The catalysts of a migraine being blood vessels that constrict blood flow as they dilate externally, and the headaches themselves being the reduced metabolism that is the consequence of the constriction and the dilation: she knew them and their impact well. She was feeling unprecedented surges of pain deeper than she ever had before; still they were nothing to her, catatonic and naked as she was on a billiard table for a period of hours. Lying face forward in a state of shock as the body cuddled to the clothing that was beneath her—clothing that absorbed a bit of her blood and incontinent discharge while the rest seeped into the fabric of the table—she was a veritable puddle there unto herself, and her mental state was not much different than severed consciousness. For the most part it skid like blowing trash that moved with the elements and had no sense of itself in space and time. Occasionally there were seconds of sensing something, or imagining herself sensing something. It was some type of boxed light or illuminated squares like the pattern of her grandmother's quilt and with it was static as a deafening cloud of locusts. She was not trapped in the boxes because there was no she. Likewise, she was not exactly listening to the sound for to do so would be to have intent and for intention there would need to be a self that she did not have.
The monotony of the enclosure of boxed light compacted with that masticating rumbling sound of the descent of insectual clouds: when seeming to be at all this was all there was. And such seconds of coming to herself were as of putting toes into the cold waters of a swimming pool and then suddenly pulling out again.
Whereas a hallucination like the tunnel of light was an instrument of the psyche to delude a dying soul that there was a positive within the termination of being, hers, which she encountered in the third hour of her figurative demise, was more like regeneration. To avoid more pain by accepting death was the aim of the former but for the latter it was a time, a half-life, before some renewal could begin. Then light and locusts were transmuted into balls and banging.
The black ball and the myrmidons of the black ball were moving like the cars of a train around the table with individual parts sometimes banging against the edge and rebounding but always to return to that designated train in that ineluctable orbit. The pull of the eight ball was gravity in a sense like a sun moving ever so slightly in space and by its movements capturing smaller entities or the whirlpool formed in the sinking of a ship. But why was the larger black billiard ball moving to begin with? Inertia? What was the prime mover of inertia? The answer she would not know even if she were aware of a she to know something, which she didn't.
It seemed to her, if there were a her, which there was not in such a state, that the moving train of balls sometimes slowed down and curved into letters as if they meant to communicate something incommunicable, too painfully incommunicable, like the image of a US soldier who had a hand hideously swollen from the radiation he received from the A-bomb experiments on Bikini Island— hideous images thumping consciousness until it became something other than consciousness, something altogether surreal.. If there had been more of them these billiard balls might have come together to spell out a message one letter at a time. But these Pythagoreans had numbers tattooed to them as mute and wordless as they were. Though numbers they nonetheless conveyed:
— Andrei Linde began a paradigm shift in cosmology that allowed for theories other than the Big Bang or Steady State theories when he proposed that the universe or universes were self-replicating and inflationary.
—The mixture of hydrogen, methane, ammonia, and water vapor was bombarded with lightning, and in the course of time generated amino acids that could produce protein, but how a self-replicating organism of DNA sequences evolved from this has no plausible theory.
—The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins was an original means of envisioning organisms as temporary, reproductive homes existing solely for the purpose of allowing genetic material to thrive eternally, and from it a new branch of social sciences known as sociobiology emerged.
—Wild wheat and barley live naturally in the area between Eastern Turkey and the Caspian Sea. Some time between 12,000 and 8,000 BC, women must have discovered that by sowing the seeds of these grains they could reduce the amount of time required to gather fruits and vegetables. In so doing they allowed sedentary life in organized cities to emerge.
—Amonhotep IV (1353-1337 BC) changed his name to Akhenaten or Akhenaton, which meant, "Aten is satisfied." Although unable to retain conquered lands like Palestine or succeed very well in military campaigns, this pharaoh's emphasis of the sun god, Aten, allowed a more naturalistic art to flourish.
—Cleopatra (69-30 BC) was the last ruler of the Ptolemaic dynasty which ruled Egypt from 51-30 BC. As one of the strongest women in the ancient world, she was idealized by her people as a reincarnation of Isis.
—Most owls are nocturnal and spend daytime in a quiet and inconspicuous roost. Their activities consist of preening, combing plumage with their claws, screeching, hooting, whistling and snorting
—When owls bob and weave their heads it can appear as if they are exhibiting curiosity concerning the world around them in a humanoid gesture, but in fact they are merely attempting to improve their three dimensional concept of whatever it is that they are looking at. It is no wonder that people, such as they are in readily subscribing to the superstitions of their brothers and sisters in the herd, attributed wisdom, prophecy, and witchcraft to the bird.
—As a successful predator feared by the other birds, lone owls are sometimes mobbed by flocks of rival birds and forced to depart from its roost because of the harassment.
—In keeping with the first two laws of thermodynamics, organisms can neither create nor destroy energy but can only transform it from one form to another.
What she was thinking curled there like an aborted fetus — there being in a corner where she could see a beam of sunshine from a distant window as she stayed hidden behind a large chair, obscure within its shadow — she did not know. She did not even know how she got into her library, or even that she was there.
There, in this fetal position on the floor, she was not as ingenuous as a child for she was more innocent than this. An infant had its cries and smiles to manipulate responses but only she, a non- lachrymose mute, timid and shaking but with eyes open to any compassionate deity who might transcend from the beam, had such ingenuousness. Had someone other than Nathaniel gotten beyond the locked door she would have reached her hands out to the deliverer and the deliverance unreservedly. Once she even slipped into the raiment of memories where a self (presumably herself) interacted with another; and it was from it that, all so briefly, she imagined herself there in human form feeling of Thai silk with Hilda opening the door to find her. Behind the leather of that antique and ostentatious, patriarchal chair that had become her protector and shield she was a human being for the first time, needy, needing to be needed, and enmeshed as a member of the herd. There was even a second where Hilda fused into Rita/Lily and instead of coming to her, it was she, Gabriele, who came into that apartment in Ithaca, embracing her friend in the joy of comforting another being and just being there in the throngs of shared human thought and feeling.
