There might have been poetic significance in having done this mundane job: having taken the refugee children to the zoo with seventy year old Jesus and the fifty year old Sanchez; having said the names of the animals in English and the girls giving the Vietnamese equivalent; having taken them to the social security office to get them cards with designated numbers; having taken the Cambodian boy into the clothes room of the Welcome Center to try on pants of various sizes but when he would not put them on and take them off with an adult sense of speed, having performed the unzipping and zipping herself; having taken the little Cuban girl to the Vietnamese doctor when she had a fever although the doctor only gave Gabriele the suggestion of Gatorade and crackers; and having often heard the little Laotian girl imitating Gabriele's growls through the tattered 1screen of a window although Gabriele's growls toward the girl were real ones. Still, all in all, she thought in the car, it had been a waste of time to have prostituted herself to such an agency. She liked these refugees for various reasons but one less altruistic reason was that she didn't have any other people whom she liked and thus she needed to like them. She chastised her maudlin disposition and returned to the interstate.
After washing her wounds and cursing the cat, she again picked it up by the neck. But this time she threw it outside into a light surface of snow that had fallen an hour earlier. Frothy top layers sometimes drifted about like desert sands in the occasional strong gusts. They went here and there as directionless as her mind that, in one respect, had become detached from traditional roles and responsibilities, and in another had sunk into the mire of motherhood. Inside closed doors, she was resistant against the cat's cries. Empathy, she told herself, was not in her vocabulary. But when the cat, named Mouse, could no longer be heard, she stood outside on the steps and called for it until it at last appeared from under the trailer. She warmed a bottle in one large pan and a bit of milk for the cat in a saucepan. She had never warmed milk for the cat before; but she decided that if she was doing it for one she might as well do it for the other particularly with the advent of the furriest one being subjected to the cold. When both animals were fed she watched the television but its senseless action and its fictitious and ludicrous sentimentalism were putting her into a numb and depressed apathy. It was deflating her of all energy to the point where she couldn't follow the characters or plot since the figures were now helter-skelter in the meaninglessness that was rife in her own mind.
To escape a stagnating and a somewhat discombobulating loss of herself, she grabbed her sketchbook and drew the exact likeness of her child with little time and effort. The book, like a photograph album, was filled with her sketches in chronological order: stoic and erect poses of her parents based more on childhood memories than some brief reunions when she was a teen-ager; a 13 year old friend in her bicycle club; the faces of drunken high school classmates when she was bar- hopping and ignoring most mandates of her aunt and uncle; some of a trip to Germany with her aunt; college friends; and yet some of unknown Antarctica, a dreamy non-asthmatic land of ice mountains and valleys. In such a place dreamed about and sketched from her asthmatic youth onward neither rivers of flowing pollutants nor mountainous landfills existed. Within its solitary and pristine nature, there would be no tacit or overt pressures to get a job and become someone. In Antarctica an exceptionally aware person would not have to go through the degradation of being compelled to reinforce the rules and procedures of a business or organization in order to have the income derived from a job. No professional, entrepreneurial, or common slaves would exist here.
In this place, which she fabricated as being no less habitable than Greenland, there would at least be a small ecosystem of fish and seaweed for food, and societies of walruses, seals, and penguins which she could watch and record their social interaction. Such a record would be exclusively for the one-person audience of Gabriele. That being the case, the purpose of an article to which author and reader were one person without the prospect of extending further seemed a futile waste of time; and yet if meaning in a record of the habits of species could only be gained by sharing this information with others or if the whole essence of meaning existed in edifying others and by shared experiences this would be the source of another research paper which she would conduct in Antarctica.
Daydreams gave movement and stimulation to housewives standing in line at supermarkets and provided an escape for mothers of infants who sat alone as inert and purposeless as rocks until becoming instruments to be used by their babies. To find the source of his discomfort and ease it was in a child's mind a woman's only role; and this particular one also felt that his mother could also be manipulated by slight smiles and the temporary end of tantrums. And in a sense she was manipulated to toss him in the air, albeit only in the physical gesture itself for only fools read expressions of love in these smiles and the cessation of screams. Gabriele accommodated him beyond what was necessary for his welfare only because of the horrendous nature of his cries if she didn't do so. Throughout these months of care giving she did not have any other world beyond the child. She tried to keep herself from being flattened by the perfunctory role of bathing, feeding him, and changing his diapers by telling herself that motherhood would pull her into the swathes of human experience and its interconnectedness, that it would be a novel learning experience on coexistence, that it might be a means of duplicating the ideas of respected child development theorists so as to corroborate or discredit them, and that he could be the specimen of an experiment on how the instincts and proclivities of a male child might be altered into more ethical variations although she wasn't quite able to isolate the exact nature of the experiment and its parameters. But really these ideas did little to counter this pauper's version of ennui that fogged over her perceptions. What sustained her were her daydreams and art. Once she drew a surreal image of her baby in a business suit with an attachZ case in his hand. It was a partially adult caricature of a being standing proudly alone on an ice mountain. She drew its contumely as master of itself in all of its avarice, ability to facilitate its own pleasures. It was a fragmented child glued back together as an enraged whole and she accentuated this by drawing myriad cracks within its porcelain skin. . When she finished the sketch she knew that charcoal was an ineffective tool for the ideas and the color that rushed inside of her. Still, the sketchbook was compact as an album, and a bit of paper and charcoal were affordable.
Closing the sketchbook on a mental catharsis, she did pushups and situps beside her director's chair and then aerobics to the televised instructors who glowed in a little box in front of her. It all helped to extract her from malaise. She really needed the physical exertion of games like racket ball, and in a very self-centered way Betty began to permeate her thoughts. The idea of her friendship became more palatable to reminisce over. Then she fell asleep with the ideas of Antarctica in her mind. When she woke, her thoughts were disconcerted and there was a forlorn neediness sticky as the baby's vomit. She needed a break from solitude and an exit away from the obligations of motherhood that tyrannized over her. For the first time in her months of doing this she needed an adult presence in her life and she yearned for the appearance of this Rita/Lily person who lived somewhat nearby and was adult in the sense that she could be spoken to. Lily (she was mostly that and preferred this label although she was really Rita) was supposed to have come earlier and Gabriele wondered where this Rita/Lily person was. She heard the baby crying. Maybe too much light in the trailer was irritating his eyes. A silver light from the glare of the snow with its power to make objects (even the baby) seem blindingly unreal was bleeding throughout the whole trailer. It captivated her and made her think that the baby and its needs were nothing short of a dream. She stared out of the window to confirm that an outside world did indeed exist. She saw a neighbor's car pull out of a rocky driveway and one young boy unsuccessfully trying to pull his brother on a sled in the superficial layer of snow and left over hail. Too many weeds were blocking their progress. Too many diapers were blocking her own.
