Traditional homes often had extra guesthouses as an extension to the main unit and it was within this "yogwam" in Chongju that he more or less had residence. Luckily for him, during summers these outdoor rooms were not so horrible but in winters the cold snuffed the residents out of sleep in early mornings as animals from forest fires and the mostly aged tenants, before finding warmth elsewhere, would individually go to splash their bodies and faces in a shared bathroom not much different than the ones bears use in zoos. One low faucet fed the cement creek, which had a plastic bowl floating in it. No different than one's paws, the bowl was the means of obtaining a bath.
It was in a bland closet sized room that his cello was in one corner and he, a laptop computer, a short wave radio, and his stack of clothes were at the other end. When he arrived there after teaching in Chinchon, the ride made him feel exhausted; and after an hour of work, his notebook paper with the Gabriele symphony was under the sweaty socks of his feet, the Voice of America news broadcast became nothing but static, and he was asleep.
A person remembers his last dream if awakened in a specific stage of dreaming, if the mind is devising some way to startle the dreamer into going to the bathroom, or if the examination of present problems in a skit becomes violent images running amuck. Unrepressed wishes, and rehearsing events before they actually take place to gain some sense of how to respond before they occur are the ideas most often given for dreaming but the brain is a revelatory organ not of future events but of present realities; and so it was with him.
He dreamt it was Buddha's birthday and that Yang Kwam was under a huge canvas canopy on a university campus where the ground was a hard sandless desert. Those under the canvas were resting and drinking as the others played soccer; but Sang Huin was alone on a dry and grassless bluff that overlooked the activity. He was drifting on and off in sleep; and although a bit conscious of being alone and feeling reluctant to have Yang Kwam involved in a host of other lives in his absence, he was unwilling to tamper with fate or reduce his exposure to the sun, shaped with divine human limbs like Aten himself, that kept putting him to sleep.
A man came up to him. He first spoke in Hanguk mal (Korean), but upon getting no acknowledgment of having been understood, he changed to English.
"I thought that you surely knew a little Korean. It is my mistake."
Sang Huin sat up.
"Let me introduce myself. My name is Kim Jin Huan. My major is tourism. I study here at Chongju University and I'm part of the English club here among other things. I'm very pleased to meet you. You can teach me lots of things and we can become friends but I can't learn at this altitude—not even of you. I think it is best to come down below where the sun is not so hot. You are surely thirsty."
Sang Huin shook his head and laid it back on the big rock that he used as a pillow.
"I came up here to ask you if you would like to come down and join everyone else although it was suggested that it would not be an easy task. Sung Ki [the dream now made Yang Kwam Sung Ki] was saying that you like dirt. He said—I don't know why— that the floor of your apartment was dirty and that there were lots of mosquitoes there. He said that is why he tells you to stay with him. He said that I'd have trouble getting you out of the dirt. I don't know that this is all true but you surely know by now that dirty rooms, dirty plates, and dirty dogs—Koreans have no tolerance for these things. You really should not be lying in the dirt like this. I know you don't know me but that is my advice." Then he smiled ingenuously.
Sang Huin knew the man's snobbishness showed that he was ignorant of suffering and deliberately ignored the dirt from whence all carbon molecules spring into life. "Koreans—North Koreans or South Koreans?" asked Sang Huin as he propped part of his upper body with the use of his elbows.
"South Koreans, of course."
Sang Huin didn't say anything. He was from the greatest and most powerful nation on the Earth (at least it was at the present date if the European Union "stayed out of things"-a common idea of his father's that made him smile) and, in his perceptions, it was being equated with dirt the way Americans envisioned most all other countries including those in Western Europe.
"Everyone wants to talk to you in English."
"But I don't want to," said Sang Huin kindly. "I'm tired of saying little things and hearing little things. I don't mean to be rude."
"Are you happy to lie out here like an animal?"
"Yes. You know…" he paused. He had trouble getting out words that would refute the visual evidence of him lying in the dirt. Such words had to be special if they were to vindicate a nation and its people not to mention himself and all physical evidence. There were no words that he possessed for such a feat so he reverted to attitudes fixated in his childhood and thus became childish in the process. "You know, Americans think that South Korea is a little third world country composed of nothing but dirty people."
"Is that so? Is that your opinion of your people?"
"No," he said sullenly as he shook his head, not knowing who his people were. "I have to think out here in the dirt. I know it is strange. You don't know me. Of course you think I'm strange. I just enjoy seeing insects crawling around in the dirt and the dirt itself- everything that comes from it is inspirationally calm." He laughed. "I guess I like playing in the dirt like a child." He knew that he must be an amusing caricature for them.
"You don't have to do much. It is kind of hard to fail. Just drink a beer and ask them little things. 'What is your name? Where do you live? How many people are in your family?' They can't interact with tape recorders. Can't you do that?" Sang Huin ignored him.
"Don't you have any goals?"
"No, not really." He sat up as if he were taking a defensive posture within the limits of his personality. He spoke with mild sincerity squeezed in with a bit of sarcasm, giving the depths and secrets of his being in a laconic paragraph to this stranger. "No, I have come to the conclusion that doing nothing in a bad world is improving it so I want to contribute in this way. You know, maybe there are people out there who do nothing but lie around in the dirt. I don't know that they are any worse off to be dirty. I don't know that I'm better than they are by usually preferring not to act that way. I'm just another creature out there with microorganisms in my body helping to clear out my intestines." He felt his warm burning face. "I guess I am getting a little sun burnt out here but so far it has been a good experience." Around him little pieces of trash were dancing around circuitously. He heard the sound of a vehicle he could not see since it was at a distance. The world was alive.
"Suit yourself," said the man.
Upon awakening and sitting up in his blanket and futon on the floor, there was such a clear image erect and tilted in the forefront of his mind that it almost seemed to be registered in his perceptions as reality and not a part of his dreams. It was of a German American woman in a Volkswagen driving southwest through America's heartland to the destination of Mexico but driven insatiably to an isolated state as if the car could take her straight into Antarctica. She, Gabriele, spit her snuff into an empty beer can as she drove. This odd and unusable vision was not, to his knowledge, reflective of any psychological state of his own, and yet it somehow seized him. She was broad and burly, isolated and insulated but worldly and perceptive. Sang Huin sensed a story within her. It was not music. She had too many notes. The stagnation of the room, however, pushed him into the drone of movement and this movement flattened this vision and made him the doormat under the weight of the day.
He got dressed. He felt agitation at the idea of having to go all the way out to Muguk for his doctor's class but at 4:00 A.M. he slipped on his pants, regardless, and walked outside to the bathroom. He would have to get in a taxi by 4:30; be on the bus by 5:00; and travel an hour and twenty minutes all for a class that lasted less than an hour. The class was composed of psychiatrists, surgeons, and those practicing internal medicine but they were on a soldier's salary and the payment he got for the class was paltry. Still, he said that he would do it. They had lost money for classes they did not receive at Shin Se Gye when he quit there.
Near Muguk, from the bus, he saw farmers of the dawn planting their weedy rice patties by hand. They were dressed in baggy shirts and rolled up pants and pointed straw hats covered their heads. Their long boots were entrenched in mud. According to his romantic perceptions of them, each one was august, unpretentious, and melting into the morning sun. Those rags they wore were more patriotic than flags and more majestic than King Sejong the Great's crown. Once their farms had been irrigated into ponds and frogs croaked within the allure of their enclave they would have sewn not only rice but the continuation of civilization. Their footprints in mud were ephemeral, but they had their eternity in their families. He asked himself what eternity he would have in such a decadent and disconcerted existence that was obsessed by this mixing of people in an emotion of love that brought the selfish and altruistic splashing of the other in one's container and he or she into theirs. Love still was something that he hadn't really experienced and he hadn't experienced it because of his greater obsession with carnal devouring.
