Tokyo to Tijuana: Gabriele Departing America

Tokyo To Tijuana: Gabriele Departing America By Steven Sills

Book One: Sang Huin

"It is probable, then, that if a man should arrive in our city, so clever as to be able to assume any character and imitate any object, and should propose to make a public display of his talents and his productions, we shall pay him reverence as a sacred, admirable, and charming personage, but we shall tell him that in our state there is no one like him, and that our law excludes such characters, and we shall send him away to another city after pouring perfumed oil upon his head and crowning him with woolen fillets; but for ourselves, we shall employ, for the sake of our real good, that more austere and less fascinating poet and legend-writer, who will imitate for us the style of the virtuous man." Plato (Republic)

Chapter One

At Toksugum Palace in Chongno of Seoul Sang Huin (known by his friends in the states as Shawn) felt an empathy as deep as the gods; and the reconstructed walls of ancient buildings that he could see into and imagine long deceased emperors in coronation ceremonies or reading their mandates became irrelevant. Yang Lin, parting from their movement toward the steps that led toward the Royal Museum, began to walk to a distant place where a woman in a western wedding dress stood at a pond posing for a picture with her groom. Near earlier buildings Sang Huin had noticed him looking at them questioningly. He had seen a sad and innocent yearning in Yang Lin as if, after a long search, that creature had found his alter ego in the woman and would not let it go.

After five minutes of waiting alone, sitting on those steps and letting a cigarette dangle limp in a frown, Sang Huin realized that this new friend of his was not just straying off briefly, so he gradually went over there in a circuitous and jaunty stroll as if other things had gained his attention and only by accident was he moving there. Yang Lin told Sang Huin that he longed for her: longed for himself within her beautiful clothes, within her commitment, and within her sex. He had been so sincere. Sang Huin felt a worse form of compassion for him. It was sorrow, the enlightening, sweet venom, and it sank into him. It was deep empathy. It was God. It was definitely something that was not wanted. It stayed with him on the bus.

On a ride from the Nambu Bus Terminal to Chongju, Sang Huin's sleep was spastic like a nervous twitch that would every now and then startle him into wakefulness and he would wonder where he was: Muguk, Chongju, Seoul, or "Miguk." Sometimes at the primary school in Muguk he would ask, "Where are you from?" Then once, in a coaching effort for the pitch of a complete sentence, he had made the mistake of "Miguk…Miguk" ("America…America") and the class was in an uproar. He thought of this in one of his startled awakenings. He looked from the window to flat patches of skimpy forest that most Koreans thought of as so beautiful. The way was straight, south and barren and made him almost yearn for the tortuous roads that appeared near Umsong to be rid of scenery so bland. Although the bus traveled down the highway as a solid, jitterless mass, he jittered into more drowsiness. The contents of his head shook and his mother's voice cried out to him like locusts from the branches of trees. There was a hot sticky childish oozing within him. Within dreams his fortitude was like marshmallows when pulled off of sticks after roasting in a bonfire. He heard voices of he and his sister counting 7 o'clock, 8 o'clock, 9 o'clock rock. 10 o'clock, 11 o'clock, twelve o'clock rock - Ghosts won't find me. Ready or not we'll find you.

Then there were those macabre photographs, at the trial in Houston, of his grown sister's skeleton. The police had looked for his sister's body in the park but obviously not thoroughly in the ravine. In one year they had only searched that park once and in the meantime her body had decomposed. He dreamed of those photographs of skeletal remains and the other photographs of more than a few bones that had gone off from the rest. They were marred too but by the fangs of dogs or other beasts dragging them around before dumping them away from the rest of the remains. He dreamt of these photographs exactly as they appeared from the slide projector and in that sequence as one of those most godless days of that long trial when one's whole body trembled in continuum through bits of the hours with stolid, cadaverous expressions throughout the ordeal. He assumed his parents had also behaved the same. Before the real confirmation of her death, all three had been functioning with such dead but hopeful words and perfunctory gestures which were then ripped out of them as the program, memory, and energy cells can be pulled out of robots and soon they were thrust in their own personal black abyss with none of the three able to see outside of blackness and pain as much as they might have wanted to offer solace to each other.

Who could offer solace when the conclusion of life as an evil and godless place had solidified into consciousness like Death etching her name in wet cement? Back then, it had been obvious that the trial, a pantomime of the mute for justice, could never be allocated to the dead under the best circumstances, and this particular trial was going nowhere. The conclusiveness of the evidence and motive had been defaced with time that had entirely decomposed her form. There had been theories. Plenty of circumstantial evidence had been presented. Her employer had done it to her as conclusively as a feeling could testify. Then and now there was plenty of indication that she had been pregnant with his child. Twenty years ago Sang Huin (Shawn then) had swung a golf club into her eye and the blood had splattered everywhere. On that day, as a boy, he had thought nothing could happen worse than that; but back then there was blood and back then there was composition. He woke up and once again knew that even in sleep there wasn't always repose. Sometimes, without finding a way of sealing memories in tidy body bags, one's inner voice was as active in sleep. He said to himself that he shouldn't be surprised by such restlessness when life's conundrums were so horrific. The passage of a few years, and the passage through a thousand times of falling asleep could not even restore one's equilibrium in something so horrific. He shook off his sleep like a dog its wetness. He tried to think of Yang Lin whom he had left: that mild voice so slow and deliberate in its intensity, the morbid and thoughtful eyes like an ocean containing its ecosystem, the muscular young body that had an orange hue like a Chinamen who had sucked up too much sun.

After the revelation he had listened to him repeatedly talk about wishing that he had been born a woman; and except for once of saying, "Well…I understand, but" (and stopping not knowing what to throw in as the "but"), he had been silent with eyes of empathy. It was painful to see a perspective; and Sang Huin broke out of his skin like a reluctant and tortured snake but accepting the inevitability. He just stared at the fountain for many uncomfortable minutes hoping that the mouth of the fountain could articulate a statement that would solve the situation as well as ease his discomfort.

At the fountain, in silence, he had thought of rigid Texan horses and the lazy meditative cows of his home state in warm fields at mid- afternoon—creatures of the gods with no sense of the vile practicalities behind their domesticated state. During his times of stress long ago they had often seemed to Sang Huin as so aesthetic that one could wish to slip within them for an hour or a bit of the day; and surely after having done it one might instantaneously wish for the freedom of whatever was beyond the fence. Maybe, he had thought to himself, something like this was how Yang Lin felt.

He had suddenly blurted out, "You commented that the pigeons and the fountain in the pond are beautiful. Maybe they are." He had hesitated feebly. The coarse words and tone had surprised both of them. "I hear that doctors can now make a man half pigeon if he dares to have a mixture of pubic hairs and pubic feathers; or if you prefer a beautiful fountain-surgery a continual waterfall can come from your ass." Sang Huin had not known where the words came from. His gentle imagination had rarely formed such an aggressive flare of thoughts and yet he had felt that he could not let this stranger—this recent buddy— this someone he had slept with—save up money on the assumption that he could be made into a beautiful woman. Twenty years from now he did not want him to be made into a hybrid mess from a lifetime of painful surgeries… hormonal confusion…mutilations.

