Sang Huin had a very strange dream one night. It was a night in which he had experienced a cancellation of a lesson and instead of returning home he had gone toward the Myong Dong area of Seoul to a gay Turkish bath, which he hoped would exorcise him of the void.
Like any explosive, the chemicals for the detonation were inside the container (himself); and all it required was a small sensation as its spark. It always struck him as peculiar and intriguing how a sexual feeling that was so internal should be linked so indelibly with the external like a woman's ability to produce milk, which required birth and a baby to suckle if it were to not dry up.
There, once again in the Turkish bath (as if this time would be a less specious form of intimacy than all others), he had sought excitement — fireworks of sensation within a dark room for orgies. There, like a balloon, he had blown his body in titillations and desire only to be deflated to a moment or two of tameness and godhood and then an equilibrium — this concoction of a little god and a lot of animal called a human being.
And when he returned home to Seong Seob, there was a contrived inflation and deflation of the phallus in the ersatz of coerced will. Then he lay there like a squeezed orange, albeit a discontent one. He was unable to sleep for countless minutes that seemed as hours. And when he did go to sleep he dreamed strange and erratic things. At worst these images burst and burned against the walls of his brain like jets against the World Trade Center. At best they expanded and contracted nerves in his brain like the coldness of an ice cream headache. Accelerated by too many graphic CNN reports and satiated in anxieties and guilt within his own life, he dreamed that Gabriele was living in an isolated area in Pakistan with her cat, Mouse. One evening there was knocking on her door and when she answered it a stoic Rita/Lily with obdurate, mechanical, and glazed eyes injected a drug into her arm. When Gabriele woke up she was staring into the face of Osama Bin Laden. "Where am I?" she asked as she lifted her head and wiped the pallid dirt from hair and face. A translator relayed her voice to Osama Bin Laden. She recognized him too. He was Khalid Shaik Mohammed. Osama said something and the translation was "Al Qaiida Hills in what people wrong to call Afghanistan behind Tora Bora. You relatives must pay big ransom or we cut off you head."
"Relatives?" said Gabriele. " If you mean Peggy, you inane turbaned bearded little freaks, she wouldn't give you a nickel or a dime to save my head. She wants every cent to go to Wal-Mart to buy toys for her beloved grandbabies so they will smile at her and reach for her before they do their own mommies. She likes babies: the thought of them fills her with dopamines and endorphins; and the inveterate shopper that she is, buying for them couldn't make her much higher. Such neurotransmitters run amuck in her. Mama bird must do what she is created for. Anyhow, nobody's getting rich off of my head and I want — no demand — I demand to know how I got here and I further demand that l be transported back immediately."
"Remember Rita/Lily, devout Moslem sister: she inject you with tranquilizers, give you swallow sleepy pills, and then put you in trunk of you car. There she drive across border," said Khalid Sheik Mohammed."
"Thanks for the info, Shake!" said Gabriele. "She always was a crazy; and crazies are always religious—no offense." Gabriele heard Osama's palaver in Arabic."
"Osama wants to know if you play volleyball with us." said Khalid SheikMohammed. Khalid Sheik Mohamed smiled widely with his fangs.
"Volleyball?" asked Gabriele. "It's a bit strange, but what the fuck. Will it expedite me getting out of here?"
"No doubt! Osama want to be a good host while you here. He want to have fun with you."
"All right, if I must."
"Splendid," said Khalid Sheik Mohammed. "You must."
Osama slapped a desert mosquito that kept circling around his big nose. He flattened it on his face. Then his large tongue came out with the twitch of his face and the mosquito fell onto its waterbed coffin. No sooner had the Al Quaida mastermind eaten it than the Taleban cleric, Mullah Mohammed Omar, snuck up like Death in a brown hood and robe. The one eyed reptile then cut off Gabriele's head with his hatchet. Osama Bin Laden and Khalid Sheik Mohammed then began their game of volleyball. Mullah Mohammed Omar stood at the side of an invisible net counting score as the two other men volleyed the head over the line which he had dug into the dirt with a stick. There was talk of getting access to North Korean nuclear fuel rods, a strange epidemic that they had manufactured and proliferated in East Asia, and assassination plans for George Bush. The face of Gabriele's head kept staring at them while she volleyed about. Gabriele thought, "Talking politics and playing ball: these inane turbaned bearded little freaks can walk and chew gum at the same time."
Sang Huin suddenly woke up and went into the bathroom where he splashed some water on his face. His face looked heavier when he stared at it in the mirror. He realized that as much as he had hoped to hold onto youth, it was already shed and blowing around like fragile leaves within another time and space. He chastised himself. He was getting older by the hour and yet he had no career aspirations. His Bachelor's degree in music history was worthless. He probably had no special aptitude for teaching and even if he did, he doubted that being this native gypsy who appeared on people's doorsteps at their request counted him within the ranks of teachers. What did he know that he could teach? There was nothing he was trained for, he had no competitive strife, and he did not know of anything worth doing.
He heard the sound of rain and so he went to a window but could not see the substance of this harmonic pattering in external darkness. He listened to its orphic sounds, inventing reasons to go into this gentle falling of sky: milk for his cornflakes or batteries for his Walkman that he could purchase at the AM/PM or the 7-11.
He wrote: Gabriele put on her hat and sunglasses and went into the rain with a bag carrying her keys, passport, wallet, sketchbook, and charcoal pencil as well as makeup and a bottle of this newly acquired substance, perfume. She had been told that there was a park near her hotel where she could see the ruins but, despite floating on cloud nine, when she arrived there all she could see were the ruins of her own life.
Michael was lovingly amuck in her thoughts and since she would see him in a few hours she was in a heavenly abyss greater than having the license to do some Italian stud fishing in the pool of her hotel. She loathed how the chemicals of this infatuation had been detonated in the Leaning Tower of Gabriele causing major structural damage. Furthermore, the smoke of the aftermath distorted the world in such a fervent red mist. If she hadn't been on her guard or had been born a half-wit she could have easily believed in love and bliss at every turn. She, the master of reality, guessed that she was walking on a precipice: that very soon if she were to part with him for a week she would be there in the pangs of the travail of loneliness — a most lost and forlorn creature and an ignominy to herself.
And yet despite her higher authority and monitor wanting her to discard this man sooner rather than later, she regretted that she had resisted the idea of him getting a room in the same hotel where she was staying. She could have made his trip less lordly and more "in touch" with the common man if he had stayed with her instead of ensconcing himself in four-star hotels. Also she would have saved him money, not that saving money was so essential if he were indeed part of the wealthy Quest family of Albany.