The hours led into dusk and the beam of sunlight floundered behind an opaque screen and then withered into darkness. In that vacuous darkness within and without she remained a convalescent to the impairment of memory which could not be lobotomized no matter how much she yearned for it to be. As before, there were some sane and enlightening ideas in her hallucinations, which had she been able to record them in her madness, upon reflection might have shown a world beyond Fort Gabriele. But all her thoughts were merely shards within the hours. It did not even dawn on her to go to the bathroom. Without meaning to do so she urinated where she sat and even this fetid puddle soaking into the carpet seemed distant and detached as if not having been perpetrated by the self.
By this time truly crazy thoughts interacted with memory as if the mind were attempting to cause her to recognize herself in the midst of absurd fantasy. She believed that she was her Ferrari; that in each city where she drove the traffic lights always turned green at her approach; that she, the car, often reached into her window for the snuff on her dashboard which she would put into the gas tank as she drove south; that she would have gone all the way into Mexico, departing completely from the truculence of American society, were it not for that red light in Fayetteville, Arkansas; that after five long minutes she, that car, felt restless before the ongoing red, turned right, and moved up a steep hill until she was at a Confederate cemetery; and that there on a gravel road in the thickets of Elm trees, huge Evergreens, and weathered tombstones she felt a kinship with these deceased secessionists grouped according to states —
Legs on a bed (presumably her own) and ants on the sheets crawling upon those legs — empty cities and this feeling of being forlorn and banished in a world of no people — an uninhabited White House where no flag blew — flaming World Trade Center towers and her eyes looking up in horror — people falling wordlessly out of hundred story windows and herself thinking that Aten, Athena, Jehovah or some god outside of man's feeble conceptualizations of one would surely deliver them by using clouds as baseball mitts but not feeling surprised, only disappointed, to be living in such a godless realm — gluttonous nations fighting for the free flow of oil, and herself seeing them on the evening news — a maze of rooms in her home divided like Baltic states — wanting something to impale into the concrete of her makeup when she went to galleries, museums, and these art parties—herself, her complete self, with Nathaniel as the two of them watched her cat, Mouse, sniff the room for bugs; herself, her complete self, telling him that "all creatures need to feel industrious no matter whether they accomplish anything or not," hoping that subtle clues would inspire him to attempt his homework — the chest of her husband, the man with the unmemorable name, inhaling and exhaling and herself floating on it in the undulations of an ocean.
At this time she was not even aware that her fingers were pinching air as if a brush lay between them or that she was tracing out owls with her hands as if this was magically transmuting them onto the walls. Owls and more owls she patterned out — not regular barn owls, and not saw-whet owls, but Arctic owls living alone in cold snowy deserts. An hour into this some consciousness of what she was doing took place and the word "Paint!" flashed over her mind in a conflagration for she was afraid of falling into complete madness.
Opening the door, she crouched on her four legs as if in crawling through tall grass she could extricate herself from the land of her enemies to a land of lambent color. Scurrying from room to room, she at last found that which she sought; but she became terrified at finding a photograph of Nathaniel on a table near her paints and she retreated from it. She crawled into a corner and for twenty minutes she kept her eyes closed and her body shook in chills of terror before courage began to replenish within her. Reentering her fortress with color and instruments, she stood on one of the upper bookshelves that surrounded the whole room of the library. Dashing paint into solitary stoic owls, in one moment she became cognizant enough to see that each one was without any variation from the others because life was incessantly cruel without variation. The room was in total darkness apart from a bit of moonlight that kept her task possible. Then something divine came out of the moonlight. It was not a deity for it was flesh and blood as she.
"Gabriele," sang Rita/Lily happily. Then, like an empath, her visage changed as had the compassionate face of Gabriele's grandmother, and as had the mood ring that Gabriele wore as a teenager. "What are you doing?… Are you okay?… Can you understand me?"
Gabriele's bottom lip trembled and she dropped her paintbrush on the floor. Then she accidentally tipped over the paint. "My friend, my friend," she murmured.
"Yes, Gabriele, yes I am your friend. Don't be afraid. I am with you now." From at first seeming to comport her usual uncertain hesitancy, Rita was now appearing as a decisive voice according to the perspective of the child before her.
Gabriele pulled back inside herself for a moment, uncertain about swapping roles with the callow and manic-depressive neighbor whom she once cared about. The idea of friendship was beginning to befuddle her and she looked dazed, swept away in a mist of adult skepticism for that which was not in her experience. But overall she was ingenuous, and as one who was ingenuous she retained hope in foreign concepts. "Friendship. Really? I have existed all these long 39 years without any."
"No, you only thought that you did not have them."
" I didn't forget you, you know. I haven't forgotten you."
"We are here together so we haven't forgotten each other."
"Together in a dream?" Gabriele asked.
"Sometimes dreams have a reality unto themselves."
"I wasn't good to you, I know. I'm so sorry."
" I cried for a week when you left. I cried because you did not tell me that you were leaving. But it is okay now. I don't mind now. You are better and brighter than me, and I understood that you weren't thinking of me then, that I was nothing to you then. But it is all in the past. Now we just need to get you well."
"Am I sick?"
"You will be well. You will be well soon."
"Rita/Lily, what has happened to me? I don't understand any of it!" she cried.
"Hold on, my dear. I'm afraid that you will fall."
"Please!"
"Be careful! Stay unperturbed. Look at the paint. It has splattered onto the floor."
"What happened to me?"
"It is better to not think of it. Far worse things have happened, as bad as this is or seems to be. They have, and they have been overcome by mere mortals."
"Is he here?"
"No, he is gone. Didn't you hear the car drive away?"
"Yes."
"He'll be back, won't he?"
"No. You saw him with a suitcase in his hands."
"He spat in my face with that bag in his hands."
