"You Americans are lucky. You can go here and there and stay as long as you want— wherever you dream. Most Americans just step into Tijuana just to say they have been in Mexico but you dream about studying here and do it. It isn't much of a paradise—this place. Maybe you have gone to other places." Gabriele gave an abridged account of the places where she had lived.
"To travel is good; but if it was me to do something as this I think I would be dizzy to stay a long time in one place and then another place to meet and to lose people."
"Strangely, it has made me dizzy; but not from the travels really. Maybe a bit from the travels — a combination of things. Before this I never needed anyone. I had my own convictions, my own ways, and my own mode of life. When I was younger I removed men like ticks a lot of the time, screwed and bit off their heads some of the time—not really but metaphorically, and thought of them — everybody really — as unwanted distractions on my studies and independence most of the time. I never felt lost and lonely until I was married and was living in Japan."
"There isn't a more lonely thing than this to live together with someone," commented Hilda. She changed to Spanish. "People don't grow together. They grow apart if they are capable of any growth at all— especially if they started out as strangers." To Gabriele nothing could be said that was any truer. These ideas were identical to her own even if hers were as yet kept confined into the cellar of her thoughts (a place she restrained all ideas until they seemed more incontrovertible). To hear these secret ideas that still had not dispersed widely in her own brain come from someone else's mouth was startling. So rarely did Gabriele hear truth that she often imagined it as something that only she conceptualized or fabricated. Her muddy puddles of cynicism were evaporating under the light of the sun. Gabriele smiled her first real smile in months.
Hilda elaborated that this friend of the sister's boss, Stranger X, also from Guadalajara like her family, promised to her father that if married to Hilda he would contribute to the family's household expenses and pay for Hilda' s education. The father told him that if Hilda consented so would he.
"It was a practical decision, really."
Gabriele nodded distastefully. The calculative and the irrational were always in a woman's head when entertaining marriage. All people had to prostitute themselves a little to make a living but, according to Gabriele's assessment, women who contemplated marriage were complete whores. She almost felt sorry for men if it were not for loathing them so much. Hilda was a whore for knowledge and so this got Gabriele's approval. "Go on. I'm listening," said Gabriele.
Hilda told her that she had majored in health and physical fitness at the community college. She graduated but any plans to teach went awry in a pregnancy, a miscarriage, and then some years of housekeeping. But when her husband lost interest in her for her infertility and inability to carry a child when they had undergone such expense and effort to conceive one through a fertility clinic, she stopped taking care of the house and got a servant. This allowed her to teach aerobics.
Gabriele listened intensely while her eyes glanced at the cart of wet clothes, which seemed to her like the great hills of Tijuana dirt but in a medley of colors and fabrics.
"Why are you really living here in Tijuana? Why not Puerta Vallerta or MexicoCity?" Hilda suddenly asked.
Gabriele began spacing her words into fragments and some of the fragments contained space as if her mind were moving up and down those hills across all of the distant colonias, the ocean, and into the past. She said that for a few weeks, now, she had been staying in a room of a house owned by a "nice woman." She just wanted to learn her Spanish here and she wanted to learn of simplicity. "I thought moving here would improve me somehow— Suppose it hasn't," she prevaricated. Hilda, who now doubted the sincerity of the conversation, was beginning to withdraw her attention; so sensing this Gabriele confessed. "The truth is that when I got married I lost myself to a wifely role — domesticated Betty Crocker crap and being an unpaid cashier/assistant manager for my husband's business. When I wasn't at my shift I was learning how to cook regular western food since he hated Japanese food—sushi, mizu soup, soba, and all that stuff. Of course, washing his clothes and ironing his shirts. In the meantime he was seeing someone—a friend…an employee who was dear to us." She chuckled. "Not someone but the same gender — a man. He was seeing a man. After the divorce I came back to the states. I didn't know where to go so I followed my own shadow and came here."
Hilda looked at her empathetically. She spoke softly. "So many people come to this ugly place for one reason or another. Some work in the American and Japanese factories. They often live in groups so they can afford rent. They earn 150 pesos each week, but what can they do? They tell themselves that a job like this is better than none. For others Tijuana is a place to sell souvenirs to the American gringos. They sell this and that on cardboard tables and they survive. It is a place for a young woman to hope that one of the American naval officers that she sells herself to will actually want more than a…como se dice… Anyhow, not being used for sex — a real relationship. It is where those lacking emotional resources can recover."
Gabriele caught the air before it came out of her mouth as rude chortling. "Lacking emotional resources" …th she hadn't heard a more apt and erroneous phrase to describe herself; but she liked how artfully Hilda used such laconic sentences to show understanding, to make the two women's experiences cognate, and to pull the conversation out of the dead-end of the personal domain.
Gabriele smiled thoughtfully with her closed lips. She was pleased that the serendipitous heat so early in the morning had carried her here the way birds, without having to flap their wings, soared on waves of solar energy that were refracted from the ground. She now felt that she was soaring away from the flares of tortured memories—memories that if personified, seemed to think that she could somehow rescue them when the only rescue to be had was their own burial. She was at last leaving the pine trees and the snowy slopes where she had once skied with Kato and her husband. She was razing that raised foot to its burial pit and raising herself out of the inundations of yearning in the pools of Michael's retinas. She was no longer drowning in the deprivations that had fathered his unfulfilled pent-up yearnings or trapped in her own eyes and ideas for witnessing what she didn't care to see and, at that point, couldn't conclusively know. She was demolishing the ski lodge where her former self stood in front of that door of what was their room with mouth agape, key tightly clutched, and thoughts wandering lost here and there but aggravating her with recurrent questions of where she would "fit into the picture" should her husband's homosexual liaisons be more than a temporary and belated experimentation. For the first time in so long she no longer felt the inclination to pull a ski cap down over her face.
For Hilda sentiment had risen the previous year for warmth and stability and she clung to her husband's side, the old ogre that he was. She begged him to not leave each night and see this other woman or to see her but to not treat their marriage with such total indifference and contempt. If she had not loved him before she loved him desperately then; for to be rejected by an ogre made her feel uglier than the one rejecting her. She pontificated that love was a shared experience that could not be dropped one rainy Sunday when it was apparent from the first ten minutes of the televised soccer game who would be the winners, clearing the way for daily habitual liaisons thereafter.
She told Gabriele that, while they were living together that last year, she never knew who her husband saw. "It was probably a woman. I don't know. A Mexican man, when he is horny and bored, would get off in a hollow log but never his wife if she has disappointed him."
One night on the Guadalajara beltway, while she was returning to her empty home with her bags of groceries, there among distant lights in clusters like grounded stars, Hilda's headlights beamed on the sign "Tijuana." She felt that second where the new could not be avoided and that out there might be a little compassion toward her. She headed north to Baja California and then got a job as an aerobics teacher for the Municipal Sports and Cultural Center of Tijuana.