What made him attack himself so? It was obvious. As a gay man he reshaped perception in an uncomfortable way (although undoubtedly he was not the first): his life became an admission that there was no operator's manual for any man's life; but when he saw couples with their babies he believed, in contrary to this, that a natural course in a man's life had been severed or abducted from him and so life became all the more confusing. He could not do otherwise than to feel sad and insecure. It was a loss in his life and he did not deny that it was such. He was not really envious when he saw them. It made him pleased to see them even though in such occurrences he felt empty and stunted at best.
It made him sick to think that—oh, the same old disconcerted thoughts spun around and around in his head like when a bad tune by its prevalence repeats itself over and over in the tape recorder of the psyche and the repetition feels like drudgery. It made him sick to think that he had caused a woman to conceive and then had not been forceful enough with his will to ensure that the child would be born—no, that was just a fantasy albeit a partially believed one. Really he had insisted on the abortion but as time went on the perception changed with the neurons and the desire to have a good self-image. But this was the past: immobile, irrelevant, and except for occasional lesions that opened up the bleeding of memory, forgotten by all. The future was anxiousness where hopes of happiness were thoughtlessly draped against despair.
In the doctors' class, held at Dr. Lee's breakfast table, he brought up articles and political cartoons for discussions. Everything from the continuing menace of Saddam Husein, incursions into the demilitarized zone by North Korea, the Yonsei University student demonstrations, the convictions of the ex-presidents, and all of the most newsworthy of the world's unhappy events were there for the probing. But today, upon leaving, he remembered an article he had forgotten to bring to them: the Taliban's restraint of war ravaged widows from work. The doctors liked such things. As Dr. Lee had pointed out, even happenings in the most remote parts of the world often spread amuck like an oil spill in a global community. He remembered having forgotten this article when he was walking out the door and then it slid from and fell off his memory altogether.
After walking to the Muguk bus depot he had second thoughts about going back to Chongju. He got in a taxicab. That was the easy part. He said, "Anyong Hashimnika?" and then probed his mind. "Odie ka?," (where you go?) asked the taxi driver sharply. The word, "kang," meant river and "mul" meant water. What, he thought to himself, was the word for lake? "Kun mul? (big water)…no, that would never work!" Somehow he found it and got out a coherent sentence. The taxi took him there leaving him on the shoulder of the road. He got out. The highway that was the main road of the town was sandwiched between a bluff and a lake reflecting the marginal space of the Korean landscape. There were no classes for a while and the day was there to celebrate like the disrobing and denuding of a goddess—or in his case, a god. Sang Huin pulled off his shirt and rolled up his slacks. He sat down under a small pavilion. Near it weeds grew. He plucked one and put it into his mouth. He chewed it and sprawled himself on the bench thinking himself as a more worldly version of Huckleberry Finn. Looking down at the waters and the small fishing crafts that were tied to a few docks at a distance, he thought about the Korean landscape in general images: the croaking of frogs in the irrigated rice fields near the apartment that he once had in Umsong; the farmers ("nongmin") who would insert each individual plant as painstakingly as a plastic surgeon grated each item of hair. In galoshes, they would trudge into the depths of mud to sow, reap, and thresh the rice. The moon above the empty Umsong stadium was a lambent glow over the rice and gave a slight visibility to the forest that interconnected a nearby field to the stadium. None of it was all that spectacular when compared to the variety and splendor of the vast country, America, that was and wasn't his country; but still it was new and he sometimes liked it.
Then, in full broadness, he saw Gabriele. There she was in a tight t-shirt and wholly jeans. Hail beat upon the tin can of a trailer where she lived with an infant and a cat. The hail seemed to her like the bullets that she imagined from the distant war that America wedged against Iraq. Then he saw the antithesis of this: big diamond earrings dangling from her lobes and that she wore the most expensive fashions of the elite that gave her broad and muscular German frame elegance as she got ready to take her son to galleries, temporary exhibits, and then to have him sit alone in a corner at these art parties where cheques were often signed. He saw him sitting in those strangers' homes as Sang Huin himself had sat on the bleachers during his sister's basketball games. He saw him taking umbrage with the gods (the sun god in particular if He existed) for they had bore him in the suffocation of her gray colors that sprayed out onto the world like a mist that none of his friends went through. For them it was sunny picnics of complete families, weenie roasts, and marshmallow burnings over bonfires. And there she was again a younger entity, youth asphyxiating in the dust storm of talcum powder that, in her trailer, she swept across the hills of his buttocks, wishing to walk across hills and depart from family. . He felt her true, committed, objection to everything in her big lonely home and with everything consisting of so much it stayed latent in the confines of her leaden eyes. He pulled out a notebook and sketched her different varieties. Underneath her image, he began to cluster a second draft of words and notes. He didn't know what he was doing.
Having had no book to sink into when he arrived at an apartment in Umsong months earlier, he (this new arrival from America) must have seemed like a bird trying to build a nest with two or three sticks. It had been an insane episode for the scrutiny of his roommate-coworkers: the way he had organized and reorganized his few things in the loosely partitioned area of the living room and how he had been so reluctant to speak. Hadn't he, in his disconnection, looked like a man suffering from some neuron-entangled nervousness, heavy neurosis, or a bad prion making the holes in his head to match the holes of his being.
His sister had been raped and mutilated. At least that was the theory-as much as one could assess from skeletal remains. The prosecution wanted to horrify the jury with photographs. Maybe they had succeeded inordinately disconcerting the jury so that it couldn't ascertain the facts and probabilities. The only measurable impact that he knew of were ramifications of deep, paralyzing shadows that the three of them fell into—so far and so eternal had been the abyss. "Were the perpetrators human or hominids? If they were human, what did that say about being human?" It had been their first unshared question easily sensed in the eyes of each other. "Are all Americans like this?" they had all silently thought. No one would have said such a thing. "Was all humanity this way?" It was in their eyes—that and the wish to escape the species. They were there: in this word "hell" that all had talked of and few had ever gone into. Hell was full meaninglessness and savagery without rationale and with a judicial system forcing the mutilated further into unprecedented horrors.
Pusillanimous and cowering in fetal positions within themselves, limping around the days with perfunctory and lifeless movements, his father had nonetheless spoken of "getting on" with things although he couldn't define what one was supposed to get on with or what was worthy of getting on to. They all could perceive the horror of everybody and everything so no matter what they did—even killing themselves—it would all be equivalent to meaningless and savagery.
It was good to have this hour of complete silence near the lake without any sound but the rushing of cars, which also came in inundated waves, peaked, and died. Still, one would have to hear a language sooner or later. At times if only he could have a silence, a respite, from his thoughts to go with his free time to think his recovery would be expedited. He thought of his sister. She had kept her Korean. Occasionally, even as a teenager, she would mutter off some idea in Korean to which his mother returned some reply. He had always felt jealous of this secret language and here he was in Korea but the language was still a secret to him.
