Gabriele's cheek bled but still she did not kill the cat. She didn't know the reason her hands, pulsating in rushes of vengeful energy, did not catch it and crush it in her fingertips. At that moment she did not know her reasons for anything. She tried to stop the bleeding with the back of her hand, for the bib near her feet was unusable since it was fuming in vomit. As she looked at the swab of blood that was there on her hand she felt a void careen into her (or herself careening into the void), heard a parents' declaration to depart from her, and again felt the impact of being rolled on by a tank. She imagined the cat deliberately paralyzing itself in the actions of the prey it had often witnessed. She imagined it praying to the earth for a delay of its execution and subsequent decomposition by having the earth force compassion on Gabriele, the executioner. She imagined it praying to the earth that magically brought it into life to shrink its size into something so much smaller than a cat in order to be at all. She did not know why it happened. She just did not kill the cat but instead watched it masquerade itself as dead. Gabriele picked up the cat by the neck and the four eyes met. The cat did not swipe. It concentrated on cowardly prayers and of remaining limp. Gabriele tossed this other "criatura." It landed on top of a book on Freud on the lowest part of her bookshelf.
The reasons for the specific elements of a myth (the cryptic reason why a given culture might have chosen a serpent god or the son of god over the sun god) are ineffable, and all attempted explanations of a myth are mythical. Scholars of myths compare religions to find that spiritual element that links and validates the human search (that search to find that which is everlasting within the brevity of a human's lifespan); and historians of recorded cultures thread together implication, meaning, and motive from a few tangible and often random happenings.
The myth of Aten came from the Eighteenth Dynasty of Ancient Egypt. For over 1500 years Ancient Egypt practiced polytheism with each town having its own god. Usually such gods were animal gods as was the case with the cat-goddess, Bast of Bubastis, but many of the towns found that once they attached the word "Re," the commonest name for the sun god, it enhanced the denotation so that local gods became more ubiquitous and more deserving of reverence. In the case of the falcon god, Re-Harakhti, a name change was given to It (the great It) that contained more overt connotations. Not only was the word, "Re" put before the regular name of the falcon-god, but engravings depicted It with the sun god above It's head.
The pharaoh, Akhenaten, in his quest for the one sun god, Aten, disliked focusing all of his energies toward military ventures that would have decimated the bellicose Nubian-like creatures and stray Hittites that fell onto his shores like waves. He knew that he could decimate them if continual efforts were applied the way one wipes away a group of ants again and again. He hadn't even considered that it would wipe out his nation's treasury not to mention his own personal coffers. He didn't want to give himself to anti-terrorist strategies and 24 hour a day campaigns that would have sustained his empire but buried him in lonely problematic calculations, hypotheses about the thinking of some elusive enemy, and general logic (not that the President Bushes used any of the above). He was reluctant to part from continual dreaminess and to end the world of the child that saw magic in a waving leaf on a branch of a tree. He didn't want tedium that was as long as the sentences of this prose. The only military ventures he envisioned for himself were preemptive and bloody executions of the more vocally intransigent non-believers who would diminish the ubiquitousness of his own god and challenge his animistic thinking of nature as being linked to man by their harping on animal gods. For his eternal link to the sun was more essential and part of himself than any of his arms or legs. And so, reluctant to part from dreaminess, he built a new capital city for Egypt that he devoted to the worship of Aten. The city, Amarna, was created to be Aten's sacrosanct home. As for the crusades to extirpate all memory of any gods other than Aten through the destruction of temples and relieves (particularly the temples and reliefs of gods that had a "Re" attached to their names), none of it would have been so bloody had the believers allowed him to clean away their chiseled nonsense the way one would the crayon happy markings of children on the walls of the family home.
Gabriele's motives for creating a non-melodic lullaby about a god that had been extinct for thousands of years were even a little unclear unto her. Perhaps the reasons for the avant-garde lullaby could have come from that one afternoon when she was four. On that day she had become less interested in nursing a wounded bird and so began to play with her tiny plastic toy soldiers beside her mother who was clipping wet shirts and military trousers on the clothesline.
The noon sun was slapping both their faces the way the heat from an oven evaporates the grease put on two baked potatoes. Gabriele, bothered by the heat, turned away from the soldiers and then took a glance at the sun. She turned toward her mother and mentioned some eagerness for Christmas. Her mother turned toward Gabriele with stoic facial expressions and then crassly spoke in German that Gabriele should stop thinking about Christmas since it was a long way off. The mother snapped the clothes on the line with more forceful pinches and then asked her daughter if she didn't think she was a bit old to pursue such nonsense as Christmas. Gabriele said that she didn't understand and so her mother unhesitatingly told her that there was no such thing as Santa Claus. Gabriele saw her mother smile sadly. She sensed a kindness in this smashing of ignorance and innocence the way she had seen Aunt Peggy smash a horse fly on one of her uncle's stallions.
"In a way, I am glad you brought this up," continued Gabriele's mother in German. "There are some things that will be changing soon." A cloud ran by the sun and in its shadow Gabriele glanced up at a frothy blob that looked like the form of an old man in ancient garb. At the age of four she could not recognize the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus sculpted into the cloud or a cloud shaped or sculpted into Heraclitus. "There is some early news I should tell you. I really should but it is a little hard to get it out. You are such a baby, you are, but now you are a bit wiser, eh? You know the situation with Santa. Life is going to be full of sobering face slappings like that .I am very glad that you are clogging your tears like a good girl. I'm proud of that fact. I was a little worried that you would be bawling like stupid little thing. Crying about such things like this would be bad, bad behavior when there are so many bigger things one shouldn't cry about either." The girl couldn't help having watery eyes even though she did not release the tears and soon mucus began to run from her nostrils. She wiped it onto the back of her hand. "Heavens, Gabriele, that's nasty. Remember to not get into the cookie jar without scrubbing those hands of yours thoroughly. Well…now, you are wiser for knowing the situation with Santa so I can tell you things, eh? You have a wiser and smarter brain than any other 4 year old who has ever walked the planet, don't you think so? Now I can tell you things because there won't be any damage, eh? Oh, why won't my mouth work right at getting this out? " Gabriele stood stiff. Questions were piercing into her as if she were target practice but she stood stiffly not feeling a thing accept the demise of Santa Claus. "Christmas is so lovely with everyone being together, don't you think so? Still that doesn't always happen, eh? When this doesn't happen there is no weeping. In this case, there will just be smiles on the kitten's face, eh? I'm sorry but we will not all be together this Christmas. We are parting our ways. Your father and I will be experiencing something new and you will be experiencing a different thing that is something new. In experiencing something new, you've got to be bold and take one's stance with a smile on the kitten's face. Some things are the way they are. No wishing will bring Santa Claus into existence and wishing won't stop new things from happening. You will soon go live with your Aunt Peggy. Your father and I are going back to Germany. He is going to be stationed there again. Your father is a great American patriot and has been asked to return to our motherland of Germany on important duties. You like your father's sister so much. Am I right? Your aunt Peggy: we are lucky to have her. Really, we are. Strange lady though; but with all those horses, maybe she'll take you for a ride sometime. Horses have ponies. They could give you one. You never know. She will have a tutor to help you to read and do math and will let you play sports in her yard under the supervision of an athletic trainer. The yard is large and fenced in nice. You know that. You will be happy there. The house is near a Catholic school. You will go there each day with those monkeys of hers. Much better than being here and there with us; and with this plan, you get two mommies instead of just one. That makes you better than the stupid little rascals your age."