When their clothes were dry Gabriele invited Hilda to go to the movies. There in the darkness of the theatre she felt happy but uncomfortably pinned in by the wistful desire to touch the leathery silk of her friend's skin and this sense that to do so might bring on the demise of the friendship. As strange as this yearning, the fear, and the polarity of these opposites experienced together, was this peculiar sensation of needing to be embraced in the cocoon of Hilda's arms whereby she might, in this unconditional love of compassion and understanding, more smoothly reconnect the ridged pieces of self that she had cobbled together from a fragmented state early in life. She did not know if clasping her hand would endanger the friendship so she sat there and sweated with her hand in between both seats. And yet, strangely somewhere in the middle of the movie she coalesced Gabrielishly. She was restored in shared experience and understanding and this was all that she required.
She had felt similar emotions of physical repugnance toward Michael. Often, in their bed, with the enjoyment of feeling her body again after sex as his motives, she shunned him like a picnic that was infested with ants. The need for autonomy, hegemony, and harmony that comprised self-containment became her.
Still, in the last moments of the movie she curled her hand on her chin, smiled, and absorbed herself in light and sound presented as form. She thought about how Hilda had waited around for her clothes to dry and had helped her put them in the back of her car. The mystery of possibilities and implications to subtle gestures dangled above her like a toy of a musical crib.
When considering how marginally educated he was ("bare-assed with a tie within this professional world of masters and doctors" as the words of such deliberations), Sang Huin would succumb to the undertow and founder in the myriad oceanic fathoms of the lugubrious self. Each of those times descending deep in this silent abyss, he would remember those times of being in his parents' garage. There as a boy with his broken bicycle, he, the maladroit, could only fumble a feigned semblance of competence with the alien tools of his father's screwdriver and wrench. Mixed in smells of oil stained concrete there would be a feeling of ineptitude slowly trickling through him like the numbing poison of hemlock. Then there would come those excoriations of his father telling him that his inability to fix things made him good for nothing and this poison would dart through the ventricles of his heart and finish what the subtleties of drowning in oily, nebulous despair could not immediately do. Now, as back then, he believed that the comments of him being good for nothing were true even if now the negative judgment calls were for a litany of other unrelated issues.
Lackadaisical or indifferent (the intense, wanton drifter never even insouciant when going on rendezvous with his true decadent cravings), the hours of his days were often extended no further than going from one private lesson to another, to one gay sauna or another, and then back home to Saeng Seob within a somewhat hidden malaise. Still they were nexuses; and as fulsomely inconsequential as they might seem to others if they were able to peer into his sordid domain and not be repulsed by these orgies on tatami mats, still they were human connections; and it was human connections that were a man's life raft and dinghy when floating in the empty effluvia of self, water, space, and time. For they who were endowed with the ability to see ideas, sense an endeavor within them, and not only know a reality beyond the personal domain but experience a personal genius in the mission of transferring ideas to the world, they were their own buoyancy. And although Sang Huin could see that truth he was not of such an excellent make. His destiny would not be like those who were truly happy, they who knew felicity in themselves and that the outside world was inconsequential.
In meaning-seeking respites no different than at any other time of his Korean sojourn, he dabbled and danced with his Gabriele and, from buses, taxis, and subways, read the news about the U.S.A. (now in the thickets of guerrilla attacks from these liberated Iraqis who loathed the American intruders and devastators). He contemplated Americans' free expression of violent inclinations in movies, books, and life — violent inclinations clearly within the self or at least in himself, and dwelled in a lonely neediness that was still motivating him to seek out others in a neediness more akin to ductility than deference.
He got a part-time job as a sales representative at Rosemary Cosmetics since his mind still yearned to give the amorphous blob contained therein form, purpose, vocation, and meaning which still eluded him. His life in its quest for meaning was like the Bush administration's groping for these weapons of mass destruction to disprove the obvious: that Bush's hallucinated epiphany was similar to the sun stroked and deranged Akhenaten. As this "Shawn" needed secular meaning not in the material world, they needed to believe that the bushes were God's executioners in Iraq and elsewhere.
Like all dirty bluish-white collared Koreans in search of a vocation as well as a job, he wanted to work for a big firm: the bigger the company the less small he would seem to others and himself. This was a typical East Asian reaction; and the concept that a man was no more than who he associated himself with was applicable even to one like Sang Huin ("Shawn"), as queer as he was. Rosemary Cosmetics was no Samsung in size nor did it have much merit in global commerce; but this was his only opportunity at present and from it he hoped it would be his mold making him into something solid and patterned or at least not a deciduous, tenuous leaf tossed erratically with every breeze. He wanted to be connected and to no longer be tortured by those discombobulated seconds when his self did not register itself— a time (in his case usually on the bus between private lessons) when one's consciousness had a rupture, thoughts seemed even more evanescent, remembered heads of the people of the past (including his deceased father and sister) got tangled up on the wrong bodies or the features of those faces became effaced or alloyed with others' features, and not having the destination of meaning, the self thus tripped over itself directionlessly.
But a week into contacting long-term overseas customers to advertise new cosmetics, reestablish relationships by offering a substantial supply of free samples, and processing orders on the telephone in a rather menial position that had no guarantee of leading to something bigger he became less hopeful. Early into the job he knew that he was just one more cog in one more machine. Early into the job he knew that it would not make him into this vague, nebulous concept of a man that he only half-sensed even if fully and wistfully desired; so he was lost now as he was lost then. But, fortunately for him he was not entirely lost—almost entirely lost and ineluctably if not indelibly so but not entirely lost in the complex labyrinth of the thickets of darkness that was in society and nature as well as one's human nature.
He had his hallowed hobbies which always kept him from wanting to slit his wrist—solitary hobbies that in one form or another had saved the oversensitive boy who had felt that his father was afraid of one-on- one contact with him just as they saved him now. Now the cello was abandoned for the melancholic sounds of the shokohachi but Gabriele remained steadfast. She was his attempt to find simple and innocuous pleasure and lasting truths that were not in sordid and temporarily enflaming raptures of ecstasy. She was his higher consciousness, his higher authority.
Sang Huin was a city boy designed for Seoul. He liked seeing dual soldiers guarding each portal of every underpass; the dark green military buses that waited in Chongno Sam Ga, at Yongsei University, and no doubt in countless sectors of this sprawling mega city; he liked the drama of tall skyscrapers undaunted by besieging clouds, traffic rushing here and there as if to foment the provincial sleepiness of Hanguk society, the variety of people he would encounter in what was on whole a rather homogenous group of kimchee-eating, child-rearing, follow-the- leader advocates, and especially passing belatedly through the remnants of tear gas that had been targeted on boisterous anti-US troop demonstrations. He liked window shopping through stores that had Buddhist icons; the sexy galaxy of city lights scintillating like stars; being in a city where differences were as inconspicuous as rolling pebbles in an avalanche; the random subway passengers who sometimes, after buying their tickets, would see him using an English map and ask him in English if he were lost; the exhilaration of speaking in English with a probable chance that someone in the immediate area would understand him; and the many American alternatives to Korean restaurants (shiktangs). He liked buying groceries—those few he got—beneath department stores; purchasing expensive clothes for Seong Seob who still resonated as his makeshift family even if he could not relate to him any more than anyone else; the big supply of English books in various bookstores; sex and deodorant. The sex was self- explanatory: he had a true weakness to touch beautiful things the way he used to stroke the legged panty-hose of his grandmother when sitting on her lap so as to feel the friction and static against his fingers. As much as he not only wanted to end his promiscuity but sever sexuality completely for the rationale that pleasure bonding was a selfish love that stunted his ability to care for someone altruistically, he was unable or unwilling to do it. The touch, smell, and taste of human flesh were inordinate delights that bypassed his abstemious and acetic intentions. And as for deodorant, he, a Korean, did not sweat much, but he, an American, needed it to feel as if he were not entirely naked. In Seoul, at least, deodorant was not impossible to find.