The social creature that even he was, if he were not to hear a voice for long even those boats in the lake would have been a discomfiting image—interspersing his conceptualization of them in depersonalized momentum. He wanted to call Kwang Sook to hear her voice but also to cancel his classes. He didn't need so much money. His former boss had deposited some of the owed money after the issue had gone to the Department of Labor. He wanted to go back to Seoul but classes were his equanimity. They personalized his world in a professional and impersonal manner that gave him fortitude to float through the expanse of his existential turns where it seemed that there were no other sailors.
Maybe, he thought to himself, he would go into a video pang later and let drama absorb him in a personal intimacy with a fictional entity of depth and substance. He had no misgivings. His life was a stunted one. Still, back in Chongju, he made the call and cancelled his classes. Then, near the bus terminal, he went to a restaurant. He ordered some bogum bop, a thick mixture of rice and vegetables that one mixed into a thick brown gravy that stood off aside on the plate and the appetizer of kimchee maundu. Alone, eating and reading a Newsweek he pulled out of his bag, he began to wonder of the lives of those that owned or managed the restaurant. Their area was shielded only behind sliding doors. Behind the tables and the chairs, their living area consisted of just one space. A girl came out and he could see within it clothes drying on a plastic rack and a small television that was on the floor. Then a man came out with a baby in his arms. He wore an undershirt and boxer underwear. The women cooked. Then, after they served Sang Huin a second helping of kimchee maundoo, they put breakfast on a table for the family. They all ate together. Like Yang Lin at Toksugum Palace seeing newlyweds and the wife he should have been, Sang Huin saw his alter ego in the man. His life was probably limited. A wife and children pinned him into a small existence with family commotion and responsibilities. It floated in non-ambitious swaying like a plastic boat on ripples in a bathtub. It probably droned on in its unaware and insignificant tedium through the years, but it had its connections.
Attempting to thwart his primitive hungers for sex and socialization (synonymous words of civilization's shaping, but base nonetheless), and sensing the true vacuous abyss that would exist without learning or creating, he went into a park that was near the bus station. There, he worked on his amorphously wordy musical composition that was a bit of everything and nothing. Still, he told himself that this potpourri was worthwhile even though really he had his misgivings about it. He told himself that he needed to test the musical aspects of it on his cello later that day when he returned to the yogwam. It was a plan of a return "home"(whatever that word meant) and a means to contravene his deviance to Seoul. It was a self-created urgency to repress his sexual obsessions and to clothe the animalistic movements and hunger of his naked soul. To his delight, from previous recitals of Hayden at the yogwam, it would probably bring to his door an audience of elderly tenants and one of his more fulfilling connections.
He came upon a crowd of people clustered around an elderly man. The man was a governmental employee paid as a teacher of Korean traditional dance. He was promoting the program by a slow and illustrious dance. He wore the traditional hanbok of the paji and chogori. Sang Huin was inveigled by the dance but the sun god was putting him to sleep and 15 minutes into the performance he was on a park bench fast asleep. When he awoke, the crowd that had gathered around the dancer and the dancer himself were no longer there. Just as Sang Huin, the boy, had skipped around the kindergarten teacher's desk, sat down to drink his chocolate milk with his Graham crackers, and found himself a grown man listening to a university professor's lecture on biology, so the sunlight of this day's slight 2:00 descent vaporized the people he had been witnessing no differently than it had vaporized the dinosaurs myriad afternoons of myriad centuries ago or the body of his sister that had decomposed in a park. It had all gone-gone but where it had gone he couldn't say.
Like a 5 year old, he rubbed his eyes to wake up. Following an instinctive response that was a yearning overwhelming his common sense, he felt the impulse to stretch forth toward Seoul: toward adventure in the masses and bathing the rational mind in sensual massage. He wanted meretricious sex. Young men encroached on his mind in droves. Maybe this obsession, if it were such, was from an inability to communicate in any other way. He did not mind—well, he did, but what could he do, he argued, when the irrationality of pleasure seeking sedated one as he journeyed around alone on the rugged terrain of the Earth. He did not believe in much platonic constraint. When his hormones were boiling to overflow he "hauled [his] ass" to Seoul. There, a theatre existed for meeting and touching men near Chongno Samga Road and he had been told that there was a gay Turkish bath in the area of Myong Dong. Too much creative energy would be depleted if he were to lasso the wild bore for long. Too much craziness would go into creating sense in insensible passions. Wasn't marriage created to give sense to such passions? Hadn't this lifetime contract that his parents signed in their marital vows caught two of life's myriad souls in the idea that they could defy a changing universe and be as non-changeable as rocks? Hadn't their confinement of each other in this materialistic American dream become the incommunicable cries of two strangers tied back to back by weeds from their many parcels of land after all substantial conversation had been exhausted? Yet, his liaisons were not exactly more viable versions of relationships. He did not want to talk to these men nor, as he knew, would they to him. Ideally he did; but it was just a fleeting expression or whim. Reality sang another tune. There was this day's ticket to a symphony in Seoul that Kwang Sook had given to him because she couldn't go. He had taken it. He loved symphonies and there were parts of this day when he told himself that he would go to Seoul for that purpose. Really, however, he wouldn't have bothered at all had it not been for the urges of his body anxiously nudging him northward.
He bought another ticket to Seoul and drank milk he obtained from the bus station vendor while waiting for his designated departure. The noxious smell of bus exhausts filled the open cavities of the bus station. A torn back on a plastic seat seemed to snag his shirt more than once like a cat's claws. The wait was not long since a half hour later he was part of a line to get on board. This particular flatulent bus seemed to say his name, Sang Huin, as a feces colored gas, carbon, exuded from its rear. Strange ideas like the talking bus and the clawing chair, in the back regions of the mind, were only experienced by the lonely and the isolated. He knew this. Those who were isolated were such out of their contempt for the sadistic and hedonistic impulses that were hidden in smiles. They were such to protect their own ingenuous vulnerabilities despite being sociable human creatures; and they weren't always so firmly in their right minds. The landscape seen from the moving bus was unremarkable but still the beauty that was there dazed him into self-reflections. More than the physical response what did he crave? To be loved and to love was like a dog chasing its tail; and if his tail were long enough he would have it in the mouth. He would have it there in his mouth if the mouth liked the taste of the tail and the tail the feel of the mouth. Foolish as he was going to Seoul once again for his fun, he wasn't a fool. Most people obeyed their sexual inclinations as if they were great oracles of wisdom that would broaden them beyond the limits of themselves in such a primitive interaction. He couldn't say that he wasn't as they were, but unlike them, he knew that the whole thing was a mirage for those who couldn't or didn't know how to build worlds within themselves. A Newsweek article had proven to his satisfaction that love was not a splendid thing. It was just a four-year addiction at best. The article had theorized that primitive man needed to stay with the woman long enough to help with the child's welfare by feeding the creature and its mother during those years when the baby encumbered the woman from hunting on her own. He didn't need more than that.
In Kwang Sook's school, Sang Huin had asked the children to draw verbs next to a series of words they found from his handout. When this was finished, he would read sentences with those vocabulary words like "A tall boy hits a ball in the air." "How many people are there?" "There is one person," they would say. "What does he do?" "He hits?" "What does he hit?" "He hits a ball." "Where is the ball?" "It is in the sky." "What does he look like?" "He is tall." The younger ones were so competitive with each other in the games he devised for them as if beating others in the game of survival were entrenched in human curiosities.
They had also done English exercises together on the roof where he had been the military sergeant giving peremptory whims and they had to jump, run, go to the right, go to the left, etc. at his command.