"Yes, my dear. Let it go from you. You are a goddess. You are beyond the cruelty of this world."
"Oh, Rita!" she cried and fell into hysterical sobs.
"Stay calm, my dear. Don't fall from the bookshelf."
Gabriele regained her composure and smiled lugubriously at the moonlight as well as at her friend of the moonlight. Even though nature was sometimes cruel it was beautiful; and even if hallucinations were derangements this one was kinder than any reality she had experienced.
"Maybe I should go somewhere else, Rita. I could go away into the northern parts of Canada."
"Newfoundland?"
"Oh yes, Newfoundland! It sounds so beautiful."
"They cull seals there. They beat and impale them in the most inhumane manner. It is better than American culling of its unique people but no, cruel places like that are not for a goddess like you who has seen too much cruelty and pain as is."
"Look at my paintings, Rita/Lily," said Gabriele in retaining the nine years and deleting her thirty.
"Yes, beautiful my dear. You are so talented. What a beautiful artist you will be."
"I think I was wanting to bring back the owl again."
"It is dead, as is the dog, as is so much. No, don't climb down. Not that way!"
"Which way? Oh, look, my vagina is bleeding profusely! This is not normal bleeding. It's damaged! I'm damaged!"
"Yes."
"And the blood is on my hands."
"It will wash off. And you will get well. You are already better than you were."
"Why is the blood on my hands and vagina?"
"You've been mixing some of the blood from your private area. You've been putting it into your paint."
"That is strange, isn't it?"
"Yes my dear. It is part of the shock. Don't concern yourself with it. No one has seen this—just you and I. Please do me a little favor. Can you? Are you listening? The bookshelf on this side is not steady. I want you to slowly slide down to the other part of the room."
"I don't feel real and my entire body feels numb like it doesn't belong to me."
"It is part of the shock but you are coming to yourself. You are."
"Are you real?"
"What's real? Will you be here in a hundred years? You need me, and that makes you more real than you ever have been before. Come and slide down a little further. Near the open window. That's it." Gabriele scooted carefully to the other side of the room where the bookshelf went over the window. "Yes, good; now crawl down onto a lower shelf and let me take you from this state."
"Yes," said Gabriele, and she swung down to the third shelf.
"Good my dear. Look, I am here too. Now we will dive together."
"Dive? But you don't want me to fall."
"Fall from the bookshelf, no." She hesitated as if not wanting to say anything more.
"What is it, Rita/Lily? Tell me as a friend."
"If you were to go back you would be stone. There is no life in that. Really there is no other choice. We will dive from the window."
"From the window? It is three stories high."
"Yes, if we just jump we might miss the exit. We will do it together and depart from all of this death."
Then she was looking up at the unhinged diagonal teetering of the bookshelf and glancing back at this strewn rubble of books girded about her on the floor. She judged that the bookshelf and the diagonal teetering of a mind were analogous to each other not so much from what they lacked as from what they possessed. Both were on one last hinge really, neither one was completely gone, and both could continue on in this state for as long as the elements that made them did not unravel by decay or degeneration.
She guffawed and the guffaw droned on monotonously into a dry acrimonious hysteria precipitated by a need for relief from loss, lament, and this feeling that she was vile for being violated in this most repugnant way; but this laughter was essentially the revelatory irony that madness, in whole or in part, was willed into existence, or at least hers was — she who was a consummate actress unto herself.
She had missed her suicidal exit from sensing that the right bounce before the leap would bring it all down, and it had, making the wish to live more dominant than the wish to die. Now with bruised buttocks there in the rubble of ideas, unable to think of any reason that she had averted her demise, pain tore at her inside and out.
Conscious will had devised suicide that the instinct to live had thwarted. Before this, somewhere early into the "madness" when the shock of this horror had passed, her ongoing madness into the hours had been merely a conscious choice. Both had been her own scheming, her own devising.
She got up in full recognition of herself, her surroundings, and the memory that thumped inside her brain. This memory of the rape played over and over and the monotony exacerbated the thumping. As a living entity, one lived without a clue to the reason of it all. One rose in pain and moved as she was doing now, for how could even a creature of contemplation contemplate without movement away from the sedentary gaze of one specific thing? Did she really contemplate more than others, and were here contemplations more trenchant than others? She assumed so and that it was a mixture of her own genius and her obdurate wish to not be one of the herds. It was her wish to be a unique person who was not afraid of homesteading in the self and listened to and experimented with original thoughts that a good intelligence removed of cacophony devised. It was her belief that this was the only real life for it was beyond delegated roles and instinct.
But as she went into the bathroom to vomit she thought such a reaction was as feeble and absurd as homesteading within the herds. Should she throw up what little energy she had? Would she let an external event discombobulate her in such a nervous disorder? This thing that happened to her was repugnant rape but, she argued, only societal norms made it viler than other forms of rape. It had not harmed her irrevocably. Only the horrific memory would harm her and it, memory, was within the self. Only she could create pain to herself. Only she could continue self-flagellation lodged there in the brain whipping herself in memory. No, she answered herself, she would not let memory maim her.
She filled up the tub with cold soapy water. Going to extremes by the attempt at sterilizing herself in hot water would have been a natural response, and it was in the fear of scolding herself that she avoided the tab controlling the hot water altogether. She liked the coolness and the vibrant stimulation that it saturated onto her body. In the frothy suds she tried to sculpt the rough external shapes of the ice sculptures that she and Kato had made during the snow festivals of Sapporo. With her fingers she traced these suds-sculptures the way they once were as ice, but the suds only lasted for a moment, a reminder that time went by like a shell-shocked soldier.