If the little girl within Gabriele had been born a boy and that boy hadn't slipped away from the influence of the mother toward a male role model, she would have been branded a homosexual by one impact of the brain onto another. It would have been a gradual but ineluctable branding within a few critical years. But these few minutes of a girl's life at the clothesline with her mother made her into a misogynist, a stoic and an atheist. From this time at the clothesline she learned that everything was a myth or prevarication and the only kind of reality that existed was her own self and the natural forces that beamed onto her. Romanticizing the sun that burnt her face and could end up giving her skin cancer was better than the self-defeating flames of hate that might have been a force inside her consuming what could have been her. This silly, and barely believed myth gave grace to her infrequent social interactions and regulated her sleep patterns.
(1989: Houston)
Turning away from the cooked bacon strips dripping grease on their paper towel bedding, he walked to the bathroom. He hoped that she would come into the kitchen while he was away. He hoped that she would swig her juice in one gulp and quickly eat her share of the bacon and toast; and once finished, that she would quickly go out with the garbage of the early morning that would soon be picked up by the sanitation workers whom people crudely referred to as garbage men. He hoped that this could be done while he was in the bathroom and while his new bacon began to sizzle in the skillet. She knew this as much as one knew anything. She believed that it came to her intuitively without the use of her faulty senses that were capable of adulterating reality; or, if sensed, that it entered her consciousness ineffably similar to the passing dog that recognizes the pheromone spray of a much earlier dog. She did not mind. Non-romantic conclusions were non-confining. They were spring breeze declaring the end of winter. This was a beginning and an ending of a relationship within the space of 6 or 7 hours and she did not mind that at all. All relationships were the beginning of an end and the quicker expedited the better off she thought she would be.
She was in the bedroom dressing herself in a very faint light of early morning and she could not see him return from the bathroom to cook the last of his bacon where the strips shrank phallically in the heat. But from the smell she, of course, knew that was happening and she could imagine that he was analyzing their experience together in front of his skillet, and sinking into a void. She could guess this because he, like all humans, was incapable of reliving the frenzy through a precise memory of it; and he was now trying to find some sensibility in his voracious, self-consuming frenzy. She wanted to laugh out loud the way she had laughed out when they were in bed together and she seeing his body, less real in the darkness, become wholly stiff before her. Yes, she thought then scoffingly, he was a holy stiff. Now, kitchen-bound, he was no doubt using logic to create a sententious wallowing where the act was more hallowed in the past. She presumed that he was thinking back on his experiences with his wife and comparing this one without "love" to the separated wife's loving caresses. She thought about the way he looked ten minutes earlier scrambling around for his clothes that were by his bed in almost arthritic movements. Even as she slipped on her skirt, she still felt the same repulsion and indifference toward him because of this action. Certainly no friendship could ensue from this intimacy with the young assistant professor. It was always a bit disappointing for her, really, that physical intimacies were so gluttonously selfish and fully incompatible for caring relationships. She knew that reality every time she engaged in such activities and yet she somewhat inaccurately told herself that with each new sexual experience she acted like an innocent girl in her first sexual foray. Following a mirage, she told herself, was just an inane pitfall to being human, and only a fool was disappointed in human vulnerabilities-as slight as she told herself hers were.
She hadn't run over him with a car to create those arthritic movements in the bedroom nor had she cast some spell on him although she was loosely affiliated with bewitching organizations like WICCA despite their ecclesiastic and congregational ambiance. His pathetic reaction was strange although undoubtedly provoked. Sure, in bed together she had guffawed at his ridiculous post-sexual statement that he could not leave his wife as if women could not have sex with handsome men for pleasure. She apologized to him immediately afterward for this egregious chortling. After all, he wasn't so mistaken. Most women were there to mate with a man for the purpose of perpetuating their selfish genes by breeding. Most could not sense themselves beyond that feeling, that rush of love, that dopamine addiction that was cajoling them to breed. In fact, she had to admit that she had never met a woman who was not like that; but then, unbeknown to him, she never categorized herself as a woman. She was a female with nothing womanly inside of her. To her knowledge, there was no pathetic lonely neediness or "womanity" that brewed within her. Hearing her guffaw in bed an hour earlier and her bashful apology afterward, he probably did not think about anything in particular except how best to create an amicable departure. But then, still in bed, she made an analogy of sex to stale potato chips, which upon occasion she did not mind eating for the salt that was contained there. This faux paus must have made him feel as if he had had intercourse with a cannibal for soon there was that arthritic rustling with his clothes. The corollary of seeing him look for his clothes feebly was the igniting of her "miso-him-ony" (a word that she coined gabrielishly).
She went into the kitchen and to her satisfaction she found the man transformed into bacon. Anyhow, he wasn't there so she ate her breakfast snack, went to the bathroom, and then came out only to imagine that she heard him crying in the closet between the muffling of jackets, with empty hangers lightly clanging against each other. She felt a sorrow for him and took on his mental void. She saw, however, that he was outside and felt foolish. Had her senses been more astute than her cognition? It sometimes happened. From the window she saw him in the tiny park swinging alone with the full moon diluted by the rising sun.
Sex, she thought, as she watched his body hit the winds, was being massaged by one's own hormones, turned on by oneself, or more accurately one's sense of pleasure, and making love to fantasies of one's mind rather than the individual locked into one's body. Yet she was titillated if not inveigled by such physical pleasures that kept her imagination more bound than what she would have liked. Sensate hungers of animals and men were ineluctable but inconsequential "things" that she would not allow to be the synopsis of herself even if upon occasion she explored these appetites fully. This night was more than just diving into sensual experiences when she could no longer stay logical without slipping into a philosophical void: it had been a sociological experiment of seducing the opposite sex in a gay bar called "Heaven" more from compassionate and empathic dialogue than sexual ploys; it had been because of the humidity of Houston; it had been…she was not sure what it was. She, having gone with some of her gay friends to "Heaven," had become one of those "fag hags" that such non-lesbian gay bar-going women are often called. Ostensibly, the night had been so different and so speciously amusing but really any nightclub was the same: that same loneliness and that same sense that appetites were fueling a human form like a smart bomb that was out of control. She scorned having had sympathy for him. She rebuked herself for having sympathy for situations that did not exist, which was so much worse. To think that he had been in a closet crying was worse than insane for one who was so proud of her logical skills, and so believing that she could stare down the eyes of wild leopards and not shirk from the eyes of lepers. Sorrow for him, she told herself, was a brief misfiring of neurons in an awkward situation that brought on a second of a brief hallucination and an emotional barricade that she now had to scurry around.
Gabriele ate a piece of cold toast abandoned near the bacon. She did not delude herself: he had prepared this meal (such as it was) to minimize his feelings that he had used her, although really she had used him. She was hungry so she ate. The fact that it was cold showed his hostility toward her. She knew this but ate the toast with a smirk on her face. A minute later, she took out some snuff from her purse and a cold beer from the refrigerator and then went onto the porch. Outside, the wind was still bringing the coolness of winter nights that the sun beat down with the days. She drank and watched him. She felt repulsion for her one-night stand and wanted to get into her car, which would move her to her apartment, exclusive to herself and her logic. The impulse to play, however, was too much; so after mildly draining the tobacco-saliva from her mouth into the beer can, she crossed Dunlavy street to join him on the swing set.
"Y-e-s!" said Gabriele in a tone of affected romanticism of the trivial, kicking the air beneath her as his swing lost momentum. She giggled like a schoolgirl. She reduced her swinging gradually to cessation careful to not just stop because he had done so. After her feet were dragging and cutting into the dirt, he pulled out a cigarette to hang in his face.
"I fixed some bacon," he said indifferently after she was equally stagnant and inert.
