To the ancient Egyptians man died each night in this void absent of the sun god
and then each morning was resurrected in daybreak. She thought of this; and it
seemed to her as she was driving home at 3 a.m., hair blowing and mind
mesmerized in prevailing darkness, that this particular myth was as all
religious balderdash that justified one egregious proclivity or another in the
natural state. In Christianity this was myriad: everything from man's god-given
dominion over animals in any arbitrary whim to the Lord's omnipotent power to
part the Nile one moment and turn someone to stone the next (indiscriminate
aiding of some and annihilating others). As the deliverer who cared so much
about individual man as to intrusively know the amount of hair strands on each
head He was the perfect god; and his conspicuous absence or non- involvement on
9-11 and countless other occasions of inhumanity of man to man was merely his
allowing free will to command human affairs.
The ancient and relatively forgotten myth of the Egyptians explained man's
mysterious absconding from the night in seven or eight hours of sleep as a
partial death when apart from the vanquished sun. Its innocence had charmed her
for years, but now it just seemed as one more vapid fable with no redeeming
qualities. Going home circuitously, the idea of sleeping away one more night
seemed as a reprehensible closing of one's eyes to the night's gilded silence.
Long hours of atavistic sleep to keep the body still and hidden from barely
visible predators had been utile in prehistory but now it was an anachronistic
vestige of adaptation. Thwarting nocturnal consciousness of this fragile
animal, man, sleep inadvertently obstructed an appreciation for all that was
black — and she did want to appreciate all that was black.
Outside of bubbling in champagne and a bit of public relations to secure a sale
what had this party been, she asked herself, unless it were to reclaim the
night; and what had this bathroom rendezvous been but to cease to abscond from
that which was black? She laughed at her joke, which she mumbled aloud to
herself. Half drunk, she was inexplicably pleased with herself. She told
herself that her adulterous tryst with this twenty minute black friend had been
her refutation against the notion of ugly-bodied darkness. She inanely told
herself that by brushing naked against his skin this making herself one with
what was black had made the intimacy a higher accomplishment than mere banging.
She was even amused by how easily amused she was in her self- containment in
the car. For her, happiness was not dependent on external playmates although
something vaguely similar to happiness was sometimes facilitated by them.
There was nothing like back roads so bare of automobiles. Driving made her feel
as if she owned the night with the wide stretch of her headlights that were
only deferentially dimmed at the encroachment of other automobiles on her
terrain. She loved the peace and the vastness of these strips of road in the
heart of unpretentious night; and if she had her way about it the universe
would be purely black without the tawdry dappling of stars. It dawned on her
that moving through night at sixty miles per hour her very movement was in
opposition to what was splendid in the night. If Aristotle were right in saying
that happiness was greatest in contemplating this non-changeable entity that
had tossed the chemicals of inchoate matter, then cloistered artists,
philosophers, and other contemplatives would be the dominant force on the
planet. If contemplation were the highest pleasure in life wouldn't her canvas
be more eagerly sought than her hedonistic flings or that which she was now
pursuing: a sense of freedom by sipping a beer and riding around in a Ferrari.
Being blown in all directions from the open windows of her car, she was half
tempted to drive all the way into arctic Canada instead of returning to the
odious smells of her paint—chemicals that were no doubt carcinogens if the nose
were to express its opinion on the matter—paint once vibrant in her perceptions
but now the mental strain of attempting to reestablish success.
She again contemplated the night. If only man had not had this fear of being
eaten, sleep, if it were needed at all would be merely sporadic naps for the
restoration of energy instead of this long withdrawal from the black of night.
Then she thought about this twenty minute chocolate candyman, whom she named as
Candyman II (Roman numerals giving him a sense of eminence). She told herself
that she should have made him withdraw before being allowed to climax within
her. He had worn a condom but it was doubtful that condoms were meant to
stretch so far or be unbreakable when the long black horn was impaling with
such force. How would she know whether or not it had ruptured? She would only
know with the advent of symptoms from AIDS, syphilis, gonorrhea, and that whole
list of undesirables.
