel needed a different influence since she was apparently not

much of a role model. Maybe pursuing a floundering maternal role for the sake

of a child, who would in a short space of years be engaged fully in instinctual

and hedonistic pursuits, was foolishly myopic at best. At worst it might stunt

her from any form of enlightenment and she would appear foolishly gauche and

inept to herself. Was her reasoning so fallible? She knew that it was. She

wondered whether she was just trying to justify the desire to jump on a tank

with her mate and roll off into the sunset. Maybe she would be running over her

child no differently than her craven and neglectful parents except that their

rationale was to fulfill duties whereas hers would be less definable.

"But Rick is with your parents."

"They got fed up with him. Now he is with my sis."

"Fed up with gentle Rick?"

"Kids are dirty."

"We should take them with us." Her thought was of rescuing her favorite from

such in-laws to her and laws to him.

"Honey, we can't afford them initially. Do you know how much international

schools cost?" She at last saw his point. She felt apologetic. Maybe his reason

for this marriage had not been to get her money after all. "Besides," she

thought, "whatever dilemma he might have in obtaining liquid assets, I'm a

pauper in contrast. Maybe there is nothing to it at all but my own overactive

imagination." She looked at him again. She saw the eyes of a man who yearned

for money. She saw the eyes of Venus who would have said anything to woo

Adonis, and she felt that his love for her, if it existed, was not good.

"Go by yourself then. I'll stay with the boys. When I sell what I have painted

-- I can pull in 20,000 more or less--I'll send it to you. However, regarding

the mortgage of my house you can get that out of your thoughts! The day I'm

expected to mortgage my house is the day I file the divorce papers." She smiled

malevolently.

"Of course. I shouldn't have asked that. Please come to Sapporo with me. It

might be your only time to actually live outside America."

He was putting the taste for new experiences back within her palate, and to her

the taste of it was uniquely tactile and sweet like a wad of chewing tobacco.

The possibility of going elsewhere potentially out of the reach of America's

long shadow made her soar as invincibly as an archaeopteryx departing from a

tyrannosaurus, if indeed these two creatures were coeval.

Like a massive billowing wave of dark cloud overtaking the top stories of a

skyscraper, the prospect of opaque drama in unknown foreign adventures animated

her lofty imagination. She half believed that a time in Hokkaido would send a

beautiful mix of color rushing like a torrent from her pallet. It would

coruscate her in warm intimacy the way, to a swimmer, the 5:30 sun appears to

immerse itself whole in a pool of water. America exported greed and violence in

cinematography, had sovereignty in technological exports, dictated world

affairs, overthrew leaders, craved for energy to give to its race horse economy

despite its havoc on the environment, and believed with certainty that God gave

hegemony in this superpower status to they who relentlessly pursued gluttonous

freedoms in a world of misery ridden masses. If she were to live elsewhere

experiencing other cultures fully she felt that the inhabitants would be a

"totally different fish;" and being exposed to a different fish would be her

mutation into something higher.

The idea kept reoccurring to her that children were temporary objects in her

domain but experiences of this kind were transformational. For so long she had

wistful thoughts of departing from America in a more permanent way than one

could do as a mere tourist. She yearned to abscond from this country of

sensationalized serial killers, child abductors, murderers in school yards,

random shooters, Al Queida and Timothy McVeigh car bombers, and America's

obsession with those of fame and power who lusted for more and more until

plunging so fully in their passionate energies fell into jealous fits, white

color crimes, or murder related to that above. Already the enemies were

gathered outside the American gates and at any moment they would storm the

Bastille. A war with such poor masses would siphon away the coffers of the US

treasury to the point where the superpower status would be gone. There would

just be mountainous rubble of debt on the great debtor country.

There came a day somewhere in the middle part of January when she called the

man with the unmemorable name from Arkansas. She did not tell him of her

marriage but she did tell him that Michael had asked her to go to Japan with

him. He told her to go. He said that one should always use any opportunity that

came along to be exposed to a new culture although both of them knew that there

was little else in the world but America's capitalistic shadow and that little

enlightenment could be gained from any other source than stagnant words and

pages of the books written by the dead masters. He said this with such

conviction that she almost loved him for not holding onto her.

Tijuana, Mexico September 17, 2001

It would be 90 degrees later that day and she had come to do her laundry

earlier than usual. Her mind swished like her frothy socks that foamed and

compressed, were locked in and were often lost. Somewhere, on one continent or

another, something severed within her. She told herself that she would not

blame Atsushi Kato, and especially at this late date. She tried not to think of

this matter by watching the diving dances of her laundry, but it was not at all

helpful. She imagined two men's socks of different colors and sizes

intertwining within the fast movements of her wash. No, she again reminded

herself as if needing to reiterate a truth so that feelings did not overtake

her with their mendacities, Kato was not the source of her disconnection. He

had merely been a stock boy for the foreign food store that was partially owned

by her husband. Perhaps he was that still. Certainly he was more than that

role.

His face always smiled widely when he saw her or her husband. He had an

affinity for foreigners and she, in particular, needed his friendship. His

English was excellent; and he finally brought life to their stagnation by

getting them involved in an understanding of Oriental antiquities.

The weather was inordinately cold, and the city was so large and congested; but

they nonetheless needed their outings, and he took them to museums and Japanese

theatres within the inner city of Sapporo. He was so eager to use his English.

He translated the signs under the artifacts and became aware of the styles of

Japanese calligraphy. When they pelted snow from the soles of their shoes

before entering the theaters, he seemed grateful that such experiences were

resuscitating him from the continual repetition of counting and stocking

inventory. From these invitations to escort the couple he began to see a

newness within his ancient and isolated people on this one of myriad islands.

He said that he studied the English language and had kept it within himself for

so long; but it was really perceiving his race and culture anew that seemed to

revive him with a real personality. Michael was not inclined to befriend a

Buddhist this lifelessly innocuous and bereft of money and status so she pushed

on her husband's association with him, this "subordinate. " She asked Kato to

accompany her husband in the barroom business meetings. He would just be a

human speck in these overcrowded places. His shyness with those of his own race

made them not pay attention to him. He would understand the implications to the

meetings that her husband found opaque. She would not blame Kato. He might even

be doing Michael's laundry right now as she pursued her own, but he was not her

disconnection -- not really.

What did her disconnection matter at all in the scheme of things, anyway? When

she asked this question she was not able to concoct a truthful answer that was

at all savory. In the scheme of things her disconnection was just more

worthless tripe as insignificant as a gum wrapper blowing on a sidewalk. As

intangible as a "state of mind" was, she knew that for all its intricate and

fascinating complexity it was less significant to the outside world than a gum

wrapper.

Thousands had lost their lives in the World Trade Center towers in New York

City just days earlier. No one could ever know the panic and hopelessness that

they felt at the travail of being cognizant and on fire or seeing someone else

who was ablaze and being unable to do anything. If there were any continual

evidence of those who had become a gas it would be the sounds of their panicked

utterances of love and farewell or the light that made visible those horrified

countenances leaning their ears as hard as they could into their cellular

telephones. By this time, she supposed, those sights and sounds would be at the

edges of the Milky Way before moving further into deeper space, the gray matter

of this black god. She still thought about September Eleventh every few

minutes: those repeating images of the two jets flying into the skyscrapers and

people jumping from the upper stories. What did her disconnection matter to the

gods, who if they existed at all, despised life?

She remembered: on the Eleventh (9-11) she sat on the bed in her little room. A

bowl of vegetable soup from her crockpot was on an end table and a tofu taco

was on a plate that was on her lap. She was just about ready to put some food

in her mouth when she used the remote control to turn on the television. For a

few moments she was incredulous and just stared motionlessly aghast. Then she

suddenly stood up from the precipice of the mattress and rushed to the

telephone to call Michael's sister. The line was disconnected as it had been

the past few times she tried to call. She tried email but again her letters to

her son came back to her. Nathaniel ("Adagio") still had too much email clogged

into his Yahoo account--no doubt all the unopened letters she had emailed to

him from Sapporo.

Somewhere something had severed. Was it here in Tijuana, in Tokyo or Hong Kong,

Seoul or Sapporo, or a mezcla (mixture)? It was a gradual harvest of

disconnection invisibly sewn and its fulfillment placed in her hands. She had

accepted her divorce stunned and numb, but not disbelieving. She had been there

throughout his travels. Her mind had been scrambled in different languages and

her environment splintered like Kanji, Hirigana, and Katakana.