She packed some baby food and disposable diapers in a bag. Imitating the witch's dogma of the sanctity of the earth, for a few months after Nathaniel's birth she had been adamant that she wouldn't use disposable diapers even though she had yearned for their ease. Back then she saw mothers with money and impunity buying boxes of them at the supermarket and she loathed these vile mothers who degraded the environment. Once, however, when she had a migraine headache while experiencing some asthma problems and he was suffering from diarrhea she had trudged over to the store with him in her arms and bought a box of diapers. From that point forward it became part of her habits. To not do so now would only inconvenience her. Not even if thousands of mothers went back to cloth diapers and their plastic over-panty counterparts would such thoughtfulness save the environment. It would merely postpone the inevitable. A slight postponement could not be achieved by one alone and, even if it could, she didn't see that it would merit her discomfort.
Giving up on the idea of Rita coming to her home, she fixed a tuna sandwich for herself and ate. Then she undressed the two of them; and they sank into a soothing bubble bath. Gabriele made soap castles for her son, and smacked top stories off of them, which caused his eyes to become wider with curiosity and his mouth to become circular in the wonder of all things new. She slowly sang a choral movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, emphasizing the accent of each German vowel and syllable exaggeratedly. She internally debated the merit of giving her child mendacities as she told him German nursery rhymes and lightly washed his small body. She supposed that the sparked imagination that could deliver him from being a somber, adult zombie, alive only in insatiable hungers, was important enough that she didn't have to think of such lies as bad. Besides, if reality and goodness were perceived differently by each individual, she didn't want to rush toward an indictment even if she would be a most willing judge in rendering a verdict in the Gabriele-made indictment of the past 7000 to 10,000 years of civilization.
Drying herself and the baby in front of the window she put her fingers into the crevices of the plastic blind. She pressed down on one rectangular piece of this thing called a blind and wondered what piece, if any, her blind life had in this thing called society. She looked at the outside world. From the relatively quiet trailer park, it was hard to imagine how much all the inhabitants of Ithaca spun around in life. As futile as it was to spin, she thought, humans were not meant for thought. They were creatures meant to expend energy and to overtake their world. Maybe this was needed for the evolution of a higher species than man to exist on the planet. Sexual reproduction was not thought but illusion and frenzy, which brought forth offspring. It was overtaking women. A human (women included although she found them a bit more repulsive than the average human) was mostly all energy conquering the planet, making it subordinate to human will. If care was not given toward the environment and humans overtook the planet too forcefully, the world would expunge them from the list of species. Any caretaker of a child needed to spin from time to time too and Gabriele needed to do this to fight off sensory deprivation. She pulled up the blind. Naked, she was in a pillar of light the way the so-called prophet, Joseph Smith had been-only, being atheist, her pillar was only silver. She knew that a personification of the sun was absurd, as was all religion, which she had dabbled in knowing about years earlier; and yet she did not want to believe that this was all there was. Television, movies, billboards, and music all recorded that the rich, and happy people who played in this survival of the fittest game so successfully did so by following their desires with confidence and unapologetic insouciance. These most capable people monopolized over the world's resources leaving the vast majority of humans destitute, hopeless, burdened by hard labor for sustenance, and in some cases famished. They chased around like mad men trying to buy up the planet. Some of the mad men did so while repudiating their own mortality. Others acknowledged their mortality and so they told themselves they would gormandize while the feast was on the table. There had to be more than this.
She dressed him and herself warmly and when she was outside she realized that she had overdone it. The temperature was already above freezing and the traces of snow were evaporating tracelessly, later to be sucked up into a Heraclitus shaped cloud. The odd weather, which was becoming less odd annually, concerned her especially after the United Nations report that the world temperature would rise two degrees over the next three decades. She knew, however, that there wasn't "a damned thing" she could do about it. She supposed that she might be able to stand in front of Cornell University with placards advocating that human beings go back to being the hunters and gatherers from whence they came. She could stand there like a madwoman denouncing the past 7000-10,000 years. Nothing would come out of it but 12 hours of sitting in a jailhouse and then paying a fine.
After waiting over forty minutes for the rare and irregularly timed buses to come by within this small city, she got on a bus with her baby pouched onto her back. A seat near a young man with a plain face who was thumping his foot to the music of his portable radio was the only one left. She took it. She was grateful to have it. Having to balance herself and a baby to the movements of a bus was something she had mastered like a sport but it wasn't a preferable hobby. Adagio liked the bounces but she doubted that he would care to bounce off of a window. After the door of the bus was shut and the vehicle was beginning to roll without any sudden speed it was rapped by a hand. The driver stopped the bus and folded the door again. A woman around 20 years old entered. She smiled and greeted Gabriele with diffident childishness after shouting her name triumphantly to the back of the bus and by a wave of her hand. Then as the vehicle picked up speed her expressions became more diffident and she stumbled to the back of the bus. "What do I do?" she said. "I don't see anywhere to sit."
"You'll have to stand," said Gabriele.
"What do I do?"
"Hold onto the railing," she scoffed.
Lily grabbed it and began to dangle there like a leaf on a tree. "I guess you forgot me," she said timidly.
"No, you said that you would come in the morning. I thought maybe you had decided against coming." Her expressions were hard. It wasn't her idea to get this Rita/Lily person to come with her but she didn't own the services so she couldn't tell her to not come. "Really, you know, it isn't for everyone, Lily"
"Rita," she said.
Gabriele could never empirically detect the existence of a second personality that the girl purportedly had, and as such she could not believe that one personality came out in manic stages and the other during depression. When the Rita/Lily person called herself Rita and when she called herself Lily she was both timid and fragile, and tended to lie or imitate language like a parrot within her stages of depression. When she called herself Rita and when she called herself Lily she was even a little timid and fragile within contumacious manic fun. A month earlier she had contradicted herself by saying that she had not been sexually abused when she was young and that the patriarchal abuse she was "always talking about" was infrequent sexual abuse experienced as a teenager. The abuser was also amorphous: at one time a stepfather and another time a biological father. Gabriele again thought, "Once didn't she claim that her mother and father would soon be experiencing their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary? And yet there is a stepfather? What an interesting little liar." These contradictions were performed consistently by both of the "personalities." Furthermore, she talked of enjoyable times that she experienced with her parents. These times seemed to be ongoing. At any rate she spoke of them happily instead of looking onto happy but deceased memories sadly. It didn't appear that emotional trauma or abuse was bedizened as sexual abuse in a display to get others to empathize with her tattered past. It didn't seem that she was fabricating a happy family life scenario like someone extirpating weeds to plant flowers. That would be trauma- induced schizophrenia that would not be attributed to a manic-depressive who was being prescribed lithium. She claimed to have had a hysterectomy although neither childhood molestation nor cancer was claimed as the culprit. Gabriele thought that having advised Rita to go to a gynecologist once a year for a checkup might have brought on this comment. Maybe the Rita/Lily person fabricated information to keep a conversation ongoing. Maybe she needed continual conversation because it blocked out the moods that were a catalyst for divergent and erroneous perspectives and ideas. Gabriele's conjecture was that the split personality was nothing but the Rita/Lily person's own way of justifying why she had shifts in moods.