The boys had been especially fond of him chasing them around trying to eat them on the roof as he sang, "This is the way we kill a pig, kill a pig, kill a pig. This is the way we kill a pig so early in the morning." This play-acting and making the brutal world seem as nothing but an innocuous frivolity caused them to squeal like piglets. It was insignificant wrestling around with the children in a job that did not take too much talent or knowledge but it was a silly example of love. He wanted to give that spark of imagination and knowledge just because it seemed right to give it. Weren't more altruistic connections really what life was about? And yet if this were the true form of love, he often asked himself, wouldn't it be so fulfilling that he would give himself to it completely?
When he arrived at the express bus terminal, he took the subway to Chongno. Near Pagoda Park, he went to Hardee's . The break from Hanguk food (particularly kimchee) he found nourishing to his imagination that craved variety. He wanted to be a vegetarian but at times he thought that he almost lapped up the grease like a starving dog. When he finished, he found himself on one of his first safaris to a gay sauna. He was still unsure how to get there and so he looked down at the "chito" (map) a fellow hunter at the theatre had drawn for him on the back cover of his "Expatriate In Korea" resource book one time when he was at the theater.
Once there, he took off his shoes at the front desk and collected a key and a toothbrush. Then he went upstairs. After his shower, a brief phase in the hot whirlpool, and a second cool shower, he put on a robe from those that were on hangers and went to a hallway of rooms where orgies were in progress. Some men in the hallway wandered from room to room, selective of that which most excited them on the tatami mats of the floors. Others joined shadows of faintly visible figures groping around in a state of almost complete darkness. For him only lighter rooms were an option since less illusionary beings were the only meat and grease he could stomach. With the barrage of his passions released in one of those rooms, he became a perfect receiver of transmission. There was no interference from either psyche or physique. He relaxed on one of the leather sofas in the lounge with other smokers and those limp individuals in between engagements. Visions came unto him and he almost felt holy writing out aspects of Gabriele's life within the fog of his smoke. Naked bodies in contrast to his, that was now clothed in underwear, did not distract him. In the next room men bathed themselves in the whirlpool or heated themselves in the sauna and behind him were others engaging in what he had done. If human beings were only shadows passing in and out of memory, which was nothing but the night sky for such ghosts, what then, he asked himself, were one's dreams? The fantasies and emotion propelled thought; and thought propelled action. Surely action was more real and tangible than the hopes and dreams and yet how could it be such if dreams and emotion conceived action.
Ideas of Gabriele grasped him as if she were more real than he was. Pages of words created themselves on his lap while above the couch was a television showing a drama of an ancient Korean period linked with reverberating melancholic Buddhist melodies. Toward 6 o'clock, he was still there—and for his excesses his underwear was stolen off of his body when he was performing on someone else. He wasn't sure exactly how it happened. His head hurt; and he felt a nausea concerning his life. He left wishing that he were ten again gaining the rapture of a millefleur morning of dandelions patterned into a greener fabric of grass after the evening's rain and exploring a more oceanic landscape with his sister as they splashed through an alien terrain in their rain boots. He wished for the time when she existed long before her attraction to older married men like her boss-long before her attraction to men at all. He reassured himself that he wasn't completely bad, that he was a caring person who did not harm others even with the knowledge that there was no real right or wrong on the planet, and that innocence hadn't left him entirely. He told himself that he was innocent in many ways, if not an outright fool, since he had shown himself to be kind and easily taken advantage of in business (he would have continued to tolerate only getting two-thirds of his salary so that the other teachers would get paid had it not been for the fact that he stopped paying his secretaries as well and began to rehire new ones when the old ones quit). When he arrived in Chongno Samga again his pain did not abate. He went to a pharmacy. The woman at the pharmacy was a grandmotherly type and a little boy sat on a stool in front of him. She asked what he wanted. He told her in his babyish Korean. She asked how many aspirin he wanted. He told her six. She asked him other things. He told her that he was an American and could not say much anything in Korean. When he was leaving the boy told him, "Good-by" in English. The Grandmother laughed warmly. Sang Huin felt pleasure from this little minute of his life as if all sweet and little moments were not gone altogether; and his nausea from believing that all human beings perceived each other as a voracious fulfilling of appetites diminished.
From the cannibalism of sexual excess, he ate a salad at Wendy's restaurant despite its exorbitant price and the one plate serving rule. It was a nice respite from eating too much of the dumpling snack of kimchee maundoo. The thought of eating meat did not agree with him. He shoved down some aspirin with his chocolate frosty and stared out of the window. It was past 6:30 and this area of Chongno Samga was already riveting in youthful crowds. In a few hours young men would bee vomiting on the sidewalk for their alcoholic excess as he had done on Uchiro Samga after coming out of the sauna. He hurryingly got a yogwam. He turned on AFKN, the American military channel and saw a bit of a movie on Franklin Delano Roosevelt while he pulled out a suit jacket and a tie that he had folded away in his book bag. Then he got into a taxi and went to the Sejong Cultural Center. His seat was located in the middle of the auditorium. As he sat down his cigarettes fell out of his front pocket and as he picked them up he noticed the blind man he had seen before in the subway seated with his dog in the same row. Time had made him think that the person had just been a flitting fantasy but there he was. It was a basic instinct of the lonely human psyche to wish for meaning and connection in such events as if God would move heaven and hell to give him a companion. He put the cigarettes into the slit of his pack and then glanced over to his left in the hope that no one had noticed his clumsiness. A man that looked like his sister's boss was seated next to him. It was a slight resemblance but still it horrified him. When that "thing" had been declared "not guilty" in reference to his sister's murder despite all the evidence that the prosecution had brought forward, he had fainted for a few seconds. Then, in a slow dizziness, some feelings had assembled themselves and then he had begun to think that he wanted death; and then he had just wanted out of America.
During an intermission, while others were leaving, the stranger got up and left with his dog. Sang Huin, on impulse, followed. Without yearning for a cigarette, he lit one in the lobby and waited at the entry of the bathroom. If he were troubled by the peculiarity of his actions, he was only marginally reassured by the fact that they were not witnessed. His actions seemed that of a stalker although this seeming, this appearance, was only ruminated on by himself. His motives, however, were nebulous in this desire; and this inability to understand why he was seeking this individual was a troubling factor. It was the impulsiveness of one lacking social skills who suddenly drives up to a school playground to form intimacies, discards the body in abhorrence and disbelief over being the perpetrator of the crime, and in a half hour finds himself to be a pedophile and a murderer. And yet he wasn't stalking a child but a man and he wasn't running on the energy of sexual conquest and hate, but just running away from loneliness. If this innocuous action were stalking, all humans, he told himself, were stalkers. Without question, he was so desperate to disrupt his isolation like the pensive ruminations of a mute circus gypsy alone in the back of his tent. He was so anxious to escape his incommunicable thoughts through friendship, or the hope of it, that he was ready to shoot it out randomly to whomever caught his eye. Many selfish whims constituted an attraction, but he told himself that this was not the making of a stalker. Then the stranger and his dog came out.
"Anyong hashimnika," greeted Sang Huin as he touched the man's arm so that he would know he was addressing him.
"Anyong haseyo" (informal: peace, you do). They spoke loudly because of the noise of the crowds loitering and coming and going from the restrooms.
"Yongo mal ha su isumnika?"
"Yes, I can speak English. Can I help you?"
It was interesting for him to be thought of as an American instantaneously. Sang Huin found it refreshing to not have someone give him that surprise and grimace for being a Korean without a language.