But had he not mutilated four months earlier? A video "pang" girl [the clerk at the video room where he had watched a movie with his friend, Yang Kwam] tracked down the friend's license number, and then the friend's telephone number, and began to inundate him with a flood of messages. It was quite flattering and Sang Huin finally returned the calls. He was curious. At that time he wanted a girlfriend. From an erection, a yearning, an ejaculation, and more than he wished, knowledge of his own virility by the conception, he proved the very essence of manhood. She aborted at his request but nature aborted and mutilated: still-death, genetic defects, and miscarriages. Human beings were rifted apart from each other by circumstances of separation and death despite love. The life of a being, itself, was nothing but different transparencies miscellaneously tossed onto an overhead projector. No, he thought, maybe that was just his own life. The transparencies of most humans were in order—the last of which would be old age and decay but what was written on them was meaningless. His transparency recently had been to prove his manhood by having sex with a woman and it had all gone awry.

Sang Huin sighed. He took off his shoes in the bus. He stroked his feet, in short white sports socks, across the vinyl of the back of the chair before him as if he were giving a massage to the person seated there. He needed sex. He needed to lose himself in a pleasure that would reduce his headache and release him from worries even if it was an illogical frenzy far removed from reality and only lasted for a few minutes.

He tried to rest comfortably in his seat, absorbing himself in Time and Newsweek. Then someone yelped at him in Korean, pushing him out of his sympathies toward the bondage of the Afghan population under the theocracy of the Taleban and the tattered infrastructure of the country. There was no way to catch even a word or two of it and this balding and middle aged man gave Sang Huin a look as if he had wasted his time talking to the world's biggest dummy. Sang Huin gave his typical defense of "Miguk sarem" ("American") which would bring on a confused and critical look—in this case, it was a closer examination of Sang Huin and a slanting of the man's face as if he were ready to give Sang Huin a big fat kiss. Sang Huin picked up his book bag on the spare seat near the window and sat there.

It was complicated, in a sense. If he had been less temerarious perhaps to not have the support system of this whole chain—family, city, state, nation, and racial identification— might have posed a problem. To have lived all but the first few years in America, and so existing as a Korean only by birth and race definitely made him American in every way but a legal one. Most persons under such a scenario would have clung to the country that had made up nearly all of his experience. At least that was what he told himself. Effrontery and cowardice were two sides of the same coin. He loved his mother and she was alone on the American continent as he was in Asia. They were indeed alone in the world.

Even though he cared about family (what was left of it with both his father and sister now dead) it did not deter him from leaving America. To be on a traveler's visa with his own Korean passport did, however, seem to be a bit strange but he could not think of a situation in life that was not confusing. Relationships were confusing although he had never possessed one for very long. When he had the ineluctable sympathy for another person, it deflated all the romance. He didn't mind that so much. To embark on a deep friendship with strong personal commitment and devoid of the bouts of infatuation and frenzy like seasickness seemed the right course; but all partners of the past seemed to him to have wanted only to cast a romantic aura around him as if scared to see the real person inside, and scared to look at beings that were also banal and in continual suffering. Reflexively jumping into pleasure like a lifebuoy, as a human did, what could one expect? One thing was sure: he had experienced a deep pain that his fellow humans wouldn't even give the briefest of stares if they could avoid it. Besides, no one wanted his enlightenment that the world was a bad place when each was trying as best as he could to find an entrance into Disneyland to which there where no security guards to force a departure.

He searched though his billfold for a calling card. He went to the front of this high-tech bus and made a call.

"Yoboseyo."

"Yoboseyo. Yang Lin bakwa chuseyo."

Silence.

"Yang Lin or Antonio. Ku nun manhi irum ul cajigo isumnita. I sarem i wanhamnita." He threw in both names that the little guy went by and the telephone clicked off.

He called again.

"Yoboseyo."

"Yoboseyo. Yang—"

"What do you want with him?"

"I'd like to talk with your son. I am an acquaintance of his. He helped me to get to Toksugum Palace. I want to thank him. I'd like to talk to him again." Yang Lin had told him that his father suspected all male callers and that Sang Huin would have to give a defense of his acquaintanceship but Sang Huin felt awkward in his misrepresentation. Here he was playing with a man's reality concerning his son. He did not feel good about himself.

"Well, he isn't here. He's never here!"

The telephone clicked off. Sang Huin felt hurt. He felt a morbid clarity behind how people always left his life. He thought about what he "knew" of this Chinese friend, Yang Lin, if he knew anything at all: he was adopted and lived in America; that those parents died— his mother first and then the father in a drunk driving accident; that he was readopted by Korean parents; that his father despised him and suspected his son was gay; and that Yang Lin felt that his English level was the same as his Korean. Abstract ideas must not have existed in his head at all. In short, he "knew " very little and the scanty but pathetic information he received might, for what he knew, have been nothing but a mendacity. Sang Huin had a great empathy; but now another friendship had just bit the dust.

Had it been a month ago that Sung Ki had left him. Sung Ki: even now the name sounded musical. After the video pang girl's attempt at marital entrapment, this neighbor boy had been most alluring in their nightly rendezvous of two months. The sister who fed him rice and Korean pizza and the father who wanted to introduce him to his native country by teaching him the sounds of Korean letters were glad to get the youngest child an English teacher. Little did they know of the pleasurable respites from pain Sang Huin was getting in the back bedroom. Homosexuality was so taboo there that nobody believed in its existence. In that respect, free of discrimination, one was free to be gay in Korea. Then the18 year-old boy was told to meet the masculine and the vicious just as his country dictated. Right after getting his letter from the military, Sung Ki laid out Sang Huin's blanket in a different room. He talked of needing a girlfriend. It hurt; but, Sang Huin rationalized it was what Sung Ki needed so why shouldn't he talk about it? Superiors in the military often beat a man if they felt that he didn't have a girlfriend evidenced when no letters and photographs were forthcoming. Then one day he was gone and soon thereafter Sang Huin lost the address book and key chain from the souvenir shop at the history museum Sung Ki had given to him. He lost both by leaving them in the locker at the mokotang (bathhouse ). "We lose our friends," thought Sang Huin, "and then we lose the things that our friends give to us." It felt less harsh to make the idea applicable for all mankind.

There had been no real reason for him to go to Seoul this time. There were no private lessons there. His reactions toward Umsong also did not have much of a rationale. Occasionally, even when there were no private lessons in that area he sometimes got up around 4 a.m nonetheless; took an hour long bus ride to that small town he had once lived in; walked near bowing rice and corn; crossed the bridge around a thin circular lake at a small park; and stared at the Korean moon bolted tightly against the Korean sky. He wanted for the night to capture him somehow—for a drunk motorcyclist or a lazy trucker to whisk a wild adventure and physical intimacies upon him and yet, in full wistful innocence, he equally wanted what he would always go there for: to hear nothing but birds and a whisk of wind in the tranquility of that sleepy town in one of its most tranquil hours. Nothing of the former ever happened and he would always come from the impulse to a feeling of loss. His impetus to go to Seoul this week had come from a dominant feeling of disconnection experienced by one who knew the extreme violence of the world, who knew the madness of hope for anyone, and felt being buried alive in that one perspective that the world was an evil place-a perspective that was not ethereal but solid as a coffin even if it did spill over into other things. A further disconnection of any significance would cause such an individual to let a numbness and deadening of the concept of self to take place. The day before his fleeing to Seoul, his platonic friendship with Kim Yang Kwam had gone awry and he found himself floundering in suffocating despair as that time years earlier at the trial. Yang Kwam was asleep with his hand in his underwear when Sang Huin awakened. Sang Huin touched him. It was the end of the closest Korean friendship that had been his life support in the six months he resided in this foreign country, South Korea, which was his birth home and the source of his nationality.