"So you did," she responded less zealously.
He didn't say anything but she could read it all the same. He didn't say, "I'm sorry, but could you go?" He didn't say, "We enjoyed each other's company, I think." He didn't say, "I've got a relationship, more or less, with my wife although she doesn't know my other side." He didn't say, "I thought being with you might make me feel more desire for women, be more romantic, and get her back into my life again. I hope you don't think I've used you." He did not say that predominant thought that was in his eyes, "I'm sorry, but could you go, please?" There would have been a pleading "please" in it if he had been able to "find the backbone" to articulate his request. There was none of that "stuff" said among nearly all men from one generation to the next with a few extra contemporary novelties that saved men from being completely trite. She liked wordless empathy. It could be shut off at any second like tap water."
"Relationships: they are plural, complicated, and opposing for you, it seems." Gabriele said this with her hand under her chin as if her lover were an interview for a dissertation. "Don't be so worried." She smiled. "My fear of you hunting me down has more merit than any fears you might have of me." She chuckled at herself. Her mind repeated his laconic words: "I fixed you some bacon." They began to echo in her mind. "What is this?" she thought. "Does he want me to think this breakfast of his is my reward for this bit of a roll in the hay?" She snickered to avoid piercing him with dilating eyes of hate. Then she smiled at her former professor. It was a contrived smile and although she hated artifice, in a world of getting one's needs met one needed to behave insincerely.
"Complicated and opposing, are they? Okay, if you want to look at it that way," he retorted. "Well, you can't exactly say that you weren't in Heaven, can you?"
"Si' estaba alli tambien. Eso es innegable"("Yes, I was there also. This fact is indisputable"). She spoke to his dark Brazilian skin. She spoke to all of his Morris codes and secret languages that she understood all and had contempt for everything that he was. She wanted to speak to her former psychology professor as a cheerful therapist but such nascent words when she tried to formulate them in her mouth became dying winds over the rubble reef of her tongue and the sea of her saliva. Still she smiled although a supercilious undertone tried to gain beastly dominion. "The sport of seduction was all I had in mind, Mr., and then you went ahead and gave me more. You cooked some bacon and toast. I thank you." When his face again fell, as she wanted it to fall, she raised herself from the swing. The tree limbs seemed to wave goodbye to him. Then they bent as she walked away from him; and as she, on reflex, glanced back, they ricocheted and then folded back like a curtain which had material composed of the darkness of the limbs and the sketchy sunlight. She could not see him, and she appreciated this fact. The vinyl and its coolness, within the car, made her upper body shiver—how she sank into it and felt soothed. She thought of the waves of the Gulf, at Galveston Bay, pulling at her legs with cool and non- scathing talons. Although she was attracted to the Gulf of Mexico, and felt befriended by an identity of its vastness synonymous to her own, at this moment she preferred how she felt from the vinyl, which was limited and all encompassing. It snuggled around the back of her throbbing head and body.
The accelerator, firm and responsive to pressure, was freedom that the social instinct (what little she had) and society at large robbed from her. It moved to the embodiment of her will, propelling her from anything she chose to disregard. She turned onto Westheimer Street. She had gone as far as the thirteen-thousand block once, a year ago, after enrolling at Rice University to pursue her graduate studies. Someone had told her that Westheimer finally turned into a farm road, but back then she decided to let her experience testify otherwise by choosing to not go that far.
She drove on and on and soon she could see the roof of a church. In an hour, she thought, there would be the culmination of activity from the followers (the sheep) and the fully arrayed morning. Inside the cathedral of Santa Anna, which she was now approaching, a priest would soon begin to prepare himself for an early mass after the golden curved roof began to reflect the sunlight in a seductive glare. The marble walls would seem steady to these followers as if prayers said within these corridors would cause one to be as steady and seemingly everlasting as those very walls. The church would shelter the convictions of the myth reinforcers who actively promoted their religion so that anxieties of injustice, the vulnerability of the human form, the madness of a violent world and violent thoughts and feelings from within, and the issue of mortality could be eased. In the face of challenges from other ideologies, Christians protected their God and religion with defensive armament of an anxiety-ridden people. It wasn't so hard to keep an individual-caring God inculpable of genocide, typhoons, and plagues. In modern times, those issues occurred in underdeveloped foreign countries among heathen populations. But car accidents, cancer, high mortgage payments, a fire gutting a family home, and stock market decline made the firm arms of a loving god into a tenuous thing. It shook the marble walls of the church. Further, made insecure by the believability of alternative religions with scriptures or some dogmatic premises that were also claimed as infallible, the Buddhist and the Moslem were threats for an American Christian no less than the witch. She wondered why she did not hate religion more than what she did. She asked herself why she did not circle around the block for an hour and then grind a soul or two to the pavement. Now that she was thinking such peculiar things she continued with them. She assumed that driving through a crowd of people was a lot like bowling only the pins weren't stationary. Actually, she thought, it did sound more of a sport than bowling ever did. However, the thought of doing such things out of the context of her playful inner world was so repugnant to her that it struck a chill down her spine. Only an unequivocal nervous breakdown would cause her to obey the savage and crazed thoughts that ran amuck in one's head. Like any German dam, such energy was a trickling stream next to the mammoth structure that contained and regulated it. She not only was her own effective dam and continually building upon it, but she constructed worlds of ideas there. From the mammoth height of intellectualism, her turbid passionate waters seemed almost puny. German people, she thought, did not camouflage their barbarity in "goodness." Early in history, except for notable flare- ups, Germans were aware of their barbaric impulses so, like Nietzsche, they coldly refined all emotions into philosophic rationales.
The idea of wanting to preserve oneself in the spirit made her face cringe. She had often felt this way throughout her life, and it seemed so alien to her that those people who could not create their own sense of truth regardless of man's basic purpose (which was never known), desperately sought immortality.
Myths, themselves, would give half-rational women and men artificially solved philosophical truths that would ease their minds into their jobs, their families, their adultery, their small capitalistic ventures with large levels of greed, and their soap opera, small-life concerns; but she could not conceptualize why their myths had the element of self-preservation. She did not care to preserve herself. Just in dying, and letting microorganisms rot her body away, she would give her energy back to the world that would radiate it again elsewhere in another form. If she had a child, she thought, she or he would not be allowed to be subject to this Christianity, which had the plagiarism of Ancient Egyptian Literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Plato, Confucius, and God knows what as scripture. Still, there was no escape from the West for fresher lies. The whole world was western now. All that was possible was to abscond from it as much as possible.
Friendship, as that with her roommate, Betty, would be plugged up in smiles and feigned promises to write. A day earlier she was folding, sealing away, and throwing away material things and now it would be states of mind. It was very exciting-more than even a racket ball game with Betty whose African American skin, muscular physique, and strong competitive strife got her equated as the sister of many famous sports legends. This bantering was a subject for mutual scowling since both wanted "female" sports to be "on an equal footing" and for races and genders to not be stereotyped to certain activities. With a thesis accepted, the fourth largest city in America was to be nothing but a folded map forgotten in the outside pocket of one's suitcase. What would she do now that her graduate studies had ended? She did not know. She had gained the knowledge by which to do nothing with complete confidence and so taking it into a PHD level seemed redundant. As much as a human could be free, she was now free.
She wondered if the homosexuals at the bar last night were free. She had enjoyed the men in colorful briefs-some who had danced on wooden platforms covering two juxtaposed pool tables to be more into the crowd. When someone of her own sex had introduced herself with lust in her eyes, Gabriele had wanted to sprint a quick exit through the wall but, instead of cowardice, gave her a quick kiss on one of her cheeks and declared, in her giggling, that this would be as far as she would go in that type of liaison. At the same time she wondered a little whether that woman felt more free by subconsciously choosing the type of sex she wanted to copulate and then following the dictates of her own hormones instead of having hormones dictated by social mores.