She thought it was noble that he, a member of the wealthy class, had chosen to be a mere educator to help young minds. " In a sense," she thought, "we are both educators but he has chosen to not make business and money a priority whereas I yearn for money and things. I am just a fool who has gone from being impecunious to an upper middleclass snob — okay, a bitch with a servant even if I call her my assistant. And I am not free. I'm always fettered to canvas." She meant that as free as she was she always had to be unique, clever, and technically masterful at all times to have a reputation and to pay her bills—one of which was her tuition. She could have gained a "scholarship" but she did not care to have strings attached. She did not want to teach pathetic dilettantes in some basic class what a paintbrush and pallet looked like. She didn't want to sing to them, "This is the way we paint a pig, paint a pig, paint a pig. This is the way we paint a pig so early in the morning."
Perambulating through the park, attempting to conceptualize the internal and external reality she wanted to transpose to canvas, she became distracted by Italian lovers. Strangely, for her, she looked on them in joyful awe. Unlike in America when she had wanted to roller- blade through their interlinked arms or sweep away these lovers who littered the world with their specious illusions, she now appreciated them. These Italian couples abetted her fantasies of she and Michael strolling together under one umbrella instead of the solo half being under there now. She could sense that her rule in the crumbling and further leaning tower of Gabriele was faltering, floundering, and foundering. This, while she walked, was evident by her sporadic humming of Joni Mitchell's "Michael from Mountains."
Sitting on a bench in the gentle rain, she watched the heavy traffic and the shuffling array of Italians through the iron bars of one of the many walls that went around the park. It seemed to her that it all had the splendor and significance of love. She was not at ease in this rosy/fiery way of looking at all things and yet she couldn't quite see the harm in such elated perspectives. If all people were like Moonie cult members avoiding negativity wouldn't the illusion transform reality? If love were an illusion, she couldn't see how it was different from anything else. Each generation of people were passing shadows thrust out at dusk before being swept into darkness. Everything was an illusion although it seemed to her that some things were more real than others or at least less illusionary. Shadows were illusions of tangible things and perhaps these blocked rays of light or diminished forms were of something bigger. Was life just a pale version of what was really out there? She did not know. She was still waiting to get an email from God.
This inchoate friendship/ relationship was releasing her from the manacles of heavy, oppressive, and dragging thoughts and so in certain moments she couldn't see any reason to oppose it. Did she care to be as dour and sour as a spinster? Such women became more acrimonious with each new birthday.
Before she had time to go back to her hotel room with only a couple rough drafts to show for her efforts, they came for her in the park. Although he, like his son, preferred motion, Michael had persuaded his son to sacrifice a bit more of their time before her beloved alter of art. The taxi's meter was aggrandizing numbers for some time when they finally found her and took her away with them.
He believed that his closeness to Gabriele would increase if he showed himself as someone willing to enter her hallowed institutions — institutions he came here to see but on the fifth or sixth time these buildings were like visits to a mausoleum.
Only as they were trudging up more concrete steps did it occur to him that he should have asked her if she wanted to do something different. And yet when he looked at her smile that was so radiant from being linked to art and linking it to them he could tell that she would never find art museums boring let alone cloying the soul. He was the deferential gentleman, and his inveterately shy son tolerated the museums with little fidgetiness.
After they were inside for an hour she began to lean on him the way he liked women to do even though he had not let them do it for many years. But he detested how she was dressed. Like at the park, she was still wearing sunglasses and a hat that coaxed upon itself and draped down as if it had been thrown into the wash too many times. She would pull the glasses down to the tip of her nose when they came to a work of art, talk about it and what she knew about the artist (if anything), and then move them up her nose. He did not understand this flagrant violation of femininity. It was as if she wanted to be as inconspicuous and stealth as a bag lady for fear of being mistaken for Michelangelo. He had avoided the subject in the taxi under the belief that she would remove them once they were in the building.
"What is all this?" he at last asked as he pulled on the brim of her hat.
"Oh," she interjected and acquiesced wordlessly as she smoothed out her hair. He was pleased. She was transforming from a sallow and destitute street person back to an image more suited to be loved. Within the machinations of self-centered man, each saw the other as an "opportunity" and each one contemplated and re-contemplated what that opportunity was in vain.
He wanted to move about and change visual images as if he were in front of the television with his remote control, but she wanted to stare for a few moments at these portals into the entity.
When they were outside again she put on her sunglasses so as to counter these feelings of "tenderness" which could misdirect her down a long and dark labyrinth of tight one-way back-alley actions leading further into her own obscurity and to prostate positions at a man-god's feet. For he was already becoming a bit of an extension of her own little life and a medium for more intense pleasures that she could not reach alone, and so she put on glasses that he disapproved of so that she would not lose herself to him even in the most miniscule way.
As with the brain that made deals and compromises to reconcile contradictory opinions within itself, she knew that a woman would need to be deferential in a relationship that was that extension of herself. She told herself that she would try to be as little accommodating as possible. She smiled as if ready to laugh for the two of them at this stage were nothing. They were merely accidental traveling companions. She thought that even if they did become involved with each other the myopic perspective of a personal life and love might be nothing in reality but attempts at cell replication in this organ of the Earth in this organism of the universe. Such was the human predicament of not knowing anything of reality but one's own caprices. Her levity was transient. She became serious.
"Why do you wear those things?" He smiled. His tone was more bantering than condemning. If it had been altogether condemning she in her moody caprice would have walked away proudly, severing him without saying a word in that behavior typical to those whose youth had been besieged in the worst of ridicule.
"I don't know. Sometimes I want to be different. Sometimes the glare of the sun gives me a headache."
"You aren't feeling sick now, are you?"
"No."
"Then take them off."
"Ask me in a nice way."
"Please do it. Do it please. Do please it." He laughed.
Her womanliness flowed in and she took them off, begrudgingly eager to please and a little excited that someone should take an interest— even a critical interest— in the mundane aspects of her life. She felt sexual energy hit her in a large wave since two wills clashing against each other was a sexy thing. They followed Rick who had run toward a hotdog stand.
"Corndogs — won't you have one, Gabriele?" asked the former MF.
"I don't eat meat, you know."
"Well, you should, you know. Its why the brain size of man is so much bigger than his hominoid predecessors."
"I doubt that much evolution can come from a corndog. And if I had a bigger head it would probably explode all over the place. Wouldn't that be a pretty sight?"
" Maybe your grandpa slaughtered your pet pig at his farm— something made you this sensitive. I wouldn't know about that but I do know that as long as the killing isn't man to man it's just nature's checks and balances." She saw that truth lay there and not wishing to dismiss it , she nodded. She wondered if he had put too many limits on his theme. Maybe murder and wars were checks and balances of man on man too. He smiled with a flippant boyish mischievousness. "You know, by walking from the museum you have squashed at least a thousand ants and other creepy things, but you haven't given up walking from what I see. Survival of the fittest, Gabriele; and the fittest animal is the one with the most bills in his wallet. If the pig had come with a wallet and could out-spend me I'd be the one on the stick. Come on. Haven't you ever eaten a corndog before?"
"Well, yes. When I was a girl, I guess."