But there was only so much enjoyment that one could have in hell, and one thought kept pecking like a vulture on the corpse of her brain: was she cleansing it all away? The semen had gone to the uterus and then into the oviduct or the fallopian tubes. How would she get it out now that it was there? Menstruation and those hungry janitor cells called macrophages that were responsible for dead cell removal would cleanse her of such things in the course of time. She needed to wait without going out of her wits. This was what he told herself, and yet still she poured half of a bottle of shampoo onto her head and body and the rest she poured into her vagina and began to scrub. "If only," she told herself, "I had a washcloth with that scouring side like those one gets in a Japanese sento!" Having none, she scrubbed even harder. "Still," she said, "this is absurd. Nothing will get it out but natural processes over the course of time. As repugnant as it is by instinct, it is no more repugnant than him having grown in me to begin with. I must override instinct with logic. Stay calm. Stay calm."
But one moment her equilibrium tilted and she found that the control of her thoughts was slipping away. She thought of her mother braiding her hair when she was a very young girl, and how Peggy had often taken her out for ice cream. Were these women so unforgivable, so unreachable now? She just wanted to grab them by the sleeves and yank them back to her but all had gone to the point of no return and these situations of estrangement were, she believed, the unparalleled human tragedy. And then she thought of how, after walking with Nathaniel through Cornell University and eating ice cream sandwiches with him one time, she took him to a mall to buy for him clothes that she could not easily afford. She remembered how during this time she went with him into the men's bathroom to get him started on his own "Go to urinal 425. It looks lower." "Urinal 425" he repeated in delight as he read 425 from the wall. "Lady, what the hell are you doing in a man's bathroom," demanded a uriner. "Peeing," she told him coldly. "Zip it up, man. Zip it out, Adagio." Was the boy too so unforgivable, so unreachable now? This sweet lost boy she too wanted to take by the sleeves and yank back to her but he too had gone to this point of no return. This estrangement was, she believed, the unparalleled human tragedy of all unparalleled human tragedies.
At this time she picked up her mobile telephone and dialed Information to get the number for a rape crisis hotline. However, as she was in the process of making the call she could not think how mere mortals could guide the more advanced creature, or perfected mutant, that she was. Assessing that it should be she who should be giving crisis intervention to the herds it suddenly dawned on her that working at some type of crisis hotline might be her part-time vocation for the future. She would only need to pick up a telephone, reflect feelings the way a calm stream might cast one's reflection, subtly throw in ideas for them to ponder that would challenge them in new directions according to her training as a counselor, and guide them to social work agencies and resources in the community. She would never need to see the faces of fellow counselors or fellow victims of abuse and madness; and furthermore her thoughts would not be stymied within the paperwork of regular psychologist-prostitutes by such a dabbling.
And yet it was an entirely different phone call that she made instead, and after making it she then asked herself whether she should make another one. She wondered if she should call the man with the unmemorable name. "No," she thought. "There are realities that if words are used to describe them people will sic the men in white coats with their strait jackets on the verbose culprit." She didn't want her words to be mistaken as a source of mad delusion as they no doubt would be.
She would just dress herself blandly after a time of soaking in the tub—not that even hours spent there would make her feel clean unless she controlled her feelings and willed concluded cleanliness into her thoughts. And after that she did not know. She sliced off an ice cap of a mountain of soap and it flew toward her like a garuda. Yes, she told herself, "I will fly on Garuda Indonesia Airlines and mingle with common people of Jakarta — paint the world as it is." But as she thought about it, the subject seemed more of a distant plan. "Before this I need to sell off this inane property that I have, but that can't be done in a day. Maybe in the meantime I could go to the industrial sector of the city and get a job in the new Tyson's tortilla factory stuffing dough into the machines. They are hiring now. I could blow kisses to men in hairnets. I've always been curious what these simple folk are like. Maybe their lives are better. Anyhow, it would provide me with some experiences that I could sketch. I need to practice sketching for a while and regain my talents, anyway. Yes, I need to practice before I go off to Jakarta and do it for real. Oh, and I would need to train someone else to be the slave manager of the shop. I can't train any one of my employees immediately. It takes time and I would need to witness them in action before I would ever sign someone over for such a feat. I can't even go back to work until I recuperate. But no matter what, I have to live here until I can sell this place off; so to make that bearable there must be a great conflagration of all things that belonged to that devil. There should be no reminder of him. Whatever can't burn can go to the Salvation Army. And about this man with the unmemorable name, if I can't say the name by this point, that should tell me something. And what good would he be, as a husband, if I cannot tell him about any of this….well, maybe I can but I presume that I can't—not to anyone. One is merely married to herself. That's all there is."
She tore off the loose threads of her washcloth and tied them onto one of her fingers. Then she loudly asked and proclaimed, "Do you take this woman to be your lawful wedded wife to have and to hold until dead do you part? I do. And do you take the same she, yourself, to be your wedded wife to have and to hold until death do you part? I do! I, by the power vested in me proclaim you and thee married until death do you part and a little time afterward when not all cells have come to a cessation" She smiled and puckered her mouth into a kiss toward her reflection in the mirror. And as she was playing in the suds, singing the song, "Alone Again Naturally" by the Monkees the doorbell rang. She got out of the tub, not bothering to take a towel to the frothy suds that were still on her naked body, and went downstairs. She looked out the window and then opened the door. The Pizza Hut delivery boy gasped.
He stuttered. "Ah-ah-I am su—supposed to da-da-deliver a pizza."
"Deliver it then," she said. Her eyes were like the coal of a snowman.
"You ha-ha-have to pay for it."
"Is that a fact? Have you always had this stuttering problem?"
"Ma-mu-ma'am, you are na—ked."
"I'm in my own home. Can't I be naked in my own home?"
He took in a deep breath. "Well, most people aren't when they come to the door."
"Well, I'm not most people. What does it do to you to have to deliver a pizza to someone not wearing any clothes?"
"It ba-bu-bothers me."
"It bothers you because you are revolted by it or because it excites you?"
"It's exciting."
"But I'm sure that if I were twenty years older it would be revolting to you, wouldn't it?"
"Uh-uh-I don't know. I suppose so."