"No. Good symphony. Do you like Rimsky?"
"Rimsky-Korsakov. Yes, not all of the music is Rimsky's but they were playing music from that composer earlier. He is Russian, one of the best, I think." Sang Huin smiled at the acquaintance and then realized that his smile wouldn't pierce through the sunglasses. Unable to let his benign nature penetrate through the plastic, he again thought of himself as somewhat equivalent to a stalker. He felt nervous.
""Would you like a cigarette? We've got ten minutes." He thought of the words and instruments which human beings employed to break from their innate states of emptiness; and the connections sought from attractions that would be forsaken if the experiences seemed shallow and there was an assumption that no major connections would evolve from them.
Sang Huin crunched the pack for a bit of noise and the stranger took one of the cigarettes which he then aimed toward the hiss of the emerging flame that Sang Huin provided with the click of his lighter. The blind man inhaled a couple times but then coughed in perpetual rhythms like the beats of a drum. The seeing-eye dog gnarled its mouth the best it was able to do and growled importunely. "He doesn't like," said the blind man barely able to get out his idea from his stanched breath. Sang Huin thought of Sungki's syntax which also lacked object pronouns in "You must all eat."
"Is there an ashtray? I'll put this out. I'm sorry I wasted it," said the blind man.
"No problem," said Sang Huin as he took the cigarette and smashed it into an ashtray a few feet away and then walked back to where he was. "I feel a bit foolish." He chortled for a couple of seconds nervously. "I was seated alone, really, not liking that feeling as much as I thought I would; and then I noticed you. I've seen you before on a subway: you and your dog. It was a few days ago. You got out shortly after I did in Tonggyo-dong."
"Do you stay in a hotel in that area?"
"No, but a few times when there were demonstrations at Yongsei University I went there and watched the police and the tear gas from the fourth floor of a building that has a pastry shop. I guess that is a bit strange, huh?" The stranger filled air and space with a feigned smile and a nod, not knowing what to say. "No; I live in Chongju," continued Sang Huin, "but I come to Seoul as often as I can. I'm American. At least I say I am. My friends call me Shawn in America but my friends here call me by my real name, Beck Sang Huin." He knew that he didn't really have friends in either place.
"Saeng Sob," said the acquaintance. They shook hands although both were doubtful that they could concatenate a conversation. When the man said his name, Saeng Seob, Sang Huin thought of the boy in Kwang Sook's school who also had this name. He was in his class; but Kwang Sook said that the last year he had to drop out of her school completely after going through more surgeries from being hit by a truck. That accident had happened a year earlier. Even during the brief months Sang Huin was familiar with him there was yet another surgery for his legs and feet. Sang Huin brought him toys every few days. During this time he hated having the poor boy languish in the bed—skin from his buttocks used to supplement the thin blackish skin of his legs and the pins in his toes. It was the least he could do.
Hadn't there been a time when he and his sister were driven to the home of their Grandma Vera and rather than connecting to her chose to run across the street to a nearby park and feel alive with the swing against the winds as their parents socialized? Hadn't there been a time when he knew the brilliance of grass poking through the crevices of his bare feet? Then puberty came and there was an aching need for other people. The aching was incessant.
"I guess you are here with friends and family. I should let you get back to them and the performance."
"We're here alone," said Saeng Sob, " but I guess we should go back in before the second part begins." Sang Huin did not know if he was included in the conceptualization of "we."
"Do you live in Tonggyo-dong?," asked Sang Huin creating a mental barricade to stop the closure.
" No, but I work and study at the university." He paused and then filled in the silence. "My cousin is a dean in the mathematics department. I work part-time at Yongsei as his receptionist so that is probably why you saw us there," said the man speaking of himself in plurality.
"And you take classes?" asked Sang Huin.
"Sometimes," said Saeng Sob.
"Maybe we can get something to eat after the performance if you aren't busy," said Sang Huin.
"Maybe. They're probably ready to start." Sang Huin and the blind Saeng Seob returned to their seats.
Then, after the performance, he cornered him in the ambiguity of a "maybe" which a strong will could distort to affirmation. Such enthusiasm could not easily be negated especially if it came from an American and soon he was with the blind Seong Seob answering questions about his life in the US and eating some cold noodles in soup that was as flavorless as water. The meal tasted like a cold and bland version of Ramen noodles ("Ramyen" in Korean) but he was told that it was not Ramyen. He didn't like the food and yet his closed lips twitched up smilingly as if the opposite were true. Deferential deception seemed the most cordial solution. Through children observing it in his society in various forms it was passed down through the generations by imitation. And as humans had and in interactions proliferated these tactics of coexistence to the young that were successful enough to keep the species, so far, from self-destruction, what did he in his short life know that was a better substitute? In reinventing etiquette, it was hard to know if the new behavior was better or worse than the old one in the abstract. The only measurement would be the reaction of others. To eat and smile while hating what was being eaten and to succeed at it pleased him. It made him feel that he was a decent person. In that minute it picked him up on a wave of optimism that distracted the lonely, mundane, and stunted life that he chartered for himself. Sang Huin spoke frankly about why he had come to Korea. He had been so lost after his sister's death, his father's suicide, and the exacerbated disconnection from the robotic and perfunctory movements and rambling of his mother month after month. He had to break away and become acquainted with his heritage the way Seong Seob, as much as he was capable of, had to flee from the cousin and then him, as perverted as he was, to end those 20+ years of disparaged containment. Both had to chart independent lives exempt of family and without the possibility of ever having one; but really was that so bad - to be ungrounded and to float on winds of circumstance. In the right perspective it was liberation.
Sang Huin wondered what this name, Seng Seob, meant (not that he knew the meaning of his own) and why he was so excited to be with him. They agreed that they would just be together for an hour. That hour became two and then it was the rest of the evening. They drank soju, a mild equivalent of sake. Late into the evening Sang Huin had the waiter calculate the tab and then suggested that they continue drinking elsewhere. Both were drunk at this time and drunkenness was making them thirsty. He and Saeng Sob returned to the yogwam with a case of beer they purchased at a convenience store.
They slept together. Naked and awakening from sleep, Sang Huin listened to the breathing of his friend. For the first time since his sister's death he did not feel alone. Later on in the morning when the light began to shine into the room he continued his prose, every now and then looking at the presence that slept there as well as the imposition of his dog.