"That's probably the best life gets as an adult: secondhand experiences, reliving childhood." He ordered three corndogs and soft drinks from the vender and gave each their share. "Here!" She took the corndog and began to eat with them. She imagined the corndog as a vegetable. She imagined it as an important experience.
"Good?"
"Yes."
"More ketchup?"
"No."
"Rick?"
"Yes." And she watched the bloody substance squeezed onto the boy's phallic symbol.
"See, you enjoyed it as a girl until you thought that your pet pig would be next. Associationism."
"David Hume?" she chuckled.
"John Locke/David Hume—I'm not sure which. "
Rick had to go to the toilet and so Gabriele was left in awkwardness at being with Michael all alone. He grabbed her hand and led her to a bench. He kissed her and she liked it even though the nearness of him felt as if she were being stung by Houston fire ants. It was a sweet inimical sting. It was a contract of mouths and joint breath, of two becoming one but not of equal parts—more of a stronger company forcing a large competitor in a merger.
And the days of the week proceeded on—that day closing most eventfully on a surrey, a four seated bicycle, peddling and encircling Roman sculpture at the Borghese Garden, and then watching a mock chariot match in a field known as the Circus Maximus. The ensuing days were of seeing the bones of 400 monks at the Cappuchin Cemetery, going to the ancient Pantheon temple of the gods with its open portal to the sky, sitting in outdoor restaurants near fountains still spurting from ancient aqueducts, St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City, and the catacombs. Their final whole day was filled with Etruscan art, a return to the Coliseum, another meandering around the ancient statues at the Borghese Garden, and back to Laneur Parco di Luna amusement park for a ferris wheel ride and trampolines. For all her brooding on life she realized that such contemplation was just hiding from it. She thought that motion and community were natural and having opposed them all along had been foolish. Like diving into a pile of leaves, these simple pleasures were transcendence into the entity. When she was again alone at the airport showing her boarding pass she walked to the plane like a propped up cadaver.
Lightning flashed into Hispanic Betty's makeshift bedroom and she woke up to the artificiality of her life ensconced in a room that was not her own with things in it that she was a little uncomfortable to touch even with a dust rag. She was here and off the streets but the glitter of being such seemed dimmer as she woke up in the flashes of lightning.
Her first self-coerced thought was of Nathaniel and needing to be responsible for him. She was compelled to perform her newly delegated responsibilities of guardian despite not really knowing what they should consist of. This role of guardian, as she saw it, consisted of the same cooking, shopping, and cleaning she always did plus maternal functions that varied with each woman like checking on him at strange hours even if, fettered in language barriers and stumbling about in her illegality, she might not know what to do if something were really wrong.
Resenting the fact that this had been thrust upon her, she nonetheless was able to drag herself out of bed to see if he was okay for the maternal instinct to attend to the young during a storm was in the collective consciousness of all female fauna. She knew that the true challenge would be for her, who had no family or friends in this country, to perform this maternal role without caring for him inordinately. She put on a bathrobe and snuck down the hall to his door where light slid under the crack like an urgent note.
He was chatting with one of his Internet friends, seeking an affinity with those acrimonious others who construed themselves as being abandoned and neglected but hid it in cynicism of all other matters. But to her who knew nothing of chat rooms or anything in particular about computers the boy was simply writing a report for a class and so she was hesitant to knock on his door and tell him to go to bed.
Hearing the pecked tapping of the keyboard, she imagined the sliver of light at her feet as a computer printed note that said, "Mind your own business, Betty, and go back to bed"; and, smiling from an amusing end to her ambivalence, that was exactly what she did. From her bed, her lair (if she could call it hers), she ruminated about what had happened to her recently: Gabriele having picked her out of the homeless shelter from the other strays; the proud and sagacious confidence, if not hubris, which Gabriele possessed in bringing her into this home without even asking her to forfeit her passport; the loyalty generated from such trust; fear that the ringing of the telephone was the attempted connection of immigration authorities; barely getting around on the crutches of the English language, which she had ineptly cobbled together from scraps; the fear of the six and sometimes seven day a week servitude in this remote home diminishing what little chance she, a homely 22 year old, might have of creating her own family; this fear motivating her to get a cheap efficiency downtown although she was rarely ever there; and how the imposition of taking care of someone else's child was a calamity waiting to happen.
Over the course of the week she worried excessively. She worried that she hadn't heard from Gabriele to know when she would return. She worried about having this awkward tenderness for the child (this wanton thought of him) caused by having to care for him and make him her exclusive concern and pleasure. And she worried that she would resent Gabriele's return since it would inevitably pry away this maternal fusion. She also had specific worries of the present day: that this act of absconding in his room, not wanting to play cards or board games like Checkers and Monopoly, meant that he might not like her anymore; and that he was now in his room for two hours and she wasn't exactly sure what he was doing in there.
Then came more of those ideas that self-flagellated her flaccid mental skin throughout the week: if something bad were to happen to him she might not know about it or have the vocabulary to ask about it; if she were aware of it that she might not be able to explain it; and if she could explain it she might prevaricate or become twisted in mendacities since she would not know how to explain her connection to this Sangfroid family.
Still, no matter if these nightly ruminations made her placid or just got her stuck in rehashing the same worries, she was glad to have them. They resuscitated a self-concept that languished each day in being cognizant of her own babbling in this north-of-the-border language.
She heard Nathaniel's footsteps in the hall. She wanted to open her door and call to him and yet she knew it wasn't so much for him as for herself. For she was feeling the travail of loneliness and it was not imagined suffering but a physical assault on the body of the mind.
She did not want him to think that she was spying on him or that she, a servant, would have the effrontery or impertinence to tell him what he could and couldn't do in his own home; but still, she told herself, she needed to monitor him. She once again diffidently walked into the hall and sought the traces of the boy. He was downstairs in the kitchen as evident by the light. Listening closely from the stairs, she could hear the refrigerator door open and a pitcher of milk being drained.
Had she not felt like a florid group of cells shot out like random shells into the void that made up the cosmos, she would have been satisfied by this and she would have gone to bed and slept soundly. Instead, she went down the steps and into the kitchen.
"Knock, knock, Nathaniel."
"Oh, hi there, Hispanic Betty."
"You no can sleep none?"
"Haven't tried."
"I can to fix you food. Maybe you are hungry."
"No, I've got a plate of Betty cookies. You know, I ate shit before you came here."
"Es verdad?"
"You bet."
"Pobrecito. Well, your mother is smart, brilliant, wonderful artist. Everybody has something good they can do and some things they can't do none."
"You could put these cookies in packages and sell them," said Nathaniel. "You'd get more than working here for my stingy old mother." She smiled. She had been random matter rolling about in empty space moments earlier and now she was put safely back to earth snapped into society like an instrumental piece of life's daily puzzle.
"Hispanic Betty, do you think school is like that?"
"What?."
"I mean good for some people and not others."
"So-so. Your madre, Gabriela, may probably kill me for saying it but I think you're right. I mean you need kid school and teenager school. Nobody should to be a dummy—but some maybe they find that special thing not in classes. You go to bed soon?"