She and her husband had an "open" relationship so long as neither one of them
fell in love with someone else but she didn't want to die for the periodic
cravings of sex and more importantly she did not want to harm her husband with
a lethal touch. Like a postulant at a convent, she might well have relinquished
such meretricious spells of lust months ago had she not held two opinions in
favor of this "open relationship" remaining such. This sauntering away from
domestic life always brought newness to marital vows upon one's return; and
being shaken up in promiscuous rendezvous made the brain more lithe in
generating ideas. Ever so often a woman needed to remove a man like her dirty
panties for the required laundering. Ever so often a woman needed to put on
some fresh panties when allowing the old ones to spin around in the wash. It
was an ablution in a sense—this running barefoot in dirty fields to exorcise
her demons of passion. When the exercise or exorcism was completed it allowed
for domestic life there in its small space demarcated within drab walls. Sordid
nights were a bit like wallpapering anew the old shack. But she did not think
about the primary motivations for her adultery: the wish to not cling to this
concept of a relationship as if it were an actual reality, the wish to debunk
this notion of permanence in a mutable world, and that desperation to repudiate
her vulnerability as one who would like to cling to such things, to cling to
her man.
Guilt…there was none—not even when arriving at the house. She was, of course,
surprised to see her man's car parked in the drive but it was not a catalyst of
guilt per se. While the solitary newlywed was getting out of her car she
considered a half imagined societal measurement of her actions. It was from it
that there was a mordant gnawing within that might be labeled as compunction.
She doubted it at first, but then why should she doubt? She was not totally
immune to others. As much as she might claim that feelings were her own
self-manufactured car that she drove around in, she would be a veritable
lunatic were she to have feelings that were little else than her own imagined
whims. Also her art would not pertain to anyone if she were not to some degree
a product of her world, as repugnant as that thought was to her.
As she stepped into the parlor the compunction exacerbated exponentially.
Seeking to be unperturbed by conscience, she told herself that having sex with
a hundred men in a hundred days was no different than being loyal to one spouse
for a hundred and some odd days. She argued that one behavior was no more or
less slutty than the other. It was true in a rational context; but on the other
hand sexual loyalty was a way of discerning this feeling-based abstraction of a
relationship which otherwise would diffuse as a cloud of smoke. She went into
the family room where she saw a light ("family" seeming a misnomer since she
doubted that there was such a thing).
"Hey! You are here!" she called as she went through a hallway to this room
where her husband and son were standing at different sides of a billiard table.
Obviously they were there to play against each other but seemingly it was as if
they were together brandishing their cues, their phallic sticks, which would be
used for her flagellation. As titillation and inebriation were falling flat
with each passing moment, so her smile at imagining her forthcoming beating was
momentary.
"What are you smiling at?" the man with the unmemorable name asked.
"Nothing." Acerbic guilt was bubbling within her.
"I decided to come back this weekend," the man said.
"What a surprise. Grading completed?"
"Some of it. I guess you are okay. Why is your hair this way? What's the word?"
He said something in Russian that she did not understand.
"Disheveled. In the car-- windows down, me blowing in the wind. Guess I look a
mess. Don't worry. I wasn't in an accident."
"Okay, I'm not. I wasn't."
"Seems that a late night pool game has stretched into early morning," she said.
There was no response so she feigned a beautiful wide smile as she slouched
into a vinyl couch --vinyl like that she had withdrawn into when parting from
Nathaniel's father with his dividing cells within her—cells that were either
cancerous or salubrious divisions although now it was perhaps too early to
predict which or the denouement of this dabbled experiment. "Don't you think it
is a little bit late for my two boys to be playing billiards like they are at a
poker party?"
"No, I don't Gabriele; and do you want me to tell you why?"
"Please. More than anything else on the planet, I live for it."
"Both of us had to do something while we waited and waited for you, didn't we?
We couldn't stare at the door all night. Folk dancing to balalaika music seemed
out of place and we didn't know the phone numbers of hospital morgues to see if
you checked in with your bags."