Maybe having lived in Umsong for half a year contributed to his metropolitan enthusiasm since there he was miserable with a malaise ameliorated a little only on rare occasions of discovering M&M chocolate candies, pancake mixes, Fruit Loops, and Fruit-of-the-Looms on store shelves. His stay in Umsong had been like a fearful boy scout in a tent on a camping expedition—a child looking at black clouds from his small portal, and wishing to again restake his homestead in the less ominous domain of his parents' back yard. Still, the isolation had its beauty: mountainous green hills near lush, green rice fields, and some good times such as when he and Yang Kwam made their way down a trail in the forest and then spent the night at the Umsong Stadium sleeping on the vast green Astroturf in the midst of empty yellow seats and stars.
For some brief minutes one Saturday after waking in darkness Sang Huin did not know where he was at. He could not get his baring. He was still in the dream remake of an incident that happened to him immediately before he began to write Gabriele—a haunting memory in a dreamonized state. It was not unlike others he had experienced such as those of his mother's aloneness when going from the need to water one plant and then the next (an idea extrapolated consciously and repressed to his subconscious from the letters she sent to him), or dragging his sister by the hair and into a forest so that he could stand there and watch as she was gang raped to death. Dreams were, of many things, seeing the self's place in the environment and judging of itself as one cloud or part of the function of a group of clouds.
The dream of his sister was a major literal distortion of the reality it was based upon, but that was not the case with this one that he had just awakened from. It, like the plant-watering dream, had more of a literal base. It pertained to the Korean girlfriend whom he was involved with when he first came to Chongju. In the dream, as in reality, she said, "You can get a good job teaching at a private high school—I don't understand why you won't. If you do this, then with your money and my money we could have a good life together. We could make a family." He sensed that she would use him the way any woman studded pregnancies from infatuated man for children who would be her, the woman's, happiness. He sensed how a male slave was compelled to toil as a provider to an early demise because of the allure of a woman; and then he told her, "Living petty selfish lives tree hunting, investing money, house remodeling, complaining about taxes and the kids' dental bills. No thanks." It was the first time a thought so critical of his parents had materialized in his mind from all those repressed feelings that had been smashed under filial respect in accordance with Korean etiquette. If it weren't for this calculating feminine conniving, the thought of a normal life with her would have seemed at certain moments as pleasurable as having one's tongue slicing through ice cream. The sensation of eating the vanilla of a woman's cold skin might have obfuscated the knowledge of the forthcoming tonsillectomy. Her eyes were drawing him in. They were like the placid Great Lakes at night and they sparkled like the surface of the waters at the occasional passing of boats. The light from the traffic was her scheming thoughts. "I'm going to have your baby," she averred as if this solidified the relationship. "Abort it," he demanded. He hadn't been effete on that real occasion but the dream that awakened him had a more masculine firmness of will that was not his own; and hers was a mellifluous, inveigling sound surreal and harmonious as waves brushing against the beach. "Abort it!" he reiterated, "or I'll - - "
Not able to shake off the dream for a few minutes it was as if he were a very old and one night the sleep that was supposed to sort his thoughts, feelings, and sensory details into files of meaning and dates of occurrence had been ransacked and here he was on his hands and knees groping about the room trying to pick up scattered paper that had once been the files of himself. It was as if he were crawling around scavenging for bits of himself, not heeding the horrified calls of his old wife who nervously maundered her concerns to him from the bed.
People had come and gone incessantly from his life (the most important being his sister—taken from him by American violence not the least of which was his own). Recently Sang Ki and Yang Kwam vanished from his life; but in all, these phantoms appeared and disappeared without rhyme or reason like the changeable fish in the small aquarium belonging to Seong Seob's cousin—there at a given time and then gone. He sat up in his bed only to become instantaneously albeit vaguely cognizant that he was at home in Seoul even if he was not really sure what home was. He stared at that body next to him. It was the same body that was always there. In ways this gentle and cautious being of a few mundane habits was so known and yet it was alien in most respects. Sometimes he thought that Saeng Seob elected to be part of this relationship and sometimes it seemed as if this friend thought of himself as a victimized participant. The latter could be sensed there amidst tacit clues: a despondent sigh, a pleasant tone of voice belied by pressed angry lips, indifference to sexual pursuits, or rehashing his wish to study English literature in America if only he had the money to do it. The tacit, when discerned, was Saeng Seob's coming to terms with antithetical summations of the relationship. The compromise was a suggestion that when choosing between two disagreeable choices he preferred an unconventional relationship with Sang Huin to the weathering of belittling comments from the cousin. It wasn't much of a compliment for in all it was a complement that this relationship existed for whatever time it might last and nothing more than this. Also Saeng Seob's tepidity did not exactly engender within Sang Huin the wish to possess another: this "virtue" that was monogamy.
The water of his saliva — warm, wet, and active — barely squeezed down the empty hollows of a constricted area of his parched throat. He put on his bathrobe and went to the bathroom sink. He sipped some bottled water that was on the counter and splashed cold water across his face. He looked at his handsome face in the mirror. It was so fervid in its seriousness and intensity. Anything that bright had to go out fast. The idea of getting to be an old gay man like a crumbled old leaf scooting around aimlessly in the breezes was a thought hideous enough to trigger off random suicidal aspirations. He doubted that any man's life near completion constituted much but to be an old faggot without family and rootedness seemed to him a horror that he did not want to imagine. He was young now but he knew that the jesters of the years stuck their tongues out at mortality and ran off quickly to hide someplace. His childhood had absconded this way.