She was almost at her apartment when she consciously noticed Betty's cigarette butts in her car ashtray. She chastised such vile and unaesthetic habits, but really it was her own maudlin oozing that she despised. Needing some time alone to sink into herself, she decided to procrastinate packing and her last meeting with Betty by going to Allen Parkway. She parked her car in a lot nearby and told herself it was time for her one-person celebration and to ensure that the past would not be left in abeyance suffocating her in sentimental mush. She wanted people of the fading present to depart from her like releasing a deep breath. She sat in an obscure area of the Buffalo Bayou away from the bike trail and a herd of morning bicyclists approaching the fountain. She sat in the grass and allowed her body to be prey to fire ants, which, like a goddess, she would then smash with her fingertips or gently remove to blades of grass. She meditated on the theme of chance that was so intricate in the fabric of all things. She picked clover and dismembered their leaves, gladdened that the little girl flattened out as she had been by the tank, still floated like a ghost in the ethereal parts of her imagination. She told herself that she would be an empty shell of an adult to be bereft of her.
She again thought of the go-go boys dancing both on stage and on pool tables. They had been such titillation but as different as they were, she doubted that they were free. By their freedoms, they were imploding into their own hungers just as she was imploding in memories of last night that she couldn't quite shake. She remembered how with each beer her mind lost the paralysis of logic and she began to be more sociable and pay less attention to the flickering icon, on the wall, that was shaped like a wine glass; the queer associations of social butterflies known as transvestites; the mirror which gave a blurred version of this other part of humanity; and of course the dancers, who were rather boring after a few minutes of seeing the ends of their briefs sag from being paid for non-sexual tricks. Except for glances at the surreal mosaic fragments of commercials and video music that played on television sets, which were on the far corners of the walls, she sometimes stared at men throughout the night with a specific intention of wanting to copulate with one or all of them, but enjoying the aspect of feeling sensual regardless. It was there that she met her professor. He was someone who, according to her friends, often came to the bar, and yet he looked lost. The seduction was easy. She asked if he wanted to go with her, and he said that he did. Nothing was simpler and more exempt from life's energy consuming, cat and mouse games. She thought about the butts in her ashtray. She wasn't sure the reason. Maybe the thought of the smoke filled bar triggered this memory. Betty should have cleaned out those cigarette butts, she thought. What an ugly reminder of herself. She looked at the grass all around her and then at the traffic speeding by. The creation was sublime and chaotic. She pondered how simplistic human logic was: the eyes taking in the light, the image of the object refracted on the retina, the mental image playing in the brain, recent memories regarding that object, and an abstract idea. She didn't want to think of anything. She just wanted to watch the early morning sunrise over the bayou.
Jiffypop popcorn leaping over the heat of the stove's burner, the expanding of the aluminum foil cover into a crown, and his sister, Jung- Jun (that girl sister as dead and yet phantomesque as the murdered adult) tacit and waiting anxiously to be the first to pierce into the crown to obtain its edible jewels -the early days of her teaching him how to catch a baseball, how to tie his tie before they went off to Sunday school… He woke up from some forgotten but unsettling dream with a few thoughts of her trickling into his consciousness. His thoughts were uninvited and he tried to shake them off like a wet dog. As much as they were the past, they materialized through distant, sealed corridors to haunt him. Anything could be remembered. One thought slapped into another in a restrained domino effect in the primitive human psyche. Human will was like meat skewered and cooked on the rotisserie.
He had only recently moved to Seoul. Desperate for work, English had delivered and cursed him once again; although this time he had become a clerk in a convenience store in the American military sector of Itaewan. He had a room in the back area. It was really an extra stock room. The owner had been so insistent in the interview that any employee he chose would need to live in the back area as an extra security precaution. Sang Huin didn't have the inordinate money required to obtain an apartment since in Korea deposits on apartments were like the purchases of condominiums and so, not wanting to live in a yongwam, he had agreed. So upon waking this night, he did not immediately recognize where he was. Waking in darkness and wondering where he was at, it was Gabriele who dominated over his thoughts of Jung-Jun.
Gabriele's mind was sticky in malaise. The child that she had had not grounded her. It's crying was without rhyme or reason. It spouted out vehement, hellish, and non-stoppable roars like a locomotive. The malaise was hot and sticky. It was as if all of his insatiable needs were like a vomit-smelling glue and it was in her hair, on her face, and in her clothes. She could not escape. Her intellectualism was being stunted to this exclusive task of being an infant's caretaker. "I will surely snap like a twig on a crisp winter morning if I do not leave this trailer," she thought to herself although she did not completely believe it since solitude did not have much of an effect on her. In this moment of weakness where she did feel the need to depart from all the responsibilities and the cacophony that was her son, she looked at him disconcertedly. He was no more family than the one she had come out of. "I am like this lone soul that is forever seeking, although not expecting, the one true friend that wants nothing from me other than to be with me…that person who will love me for just that." She further thought, "I shouldn't have had this accident of conceiving a child…this mistake of giving birth to one. However, here he is. I can't exactly return him." Sang Huin recollected where he was. He got up and opened his door. He saw the aisles of groceries. Living here, he thought, was like living in a storage area or a gigantic pantry. He sighed. He grabbed some milk and a package of Oreo cookies that he would have to pay for later. Then he sat on his bed and took notes on what he had been thinking concerning Gabriele.
But it was his sister who haunted him more. As teenagers, they would jog together at the high school track and in school she looked so beautiful wearing a skirt and her hair in a bun. She was experimenting with makeup at the age of 14. She never did like it, dabbing it timidly over her beautiful face. She didn't need it any more in her late twenties. With their mother she would continue to talk in that mysterious language of Korean (Hangkuk-mal) that he did not understand. It was their secret language. It was their girlish society that he had been excluded from. As a family they functioned fine. However, he and his father never had connected personally when they were apart from the others. The man had always absconded from him. He had been aloof. Both of his parents were so aloof and so aged during the 14 months of Jun-Jung's disappearance and seemingly elderly at the discovery of the skeletal remains and the ensuing trial.
Gabriele felt as if she were at an amusement park and that her own little world were nothing but a house of mirrors. Each subsequent mirror (despite her youth) cast an impression of more furrowed wrinkles on her forehead, seemed to expand the appearance of bags under her eyes, and made her hair look increasingly gray. Life was nothing but a bottle, a diaper, burping, feeding, and washing. The robotic movements he demanded her to do to take care of him went on perpetually. His crying went on perpetually.
Like with other late evenings that week, at 11:30 p.m. Saeng Seob and his seeing-eye dog took the 40-minute subway ride over to meet him, who would be waiting there in the terminal. Saeng Seob resented him some for quaking and thwarting the direction of his passionate river that most men felt, rode, and defined themselves from. Still, he kept the resentment mute. Being corrupted was a marginal thing when confronted daily with oceans of loneliness. Consciousness needed an object and he needed a consciousness that wasn't always disconcerted, diffident, and being thrust about like a lost, lonely man sucked up in the waves. When he finished dabbling in some work for his cousin at the university it was good to go someplace where he was wanted-someplace away from the campus where friendship gave him identity that an indifferent cousin cajoled or coerced into helping him failed to do. Sang Huin had the need to impress him with the material that he had written from the previous day or two. For Seng Seob, listening had become a means of inveigling those who needed to feel that someone cared to hear them-a lifebuoy that he could embrace around himself when encountering the waves. Sang Huin was not frightened away by his dead orbs and so Saeng Seob let swimming, eating together, listening to the recitation, giving Sang Huin brief tutorials in Korean, and this peculiar sleeping together become the activities that bonded them. Each needed to chisel his name on the other one's brain in a city of ten million strangers. In a world of 6 billion people, each one needed a special lure, and for him it was listening intensely to others. He saw himself as a demure epicure with no published writing and nothing outwardly erudite to show for it. He in his reserve believed that in a world of nonsense spoken by barbarians little outside of human culture had a positive worth except for friendship, and if he needed to listen all night to someone he cared for, he would do just that.