"Pronto."
"Pronto. Excelente. Necesitas dormir las horas bastante para tener un dia grande por la manana. I go to bed now. You do it too after to eat your Betty cookies."
"Hey, Hispanic Betty, why do you have two names?"
She laughed. "Because of Santa Gabriela. Como se dice? Nickname- -it's a nickname. Your mother has told you when she comes back?"
"I don't know" the glutton said evasively as he devoured a cookie. "Buenos noches."
"Buenos noches, Nathaniel."
In the morning Nathaniel took a bus to the facade of the school and then meandered downtown as obscurely as he could. His virtual friend twenty years his senior had told him that summer school wasn't "all that important" and since this reinforced his own ideas about the matter, there was a guilt-ridden conviction in his movements as he splashed through puddles in effusive kicks of vexation. Nathaniel, who was less than a decade from the womb, had his mother as his conscience; and this conscience chastised his every deviation. And yet it was she who had made herself inaccessible. And when she had the chance to make it up to him with a summer trip abroad it was she who had departed alone.
For a couple hours in front of a computer he used a joystick as an extension of the arms of virtual boxers, and the flights of airplane bombers. With it he could also maneuver entire armies according to his sense of viable strategies not that his age and turbid thoughts at present could offer much beyond the contribution of his reflexes. When his body felt stiff he paid, left, and then lit a cigarette in the back alley. Stealth in front of the back wall of the internet cafe and computer game arcade and crouched behind a trash barrel, he tried to release clouds of smoke in various shapes the way in earlier years he had blown bubbles of various sizes into the air. He coughed as much as he smoked and the shapes of his smoke were nebulous; but his cigarettes were a self-taught rebellion in back alleys like this one and lacking male influences both good and bad maleness was an awkward stumbling of trial and error.
Coughing inordinately, not able to master smoking a cigarette with that insouciant fortitude and confidence seen in movies, he went into a Ben Franklin dime store. There he twirled the plastic sunglass rack.
"Hey kid, stop that," said a clerk "It's not a merry-go-round." But in fact he had been imagining it as such and his mother strapped there by the clasp of Lilliputian schoolboys the way Shirley and her friends had fettered him on merry-go-rounds and besieged him with kisses. Only in this daydream there were classmate enemies from a couple years earlier accosting Gabriele directly with their ridicule. Simultaneously they reviled, scoffed, and guffawed the culprit instead of her son with, "Dirty lady bringing men to your trailer drinking their pee like a toilet. Our fathers know of you personally. In the Laundromats our mothers talk of rationing water because one of your spells has caused the lack of rain. "
"Kid!"
"I'm buying," said the boy with his mother's contumely. He pulled out a twenty-dollar bill waving its voluble greenness as the true emblem that conveyed everything about his country and his world. Restricted from spinning the rack, he sought less mindless thrills. He tried on various pairs of sunglasses before slipping one pair in his underwear and then walking up to the cash register to pay for the other pair. It was a test of nonchalance and despite palpitation and sweaty palms he passed it successfully.
He waited at the movie theater for the form behind the emailed image to come to him.
"Nathaniel?" asked the man.
"Yeah," said the boy.
"Hi, I'm Tom." The boy began to reach out his hand toward this urbane form of manhood he wistfully hoped would befriend him. A handshake was a guise of strangers with amicable intentions; but he had to withdraw his hand awkwardly when the man did not reciprocate. "Hope you haven't been waiting long—I went to get some snacks for us. Every boy likes chocolate." He smiled but it waned insincerely as he guardedly looked around the empty parking lot. "So you ran away from school?" He bantered and then shoved a cigarette in his mouth. It jiggled in his chuckle.
" Sort of. So, you ran away from work?"
"Sort of." Tom grinned sheepishly. "We've still got a few minutes until the movie. I'd offer you a smoke but I probably shouldn't out here."
"I had one a few minutes ago."
"Oh, okay— take off the sunglasses. Can't use them in there." Nathaniel pulled them up on his head. "You look just like your photo minus the glasses. What about me?"
"Older in person," said the boy.
"Oh," said the man. His tone, as his word choice, was vapid as life, to him, was vapid. The thought of age slowly gnawing on him while he engaged in life unawares made him want to evade conversation and entomb himself with youth in the movement on a screen in a dark room.
"Let's go in if we can. I've got the tickets already. You sure you can get into something R-rated this way?"
"I've done it before. Here: I bought you a gift." He took them from his underwear.
"Ah…Children's sunglasses with a ninety nine cent price tag on them. You shouldn't have." He sniffed them. "Although I do love the smell."
The boy gave a full hearty laugh.
"Do you always keep things in there like that?" He was careful about his words and glanced around the sidewalk. The boy did not understand him and said nothing. "What do I do with these things?"
"Give them to your son."
"I don't have one."
"When you have one"
"I won't have one," he mumbled evasively. He opened the door and they went in.
Seated together, they consumed contraband chocolate peanut butter cups and cola that the man pulled out of his bag. The man told himself that the boy was like a nephew. He did this to allay guilt that was burdening his positive self-image and so that he might restrain himself from a touch that could cause him to lose his prey so soon. His hormones boiled and steamed like the rolling levity of atoms and yet he did not reach for the succulent young flesh there beside him. The boy told himself that the stranger was like an uncle for there was a dull aching within him of one needing to believe that somewhere he would find a man's interest in him — one who would take him to baseball games and whom he could confide in, one who could teach him how to become a man.
When the movie ended the man said he had a better film in his apartment and they went away together to his furtive domain.
On his sofa bed, which had not been pushed back into a sofa, they were propped up on pillows. They were half sitting and half lying on a bed watching a movie and eating grilled cheese sandwiches and potato chips. Somewhere into the video was a car chase. Apoplectic expletives of the driver being chased—words that were part of the lexicon of American culture but ones to which he did not understand fully — puzzled and intrigued him. He was eager to know jargon that he assumed was linked to this thing called sex (whatever it was) and abbreviations like S&M and MF that were stranger yet. The ideas within these abbreviations were so hidden there that he got a sense that they were the conduit for experiencing great things. He felt that by cogitating all of these mysterious words and abbreviations long enough he would be able to transcribe them as if the English that was chiseled on the walls of his brain were a Rosetta stone. As he was pondering this Morse code of the adult cabal, there was a feeling of a hand under his buttocks — a hand that then passed through the border of the elasticity of his underwear to direct contact with his flesh. Nonplussed, he turned to the trespasser and saw for the first time an erection that seemed such a freakish abnormality (here it was poking out of jogging pants that had been slid down to his hips). Even more fey was that mesmerized and fixated look of yearning for absolute pleasure on the face of this stranger called Tom. Nathaniel removed the hand.
" What are you doing?"
" Can you help me? Pull down your underwear. "
"Why?"
"Don't worry. I won't tell anyone you came here to my apartment—you won't get punished if only you help me a little. Put your mouth on it or let me enter."