"And yet it would be the same body. The same type of replication of cells, just not as beautifully rendered. Not worth stuttering over. If I were you I would go to a speech therapist and get that cured.
"Yeah, maybe I will."
"Good. How much is it?"
"Seven dollars. Should I cu-cu-cu-come inside?"
"No one comes inside me, buddy. Wait there." She took her pizza and slammed the door shut. When she returned to the door she only slid a ten-dollar bill beneath it and fastened more of the locks.
Conclusion of Sang Huin
Beyond his dabbled research on the subject, Sang Huin did not know much about Jakarta …th its Rupiah coins as light as a child's play money; female mendicants ever so often dancing seductively into the open doors of tiny shack restaurants as their partners carried speakers and collected the money that only rarely was given for these dances of desperation and futility; guitar mendicants (usually children or teenagers performing in stalled buses); Suharto's penchant for small gardens of ostentatious statues to beautify Jakarta still his legacy; women free to let their long hair flow or to constrain it under hijabs and jilbabs; blue bird/ white bird/black bird taxis; oblong orange tuc tucs swarming the streets like cockroaches; Wartel phone cafes on every corner for those without phones; photocopy shops for so many businesses without photocopy machines; green and white city buses as uncomfortable as a back of a pickup truck; graffiti on doors of businesses such as that of "Fuck The System" somewhere between the train station and Jalan Jaksa (Jaksa Road); 40 percent unemployment with panhandlers, newspaper boys, and money boys on every street; train personnel giving out free condoms to all of its customers; trains going through the middle of Jakarta linking its disparate groups to other cities of Java — each with its own provincial language; the provincial languages, Javanese, and Indonesian all spoken in Java; those calls to prayer from distant mosques reverberating sotto voce as slightly discordant echoes of the nearby mosque; that orphic song of a nearby mosque thundering its plaintive notes; commerce and human activity stunned and mesmerized by wailing notes ubiquitous to the human heart and experience but still continuous; and the cacophonous cries of competing street merchants and entrepreneurs all amalgamated into one chorus.
Sang Huin was not quite sure whether or not he had written his conclusion. It was an open question whether chapters on Gabriele's life in Jakarta would add much to the book. Regardless of having finished it or not, he would no doubt be writing on something or another in the immediate future if nothing but the unpublished musical notes of chamber music for the cello. For not having connections of family dwarf his imagination in financial and emotional obligations, his world was less myopic and this play with ideas was still rich within him. It seemed to him that the fecundity of homosexuals in the meaningful production of ideas came about from not lodging a foundation of family within the sturdy earth. Instead, homosexuals blew with the top soil and ideas shifted along with this drifting in the pensive ponderings of the ephemeral nature of reality. He thought that it was true enough but his reason for formulating the idea was more from a wish to see a positive within this solitary blowing that became him than a belief so much in its veracity.
The antithesis of this, a woman, was a summation of an obsession with stability and the characteristics of prostitution that entailed. At least it seemed to him as such. Each woman was slightly different but in general they married to have that exhilaration of raising little children and property to put their nests on. To have this they would do anything: live years of indifference to a man and hide the rift in meretricious tree planting with him; overmedicate a boy and tell him what to do in all things; ignore that boy's need for a father to suffocate him in her own need to nurture little beings to feel useful and loved; and then suddenly ignore him when it is clear that the years had.mutated him into ugly opinionated manhood. Landscape obsessions were his mother's substitute for lack of stimulating conversation with a spouse but she got some satisfaction in her active sorority with a daughter. Still both were exponentially more important to her than him and yet both were deceased.
It was with a sense of relief that one day he found actual content in a letter that his mother sent to him which went beyond planting roses and water aerobics. It was a need to reconnect and his heart warmed like a child being given a Valentine's Day card. He bought a plane ticket to St. Louis, at his mother's quasi-request, which would allow him to see her once again and to escape the imbroglio that he currently found himself in with a girlfriend, a boyfriend, and bafflement what to do with any of it. The only thing so far to come out of these dates with the convenience store girl at coffee shops and cinemas in Seoul were her suspicious looks for of all these months that he would he not invite her to his apartment or introduce her to his friends; and this incessant returning home late without any inclination to touch his boyfriend exacerbated that one's suspicions of disloyalty and infidelity. Absconding into a plane seemed a natural course.
He found it odd that after so many letters where she told him that she was fine and did not want him to return (letters that became increasingly blunt to the point where in the previous one she said, "Frankly, I don't need you. You need to get on in the world alone — start your own family") that she should aver the opposite now. In the long flight to America he was preoccupied with this subject and in his preoccupation he would frequently drift in and out of sleep.
— My cousin is always wondering about you — What? — Well, why you left ourmother in a foreign country all alone. He thinks that you are a bad person butI tell him that you aren't really that…that you are more like damaged goods —Yes, I am that. Not bad, just damaged. Damaged goods, as you say.
—For her and everyone. Let people come and go like breathing. It is unnatural to give it conscious significance.—Okay, Gabriele, I won't worry so much. Whether she hates me or not, you can't go home again.—That's right; and it makes the issue irrelevant.—Are you okay in Jakarta? I sort of left you there —You left me positing the possibility of going there but now I am in Bandung Indonesia and planning to go deep into the jungles. My choice only, as always.
His mother, a tall broad woman once beautiful but made haggard from tragedy was wearing a scarf to cover hair loss and a feigned smile to get through the day. The smile's lack of warmth could be measured in the inconsistency of its flickers — Glad you could come, she said disingenuously — Anyong hashimnika, Mama — Is that all the Korean you've learned? — Yes, he chuckled, not a lot more than this. How have you been? — As well as someone like me in my circumstances can. Put up an ad for your father's John Deer riding lawnmower but there haven't been many callers to take a look at it — Well maybe you priced it too high — What would you know about it? — Nothing — I finally threw away your sister's music box. I didn't want to go on year after year fighting the temptation to wind it up and listen….Who is this with the dog? — Mama, this is Seong Seob, my special friend. Seong Seob, this is my mother — Anyong haseyo. — Special friend? What is that? No, sir; not under my roof. He can find a hotel or the two of you can go back to wherever you came from.