In the back of the convenience store it was hard for him to critique Sang Huin's prose. After all, it was a foreign language being read to him but despite its blur to his mind it dazzled him in new vocabulary that he would look up in his dictionary later. The role of boyfriend to Seong Seob was peculiar but the human gourmandized touch above all ambrosia. It was a special sensory input to the reticular formation of the brain. Touch gave a consciousness of relationship and belonging that were the highest goals of all such humans, hominids, and primates creeping their way to godhood. He hadn't felt particularly inclined to be homosexual and yet that had little meaning when one needed touch and friendship. Being blind made touch even more of an instrument of knowing something although all grabbled around in darkness.
The next morning was Sang Huin's bit of a weekend and so Seong Seob feigned sickness in a phone call to his cousin. The cousin was indifferent and if he questioned the logic of calling in sick while being absent from the home that both of them shared, he did not mention it. So Seong Seob and Sang Huin went out to experience the changing of the guard ceremony at Toksugum Palace: the soldiers in their colorful ancient garb and round black brimmed hats, the horns, the drums and the changing staffs. At first they went to Lawson's convenience store and bought some kim bop (a Korean version of sushi), potato chips, and cola. They took the food to a stack of lumber that had been piled to the area opposite of the ticket counter and, for some minutes, plopped themselves on top of it and witnessed what their senses allotted. Later, they went to the amusement park, Lotte World. For each ride they stood in line over half an hour. Once, as they were going into the bathroom, Sang Huin kissed Seong Seob hurriedly before more men entered. Saeng Seob disliked the intrusive act that brought the acknowledgement of his aberration if not perversion into the light of day but the hot mouth was full of molecules and passing of molecules in a kiss was an intoxicating thing that took one away from the mundane aspects of reality. Further, he knew that the only wrong was in judging one Epicurean quest over that of another. It was an inconsequential thing.
Gabriele smashed a corpulent ant into her second composition when neither flicking it away with her fingertips nor blowing it off her paper was successful. She was writing a second story to put her son to sleep after finding the first composition ridiculous. From this action the insect was nothing but a brownish green blotch on her new work. "Thai Tiger," she rewrote after scratching out the earlier paragraph that had the blotch in it, "waved goodbye to his mother and father from the window of the plane. He was both sad and happy because he was leaving one thing he loved and going to another. The plane went into the clouds and came down in Sri Lanka. Tamil Tiger was waiting for him. Tamil Tiger's mother took Tamil Tiger and Thai Tiger to her home in downtown Colombo. What is Colombo like, asked Thai Tiger from the backseat of the car where he sat with Tamil Tiger. It is full of wars, said Tamil Tiger. What are wars, asked Thai Tiger. Let's change the subject, retorted Tamil Tiger."
Gabriele paused from her writing and remembered her time in a Moslem country. For three months, when she was almost 6, she was in Turkey. She remembered that day when her mother suddenly came to Kansas for her. It had been nearly a year since she had seen her and she felt a mixture of fear, surprise, and happiness at the thought of having the fragmented pieces of her life reassembled. She did not know if this interruption of her adaptation to her aunt, uncle, and cousins had some permanency. She was already speculating that there was no permanency- only being banged in the buttocks with bumper cars or being run over by tanks. She was only told that they would be going on a trip to the other side of the world. The potential of seeing something outside of Kansas made her very happy. Like any child, the discovery of flight was a marvel and she stared out of the window as much as she could. It was a subject of curiosity that the clouds she had always looked up to (a good many in the shape of the philosopher, Heraclitus) had really been nothing but footstools with wooly sheepskins on them all along. It was quite a surprise and shook her hypothesis that her mother was mistaken in saying that there wasn't a Santa Claus. She had formulated this hypothesis erroneously by the evidence of some irregular clouds that seemed as if they were Santa's frothy sugar castles.
In Istanbul she became reacquainted with her father again. Like in olden times when she was four, he began to take her on trips to the beach to pick up seashells or shop for groceries. Once they were shopping for some vegetables in a tight labyrinth of a crowded and dusty outdoor market when suddenly they heard the sound of that Moslem call to worship (a hybrid sound like of an instrument and a human voice) but the call was at the irregular time of 3:00 on a Friday afternoon. Pandemonium was in the streets, but everyone was going in the same direction so actually Istanbul was less helter-skelter than usual. Pushed with the herds, she and her father walked 5 blocks to an ornate mosque. She wanted to know what was "going on" so her father put her on his shoulders and told her that a special Turkish custom of a beheading was to begin shortly. "Beheading?" she asked. "Yes," he said with a wry and troubled smile. "To be without a head like the headless horseman although I suppose a less animated one." For a moment she was so pleased and excited that she would witness such a splendor until she saw a man with a bag over his face dragged up against his will onto the marble stairs leading to the temple and a third man with a huge scythe in his hands. A second later she witnessed the burly third man swing, with all his round, bulging, muscular might in one fail swoop and the head part from the shoulders which the second man placed in a basket. There was surprisingly little blood at first. Then the arteries disgorged their content while the body fidgeted a few times on the holy marble.
She suddenly knew that adults were monsters and that they ran amuck in the world inimical to human decency. In deep pain of one fragmented and grieving for this man and the human race, she nonetheless controlled her urge to cry. She assessed her situation. If indeed she were in a land of adult monsters, outwardly she had to acclimate to their mores and yet do the best she could, while growing up, to refrain from becoming a monster herself. If one couldn't withdraw from a situation, she felt more than thought, a girl must play the game. If she were to leak out her pain by blubbering, they would hate her and she would be perceived as foolish and weak. Crying would never help. It would only get her into trouble. She asked herself how best to achieve this ostensible aim and she told herself that she should be inquisitive. She calmly asked why the beheading had occurred, the reason for the timing of the occurrence, the exact nature of the crime, if beheadings were permitted in America, and the final resting place for a 2 part individual. The questions made her father, a USAF officer for NATO, and her mother, a USAF soldier's housewife, so happy. The next day as her mother was with curlers in her hair and her head in tact and under the dryer at the beauty parlor, the young mother pointed out her daughter and boasted about all the questions she had posed regarding the beheading the previous night. They boasted about her often; however, two more months passed and the clarity of the ephemeral nature of the reunion with her parents became clear. After her summer holiday was over and their honeymoon reunion with their child had ended, Gabriele was sent back all alone in a jet to New York City and then a second connecting flight that would lead her back to her aunt in Kansas.