She chortled. "Uh oh, facetious and angry. Looks like I've been grounded and
will have the car keys taken away." But grave memories were flung into her
consciousness that sobered her frivolity: she remembered being in Japan waiting
for Michael to return from his dates with Kato. Sitting on her futon on the
tatami of her living room, she would blow into the shakuhachi, that wailing
instrument that was the only thing she could communicate with in a grief so
tacit and incommunicable.
"Do you want me to not care?"
"Huh?" She was recovering from damnable memories that were running over her the
way swathes of the Earth's hardened vomit, continents, moved, reshaped
themselves, and demarcated anew its body of water. Then it occurred to her what
he said. "Sorry. I thank you for caring. I really do. You are a good guy."
"You left your son here all alone."
"Are you kidding? Hardly that! After hearing from Peggy about his penchant for
arson, I wouldn't be that crazy. Where is the babysitter, Nathaniel?"
"I didn't like her so I got rid of her," said the boy. "I fired her but I paid
her off first."
"With what?"
As she waited for him to speak she saw him scratch one of his earlobes. From
this she imagined him saying that he paid the babysitter with money he made
from selling earrings like the ones she was wearing. Then, in the daydream, she
demanded to know whether or not he had been pilfering bits of her jewelry all
along and what he did with the money once he sold them; but in the daydream he
did not answer either question leaving inconclusive speculation to run rife.
But she told herself that the daydream had no significance. Once in February
when not able to find various pairs of earrings and blaming herself for having
lost them somewhere between Tokyo to Tijuana she had engaged herself in comic
anecdotes of the boy sneaking into her bedroom in leather gloves and pajamas so
that he might mail some of her jewelry to Hispanic Betty before Valentine's
Day. She told herself that this daydream was merely the rebounding of her
dismissed caprices. And yet she couldn't help wondering if this particular
daydream was, as Freud would say, a resurfacing of repressed fears, unwanted
knowledge, or strong convictions about a given matter of importance.
She thought about how little of a human's mercurial life was grounded in the
present moment: an athlete was in the rush of his adrenalin, a conversation
consisted of past events and future expectations, and a current event was
impinged by pertinent hunches exhumed from the subconscious in daydreams. Even
if she were to have conclusive knowledge about her son's actions throughout
each and every day, and even if she were to find him as innocent as a babe, the
correct way of dealing with him would still be guesswork. Such was the
peculiarity of the human condition.
"With Monopoly money," he chuckled
"With what?" she repeated irascibly.
" Twenty bucks out of my allowance money. Are you going to take my head off for
that?"
"For twenty bucks, never. Thirty, maybe." She turned to her husband. "Didn't he
tell you where I was at?"
"He said that he didn't know."
"I don't know," said the boy.
"I told you."
"I wasn't listening. Was watching a movie. Didn't hear," he spoke with cold
indifference. Only his eyes were visceral and they were directed at the
billiard balls while he daydreamed phantasms of men and orgasms in which his
mother copulated with male partygoers in a back bedroom. Bending toward the
table and aiming his cue stick he murmured inaudibly, "I never listen to where
anyone is planning to cat around to. It's none of my business." Then he shot
the balls. "Your turn, Comrade."
"Cat around?" said Gabriele. "Is that what you said? I think it's time for you
to go to bed." Angry as she was, she laughed awkwardly to give the impression
that she construed it to be one more impertinent statement having as little
significance to her as others he had said previously.
"Go on! We'll finish in the morning, I promise," said the man.