He remembered wishing to cut his wrist during the trial of his sister's murderer. The unwitting accomplice that he was, his body (even more then now) had ached in burdensome guilt. Now, with hindsight, he firmly believed that she would have run back to the power and virility of this successful, married man no matter what he would have done. Back then she plead for a sanctuary from the one who owned her in the pleasure of love; but even if he had locked her in her room, instead of dragging her back to him, on her own she would have gone to the greed, lust, and ambition that were her interpretation of the American dream. He knew this at the trial but it did not mitigate his guilt. Back then the horror, the senselessness, the rape and the slaughtering that were alleged but unproven with the rotting and effacing of time, the acquittal, and the general emptiness carried him off to a horror and disconcerted void worse than death. It was a disconcerted space of months as a walking mannequin with that one keen perception of seeing how the darkness of selfishness and destruction were there in all human pursuits. He walked around the living room. He looked at the clock. It was now 5:30. He stared out of the window onto the traffic of Seoul. He hoped that Seong Seob did not hate his life with him. He prayed that he didn't. There was no indication that he did although he was not blind to Sang Huin's promiscuity. Maybe, he thought, he should release Seong Seob: first experiences did not make any man entrapped in an embedded pattern. What they had was innocuous to him but to pursue it any further might distort the man that Seong Seob might become. Sang Huin sighed and went back to their bedroom. His fingers slid through a lock of hair on his friend's head. After much effort he went to sleep.
There in his dreams was this Yang Lin/Shang Ah/"Lucky" character (He never knew what his name really was) whom he had met that time in Seoul. In ways it was him, that one who wanted to become a woman and had been envious of a bride posing for pictures at Toksugum Palace in the Chongno Sam-ga area of Seoul, but his features were more spread out, his nose more like a pig, and he had a dark brown Southeast Asian pigment. He was an emaciated "money boy" with a book bag swung onto a bony shoulder; and he was wearing torn jeans, a grey t-shirt and the rife stink of his rotting skin. He saw him but in Gabriele's eyes. He accosted her timidly as she was drawing the reflection of Wat Phra Kaeo (the Grand Palace): its golden cupolas, stupas, and high triangular roofs shimmering silver in a fountain that pigeons were using as a bath. She knew his and her plight instantly: suffering was there, pulling decades from his skin and misery was intruding on her contemplation of beauty. It was often that way for artists, for the jungle, beautiful as it might seem from the external view of its thickets, was a truculent horror for those with no special skills or who possessed unappreciated uniqueness; and she smiled painfully at ineluctable fate with its ensuing moral obligations. She asked if he would allow her to sketch him and he agreed. He said that he had been living on the streets for one year; that his mother and brother were living in Rattchaburi; that his father died when he was nine years old; that sleeping on the streets was "danger"; and that sometimes "nice" people would talk with him when he walked around the park, but not often.
This was all she knew of him from dearth, shaky, timid words of clogged superfluous emotion and the deep swallows of his saliva. She fed him and this ductile creature began to follow her from a distance after they said their goodbyes as if repudiating the meaning of the word lest it be too disconcerting. She had guessed that it would probably be as this. Repressing her contempt for Catholicism, she took him to St. Joseph's High School on Convent Road and the scrutinizing hope-builder of a nun there referred her to the Holy Redeemers and the hope-builder of a priest there re-inquisitioned him and told her to come the following day at 2:00 when the St. Vincent volunteers would arrive. The priest was unwilling to even give him a corner of a room for some hours leading to the interview so after taking him to Big C to buy him some clothes she then took him to her hotel room for she did not want to lose him to the streets. She mothered him to compensate for the lack of mothering she had done with her own son. He gave her the gesture of the "wai" [wh-I] and stammered his gentle "thank you very much" with every glass of water that she poured for him, the soap and towel which she handed to him, and the cushions and blankets that she laid out for him. The St. Vincent De Paul volunteers re-reinquisitioned him at the church but through polite reticence, a taciturn distrust of social services, or saturnine despondency from so much time alone on the streets he continued his polite statements that he didn't want any help. But she insisted that he did and went with him two hours through congested traffic, the bane of Bangkok, to this referral. When the Maryknoll brothers in the migrant workers' office reneged on their promise, they went the two hour ride back from whence they came even though she just wanted to reject the fragile creature into the thickets of buses, cars, motorcycles, tuc tucs, buses, and the heavy black trails of carbon monoxide. Tired and sick from a migraine, she returned to the priest at Holy Redeemer who had indifferently volleyed her to the St. Vincent charities. In the priest's office at the rectory she was supercilious and fulminated her derision of those whose organizational name was a misnomer, they whose congregations were foreign capitalists whom the church establishment would never alienate, and they, these emissaries of the Pope, whose ideas of human worth was just the mimicking of their donors. She felt anguish for this Thai boy and all of the myriad throwaways of the planet who were volleyed here and there indiscriminately and if she had been more like a woman she would have cried even if the anguish was beyond tears. She decided to redeem him herself with her consistent presence even if he was AIDS ridden (a distinct possibility), their conversation was palaver (a certainty), and even if she had to stay in Bangkok another month or two for his sake (an inevitability). But one day at the swimming pool he stood there looking wistfully at those his age without stepping into the water. She saw what she had seen when she sketched him that day at the Grand Palace. Then, his wistful stare was directed toward untainted soccer players engaged, as boys, in simple pleasures which he would never be able to partake in. He twitched and stammered out to her that he needed drugs, men, and money, that the bruise on his arm wasn't really from a dog as if she had believed that it was, and that she should let him go. Fervent vacuums of passion were sucking him into the black hole within but when he packed his things he wouldn't leave. He just sat there on the floor near some rolled-up blankets in incessant dazed ambivalence until she at last told him to unpack. The next morning, from being weakened by the evening's migraine or from the restoration of common sense, she was insistent that he go begging like a monk and leave her alone. He kow- towed to her myriad times, began to cry, and said that she was too good for him. He averred that he would not return. She told him that was fine and that she wished him good luck but when he was gone she blamed herself for not giving him a few days of complete sanctuary from the streets. That evening, after a passing thunderstorm, he knocked and anxiously slid a card under the door. When she opened the door the elevator door had closed.
When he woke up again he could hear the gusts of wind and the movement of traffic through the open window. There were the smells of dogs beneath the tattered screen—the living as opposed to the cooked version thought by Koreans to rejuvenate the body as much as ginseng. There was also that peculiar amalgamation of odors which was of evaporating urine-on-sidewalk particles, and the faint exhaust of cars. There was the light of early morning and it all excited him. He became conscious of the slight snoring of his special friend and he knew that this sound was beautiful because he cared about him for otherwise it would have been an unbearable annoyance.
In mid-afternoon they went swimming. He watched Saeng Seob's dives which were more complex and aesthetic than any he would have been able to do. They were Saeng Seob's one action of bold maneuvers that always renewed Sang Huin's interest in him for creatures of motion like himself, he knew, could only admire base kinetic movements of the outside world. Movement outside moved the being within: fervid movement that flourished pleasurably in one's loins, harmonized with hormones amuck in the bloodstream, and revived dopamine that was to be as lightning through neurons and pleasure receptors of the brain.