It is 2008 and he, sometimes Adagio and sometimes Nathaniel or various nicknames, still doesn't even have a consistent label for himself. Not even a consistent name has stuck on him all these 18 years; and the half hour that he has sat in the library there is that same mental numbness of all other previous half hours. It is numbness as empty as a pit in the mouth from an extracted tooth. He knows that most men wander around the world untouched, unknown, not touching, and not known or knowing. He knows that such men use girlfriends to prop themselves up in order to feel fortified outwardly in 6 billion mostly "nobodies" within a universe of continual flux. He knows the selfish jaundice of both men and women in a relationship and how with any length of time it inflicts the relationship with the disease that is an extension of the two. He has been there and done that. He had one steady girlfriend but the relationship was hard to maintain when swirling colorful treats in many edible shapes, smells, and voices of varying feminine nectar fell through the orifices of his senses. It does not bother him to be no one special. It does not bother him to be the same as "regular guys" although most of them have consistent names, nicknames, or aliases they do not cower from. They make up the masses; and the masses are a brute force to which he is one of the billions. When a thing or a way of being exists in large numbers, he supposes, it is bound to be right. At a large table in front of an open book, with fingertips he grazes an area of skin above his upper lip. The facial stubble, when he rubs it, gives him extra reinforcement in his vain embellishment of masculinity. It is a vain reinforcement that the litter of pornography he perused like a philomath in his car a few minutes before entering the library did not do. Even the insouciance that he artificially concocted there with the puff of a cigarette while waiting for the rain to soften enough to drive did not make him more conscious of his male vigor than a brief feel of facial stubble. There is little beyond sexual energy to define him. No fields, no disciplines, have awakened an internal voice. Not yet, not ever, he thinks. He is a man without a voice and such a man is most conscious of the primordial emotions of hating those who bar his pleasure and love toward those who facilitate it. Adagio-it was a somewhat forgotten word, which once popped into his head for the creation of an email address. The word has inadvertently been a perfect epitome of his slow mental activity for books. Slow in that respect, academics with their words and numbers in infinity have stood out like the awkward anachronisms of hieroglyphs chiseled into stone. It would seem ironic that someone who perceives books to be as lifeless as stones should be in a library watching the pages of a book occasionally turn under the draft of the ceiling fan when not under the directive of his own will. The book is of 20th century American art and contains a few examples of his mother's work. Only pleasures from pictures have had some vague calling or tugging; but then it has been pictures that have composed so much of his existence.
He had detoured from the interstate and came into the town to buy a sandwich and cola at a convenience store, which fostered the purchase of the newest issues of Playboy and Hustler as well. He is downtown because the heavy diluting of rain in this small town necessitated him to pull over to the side of the road and park his car. He is in the library because it was a two-block run from where he parked his car. The continual pounding of rain caused him to have to go to the bathroom sooner than what he would have done otherwise, for he is in all respects a follower of nature's suggestions. The bathroom was his impetus for entering the library. In the process of staring up at the fan to focus a second of hate toward it he sees a woman straightening her body after rising off the seat. She is at a table around 50 feet from that of his own. Her table is near a small wall of books. He regrets that he has not seen her legs slide on the shiny wood of the chair or her thighs rising up to him although imagined action can be continually repeated and he continually repeats it. Bound in black stockings, the legs go to the front desk where some hands scan titles of her videos.
"It seems nobody checks out books any longer. We've had to restrict the kids use of the internet upstairs. They'll do nothing but chat the whole day if nobody catches them and then before they leave they check out videos to take back home."
"Well, guess I should feel honored to be thought of as a kid when I'm nearly 42. I am really in a hurry so could you please…"
"All right."
For a minute if not longer there is a momentary lapse in the present before he becomes conscious of it again. Fueled on adrenalin and hunger, he finds himself walking behind her in the rain. He imagines himself catching up and offering his umbrella to her but she has one of her own and so he timidly tracks her from a distance. He imagines her dropping the keys to her car but the fates also do not allow him this prop. He sees her get in but imagines her already seated with the door shut but unable to start the car. This does not happen either. He is unable to monitor himself. Like a child he distances himself from his actions. He is feeling the movements of someone else's body. Will has been frozen in time. There is a cold frozen constancy in his consciousness of the present moment. He finds himself knocking on the window. She rolls it down. He does not know what to say. She hasn't dropped one of her videos in the rain. He is as if naked and without a gift or prop with which to make a confidence. He stares at her mature beauty.
"Yes?" she asks.
"Looks like the air in one of your tires is low-this one on the driver's side."
"Oh. That shouldn't be the case. I filled them up yesterday. Do you…" She hesitates. "Do you think I need to come out and look?" Her words are circumspect. They are of one who does not trust his intentions. If only she could have said this with confidence, he thinks. He means that then he could have gotten the opportunity to have her outside. He could have pushed her under the car and accosted her with his body.
"No, maybe you'll get back home okay. I think you will. I just noticed it looked down a little."
She smiles. "Maybe because I am sitting here. Don't you think so? - Or maybe not." Her tone reflects more confidence in him and she treats his ideas with deference. She defers all mechanical judgments to men whom she supposes to have such genetic predispositions.
"It's low," he says, "but I think you'll get back fine. In the morning you can put air in it."
"Thanks so much. Okay." She pushes the button to roll up the window. He wants to stop its progression. He wants to put his hands in what is left of the closing hole and break out the window. He wants to shove himself on top of her, slap her down onto the passenger seat, and have his pleasure. As strong as that urge is, he is too socialized and can't break in. He retreats to his car. He subconsciously pushes in the lever of his umbrella and carries it, compacted, within his hands despite being drenched by rain. He feels the tightening of his sinuses. He is getting ill but he isn't aware of this. He passes a music store. He notices that his shoestring, to the left, is dragging onto the wet pavement like broken strings of a guitar. Passing an alley he envisions her there to be grasped like a guitar's case; yanking the instrument from its case; and letting his tongue strum. He feels incontinent and he notices his erection. He imagines her without ablution, naked to smell, touch, sight, and taste. He gets into his car, ties his shoe, pulls a handkerchief out of the glove compartment, and wipes the sweat and rain from his forehead and face. For a moment he rests his aching forehead against the rim of the steering wheel.
(1989: Houston)
Back from Allen Parkway, Gabriele pulled into the driveway of the house she and Betty rented. She drove beside three black girls at an adjacent property who were tilting back a large stone. As Gabriele opened her car door, she wondered what was underneath that had gotten their attention. It had to be a salamander, a gecko, or a swarm of large fire ants. A two-part skeleton of a midget in a partially underground ossuary wasn't in the realm of possibility; but whatever existed there, it caused their squeamish giggling. She felt a little squeamish, herself, at the thought of children grotesquely disgorging into her senses. What made it worse was the fact that they were there doing this when she was in such a need of finally reaching her home-her sanctuary. She thought about the Turk that had been decapitated twenty- three years earlier, although it seemed only days ago. Back then she had been as young as the youngest of the three girls whom she was now looking at.
She remembered how one of those bedeviled executioners let the head roll out of the bag, took it by the hair, and displayed it to the crowd before returning it to its basket-a basket that looked to the very young Gabriele as if it should be used for apples. Even so long ago she tacitly condemned the adult monsters that enjoyed the macabre and applauded such savagery in the name of justice. Still her monstrous father, her teacher, had inadvertently led her into that large life- changing enlightenment that was always arrived at from a corridor through the darkest abyss. Partially from being pushed along with the crowd and partially from human curiosity, he had shown her the loss of innocence through the realization that society, that lovely refinement of conveniences and kind neighboring policemen, was a horror. Even when so young, she intuitively guessed that Turkey was just an outward display of a refined and obscure savagery that had to be in all adult institutions regardless of what they were or the nations they were in. She didn't exactly think it but she felt it all the same. With tears that she could never shed and by grief, full empathy, and comradery for this unknown individual, she had walked into the full darkness of enlightenment. The sentiments for the slain man would remain dormant and mute in her thoughts all the rest of her life but the enlightenment, the darkness, would be more active in its behavioral influence.