"Game over permanently," said the boy in decisive coldness. He hastily garnered
the balls into a tray and then began to descend into his room. As he did so he
heard: "I want to know where you have been!" "I was just at a buyer's home. A
kind of show and tell party." "You hate going to those things." "Yeah but I
sometimes have to: smiles, and small talk. One has to suck up to these people
for cash. I don't have any money, you know — well, not completely that way but
coming soon. And if it gets any worse Adagio'll have to go to public schools
and I'll sell the house. Maybe go back to Mexico and this time live in an Adobe
hut." "Well, if that came from another person it would be a joke but since it
is coming from you it would not surprise me if you mean it. Remember that any
crazy action like that would be the end of us." "I'm joking. I don't want an
ending of us but a forever of us. I just mean that money has become an issue. I
have to rebuild my reputation — not from scratch, but still reestablishing it
is a struggle. It ain't easy." "Get a job." "No, I detest jobs — especially
professional jobs. I would rather be an automaton in a factory than a paper
pusher or a money hording entrepreneur. All of them have such wasted lives." He
laughed. "I have such a wasted life then."
The words did not fall into place so much as they just fell profusely like a
mist that kept her obscure from her spouse. By their mere arrangement, their
emphasis, and their plausibility, deceit was done without the need for
prevarications, obfuscations, mendacities, and outright lies. She felt
delivered from being thought of as the slut that she was beginning to feel that
she was.
Later, while the two were asleep and she was reading on her vinyl sofa and
occasionally peaking out of the curtain into the darkness, it seemed to her
that with sordid thoughts and deeds being such it was a good thing that
communication conveyed so little of life and reality. In her own brain there
were these incessant skirmishes to separate herself from her environment, the
tacit hostile intent toward others expressed in the coldness of her eyes, and
all these indefatigable hungers of base instinct. The loneliness of
philosophical ponderings, the ineffable brooding, and the meticulous details of
producing life and personal statements in her art forced her to take dives ever
so often into these wild sexcapades. Sometimes one needed to have those moments
of feeling, although never believing, the specious inebriation of mutually
shared physical intimacy.
She thought about telling him the truth. She believed in honesty but as she
pondered doing so honesty didn't seem to her as either all that pragmatic or
virtuous. If one were to convey her more carnal side to any of these judgmental
and precipitous creatures they would believe it to be the full summation of the
confessor. She was a faithful wife: faithful to her intent to care about a man,
and this faithfulness did not require ridiculous sexual fidelity as its
measurement. She told herself that a higher being, a licentious goddess, was
able to sculpt a higher authority within all this effluvium, this muck of
feelings and thought.
So, what if she were unfaithful in a sense? It was not she who had amended the
marital vows. His utterance was partially made in jest, but having made it
changed the nature of the contract. Being faithful was no longer an
indefeasible Claus. It was he who had begun it all. "So many beautiful women
are on campus. Sometimes they look like babies and sometimes they look so
ripe." "Well, don't famish yourself on account of me." "You wouldn't mind?" "I
guess not. Not if it didn't mean anything. If a man sits in a box for some
hours he would need exercise. If hungry enough you would chew on a shoe if
there weren't anything more edible in sight. What right would I have to stop
you?" "Good, that is what we should do if it becomes hard to control, and I
promise that it won't mean anything." "Fine," she had said; but surely he
wasn't so na•ve as to think that it would be an amendment giving privileges
that would be exclusively his own.
Then she went to bed. Not able to fall asleep for an hour, she just lay there
with her man. At certain moments she felt reassured to be there listening to
his breathing and at other moments it felt constricting to have the imposition
of a man share her space. And yet she too needed her contracts. She too needed
to cling to another person to seem to herself that she was more than dirt
blowing around in the impermanent streets of the city. Each minute hunted and
devoured its predecessor, and together all the minutes were this composite of
time as the replication to replace dying cells was a collection that was the
body. She listened to the clock. It too was an ephemeral device that seemed to
hum as incessantly as her breath. But both, she knew, were temporary devices.
The abstraction of time itself, the best a woman could conceptualize it, seemed
more "eternal" just as the life of any elderly woman would seem successfully
"immortal" when there among grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Still, in
the scheme of things all was blowing dust.