When they returned the mail had come. The envelope of one letter had been forwarded from Chongju to Umsong and then Umsong to Seoul. It was from his mother who kept forgetting his address just as she forgot that he was living with a man to have a semblance of family the best that he was able to do. She wrote that she called the office of Shin Se Gue in Chongju but the telephone line was disconnected. He knew that she was not thinking either that it had moved to Umsong or that he was now in Seoul. Small ideas seemed to easily blow from the posting on the surface of her memory. She was suppressed in busy habitual action in which thoughts would have trouble permeating through her hardened, desiccated surface. Her daughter and concept of the world at large had been mauled by the hungers of the night so of course she was not alive - -just a hollow ambulatory thing like the swift moving cockroach. There was no real content in the letter apart from the lack of content itself: a patio table and a hummingbird feeder that she had bought, the wallpapering of another room for the umpteenth time, trees, roses, and tree roses which she had planted. He kept folding, unfolding, and refolding the empty envelope into and from smaller rectangles, felt warm and flushed, and could only think how there were not any relatives for the two of them apart from each other. There never would be more than this; and there would be nothing at all of family with her passing. In a flare of emotions that were sensitive but callow he wanted to "go home"- -to abandon every reality that he knew here by jumping through a child's portal.
He couldn't think what to say when he tried to write back to her so he went with Saeng Seob and his dog for a walk. In a park at dusk they heard the sounds of birds and crickets and they felt the majestically warm day trail and descend into a gentle cloak of coolness.
"Did you write your mother?" asked Saeng Seob.
"Didn't know what to say. I'll mail a traditional Korean doll to her or something. Where would I find something like that?"
"Wouldn't know," said Saeng Seob. The world was America now so why would he.
"Something. It doesn't matter what it is. Some type of clutter— things: she likes that sort of thing."
In one perspective she believed that these circumstances not so much governed by choice turned out to be quite liberating: the lackadaisical dereliction of motherhood which came about from that love of a man, and the divestiture of her life in Sapporo the result of a divorce from him. Within that perspective she was a child humbling herself to circumstance as if it were the mandate of a parent or god who would supply routine to process her directionless whims. In such a frame of mind she would think thoughts similar to this: "It doesn't have to be seen that way — as child abandonment—that sort of thing. Only simpletons would judge me or any other thoughtful woman considering and doing the same. This taking off of a role that does not fit me is just a disrobing in dawn to take a shower — and who is to say that my departure is not a predestined conclusion? I really didn't take off anything. Adagio is the one who took me off and took off to Kansas. Then I took the flight to Tokyo and then — What does any of it matter anyway? I haven't bothered to put on the mother garb equating it as garbled garbage but who is to say that it is not better for the boy in the long term? I would need a lower IQ to constrict myself in instinctual roles like a content biological robot. It is no more preposterous to believe in fate allowing me this contemplative time than it is to think that slipping $50.00 in a homeless person's cup would release him from pain and vice, that altruism perpetuates good, or that a loving god allows planes to slam into the World Trade Center Towers. If I am bad the creator of time and the universe is worse. Maybe any being that thinks outside the box would be perceived as bad by these simpletons — even God were these simpletons not so simple as to fear thinking Him evil." The failure of Her Vastness, Ms. Sangfroid, in motherhood and marriage the result of an adulteration in mixing, had been more than a bit discombobulating at the times when they occurred and they were even discombobulating now; but then and now she tried to address them as external details like an uncomfortable raincoat that she would wear for a time during a storm which she wouldn't be able to wait out. Since that time when she was a girl watching her reticent father's rejuvenation from a commune with himself in his solitary walks on the beach she had sought this acme of aloneness. Here it was, albeit in a warmer environment than the Antarctic camp she envisaged for herself, and she shouldn't have been happier.
In a sense this disconnection that had her abscond across the border like a fugitive at large was as harmonious as the breakers which she would watch for an hour each late afternoon on the Tijuana beach: harmonic and not missing a beat; the mesmerizing splashes cleansing the conscience; the optimistic fizz; and the inconsequence of her seemingly insouciant or reckless actions when measured against this seemingly infinite and permanent body of water. The solitary disconnection of the lonely sea was the reflection of her self and together they whispered inscrutable truths to her consciousness; and surely if she needed anything to comfort her, she needed the Pacific Ocean. But storm clouds often coalesced around her diurnal sunsets on the beach before dissipating into the desert city's heat, seagulls seemed to have a wailingly ominous sotto voce as they spiraled about in the winds, and her thoughts dwelled on this Berlin wall which sliced through the Mexican-American shore. The drab wall with its painted words of "El Mundo partido" reinforced by a picture of the broken egg shell of a world became uglier and more piercing as gigantic stakes or prison bars standing out of the water. Each time that she saw these divided territorial waters they constantly reminded her that the city and her departure — really her quasi-belief that circumstances dictated her withdrawal — were far from an oasis. She would recall the words of Herodotus that "No man steps into the same water twice" and this would aggravate a restlessness in her restfulness prompting her to arrange more frequent meetings with Hilda than she would have done otherwise. Through socializing, she hoped to get a reprieve from the bites of conscience that came upon her as stealth as a vampire.
Certainly Tokyo to Tijuana hadn't been a gentle transition with serendipitous fate disgorging onto a life the way that it did. The molten heat had changed the landscape of the self and as its only cartographer she, a divorcee who regretted having ever mixed with a man, was now beginning to map out who she was and it wasn't easy.
Now with Hilda at an outdoor table of a lesbian pub, both eating their nachos and cheese and drinking their tequila diluted in Sprite, her happy demeanor was a little bit affected. As Hilda renamed the food ("tomales" henceforth to be called "tofemales") it bordered on giddiness. Happy as she was or was not on this day of her birth, she could not deny the fact that the ineluctable stirring of memory was scathing her. Some late nights in her solitary bed it was more of a lacerating pierce of claws. Before the divorce she would at times wake up from a dream of a tank running down her son and pulverizing him into layers of permafrost. After the divorce there were these same dreams but with him pulverized into dust; and they were mixed with those of finding herself naked in Isetan Department Store — Japanese clerks, doormen, and beautiful bowing welcome-ladies all staring at her in consternation until an Ikebana instructor in the flower shop threw a blanket over her that was woven in American dandelions.
The dreams were not from guilt — or at any rate not much conscious guilt. She told herself that a little responsible compunction was fine for it reminded her of others' unfulfilled wishes that in an ideal world she would have liked to see herself obtain for them but further guilt was unwarranted. She didn't even believe in guilt — a goddess balancing so many perspectives and antithesis perspectives as she was. Sure, the ideal for her son would have been for her to be a Betty Crocker/Dr. Spock hybrid and to give herself exclusively to motherhood and child development. However, responsible as one should be to others how could she have disregarded the strange novel sounds that splashed in her imagination? If happiness was not in devouring sensual experiences that brought about pleasure but being a kind, contemplative juggler of human perspectives (watching, meditating, and loving all passerby) surely this realm of the divine that separated gods from self-centered beasts could not be willfully disregarded. Still, even she was a social creature. Despite her cold independent aloofness she could have had a self easily demarcated by others — a self that to ever be real at all needed to see itself beyond others' use of it. For someone like her who was infinite and without parameters, pinning oneself onto a man's last name was the action of being Mrs. Nobody and so this Kato and Michael relationship had been the magic pill restoring her to herself after a bout of a needy illness called love.