"Enter?"
"Your butt hole."
He asked himself it this was sex. He had assumed that it was a moonstruck look and a bewitched yearning of adult lunatics for kisses from the opposite sex.
He wanted to scream, "No!" and to whine that he wanted to go home. He was hurting and feeling diminished in years and he wanted to cry. He was scared despite his interest in how this freakish penis augmentation was linked to sex. He wished that he had never been so foolish as to come here or even gone to the movie theatre with this stranger. And yet he tried to hold onto his senses. He realized that to oppose a man trying to get his fix of exhilaration might be risky. He tried to figure out the most innocuous or least deleterious path that his childish mind could concoct. It was mostly a feeling since he was not all that logical. He remembered that mesmerized and fixated look of yearning for absolute pleasure on the face of this stranger. It was proof that although sex was linked to another person, it was mostly an internal function. To disengage himself and yet fulfill his curiosity, he returned one of the stranger's hands on his buttocks and placed the other long hand onto the stranger himself. Then he watched the stroking and pumping that lead to a whitish disgorging. With its passing the stranger went into the bathroom to urinate. A few seconds later, Nathaniel quietly exited the apartment for the first city bus he was able to descry. He kept wistfully hoping for his mother's return. He missed her.
With all windows open and at top legal speed, the wind dishevels his hair .His sunglasses are so dark that they make the day into dusk. His car is strewn with myriad CDs but he repeats the same song from one that belongs to his mother. He sings along with Led Zepplin.
"I've made up my mind to make a new start./ I'm going to California with an aching in my heart./ Someone told me there is a girl out there/ with love in her eyes and flowers in her ha-ir./ La la la la/ I took my chances on a big jet plane./ Never let them tell you that they are a-l-l the same."
He beats the steering wheel to the remainder of the tune until he glances at the gauge and decides to pull into the next gas station that he encounters . He has to laugh and that laugh comes out in a bitter and cyical drool. He wipes his mouth with his sleeve. His California girl lives in Sante Fe, New Mexico where her husband recently divorced her. She isn't a girl but a woman who last week, after recuperating from her face lift, emailed a photograph of her new face. She is just Hispanic Betty but he doesn't mind. Older women are more appealing to him and this one has always cared about him. He will use whatever she has to give to him. He has no compunction.
And for those who never had epileptic seizures or other afflictions as young children and never witnessed their weaknesses mocked by cousins or other "family," their blessings were to be content to emulate others in their society and to follow the desires that were innate in human instincts.
But for outsiders like Gabriele, who when very young survived their mothers and fathers running over them in tanks and their forging of mutinous lives in the distant east only to then briefly succumb to spells of seizures following the witnessing of state sanctioned and individual applauded barbarity (in her case a couple weeks after the Turkish man's decapitation), their only blessing was a key to the discontent of their days.
Abhorring the cold and cruel functioning of Turkey's legal system and the world at large, this little Kansas girl, Gabriele, became sick upon her return to the States. When her sickness and flaccid sensitivities were vehemently ridiculed by "family," it was through the determination of her will that she willed herself well; and the seizures that mysteriously came mysteriously vanished.
Realizing that she had gone from one group of belligerents to another, and that this particular family was no less akin to war than the other one, she tried to think how best to survive being in her aunt and uncle's domain. This family's attempts to hurt her could not be controlled but being hurt resided in her domain. The latter was her choice. She told herself (it was really more of a feeling since, as precocious as she was she could not reason so well) that she would not allow herself to be destroyed in deliberately planted psychological landmines in this temporary coming together of family. In her own way, despite her young age, she felt the equivalent of "Why should I be a casualty in a make-believe war when the real landmines are real indeed and wide-spread in far reaches of the planet." And so she walked through back corridors of herself until at last she was in the outside world staring back at a gigantic cage. All alone in the outside domain she read her books like a good scholar, and watched some of the six billion spider monkeys within that cage. She saw how they obeyed their hungers to eat and so they did some tricks to get their food, hungers for sex and so they stole monkey mates which looked similar to themselves (monkeys were notorious xenophobes who only desired non- threatening monkey mates from nearby trees), hungers for stability so they clung to the same sets of branches and ate the same brands of bananas, made sacrosanct rules for themselves like never defecating on a tree, and developed little routines for themselves as to when one must eat (the arbitrary concoction of breakfast, lunch, and supper given appointed times) and when to swing to a new branch. So, it was with true chagrin that despite her obdurate snobbery at having to live beside such opprobrious creatures that she should find herself as one of the myriad monkeys.
The four of them had just returned from an American football game and she was still numb all over like someone who had been kidnapped, blindfolded, and finally freed with no explanation. She would have been less discontent to sit in a world football game (this thing Americans referred to as soccer). When young, she liked playing the game herself so sitting through continual action, even if it were continually boring, would not have been so bad. Better, she would have eagerly challenged Michael to a racket ball or tennis competition or played badminton or croquet with the whole family. Instead, like Patty Hearst taken from relaxation in front of her TV at gunpoint, she had been carried off and put on bleachers at an American football game. The boys, whom she nicknamed Mr. Placid and Mr. Petulant (Michael, formerly MF, being Mr. Phlegmatic), had willed this to happen. She couldn't have opposed them. It was her son's tenth birthday. It was one of her presents to Adagio that she should sit there on the bleachers stuffing these frankfurters or weenies into her mouth and staring onto this little sea of intermittent tackle and throw action (the object being thrown like an irregular, phallic weenie). There were crueler fates than the desire to jump out of one's skull. She had to continually remind herself that it was her son's tenth birthday and that she was doing this for him. These reminders helped her to construct a florid and baroque facade of smiles and chatter. Her chatter was a repetition of their ideas about the players and the plays. Since she hadn't really observed a thing and they seemed to like womanly creatures who would parrot their ideas, parrot them she did. The game being one and then two hours relegated to the past, it still seemed to go on incessantly in their imaginations.
Here she and Nathaniel were 8 years removed from patty cake. Here they were now nestled together for his blowing out of the candles on the Betty Cake made from a Betty Crocker cake mix. Here they were as part of something larger—four birdies and a Betty in the nest. Because of the random bird droppings of fate these people were somehow hers (or at least it seemed so according to her feelings).
She told herself that in her promiscuous years in Houston she had been a crazy woman defying her repugnance of physical touch to play seductress games, half wanting to conceive a clump of clay in whom she could shape her animadversion of life, her gentle contemplative preoccupation, and her glint of disdain. However, these two—father and son— were born through the sanity of her head in a feeling of love. These relationships conceived in the art and beauty of Rome were of friendship and a shared exploration.
In both how she conceived Nathaniel and how she had auspiciously gained the other two she had to applaud the unconventional way it all came about. It was much better than boy meets girl, boy and girl hunger for each other, boy and girl claim each other to have something solid in a world of passing shadows, boy and girl in part briefly dream up a romance for themselves to escape their solitary enclosures, and boy and girl in part become victims of a delusive mist the making of one's selfish genes which say, "Mortals, reproduce so that we, the genes may go on in perpetuity."