She did not blame her morbid disposition on the night. Nocturnal stillness
aided concentration and she sunk under it as if it were her grandmother's
quilt. It did not evoke a mood, for her saturnine thoughts came in part from
the slowing of spinning intoxication and a more sobering reality pressing upon
her: that she was a fraudulent wife, an adulterous bitch, and a woman wrestled
to the ground by the mundane of financial woes. How she could devise a viable,
commercial art that would be easily manufactured without having to forfeit her
role as a serious artist—this was her insoluble dilemma. Even though she sensed
the answer to be immediate and palpable, it kept eluding her nonetheless.
Seeing that her bedtime contemplations were circumgyratory spirals of thought
expended without even tiring her to the point where she could sleep, she
dressed and went outside.
A bike ride taking hours; hills beyond the city limits—hills gilded in sunrise;
hills like that picture in her son's Book of Mormon showing the Hill Cummorah
where, according to the myth, these imaginary plates were once buried; hills
like that idyllic Hill that recently provoked her to say that she would rather
have him study a dirty magazine than these man made scriptures; the idea, as
the wind blew through her hair and massaged her skin, that physical delusions
were less deleterious than mental ones; the coolness of wind blowing in her
face; the silent splendor of the ride; the hat blowing off her head; halted
peddling to find it; the potholes and sharp rocks of rural roads; running over
some type of shard; and then there was that flat tire. She walked the bicycle
for an hour before finally coming across a filling station. A worker told her
that he would patch her inner tube for twenty dollars. She called him a
capitalistic pig. He pointed to her long, ostentatious diamond earrings and
asked her what she thought that she was. Then there was an awareness that she
knew that she was that too. A fixed bicycle; slapping against the winds within
her movement; a new conviction to simplify her life; a rest at a convenience
store; coins into the slot of the newspaper vending machine; headlines of a man
in Albany who shot his wife's lover, his wife, the children, and then himself;
headlines of an overworked postal employee from Albany who began to shoot
people in the queue so as to reduce the amount of packages submitted into his
window; a nice elderly woman smiling at her like sunshine and asking how she
was but Gabriele's cold eyes turned her to ice; an awareness of having wronged
the woman, a compunction, and a recalled analogy that she was that stuffed
polar bear with the stiff arms that the factory of the human race mutantly
created; an elderly man wanting to change her quarter into two dimes and a
nickel for the newspaper vending machine but Gabriele's cold eyes turned him
into ice sculpture until he came to himself and quickly fled from the witch;
and then at last a return home. Her son was there, brandishing his BB gun in
late morning.
"Morning soldier! Aren't you a little old for this thing?" she asked as she got
off her bicycle.
"Yes. Give me the real thing and this kid's gun can go into the trash," he
said.
"No can do," she said, "or matches to an arsonist."
"I'm not an arsonist. It was an accident."
"I wouldn't know. I wasn't at your Aunt Peggy's."
"No, you were in Japan, weren't you? Where have you been?"
"Riding. It is a beautiful morning. Good exercise. And I was thinking: you
know, we are living beyond our means. I've decided to sell the house. We'll
look for a smaller place and we'll have money to travel around from time to
time. You'll get to see other places. Maybe you'll get to see Japan too."
"You do that and I'll be gone."
"Gone? Gone where? Peggy would never take you back."
"To Sharon's"
"You despise her."
"Yes," he said. He fired one shot and it went into the window. He fired a
second, and a third time at the fleeing owl and the bleeding corpse plumped
onto the earth like a water balloon.
Although he saw it flounder in the skies as he floundered around on the Earth,
Sang Huin was not exactly sure where the kite was struck to the ground. He
thought of how so many years of his life were struck down in silence. Only
June, the basketball star, had voice and opinions that could sway the parents.
He was inconsequential, relegated to shadows. He upbraided himself and stymied
his thoughts immediately. He didn't want to think any bad thoughts about his
sister. He had no right to think them. Instead, he desperately thought that he
should marry a woman and have a family of his own, thereby enveloping himself
in a world of forgetfulness. His buttocks were hurting from where he sat and
the wind was beginning to sweep down its polluted grit of rain. He got up. He
needed to go downtown to Myong Dong and try to find a birthday present for
Seong Seob, but first he needed to pick up an umbrella.