That being the case she shouldn't have been happier. So the envisaged Antarctic seals and walruses were really myriad Mexicans wallowing languishingly in another overpopulated city. So, the only penguin she saw from the outdoor table of the lesbian pub was a green uniformed motorcycle cop trudging as quickly as he could in his boots toward a public restroom where he might lawfully urinate. So the unadulterated snowy landscape, untouched and untainted by human hands, was lucky to have very few palm trees as deeply rooted in hard clay soil as it was — soil arid as desert sand. And peaceful Camp Gabriele in Antarctica turned out to be TJ, a city filled with drug addicts, drug lords and perhaps one or two intoxicated goddesses like herself.
Tonight with Hilda, shaking her booty in the pub's adjacent lesbo- disco hall as if both had anything outside of contempt for men in their minds, She drank more booze like all goddess predecessors from Hera and Aphrodite to Shirley McClain.
Her afternoon had been spent depicting miscellaneous individuals waiting in a queue in front of the immigration building which was the portal to their jobs in San Ysidro or San Diego; and from there, like a beggarly Indonesian caricature artist instead of the successful artist that she was, she would sell her paintings on the street "for nickels and dimes," (each a hundred pesos or some such sum if subtraction for policemen extorting money were figured into the calculation). She addressed such policemen in a taciturn manner with hard stony supercilious eyes made all the harder by that male look of wanting to fuck the Gringa with the attitude.
Head and body spinning separately on the dance floor with a shot of pure tequila in her hands ready to be devoured so she could be devoured in its fire (the base instincts of mankind wanting to mutate an individual into flames), in one moment she was telling herself how relieved she was to no longer be the inane thing in this little box of the personal life and the next moment she was reminiscing about the past foolishly. She thought of romantic walks with Michael through cherry orchards; their long hours in partnership at the store; she, her husband, and Atsushi Kato eating sushi, soba, mizu soup, and okanimiyaki in museum restaurants; she and Kato making deformed sumo wrestlers out of ice; she and Kato's sister scrubbing each other's backs in a sento; and of course Kato leading them to sites and to her newly founded interest in the native people of Japan, the Ainu.
But her best memories of then, as with all sundry memories in general, were of being alone for she was always trying to squeeze her head and neck through a small portal to the entity. She was always trying to glimpse ideas and still depth beyond this world and deep within the self. Back then there were solitary ponderings in summer walks along the coast of the Sea of Japan. There, walking on prodigious cement slabs shaped like tacks, which stopped the erosion of the beach by high tide, she turned toward ocean pointing to America and contemplated all. She took long walks in street markets and along shipyards, each street of the metropolis smelling like fish. She was alone then and it had been good. Now it was dirt and pinatas; colina deserts and an eternal sun; and Mexican drunks, beggars, and vendors along the bridge that went over the contaminated river. As the cool air seductively concealed the breadth of its heat in the dirty desert called Tijuana, so she shrouded herself in a sense that she was free from the powers of men, sexuality, mythology, motherhood, and all human concern that gnawed into one's entrails.
They were returning to their apartments with the expectation that Hilda would, by tradition, dunk Gabriele 's face in a birthday cake. In the car she thought of Nathaniel and her property with deep homesickness. She thought of her liquid assets that were mostly embezzled by her ex-husband but were in part tied up in stocks and bonds. Something was amiss.
Her ongoing separation from her house, land, and financial resources could have made her succumb to an emotionally mutable perspective of feeling, for a time, as if she had lost everything and then to a feeling that she needed to hurry back to New York State before what little she had was all lost to her. She didn't even know for sure the name of this lawyer of the ex-in-laws—in-laws who in their own elusive way were also nebulous figures. This lawyer of these Bassetes (ex-husband going under the name of Quest) supposedly diverted some of the interest of her savings to property tax, the maintenance of the house, and no doubt whatever the legal expenses were. It was property that, by now, could be razed to the ground and paved with a highway for what she knew of it; and such neglect at being responsible for herself, an aberration from who she was, kept disturbing her equanimity.
Her placid state of mind could have easily been ravaged by maudlin brooding, homesickness, maternal stirrings of instinct, and multifarious emotionally fueled reasons to return to Albany. And it would have been so without determined supercilious will that rebounded her back to her stoic, rational, and insular existence. There in her supercilious brain, amidst the endless walls of tidy, barren, and ostensibly eternal gray matter, she would soar within curtailed bounty and the journey within would seem as an ongoing discovery on the edge of a non-spherical universe. But sometimes without warning the eternity would become a constricted little room and then she would be nothing but a claustrophobic black bird that one day years ago got trapped in the living room of her trailer in Ithaca when she was cleaning a window. Like that sight-trusting bird ready to window-bang itself into oblivion rather than accept the conclusion of pain, obsessed with thought she would crash repeatedly against the walls of her brain. In such migraines she almost felt locked away in her cold, impersonal thoughts— locked away behind walls bigger than any the American government could envisage against Mexico. She would seem locked away in thoughts and only this, unable to conceptualize a higher and more unfathomable wall than this. Would not Parmenides have been abhorred to hear the "nous" so defiled. She didn't care. Heraclitus was now her unsung hero; and not even Plato or God himself, if there were one (which there wasn't), understood migraines except those who experienced them. And sicknesses of all types were exacerbated all the more in foreign countries even if one were lucky enough to have a native friend like Ms. Quest's Hilda who had held her head steady and tilted to the toilet on a couple occasions.
Property: she would define it as that claim on a person or thing to seem to oneself to be. It was like that idiot, Alan Shepard, putting an American flag on the moon; but it was from that idiot, Shepard, that, in girlhood one of her more original ideas was reinforced enough to become a calcified decision or at least a determined perpetual caprice. At the age of eight, seeing those rerun black and white images of this so- called "groovy" astronaut as he bounced around the moon with the stars and stripes (these declarative bounces of ownership and half expectations to encounter a whole host of mooners to pose his symbol to), and recently having learnt of a place on Earth not rife in human herds, she decided to stake her flag on Camp Gabriele, Antarctica in that self-declared city of one. Now, as then, she knew that she had never had anything but herself to begin with and that this was as she liked it.
Being divorced, she could have clung to these things that were hers, declaring them as such in her own mind to reiterate that she was a separate being from what was once her husband or was once believed to be her husband. She could have felt victimized and vulnerable from this chemical volatility of mixing with people and men, these two species that she might have enjoyed had she thought of them as pets. An emotional neediness could have rushed her back to motherhood and attempts at freshly burnt chocolate chip cookies. With less intelligence she might have even thought of it as her maternal calling to nurture him, her ungrateful son, and cater to his selfish whims under the guise of love and doing good. She could have feigned a contentment within the narrow parameters of this easily made/easily fumbled role without noting the hypocritical and selfish neediness that would have been therein especially for a woman like her, a returning child deserter. It would have been so had she believed in feeling something about anything and to allow feelings to drag her around; but for her even succumbing to numbness was a very peculiar state to be shaken off like a lint-ridden blouse.