The Book of Gabriele and Sang Huin
"Thought is the idea of extension and extension the embodiment of thought"—Baruch Spinzoa
"Mind+entity=truth Sensory perception+things=opinion" —Parmenides
Hunched over a TV tray, with the baby locked into her lap in one hand and snuff locked into a cheek, she wrote her story. Occasionally she would write while dribbling brown into the open portal of her empty beer can. She needed her portals for they led her, like a child, into animistic realms far from the mundane of soiled diapers or the powdering of a bottom as repulsive, to her, as perfume scented women. She was dressed in nothing but a dark bathrobe of a bosky fabric and like a soldier in military fatigues, she blended in with the subdued light of a tepid morning, which stumbled onto the floor of her trailer like a collapsing drunk. Every few moments while she wrote, her thoughts became distracted by the hail that besieged the roof and walls or by the screams of the baby which made her glower whenever he spat out his pacifier to become the self-centered squealer that she knew to be the base nature propelling human actions and society's disarray. Richard Dawkins' idea that one was born selfish but did not have to stay that way was an adage that, with the energy she had in her glowering eyes, she wanted to etch onto him if only her eyes were lasers where her commandments could cauterize the human brain. It seemed to her that Jehovah, had he existed, would have glowering eyes no different than hers and such lasers would have gone simply into the malleable substance of the human brain instead of searing it into stone. With aversion to reading anything printed on paper let alone etched in stone so acute it would be more sensible. Had Piaget really studied beings such as this, she thought, he would have seen them as the making of Wall Street and the thunder of armies. She listened more intensely to the hail that was like a machine gun with rubber coated pellets. She imagined herself riding on a tank through a desert and into Baghdad half-naked and exposed, waving her red white and blue brassiere from the opened hatch of the tank. Yes, she admitted, she needed portals. She needed her exits. She needed a change, a respite, from the monotony of motherhood that was sinking her into it like a hole. The baby was a gift, and more a choice and for these points a sacred responsibility to which, she told herself, she would rectify past grievances that her parents, and even Aunt Peggy herself, had done to her. She would never engage in the treachery that had flattened her out under its tank when she was so young (although, she had to admit, the demise of early sensitivities had made her, in such early childhood, reconstruct a new and indomitable self). As she thought this she noticed a spider crawling onto her hand, which held the pen. When the hurricane of all the air from her lungs was not enough to release it from her palm, she did not drop the pen. She decided to look on the intruder as a lecturer on persistency and to gain inspiration from it. She knew that once she finished writing her piece, the spider would be smashed, but she believed that the act should be performed with conscience. Gabriele did not subscribe to the idea of civilized man that life was ranked into a hierarchy of importance. A human certainly could not get by without killing, or picking up killed produce from a grocery shelf, but the idea that there should be a real distinction between a can of beans and the entrails of a local senator seemed absurd, although she did not think that being put in an electric chair for having eaten her local senator ranked very high up there in the chances of probability. Yes, she again told herself, the child was a gift and a responsibility but she would not dote him. The world flattered itself that doting mothers carrying their worms to the baby birds exuded such a profound love by this thoughtless emotional instinct of proud and adoring pampering. They thought that pampering the pleasure-seeking savage was the acme of nurturing motherhood and the making of good human beings. She thought to herself that such mindless bitches, doting as Aunt Peggy had done with her children, were an embarrassment to this word love. Love in its purest sense (what little one was humanly capable of) would be a selfless caring of another without such instincts to keep one's genes replicating for all eternity. It was not suffocating one's children in dependency so that one could have the role of mommy to avoid rolelessness and void. It was not needing a child. Being a doting mother was as far from her instinctually as those bizarre apathetic ones who could toss a child on a relative or an ex-husband himself before joining the military. The other day, on page 2 of the Ithaca Times she saw that there was an article on some such oddity although much bigger stories with more bizarre and sadistic ramifications were buried each day on page 1,999 of the New York Times. She would always read voraciously and thereby find their cadavers. "Piaget, Piaget, go away, go away," she mumbled inaudibly to herself slurring and babbling the consonants and vowels as if she were now beginning to imitate the language of her son atavistically.
Her calligraphy was composed of letters that were large, circular, and loosely connected. The sentences contained at least one or two words scratched out with others sustained above them. She considered herself a scholar when it came to writing and so imaginative works, in such a medium, did not come easily. Still she could not fathom in herself such a shallow stream of sentiments that would actually cause her to repeat the words of the lullaby, "Rock a by, baby, in a tree top" nor hum even the notes of the lullaby symphony of Brahms. For this reason, she allowed her back to ache and a slow-moving spider to climb along her hand to finish an alternative lullaby—a truth beyond a myth although she did not delude herself by thinking it other than her own personal concoction at a different mythology the way Psalm 104 might have seemed original long after the Great Hymn of Aten was written in Ancient Egypt. In constructing another paragraph she began to ask herself whether or not she had ended the story. She wasn't sure how one would know about such things that were so lacking of scientific or mathematic certainties. Then she began to wonder if she should have written it with a zoomorphic emphasis (maybe a bovine God standing there in its pasture cognizant of nothing, wholly holy in the innocence of stupidity and lack of aggressive tendencies—great virtues to which no other gods comported). She stretched her large muscular framed back; heard a thump on the bookshelf but, in her state of concentration, she dismissed it; dropped the baby back into its crib, and took the top of a TV tray off its legs. In place of the baby, she sat the tray upon her lap providing a close-up foundation for her manuscript.
The hailstorm that was once like artillery against her flimsy enclave now seemed a milder sleet tapping and scraping the ceiling and walls. This type of weather was a bit like the tapping and scraping of her cat, Mouse, clinging and banging its body on the screen of the door in the hope of getting in during the times she threw him out, and she imagined that it would go on this way 1990 times. She listened intensely to some of its 1990 scraping taps, tapings of "the year of our lord" which also happened to be the year of the American war against Mesopotamia. The sleet was mixed in the wind; and for those who resided in warmth and even those who ran through it in the hope of finding shelter such falling crystal, that was once an ethereal gas, couldn't have been anything other than splendor. At least, in a diminished way, it was for her who could only hear and imagine it within the ruminations of her cynicism and maternal gloom.
For a couple of distracted seconds she contemplated her isolated existence in an obscure trailer park in Ithaca, New York within the middle of winter in contrast to the crowds of Iraqi and American soldiers ready to ignite the deserts the way crowded rats, too overpopulated, too irascible, and too conscious of the movements of other rats, kill each other off. The whole thing should have made her feel leery: a single woman near the outskirts of the city limits all alone with a baby, hearing banging against her home and listening intermittingly to the news on her radio about the Persian Gulf War. She did have knowledge of Judo and fully believed that any violent intruders would regret trespassing on her space but she knew that it did not protect her from the fact that she was a tenuous mortal, a woman with a baby in a flimsy trailer, and that this trailer was in an inauspicious location in one of the more violent countries on the planet. To compound matters, she didn't have any friends or much society except for her bovine-thinking neighbor, Rita. That woman, who called herself Lily, was like a lackadaisical grass-snacking cow right before slaughter time. She had been a former group-home girl at a home for schizophrenics and manic-depressives although she recently graduated to semi-independent living. For Gabriele, her intrusive presence often cut through the black gauze of isolation that could cover every aperture of one's senses prompting her to feel an extreme numbness. But, apart from this mental sustenance, isolation was something that she thrived on like a light hating moss deep in damp and obscure crevices. The walls seemed to shudder in the winds but she did not mind the cold. She felt that it was comforting and when it crept in it seemed to be tangible and come through the cracks around the windows and the door like waves. The baby, however, was another matter. It sneezed out into the cold.
The previous day he was crying in part from the cold and the need to be suckled. And she did suckle him occasionally although, less euphemistically, she saw it as him being allowed to devour her. She did this to pass on her nutrients and antibodies, although giving milk and having a child use her for her tit repulsed and stiffened her posture at times like a soldier at a machine gun in a trench and at other times like a soldier in a queue waiting for inspection. This act more than any other was a reminder of the fact that she was a bit like all other women: a female animal there to be bred and to nurture the continuum of her breed. She fed him and dressed him even more warmly, then, but it was to no avail. Lacking options, she repelled her repulsion toward the rock-a-by song by telling herself that it was the collective culture in the earliest of all primitive American, if not western minds, and so inescapable in a sense. On that day she brought herself to hum a few bars while rocking him according to the melody of the song; but he frowned and looked at her skeptically if babies were capable of skepticism, and so she had to speed up the movement. The faster and harder she rocked him the more he seemed to enjoy it, baby-laughing that one monotone squeal and slobbering all over her. At that time of such Pavlovian drooling she wondered to herself belatedly if having him there to seize her day was worthwhile but the squealing gave her a sense that it was. This roller-rocking of her arms was at first enjoyable because his squeals of euphoria were delightful to listen to but soon she found them to be a tiring repetition and so she gently tossed him back into the crib which inadvertently caused him to cry once again.