She was lost then, and she was lost now. People were temporary entities

flitting around in her imagination as solid substance but it had been an

illusion. Why she had come to Tijuana was even more difficult to isolate. It

had less shape and size than even the divorce of intimate parties. It was a

shirt of a distorted form. Here, she could more easily stretch the money that

she had fully withdrawn from the "grocery and household account" which Michael

had put in her name at Daiko Ginko (Daiko Bank). It was around 3000 dollars.

Within Albany she had her real money and property but she had not seriously

thought about those resources for nearly a year. The passbook and ATM were lost

to her now and she could never access those resources from here.

It was a most mortifying fact that upon telling her he had filed for divorce

and his reason for doing such that she just stood there so numbly like a driver

witnessing a falling bridge. She had not laughed or accepted it with a smile,

which would have been her typical reaction--a reaction she had toward all

absurd caprices of a human race that she still believed was beneath her. But

within the daily work at managing the store and fighting along with him to

secure a profit, she had unwittingly married him in her heart; and all those

outings with Kato sealed the three in work and pleasure. It was her first time

of really feeling as if she belonged to a group and the explosion of it wounded

her in shrapnel.

Upon entering the states she was too fragile and too mortified by all that she

had abandoned to go back to her son in New York State. She spent a few days in

Los Angeles and a few more in San Diego. Then she pushed the rotating gate in

San Ysidro and found herself in Tijuana. She had always wanted the chance to

recall her college Spanish and to somehow use it. American cities seemed so

large and so full of violent accosting figures; but she did not reason that

this large south-of-the- border city that she had chosen to reside in, which

had its toddler days as American military barrooms, had the crime level of LA

and Chicago combined. She didn't really have a reason for her inability to

acclimate. She told herself that Ithaca was too cold but Sapporo had been

colder yet. The bench at the zoo before the spider monkeys had been her

favorite spot in San Diego but the monkeys reminded her of the man with the

unmemorable name.

For a few moments she hypnotically watched her towels and clothes through the

window of the double-load machine. Washing clothes was a dollar and sixty-five

cents per load. Most of the customers paid in dollars, but not all of them; so

the machines needed special tokens to fall into the slots. To her knowledge

doing laundry here was the only thing that was more expensive than in the

states. A teenager was seated in a laundry cart. Her hand leaned on the lever

of the dryer and she pulled and pushed herself in a gentle swinging movement as

if it were a hammock. Two children on roller skates created a roller derby for

themselves but they walked and stumbled more than they rolled and the force in

which they ran into people was nominal.

Just as she was glad that her ex-lover, Candyman, had not been allowed into her

body during one of her more fertile dates and had been kept as syrup on her

tongue, she was glad that throughout the time of living together with Michael

as lovers and then as husband and wife, that no daughter or son was concieved

(for once concieved the embryo never would have been aborted since her

principle of being humane would have been the overriding consideration at the

expense of all else). She was also glad that she and her husband had not

amassed any common property within their nine months of marriage. She liked a

disconnection--a dismembering--that was made neatly in one quick motion of the

knife. She felt that it was good even when the knife was not sterile.

She thought of the salient, life-changing conversation that she should have

laughed off with the frivolity worthy of all human considerations. At the door

of their room in the lodge Michael said to her, "Yesterday while we were snow

skiing and Kato broke his foot, I lifted it and touched him in front of you

without wanting to hide anything. Do you remember? You stood above us. You were

wearing a cap and your bangs were in your eyes; still I could see that you

understood fully. I knew that you had known all along. Can you really say that

you haven't known anything all these months?" He asked her this as if she were

the one who was culpable. He asked her this as if she were the one who made him

feel guilty by this contrived performance of consternation and shattered

innocence.

The stoic that she was, she had not created a dramatic or melodramatic

spectacle unless an ingenuous sense of confusion was a spectacle. There, in the

hallway outside their rooms at the lodge, he condemned her, the victim. That

which preceded it had been Michael rummaging through his pockets, handing her

their key, and then announcing that he would stay with Kato. Naturally, she had

been disconcerted; her feelings had been dominant and ineffable; and the

scenario of them talking like this with their friend on his crutches gazing at

them both in a horrified expression had been so surreal. Her true self would

have laughed and relinquished him. She would have even bought the gay couple a

housewarming gift of his and her bathrobes (maybe just his and his) with

minimal bitterness that would have animated her in light-hearted

mischief-making. Instead a bomb detonated.

Time moved by like a shell-shocked soldier and it dragged her along as a war

prisoner tripping recklessly over landmines. She was battered in shrapnel but

she knew that her wounds were figments of the imagination since they were

merely psychological ones. With the right idea she knew that she could wedge

herself from the microcosm of being a casualty of an imaginary war, escape from

its hatch, and be herself once again. If she were just to open the hatch she

would be out of jealous instincts and the pettiness of a personal life.

Whenever she got bored with reading Mexican newspapers and memorizing new

Spanish vocabulary she would go into San Diego and take bus #9 from Broadway

Avenue until she was in Old Town. Her favorite building was Casa De Miguel

Pedona y Maria Antonia Estudillo. Maybe it had been restored long ago, but now

it retained its tattered walls once again and no refurbished items cluttered

the dense emptiness. It was time: empty and tattering. She felt less alone

seeing it exhibit that, which in an abstract way, was in her own heart. To her

the dilapidated structure was good.

She could easily enough replace a husband. When she was in Asia she had often

sent e-mail to some of those whom she met in chat rooms. There were lonely

males out there just as there were lonely females. She might find an

exceptionally attractive man with responsibility, status, and initiative who

would infatuate her and, if she were lucky, seem like a comfortable friend.

Perhaps they would have a rapport even if their hobbies were different and the

degree of seriousness that she gave her art disconcerted the domineering male

who could not understand the independent fullness of self in ideas. She could

find a man just as she could get rid of her old clothes and replace them with

new ones.

She hadn't bought many new clothes for some time. Her budget wouldn't permit

such purchases now--not even here. She could, however, give some English

classes and with a few hundred dollars each month she could have been one of

those common consumers in outdoor markets, the real people. However, it all,

seemed as if it were clutter (tangible things like clothes and the intangible

things of the mind like relationships).

Once, a musical group from Ecuador was playing in Old Town in front of the

historic buildings, where inside them everything was sold from candles to

homemade fudge. Three old ladies ran up to them before leaving. They stood

beside the musicians who were dressed in red and blue ponchos so that someone

could take their photographs with them. They did not stay for here was proof

that they had encountered another culture in passing. The picture was solid:

more solid than months of experiences in a culture.

Two days before she left Sapparo, she spent hours in an exhausting search for

her son, Nathaniel, the best one could from a distant continent. She called

Michael's sister, Janet, several times but that line was disconnected. A couple

of operators reaffirmed this fact. She went through people search engines for

her ex-sister-in-law whom she never met but whom she believed to be keeping her

son. Still these attempts were futile. She called the numbers of myriad

businesses owned by Michael's parents in the hope that the managers and

directors there might link her to these unlisted, affluent proprietors; but

once she got the directors or operational managers of these organizations on

the phone with trying effort, they would never disclose any information on the

owners who had been her in-laws. She used email search engines in the hope that

Nathaniel had a second account but all those individuals with his name lived in

states other than New York and Kansas. At last she called her Aunt Peggy.

"Peggy, this is Gabriele. How are you?"

"What? Where have you been? We haven't been able to reach you for nearly a

year."

"I have been living in Japan but I'm coming back home soon."

"How long have you been over there?"

"For nine months or so."

"Doing what?"

"Painting."

"Is Nathaniel with you?"

"No." Gabriele was disappointed.

"You haven't contacted that boy in all this time?"

"No. I've tried so many times but it gets me nowhere. I was hoping he would

contact me on his own. Obviously he is not there with you, but maybe he has

given you Janet's number."

"Janet?"

"It's a long story." This call was another dead end.

"He set fire to the house. We sent him back two weeks after he came. We don't

want to see him back here again. I don't know where he is at--Janet or whoever

he is with. No wonder he hates everybody with a mother abandoning him."

"I didn't abandon him; but since when were you so worried about condemning

abandonment. My parents just went on a working trip forever and to you they are

remarkable people; I was shipped off to you, and your old fart of a husband."

"What did you call him?"

Gabriele laughed. "Let's forget the past. It shapes us but doesn't behead us,

so to speak. You clothed me, sheltered me, and gave me food."

"That's right. We bothered with you when no one else would so how dare you call

your uncle a bad name. We loved you."