As Nathaniel blew out the candles, Michael began to cut the cake. He did so within the last remnant of light within dusk while obtruding a cloud of cigar smoke into the room. Cigar smoke and clouds of it over her food was especially loathsome to Gabriele; and yet she didn't say anything. She bit her tongue and ruminated on what this thing called a relationship was. Her higher authority said, "It is an intangible bridge of one person to another that seems more real than the people who make up the relationship. It is keeping one's opinions concerning a man's nasty habits in shackles."
"Fire! Something burns in the kitchen," said Hispanic Betty as she returned into the darkness of the dining room after going to the bathroom. She had a handkerchief half wadded up in her hands but bits of it still fluttered in her gestures.
"No, he's puffing on an old man's turd." Gabriele's wanton words galloped away like a wild stallion.
"Gabriele, why don't you try to be a little more crude if you can," Michael interjected. "Betty, hit the lights if you will."
"Turn?" Betty saw the cigar as she turned on the lights. "Turd. Oh!" She realized that which was spoken about was "turd" and not "turn."
"Sorry, Hispanic Betty," said Gabriele. "Nathaniel didn't want to wait for you.He had to blow out the candles immediately so that he could inhale his cake."
"I waited ten minutes, Betty. How long does it take to piss, anyhow?"
"Adagio, women don't just lift the lid and spray. There is delicacy in it."Gabriele hoped to break him of his misconception.
"Well, she doesn't make a trickle. I think she puts TP in there to clog up what she thinks is bad sound because I don't hear nothing and we're always running out of toilet paper."
Gabriele laughed. "Double negatives are for Spanish, dear heart."
Michael said, "My mother would have taken dish soap and washed my mouth out with it if I had said something like that."
"Would have?" Gabriele laughed derisively. "Either she did or didn't. If she didn't clean your mouth you wouldn't know that she was a profanity policewoman ready to strike you with her bottle of Ivory dish soap. Am I right? To say 'Would' you would need to know about her doing it so that's proof of you saying something wrong to provoke her to do that outrageous action. What did you do?"
"All right, Smarty. Once—just once and I learned my lesson; and no, I'm not telling it."
"Scared that Mom might come over with the Ivory soap once again, eh?"
"Maybe."
"Please get that smoking turd out of my face."
"Gabriele, you are going to stop that crudeness right now! Here, give Betty some Betty cake!"
"Que cosas oir! What things to hear." She sat down between Nathaniel andMichael. "And smell."
"Betty," said Nathaniel, " Put your snot rags up your holes and you won't need to know we are around."
"I taked care of you when tu madre was not here and this—you dices cosas malvados a mi." Betty got up with her Betty cake and moved to a chair near Rick who just ate and withdrew from the world of commotion.
Gabriele hit him on the head. "You. Apologize."
"Sorry, Hispanic Betty."
She hit him harder on the head and the smack made his ear burn.
"Sorry, Betty." True repentance, Gabriele assessed, was such a coerced thing. A person naturally saw only his own perspective. To have empathy for others was such a chore and in some cases was only gained with the crack of a whip.
Here he was at ten with at least a tenth of his life completed. Once an infant content to have his feet played with, each year he needed more explosive pleasures and a larger array of them and this would continue into insatiable hungers of money, power, property, sex, and love. But she knew discontent was in all things — When she had picked up Mouse from the inhumanity of the Humane Society it —
She could feel a nascent migraine swelling within her, and like Betty and her allergies, she absconded to the bathroom.
A few minutes later Michael knocked on the bathroom door. She wanted him to go away but at the same time she wanted him inside to hold her head and to pin her hair back from the rim of the toilet. She wanted him to understand her pain and console her in empathy.
"What's wrong? You alright in there?"
"Sure."
But he heard her strenuous efforts to vomit like the cries of stretched muscles. They were as empty as yawns. "You're sick. Are you sick? What am I smelling in there"
She turned on the fan.
"Smelling?" she asked idiotically.
"Open up the door."
She opened it and smiled painfully. "Don't freak out. It's a joint."
"It's illegal."
"It's necessary. It's preventive pot—sometimes when used responsibly. See, once in a while, I feel a migraine coming on. Michael, darling, it isn't homeopathy but it relieves symptoms for lots of illnesses and migraines too."
"Flush it down the toilet. What if the boys were to see you smoking that?"
"What if they did?"
"Flush it down the toilet," he commanded. She did as she was told. She watched her tiny higher authority wave goodbye to her sadly as she was sucked into the whirlpool with her ship.
15 years ago when receiving her graduate degree in criminology at Emporia State University Gabriele got cards of congratulations that were not at all palatable to her. Reading the writing on these weighty bits of paper should have been just more insipid clogging of one's time and shouldn't have made much of an impression on her unfavorably and yet she couldn't help resenting this intrusive attitude of "Read me! Read me! Take moments of your life and read me!" She believed that the factory produced clichZs contained therein were not congratulations of past academic accomplishments but more the prompting of those who advocated that post-graduates utilize ideas for pragmatic pursuits. These were mass produced clichZs of ignorant professionals in bondage to the idea that worth was wealth secured in slavish development of commodities or services, which were the means of affluence. Such people erroneously believed that, if well compensated financially, a life spent planning a product to develop an artificial and insatiable thirst or governing men so that they did not founder totally in their base instincts, as all earlier predecessors had done, was a constructive engagement of one's hours on the planet.
Among others, there was a card from her aunt and uncle and another one from her perfidious and mutinous parents. She opened and read the other rubbish before putting it in the rightful place but she let these particular envelopes lay on the counter, near her toaster, for a day or two before stabbing her foot against the ribbed lever and guiltlessly opening the trash can's jaws. "Saccharine for the alligator—gotta feed 'gator," she thought and then pitched the envelopes and their unopened content into the trash. It was such an American gesture, which was an alloy of a disposable culture and the independence by which one might extricate herself from the visceral, vitriolic virulence of a dysfunctional family.
And when she got her Master's degree in psychology in Houston there was a pleasant absence of this driest of sentimental tripe until one day Peggy sent a belated card and letter with "Urgent" marked on the envelope. Gabriele opened it begrudgingly. It was one of those half- hearted apologies of "If I've done anything that has made you wrongly perceive…" or "If I've done anything that has made you believe…" with something like "that you are unloved" or "that you weren't wanted." Now she couldn't remember the exact details even if there was that indelible impression of one who would never apologize or admit that there was anything to be sorry about.
Still, it wasn't an unpleasant letter (she had had worse) and her vantage point when she read it from a lawn chair on the deck brought a happy serenity even onto it. A humming bird was boldly drinking from its feeder of nectar, a butterfly was fluttering above a potted plant, a young boy who was running for his ball was casting such an elongated shadow in the morning sunlight, and this vertical shadow was appearing somewhat three dimensional from her aerial perspective.