Now it was Kim Yang Kwam he kept thinking about in the bus. Sang Huin was labeled as dirty a few nights ago: the way he walked on the floor with his shoes instead of taking them off at the door; the half open window that allowed any insect an easy passage; the fact that he didn't have any rubbing alcohol to cleanse the mosquito bites that his friend gained while sleeping in Sang Huin's room; the fattening mess of pancakes with half burnt ridges in place of rice which Sang Huin prepared for him despite the criticism; and then came questions about the nature of his relationship with Sung Ki.

Glancing out of the window, he pulled out a pint of "ooyoo" (milk) from his sack. His throat was not dry or hurting but for some reason he felt the need to caress it with what he drank as well as with his fingertips. He drank his milk, attempted memorizing a few words of Korean, and then went back to sleep. He had a strange dream of some inconsequential happening in Seoul. The dream was not much different than reality. In the dream the subway (Orange Line, number three) stopped and he noticed a young blind man with a dog getting into one of the cars. Sang Huin quickly moved toward that door. Then he found himself walking through one car after another since the blind man and the dog passed through the inside doors. He woke up and thought of the dream in the context of himself. He was drawn to beauty and carnal activity but also to those captive in some imperfection for within them sensitivity, existential and knowledgeable of suffering, would be complete. He yearned for the deep intelligence that knew such things. His imagination swelled with the thought of this individual just as it had when he actually encountered him in Soul. Sang Huin was always traveling—especially when he was in the States. He was discontent and was seeing himself falling further and further away from the normal path. He had nothing but a college degree, no specialty, no ambition for money, he couldn't really think of a field or discipline for himself, family was a deep life altering wound that made the thought of gravitating himself around a wife and children unbearable, and even his hobby of playing a cello was as a musical dilettante. He looked out of the window and smoothed out his hair. The bus was becoming full now. Still, no one was standing.

Maybe, he thought, he should have been proud at the restaurant. Instead, when Yang Kwam said that he never wanted to see him again Sang Huin said, "I understand," but was thinking "Well, then why are we eating together?" Yang Kwam's eyes were stern. Indeed, it was the end. He felt stunned at that table: to lead a person to a restaurant so that he could not talk to him and then at the inquiry on if he was upset— Oh, what did it matter? Sang Huin's head hurt thinking about it. He put his hand on his forehead and looked out of the window. Sang Huin said nothing to the statement of "Don't ever call me." They both ate sparsely in thorough silence, Yang Kwam paid the bill, and then he was gone. Sang Huin's instinct was to follow his former friend to the ends of the earth on the public bus system and to harass him in the bus by making him feel miserable for his declaration that he was a dirty person. No, he told himself, he had handled the situation the best that he could. After sitting at the table for a while, he had withdrawn to his home passively. On what seemed like an eternal trip, cramped on a seat in the bus, disconnection was making his mind jittery, soft, and rolling like a ball away from him. He tried sleeping but his mind kept trying to imagine what really took place between his sister and her boss at the park if indeed it had been really him at all. The jury years ago had not thought of the evidence as being conclusive. In sentencing a man to a life of imprisonment it couldn't be done on a feeling.

He felt lost and loose. He still felt stunned. He remembered that he had only touched him by barely stroking his hair and his hand and then touching his underwear. It only lasted a minute and then he turned on his side away from him and his own instincts. It was an insignificant minute in one's life and he could not figure out why it became such evidence of the accuser that he was dirty-the charge of homosexuality not being directly stated. He asked himself why, even now, he was staring at moving forest and long stretches of road with this yearning for love. He opened another pint of milk. He sipped and then rested its opening to his bottom lip. Why did human beings end in such closure? Why did they gain worth and awareness of their being only in personal interactions? Was he nothing but the composite of other people's impressions of him? These impressions—these judgments— could not be real. They were based on brief outward gestures and the judges had nothing but their own usual experiences of their petty and selfish lives to compare others with. In Japan women who left their children locked up in hot cars were rarely accused of the crime of manslaughter; and in Korea the handicapped, he had seen, were left to crawl like worms, pushing their carts and singing their songs as traditional music blared forth. He died every time he saw one of them. He yearned for the love and the language where he could befriend someone who was handicapped and he chastised himself for only being able to lay money in some of their cans. Once he put his hand into the hair of such a man. He stroked the hair around his face. The gesture lasted only a couple seconds. The man screamed out something and a security guard began moving toward them. Sang Huin placed money in the can and went away. Then he began to question himself. Maybe it was loneliness that had compelled him to do that. After all, the action was undoubtedly bizarre in the sense that no one else did such things. He was not wearing a monk's robe. Another man's fate was none of his business. This type of action just was not done; and yet, he was not the same as others. Suffering the paralysis that would not allow him to make a full smile and finding the eyes x- rays that could go, for the most part, beyond pleasant countenances to a suffering innate in other beings, it was no wonder that he was peculiar. It was no wonder that at Christmas parties or barrooms he sat and drank in silence feeling like a buffoon for not acting like one. In ways he was a buffoon: his taciturn ways that thwarted the lighthearted frivolity of a world conceived out of motion was the substance that often caused contemptuous laughs.

What did it matter? What did any of his actions towards others matter? Everyone came and left him. He was dizzy on a merry-go-round.

"You must all eat," said Sung Ki as he poured water into the remaining rice in Sang Huin's bowl. He had heard it so many times. How they had carried on an affair with the sister staying there and the overnight visits of Sung Ki's father was a mystery.

They had met in the park in Umsong. Sang Huin was memorizing words in his textbook entitled Let's Speak Korean. Sung Ki spoke something to him in Korean. "Miguk Sarem imnidad" responded Sang Huin (I am an American). Sung Ki, accompanied by a high school friend, took him to eat kimbop (a Korean version of sushi). He spoke in English the entire time neglecting his school friend from the conversation. After visiting a couple museums, Sung Ki gave Sang Huin his beeper number. Sang Huin invited him to a Christmas party held for students at a language institute but stayed contained to his own students and his new friend, Sung Ki. That night they slept together; and the boy that had stroked Sang Huin's leg with his foot when they were eating kimbop wanted to hold hands while the two of them lay next to each other. Sung Ki, soon afterwards, began to plan out their time together. Sang Huin did what he requested: touring the Independence Museum; mountain climbing; free English lessons, and visits to his Buddhist temple and congregation. Soon Sang Huin was spending every night at Sung Ki's apartment and a month later their relationship was a sexual one.

Sang Huin thought about how Sung Ki cleaned the apartment by putting a wet towel under one of his bare feet and sliding across the floor with it; how he used to go into the bathroom with his newspaper and would not come out for over an hour; and that sentence he would always say, "you must all eat" meaning that every speck of rice left in the bowl should be mixed with hot water into a soup so that nothing was wasted. On the day that he learned that Sung Ki was going away he came to his apartment and asked if there was anything he could do or get him. There wasn't. He sat on the sofa, cold and pierced, as Sung Ki ignored him, cleaning one thing or another and then reading something or another. Sung Ki lit a cigarette and sat on a balcony that overlooked the mountains and rice patties of Umsong. After a few more moments of silence, Sang Huin went to him. His voice was shaky like a faltering foundation. He cried. It wasn't so much in reference to him as it was his sister. It was his first tears for her. It was in reference to non-ending perpetual loss. He knew that Sung Ki would construe it as solely for him. He felt embarrassed and the embarrassment increased as the two men hugged. Sung Ki began to cry. Sang Huin said, "I want to apologize. I'm sorry if I did something wrong. You wanted a girlfriend and my friendship and I made you have a boyfriend."