If she were sexually traumatized, it didn't come across with any more poignancy than her reactions toward not knowing what to do when she could not find anywhere to sit on the bus. She only became taciturn if she felt that too many questions and too much scrutiny were being paid toward her statements. None of the pieces added up. Gabriele thought that she did not know this person at all. She thought that she did not know any person at anytime in her life really. A person was never quite known. All one had were one's concoctions of plausible scenarios about the person's history and how he or she might behave from empirical personal experiences or what was witnessed when with others. It wasn't the person. The fact that one never knew anything didn't bother her. It was more of a mystery to walk around the planet in a loose blindfold.
"It isn't for everyone," Gabriele repeated.
"I want to go," said Rita. Will they tie me up until I make a vow of secrecy by signing my allegiance in blood? Something like that was on TV."
"Hmm," said Gabriele. "One takes chances in this life for sure. Still, I'm afraid it's more mundane-boring— than that. You need to keep away from that TV set, don't you think."
She giggled as if manic. "No spells?"
"No spells," said Gabriele, "and vegetarian recipes afterward. It is really quite boring."
"It is just like any church?"
Gabriele thought of the Wicca services. They always reminded her of Catholic masses but without the Eucharist. However, they tapped into a mystery of spiritual forces without putting a human face on the creator or creation that was continually reinventing itself with each new generation of flora and fauna. She knew the guilt and fear of pouring oneself from the container of traditions he or she was raised with. Most people needed to change containers to get any perspective on how all of these beliefs were equal expressions of a wish for more than one's silly temporal domain. Still, someone who was definitely insecure and probably needed to project herself as crazy did not seem like someone suited for an experience at Wicca. In Gabriele's judgment, Rita/Lily was not in need of changing containers but rather, someone in need of finding the liquid to put into a given container.
"Sort of," said Gabriele.
"They believe in God, don't they?"
"Heavens, you wondered whether they were devil worshipers a minute ago. Some might believe in God and gods. I can't speak for anyone else, but I don't."
"And the devil?"
"No. No, I've been certain of that since I was 4 years old. People cause their own evil."
"Why don't you believe in God?"
"The reason for not believing. The why," she spoke out loud although the thoughts were really ones she meant to keep inside. She thought on this issue. "Well, if my life is good-and I guess it is. I'm healthy, well-educated, have food in my stomach and a roof over my head."
"And Adagio…your baby, Nathaniel"
"Him too," she sighed. "And my friendliness with you." It was often a stretch to even say "friendliness" in association to the Rita/Lily person but she did not know what else to call their association. "Well, if I am a happy solipsistic person I might well believe in God and appreciate my dizzying blessings but in doing this I'd be guilty of saying that this god cared about me but didn't care for those he allowed to starve or be eaten by a cannibal or forced into a predicament of having to jump out of a burning building-whatever. I suppose he could care about some of us and not others, but wouldn't that lower him to human levels? If I really believed in God, then this is the only god there is; and yet to be such a god it is quite obvious that he or she is no different than you or me…and I don't know about you, but I certainly can't create the Earth and the universe no matter how hard I try, and believe me I try." The baby began to scream. It pierced all the air of the bus. "I'll be lucky if I make it to 90 and don't have to wear diapers. There is a chance he, she, or it exists as a being that is not sympathetic about me or anyone else. If he is this, he is so large and so eternal, with no sense of human time, that a human life and its brief series of short-lived motions on one obscure planet would be inconsequential. If so, he doesn't think about me any more than you think about that last second you picked your nose. Yes, I'm watching." The Rita/Lily giggled manically despite her depression. "Also, he isn't one I can grasp so there isn't much sense in considering him. I'm just a fire ant stinging anything that threatens me, cognizant of nothing least of all the man that is there to squash me because of my sting. An ant might know about being threatened but he knows nothing about the being that threatens him. So it is with us and such a God." She could tell that the Rita/Lily person was not understanding much of the conversation but her eyes seemed to register that she was in a godless universe for fear had dilated her pupils.
Gabriele thought about this subject or quasi-subject of philosophy. She wasn't even a philosopher and yet in a minute and a half she had formulated a treatise and had proven it as much as was possible. She hadn't exactly proven that there wasn't a god. She assumed that would take an additional three minutes. But she had proven that it was not a worthwhile pursuit for humans to undertake. Smoking marijuana from morning until wee hours of the night seemed a more constructive use of one's faculties. She wondered how it was that Socrates could lose himself for hours in a question that perplexed him when really all he needed was just a few minutes.
"What did you eat today, Rita?"
"Lily."
"Whatever."
"I ate well."
"What?"
"Oh…" Lily said in a contemplative pose. A minute passed. Then, taking pride in thinking of an answer that would satisfy Gabriele she said, "I did have an apple…and I did have some peanut butter. That was good. Nutritious."
"Maybe it would be better if you went home to get something to eat. I don't think you'd understand the implications of the ceremony anyhow."
"We are…we are still going, aren't we to…"
"The baby and I are going there," Gabriele interrupted, hoping to stop Lily from saying the word "witch" on a public bus and relegating her life to strange stares. "Maybe I'm wrong about God. I'm sure I am. What you can do for me right now in my ignorance is to go home and think of different ways to discover him like smelling a fragrant flower or putting coins into the Salvation Army tin cans. If you were to hear someone preaching at you for two hours you would be two hours from telling me all those ways to find God." Rita/Lily agreed and began to get off of the bus. Gabriele got up and yelled toward her. " Wait a second. Remember, you have to stand on the other side of the road to go home." Rita/Lily smiled. Someone cared about her. Indeed there was a god.
Gabriele went to the service, which was held at the house of the new High Priestess. However, being there, she found that the paternal yearning to perform chants to Mother Earth and Father Sky a bit too much for her taste. Tarot, crystals to ward off negative energy, the black attire, the candles, the chants, and those god awful vegetarian recipes seemed outrageous. The only dogma her contumacious mind could obey were her own ideas. Feeling at odds with the day, she went home earlier than she had expected.