Furthermore, while concentrating on this invisible bombardment of molecules rife in the verdant yard she was also trying to figure out how best to sketch the atoms of fragrance and how this burgeoning dotty texture of atomism, rather than impressionism, could be extended to the sketching of the boy, his shadow, the butterfly, the humming bird, and a pensive woman looking out of the window to avoid packing her things.
So, reading the letter and not being of a mood to demand contrition of one who had never been contrite, she was not disappointed even though as an undergraduate she had unwittingly expected a metamorphosis of contrition to manifest itself in her aunt's sloppy handwriting. A more salient fact was that this particular letter accompanied with a greeting card of congratulations was a pensive deliberation on their relationship. That being the case, she kept it for a couple weeks before at last passing it into the jaws of the trashcan. If not a tacit apology this less than insipid letter was a wistful yearning to reestablish the relationship and from it she felt deep sympathy for her aunt.
Hundreds of times anew from childhood, Gabriele was unable to even go back for a day under the roof of an uncle whom she had successfully fought off from attempted molestation countless selves ago. Gabriele never mentioned this incident to anyone. Although in early childhood she was able to pinpoint it as the catalyst of their vehemence toward her she never said a word. So her uncle and male cousins disparaged her for what time she got up, how she combed her hair, for being left- handed, how she held her fork, the amount of time that she spent in the bathroom, where she sat, the position she sat in, why she read so much, why she was spending so much time reading in her "cage," that she was probably shedding hair on the living room sofa, why she put her legs together so prim and proper at the supper table, and why she opened her legs like a tomboy or a lesbian cunt. She told herself that childhood would not last forever and that this was something that she would pass through without crumbling to pieces. "Matter of fact," said the voice within her, "you will get through it all unscathed." And throughout each day of each year she remained sangfroid, believing that a relentless cold stare would attenuate their cruelty, and yet no battles did she win with the Antarctic blasts that she sent their way unabatedly. And years later she never mentioned it in her letters to Peggy. Why would she with reality not being an external phenomenon but pictures rendered by the brain that were unavoidably reworked to justify certain ugly scenes ("Why don't you want to go with your uncle and cousins to the lake-really Gabriele, you need to work on your disposition - no man would have you the way you are becoming"). And yet her aunt sensed this absolute inability to return to Kansas in their communication so she wrote that she would fly in to see her. Gabriele agreed but looked at her coming with dread. Removed, reshaped, and orbiting around other things in the depths of space, Gabriele was a distant star. A connection back to Peggy, she then reasoned, would take enormous energy in a sustained sympathy and it was doubtful that even with the best effort, anything good could be gained from it.
The meeting happened. The aunt, who was usually such a martinet, asked about her niece's weight gain as if it could be anything other than pregnancy. Choosing chocolate as a more viable lie than a tumor Gabriele lied in speech but Peggy lied in belief. Worse, when pressed on the issue, Gabriele promised that she would come back for a visit and seek employment in Kansas. It was a successful meeting of active but coerced lies and passive, cajoled mendacities. There was a facade of feigned smiles throughout the day despite a sense of consternation and loss. It was a day of many awkward and reticent moments of not knowing quite what to say.
Now she was to be awarded a Master's degree in art history. For her it was an eventless day without ceremony. It was a normal day of putting up new wallpaper in one bedroom and then cleaning up to help Hispanic Betty with dinner but interrupting the latter task from incompetence and the need to drive the boys to little league practice. Even until now there were no cards or special letters sent to her, and this was as she liked it. She did not need anyone to congratulate her because she did not feel that there was anything to be praised for. She might have learned the history of art but she had lost the sense of herself as an artist. The cracks of her damp coldness had been filled as complacently as a warm moss. In family there was no discontent with the world and within these heavenly cellars all else seemed musty and art the specious delusions of crack addicts.
Heretofore most of her paintings had such a still contemplative depth within the glint of the eyes of prostitutes and street people who could pull down lightning; movement had the fading lines of ripples in a pond; hard movements belied the simple pleasures; pallid colors delineated the richness of form in a world of vanquished color; friendship was portrayed with discomfited and inexplicable sense of betrayal; people were stoic mannequins straining about in contorted action and exhibiting eyes of consternation at being in ceremony and societal roles that were not what they had imagined them to be; Antarctica was a resplendent distant background in contrast to the war ravaged Middle East with its oil wells ablaze; and in stores where customers headed for scanners with an incessant array of things, these people were as blue as waves, curled and dashing as foaming breakers, in movement seemingly happy but in practice discontent. Sometimes the dominant colors were tawny but pert, ruddy and pale, and recalcitrant but with lament. Often her protagonists possessed the ideal curves of Raphael paintings and her antagonists had the angled linear depth of El Greco portraits or of distant cars. Her protagonists had a resistance against the social instinct; but she had succumbed to its truth like an insect to the light of a lamp. She was flitting from one specious light bulb to that of another: now not able to contemplate and finding sitting still to paint a torturous sensory deprivation; and now with endorphins and dopamines uncorked, she was oozing in the unbearable lightness of being.
By night she would lie with him in this hunger of flesh, pleasure, and merger; and after the cessation of sexual intimacies she would still feel undulations. She would snuggle up to his body and drowsily sink onto his chest while his head turned away from her, parting to other dreams and other illusions since the fire for this one had burnt itself out. The odors of his body would merge into her, and they furthered her illusions of a metamorphosis into something greater than the concoction of reason and the attempts at making sense of the world, which had to be done alone —a sense that she engraved onto the interior walls of her brain the way the ancient Egyptians chiseled eulogies in the tombs of the pharaohs. The smells of his body brought to her a pleasant titillation if not love of all things that were caught randomly by the magnet of her pondering. As she snuggled there she was reassured that there were possibilities of loving the world in ways she had never imagined by extending herself to him and becoming something different than a stuffed polar bear with the stiff arms that the factory of the human race mutantly created.
Then they would sleep some moments and his chest would no longer be her life buoy at all but a magic carpet ride or a Shuttle flight as gentle for her as if she were an insect on an eagle. She would be taken to where one's head might brush against the stratosphere before descending in an arch back into wakefulness. Upon them both awakening there would be frivolous pillow talk. He would sometimes narrate snippets of his life in a cathartic random response to whatever idea preceded it. In some ways he was like those who could not tolerate the impersonal aspects of self-consuming jobs and would affirm their existence to a psychologist or a priest at a confessional. She learned of the attitudes that drove his interaction with the world—a family's overemphasis of money, which made him become an educator, and yet a belief that owning and operating a business was one's only means of success. He was cognizant how the force of one's family caused one to emulate and oppose its attitudes and had a sense of humor about this, which she admired.