"Your love for me, your niece, was to approach me like a servant girl. I dare

because it is my telephone call at my expense and I'll call anyone I want and

remind him, her, or them that they are old farts if they are indeed old farts."

Gabriele chuckled. So easily did she amuse herself and how little did anyone

else move her. "And if anyone tries to finger my clit the way your husband did

they should be happy to be called old farts."

"Shut up! Shut up now! Shut that wicked mouth! This is my telephone and you

talk to me respectfully or I'll hang up on you right now. Your son hates you,

you know. Always talks of hating you everyday -- sickening but probably for

good reason; and we got the effects of your unwed mothering experiment -- a

kitchen in flames and one wall in the living room --"

Gabriele hung up the phone and paced the floors like a mad woman. She was

infuriated and yet ecstatic to have at last treated her aunt to the contempt of

words. Virtually all other times had merely been cold and supercilious looks.

Still it was a hollow victory so she set about destroying all of her

photographs--those that she had with her and those that she pulled out of a

lock box at Daiko Ginko. She stripped away each plastic sheet that contained

them -- relating to Michael and Nathaniel or not -- and threw them away. She

did that for all but one. The exception was a close-up of herself and her

mother. Her mother's eyes were sparkling and, within the middle-aged face,

decades earlier could be seen. Gabriele, who was three, was standing next to

her near their home in Bucyrus, Missouri. It was a link. It was a connection.

It didn't exist any longer but she couldn't release it any more than if she had

been an immortal proprietor of the heavens.

The washer began to spin and kick like a drowning animal caught and fighting to

get out. Its squeaking was wild with its vibration but in tone alone it was

similar to the calm, mechanical chirping sounds of pedestrian streetlights in

Sapporo.

She had a child and yet a whole realm of connectedness had escaped her. There

were only failed possibilities now. Nathaniel hated her throughout most of the

year before she "abandoned" him. She had felt it. Now, he had all the reason in

the world to hate her. She looked out to the distant machines--the medley of

Mexican people folding dry clothes; putting wet ones in their carts, seated and

bored; reading newspapers; watching the television that beamed over their heads

or falling into the rhythms of dives that their clothes made in the dryers; and

those purchasing the tokens, soap, and bleach that they would put into their

washers. How human and divine they were! She felt cheered and soothed to see

their distinct faces. They wandered around lost, too. They yearned for

something more, as she did, if only an empty dryer. They yearned to hear the

morning buses that would excrete their dark toxins and take them to their

agendas. They yearned to see the morning sun and the little barefoot boy in one

of the distant colonias staring as the calafia (mini-bus) and the water truck

with its men yelling "El Vagon!" moved up a gigantic hill in a pueblo of polvo

and desert. They yearned for the exchange of ideas that would pull them out of

the sense of being vanquished to the misery that was part of one's fate. But

they were also, in their own limited ways, capable of being Bin Ladens

responsible and exuberant about killing thousands of Americans. Maybe in just a

thousand angry looks toward gringos who purportedly had better lives than

themselves there might be something destructively vile in them. They, like all

perfidious males, no doubt followed feelings of love (homosexual or

heterosexual bliss) abandoning earlier partners who were no longer exotic

dopamine inducers. Maybe, she thought, the vile was inside herself. If the

English language had a word for hating men she felt it now and she knew it was

vile.

She tried the best that she could to pull out of herself but the self needed to

burn away both the past and the pain. Still she tried to ameliorate these

feelings in reason. "So, my Ex has a gay lover...So I am dismissed...What of

it?...The marriage wasn't real anyway; and Michael does not belong less to Kato

just because I once had a signature on a marriage certificate." She couldn't

see how anyone belonged to anyone else, anyhow; and recalled that throughout

most of her life she had been glad it was that way. She tried to let the

morning grace her with its fullness of life. She thought of Tijuana's tamale

and hot chocolate vendors of early morning, the restaurant workers and the

newsstand operators, the pharmacy managers and the street salesmen. They did

not insatiably yearn for more to make themselves happy. They accepted reality's

mandate that there would be no aspirations, no prosperity, and no urgency.

There would just be standing alone seven days a week allowing the stimulus of

sights, sounds, and smells to fill the senses and rescue the mind that tortured

itself from the knowledge that there was deterioration and death, brutality and

natural disasters, apathy and injustice, personal defects that were both mental

and physical, and yearnings for closeness and permanency in the midst of void.

She did not want to think of her husband--her ex-husband, the fact that she did

not feel as if she had a last name (Quest or Sangfroid no longer suiting her,

and "Bassete," the surname of Michael's family before his legal change of it

for himself, not doing anything for her either), and that she was now ripped

from the life of Kato and the imagery of the Orient.

She put her clothes in a cart; and then following her feelings of hunger, she

pushed the cart in front of the row of stools that were near a counter. She

ordered a quesadilla and glanced at the cylindrical twisting carcass on a spit

that would be used for tacos. She listened to the sizzling savagery of pieces

of meat dying a second death within their own grease and slow Mexican music

that moved her like the blowing fronds of palms.

Still her redundant thoughts reeled across the screen of her brain like the

repeated broadcasts of the two jets crashing into the towers. She had gone with

him to Japan on the assumption that the boys would soon follow. She even made

up her mind numerous times that she would obtain them regardless of Michael's

objections and put them in an international school. She was planning to contact

Rick's sister but the months went by so fast. It wasn't much of an excuse. She

had to admit that. Had the two of them really neglected to contact the boys all

this time --she with hers and he with his? They had; for they wanted to find a

part of themselves not linked to them. For him it was the success of this

business enterprise and obviously to engage in the taunting of his untapped

homosexual fantasies toward these boyish Asians. Such was done within this nice

ostensible marriage and partnership with his wife. And for her it was the

specious believability of that rush of energy that was the suppliant groping of

love and to find a less lonely version of happiness in a group which together

were humanity's greatest bondage. Such abandonment was done under the

ostensible label of "demonstrating a creative and independent existence" to her

son.

Seated at the counter she felt a contentedness in being near a beautiful woman

around her age. She even found a contentedness in hearing the meat crackle as

if behind the apparent truth of the injustice of the powerful overtaking the

less-abled in the slaughtering of its life there was another truth that this

was the design and essence of life with a cryptic purpose that perhaps she

would know with a little bit more age and maturity.

The warmth of her mother's kitchen when she was a child as snow pelted against

the windows; the smell of bacon in the skillet; the smell of coffee and the

sight of her mother in a thin nightgown before the stove while her father

coughed away, distant and withdrawn behind a newspaper--how beautiful her

mother was in so many ways in that short time together. Her eyes watered

slightly, and then she had control and the present moment. She excoriated her

maudlin, womanly tendencies and worried that her refusal to fall apart in front

of Michael was catching up with her now. Could the cold tacit hubris that she

superciliously blasted onto Michael a day after the shock dissipated have just

been the facade of a woman ready for a nervous breakdown?

She avoided such thoughts by telling the woman drinking coffee at the counter

some jovial comment of how at this corner of the room the scent was a

combination of soap and bleach blended with those of tortas and tacos. It was

an introductory comment of the environment similar to parties experiencing it,

and as she wished it, it invited a smile of that one individual. Certainly a

conversation beginning with "Hello; how are you?" might die at the first moment

of life. The woman responded with a trivial comment that such smells might help

in digesting the barely digestible.

"I am a bit surprised by the amount of meat that is part of the Mexican diet.

One torta has more meat than I could think of eating for a full month, although

I have to admit I do have a grease addiction for the quesadillas." Aware that,

in bits, her conversation was like an American snob who could not stand

anything other than her own quick, thoughtless tripe of a culture, she wished

that she had said something that was different than this. Then a minute later

she didn't care quite as much. She told herself that having spoken her partial

gripe in Spanish instead of English might have ameliorated any negative

interpretation of her critique to some degree. As she was thinking this she

suddenly realized that she had just taken a glimpse of this woman's larger

breasts that bounced around in a V-neck shirt. She had done this in a

subconscious but still intentional manner the way Kato might in the comparison

of his penis size to that of his new husband whenever they were side by side at

urinals in a public bathroom. Then she looked down at a plate with some

leftover food on it from a previous customer. She scooted it away and then did

not look up for some moments. She was amused and a little embarrassed by her

earlier action. She tried to hide her latent grin. Had her repugnance for men

caused this? She would not be surprised if it were true: sexuality was just a

river of energy that would move in areas where it was less impeded.