She was the one who had been barely able to embrace the favored one, Rick, on that first severing of Michael and herself. On that day of the first, less consummated, closure to specious romance she had, in a sense, embraced him albeit no differently than the fall of a metal bar at a toll road. Parting from Rick on that day, internally she had been more like the lachrymose stirring of a statue of Mary, Mother of God, but the boy would not have known that. For him, who had lost his first mother to breast cancer, he would only have that memory that her arms came down on him and then raised up like that bar at a tollbooth.
And if she were to continue in this quest to remove herself from this ownership mania of this self-proclaimed American brand of the common herd, she would continue to do so with the same dry, permanent logic. If the means of defining ownership of property were a mutual claim of ownership by the person to the land and the land to the person the most recent contracts would have taken place in the 19th century when the deceased was united in the ultimate act of consummation: the decay into that plot of land which had sustained him or her. That being true, she reasoned, she owned nothing. It seemed to her that if it were true of the land the mutuality of the contract would be even more of an imperative condition in human relations.
On weekends in Japan such an enormous exodus of people would come out to do their shopping; whereas for her, having had no firmly set schedule that enslaved her and not needing to release an enslaved being in the unbound weekend freedoms of malls, she had found a more internal brooding in the Hokkaido cold. She had feasted on poets and philosophers. She had learnt of Japanese history, art, and traditional mask carvings.
Here in TJ, impecunious as she was, she couldn't have bought anything major had she wanted to. A portable black and white television, which she aptly called the "noise box" or "noise companion," had been her most expensive purchase. But this matching of circumstances to a repudiation of ownership, far from being a grievance against fate, was liberation like that felt at being naked and under a hot shower. It was an ablution from soiled things sticking onto her and she was glad it was that way.
She found great creative energy from being here transposing the new environment to the permanency of color and theme that man's impermanent and mundane movements seemed to lack; and she almost believed that creativity lay within this country and culture instead of the omnipotent Self. It seemed to be there in this defiant city that despite being conjoined to San Ysidro, California, nonetheless maintained its distinct character: brains as blank slates to English, pinatas dangling from store awnings, and children wearing Indian feathers in celebrations of Juarez Day or running around in scanty rags in celebration of the day itself. But really TJ was not the cause of her creativity. It was just a reminder of her own defiance of stale, patterned existence—a defiance that expected and demanded novelty in Tijuana's warm sun and cool, piercing shadows. But it was more than the connection of land, artist, and paint. Here, within, was a tame volcanic oozing, frothy as waves, reshaping her clay landscape apposite to her liking. To wake up each morning anew in being exhilarated her: now an artist of a new land; recently a Spanish-babbling pseudo-lesbian consummated once via Hilda if sex were a consummation of anything; immediately upon arriving in TJ she had been a remover of old bourgeois skin and a student of Spanish; and before that, she had been a ripped rag doll in such consternation about the "Kato thing"—that "kato thing" tearing out the seams of the fabric enclosing her stuffing in such apposite serendipity.
There on the city bus, her seated stiffness jiggling like jello no differently than the tacky homemade sign of " La Playa/Calle Linda Vista" dangling from its windshield, Gabriele again recalled the delusionary socialized will that had possessed her. She reassessed her time in Japan with the same results. She surmised once more that the doll that she had been or had pretended to be deserved to be unthreaded, destuffed, and remade. With her detached eyes ensconced in sunglasses, she glanced at the rear of the bus where Hilda sat. They had been separated at the time of stepping into it by a sparse availability of seats so now she could not see her very well in the throngs of those who were standing. Still there a corner of her was, a conspicuous being with quasi-blonde hair and an aloofness no less "unfriendly," as Michael spoke of her own "bitchiness," than herself.
Seated alone, she discerned that the separation at present was good for both of them. Earlier, when on the beach that they were now returning from, Gabriele had smote her friend with a cold stare. Considering that Hilda had repeatedly served the volleyball on the beach as if she were trying to make a slam dunk with it, of course this desperate attempt to win the game had annoyed and amused Gabriele. She would have laughed at the quasi-volley morality that defied the spirit of the game and she would have congratulated her, more or less, had a larger issue not preceded it.
"Fuck, don't tell me that little swim has pooped you out already, Hilda."
"No," said Hilda as if she were not sure whether to make her monosyllable into a statement or a question; nor if it should be positive or negative.
"We've just put up the net. Serve the fucking ball! "
"Gabriela, I was just thinking that — "
" A positive thought or something quite negative?"
"My own brilliance. I can't see that it is either one."
"But, unlike you I foresee storm clouds ahead — clouds of my friend's own making." Gabriele chortled but Hilda smiled malevolently, moved a few feet back, and sat on the sand to tie her loose shoelaces.
Hilda was feeling too loose (either too dissolute or too unwed and so not dissolute enough in the apparent absence of romance and absence of belonging that was part of a couple's merry-making), and this manifested itself to Gabriele's sagacious discernment. "You know, you should not laugh at your own jokes," Hilda criticized her. "You can be amused by yourself — God knows you are so good at that anyhow, playing alone in your sterile ideas — but that is as far as it should go."
"What is your problem?"
"I don't have any—just yours—what you don't concern yourself with."
"Oh? Sorry. Like what? What don't I concern myself with? You?"
"No, not me. I don't need anyone. Forget it. None of it is my business."
Gabriele stuffed some snuff into her pallet and then scratched her head for a few seconds. "It's a beautiful late Monday morn, Hilda," she said in the hope that from placating words and prevarications the noxious mood would disperse and vanish into air like smoke. " I for one want to seize the day. All the mental prostitutes are being exploited, except for you and I who have some sense about such things and will probably live to be 120 years old as a consequence, God forbid! " She pulled out two cans of beer from a cooler and spit out the dark tactile saliva that had been littering her mouth in senseless mass and clutter no differently than planets in the void of space. As perspectives were always dictated by the demands of the body in those who were not in full control of their minds, Gabriele had a hunch that Hilda was experiencing menstruation and feeling resentful that their physical encounter was not followed by redundant ones. If so, she surmised, Hilda's mood was a combination of hormonal imbalances and withdrawal symptoms from dopamine not arriving in the pleasure receptors of her brain in quantities commensurate with that earlier experience.
Hilda feigned a more pleasant smile despite herself. "Engaged as we are in contemplative leisure." These were words she often heard from Gabriele and her bantering mocked them good-naturedly.
"Well said, and in English to boot." They had departed from the world of stress-ridden fools shifting their needs for pretty escape art and aerobic therapy onto them. They had departed from the imaginary world of believing oneself to have importance catering to others' wishes and had submitted themselves over to the salt inundations of the Pacific Ocean. They had submitted themselves over to the entity as much as tepid will allowed. For at present neither of them would drown themselves to be fully and foolishly part of the entity.
Seated beside her friend, Gabriele incrementally shaped a harder replica of her from the mold of the subject and the plaster of the dampened sand. In part it no longer looked like Hilda but an effigy of Akhenaten.
"So, what about me don't I take responsibility for? What is the source of this anxiety for my sake?"
"How am I to tell if you suffocate me?"