Often these talks were of irrelevant and petty matters that were amusing on the pillow but so easily forgotten off of it. One time he asked her what she would be doing the following day; she told him that she had to go to Wal-Mart to buy the boys some underwear and socks and some paint for the deck, and that she might look around for some clothes for herself at a mall; and then he expressed how once a cleaning lady who was doing her work in the men's bathroom in the mall had caused him to be unable to relieve himself. She giggled like a schoolgirl at a slumber party. She reciprocated by telling him that in "Bang-COCK" cleaning ladies "go in and out of bathrooms with their mops with impunity." She teased him that maybe there were these ostensible cleaning ladies everywhere whose real duties were to cause inhibition, clogging, and insecurity within the male gender. From this her mind took a tortuous and serious linking of ideas. She began to ruminate that society was upside down. Cleaning ladies in men's bathrooms, forced to smell urine, soap, and bleach all day should be paid the most and that they who were the benefactors of the world like presidents and prime ministers should be paid the least. She argued that only then, when equality was gained and each person given either money or admiration as compensation for their work, would the world be a just and harmonious place. He laughed, thinking it was another joke, but she was deadly serious.
And yet once he told her something significant. He told her that his mother was not his mother at all but his aunt; that his real mother, suffering from post partum depression, suffocated his baby brother in the bath water, dumped him, Michael, in the bracken waters of an abandoned well at her parents' farm, and hung herself in a shed. After the funeral, his aunt was urged to come to them from her home in a small Italian town. Gabriele felt an empathy as deep as the gods for she too had been run over in family which for her made hugging, touching and feeling emotions such an alien plain to this date. She too had been recalcitrant and had done antipodal actions to thwart this Aunt Peggy and Uncle Jake but for all her freedom the actions had been emulation or rebellions against this absurd, vague memory of family. Thinking of him at the age of three clinging to rope and pail she knew that she loved him.
Hate was everywhere. It was the striving to exist and to have a dominant importance in the inconsequential affairs of man. Just as the provincial Korean bravado within Sang Huin or Shawn had made him so mercilessly obdurate in administering justice against his sister and her pregnancy, so the Americans camouflaged innate aggression behind terms like axis of evil, rogue country harboring weapons of mass destruction, links to Al Queida, and liberation for the Iraqi people. They and their preemptive strikes, they and their selective targeting with improved smart bombs, were killing and harming thousands of civilians after evoking psychological trauma in this failed shock and awe campaign. They, by heat and explosion, decimated myriad soldiers who either chose to be such to secure a decent livelihood or were conscripted with threats; and yet the Americans melted their bodies in this internecine campaign sending them up amongst the other gasses the way thousands of their civilians had been melted within the World Trade Center towers. The Saddam Hussein regime, for all its internal atrocities, had posed no new threat to the world. It just had the potential for potential and this was enough because the days were dark indeed. One group of tyrants and their sadistic entourage holding a nation hostage for decades had to be the example for the capabilities of their virulence was greater than that envisaged by Al Queida — at least so the George Jr. administration, for all its cowboy stuttering, still glibly and volubly conveyed.
He thought this as Saeng Seob sat down in the living room and said, "Can you really think with that thing on?" Sang Huin knew that he couldn't—at least not well—but the television was their child from which conversation was begotten and extant. Without it their intimacy would have exhausted their conversation long ago.
"Turn it off if you want."
"It isn't bothering me. I'm used to AFKN by now."
"Well, sometimes AFKN has movies about American history but I guess not with the war. I needed a break from CNN. An hour ago CNN reported that we—I mean the Americans— bombed a residence where they think Saddam Hussein was staying at. Four two-thousand pound bombs. They thought that killing the innocent people of that block was nothing next to the chance of him being there— he and his sadistic sons. Who knows how many innocent people were collateral damage."
"Do Americans think it was right?"
"I don't know."
"Was it right?"
"I don't know." It was a cold calculation, a moral choice that was not meant to be that of humans; and yet someone behind a desk had made this one to have a chance of reducing the length of the war and its casualties. He had never been good at modern math so his studies were centered innocuously in musicology. "What do I know about this?" he asked himself. "What do I know about anything?"
"Will they do that to the North Koreans?"
"I don't know. Don't know—hope not. What are you reading?"
"Nothing."
"What's nothing?"
"Comics."
"In Braille?"
"Yes."
"You can't see the pictures. There are no pictures in that book, are there? There are words. I guess being blind makes you have to develop a vivid imagination." Seong Seob did not say anything. "Comics about what?" He was trying to control this disapproving undertone that often crept into his voice. He disliked wasted leisure. It did not seem to him that leisure should be such a frivolous pastime with the few when the many were so needy. He also did not like Saeng Seob's lack of motivation; and it was only because of his friend's blindness and knowledge that his mother had thrown him like a coin into a wishing well of death that Sang Huin managed to stay mute about this issue. For the first time a better reason for not judging others formulated in his head: he who was a promiscuous homosexual, an unfaithful partner to his friend, one who had urged the abortion of his former girl friend's embryo, and had by his Puritanical Korean values been an inadvertent abettor of the crime against his sister, Jun Jin, had no moral authority to state an opinion about anything. Even if Saeng Seob at times exhibited double his own reticence making conversation short of impossible, he knew that this was even less of a reason to judge him than the fact that he was such an unmotivated sloth. Still it was natural to think that one's own introverted character was right in being such and that someone else who was sometimes even more reticent, was abnormal. He thought, "So this guy has a part time job with his cousin and no real hobbies outside of strumming on a guitar and light reading— these are innocuous pursuits in one who from his pain could have become a hardened criminal. Surely there are blind bad guys in penitentiaries; and who am I to judge him?" . "A cat"
"Garfield?"
"Yes."
"In a book?"
"A collection."
Relinquishing the idea of having a meaningful conversation, Sang Huin changed the channel to CNN and got his fix of war updates; but a half hour later it became an overdose. He turned down the macabre sounds and returned to his computer.
By day Gabriele would make calls to her beloved so that she could get that rush in the pleasure receptors of her brain. Then, when warranted, she would go over to the site of the future school and Michael would always ask her what she thought of the construction up to that point. She would say her unvaried line of "It sure is coming along well," which of course it was invariably. Occasionally she would sketch her ideas of the interiors of faculty lounges, secretary offices, and other miscellaneous rooms. She would submit them to his blank stares and then she would have to admit that she did not "know the first thing about interior design." And yet the same aversion that she had toward holding hands in the day was making her into less of an active lover at night. Grateful to be made real by being pulled out of the stuffy chamber of her head, still it was sometimes difficult to repeat the same half hour rapture each night as if this hunger for merger and thoughtless ecstasy were to bring on intimacies and awareness that the previous night's half hour failed to do. This perspective was exacerbated all the more when she considered the fact that the urges had been no less poignant during all their other times together. Each night there was his hard thumping to please himself fully with little regard, now, for the best means of her arousal. Although still pleasurable, and even more of a gyrating release from thoughts, it now seemed more like being tossed in a blender, and each night her embraces became more like frozen fruit.