A minute later she was still concerned that she had come across as another

snobbish American passing through one of the few cultures left that, for the

most part, retained its essence despite being so near the superpower. She

didn't give a damn what this stranger thought of her but the last thing that

Americans needed were more people hating them.

"What does the H.E. Stand for?" Gabriele continued on to rectify what might

have been a negative impression. She was making reference to the initials on

the woman's blouse.

"Hilda Estrella." The stranger said her last name like she was a glamorous

movie star.

"Are you a star?"

"In everything I do in my small way."

"In a family of stars or with a husband who is a star?"

"My husband is a fizzled firecracker with no bang. It is his name though. I

robbed it from him. It should only belong to me. Don't you think so?" Gabriele

laughed.

"American?"

"No, Gringo," said Gabriele.

Hilda laughed. "Your Spanish is excellent, as it is my English," said the woman

in the world language that had been tossed from American hands out onto the

denizens of the world like a net so as to pull all in one direction. She spoke

in English because, although Gabriele's Spanish was functional, her vocabulary

was callow with a thick American accent.

Gabriele introduced herself as Gabriela and the Mexican lady introduced herself

as Hilda...de da la de Estrella. The whole name flashed before Gabriele like a

Japanese bullet train (or Shinkansen). She couldn't catch much of it.

"Mucho gusto," said Gabriela.

"It's a pleasure to meet you," said Hilda.

"You are the first person in T.J. to speak to me in English.

"They don't know it very well. Most of them are poor so they don't go to

universities none and English isn't taught so often in high schools--not well

and nobody wants to learn it none. They want to know it and not know it. They

don't want to lose their ways. Culture is language and they don't want Spanish

to collapse like a pi-ata. In their ideas of things, the Gringos took away

enough of their land--they don't want the culture to go--out would go mariachi,

bull fights, Juarez Day with children in Indian feathers, Cinco de Mayo

celebrations, and traditional Mexican ballads. In would come George Bush Jr.

signs and the American navy ships. It is a choice like the people in Paris,

France." Gabriele didn't think that there was much of a similarity between the

urbane Parisians and the dust city dwellers of Tijuana but what did she know?

There might be some truth to it so she kept her opinion sealed.

Hilda explained the education which allowed for her fluency in a second

language. Her father, a poorly paid public defender, didn't have the money to

send the youngest to college so he paid for her to study at a language school.

"Did you resent your sister getting what you couldn't have?"

"No, I was very muy muy glad for her. She felt more bad than I did about it so

she introduced me to her boss's bear friend--an old bear who was a friend of

her boss--how ever you say it. That is another story. Where did you study

Spanish?" Gabriele just said that she had dabbled in a few Spanish classes long

ago in school but that she was now living here to give the language a try.

"An American living in Tijuana, asked Hilda.

"Stranger things have rocked the planet, I'm sure," said Gabriele coldly. She

then ordered two quesadillas and two cokes for herself and her friend.

"You Americans are lucky. You can go here and there and stay as long as you

want-- wherever you dream. Most Americans just step into Tijuana just to say

they have been in Mexico but you dream about studying here and do it. It isn't

much of a paradise--this place. Maybe you have gone to other places." Gabriele

gave an abridged account of the places where she had lived.

"To travel is good; but if it was me to do something as this I think I would be

dizzy to stay a long time in one place and then another place to meet and to

lose people."

"Strangely, it has made me dizzy; but not from the travels really. Maybe a bit

from the travels -- a combination of things. Before this I never needed anyone.

I had my own convictions, my own ways, and my own mode of life. When I was

younger I removed men like ticks a lot of the time, screwed and bit off their

heads some of the time--not really but metaphorically, and thought of them --

everybody really -- as unwanted distractions on my studies and independence

most of the time. I never felt lost and lonely until I was married and was

living in Japan."

"There isn't a more lonely thing than this to live together with someone,"

commented Hilda. She changed to Spanish. "People don't grow together. They grow

apart if they are capable of any growth at all-- especially if they started out

as strangers." To Gabriele nothing could be said that was any truer. These

ideas were identical to her own even if hers were as yet kept confined into the

cellar of her thoughts (a place she restrained all ideas until they seemed more

incontrovertible). To hear these secret ideas that still had not dispersed

widely in her own brain come from someone else's mouth was startling. So rarely

did Gabriele hear truth that she often imagined it as something that only she

conceptualized or fabricated. Her muddy puddles of cynicism were evaporating

under the light of the sun. Gabriele smiled her first real smile in months.

Hilda elaborated that this friend of the sister's boss, Stranger X, also from

Guadalajara like her family, promised to her father that if married to Hilda he

would contribute to the family's household expenses and pay for Hilda' s

education. The father told him that if Hilda consented so would he.

"It was a practical decision, really."

Gabriele nodded distastefully. The calculative and the irrational were always

in a woman's head when entertaining marriage. All people had to prostitute

themselves a little to make a living but, according to Gabriele's assessment,

women who contemplated marriage were complete whores. She almost felt sorry for

men if it were not for loathing them so much. Hilda was a whore for knowledge

and so this got Gabriele's approval. "Go on. I'm listening," said Gabriele.

Hilda told her that she had majored in health and physical fitness at the

community college. She graduated but any plans to teach went awry in a

pregnancy, a miscarriage, and then some years of housekeeping. But when her

husband lost interest in her for her infertility and inability to carry a child

when they had undergone such expense and effort to conceive one through a

fertility clinic, she stopped taking care of the house and got a servant. This

allowed her to teach aerobics.

Gabriele listened intensely while her eyes glanced at the cart of wet clothes,

which seemed to her like the great hills of Tijuana dirt but in a medley of

colors and fabrics.

"Why are you really living here in Tijuana? Why not Puerta Vallerta or Mexico

City?" Hilda suddenly asked.

Gabriele began spacing her words into fragments and some of the fragments

contained space as if her mind were moving up and down those hills across all

of the distant colonias, the ocean, and into the past. She said that for a few

weeks, now, she had been staying in a room of a house owned by a "nice woman."

She just wanted to learn her Spanish here and she wanted to learn of

simplicity. "I thought moving here would improve me somehow-- Suppose it

hasn't," she prevaricated. Hilda, who now doubted the sincerity of the

conversation, was beginning to withdraw her attention; so sensing this Gabriele

confessed. "The truth is that when I got married I lost myself to a wifely role

— domesticated Betty Crocker crap and being an unpaid cashier/assistant manager

for my husband's business. When I wasn't at my shift I was learning how to cook

regular western food since he hated Japanese food--sushi, mizu soup, soba, and

all that stuff. Of course, washing his clothes and ironing his shirts. In the

meantime he was seeing someone--a friend...an employee who was dear to us." She

chuckled. "Not someone but the same gender -- a man. He was seeing a man. After

the divorce I came back to the states. I didn't know where to go so I followed

my own shadow and came here."

Hilda looked at her empathetically. She spoke softly. "So many people come to

this ugly place for one reason or another. Some work in the American and

Japanese factories. They often live in groups so they can afford rent. They

earn 150 pesos each week, but what can they do? They tell themselves that a job

like this is better than none. For others Tijuana is a place to sell souvenirs

to the American gringos. They sell this and that on cardboard tables and they

survive. It is a place for a young woman to hope that one of the American naval

officers that she sells herself to will actually want more than a...como se

dice... Anyhow, not being used for sex -- a real relationship. It is where

those lacking emotional resources can recover."

Gabriele caught the air before it came out of her mouth as rude chortling.

"Lacking emotional resources" …th she hadn't heard a more apt and erroneous

phrase to describe herself; but she liked how artfully Hilda used such laconic

sentences to show understanding, to make the two women's experiences cognate,

and to pull the conversation out of the dead-end of the personal domain.

Gabriele smiled thoughtfully with her closed lips. She was pleased that the

serendipitous heat so early in the morning had carried her here the way birds,

without having to flap their wings, soared on waves of solar energy that were

refracted from the ground. She now felt that she was soaring away from the

flares of tortured memories--memories that if personified, seemed to think that

she could somehow rescue them when the only rescue to be had was their own

burial. She was at last leaving the pine trees and the snowy slopes where she

had once skied with Kato and her husband. She was razing that raised foot to

its burial pit and raising herself out of the inundations of yearning in the

pools of Michael's retinas. She was no longer drowning in the deprivations that

had fathered his unfulfilled pent-up yearnings or trapped in her own eyes and

ideas for witnessing what she didn't care to see and, at that point, couldn't

conclusively know. She was demolishing the ski lodge where her former self

stood in front of that door of what was their room with mouth agape, key

tightly clutched, and thoughts wandering lost here and there but aggravating

her with recurrent questions of where she would "fit into the picture" should

her husband's homosexual liaisons be more than a temporary and belated

experimentation. For the first time in so long she no longer felt the

inclination to pull a ski cap down over her face.