"It's okay. I liked the feeling then." That friendship had bit the dust.

Right before the bus came to a stop, he fell into a dream where there was a dust storm in Pyongyang. He ran through one dong (neighborhood) to another lost, looking for distinguishable signs, shapes in buildings, and widths of streets. Everything from the thin dust-sheathed roads to the hangul (Korean language) on the signs, looked as identical as the occasional mom and pop stores and it was all indistinguishable from what he saw minutes and hours earlier. He ran into no one since the streets were empty. Then he became careful of where he stepped. "The dust storm," he argued, "could have slid land mines up from the thirty eighth parallel." The more he thought about it the more nervous he became and the more hurried. When he became breathless, he sat on a rock and drank the last of his bottled water. The taste of sauerkraut and hot dogs was in his thoughts and the boiling, bubbling surge of his saliva but he would have eaten kimchee or someone's dog being as hungry as he was. It became fully dark and he would have known entire blackness were it not for the speckling of stars, the moon, and a fire at a distance. He walked over to the fire. He saw four whores seated around a bonfire. He recognized different buildings, and the curves of the street near a hard dirt tennis court. This was Ne Doc Dong. "Do you want me," said one, "or do you want another?" Sang Huin's face turned a bright red like it did with drinking a bottle of beer. He smiled and looked toward the sidewalk in his embarrassment. He said, "No, I wouldn't; but would you have a brother?"

When he arrived in Chongju from the desolation of what was in between Seoul and it, the population and activity of this small city recreated an insatiable yearning for Seoul, which to him was a storehouse of all extraordinary venues to the mind (encounters both sexual and cultural). Large buildings were like the small mountains of Umsong with a topping of cloud on a rainy day—monuments of beauty welcoming him to its domain that edified and exhilarated his appetites and his love. The mountains, until recently, transported his imagination to green blankets of waving rice, and from there to farmers' markets and rural parades celebrating the farmer, the daily appreciation of the faces he saw, and the monotonous sounds of "Hello" from children and high school students who knew of him. Those students always made him seem retarded when he couldn't communicate to their Korean rambling but when he spoke to them in English with the same stream of words they became giddy and the outcome was usually a positive one from his perspective. That was before he decided to sue his boss for the 10 million won that was owed to him. At that time he lost faith in the man's decency and began to find the countryside monotonous even though the continual exposure to greenery and remoteness had been healing to his soul.

He left the bus in Chongju (where he was more or less residing) and walked to the bathhouse called a mokotong. The day was fiercely hot and he wondered if it would be better to jump on a city bus since he had experienced heat exhaustion a week earlier and had to be put on an IV to replenish his system. He pulled out some bottled water and crackers for countering any remaining potassium deficiency. He needed a walk and was not willing to be impeded by a weakly cowardice in broken manhood that was contrary to his muscular form. He passed coffee shops, Samsung stores, a convenience store called Lawsons, and one called Best Store. Even though he could read some of the signs in Hangul he did not know what he was reading for the most part. He wished that his family had taught him his native language. Here he often felt like a handicapped moron. If he were an Anglo-Saxon, a blue-eyed Miguk sarem English teacher, spending 6 months in the host country without learning much of anything about the Korean language, it wouldn't have been even a minor offense. To most he was a retarded Hanguk sarem. He chuckled and then smiled at the faces he took in.

He waited at a red light with other pedestrians. He sifted out bodies and faces. For a few seconds he appreciated the old and the young whom he saw. It was an unselfish sensation. It was spiritual and he liked it. Then he lusted after the young men. He had hardly looked at them lustfully while in America. Occasionally Korean women also got his attention but not as much as American women. He had trouble believing that such predilections were a summary of a man. In fact they seemed to him a cathartic release of energy that blocked manhood if manhood was gaining equilibrium when coming up from the punches or finding a positive expression of himself and the world, and even a pride in both, within adversities. Since he quit his job following the suit and the loss of Sung Ki from his life he went to Seoul often more for sex than anything else. How easy it was. All he had to do was put his eyes on someone at a bar called "Trance," around Pagoda Park, or at the movie theatre behind it and off they went to his hotel room. What was it? A strong yearning for his native land and the man he might have been had he not been replanted in America, an over-identification with his own sex, or fragmentation from violence that had disgorged a close family and made him distrustful of those bindings and obligations that could go awry. He did not know. He did not know that it mattered. Anyhow, here his lusts were pursued cathartically in part and lovingly in that addictive clinging in part but always he was falling free and naked into their pools of sensation.

He did not think that he was all that bored. He had around fifteen hours of classes a week and was able, with that, to gain a salary commensurate to what he should have received monthly from his former employer. It turned out to be perfectly legal. After all, he was a Korean citizen, albeit one on a traveler's visa, and so he did not have to work for anyone but himself. He didn't have to do all that much but be able to speak English. He went to museums in Seoul on his free time even though the experience was a bit redundant since there weren't enough temporary exhibitions to entertain and enlighten him for long. The period after sex cloyed empty into the night like a finished game of solitaire. He knew that reality whenever he chose to engage in it and yet he did it nonetheless. He wanted an exchange of higher and lower energies (or at least thought he did), but men throughout the world were afraid of anything but the latter. Reality was as it dictated: and for the most part he did not want to make a seedy experience into something transformational by exchanging names and telephone numbers, and making subsequent calls although that was what he secretly wished-the tattered man that he was.

He entered the mokotong. He picked up a key, a toothbrush, and a razor at the counter. He took off his shoes and left them with the worker who deposited them into a small shoe locker; and then he went to his clothes locker. He took off all of his clothes except for his underwear. He locked them in. Then he went to the toilet. He put on the typical bathroom slippers made of plastic that were used in toilets because they were often wet and dirty. He went back, after urinating, and reopened his locker. He took off his underwear and deposited it there. He had become so socialized to the need of a beeper (not that he ever got any calls apart from students needing to re-change their hours of study) that he hated to keep it there suffocating under his socks. It was an inanimate object but, instrument that it was, it was a source for possible connectedness. Like a child, in his more subconscious thoughts, it was his friend. Still, Koreans, as addicted as they were to pagers and the new popularity of cellular telephones, could not easily dangle them from their penises at a mokotong. He locked the locker and felt "Honja" ("alone). Even among large groups of people he was alone. When he went to restaurants he was usually "honja," and had to declare it. When he studied Korean, read great literature, went to a museum, saw a video at the video pang, or went to a mokotang he was alone and often questioning how anything could be enjoyable in such remoteness. There was pain in it but like any adaptive mammal choosing one lesser pain to the greater one (in his case choosing the aloneness of his thoughts to the sociability of the masses) there were times when he wasn't even aware of how alone he really was. Everything was measured by its impact on others but the pre-adolescent, found buried deep in the man, could always play alone. When violence was really known and the world was conclusively bad in one's perspective one could go at it alone.