"He enjoys the pleasure. He is the man. The pleasure becomes the man. She is wedged there in the sharp gravel of the alley littered with her videos. It is good that she is there with the earth also digging in carbon to carbon. Face juxtaposed to the trashcans, and mouth gagged with his strong hand that she fears (hands that could twist a head and break a neck, and those that in younger days and as a smaller size, had in fact snapped off the heads of crawdads) she is paralyzed. She is obsequious to him, the man. Who would dispute the naturalness of a woman being there for a man's pleasures? Who would dispute the docile make of a woman to be ravaged? He thinks that even with married couples the relationship is probably conceived by desperate thrusts in a hole- thrusts of pleasure; thrusts against being denizen to one's isolated sphere; thrusts against maternal domination when one was a boy; thrusts to have some form of intimacy not related to the misinterpretations of language; thrusts against loneliness; thrusts like the hands of a thrill seeking, dice rolling gambler who enjoys the uncertainty on whether or not a conception would take place; thrusts as copulative sports; thrusts to relieve tension; and thrusts of aggression against the abstraction of nature that could efface the memory of a man at any moment in sudden death. If family matters like the intimacies of a man and his wife are restrained expressions of a man's subconscious wishes, who could say that he is unnatural? Rape, not just sex, is what he knows a man to really long for. It is as Genghis Khan believed: 'To kill the villagers, rape their women, burn their villages, and run off with their horses—this is the good life.'"
Sang Huin crumbled up the sheet of paper. Words were trapping him in their clutter. He tried to use their thrust to be because they were all there was; and yet as he tried to steer himself in them they were often nothing but bumper cars obstructing his every move or regular cars piling onto each other in a crash. He wanted to raze these walls of wrecked cars. Nathaniel would not know of Genghis Khan. Besides, interesting as the thoughts might be, they weren't applicable to Nathaniel unless he were to rewrite one of the earlier chapters. How could he be raping the woman when he, Sang Huin, had written him in his car, repressing his savage impulses like a good social creature? Also if he, Sang Huin, were to interpolate such ideas, he told himself, he would be like all those other writers who took pride in writing their salacious pieces. From the point of instigating pain on the giver of life and the bloody cut of the umbilical cord soon came the knowledge of mortality in the death of pets and vicissitudes and the ephemeral nature of all things in childhood friendships thwarted by the mutability of its members. Its hormonal promptings to socialize more for meat to satisfy hungers, the voracious appetite for human flesh, fornications to maximize its pleasures and gain its intimacies, its ambitions toward money, power and status within this ticking of limited time, the deaths of family members, its own gauche stumbling attempts at family as an auxiliary and then an outright replacement for the deterioration of this first family, and it (equally so in so-called saints and laymen) was graphic. It was salacious. It was violent. It was the desperation of one in mortality who wanted something for his short time on the planet. And of art, what was it actually? It was not so much a reflection of the self in still waters as a reflection of something deeper sensed in the rhythms of the falling rain and the movements of fictional others in plotless lives plodding along as his was. As another graphic creation appealing to the hedonistic pleasure receptors of the brain he would have more readers if the violence were to extremes. Still, did he really want to write something that others might imitate unwisely? He laughed. This was a frivolous concern when he knew that nothing he might write would be publishable.
And yet macabre as it was, he wanted to know the reason for his sister's death through his creations. He still wanted to know what had brought her to that park, if it had been her boss who had done this to her or a serial killer, and the motivation. One could read profiles of serial killers on the Internet. He had done so; but even if a serial killer had done this not all of them were the same. He did not want a generalization full of inaccuracies. He wanted to know the real person and what had caused him to act as he did. He wanted to know of deep repentance, and deep psychological travail on the part of the man- whoever this man was. Earlier he had been so certain that the accused had perpetrated the act but then a jury had acquitted this person or quasi-person and as time went on he did not know anything.
He went back to the making of kimchee maundoo. The flour had already been made into dough that he had cut into pieces. Now he inserted the cooked pork and the kimchee and pinched the dough of these cabbage dumplings into shape. He boiled a little bit of hot water in his rice cooker and set them in there to steam. He felt so restless. He wanted to be raptured from lonely nights that followed hard work in this convenience store or for Seong Seob to call. Every time he now called his friend's cellular telephone number there was no answer. Seong Seob had a program that would instantaneously change letters into sound every time the computer dialed into a server but every time he e- mailed him there was no response. "So little did one know a person," he thought. Three days had gone by and he did not know of any altercation that could have caused this absconding. His mind was vertiginous. There was nothing worse than an inexplicable rupture of a friendship, he thought to himself; and yet he knew that this was not so. North Korean children were starving to death in a faltering totalitarian regime and here he was playing in his personal life, and in so doing, getting hurt. There were a lot worse things but a lot of good too. There was good everywhere. It was in the atoms themselves: in the steam rising above the rice cooker or the feel of the hot pipes under the floor, which warmed his bare feet in the cold room. Man might miss the mark of kindness but sometimes man tried for kindness since kindness was in the atoms although self-preservation was in the selfish genes. This good was readily visible in simple pleasures when one was sagacious enough to appreciate them like a child. But Seong Seob would not leave his mind. What could have happened? Was this friend hit by a car? After all, he was blind. Sung Huin did not know any of his friends or relatives, so there was no one to call. Did this friend become busy? Did Seong Seob decide that the relationship was not for him? Had he, Sung Huin, personally said anything at all to cause this? He reexamined their last conversations. The only thing he could remember was that he mentioned to Seong Seob his own need to make more friends, but that wasn't meant to negate the friendship that he had. He didn't know. He turned on the television to obstruct his thoughts.
"Oh, no," thought Sang Huin. His customers had talked about buildings on fire in New York. He had been so busy all night that their words and horrified expressions hadn't penetrated him. Moslems (the speculation was Al Queida) had flown two jets into the World Trade Center in Manhattan. The American military channel was showing CNN coverage of people jumping out of hundred story windows. Their bodies were flailing against the winds as if they were having second thoughts. He sat down on the edge of his bed. The quandaries of his personal life vanished and he became numb. He kept saying to himself, "Oh, my. This is the empirical evidence that there is no god." Solipsistic for a second, he then thought, "It is as if God is proving to me that he doesn't exist-that I am right in what I recorded in the Gabriele and Lily chapter." The incident itself shouldn't have been altogether shocking. America was an arrogant country. It thought that it was the godly power that was allowed to prosper while God subjected heathen people to dire circumstances. America felt it was entitled to bully all nations and befriend Israel beyond human decency to keep the Christian constituents, brethren of Israel, happy. Its political engagements were for its own economic and military hegemony instead of fairness and the greater good. It would be understandable, he thought, how the Moslems might think of this as a reckoning of justice. In ways it was no surprise. The real surprise was that there was no large palm of God out there hovering like a cloud capturing these falling people within it. What was incredible was that the power that would make a universe couldn't capture a few humans into its clouds like nets. Numb, he knew without thinking of himself that this numbness would continue on for many weeks and, to less extreme levels, for months and years. It was an eternal sting. When he did look at his manuscript again to expound upon it he thought, "Gabriele, sitting in the living room and waiting for a customer, jotted down some notes about how to live godly in a godless universe. However, at present her time to really write it was being usurped by Adagio." Then he deleted it.