For Hilda sentiment had risen the previous year for warmth and stability and

she clung to her husband's side, the old ogre that he was. She begged him to

not leave each night and see this other woman or to see her but to not treat

their marriage with such total indifference and contempt. If she had not loved

him before she loved him desperately then; for to be rejected by an ogre made

her feel uglier than the one rejecting her. She pontificated that love was a

shared experience that could not be dropped one rainy Sunday when it was

apparent from the first ten minutes of the televised soccer game who would be

the winners, clearing the way for daily habitual liaisons thereafter.

She told Gabriele that, while they were living together that last year, she

never knew who her husband saw. "It was probably a woman. I don't know. A

Mexican man, when he is horny and bored, would get off in a hollow log but

never his wife if she has disappointed him."

One night on the Guadalajara beltway, while she was returning to her empty home

with her bags of groceries, there among distant lights in clusters like

grounded stars, Hilda's headlights beamed on the sign "Tijuana." She felt that

second where the new could not be avoided and that out there might be a little

compassion toward her. She headed north to Baja California and then got a job

as an aerobics teacher for the Municipal Sports and Cultural Center of Tijuana.

When their clothes were dry Gabriele invited Hilda to go to the movies. There

in the darkness of the theatre she felt happy but uncomfortably pinned in by

the wistful desire to touch the leathery silk of her friend's skin and this

sense that to do so might bring on the demise of the friendship. As strange as

this yearning, the fear, and the polarity of these opposites experienced

together, was this peculiar sensation of needing to be embraced in the cocoon

of Hilda's arms whereby she might, in this unconditional love of compassion and

understanding, more smoothly reconnect the ridged pieces of self that she had

cobbled together from a fragmented state early in life. She did not know if

clasping her hand would endanger the friendship so she sat there and sweated

with her hand in between both seats. And yet, strangely somewhere in the middle

of the movie she coalesced Gabrielishly. She was restored in shared experience

and understanding and this was all that she required.

She had felt similar emotions of physical repugnance toward Michael. Often, in

their bed, with the enjoyment of feeling her body again after sex as his

motives, she shunned him like a picnic that was infested with ants. The need

for autonomy, hegemony, and harmony that comprised self-containment became her.

Still, in the last moments of the movie she curled her hand on her chin,

smiled, and absorbed herself in light and sound presented as form. She thought

about how Hilda had waited around for her clothes to dry and had helped her put

them in the back of her car. The mystery of possibilities and implications to

subtle gestures dangled above her like a toy of a musical crib.

Chapter Thirty-Five

When considering how marginally educated he was ("bare-assed with a tie within

this professional world of masters and doctors" as the words of such

deliberations), Sang Huin would succumb to the undertow and founder in the

myriad oceanic fathoms of the lugubrious self. Each of those times descending

deep in this silent abyss, he would remember those times of being in his

parents' garage. There as a boy with his broken bicycle, he, the maladroit,

could only fumble a feigned semblance of competence with the alien tools of his

father's screwdriver and wrench. Mixed in smells of oil stained concrete there

would be a feeling of ineptitude slowly trickling through him like the numbing

poison of hemlock. Then there would come those excoriations of his father

telling him that his inability to fix things made him good for nothing and this

poison would dart through the ventricles of his heart and finish what the

subtleties of drowning in oily, nebulous despair could not immediately do. Now,

as back then, he believed that the comments of him being good for nothing were

true even if now the negative judgment calls were for a litany of other

unrelated issues.

Lackadaisical or indifferent (the intense, wanton drifter never even insouciant

when going on rendezvous with his true decadent cravings), the hours of his

days were often extended no further than going from one private lesson to

another, to one gay sauna or another, and then back home to Saeng Seob within a

somewhat hidden malaise. Still they were nexuses; and as fulsomely

inconsequential as they might seem to others if they were able to peer into his

sordid domain and not be repulsed by these orgies on tatami mats, still they

were human connections; and it was human connections that were a man's life

raft and dinghy when floating in the empty effluvia of self, water, space, and

time. For they who were endowed with the ability to see ideas, sense an

endeavor within them, and not only know a reality beyond the personal domain

but experience a personal genius in the mission of transferring ideas to the

world, they were their own buoyancy. And although Sang Huin could see that

truth he was not of such an excellent make. His destiny would not be like those

who were truly happy, they who knew felicity in themselves and that the outside

world was inconsequential.

In meaning-seeking respites no different than at any other time of his Korean

sojourn, he dabbled and danced with his Gabriele and, from buses, taxis, and

subways, read the news about the U.S.A. (now in the thickets of guerrilla

attacks from these liberated Iraqis who loathed the American intruders and

devastators). He contemplated Americans' free expression of violent

inclinations in movies, books, and life -- violent inclinations clearly within

the self or at least in himself, and dwelled in a lonely neediness that was

still motivating him to seek out others in a neediness more akin to ductility

than deference.

He got a part-time job as a sales representative at Rosemary Cosmetics since

his mind still yearned to give the amorphous blob contained therein form,

purpose, vocation, and meaning which still eluded him. His life in its quest

for meaning was like the Bush administration's groping for these weapons of

mass destruction to disprove the obvious: that Bush's hallucinated epiphany was

similar to the sun stroked and deranged Akhenaten. As this "Shawn" needed

secular meaning not in the material world, they needed to believe that the

bushes were God's executioners in Iraq and elsewhere.

Like all dirty bluish-white collared Koreans in search of a vocation as well as

a job, he wanted to work for a big firm: the bigger the company the less small

he would seem to others and himself. This was a typical East Asian reaction;

and the concept that a man was no more than who he associated himself with was

applicable even to one like Sang Huin ("Shawn"), as queer as he was. Rosemary

Cosmetics was no Samsung in size nor did it have much merit in global commerce;

but this was his only opportunity at present and from it he hoped it would be

his mold making him into something solid and patterned or at least not a

deciduous, tenuous leaf tossed erratically with every breeze. He wanted to be

connected and to no longer be tortured by those discombobulated seconds when

his self did not register itself-- a time (in his case usually on the bus

between private lessons) when one's consciousness had a rupture, thoughts

seemed even more evanescent, remembered heads of the people of the past

(including his deceased father and sister) got tangled up on the wrong bodies

or the features of those faces became effaced or alloyed with others' features,

and not having the destination of meaning, the self thus tripped over itself

directionlessly.

But a week into contacting long-term overseas customers to advertise new

cosmetics, reestablish relationships by offering a substantial supply of free

samples, and processing orders on the telephone in a rather menial position

that had no guarantee of leading to something bigger he became less hopeful.

Early into the job he knew that he was just one more cog in one more machine.

Early into the job he knew that it would not make him into this vague, nebulous

concept of a man that he only half-sensed even if fully and wistfully desired;

so he was lost now as he was lost then. But, fortunately for him he was not

entirely lost--almost entirely lost and ineluctably if not indelibly so but not

entirely lost in the complex labyrinth of the thickets of darkness that was in

society and nature as well as one's human nature.

He had his hallowed hobbies which always kept him from wanting to slit his

wrist--solitary hobbies that in one form or another had saved the oversensitive

boy who had felt that his father was afraid of one-on- one contact with him

just as they saved him now. Now the cello was abandoned for the melancholic

sounds of the shokohachi but Gabriele remained steadfast. She was his attempt

to find simple and innocuous pleasure and lasting truths that were not in

sordid and temporarily enflaming raptures of ecstasy. She was his higher

consciousness, his higher authority.