Twenty-three years ago she imagined all children as the good and the innocent as she believed herself to be back then. That was before she went to school and learned what egocentric sadists they really were. For they, the masses, enjoyed the ruthlessness of the name callers whose arrows and vitriol of "Four eyes! Four eyes!" and "Piggy! Piggy!" toward two of her classmates was inexorable. How deeply ingrained was the hunter and the competitor in every child. She could see it in the sports they played together. She could see it in the spelling bees. She could see it in the name-calling, which was an aversion toward anybody who was different. Differences might be deleterious to the concept of the tribe. It was the corollary of the need to survive that existed atavistically and came about instinctually as a response passed on from the youngest of the earliest Homo sapiens. It was they who, as sexually reproductive adults, passed on the knowledge of their inner children. Gabriele was so fortified that attempts at name-calling directed toward her personally did not even scathe her. But when the name callers and all their tacit accomplices shot their arrows and threw buckets of vitriol at the fat girl and the girl with glasses, her wrath was also implacable. She would beat up the worst of these tiny savages. Innocent expressions and gauche interactions of ostensibly pure children belied what the offspring of these adult monsters were really like; and as if misogyny and mis-himony were not enough, such incidents caused both mis- girlony and mis-boyany. Normally such an abnormality of four misses would constitute the misanthropy of serial or spree killers but Gabriele did not feel much misanthropy.
Her ideas, she knew, were as rare as a Tennessee Coneflower or a Black Outhouse Hollyhock-both of which bordered on extinction. They were as ineffable as the very universe she resided in and as pessimistic as Hobbes' social contract theory (although to her who often liked dressing up in black, black was not pessimistic being the color of intrigue and enlightenment). She believed that Hobbes was somewhat wrong in thinking that humans suppressed their own savagery through the common necessity of not wanting to be murdered in their beds. The contract wasn't as simple as that alone. The adult Gabriele thought that through society small doses of competitive cunning could be exuded in basic business competition and politics for the whole duration of one's long life. The common workers left out of both, if given a high enough salary, would not be anarchists or proletariat revolutionaries if they had enough money to go to action packed movies or sports stadiums, buy whores once in a while, or other benign conduits of savagery. In short, she believed that society came about for the purpose of giving its members a long lifetime of small doses of savagery instead of a few episodes of gluttonous devouring that could cause one to be murdered rather easily. She wasn't sure of the specifics. She hadn't thought it worthy of her time to think them out in an obscure philosophical treatise. Besides, figuring out why the dog bit the bone wouldn't stop the biting.
"What are you doing, girls?" Gabriele smiled at them and walked toward the stone.
"Wer' gonna killem, Lady," said the eldest girl.
"What per se are you hoping to rob of a life?"
"Lady'speakin' Shakespeare," said the eldest.
"Wer' gonna open these lizzardheads like coconuts and pull out the brains and give'em to you, Lady, so that you can have breakfast," elucidated the second one.
They laughed and Gabriele smiled widely, fully amused by their non- feminine creative play. "My ladies, methinks thou art so nice, but unfortunately I've already had breakfast."
"Lady'speakin Shakespeare again," said the first one.
"Oh, that Lady," scowled the second one playfully.
"Yeah, it's the Shakespeare language," continued the first, "But I'm good at figerin'out Morse code so I can do this. There's more English in Shakespeare than in Morse code. She's meanin' she already had breakfast but I don't think that matters none. It ain't an issue."
"Yeah-ain't anissue— any o'that," mimicked the second one.
"You can put it in your 'frigerator," said the oldest
"Pootit in your 'frigerator" said the third and smallest of the girls. The two eldest girls laughed at her intrusion into the conversation. Everybody began to laugh including Gabriele.
"No," Gabriele said, "The refrigerator is full." She was quickly becoming serious. She saw sharp little stones in the hands of the eldest one. Even a child was a brutal force or, at any rate, immolated in play the brutality of life on the planet. She sighed and took away their instruments of war. She wanted to scold them but there was no way to scold all humanity of the past, present, and future. Only a crazed individual would not be cognizant of their limitations.
"Damned if she done takenway the lizzardknife," said the second one in disbelief. To the luck of all concerned Gabriele didn't hear them and wasn't even aware that one of them tried to spit at her from behind as she was walking toward the house. She climbed up the stairs to where she and Betty were living.
She hoped that Betty would not be there. She needed some time alone to be in that harmony within and to probe the endless fathoms of her probity and intelligence without the intrusions of the outside world. Even in childhood, Gabriele thought, she had projected an aloof quality of a stereotypical German. A sotto voce current in her brain called "conscience" when in fact it was nothing but a less dominant or minority opinion that was disgruntled at being such chastised her for her "bitchiness" (an indifference that both barked and bit). Still, she told herself, it did not matter. How was a self an extension of others? When she was born did she bring them into existence, and when she died would the human race cease to exist? People came and went as they should and friendship was merely for those of feeble ideas needing to be reinforced by the herd. For her whose ideas were such steady companions and was real within herself without needing to be reflected in her associations with others what need had she of the Betties of the world. She had never met a German whose example confuted the stereotype. She remembered the few times that her father took her to a beach along the East Coast and the myriad times when he took her to the beaches in Turkey. She always wandered to one side of the beach, culling certain miscellaneous seashells to examine as her father sojourned away from her with pensive and hard expressions, sunk in his own mind. The expressions told her that he savored the idea of being alone in his own cold, watery depth. Despite the fact that he had taken her to the execution, she loved him most as far as people were concerned.
She turned her key in the doorknob and opened her part of the house. She thought, "The human mind when opened up has, at its crypt, humanity." Particularly for herself she loathed the idea of being a social creature. She often thought of her roommate each day of each semester, the homeless grass chewing Filipino whom a woman at the Laundromat nicknamed the botanist, professors, her family, and acquaintances: they all made up her reality. She did forget about Betty during vacations and she forgot about her aunt, uncle, and cousins except during the vacations but she couldn't quite escape thinking about them altogether. Overall, she didn't have much sentiment toward anyone, and they could easily be shaken and faded from her memory once she was away.
Betty was usually an early riser, but not hearing any noise in the kitchen or living room, Gabriele at first assumed she was sleeping. She checked all the rooms but they were empty except in sound, where a small television remained turned on. A newscaster was discussing the economic powers of the East with reference to the new economic experiments in the Soviet Union and China. "The whole f— world is West," thought Gabriele. She felt that democracy was as much an experiment as communism: an experiment on how free to be greedy things could get without entirely destroying the ecology that was the base of it all whereas the original communism of Trotsky was an experiment on how equal life could get and still be bearable in its world of frightened and impoverished clones. It all missed the mark as far as she was concerned. If each and every person was not granted food, shelter, and a profession by which to feel worthy (if indeed there were worthy professions, a question that she posed to herself) all of these socioeconomic systems were nothing to her but debauchery. She contemplated the fate of the homeless Filipino: wasn't she quite the hypocrite to say that the world was wretched to not offer him assistance that would pull him from the streets and away from feeling disoriented and hearing voices in his own head when she didn't care to bring him into her apartment. Still, she didn't want him any more than she would want a tick, a cockroach, or a bedbug. If he wanted to come into her apartment and be Betty's lover, after the last bag was put into her car, that was another thing altogether.