Out of the bus, she trudged back home in early evening through the marshland of the melted snow that was refreezing treacherously. Then she detoured a block west from the trailer park to the apartment complex where Rita/Lily resided. Gabriele heard popular music playing in Lily's apartment. She knocked.
"Uh…just a second," said Lily. Gabriele heard the movement of papers and magazines being suddenly assorted and things being scooted.
"Who is it?"
"It's me. I don't give a flying f— what your apartment looks like!"
"G-a-b-r-i-e-l-e!" Lily said the name like music. "Please wait a minute, please," she said with childish delicacy.
For a few minutes Gabriele waited and listened to the rustling. During a minute of that time she was interested because the rustling was the rustling of a mind, and the mind was interesting indeed. "I'm leaving, Lily. In the bus you dropped one of your gloves from a pocket in your coat. I'm leaving it right here." The radio music suddenly changed to classical music with a National Public Radio DJ. Gabriele waited a couple more minutes. "Goodbye," said Gabriele.
"Oh. I'll come over and get them." Gabriele did not know what that meant. She heard the unlocking of the door bedizen with many bolts. The door opened. Gabriele handed her the glove without eye contact and turned away. "I'm working," she said coldly.
"Thanks so much. Thank you, Gabriele…well I could fix you some coffee if you'd come in…well, I'll — " Gabriele was already walking away and did not, by choice, register the rest except for that redundant word, "please." The word was projected in such a melancholic and extinguished tone that it caused her German heart to thaw for human suffering. After descending a couple flights of stairs she paused, thought, and then returned to the apartment. She knocked on the door and Lily opened it while trembling and in tears.
"Are you okay?" asked Gabriele.
"I'm nutty. Don't hate me. Please don't hate me."
"I don't."
"Everybody turns away from me. Why wouldn't they? I wash the same plate over and over again for an hour. I just want to not be hated. I just need a friend. I'm so scared like I'm falling in a dark pit and no one cares about me." Gabriele knew. The dark pit was the anxiety of cognizant man who knew of imminent death. It was an anxiety exuding into the bleeding of loneliness and only interaction with others repressed that anxiety. That was for normal people. For those others who did not fit easily into normality or categories of abnormality and who could not capture or claim the illusion of self the loneliness was all the more inexorable.
"I haven't turned away," said Gabriele. Lily hugged her clingingly. Gabriele, not knowing how to really touch her, patted her on the back. She felt as if her body were being traversed by a colony of ants; and yet as repugnant as it felt being hugged in such a way, she kept this feeling enclosed deep in her inner self for the purpose of going beyond it and perhaps illustrating some sense of human kindness. "When you do obsessive acts it isn't exactly nutty. You are trying to seek order in past trauma. It's okay. It will be okay."
Gabriele let her sob on her back until the catharsis was complete. She then looked at her once again and a restoration of manic energy was taking place. Still bleak and baggy from tears, Rita/Lily began to smile. Gabriele thought about how vulnerable the human condition was. Rita/Lily was an extreme case but the vulnerability was ubiquitous in the species. She knew that it stretched in a diminutive way even into her self. "And you know something," said Gabriele. "You are probably the only person in New York State to have germless plates. Yours also have an extra coating of soap on them to kill any forthcoming germs that might land upon them. That's good especially with Saddam Hussein on the loose. Visitors won't mind eating with you at all." Lily released her grasp of Gabriele's figure and laughed manically.
"Sit down, sit down my good friend," said Lily. "Let me hold the baby." Gabriele released him from the pouch and held him. "No, I've got him." She sat down. She did not trust her friendly acquaintance holding the baby. Also, she disliked those eyes, which were like those of her aunt: eyes of needing to be a mommy. A responsibility toward any child was to raise him or her to be a good and independent creature. Motherhood wasn't for gaining a purpose in life nor for having adoring beings who would bring one a lifetime of "love" as well as a crutch to get through life's lonely void. Real love, if it were possible, should not be self-serving. No sooner had she thought this than Rita/Lily said, "I wish I had a baby."
"Believe me, they aren't toys. If they were toys I would have returned this one months ago and gotten my money back. They are needy human beings. They are a lot of thankless hard work and believe me you don't want one. If you think you are nutty now, a baby would make shambles out of your biochemistry and throw you off the deep end if being in love with a man didn't do it. Besides, this one is too temperamental."
"He looks angry now, doesn't he? I've never seen an angry baby before."
"Huh…good observation. I've been thinking the same thing. I had never seen an angry baby until I had this one. He was yelling so horribly in the WICCA service that I had to gag him with a pacifier. He keeps spitting out this thing like a missile. Who can blame him? I often do the same thing myself." She knew that in reality a baby couldn't be angry for to have anger one needed a self. Since self was the product of thought and thought was the product of language her creature could not be angry per se. He was feeling discomfort. That was true. But there wasn't a possibility of Adagio thinking of himself as a bona fide individual that was distinct from other selves nor was it possible for him to hate outside forces for the indignities they caused him (although it was she who changed the diapers so she wasn't sure what indignities there could be). Still, it was indisputable that he appeared to be angry.
She thought of her Aunt Peggy revolving pathetically around all the self-centered members of her family like the Viking orbiter. Peggy had even orbited around Gabriele's parents gregariously. Gabriele had been excluded from that whole bunch. With the exception of Peggy to some limited degree, she had been banished to the companionship of her books and to learn of greatness away from their commotion. In childhood and adolescence she kept the invisible pacifier in her mouth. Then she went away and when she rarely returned on brief visits she was as obdurate as a Nazi. Her rebellion had not been a disgorging of the pacifier, like Nathaniel, but a subtle insurrection that would not cause Peggy's tears. She was partial to calculated and unemotional reactions. They were less theatrical. Their performances had more reality and substance. Also, such planned and subtle rebellions never brought emotional counterattacks to make one feel guilty. Now that she was a Mommy herself, orbiting her life around her own beloved, they could not accuse her of abandoning family. Photographs of Nathaniel sent in the mail once every few weeks seemed to be enough to get them off her back.