Sang Huin was a city boy designed for Seoul. He liked seeing dual soldiers

guarding each portal of every underpass; the dark green military buses that

waited in Chongno Sam Ga, at Yongsei University, and no doubt in countless

sectors of this sprawling mega city; he liked the drama of tall skyscrapers

undaunted by besieging clouds, traffic rushing here and there as if to foment

the provincial sleepiness of Hanguk society, the variety of people he would

encounter in what was on whole a rather homogenous group of kimchee-eating,

child-rearing, follow-the- leader advocates, and especially passing belatedly

through the remnants of tear gas that had been targeted on boisterous anti-US

troop demonstrations. He liked window shopping through stores that had Buddhist

icons; the sexy galaxy of city lights scintillating like stars; being in a city

where differences were as inconspicuous as rolling pebbles in an avalanche; the

random subway passengers who sometimes, after buying their tickets, would see

him using an English map and ask him in English if he were lost; the

exhilaration of speaking in English with a probable chance that someone in the

immediate area would understand him; and the many American alternatives to

Korean restaurants (shiktangs). He liked buying groceries--those few he

got--beneath department stores; purchasing expensive clothes for Seong Seob who

still resonated as his makeshift family even if he could not relate to him any

more than anyone else; the big supply of English books in various bookstores;

sex and deodorant. The sex was self- explanatory: he had a true weakness to

touch beautiful things the way he used to stroke the legged panty-hose of his

grandmother when sitting on her lap so as to feel the friction and static

against his fingers. As much as he not only wanted to end his promiscuity but

sever sexuality completely for the rationale that pleasure bonding was a

selfish love that stunted his ability to care for someone altruistically, he

was unable or unwilling to do it. The touch, smell, and taste of human flesh

were inordinate delights that bypassed his abstemious and acetic intentions.

And as for deodorant, he, a Korean, did not sweat much, but he, an American,

needed it to feel as if he were not entirely naked. In Seoul, at least,

deodorant was not impossible to find.

Maybe having lived in Umsong for half a year contributed to his metropolitan

enthusiasm since there he was miserable with a malaise ameliorated a little

only on rare occasions of discovering M&M chocolate candies, pancake mixes,

Fruit Loops, and Fruit-of-the-Looms on store shelves. His stay in Umsong had

been like a fearful boy scout in a tent on a camping expedition--a child

looking at black clouds from his small portal, and wishing to again restake his

homestead in the less ominous domain of his parents' back yard. Still, the

isolation had its beauty: mountainous green hills near lush, green rice fields,

and some good times such as when he and Yang Kwam made their way down a trail

in the forest and then spent the night at the Umsong Stadium sleeping on the

vast green Astroturf in the midst of empty yellow seats and stars.

For some brief minutes one Saturday after waking in darkness Sang Huin did not

know where he was at. He could not get his baring. He was still in the dream

remake of an incident that happened to him immediately before he began to write

Gabriele--a haunting memory in a dreamonized state. It was not unlike others he

had experienced such as those of his mother's aloneness when going from the

need to water one plant and then the next (an idea extrapolated consciously and

repressed to his subconscious from the letters she sent to him), or dragging

his sister by the hair and into a forest so that he could stand there and watch

as she was gang raped to death. Dreams were, of many things, seeing the self's

place in the environment and judging of itself as one cloud or part of the

function of a group of clouds.

The dream of his sister was a major literal distortion of the reality it was

based upon, but that was not the case with this one that he had just awakened

from. It, like the plant-watering dream, had more of a literal base. It

pertained to the Korean girlfriend whom he was involved with when he first came

to Chongju. In the dream, as in reality, she said, "You can get a good job

teaching at a private high school--I don't understand why you won't. If you do

this, then with your money and my money we could have a good life together. We

could make a family." He sensed that she would use him the way any woman

studded pregnancies from infatuated man for children who would be her, the

woman's, happiness. He sensed how a male slave was compelled to toil as a

provider to an early demise because of the allure of a woman; and then he told

her, "Living petty selfish lives tree hunting, investing money, house

remodeling, complaining about taxes and the kids' dental bills. No thanks." It

was the first time a thought so critical of his parents had materialized in his

mind from all those repressed feelings that had been smashed under filial

respect in accordance with Korean etiquette. If it weren't for this calculating

feminine conniving, the thought of a normal life with her would have seemed at

certain moments as pleasurable as having one's tongue slicing through ice

cream. The sensation of eating the vanilla of a woman's cold skin might have

obfuscated the knowledge of the forthcoming tonsillectomy. Her eyes were

drawing him in. They were like the placid Great Lakes at night and they

sparkled like the surface of the waters at the occasional passing of boats. The

light from the traffic was her scheming thoughts. "I'm going to have your

baby," she averred as if this solidified the relationship. "Abort it," he

demanded. He hadn't been effete on that real occasion but the dream that

awakened him had a more masculine firmness of will that was not his own; and

hers was a mellifluous, inveigling sound surreal and harmonious as waves

brushing against the beach. "Abort it!" he reiterated, "or I'll - - "

Not able to shake off the dream for a few minutes it was as if he were a very

old and one night the sleep that was supposed to sort his thoughts, feelings,

and sensory details into files of meaning and dates of occurrence had been

ransacked and here he was on his hands and knees groping about the room trying

to pick up scattered paper that had once been the files of himself. It was as

if he were crawling around scavenging for bits of himself, not heeding the

horrified calls of his old wife who nervously maundered her concerns to him

from the bed.

People had come and gone incessantly from his life (the most important being

his sister--taken from him by American violence not the least of which was his

own). Recently Sang Ki and Yang Kwam vanished from his life; but in all, these

phantoms appeared and disappeared without rhyme or reason like the changeable

fish in the small aquarium belonging to Seong Seob's cousin--there at a given

time and then gone. He sat up in his bed only to become instantaneously albeit

vaguely cognizant that he was at home in Seoul even if he was not really sure

what home was. He stared at that body next to him. It was the same body that

was always there. In ways this gentle and cautious being of a few mundane

habits was so known and yet it was alien in most respects. Sometimes he thought

that Saeng Seob elected to be part of this relationship and sometimes it seemed

as if this friend thought of himself as a victimized participant. The latter

could be sensed there amidst tacit clues: a despondent sigh, a pleasant tone of

voice belied by pressed angry lips, indifference to sexual pursuits, or

rehashing his wish to study English literature in America if only he had the

money to do it. The tacit, when discerned, was Saeng Seob's coming to terms

with antithetical summations of the relationship. The compromise was a

suggestion that when choosing between two disagreeable choices he preferred an

unconventional relationship with Sang Huin to the weathering of belittling

comments from the cousin. It wasn't much of a compliment for in all it was a

complement that this relationship existed for whatever time it might last and

nothing more than this. Also Saeng Seob's tepidity did not exactly engender

within Sang Huin the wish to possess another: this "virtue" that was monogamy.

The water of his saliva -- warm, wet, and active -- barely squeezed down the

empty hollows of a constricted area of his parched throat. He put on his

bathrobe and went to the bathroom sink. He sipped some bottled water that was

on the counter and splashed cold water across his face. He looked at his

handsome face in the mirror. It was so fervid in its seriousness and intensity.

Anything that bright had to go out fast. The idea of getting to be an old gay

man like a crumbled old leaf scooting around aimlessly in the breezes was a

thought hideous enough to trigger off random suicidal aspirations. He doubted

that any man's life near completion constituted much but to be an old faggot

without family and rootedness seemed to him a horror that he did not want to

imagine. He was young now but he knew that the jesters of the years stuck their

tongues out at mortality and ran off quickly to hide someplace. His childhood

had absconded this way.

He remembered wishing to cut his wrist during the trial of his sister's

murderer. The unwitting accomplice that he was, his body (even more then now)

had ached in burdensome guilt. Now, with hindsight, he firmly believed that she

would have run back to the power and virility of this successful, married man

no matter what he would have done. Back then she plead for a sanctuary from the

one who owned her in the pleasure of love; but even if he had locked her in her

room, instead of dragging her back to him, on her own she would have gone to

the greed, lust, and ambition that were her interpretation of the American

dream. He knew this at the trial but it did not mitigate his guilt. Back then

the horror, the senselessness, the rape and the slaughtering that were alleged

but unproven with the rotting and effacing of time, the acquittal, and the

general emptiness carried him off to a horror and disconcerted void worse than

death. It was a disconcerted space of months as a walking mannequin with that

one keen perception of seeing how the darkness of selfishness and destruction

were there in all human pursuits. He walked around the living room. He looked

at the clock. It was now 5:30. He stared out of the window onto the traffic of

Seoul. He hoped that Seong Seob did not hate his life with him. He prayed that

he didn't. There was no indication that he did although he was not blind to

Sang Huin's promiscuity. Maybe, he thought, he should release Seong Seob: first

experiences did not make any man entrapped in an embedded pattern. What they

had was innocuous to him but to pursue it any further might distort the man

that Seong Seob might become. Sang Huin sighed and went back to their bedroom.

His fingers slid through a lock of hair on his friend's head. After much effort

he went to sleep.