The living room had the smell of light and stagnant smoke of Betty's cigars. Betty, she thought, must have recently gone to another final examination. It was best that way. With her gone Gabriele would not have to coerce some giggling and mild sighs as she packed her racket ball paddle with other items. There would be pleasant but vague and generalized memories of their racket ball entertainment together but, to be sociable, she would have to affect some maudlin sentiments of loss. She would need to feign loss particularly about them living together as if it had made them conjoined spiritually although obviously not Siamese twins. She would have to use the width of her arms to symbolize an embrace (a real embrace would have been impossible when a sexual embrace with a man was bad enough). She quickly entered the bathroom to take a shower that might wash away any odor of the man she had slept with; packed more of her things; saluted the new communism in her heart; snickered inside at the thought that Japan had out-capitalized the West the way it tried to out-imperialize the imperialists; turned off the television, and left with the remaining two boxes. She swerved off the drive, veering somewhat near the girls in her eagerness to leave.
"What's wrong with you, woman?" yelled the eldest one.
"What's wrong with you, nigga" yelled the little black girl full of energy. The girl did not know the full pejorative nature of the word nor the fact that Gabriele, being white, could not be a Negro unless one were to label her such for the black clothing she often wore. The other two stood with legs arched and bulging hominid-like—the eldest with right arm erect and out from her body and the hand half-clenched into a fist. Gabriele saw this from the mirror. She hadn't driven that close to the girls so she thought their reaction was unjustified. The fact that she thought they looked like hominoids had nothing to do with their skin color nor their nonstandard use of language but her own aversion toward children and adults based upon the sensitivities she had as a young child and the fact that these girls were pelting the top of her car with clods. She returned to the drive. "Hey!" she yelled from the window. "Your mother's insurance is gonna pay for any damage. You are lucky that I'm not opening my car door because if I were to get you I would -" she had to stop herself. Whatever she said under these circumstances could only put violence and hatred into their callow minds, exacerbating their nature as hers, so prone to its aggressive flares. She could only make it worse than what it would be if these children were merely left to glower and ponder in silence as she was now doing. And yet there was little delectation in self-restraint. A fully sociable being was one who liked to provoke responses positive or negative like billiard balls banging against each other. One felt alive based upon the vibrations gained from being knocked around; and as eremitic and misanthropic as she was, Gabriele was a girl who liked her fun. She saw the clods of dirt in their hands and the dirt on the windshield. She slowly got out of the door, which caused them to back away a few steps. She didn't look at them but instead walked around her car. Seeing that no damage had occured, she then returned to the driver's seat. She decided to leave the matter alone so she spit a cannon ball of chewing tobacco toward the girls and ventured onward. The cannon ball was the penalty phase. After all, she did not want them to think that they could pelt motorists with impunity. Still she imagined the sullied tribulation that she must have caused the younger one. She could feel the devastating humiliation that perhaps they all felt at a wad of snuff coming at them like a projectile. She hoped that they would not interpret it as racial hatred. She felt the horror behind what she had done and yet there was nothing she could do. If she were to stop the car and return to them to apologize they would probably pelt her and the car both with stones. She disliked egocentric children. She even disliked the refugee children whom she worked with part-time until two days ago although she camouflaged it in professionalism. She knew that if only human beings were able to pierce their protective bubbles they would find that one genuine love within, that innate tender need to be liked, cared about, and have one's human worth confirmed and an identification of this sentiment in other sentient beings. Still the world was what it was and she told herself that if she were to return she would be stoned or clodded based upon their whims.
In this odd corner behind the skyscrapers and away from the Houston Symphony, the Meneil Collection with its engravings of Aten and Ptah, the Rothko Chapel, the Astrodome, the Miller Theatre in Herman Park, the University of St. Thomas, the University of Houston, and her Rice University, nothing touched her sense of imagination so much as the ghettos strewn around them. She admired the simple life burrowed away from the congested avarice of the city's center. She felt compassion for the poorest of the poor who had to be in bleak circumstances but she could not do anything in her two years in Houston but take photographs of the infamy of the free enterprise system and continue with her job working with refugees. She didn't do all that much. She sat with the Ugandans and the Kenyans on the porches of refugee houses and with them looked onto the skyscrapers at the approach of dusk. Driving in her car, she could remember the Vietnamese families clogging the sinks of the refugee houses with rice; the sight and smell of the blood of rotting vegetables in the refrigerators of those houses; the fire ants that stung her around the refugee houses; mowing the yards when she couldn't budge the refugees to do it; the disputes over whose food was in the refrigerators or how much clothing she was supposed to supply them with, and how the Ugandans tended to accumulate trash without ever emptying it. She remembered Senor Sanchez. Making a detour back into the city from the interstate, she decided to go to the refugee houses and say "goodbye" even though a couple days ago she had chosen not to tell the refugees that she was leaving in her usual obdurate opposition to sentiment. She could imagine herself telling Senor Sanchez about her immediate departure and him saying, "Heaven forbid, you are really leaving us now that you have a Master's in psychology from a great university?." She would say, "Yes, I always leave when I get Master's degrees. This one from a great university equalizes a not so great one in criminology at Emporia University." "Do you have two Master's degrees?" "Yes," she would say, "I collect them." "What will you do with your knowledge?" he would ask. "Be a better person for it and that is all. I'll sit on my butt in the future." "Oh, very good," he would say. "Maybe you can put Fidel Castro on your lap while you sit and get him to purr like a kitten." "Oh, what an excellent idea," she would say.
Senor Sanchez came from Havana. On that first day of their meeting she gave him clothes from the Welcome Center, which he took. She put food in the refrigerator and yet he would rarely eat it. "Necesito volver a Miami, orita! Esta lugar"-and there he rambled off in passionate Cuban speed which she did not understand. They sat on the porch to the Welcome Center. Gabriele handed him a pen and paper but his calligraphy was not legible. "Orita? Que significa "orita?" she asked. He snapped his fingers fiercely and then rambled incommunicably. Her eyes became stiff and large in her detest of his irascibility. Sanchez would always whistle for her attention. Then he would laugh at her hating eyes; whistle again; look up in the air, and flap his arms in an attempt to have her get him something. Partial or complete hunger strikes, she told him in Spanish would not hasten his trip back to Miami but only make his stay intolerable for everyone.
"But you buy shit for us to eat!" he stormed one time.
"I'd have trouble getting it down too," she admitted. "Suit yourself. If you die defiantly you will be my personal hero but the carcass will stay in Houston. We don't ship carcasses to Miami," she said. He was her personal favorite.
The Cubans told her one time that the U.S. was responsible for putting Fidel Castro into power since the Cuban masses needed to support any man whose rhetoric condemned American investments and the American control of their economy; and her response was, "Well, which is it-if you hate the guy so much it seems ridiculous to use such an argument even though it does have some truth. I know if I were to engage him he would be a pussycat purring on my lap and you guys could make any political cartoon on him you pleased." The Africans once said that the military cost of their civil wars were the result of Western colonial boundaries fusing incompatible tribes into nations, keeping Africa from being able to feed herself; and her response was, "Well, which is it— If you hate the idea of imperialism why are we speaking in English now; and why is your government trying to lure in foreign investment?" When the older Vietnamese individuals mentioned the war she listened to their stories intensely through a rough translation. She listened to life's horror and the ensuing trauma. That was all she could do. The past and the future did not exist but traumas of the past went on perpetually. Once she had to translate Thuc's "New House Rules for Immigrants" to the Latinos as they sat before her on metal seats. They were lectured that the food given to them should be put in boxes and set in the refrigerators so that they would know that the food was being distributed equally and without a cause for bickering. Thuc nodded her Vietnamese face at Gabriele's ostensible translations when really Gabriele was only giving a synopsis of what was being said with commentary disparaging of the YMCA treatment of its refugees and a system that was generally f—