In the shower he used a type of dual washcloth connected together like a mitten. He put his hand inside of it and used its abrasive side to scour his body. He tried not to stare at all of the bodies doing the same. He spent just a few minutes in a whirlpool because of the intensity of the heat and then dived into the extremely cold waters of the pool. His heart raced and coldness tingled through his body. Koreans believed in the salubrious qualities of ginseng, dog meat, and sudden exposure to extreme heat and cold. Besides him, there were only two boys and a young man with a rubber ball within the cold pool, but only he swam circularly enjoying the solitude as much as one could. Every now and then, by his lack of focus, he swallowed water in his lust for a man or two lying on the edge of the pool where the heat of the whirlpools in the adjacent room entered and hypnotized them dozingly. He concentrated on the steam that rose above his head, exhausted itself on the mirrors, the waves that he had created which massaged his psyche in sight, feel and sound, and the three figures that enjoyed the water with him at a distance.

It had been disconnection that had brought him here to the mokotong, as it had to Seoul or even to South Korea itself. People had come and gone out of his life in such a storm, and he was in an existence floundering on something without a stable foundation. It was a miracle, to him, that he had been able to finish his studies at the University of Houston following his sister's death. Back then while students paraded themselves in the insouciance of sociable gestures reflecting their sexual rhythms he had dangled alone like a skeleton in a neurosurgeon's office. He liked the flexibility of his schedule here in Korea. He needed plenty of free time to think his weird thoughts and reconstruct himself as long as his thoughts did not collapse onto him, burying him alive.

At the least provocation, in late August, he began to come to her, his favorite city, lost and uncertain with eyes somewhat wild and fearful but yearning and believing in Seoul's power to provide him with experiences that would thrust him into a better knowledge of himself and the world. She would reflect onto him a more refined and loving being (or, at a lower stage, a loved one since he knew that it might be true that he was one of those tattered souls who weren't needing to learn how to be loving at this point but just needing to feel loved).

Four or five times around the pool were enough to tire him to a respite of ten minutes sitting on its edge and contemplating the movements of the people around him. Their forms transcribed into ideas concerning what he thought their lives might be like; and from there, feeling and the musical notes encroached from distant spaces within his imagination.

There had been a time when the whole world seemed to him full of connections. Perhaps that is what made his childhood memories so special: as a child he believed that their meaning would go on forever. The temporary nature of family marshmallow roasts and monopoly games with his father; tire swings and neighbor's tree houses; bicycle radios fastened to handlebars; selling snow cones to passing cars; bicycle routes; meatloaves, potatoes, and onion rings; bi bi bop and kimchi chige; that trip to Arkansas at a distant relative's house and how he and his sister had played in the snow with a "cousin" the whole day; his sister….

Oh, how painful! He didn't want to think of that ever. He wanted to find the beauty of the present moment. How good it was to stretch out into motion; to feel the power of his arms; and the embrace of water.

He thought about how on his walk here an ordinary happening had touched him without even then being aware of it. A young boy standing at a curb with other pedestrians waiting for the light to change rocked a metal, rectangular trash container, which swung back and forth on a hinge. Sang Huin put his hand on his head in passing; and the world could not have seemed more rich and connected by this impersonal incident than if Sung Ki's Buddha had manifested himself supplying answers to every question that Sang Huin had ever had in his head. This contentment and absorption in the poetic qualities of the present moment lasted only that long: a moment. He told himself that he continually wanted to be in the present moment as fully as this no matter how banal or what lonely patterns it consisted of. It was better than searching through memories of people long gone who had no capability of returning to him again.

He pulled his dangling legs from the pool. So much came and went. It was hideous in a way: he could not determine who or what was important. He wasn't even sure how much people were supposed to mean to him, if anything at all. Of his friend, Yang Kwam, what importance to the long- term aspect of his life did this man make? Disconnection ran amuck looting the benign corpses of good memories. After sitting himself on a bench in front of the pool, a sadness at the loss of his friendship with Yang Kwam made him feel age that he did not possess.

He watched a couple young men stretch out in motion. He watched their splashing, their excitement, and their frenzying limbs with the awareness that this tousling around had no higher significance. He got a vision in his mind. It was a feeling with musical notes. He got his underwear and his book bag from the locker and dressed himself marginally. In the dark sleeping room of the mokotang, where many businessmen got their only bit of relaxation from the week, he sat in a reclining chair near the window and began writing down notes but he felt that he was dabbling. He deluded himself that an ability to record notes on a staff would tranform him from an amateur cello performer and general musical dilettante to a composer. it was a dream for dreams meant that he was more than amarginally educated professionless clod kicked by circumstances to job, residence, and sexual orientation. Dreams meant that he was more than a mere carbon organism jilted around by electrical activity in the circuitry within the result of hornomal activity and the results of genetics. Dreams deluded him with a sense of purpose that would be mroe pleasant than reality.

One man's long and thick penis throbbed up and down on its own volition by the impetus of dreams. Sang Huin tried not to stare but he could not help it. His eyes, still getting over an eye virus, began to hurt and he felt tired. He put away his composition and then put his hands over his eyelids.

He went to sleep. He dreamed of a woman named Gabriele driving down a country road in Arkansas. She reached for a can of snuff that was on her dashboard. The roads she chose were random and she kept yearning to move southwest until she was out of America to that neighboring country of Mexico so different than the homogonous American model that was rife the world over. He saw into her mind and her hopes to cross over the Mexican border and veer off the main road through adobe hamlets, and cacti and past Mexican Indians.

When he woke from his epiphany he wasn't sure what to do with it so he returned to the pool only to find it had been drained. Seven streams of water gushed from spouts at the bottom of the pool and three young boys were running around in the collecting waters—one kicking water up to the lower parts of the mirror that covered the walls. It all reminded him of his mother blowing up a plastic pool for he and his sister and how she ran the hose over to the pool to fill it with water. He could remember how the two of them had splashed freely inside it for hours but were so prudishly careful that neighbors hosed off their grassy feet before entering with them. He remembered telling one neighbor boy to get out after he had disregarded the rule, soiling their clean waters, and when he, "Shawn," wouldn't leave he got out to tell his mother only to gain the enflaming sting of Texan fire ants on the souls of his feet. He could remember his screams more than the sting. He looked toward his reflection on the nearest part of the mirrored wall, but still steamed, it wasn't there.

His thoughts crumbled like Graham crackers and spilled like pints of milk that Mrs. Ghrame, the kindergarten teacher, had given to each class member as they watched Winnie the Pooh and Piglet on television before being made to sleep on mats for a nap. He felt lost childhood with so many forgotten memories sucking him into an invisible vortex of dust. He was running around with a cowboy hat, a play gun, and a holster. He was running around in his own wayward thoughts before adolescence created a hunger for beautiful bodies and a neediness that he would never be able to shake.

He jolted up and went where there was more light. He seated himself on a bench near a row of lockers believing that what he had was some story unrestrained by notes but when he put the pen to paper notes exuded there. He sensed the brilliance that came to him and felt awe toward the paper that could magically reflect the mood and full realm of his mind. He yearned to embrace his cello and to practice the notes of a Gabriele symphony that he was composing.