It was in a descent to the San Francisco airport, when the seatbelt light went on and the captain's voice awakened him from these latter dreams, that he suddenly had an epiphany that there had been no request at all — that it was merely a begrudging acceptance that sooner or later they would inevitably meet. He cancelled St. Louis and boarded a flight to San Diego.
There, with his backpack, he wandered the streets of downtown San Diego, ecstatic to be a pedestrian in this great cosmopolitan medley and to see all signs in English. He wandered in this honeymoon some hours until he came to a queue of miserable morning mendicants mingled in the malaise of having to be minions for morsels of a blended meat and vegetable mush that was scooped into Styrofoam cups by badged and indifferent scoopers. Stepping into lines demarcated by ropes within this parking lot at St. Vincent de Paul he saw that only some of these eager but patiently waiting eaters were badged and that the scoopers wore badges with stars.
"Excuse me. Who are they?" asked Sang Huin to an old man in front of him.
"Who? Oh. Same as us all but residents—badgers are all Vinceteers, living here. The ones scooping with the stars on their badges are the helper pigs, the preferred pigs. For being allowed to wander the streets one or two nights a month without losing their beds and real food that real people eat instead of this trough stuff they would do anything: tell on masturbators, them that goes into the showers at the wrong times, having to take a runny shit at 2 AM when not able to hold it—things like that which can get someone thrown out of here. Ain't Catholicism and Christianity pretty? That's why I sleep in my own little hut in the woods of Balboa Park."
Sang Huin nodded painfully as if in derision of all things that were of pig stardom in deference to the pig before him. In so doing he imagined Nathaniel going into such a place expending his gregarious energy with the right people, becoming a head pig, and for two nights each month having sex under bushes in patches of greenery between highways. Then he thought of a new character, Guillermo. "Guillermo walked the streets of San Diego partially earnest to find a job."
Sang Huin took his Styrofoam cup of mush and a muffin and ate with the rest of the scrawny, chilled pigs who would hours later sizzle in the sun's reverberations of the pavement during lunch. He felt as if being here without activities of distraction he was in the thickets of life that most were cognizant of from birth to death. Within purposelessness, disorientation, and futility in life's wanderings his was the global experience of the majority.
After breakfast he continued to erode and blow off life's embankment but he was sanguine for here he was once again in America, the country that made up so many of his years. Insular capsule that it was under the current chauvinistic and militant regime, it was more or less his land as one of its class that was entitled to permanent residency. Still he could envision a more preferable state. It would be a UN government of the world mandating human affairs without any member countries having the right to veto. It would have the best hope of bringing financial equity and justice to the world, halt excessive military spending and wars, slow down environmental degradation, and allow for an extra millennium of life; but such a thing did not exist. Such a thing could not be sought by sensitive souls as a refuge for hope, optimism, and an ongoing positive perspective of life. Here he was in the embrace of the bully, and he told himself that here in America he would stay. But then he thought that it really was not his country anyhow as proven by how he had been treated at the airport. The immigration officers had put him through an inquisition suited to potential terrorist cells all because of his tourist visas at Vientiane and Kuala Lumpur prior to his arrival in South Korea. His treatment had not exactly been a welcome home placard; and of course having lost his residency card, that laminated summation of himself, had not helped.
Guillermo decided, as night approached, to take the trolley into San Ysidro to make his exit into Tijuana. He was not about to stay in a shelter. Unlike many Mexicans, he could reenter America another day. His was a mostly legal journey having obtained a passport years earlier for his military service, which enabled these sojourns. Still he did not have much money so at the tiny train stop, feeling that his monetary worth was no different than muffin crumbs sustaining pigeons at St. Vincent, he stared at the large ticket machine with awe and bewilderment and then spontaneously leaped into the sudden emergence of the trolley with the automatic opening of its doors.
The doors closed and then reopened at the next stop. He breathed out, wondering if he should get out quickly. His ambivalent finger remained pendent over a button that would keep the nearest door open if pressed. A man entering the back of the car with his back shoving and parting those that clogged a door was not a trolley cop. His leather coat was a lighter brown than trolley trolls and his entrance came backwards. A woman entered with her face forward. The face lacked animation apart from a visible twitching or throbbing in her left temple. Both of them carried a stroller. Guillermo looked again. No one else was entering from the other end of the car. He was safe.
His eyes returned to them. The black woman was pregnant and in her early thirties. She slowly seated herself, careful not to disturb the infant that she now had pressed against her. She did not look at it nor at the man that had helped her raise it here. The raising of the stroller, the folding of it, and the child himself were the only evidence of the marriage of these heavily withdrawn strangers who were forced to sit next to each other. The man's size 13 shoe was in the aisle pointing toward two black women in the passage interlinking an adjacent car who danced long inundating rhythms reminiscent of tribal heritage and sang a beautiful threnody together. He thought to himself that if all marriages were what he witnessed he was lucky that experience had mutilated his normal proclivities. As he saw them he felt the reality of what he construed to be their life together. His mind began to refine some philosophy or perspective from the raw material of his feeling and his whole body tilted in their direction when he suddenly lost what was his focus for the doors again opened.
Have your tickets out!" the trolley troll spoke generically from another door in the car. His words were rough. He turned his head to the right. The trolley train troll saw a little child around the age of six putting her hands in the greasy KFC bag and pulling out a KFC bird. He watched her eat the meat as the trolley recording said, "I would like to remind all passengers that there is no smoking, eating, or drinking in the trolley; and please, out of consideration for other passengers, do not put your feet upon the seats. Thank you." For a second it seemed that the saliva lurched around the lips of the trolley train troll like a lasso. He snatched away the bird from the child's fingers and the entirety of the KFC bag causing the girl to cry. Then to Guillermo he said, "Get out your ticket!" Guillermo gave an affected display of a search. He hesitated, contemplated his situation for some seconds, and spoke.