"Hello, little Nathaniel. Maybe he understands us and knows we are talking about him. Do you think so? Do you think that could be making him angry?"
"Be careful. He's got a tooth now. You don't want him to bite you. Did you eat anything nutritious earlier?"
"Of course."
"No Ramen noodles this time?"
"No. A salad-a wonderful nutritious salad and some nice nutritious lithium. Like you're always saying, I need to keep away from chocolate and…what do you call them…oh, yeah, carbohydrates. And there are those bad cholesterols too. You are smart. Like you say, you keep me from bouncing off of the walls. That's what you always tell me. 'Sit down and don't bounce off of the walls, kid. I've already got one bouncing baby. I don't need a second.'" She gagged her mouth with her hand and then disgorged her laughter.
"Okay, okay. No more mocking of me," said Gabriele with a bashful smile.
"Yes, I did what you told me to do, Gabriele. I had a salad." Her voice leapt like a spark of electricity on a coil. "I followed your directions. I always follow your directions. You are my good friend-my best friend. I always want to follow your directions." Suddenly it dragged in a moment of unpleasant thoughts. "But when I ate it I was first thinking about you. I was thinking that maybe you didn't like me. I mean, you sent me away. You didn't want me to go with you." Gabriele frowned. She felt bored and she didn't want to rehash this petty incident. She wanted to go back home. "You've got good reasons. It doesn't matter. And since I came back I've been thinking about all the different things you can see God in. Do you remember? You told me to do that for you. I'm still working on it."
"Gee, thanks," said Gabriele indifferently. "Well, gotta go."
"Please wait. Here's what I want to tell you. You'll like hearing this." She knew that to some degree she needed to interest Gabriele in order to have her compassion. She feigned a smile but from her manic energy it changed and became real. Anecdotes were ready to disgorge from her mouth. "When I was eating the nutritious salad I started to feel lonely. You know how lonely I can get with my head thumpin' at thinking what my grandfather did to me all drunk and pressing against me like he often did — so I tried to call Gary-you know the guy in the orange trailer — but there was no answer. I wanted to tell him I was sorry about everything that happened this morning — Oh, you do not know what happened this morning. You've gotta hear what happened this morning! I wanted to say I was sorry but I wasn't sorry, you know, because what happened was so funny and it was just like a blessing because I prayed for it, you know. I prayed for this type of a thing and then it happened. You don't know what happened this morning-Oh, you've got to hear it. Do you want to hear everything?" She began an ongoing laughter as she narrated her anecdote, pausing in certain moments to release her manic chortles. "He came by this morning-you should have seen him-'Rita, my darling,' he said-and I said, 'Rita's not home. Lily is here so maybe you should come back when Rita returns.' 'When will she return?' 'Next year,' I told him. I told him next year. I guess I was playing with him…what do you say…flirting — I don't know. Maybe it was a little naughty, but men like that sort of thing, don't you think so Gabriele? I said, 'She's starting up a cosmetic company in Africa.' He said, 'Oh, that's too long to wait. I like both of you. You're both Italian sweeties.' So then I invited him in. He kicked off his shoes, rubbing his feet together like he was trying to make fire, wiggling toes on the footstool. Those feet were so cute in his white socks so dirty on the soles of his feet. I guess that sounds strange, doesn't it — thinking a man's dirty socks were beautiful, but they were. I think so. Maybe I'm crazy, but I was thinking so then-his dirty souls. Do you think so, Gabriele. Then he said something like, "Before long, I'm gonna actually believe there's a second girl. You've got that influence over me, you know. Africa?" he laughed like someone who doesn't believe something somebody says. I told him that I guessed that they needed cosmetics in Africa. He said that he was sure they did. "Which country," he asked. "Timbuktu," I said. "Is that so?," he said. He was playing with me. "Too bad I never get to see both of you at the same time. Nothing better for a man than boobsy twins." I fixed him breakfast and when we were eating some pancakes —- actually black round things because I burnt them but he ate them like they were still pancakes — he was lookin' at my boobs. 'What big boobs you have,' he said. 'Each one jiggles independently like two girls talking and dancing at a disco. They seem to be talking to me.' 'Don't look at them. It makes me nervous,' I said. 'How can I not?' he said. 'Look at my face when you talk. Not down there or I'll think you are a dirty boy' 'I am,' he said. I said to him that he was like the soles of his feet. "You are like the soles of your feet. You have dirty souls.' Then he persuaded me to take off my shirt so that he could hear them better. He wanted to pull off my bra but I wouldn't allow him to do it - - not at the kitchen table, not anywhere ever. He said that we could be more private in the bedroom and I said no. 'Come on, sweetie,' he said. I did want to kiss him-I've done that before…just that, a little. I didn't want to get caught kissing or being without a shirt and near a man. And he kept on saying, 'Come on, sweetie." So I went back there with him but only after he agreed that we would just kiss. Anyhow, in the bedroom he stripped into his underpants. I was so scared and I kept telling him, 'No, No, I don't want that. We can just kiss' but his fingers kept going up there and down there but never around me in a nice way. Then we heard the door open and I knew it was one of the Semi- independent counselors so I had to hide him in the closet. The counselor stayed for over an hour and when I opened up the closet there he was with a round wet patch on his underwear. He'd peed his underwear. I laughed and pointed at his hole."
"I hope you told him that with a hole he was now the woman," Gabriele interjected. Rita began laughing so hard that she choked on her saliva. "You know, all of us have to be cautious — not just with men and sex (both of which are confusing and should be off limits TO YOU) but everything and everybody. You have to realize that in everything people use each other even though it isn't altogether bad. Think of it this way: if they don't use each other they would have no use of them. You just need to define if that person's use in yourself is your use in him, her, them, whatever. If they are the same, a relationship can ensue. That's my idea."
"Oh, you're so smart. I wish I was smart like that. Do you need to use me?" asked Rita/Lily with hopeful childish innocence.
Gabriele could not think of a use for her. Simple compassion had plagued her here. She wanted to be home "Sure," she lied. "Something like that. Of course you are one of my few friendly people." She looked at her watch. "My customer will come in another hour, Lilian." Names shifted like tectonic plates. "I really should leave and put Adagio to bed." She knew that Rita was still wondering to herself why Gabriele did not teach her these German shoulder massage and acupuncture techniques so that she could have her own customers. She knew that Rita yearned for a vocation and a bit of pocket money. Rita/Lily's thoughts could be read easily from her eyes. She was so ingenuous and without guile or calculation except when men made her nervous. It was for this that Gabriele actually liked her.
Rita picked up the pacifier that had just flown out of the screaming child and handed it to Gabriele. "I'll make some hot coffee before you and Baby Nathaniel go out into the cold."