Chapter Two

He dressed himself. As he put on his socks, he did it with the mentality of a small child who still felt newness in the sensation. Sexual glutton of adult games, introvert, a man perpetually weakened and wary in ways unbecoming to a man, he still was a little wiser than most on a couple issues. He was cognizant that as an effect of adolescent awakenings an adult often was so obsessed with being in the company of others that finding any degree of happiness could not occur without them. He was a lot different in that respect: influences by hormones to sociability were thwarted by his wariness that gave him back his childhood innocence. Although he was an adult he could still play alone albeit uneasily. Also they, the unwary ones, were so fixated on gaining bigger and more complex pleasures in their gross gluttony to have everything before death that the marvel of air rushing into one's lungs or the feel of a spring breeze brushing against one's face was lost to them entirely. He wanted the remnant of early childhood—the memories of strong aromas, sights, and sounds as his senses depicted them— to live in him and not be the cause of mourning. He wanted to find the traces of deceased family in those early days and be able to glance back onto those tenuous decaying remnants of memory with a sense of happiness at what was once there. Still, even with the earliest and most benign memories furthest removed from the tragic end, such a feat was difficult to master. Everything in the mind of a 5-year-old from the smells of greased telephone polls to the sounds of the school bus that picked up his older 7-year-old sister, and everything in the mind of a 10-year-old from getting his first b-b gun to spending his first time away from family at a summer camp was like walking barefoot on sharp gravel. This, however, was better than having his entrails hacked out of him in that shock of finding his father dangling from a noose in the workroom of his basement. Thinking that early memories were even more benign than the present, he knew that it was only his thinking that made them painful. He judged that he was the source of his misery and with application he would find a way to plant himself in their fecund topsoil and burgeon into the future. His childhood memories were mostly American in origin although it was difficult to isolate the Korean episodes from that of the latter. After the school bus would rush in front of a road near the trailer park and whisk his sister away, his mother would pursue her early morning exercises in front of the television and he would emulate her movements. He remembered loving the thought of catching lightning bugs like his sister and the neighbor children and his repulsion towards it when his mother stated that they were "God's little creatures." He remembered getting lost in a store, feeling tiny among lady mannequins, and being nearly hit by a car as he played in the street. A man yelled at his mother for letting her child run around unrestrained in the streets. Humiliated, she sent him to the bedroom of the trailer. The radio on the mantle of the bed was playing "Raindrops keep falling on my head" and other lugubrious folk melodies. He listened. He cried on her white blanket as if she had banished him forever. He remembered that his father came home on that occasion and took him to the Orbit Inn for a coca cola. He twirled around on a stool restored to his euphoria as his father strutted his work talk to men his age seated on other stools.

Walking from the mokotong he thought of a story that he often read to the children in Kwang Sook's kindergarten in Chongju, a place where he often worked for a few hours each week. But his mind distorted it as the benign and innocuous innocence of childhood is mutilated and the mutilation calcified by experience. Seoul Tiger gets on a plane. He waves goodbye to his mother and father from the window. He feels the plane move and rise in the air. He shuts his eyes briefly. Then he opens them widely in amazement. Seoul Tiger looks through the window. He sees a valley of clouds below him. Then he looks down further and he sees Sri Lanka. The plane lands. Seoul Tiger gets out of the plane. He gives the deferential slight bow and says hello to Tamil Tiger. Tamil Tiger picks up his suitcase and takes it to a car. Tamil Tiger's mother is in the car. She says, 'Hello' to Seoul Tiger. They all go to the home of Tamil Tiger's family. Tamil Tiger's mother slaughters a pig and boils it in her stew while her husband brandishes a machete playfully. Then they all eat at the table. 'Do you eat rice?' asks Seoul Tiger. 'No, I eat unleavened bread,' says Tamil Tiger. 'Here are some Rotis.' Tamil Tiger passes him the plate. The plate has rotis on it. Seoul Tiger holds the unleavened bread in his palm wondering how to eat it. Then a stew, called a curry, is put upon his plate. 'Do you eat kimchee?' asks Tamil Tiger. 'What is kimchee?" asks Tamil Tiger.

Again he was bouncing around in a bus without time to rush back to the yangwam, the room he rented outside of an old woman's home. He questioned himself on why he had agreed to give private lessons in various places outside of Chongju. He answered to himself that the strung out schedule and the long rides matched his disorganized, wayward thoughts. It felt comfortable to bounce around in the similar movements of his circumambulatory personal life. He hoped that the bus would arrive in time so that he could eat a meal before going into those lessons. People in these small towns would not acknowledge his handicap of linguistic ignorance. They demanded more than his short, concrete, and ungrammatical utterances. If he had been an Anglo-Saxon he would have been served in restaurants with simple statements like "Chop che bop, chushipshio" (chop che bop, please). But in small towns even a waitress who had experienced him before would come forth with entire paragraphs to serve onto him and then would stand there bewildered that paragraphs of reciprocal eloquence would not be returned by someone clearly of her nationality. At last she would go away and the dinner would come for the retard. This time, as always, he ate quickly and then waited for some woman's children to get him at the bus terminal. He did not know the woman's name even though he taught there and she gave him money and he did not know her children's names even though he taught them. They were just his "little tongmuls" (little animals). Sang Huin did not like the difficulty of memorizing Korean names so he did it seldom.

Inside the bus station he changed to a different bench. A two or three year old girl, chastised by her mother, sought refuge between his legs and would not come out. She closed the legs like an iron gate. The mother did not seem to demand that she leave the fortress; and he enjoyed the fact that she seemed to gain comfort from his presence even though his face expressed the awkwardness of having her there.

He missed childhood. Surely all people did. Was it so awful to admit this? No one that he had ever known had spoken of his or her loss. Granted, one could not stay comatose in innocence—the delight of pulling some trivial plastic or paper objects from cereal boxes; Halloween costumes; or the Christmas togetherness. The newness of running around trying to beat the clouds or run barefoot after balls in the ecstasy of just being alive ended quickly to girl chases, obligations, family, and all of such dead weight. He couldn't have stayed with his mother forever. If he could have remained steady on the American continent he would have needed more than just her; and so alone, with a sense that he would never find family or closeness again, he had ventured here to another continent that was and wasn't his home, and where he did not speak a language that was and wasn't his. Still, coming here was not entirely bereft of positive notions. Being an innocent, a childish perspective prevailed.

He wanted to once again hold something tenuous and fragile in the palm of his hand as a child would a tinctured caterpillar, the butterfly. He wanted to be there with it innocuously in awe of something that really had no use to him. He loathed this interaction, this anathema of the soul so intertwined in insatiable and wanton selfishness. He wanted to be Seoul Tiger once again but such was not in the survivalist impulses of man. Such was not destiny. Hadn't there been numerous times when as a boy he would sit hours with a stray dog that was needing to claim a gentle master, scared to take it home and yet, like a true friend, sensitive most to creatures that could not articulate themselves in any other way than in the eyes. The eyes, that dilated neediness to be in the presence of a friend in a hostile world where being born was not a sanction to live well or live long. One's innocence ran by like a shell-shocked soldier; circumventing normal sexual drive by being gay would not free him to an innocence that was forlorn. Now there was just the wistful need for family, children he helped to say small things, and his strange obsession with empty physical connections he could depart from easily. He preferred young students because they did not make him uncomfortable by pressing the issue that a man in his early twenties should be planning to have a family. His private domain consisted of a blessed, taciturn instrument called a cello that required no words to say something deep. He had dragged it on the plane and had paid an astronomical fee to get it onto the airlines. What a burden it had been to him lugging the thing around and yet, dilettante that he was, he needed some beauty to exude out of his hardened mud. He needed reverberating notes to sink into the plaster cast around his mind, which had the signature of the world as an evil place upon it , and caress his soft and lonely brain.