This was a new approach following a few minutes of having him "swig [his] bottle." "Unlike present day Ithaca, in the land of Ancient Atlantis," she read after raising the baby up to the tray like a cold piece of meat and then squashing the insect into her composition, "there was harmony;" and even when he "puked"-she would never say 'spit-up' because it was not so—she recited a few paragraphs of what she had written while the vomit seeped into her bathrobe. Her bold attempt to be indifferent to such an inauspicious start to the morning was becoming a poorly constructed fa?ade for her determination was crumbling like a desiccating sand castle. The smell of the vomit and all of the baby smells bothered her. As her body fidgeted, which in turn caused the cat to bury itself behind the lowest area of the bookshelf (although this time avoiding the tripping on a ceramic dish) she contemplated this euphemism, "spit-up." The term didn't matter in public, she argued; but to oneself, she thought, one had to be honest. Puke was puke, and she had a tale to tell, and her child needed to listen and she needed to resist shoving her child back into the crib to change out of her bathrobe.
As one of her long arms stretched and she grabbed one of his baby bibs that was folded on an end table, dabbing herself with it, she thought about how the two of them were family because of a sexual indiscretion. Fate had backed into her earlier thinking that family was nothing but war games. At one time she believed that husband and wife soldiers of the same side often acted as if they were enemies; and as they played with each other they often forgot about the children, inadvertently or deliberately rolled their tanks over them, or abandoned them entirely to pursue a second honeymoon. At one time she believed that all good soldiers (all military families) did the same thing as this. Her pregnancy (fate) had flattened her notion that an individual only had herself in this world. It had rolled over her idea that a collective unit was a neurotic delusion like the concept of God. She had been rolled on by a tank a second time and had been forced to reassess earlier conclusions. Motherhood was beginning to make her fully aware of the extent by which there was an interdependence of the social members of society and she was beginning to think of her son as a gift from God since the birth of a baby was such a miracle. And here they were tucked away in their home in a scantily lit morning. The trailer was the fortress from artillery shells, taps, and scrapes. For a moment she listened to its splendor with her usual intensity: the taping of it, the refrigerator mysteriously clicking into life with a hum slightly like a ticking heart of a great body in hibernation, and the heater that didn't work so well exhaling in dreaming snores through the mouths of floor vents. She listened until it all abruptly ended by his cries. She then thought that she was becoming overly sentimental if not completely and loathsomely maudlin in the scramble of impressions that spewed out from her subconscious. She wondered if she could shut him up in time to perform aerobics with the television instructor.
The child she had given birth to had been like a dragon of the womb, pushing its young being of fiery hell out of her. This was an image that Gabriele conjured up in her imagination as the bathrobe, that was the only thing separating her from complete nakedness, began to have such an acrid and fetid stench. She changed his diaper and lodged a pacifier into his mouth. "Unlike present day Ithaca, in the land of Ancient Atlantis, which the residents of this small island called Antinomy, there was harmony." She again recited and adlibbed the beginning of her story as a wild idea of cracking her inattentive child's head like a nut crazily passed through her consciousness, quickly diffusing and departing like a bad smell. "Once upon a time they were the happiest of people glowing from ear to ear almost as cute as you do, Adagio, on those rare times that you actually do smile. Their smiles were not inane and senseless as giddy American teenagers…no,no-Americans as a whole really before they have their heart attacks from the stress of competing for more and more or the greasy food they clog into their blood vessels or from fright at possibly being blown away when some stressed out nut comes into a fast food joint with a semi-automatic. Their kindness was genuine because valuing their link to the energy that radiated into them, competing for conveniences and pleasures was not their priority. And they weren't just happy and nice but these residents of Atlantis or Antinomy (I give you, Mr. Adagio, permission to use either word—-either word depending on Adagio's silly whims). And they weren't just happy and nice but they were also resourceful. The Antinomians when they took a crap did not have diapers to catch it. They preferred the natural way of letting it drop, and dry out a bit under the sun god, so that they could make bowls and pitchers from the dung heap. When they climbed coconut trees for the fruit, they could get up the trees in three seconds. Likewise when they hunted their wild boars they didn't need spears, little man. They just ran and pounced on the animals. Now you may ask how they did such things so well so let me answer the query of your inquisitive mind. These superhuman people were everything good: kind and gentle, strong and smart because they weren't arrogant. They had no civilization that told them to flush dung down the toilet, and no amicable smiles that are part of business transactions. They were natural, ingenuous people who meditated on the energy emanated by the sun and this link of themselves to natural forces prompted them to be more than ordinary men. The sun god liked those who meditated on the energy he supplied them so he gave them a boost-a bit of caffeine if you will. That's the way it was, Little Man, in maybe the 8th century B.C." She knew that if he were to squeal during the story this behavior would be most inhospitable to the story telling host, and so as a preemptive move she used crazed gestures that would get his attention. By getting his attention she could lure him into a story that had the potential of putting him to sleep. The name on his birth certificate was Nathaniel, a name she liked but regretted having given to him. It was her hope that the nickname, "Adagio," would, like magic, get him to be calm if not elicit from the child a rather scholastic attentiveness within his infantile limitations. She often played for him the classical music, "Scaramouche-modere" by Darius Milhaud. It was her favorite adagio if indeed it was an adagio at all. It was adagio enough for her and she believed that was all that mattered.
She was seated on a director's chair looking at the slight movements of her child's body and wondering why its mouth could not be equally delicate. She silently called it the Spanish word of "criatura." Her extended family had been a mixture of Germans and German-Argentineans, a passionate and passionless crowd who often did not know if they should call her Gabriela or Gabriele and so they had been reluctant to say anything at all to her. She kissed her son on the forehead but this action provoked vehement cries of cacophony. Assessing that her son had reactions no different than any hard Visigoth, she ignored his bellowing voice and continued the story. "Listen to this, little man. Concentrate. Scream as you will, but concentrate! They, the Antinomians of Atlantis, considered themselves a loose conglomeration of a tribe and did not have any inclination for a central government for governments are only needed to control malevolent men. When the scattered men unified for monthly reproductive sessions with their estranged spouses to ravage their fluids on their—quote- unquote 'their'—women, they were not protected under roofs from the elements but did the banging on the backs of horses. Uncomfortable, you say. I'd agree: uncomfortable but quick and quick ejaculations were what they wanted. This doing it in the open was a rather brave act, wouldn't you say, considering that they could be struck down by lightning should the sun god deem them as gaining more hedonistic pleasure, or spending too much of their thoughts in activities not suited to gentle, uncivilized men. They did not marry in the auspices of a sacrament-oriented fiend from the heavens but acknowledged the vulgarity of their intersections not in affected guilt but by cleansing and anointing their horses afterward. They weren't selfish creatures apart from those 15-minute rides and so they didn't have this wish to hide themselves in the affectation of matrimony and love like modern men and they did not need to hide themselves in clothes. The land of Antinomy was warm, you know. There would have been a different reality if Antinomy had been a little island off of our beloved motherland of Antarctica. Anyhow, in the land of Atlantis or Antinomy a child was born in this manner and grew up not with Mother or Father but in independence and its relationship with the Earth and the sun. She, the Earth, would find him. She would tell him that he was hers. He would know that there was no purpose to being alive other than living and being grateful for life. Of course, in modern societies like Ithaca, Adagio, you have no merit at all-you aren't even thought as worthy of the respect of an insect-unless you have a job and are in one way or another part of the Great Factory but not in Atlantis, my little buddy. No, not there. There, to be without aim was accepted since the meaning of life was in life itself: vibrant energy for no reason bursting forth for no reason as fireworks in a desert."