"Oh, all right," said Gabriele. She was not capitulating to outside pressure but only to the sense that she could not entirely part from the discomfort of compassion, which was the only good trait of man outside his creativity and intelligence. Compassion was half rational. The rest of its composition was that other version of love, the highest of all primordial feelings. Compassion, according to Gabriele, "flared up at the damnedest of times," and as inconvenient as it was to have it, she knew better than to forsake it. She had her distasteful coffee in a soapy cup, and once it was drunk she was pleased that by her compassionate act she had made herself into a better creature; but she knew that enough was enough. She needed to treat herself to compassion by "getting out of Dodge".
In the trailer she took a shower to prepare herself for relieving a customer; finished her session with him; laughed uncontrollably at his angry grievance over the fact that in zipping up his pants with one hand and reaching the other hand over to play with the little boy's fingers, the baby had bit him; and then she had another shower. In the second shower she kept remembering his words, "You'd better put that kid ina cage if you want any men to step over'ere. I'd better get me a tetanus shot." Her own laughter was so inordinate that it soon gave her a headache. After swallowing some aspirin, she began her other job. She preferred making a living on weekends to the rest of the week since it was so much shorter. Outside a little physical prostitution, on weekends she would freelance her "bull shit sketches"(her "mental prostitution) that went with the little "asinine" sentiments that Hallmark Greeting Cards sent to her; and then the week's work would be, for the most part, over. At least she terminated the workweek after Sunday. She loathed "prostituting" herself "to assholes" but the way she looked at it, everything was a form of prostitution from the time that one washed and blow-dried her hair that was cut in such a way that was aesthetically pleasing to "Western farts controlling economic institutions" to rolls that bound human thoughts in its limited pages, the social interaction one engaged in to stay sane, and the tricks one did to get one's little bowl of Alpo dog food. It was her belief that physical prostitution was less of a deleterious moral injustice to oneself than any other kind. Done with a condom, its physical discomfort was also fairly safe and brief. Done enough times with strangers one did not care for, it serendipitously shaped her into a regular Buddha reducing her desires and appetites.
She cut the list of maudlin mottoes into myriad strips; put paper clips around each strip, and then attached each one around a tarot card. She lit the four or five candles that were on the kitchen table; shuffled the deck; drank four cans of beer quickly; and then mumbled a bitching mumble about having to prostitute herself. With her visual perception more mobile and her brain in a buzz, she unevenly laid out the whole of this partial motto-mottled deck in a larger than Celtic layout beginning with the cards patterned out as a cross; meditated on each motto; and then drew her designs. The first motto that she encountered was "Happy Birthday To A Grandson Who Has A Wonderful Personality, Good Looks And A Fine Character. I Guess There Are Some Things That Are Just Hereditary." Suddenly an image flashed through her mind and she began to draw. For a moment she was completely stunned by what she was drawing, and completely incredulous that this was coming from her mind.
As she became aware of bearing this unique, full, and outrageous creation so effortlessly, she fell into hysterical laughter at the sketch of an old woman in a party hat, who smiles on sweetly as her grandson, abandoning all of the packages surrounding him, lifts her skirt curiously. But then for the non-pornographic version she made a young man with a girlfriend bound hand-in-hand and a second hand reaching out to his grandmother who stands near the birthday cake. By drawing this second version she was providing Hallmark with sentimental froth for those who did not see that humans were replaceable in one's own life and that the whole of a life, itself, was more froth splashed up in the washing of time. On a deeper albeit subliminal level she was stating that one could go forward in time and still retain childish affections. She knew it was not so. Only minds like Parmenides and Plato (a mind that she had) could conceptualize changeless eternity within the entity. Such unique individuals did not need to reminisce about the past. She never kept a photograph album apart from her corpus of sketches. She didn't want to be one of the masses. They were like school children trying to find their loose-leaf homework that had been taken from their hands by the winds and scattered behind them.
After she picked up the twentieth Tarot card to begin another preliminary sketch, she became aware of the fact that the flickering candles were making her extremely tired. She knew that being tired all the time was more from the monotony of being a single parent and had little to do with a full night of prostitution that she hadn't even yet begun to complete. For a moment she blamed a woman's susceptibility to become a mother for her blas? existence but it had been her choice to remain pregnant and it was her choice to raise this being whom she could have easily given away for adoption. Likewise, it was her choice to not seek employment. She had striven for isolation; but she hadn't done it with absolute perfection. She had given birth to a child and driven him into her shadows although she might have done it all alone. She knew that she had that capacity. Human society was for her a boring fair ground with the same quick-thrill rides and the same clones in freak shows. The war of the "Kuwaiti theatre" and Saddam Hussein were freak shows that Americans entertained themselves with from their television shows. These freak shows bored and sickened her and yet she listened to war broadcasts from her radio with the gluttony of other news junkies. She liked radio. She could imagine news more accurately without the visual images.
Apart from what important minds could vaguely construe to be permanent truth, human society was bereft of ontological meaning; the West was on a collision path with the environment and Islamic extremists; more and more societies possessed weapons of mass destruction that had the potential force that was beyond her imagination to conceive; and all societies were full of lies and manipulating fables disguised as truths-their own Moseses parting their own Red Seas. To be God's appointed bully of world events and His proponent of capitalism and democratic tyranny was the American myth. She often asked herself how she could even take on a janitorial job and sweep away the dirt of a capitalistic institution. How could she do functions that would keep it nice and operative looking? How could she empty its trash, and change its burnt out light bulbs when that institution was one of a billion which would bring about the destruction of the environment, the vitiation of curiosity and innovation among pampered capitalists, and often exploited third world workers. How could she contribute to society when she did not believe in it?
The telephone rang. "Hello, Lily"
"Rita speaking. How did you know it was me?"
"I'm a supersensory," said Gabriele.
"What is that?"
"I'm a psychic-witch, Rita."
"Really? Witching allows you to know who is on the phone?"
"I'm just joking."
"Oh. Am I disturbing you?"
" No, actually I was wanting something to keep me from falling asleep. What canI do for you?"
"Gary called. He wants to see me tonight"
"It is nearly 10. You aren't supposed to have visitors after 10. Isn't that what those group home counselors of yours tell you?"
"He wants me to go to the convenience store and talk to him. He wants to meet me now. I told him I was in another call and that I'd call him at the number on his pay phone booth. I don't know what to say to him."
"I think you want to see him, don't you?"
"I want and I don't want."
"So you want to stop wanting to see him."
"Right. What do I do?"
"I don't know. He'll only look as he does for a short period of years. If you really want to not want a man picture him in what will be his permanent state-the broken skeleton of another hundred and fifty years. That always works for me."