Finally, the two or three-year-old parted one of the kneecaps and the mother pushed candy bribes before her nose to keep her quiet and contained. Soon they bought a ticket in the Chinchon station and boarded a bus. All bus terminals in cities under a million people had cement floors and were dark and dirty like a cellar. Just like he had seen in myriad other terminals, here a man came along with a plastic watering bucket with a nozzle used for watering plants. He rinsed the floor with the water contained in it but did not follow that with either a mop or a broom. A few minutes later, two boys came into the terminal. One had a basketball in his hands. The other one stood a few feet behind him. He looked bored and fat.

"Anyong Haseyo" (Peace you do)

"Anyong Hashimnika, Sonsaeng nim," (Peace you do, teacher), said the one with the basketball.

"Uri-tul nun taxi ul sayang hata?" (We taxi to use?) He knew it was as ungrammatical as a pig. He knew that again there would be no taxi. Again they would be walking. Still it was his way of saying something. The one with the basketball who could figure it out shook his head.

They walked down the sidewalks. The two boys lead the way. Sang Huin felt that the roles had been inverted and he felt a twinge of resentment that he was a child or a retard in his own native country and that children were dragging him about. The three of them moved down sidewalks like window-shopping loiterers looking into every mom and pop store along the way. "Ilchik tangshin-tul rul basketball ul hayoshimnita kachi?" (Early you basketball did?) The fat boy nodded his head silently. The boy knew his genius in interpretive skills. A sense of pride exuded over his face in a white light but the flush of expression was extremely ephemeral. It came upon him and vanished in just a few seconds.

"Who won?" asked Sang Huin in English.

The fat boy pointed to himself with his thumb. He even smiled for a second in a sort of bored way.

Then they opened a gate and they went into what looked like a house only it was separated into two apartments.

Sang Huin used his photograph cards like magic tricks to get them to practice tenses and syntax. He liked seeing their tiny house and thinking how his life might have been—for better or for worse—within the childhood of his race. He loved English as he loved music; and sometimes he combined the two in such classes, but with a small feeling of resentment (to which his smile and gentle nature gave no indication) as if his time was sodden in musical doggerel that defiled him like a solecism when he might well be playing Haydn and Boccherini.

He wondered about the girl dressed in the dumpy blue skirt of her school uniform, and the boys in jeans. Were they content to be Koreans or did they yearn for bigger and better things seduced by the American culture that came to them through the cinema and the music and through his presence as well as the English that they studied. If they weren't content, he thought, it wasn't for him to say they were wrong. It was a globalized world and America was the power and the standard that was the impetus for its formation. That was why he was here with his English. He couldn't have gotten any other job in Korea when he couldn't master the simplest of sentences in the native language. He didn't like the sour perceptions that he had of America. It was home. It was still home.

In Umsong, during those times he had waited in the office of the kindergarten for his class to begin, the children would always see him through the window. They knew at that point that he didn't speak Korean and wasn't one of them and for that reason they were attracted to him. They would bang and climb on the window in their eagerness to be near him; and some, using a runny nose as an excuse, would be permitted to go into the hall. To the side of a fish aquarium hung a roll of toilet tissue. They would wipe their noses and peak into the office. They would squeal. He liked it. He liked being an American—sometimes.

He looked more intensely at these Chinchon students. Who would they become? As they begin to feel hormones, the adrenaline of the four-year high called love, and the frenzy of sex luring them into steady relationships and accompanying obligations, would they have moments where they too yearned to be in a hammock under their Grandma Lee's cherry trees? In his case he could recall the image of a photograph of a neighbor his family had labeled as "Grandma" Vera with her black dress rustling in the wind carrying him in her arms. Would they think upon theirs-something similar to Vera frying hamburgers on the grill as the scents of angel-food cakes came from the windows of her kitchen? He chastised himself. He told himself that only broken people looked back on childish irrelevance. The rest looked to the future in their insatiable hungers for bigger pleasures and their present connections that they might use to secure their hedonistic whims. But he was a "broken" person and the thought of Vera returned to him. When he thought of her intensely the image emblazoned in memory shook him and it was hard to think that it could not make her alive again. And yet to have had a connection (and the most unfortunate of lives surely have had many) would justify everything. A personal contact in the past or when the wind…or the sun…or the rain touched him, that alone would justify a life of barren prospects.

"Unto us a child is born. Unto us a child is given." He thought of the words of the composer, Handel. Yes, he thought, he had done a horrible thing by encouraging his girlfriend to abort their child. It was wrong to have robbed a being of life and any connections the fetus might have had beyond its own cell divisions. Secondly, this cynicism that a woman, spellbound in romance, robbed a man of his sperm to produce a baby by which to devote herself and obtain a purpose in life while thrusting him into the financial maintenance of this prize had caused him to abort major connections in his own life. Now, apart from his mother, there were no connections. There were only phantoms of people flitting through ethereal consciousness, and by coming here to find his land he had parted from her. When his sister was murdered, he was just beginning his studies at the university. When his father committed suicide, Sang Huin's cadaverous numbness was on fire and he felt that any trace of himself was being incinerated. Mentally, he was running to and fro in the hope of retarding the flames that were eating him for their fuel. Back then the thought of his father dangling from the noose recurred to him every few moments. At that time he wanted to check himself into a hospital for he felt a loss of sanity. His world was three dimensional but totally impersonal and wobbling. After months of virtual silence and the icy stares of his mother through the most enervated and perfunctory movements of planting flowers and trees no different than what she had or stripping wallpaper and putting up patterns that were nearly identical to the old ones, he spent a month in Galveston. A month watching waves dash against the shore was enough to make him see that being one of a billion waves dashed into the sands was a pattern engrained into life that he must not take personally; and so he returned to school. By will and discipline in reigning in his thoughts he made it through college and a year of graduate school. But he could not take the stagnation that scholarly pursuits forced him to endure and became the animated billiard ball being shot from one area of the table to the next—one part of the country to the next—falling homeless into dark holes.

Sadness punched him in the stomach. It was enough—"nomu" (too much). He frowned. He didn't care. Six or seven minutes early—who would mark the time especially when he traveled such a distance to give them these lessons. He told them that the session had ended and they got an envelope of money from their mother, which they brought to him. The session didn't seem as if it had begun. It all was a vacuum—a void. He untied the double knots that were contained on his shoes and put them on. Korean people were so quick at slipping on shoes, and he assumed that anytime someone waited for him to leave it was a complete aggravation for them. His mother had spent so much time teaching him to tie and then double-tie. He had been such an ignorant and inept child. The habit was deeply engrained in his psyche. The students stared and waited at his childish wrestling with his shoes. He knew that he needed slip-ons that would foster a quick exodus after he had taken them off at the door.

He stepped out over the crevice of a yard. A light sprinkling or heavy mist was falling upon him. Past the gate and into the street the generalized memories of a hundred such days with a hundred similar rains came to him. Rain was for him only a baptism of emancipation. From a glance up at the clouds he was compelled to acknowledge realities outside his own thoughts—and indeed Sang Huin needed the rain of Noah to get out of his own ruminations. Yet, a foreigner's experience was indeed like no others' and he was an introverted being traumatized by the great chasm of the murder of a sibling and finding the blue dangling body of his father. At 24, any man's boyhood was buried under only a shallow layer of dirt and for one with maimed manhood the clay was never solid, was partially washed away, and boyhood often resurfaced. He was a runaway from the American experience and his thoughts, when not able to do it in deeds, almost always ran to Seoul. The rural areas where he worked and at one time had lived gave him the solitude and the meditative power to think his weird thoughts as he tried to reconstruct his manhood but the problem was that he did it too much. Seoul was felicity, the exhilarating movements, the museums, the symphonies, and the sexual bliss. Within it the hurt was diffused and boyhood was gagged and he was rarely cognizant of its screams. At the bus station it began to rain heavily. A few years ago, he thought, the sun had droned on with the days of the trial and the rare rain had been his only comfort.