"Listen, I am trying to get a job in San Diego. I only have $20.00 but I didn't deliberately set out to avoid buying a ticket. Without thinking about it I just jumped in. Maybe subconsciously I wanted to save money but I didn't plan it that way. You are a brother. Surely you understand desperate situations cause desperate actions."
"I'm not your brother," spoke the trolley troll in Spanish.
"You know the language of the Mexican brothers and your skin says that you are south of the border."
"All skin, as you put it, can be American. An American is from everywhere."
"I know English well, and I am Latino so I guess I'm American as apple pie."
"You seem to think we have it in for foreigners. You can be Mexican, American, or Martian for what I care. When you board this trolley you have to have a ticket."
"Do you really give citations regardless of circumstances? Why can't you just take me out and force me to buy a ticket? Why does it have to be written down as a fine and a court appearance if I want to contest the fine? I was seeking a job. I could work for my family but I want a respectable job and I don't care if it is flipping burgers or sweeping sidewalks. Okay, I did something I shouldn't have. Have a little bit of compassion toward those in desperate situations from a land that was once the land of your ancestors in a land, as so much of America, that was an illegal acquisition stolen from the Mexicans."
"Quit the BS, la caca, and get out with me at the next stop. Then you buy your ticket at the machine in front of my eyes."
"Muchas gracias," said Guillermo.
"De nada," said the trolley troll.
Guillermo put a dollar and seventy-five cents into the machine and got a sheet of paper as long and double the width of his little finger. Both waited for another trolley on its way from El Cajon to come down the tracks; and when it came they entered. The trolley troll bounced his pad against his left palm. Guillermo saw a hungry and lustful madness for giving out citations once again seep into the eyes of the troll from within. He imagined the trolley troll rabidly looking at all people both rich and poor and searching for individuals who looked afraid. The trolley troll knew that being dressed in fine clothing precluded no one. Ticketless people were often camouflaged in rich clothes.
Through a gray wall like the back of a building was this portal leading from San Ysidro to Tijuana. Inside it was like a corridor and in this mire spray painted in Spanish graffiti he ascended and descended on pavement wreaking of the effluvium of evaporating urine. Then at a rotating gate Guillermo returned to Mexico. "Downtown for three dollars. Hey amigo, wanna go downtown?" he heard Mexican taxi drivers accost Caucasian Americans. He saw city buses in the distance. The taxis were often crowded station wagons where people sat in what was the trunk. He saw men balancing suitcases on their heads without the aid of hands as they went toward the USA border. He saw a gray headed lady with a pony tail sitting behind a table of novelties and an Anglo-Saxon Navy officer knocking over some of the statuettes and plaques in his vehement, drunk theatrics to get the price reduced to two dollars. "Two dollars," he said. "Three dollar," she retorted without the "s." It was just more of the same in this overgrown US military tavern that had sprawled into the city known as Tijuana and it made him want to return to his hometown of Ensenada.
Sang Huin avoided the three-dollar taxi rides and walked through various shopping plazas with their myriad pharmacies. He passed a bridge that went over a dried up river polluted with tires and less visible debris. Then he followed signs leading to Avenida Revolucion.
Sang Huin passed a Bankoro bank; an idle man who yelled out to him as to other foreigners, "Taxi cab! Border line, Mister!"; mariachi singers; zebra wagons for tourist photos; Burger King; stores with rectangular mirrors on parts of their facades; hot dog grills part of mobile kiosks; taco restaurants; tamale carts; corn on the cob carts—some which baked corn on charcoal and others that steamed it; police cars and policemen; and pi-ata shops and pharmacies in abundance. Tijuana, a sprawling 2 million with its myriad colonias, was like a ghetto of San Diego. According to the guidebook the sooty playas (beaches) were somewhat agreeable because of their adjacent bullfight arena and Spanish architecture. The unbearable dust colonias (poor suburbs) with the maquiladoras were to the south, and the central city, where Sang Huin was at, had some museums and art galleries displaying Mexican culture and of course the American red light district that had given birth to it all. He walked to Juarez Street. He saw an empty lot of grass where some fruit drink vendors had been throwing out orange peels for a long period of time. He saw mounds of dirt and trash that were in this street.
Guillermo turned to a pay phone that was on a side street. Not finding anycoins in his pockets he pushed "O" for the operator" and made a collect call.He placed a call to what had recently been his estranged uncle. "Uncle this isGuillermo."
"Yes, good Guillermo. Are you here now?"
"Yes."
"It has taken you long enough."
"Yes, I guess so."
"Why did it take you so long to get back?"
"To be honest, I wanted to look one more day for work in San Ysidro or SanDiego."
"Find any?"
"No."
"Have you decided that family loyalties are a bit more important than dabbling in petty jobs on the outside?"
"Maybe. I need a job. I need money."
"You are here but your cousin has not gotten here yet. You'll have to wait for her."
"Oh, I thought she would be in Tijuana by now."
"She should be here soon."
"I was told to come here."
"She's a little delayed."
"Can I wait at your place? How would I get there?"
"Guillermo, it is private residence and it's a little risky for us to be that conspicuous. It isn't easy to get to anyway and you would have difficulty getting through the guards. I'll make sure that she comes to you when she gets here. Do you have a hotel room?"
"A room? Well, yes I guess I should or else go back to Ensenada."
"You don't have a job in Ensenada. You need to align yourself with family. The loyalty of family members is the greatest of Mexican virtues."
"When is she coming? I don't even know why she needs to be smuggled through the border to begin with."
"Well, anytime. I don't know the details. I suppose it will happen when she finishes packing. She said that sometime this week she will have the money to buy a bus ticket. Her mother wants her to be responsible and save the little she gets here and there."