"Oh, thank you, Gabriele."
"Sure, Lily —- Rita/Lily. Bye now." She hung up the telephone and turned on the radio to keep herself awake. As she was listening to the classical music of Gabrieli's Canzoni and her own internal voice gabrieleishly, she left the table and began to warm the bottle containing the baby's formula. She fixed herself a large salad. She ate it and a piece of cold leftover pizza while feeding the baby the bottle of milk. As she was doing this she heard the news announcement of Saddam Hussein deliberately flooding the gulf with oil and igniting some of the Kuwaiti oil fields. Her mind was filled with the painful images of a whole ecosystem made into black and tarred corpses. She put her hand over her mouth and ran into the bathroom. She felt like vomiting and attempted to do so but nothing came up. It was nothing but heartburn from the pizza. She sat down and stayed emotionless in her director's chair until the heartburn subsided. And once it had she fell asleep.
She dreamt of her Aunt Peggy. In the dream Peggy and Gabriele stepped inside a grocery store. Both were wearing oxygen masks. All the visible items of the store that were on the shelves were locked away behind glass. All of the cashiers, grocery stockmen, and other personnel were dead at their stations. Gabriele was around the age of five. She hid her face in Peggy's dragging skirt.
"That's no way for a young lady to act," said Peggy as she reached over to the shelves, and conducting pantomime, bent her hand as if it were grasping an item, and then put it into a non-existent cart. She was trying to save money by purchasing invisible items. Stinginess was what had made them rich all of these years. "What is wrong with you?" condemned the aunt. Gabriele pulled away from her, once again realizing that only in reticent and hardened expressions would her inner sensitivities be fortified from the real world. Looking at her aunt's hardened expressions toward death that abounded everywhere she realized that she should not expect anything new and kind in the state of Kansas. After all, humans were adaptive animals. The world was survival of the fittest, and man surviving within the perils of his environment. Why should society be structured differently? Why should being in Kansas under the auspices of an aunt be different? She glanced down at the corpses at her feet unflinchingly and then over to where Peggy was supposedly picking up vegetables and fruit. She could see decapitated Turkish heads locked away behind glass. They were on the refrigerated shelf where the cantaloupes should have been. The more she looked at the Turkish heads the less impact they made upon her. They were no different than any other form of food.
"They are always locking up the cantaloupe. I don't know why they do that," complained the aunt. They moved toward where the pastry section should have been.
The aunt used gestures as if she were putting a large cake into an invisible cart. "They don't seem to have a chocolate cake with vanilla icing. It is vanilla and vanilla or chocolate and chocolate. Now, you remember that no one is to eat any of this cake until the dinner guests have not only arrived but have finished eating their dinner and any business conversation is completed. Some important people have scheduled a meeting with your uncle so they'll be at your birthday party. To wine and dine them, as our family should, is very little to do when they can help bring more business to your uncle. Don't pout over your friends not being allowed to come. Your uncle wouldn't have much luck with business if children were tearing through the place. No pouting about the fact that we can't find a chocolate cake with vanilla icing either. Cakes like this don't have any taste so I can't see how you'd know the difference if it hadn't been for you shopping with me now."
After they walked around the store using gestures of picking up items, they walked up to the cash register. Gabriele thought, "They're dead!" but she remained taciturn. Peggy put the invisible items on the belt of the counter that remained still. Peggy tilted up her chin toward nothing and smiled affectedly as if she were responding to a nonexistent cashier. "I'm very well. Thank you," said Peggy. Then her face tilted back toward the invisible items and the smile deadened. Gabriele felt the slapping of her back. Peggy put her mouth toward Gabriele's ear. She whispered, "Stand up straight. I don't want you to look like one of them" (meaning the cashier that was supposedly ringing up the purchases although her corpse was obviously rotting on the floor with maggots swarming in and out of it.
"Give me that candy bar," scolded Peggy. Gabriele looked at her right hand. It was curled with the fingers almost touching as if she had a candy bar in her hand. "You thought you would put a smart one on me. Hide it behind the laundry soap when I'm not looking. Nothing gets by me."
On their way home through the empty streets they quickly arrived at their neighborhood when suddenly Peggy honked on a horn and slammed on the brakes-ding-dong. A young Korean boy and his sister were on the road. Ding-dong. The girl had run in front of the car in an attempt to get the ball that her brother had overthrown. It was too late. The car slammed against her body. Peggy Peggy Ding-dong Peggy Ding-dong.
Gabriele woke to the sound of the doorbell. At first her mind tried to grasp a concrete image that could go with the sound. Then she knew it, and the cause of it. "Shit!" she said out loud. Now did she once again have to prostitute herself in the physical domain with some stranger at the door? She didn't want to work. People worked for money and they worked to escape the void. They abhorred the void that they would fall into if engaged in inaction. There were times that doing nothing did nothing for her either. There were days when she was a little lost in her lack of valid employment. But more times than not being completely paralyzed on what she needed to do or would like to do with her day was advantageous. Doing nothing but sitting in her living room staring up at the walls and letting the void overtake her made her all the wiser. She seemed to be unlike the rest of humanity who had to desperately see someone or go somewhere to escape slipping into themselves.
She did not want to see her clients any more than she wanted to return to work as a staff psychologist in a high security prison on the outskirts of Ithaca-a good job that she had taken upon graduating from Rice University and had brought her here. Eight months doing that had been enough. Eight weeks in a following job as an assistant director of a girl's home babysitting "women creatures" who, gaining their freedom at the age of 18 perpetuate the "classless undergrowth of society" had been worse than the prisoners. Girls and prisoners were often like comparing rotten apples and rotten oranges. There were times when she thought that the prisoners had been worse. Their sexual man-on-the-make innuendos had often frustrated parole assessments. In contrast, eight weekends with her clients (give or take a weekend) was a lesser prostitution. By the fifth ringing of the doorbell she decided to answer it so that it would stop ringing.
Two of them stood there: men. She knew she had an appointment with one client, but here were two of them. She gave a seductive smile and then informed them that she would only allow one of them at a time into her domain. The other would have to wait in the vehicle until his buddy came out. As one of them came in she thought to herself that she was really performing an important social function. Being a prison psychologist or a girl's group home supervisor had been paperwork jobs. The positions had not helped anyone. Here, at a discount since she was not beautiful, she relieved men of aggressive tendencies and stress. They were less likely to beat up on their wives or open fire in a McDonald's Restaurant as a consequence. She even argued to herself that by her service she was a bit like the Buddha who claimed that one should take the middle of the road. To her, that was the Buddha's tacit endorsement that a little bit of prostitution was needed to sustain oneself physically although it should never be taken to excesses.