There in his dreams was this Yang Lin/Shang Ah/"Lucky" character (He never knew

what his name really was) whom he had met that time in Seoul. In ways it was

him, that one who wanted to become a woman and had been envious of a bride

posing for pictures at Toksugum Palace in the Chongno Sam-ga area of Seoul, but

his features were more spread out, his nose more like a pig, and he had a dark

brown Southeast Asian pigment. He was an emaciated "money boy" with a book bag

swung onto a bony shoulder; and he was wearing torn jeans, a grey t-shirt and

the rife stink of his rotting skin. He saw him but in Gabriele's eyes. He

accosted her timidly as she was drawing the reflection of Wat Phra Kaeo (the

Grand Palace): its golden cupolas, stupas, and high triangular roofs shimmering

silver in a fountain that pigeons were using as a bath. She knew his and her

plight instantly: suffering was there, pulling decades from his skin and misery

was intruding on her contemplation of beauty. It was often that way for

artists, for the jungle, beautiful as it might seem from the external view of

its thickets, was a truculent horror for those with no special skills or who

possessed unappreciated uniqueness; and she smiled painfully at ineluctable

fate with its ensuing moral obligations. She asked if he would allow her to

sketch him and he agreed. He said that he had been living on the streets for

one year; that his mother and brother were living in Rattchaburi; that his

father died when he was nine years old; that sleeping on the streets was

"danger"; and that sometimes "nice" people would talk with him when he walked

around the park, but not often.

This was all she knew of him from dearth, shaky, timid words of clogged

superfluous emotion and the deep swallows of his saliva. She fed him and this

ductile creature began to follow her from a distance after they said their

goodbyes as if repudiating the meaning of the word lest it be too

disconcerting. She had guessed that it would probably be as this. Repressing

her contempt for Catholicism, she took him to St. Joseph's High School on

Convent Road and the scrutinizing hope-builder of a nun there referred her to

the Holy Redeemers and the hope-builder of a priest there re-inquisitioned him

and told her to come the following day at 2:00 when the St. Vincent volunteers

would arrive. The priest was unwilling to even give him a corner of a room for

some hours leading to the interview so after taking him to Big C to buy him

some clothes she then took him to her hotel room for she did not want to lose

him to the streets. She mothered him to compensate for the lack of mothering

she had done with her own son. He gave her the gesture of the "wai" [wh-I] and

stammered his gentle "thank you very much" with every glass of water that she

poured for him, the soap and towel which she handed to him, and the cushions

and blankets that she laid out for him. The St. Vincent De Paul volunteers

re-reinquisitioned him at the church but through polite reticence, a taciturn

distrust of social services, or saturnine despondency from so much time alone

on the streets he continued his polite statements that he didn't want any help.

But she insisted that he did and went with him two hours through congested

traffic, the bane of Bangkok, to this referral. When the Maryknoll brothers in

the migrant workers' office reneged on their promise, they went the two hour

ride back from whence they came even though she just wanted to reject the

fragile creature into the thickets of buses, cars, motorcycles, tuc tucs,

buses, and the heavy black trails of carbon monoxide. Tired and sick from a

migraine, she returned to the priest at Holy Redeemer who had indifferently

volleyed her to the St. Vincent charities. In the priest's office at the

rectory she was supercilious and fulminated her derision of those whose

organizational name was a misnomer, they whose congregations were foreign

capitalists whom the church establishment would never alienate, and they, these

emissaries of the Pope, whose ideas of human worth was just the mimicking of

their donors. She felt anguish for this Thai boy and all of the myriad

throwaways of the planet who were volleyed here and there indiscriminately and

if she had been more like a woman she would have cried even if the anguish was

beyond tears. She decided to redeem him herself with her consistent presence

even if he was AIDS ridden (a distinct possibility), their conversation was

palaver (a certainty), and even if she had to stay in Bangkok another month or

two for his sake (an inevitability). But one day at the swimming pool he stood

there looking wistfully at those his age without stepping into the water. She

saw what she had seen when she sketched him that day at the Grand Palace. Then,

his wistful stare was directed toward untainted soccer players engaged, as

boys, in simple pleasures which he would never be able to partake in. He

twitched and stammered out to her that he needed drugs, men, and money, that

the bruise on his arm wasn't really from a dog as if she had believed that it

was, and that she should let him go. Fervent vacuums of passion were sucking

him into the black hole within but when he packed his things he wouldn't leave.

He just sat there on the floor near some rolled-up blankets in incessant dazed

ambivalence until she at last told him to unpack. The next morning, from being

weakened by the evening's migraine or from the restoration of common sense, she

was insistent that he go begging like a monk and leave her alone. He kow- towed

to her myriad times, began to cry, and said that she was too good for him. He

averred that he would not return. She told him that was fine and that she

wished him good luck but when he was gone she blamed herself for not giving him

a few days of complete sanctuary from the streets. That evening, after a

passing thunderstorm, he knocked and anxiously slid a card under the door. When

she opened the door the elevator door had closed.

When he woke up again he could hear the gusts of wind and the movement of

traffic through the open window. There were the smells of dogs beneath the

tattered screen--the living as opposed to the cooked version thought by Koreans

to rejuvenate the body as much as ginseng. There was also that peculiar

amalgamation of odors which was of evaporating urine-on-sidewalk particles, and

the faint exhaust of cars. There was the light of early morning and it all

excited him. He became conscious of the slight snoring of his special friend

and he knew that this sound was beautiful because he cared about him for

otherwise it would have been an unbearable annoyance.

In mid-afternoon they went swimming. He watched Saeng Seob's dives which were

more complex and aesthetic than any he would have been able to do. They were

Saeng Seob's one action of bold maneuvers that always renewed Sang Huin's

interest in him for creatures of motion like himself, he knew, could only

admire base kinetic movements of the outside world. Movement outside moved the

being within: fervid movement that flourished pleasurably in one's loins,

harmonized with hormones amuck in the bloodstream, and revived dopamine that

was to be as lightning through neurons and pleasure receptors of the brain.

When they returned the mail had come. The envelope of one letter had been

forwarded from Chongju to Umsong and then Umsong to Seoul. It was from his

mother who kept forgetting his address just as she forgot that he was living

with a man to have a semblance of family the best that he was able to do. She

wrote that she called the office of Shin Se Gue in Chongju but the telephone

line was disconnected. He knew that she was not thinking either that it had

moved to Umsong or that he was now in Seoul. Small ideas seemed to easily blow

from the posting on the surface of her memory. She was suppressed in busy

habitual action in which thoughts would have trouble permeating through her

hardened, desiccated surface. Her daughter and concept of the world at large

had been mauled by the hungers of the night so of course she was not alive -

-just a hollow ambulatory thing like the swift moving cockroach. There was no

real content in the letter apart from the lack of content itself: a patio table

and a hummingbird feeder that she had bought, the wallpapering of another room

for the umpteenth time, trees, roses, and tree roses which she had planted. He

kept folding, unfolding, and refolding the empty envelope into and from smaller

rectangles, felt warm and flushed, and could only think how there were not any

relatives for the two of them apart from each other. There never would be more

than this; and there would be nothing at all of family with her passing. In a

flare of emotions that were sensitive but callow he wanted to "go home"- -to

abandon every reality that he knew here by jumping through a child's portal.

He couldn't think what to say when he tried to write back to her so he went

with Saeng Seob and his dog for a walk. In a park at dusk they heard the sounds

of birds and crickets and they felt the majestically warm day trail and descend

into a gentle cloak of coolness.

"Did you write your mother?" asked Saeng Seob.

"Didn't know what to say. I'll mail a traditional Korean doll to her or

something. Where would I find something like that?"

"Wouldn't know," said Saeng Seob. The world was America now so why would he.

"Something. It doesn't matter what it is. Some type of clutter-- things: she

likes that sort of thing."

Chapter Thirty-Six

In one perspective she believed that these circumstances not so much governed

by choice turned out to be quite liberating: the lackadaisical dereliction of

motherhood which came about from that love of a man, and the divestiture of her

life in Sapporo the result of a divorce from him. Within that perspective she

was a child humbling herself to circumstance as if it were the mandate of a

parent or god who would supply routine to process her directionless whims. In

such a frame of mind she would think thoughts similar to this: "It doesn't have

to be seen that way -- as child abandonment--that sort of thing. Only

simpletons would judge me or any other thoughtful woman considering and doing

the same. This taking off of a role that does not fit me is just a disrobing in

dawn to take a shower -- and who is to say that my departure is not a

predestined conclusion? I really didn't take off anything. Adagio is the one

who took me off and took off to Kansas. Then I took the flight to Tokyo and

then -- What does any of it matter anyway? I haven't bothered to put on the

mother garb equating it as garbled garbage but who is to say that it is not

better for the boy in the long term? I would need a lower IQ to constrict

myself in instinctual roles like a content biological robot. It is no more

preposterous to believe in fate allowing me this contemplative time than it is

to think that slipping $50.00 in a homeless person's cup would release him from

pain and vice, that altruism perpetuates good, or that a loving god allows

planes to slam into the World Trade Center Towers. If I am bad the creator of

time and the universe is worse. Maybe any being that thinks outside the box

would be perceived as bad by these simpletons -- even God were these simpletons

not so simple as to fear thinking Him evil." The failure of Her Vastness, Ms.