"You have an estate and guards and she is supposed to be some type of a beggar. I don't understand any of this. I don't know why my aunt wants her in the states after so long. I don't understand how I'm supposed to get her over the border. She just said, 'Do it!' and gave me some money to come here."
"Watch your mouth. Be careful what you say to everyone. No tiene sentido? Maybe it has a sense not so obvious to you. Maybe it has sense or doesn't have sense. You know women, Guillermo. My wife's reasoning for things is why I stay separated from her. Maybe she's got good reason for sending her to the states. I wouldn't know."
"I thought that she did not have a job and that this was the primary reason for getting her to the US."
"She doesn't. She dabbles around from time to time, drinks, and runs around with the wrong types. I don't know many of the details, Guillermo. Well, I've got to get busy. Did you find the contact man, Ricardo, waiting for you at the shelter?"
"I don't understand. Contact for what? If you are needing a smuggler to get her across why isn't that done in Tijuana?"
"Enough. There is always more at work than meets the eye. You just need to get her to Ricardo."
"A transient?"
"A transient as rich as the US Treasury."
Sang Huin's backpack felt increasingly heavy and so he obtained a motel room in "Centro" T.J. It had a barren mattress without sheets or blankets. The window was nailed shut and there was no ventilation outside of what came around the cracks of the door and a draft that swept through a crack in the wall. There was no dresser and no furniture at all beyond a wooden chair. Outside the room at the far end of the hall were the water cooler and the shared bathroom. When the night clerk showed him this it baffled him why, when he was not given a key, that they needed to photocopy his passport and needed him to sign his name in a guest book.
"No tienes un llave?" he asked the clerk; but the man just scoffed at this Asian attempt at Spanish. "No key, hombre." Sang Huin stayed in his room for fifteen minutes but he felt a loneliness suffocate him worse than the musty air. He needed out; and so he picked up his bag and drifted into the night. Instead of providing him with space and movement to shed his morbid thoughts, the night just impaled him with a vast darkness that seemed like endless meat hooks in the cold meat locker of the universe. A sun, he told himself, was a temporary thing and all temporary things gave off the illusion of animation and illumination. Only the darkness was real and he decided to lose himself within it.
It only took an hour more and he was lost in the rains that set dry dirt roads on hills into mud streams sweeping down into the center of the city and could quickly cook a brain into a fever with cold inundations. The rains drenched him and he began to cough deeply. He found the city park that earlier had couples courting each other under the eyes of chirping and squawking birds that fastened onto each limb as thick as leaves; but now no one was there but a man who collected cans from the garbage. Still this Sang Huin, this Sean, strolled around as if it were a sunny day. He examined each corner of the park as of someone in daylight enjoying the fauna for he was hoping that some queers would not care about the rain and like him would be obsessed with the possibility of being impaled in promiscuous activity. An hour passed this way and yet no one came.
Finally he managed to find his way back to his room. He lay there making a puddle upon the mattress until what appeared to be the night manager came into his room.
"You can speak the Spanish a little," said the man,
"Prefiero Ingles porque mi sabio de Espanol esta limitado y despues de viviendo en Korea mis vocabulario esta una mezcla del lenguas."
"Where you from?"
It was such a simple question and yet he did not know the exact answer. "I'mKorean but I've lived most of my life in the states."
"A gringo?"
"Mas or menos."
"Want a towel, amigo?" Sang Huin sat up in the bed and looked toward the man that was animation and illumination in his doorway.
"How much?"
"Depends," he said. "Were you looking for Mexican pussy out there?"
"No."
"Are you a gay?"
"Yeah,"
"You suck my dick."
"Yeah, maybe."
"Towel is free, then." The man came in and closed the door. The sexual activity was enjoyable for a while but then it changed to being impaled "bareback" from his rear end. He did not know if it was rape. It hurt him as if it were rape, he hated it, his attempts to extricate himself caused more resistance, and yet he wanted it nonetheless. He had never had someone insert himself into him before and the rhythms seemed to slap over his consciousness until somewhere into the pain he fell asleep in it. Asleep, he dreamed that Guillermo was stopped by the police officers at the park.
"Dinero. One hundred dollars or a night in jail."
"I'm not giving you anything," said Guillermo. "What have I done?"
"Are you stupid? You can't walk the streets with an open beer can in your hand."
"I've seen others do it. I'm not paying."
"Suit yourself.
They put him into the car and chased other criminals throughout the night. When they had a couple more rounded up, including Sang Huin himself, they took all three of them to the police office for paperwork and then far away into the dusty bluffs where there was a jail. The cells were underground and they were wet and cold like a cellar. The bunks were just metal without any mattresses, sheets, or blankets and the prison guards inserted sharp instruments into the rectums of the alleged culprits.
When he woke from a coughing fit, he noticed that all of his things were gone including the little case that had his passport and the pocket pc that contained his novel about Gabriele. "Dear God, no!" he thought. Only bits of previous drafts were on diskettes in Seoul. His only copy of Gabriele was in that pocket pc. He felt as if he were living in a shadowy nightmare as sharp as a migraine. He quickly dressed himself and went into the lobby. When he saw that same night attendant sleeping on his chair it suddenly occurred to him that it had not been this man who had entered his room but someone else of similar but not identical looks. He wasn't sure who it had been—so greedy had been his need for blind sex. He went back into his room and beat on his head in self-flagellation. He felt lost and dizzy. He felt as a lost speck of dust blowing about in space and time. He curled up in a fetal position on the bed and wept. His head ached and he fell asleep once again. He dreamed that won, pesos, and dollars were freefalling from the skies and striking animals and humans within the rain of capitalism. Then he dreamed that he was dematerializing from one country and materializing into another. No sooner would he be memorizing buildings and mapping out familiarities in his mind when he would suddenly be someplace else. People in each of these countries would ask him who he was and where he came from. He had amnesia and could not tell them anything and they just looked at him with deep sympathy.