"I'll be extraordinarily careful when I get up to the face. Don't worry."
"I've rested enough. Let the games begin," Hilda giggled.
"Not right yet. Give me the answer to my query and this stiff mummy will rise again."
"I was thinking at the time that you shouldn't be with me. It isn't like we are a couple. I was thinking to myself that you should be playing volleyball with your son. I worry about him not having a mother."
"Do you want me to leave you, Hilda?" Despite the withdrawn and impassive eyes her lips were compressed into a smile and she was ready for any answer. Any answer would have amused her, but she was betting on a particular muddled response. Having a keen enough discernment of human behavior that she could be flawlessly "scientific" in predictions remained Gabriele's goal, and she wanted it to be ongoing unlike all other forms of epiphany.
"I don't own you. Come, go, or stay for life. It's all the same to me. Well, all right not fully. Maybe I care some but to tell you the truth, I don't know what you think of me or what you want; and the reality is that you are a mother — I'm not — so do what you have to do."
Gabriele had predicted each meandering and sinuous thought with accuracy. Still she said, "No prevarications. Frankness, feeling comfortable to be such, doing it in respect, and measuring in other realities in as objective manner as possible — a relationship is relating and we do it with the perfection that only goddesses can do in such matters." She knew that her positive summary was from the overall relationship rather than this moment in time. A more myopic perspective would not have produced a full rendering of truth. Reality in any sense was more than any conscious registering of it. It was more convoluted. Although perhaps no different than the jealous remarks of Hera to Zeus, Hilda's acrimonious tone seemed boringly uncelestial. She was to some degree saying that if it were the ending of their intimacy then she, Gabriele, might as well head across the border back to the wealthy of San Diego. One aspect of their relationship had been an appreciation of self-containment, but here Hilda was jealous of it. "About my son, I don't know where he is."
"That's never made any sense to me."
"Either he's still with my aunt and she doesn't want to admit this fact or he's with my untraceable sister-in-law in the domain of her maternal possessiveness; but he is okay wherever he is at, and by now not so keen to play games with me."
Gabriele had not been able to concentrate on the volleyball game with Hilda from thinking of her son; and exploiting this weakness through unscrupulous serves, Hilda had won the game. Now, riding on the bus, she was no less irritated than before. It was an irritation at being reminded of her own negligence. By bringing a being into the world one was contractually obligated to nature to care for him and to see that his life came to good. Such a woman was obligated to forfeit her own growth to grow offspring. This was her own moral code gained from contemplative reason and she had violated it.
Gabriele stared at a couple of college students dressed in their uniforms. The male was comparing his large dark hand to the female's smaller and lighter one. This hand-play caused Gabriele's face to cringe in repulsion. This rapacious need to extend beyond oneself in mergers with other persons violated human decency. To want to know more, be more, in all life's activities was the precept of Aristotle; and certainly this girl wanted to know what it would be like to wear the man, to share his thoughts, and to merge with him. And her body was telling her there was intimacy in this most intense lowly pleasure and pain of him riding within her. Still, the lesser knowledge that it was, it was repugnant by being so void of anything wise. These human beings linked their cars so as to be declared a train as if a car alone really were so small. The linking of a series of defective cars running along on a defective track surely was not a successful attempt at extension; and from now on, she vowed, her caboose would not be banged into such links.
A woman who was standing with her child moved up to the front of the bus and sat the child on a padded hump of the transmission near the bus driver's gear shift. It was obviously difficult for her to keep the girl seated and the mother applied reasoning with admirable patience and self-restraint. Although Gabriele could not hear what the mother was whispering to the fidgeting child, she heard the child's responses of "Si" and this appeal to reason seemed lovely. It was the length of the talk and the delicacy by which the woman addressed the child's sensitivities that saturated Gabriele in beauty. She was beginning to see motherhood in a new light. She was beginning to think that these preconceived notions that housed her were houses of straw and could easily be blown away.
Perhaps, she thought, beyond conveniences, vaccines, and modern gadgets that often reduced "mental prostitution" to a 5 day affair, on rare occasions one stumbled across enlightenment in modern society that heretofore rested in voluminous, rarely read publications of deceased sages. Perhaps "God," this unfathomable entity who reacted indifferently to human affairs including thousands perishing hideously in the World Trade Center, was now sticking his tongue out at her and calling her a "know-it-all" in such an invigorating event; but it defied logic that a deity who would smash entire civilizations in the palms of its hands as if humans were mosquitoes would think her, this lone individual, worthy of the contempt and enlightenment of the tongue gesture. Even more, why should she believe that God sat her on the bus to see this mother and child as if she were the honored guest in the audience of a great symposium. Not being satisfied with her atheistic conclusions in this strange world, she was again left with the conclusion that something did exist out there, that permanent substance that was the entity or the prime mover, and it existed outside human logic.
A couple hours later, still in shorts and sunglasses (bathing suits worn underneath), she and Hilda sat down at an outdoor table of the lesbian pub. They were in the middle of dinner and a fourth shot of undiluted tequila when a woman uneventfully passed by their table and went inside. "Nice ass!" said Hilda.
"Huh? For Heaven's sake it is a padded seat and tool for excrement. Really, Hilda, is there nice and mean, nice and ugly, nice and not useful to such things unless a fluke happens where one was born without an ass." It was then that she decided to return to America.
In her sleep on an American Airlines flight from San Diego to Albany Gabriele dreamed that she was with Hilda once again on the beach. They were in front of a volleyball net witnessing the descending sun when Hilda broke the ineffable silence.
"You say bullshit all the time. The things you say are so true and so false. You are so profound about temporary families, selfish children, marriage as weak people running away from the solitude that is part of inhabiting one's head, that work is prostitution, things as ball and chains to carry around, claiming one's essence, blah blah, but life isn't objective. It is subjective — so you miss your husband, son, and things because being without them would make you naked."
Gabriele then took off her shirt in protest. With icy eyes, and bouncing boobs, she attempted successful counter maneuvers against Hilda' slam dunk serves. Her hardness crackled through the air beyond an impassively proud countenance; but she justified it in her own mind, the only mind that mattered in such petty but necessary judgment calls. She told herself that even if this wariness of social situations were an imperfect instinct of primitive man to quickly assess the danger of a given social situation its having persisted to present to free one of her social instinct was to its merit.
She woke up from a tray of food being passed unto her. She felt a peculiar sense of being unsettled and wanting to know what was real and what was unreal. She wanted to find out how to keep from being swept up into one illusion or another—she who in recreation flitted facts in her imagination from biographical profiles of the cabinet members of Germany and the names of successive presidents of Moldavia to the characteristics of albino frogs, myriad owls, and Henry and William James. Was the present moment best celebrated in thought and contemplation, in action, in study, a shot of tequila and glib, frivolous talk with Hilda at the lesbian pub, a swim, and a movement of limbs? Was it possible to live life without being in its illusions? Hilda began to fade away and Nathaniel ("Adagio") and the Man With the Unmemorable Name became stronger.