For a couple seconds she thought about how any common criminal or intruder to her domain would be immediately repelled from trespassing by her strange oral dissertations. Perhaps he or she would find himself discomfited to find logic and honesty in such an eccentric array and wouldn't know what to make of it: Mother Teresa of Calcutta or Marquis de Sade of Paris. Such a person would assume that she had been dropped on her head as an infant in a most dramatic way not knowing the reality that, in early girlhood, she had been flattened by a tank.
"The skies clothed the babies of these ingenuous savages just as it did their naked mothers and fathers. As I said before, no clothes and no shame for them for they were kind and their consciences were pure. They spoke the truth as they perceived it at the moment they spoke it and no- one resented each other because they understood that each was just trying to assemble ideas together the way prisoners in a dungeon used anything as platforms that would edge them closer to the window." At this point she did not understand her own writing so she adlibbed entirely. "A given baby had the world as his own. He did not cry in the night like a baby in need of a night light since all the books created from previous centuries…all those mysterious words in all the pages from the books created from previous centuries and shipped to Atlantis…all those mysterious words in all the pages from the books of 'truth' since the beginning of time (books seen as irrelevantly reverent, and maliciously deceiving fables) were burnt each night in his world; and this did add a small twinkle in his eyes. Yet it was Mother Earth who cradled him, after his abandonment at birth and nourished him- -" Composed pell-mell and visibly entangled in nonsense, she felt that the latter part of her myth was ruined in sententiousness and knew that she was no longer believing that their words had any truth whatsoever. That being the case, she stopped babbling. When she saw that the baby was asleep she put him in the crib, disrobed, took a shower, and got dressed. She turned on the television but realizing it was Sunday and that church programming had usurped her exorcise regimen she felt disappointed. Not knowing what to do with the day, she looked out of the window for a period of minutes that seemed like hours. A car came through the trailer park lot mixing the water with dirt. One nearby puddle looked like chocolate milk. She thought to herself that she needed to warm some baby formula. Instead, she sat down in her director's chair, stared out into nothingness, and listened to tapping that seemed more like rain. Her thoughts rambled on: "800,000 African children die from dysentery each year and yet the news is about the continuing air strikes against Iraq as if American victory were something other than a foregone conclusion." At least, the bully that it was, America was a democracy and Gabriele, as hard as she tried, could not keep herself from feeling a bit fortunate to live there. She found it somewhat comforting that the murky morality of such engagements was debated by senators and talk show hosts. Protecting Kuwait or securing the free flow of oil seemed an easy riddle to figure out. Prior to the war, what American had ever known of the existence of Kuwait outside of geography teachers? Her idea was not so novel. It was the same type of thought of commonplace dissenters but, after examining the idea, it was also that of her own. This was her last thought as she fell asleep.
She dreamed that her son was the neighbor woman, Rita (who thought of herself as Lily), with blonde hair and glasses, and that a nuclear bomb had gone off somewhere nearby Ithaca—maybe Salem for the strangers on the street, bewildered and whispering to themselves, kept mentioning the name of that city. The city of Ithaca was filled with rumors that the event had occurred and the rumors were loud in an atmosphere where everything else was silent and seemed to take on a texture of emptiness. The rumors seemed tactile and to have a visible substance that was ochre but thick as a heavy fog. Although they were no louder than whispers, these whispers were cries of bewilderment albeit softer than agony since they could not be fully articulated for lack of any definite knowledge.
"They have shut us off from knowing," said one young woman desperately.
"Sure," said a man with an Appalachian draw. "The damn people up there higher than God! They don't want us to know what has happened for fear that we'll fear others are comun'… maybe make some phone calls!"
"Are we to believe this craziness we are hearing? We live in civilized times.This can not be," said another female voice. Her accent was of a New Jerseyite.
A red headed woman, next to Gabriele on a street corner, said to a grayish woman that looked like a cat, "If the president is with them on this it is true." The words in the typical New York accent for some reason seemed the most tangible element of the dream, greater than its visionary components, and the most worthy truth. Gabriele backed away from the cat, and wished for death rather than to bear this horror where not even the surety of the death of thousands or millions could be known, whether or not the people of Ithaca would eventually be radiated, or whether or not there was indeed a conspiracy to keep them ignorant that more missiles were coming. "Let others die but not me; let other cities perish but not ours" was a dominant thought in everyone's head. It was so loud and everyone could hear it no matter how hard they pretended otherwise. She loathed that wretched instinct of self-interest that was innate in a being to make it survive, prosper, and propagate dynastically. She thought to herself that survival of the fittest truly played out in all things and selfishness was its impetus. The meek, when not uneducated and famished, were so sensitive to injustice and disparity that they became neurotic and disturbed. The truly meek were too gentle and reticent to muster the selfishness to bring forth offspring, and they inherited nothing outside of their own coffins. She also loathed that small portion of her sociable will, which stooped to what they were saying, now, with complete conviction in the streets. She heard one elderly man in particular. He was like an older version of someone in her past but the dream, which was a reality of its own, did not directly make that correlation. "Come on now. Let's not panic. It's been hot in Salem with no wind. Maybe the radiation will just stay there. What little breeze there is probably is just in the upper stratosphere. My son's a weatherman, you know." The elderly man in thick glasses pointed out Gabriele's Lily shaped son as his own. "He says that not feeling a breeze means no breeze at all except way up there in the stratosphere. The radiation is below that. If it moves slightly it will go to New York City. It will never come this way. You can count on it so let's not panic." It was a hope for self- preservation. It was a hope of the deaths of millions of people rather than themselves who resided in Ithaca. She saw the cat woman crying and a man petting her back. He was comforting her compassionately; but like one who does not wish to spend resources on exploratory surgery to find out whether or not the lymphatic cancer had spread in an aging pet, the man turned away from the woman. Gabriele could see him pursuing his own private minutes of self-pity and rage deep in lost, silent eyes.
Then the cat rubbed itself against her face and she awakened, recalling that the elderly man in the dream was a distorted version of the lover who had made her into this child's mother. She had not been meek when she went to Houston to pursue a graduate degree. She had hungered after the assistant professor because he had been as inaccessible as Antarctica. She had successfully obtained him and this was due to the fact that people loved those of a strong will who seemed immortal in inexhaustible energy, swinging their machetes beyond diffidence and forging paths and realities boldly. This sort of energy being erotic to them, they were attracted, mesmerized, and orphic to the id?e fixe, which was nothing other than everlasting youthful vigor. The assistant professor, yearning for immorality, had coupled with her. It had been a successful wish and a successful coupling because from it she had gotten pregnant. With her sleeve, she wiped her face that sparkled in greasy sweat, and then gently cradled the cat to her face. The cat scratched her and leaped away to where it once again hid itself behind the books.