Sangfroid, in motherhood and marriage the result of an adulteration in mixing,

had been more than a bit discombobulating at the times when they occurred and

they were even discombobulating now; but then and now she tried to address them

as external details like an uncomfortable raincoat that she would wear for a

time during a storm which she wouldn't be able to wait out. Since that time

when she was a girl watching her reticent father's rejuvenation from a commune

with himself in his solitary walks on the beach she had sought this acme of

aloneness. Here it was, albeit in a warmer environment than the Antarctic camp

she envisaged for herself, and she shouldn't have been happier.

In a sense this disconnection that had her abscond across the border like a

fugitive at large was as harmonious as the breakers which she would watch for

an hour each late afternoon on the Tijuana beach: harmonic and not missing a

beat; the mesmerizing splashes cleansing the conscience; the optimistic fizz;

and the inconsequence of her seemingly insouciant or reckless actions when

measured against this seemingly infinite and permanent body of water. The

solitary disconnection of the lonely sea was the reflection of her self and

together they whispered inscrutable truths to her consciousness; and surely if

she needed anything to comfort her, she needed the Pacific Ocean. But storm

clouds often coalesced around her diurnal sunsets on the beach before

dissipating into the desert city's heat, seagulls seemed to have a wailingly

ominous sotto voce as they spiraled about in the winds, and her thoughts

dwelled on this Berlin wall which sliced through the Mexican-American shore.

The drab wall with its painted words of "El Mundo partido" reinforced by a

picture of the broken egg shell of a world became uglier and more piercing as

gigantic stakes or prison bars standing out of the water. Each time that she

saw these divided territorial waters they constantly reminded her that the city

and her departure -- really her quasi-belief that circumstances dictated her

withdrawal -- were far from an oasis. She would recall the words of Herodotus

that "No man steps into the same water twice" and this would aggravate a

restlessness in her restfulness prompting her to arrange more frequent meetings

with Hilda than she would have done otherwise. Through socializing, she hoped

to get a reprieve from the bites of conscience that came upon her as stealth as

a vampire.

Certainly Tokyo to Tijuana hadn't been a gentle transition with serendipitous

fate disgorging onto a life the way that it did. The molten heat had changed

the landscape of the self and as its only cartographer she, a divorcee who

regretted having ever mixed with a man, was now beginning to map out who she

was and it wasn't easy.

Now with Hilda at an outdoor table of a lesbian pub, both eating their nachos

and cheese and drinking their tequila diluted in Sprite, her happy demeanor was

a little bit affected. As Hilda renamed the food ("tomales" henceforth to be

called "tofemales") it bordered on giddiness. Happy as she was or was not on

this day of her birth, she could not deny the fact that the ineluctable

stirring of memory was scathing her. Some late nights in her solitary bed it

was more of a lacerating pierce of claws. Before the divorce she would at times

wake up from a dream of a tank running down her son and pulverizing him into

layers of permafrost. After the divorce there were these same dreams but with

him pulverized into dust; and they were mixed with those of finding herself

naked in Isetan Department Store -- Japanese clerks, doormen, and beautiful

bowing welcome-ladies all staring at her in consternation until an Ikebana

instructor in the flower shop threw a blanket over her that was woven in

American dandelions.

The dreams were not from guilt -- or at any rate not much conscious guilt. She

told herself that a little responsible compunction was fine for it reminded her

of others' unfulfilled wishes that in an ideal world she would have liked to

see herself obtain for them but further guilt was unwarranted. She didn't even

believe in guilt -- a goddess balancing so many perspectives and antithesis

perspectives as she was. Sure, the ideal for her son would have been for her to

be a Betty Crocker/Dr. Spock hybrid and to give herself exclusively to

motherhood and child development. However, responsible as one should be to

others how could she have disregarded the strange novel sounds that splashed in

her imagination? If happiness was not in devouring sensual experiences that

brought about pleasure but being a kind, contemplative juggler of human

perspectives (watching, meditating, and loving all passerby) surely this realm

of the divine that separated gods from self-centered beasts could not be

willfully disregarded. Still, even she was a social creature. Despite her cold

independent aloofness she could have had a self easily demarcated by others --

a self that to ever be real at all needed to see itself beyond others' use of

it. For someone like her who was infinite and without parameters, pinning

oneself onto a man's last name was the action of being Mrs. Nobody and so this

Kato and Michael relationship had been the magic pill restoring her to herself

after a bout of a needy illness called love.

That being the case she shouldn't have been happier. So the envisaged Antarctic

seals and walruses were really myriad Mexicans wallowing languishingly in

another overpopulated city. So, the only penguin she saw from the outdoor table

of the lesbian pub was a green uniformed motorcycle cop trudging as quickly as

he could in his boots toward a public restroom where he might lawfully urinate.

So the unadulterated snowy landscape, untouched and untainted by human hands,

was lucky to have very few palm trees as deeply rooted in hard clay soil as it

was -- soil arid as desert sand. And peaceful Camp Gabriele in Antarctica

turned out to be TJ, a city filled with drug addicts, drug lords and perhaps

one or two intoxicated goddesses like herself.

Tonight with Hilda, shaking her booty in the pub's adjacent lesbo- disco hall

as if both had anything outside of contempt for men in their minds, She drank

more booze like all goddess predecessors from Hera and Aphrodite to Shirley

McClain.

Her afternoon had been spent depicting miscellaneous individuals waiting in a

queue in front of the immigration building which was the portal to their jobs

in San Ysidro or San Diego; and from there, like a beggarly Indonesian

caricature artist instead of the successful artist that she was, she would sell

her paintings on the street "for nickels and dimes," (each a hundred pesos or

some such sum if subtraction for policemen extorting money were figured into

the calculation). She addressed such policemen in a taciturn manner with hard

stony supercilious eyes made all the harder by that male look of wanting to

fuck the Gringa with the attitude.

Head and body spinning separately on the dance floor with a shot of pure

tequila in her hands ready to be devoured so she could be devoured in its fire

(the base instincts of mankind wanting to mutate an individual into flames), in

one moment she was telling herself how relieved she was to no longer be the

inane thing in this little box of the personal life and the next moment she was

reminiscing about the past foolishly. She thought of romantic walks with

Michael through cherry orchards; their long hours in partnership at the store;

she, her husband, and Atsushi Kato eating sushi, soba, mizu soup, and

okanimiyaki in museum restaurants; she and Kato making deformed sumo wrestlers

out of ice; she and Kato's sister scrubbing each other's backs in a sento; and

of course Kato leading them to sites and to her newly founded interest in the

native people of Japan, the Ainu.

But her best memories of then, as with all sundry memories in general, were of

being alone for she was always trying to squeeze her head and neck through a

small portal to the entity. She was always trying to glimpse ideas and still

depth beyond this world and deep within the self. Back then there were solitary

ponderings in summer walks along the coast of the Sea of Japan. There, walking

on prodigious cement slabs shaped like tacks, which stopped the erosion of the

beach by high tide, she turned toward ocean pointing to America and

contemplated all. She took long walks in street markets and along shipyards,

each street of the metropolis smelling like fish. She was alone then and it had

been good. Now it was dirt and pinatas; colina deserts and an eternal sun; and

Mexican drunks, beggars, and vendors along the bridge that went over the

contaminated river. As the cool air seductively concealed the breadth of its

heat in the dirty desert called Tijuana, so she shrouded herself in a sense

that she was free from the powers of men, sexuality, mythology, motherhood, and

all human concern that gnawed into one's entrails.

They were returning to their apartments with the expectation that Hilda would,

by tradition, dunk Gabriele 's face in a birthday cake. In the car she thought

of Nathaniel and her property with deep homesickness. She thought of her liquid

assets that were mostly embezzled by her ex-husband but were in part tied up in

stocks and bonds. Something was amiss.