In an hour's time, during the bus ride, each of these students would be completely gone from his mind exuded like the entangling conundrums of feeling, ideas, and senses in sleep. If all people were shadows of this realm in the flickering of light, what solid entity cast the shadow? Was it God? Was there a god? If the shadows were more concrete than the light, what would this say about life? He decided to stop thinking such things. Myriad complex and morbid thoughts, profound or inane, would not raise him to a wiser man. They would just get him stuck in their muddy ruts.

Back in a bus, he thought about how much of his life was dragged about in transportation here and there for a Korean buck. He didn't know anybody in Chongju but a simple advertisement in the paper would have been enough to solve his dilemma in providing him with private lessons near his home for needed South Korean Won. Still, if his whole life was spent in these bus rides, fate was not bad. He could be a starving North Korean or one of the dead soldiers who got their submarine trapped on a reef in the South Korean jurisdiction of the ocean and had been hunted down by the South Korean soldiers. He had a South Korean passport and an American residency. He was single and free to see the world. He didn't do that much and had lots of time and some money to spend.

He had little mastery over his thinking. Since he was a creative person it often went running wild through meadows with the gods. He knew there was genius to be gained in the company of deities so wild. He had left his mother's home and his mother country to find manhood- perverse, greedy, manhood with its insatiable wants, its selfish calculating plans, and its grandiose desire to find its own unique adventures and habits. She, his mother, would meanwhile be re-planning and redecorating rooms. He loved her deeply but she was not everything. He needed more connections to keep himself from rising like a balloon and going adrift; and lacking them, looking onto his life from the clouds, he could see the obvious: that this mortal would not be there when he became much older. For all of his life there was only one claim to be made and that was upon himself. In this respect he was quite American.

Chapter Three

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.

Chapter Four

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.

Chapter Five

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.

Chapter Six

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.

Chapter 7

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.

Book Two:

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

Chapter Eight

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.

Gabriele's cheek bled but still she did not kill the cat. She didn't know the reason her hands, pulsating in rushes of vengeful energy, did not catch it and crush it in her fingertips. At that moment she did not know her reasons for anything. She tried to stop the bleeding with the back of her hand, for the bib near her feet was unusable since it was fuming in vomit. As she looked at the swab of blood that was there on her hand she felt a void careen into her (or herself careening into the void), heard a parents' declaration to depart from her, and again felt the impact of being rolled on by a tank. She imagined the cat deliberately paralyzing itself in the actions of the prey it had often witnessed. She imagined it praying to the earth for a delay of its execution and subsequent decomposition by having the earth force compassion on Gabriele, the executioner. She imagined it praying to the earth that magically brought it into life to shrink its size into something so much smaller than a cat in order to be at all. She did not know why it happened. She just did not kill the cat but instead watched it masquerade itself as dead. Gabriele picked up the cat by the neck and the four eyes met. The cat did not swipe. It concentrated on cowardly prayers and of remaining limp. Gabriele tossed this other "criatura." It landed on top of a book on Freud on the lowest part of her bookshelf.

Chapter Nine

The reasons for the specific elements of a myth (the cryptic reason why a given culture might have chosen a serpent god or the son of god over the sun god) are ineffable, and all attempted explanations of a myth are mythical. Scholars of myths compare religions to find that spiritual element that links and validates the human search (that search to find that which is everlasting within the brevity of a human's lifespan); and historians of recorded cultures thread together implication, meaning, and motive from a few tangible and often random happenings.

The myth of Aten came from the Eighteenth Dynasty of Ancient Egypt. For over 1500 years Ancient Egypt practiced polytheism with each town having its own god. Usually such gods were animal gods as was the case with the cat-goddess, Bast of Bubastis, but many of the towns found that once they attached the word "Re," the commonest name for the sun god, it enhanced the denotation so that local gods became more ubiquitous and more deserving of reverence. In the case of the falcon god, Re-Harakhti, a name change was given to It (the great It) that contained more overt connotations. Not only was the word, "Re" put before the regular name of the falcon-god, but engravings depicted It with the sun god above It's head.

The pharaoh, Akhenaten, in his quest for the one sun god, Aten, disliked focusing all of his energies toward military ventures that would have decimated the bellicose Nubian-like creatures and stray Hittites that fell onto his shores like waves. He knew that he could decimate them if continual efforts were applied the way one wipes away a group of ants again and again. He hadn't even considered that it would wipe out his nation's treasury not to mention his own personal coffers. He didn't want to give himself to anti-terrorist strategies and 24 hour a day campaigns that would have sustained his empire but buried him in lonely problematic calculations, hypotheses about the thinking of some elusive enemy, and general logic (not that the President Bushes used any of the above). He was reluctant to part from continual dreaminess and to end the world of the child that saw magic in a waving leaf on a branch of a tree. He didn't want tedium that was as long as the sentences of this prose. The only military ventures he envisioned for himself were preemptive and bloody executions of the more vocally intransigent non-believers who would diminish the ubiquitousness of his own god and challenge his animistic thinking of nature as being linked to man by their harping on animal gods. For his eternal link to the sun was more essential and part of himself than any of his arms or legs. And so, reluctant to part from dreaminess, he built a new capital city for Egypt that he devoted to the worship of Aten. The city, Amarna, was created to be Aten's sacrosanct home. As for the crusades to extirpate all memory of any gods other than Aten through the destruction of temples and relieves (particularly the temples and reliefs of gods that had a "Re" attached to their names), none of it would have been so bloody had the believers allowed him to clean away their chiseled nonsense the way one would the crayon happy markings of children on the walls of the family home.

Gabriele's motives for creating a non-melodic lullaby about a god that had been extinct for thousands of years were even a little unclear unto her. Perhaps the reasons for the avant-garde lullaby could have come from that one afternoon when she was four. On that day she had become less interested in nursing a wounded bird and so began to play with her tiny plastic toy soldiers beside her mother who was clipping wet shirts and military trousers on the clothesline.

The noon sun was slapping both their faces the way the heat from an oven evaporates the grease put on two baked potatoes. Gabriele, bothered by the heat, turned away from the soldiers and then took a glance at the sun. She turned toward her mother and mentioned some eagerness for Christmas. Her mother turned toward Gabriele with stoic facial expressions and then crassly spoke in German that Gabriele should stop thinking about Christmas since it was a long way off. The mother snapped the clothes on the line with more forceful pinches and then asked her daughter if she didn't think she was a bit old to pursue such nonsense as Christmas. Gabriele said that she didn't understand and so her mother unhesitatingly told her that there was no such thing as Santa Claus. Gabriele saw her mother smile sadly. She sensed a kindness in this smashing of ignorance and innocence the way she had seen Aunt Peggy smash a horse fly on one of her uncle's stallions.

"In a way, I am glad you brought this up," continued Gabriele's mother in German. "There are some things that will be changing soon." A cloud ran by the sun and in its shadow Gabriele glanced up at a frothy blob that looked like the form of an old man in ancient garb. At the age of four she could not recognize the Greek philosopher, Heraclitus sculpted into the cloud or a cloud shaped or sculpted into Heraclitus. "There is some early news I should tell you. I really should but it is a little hard to get it out. You are such a baby, you are, but now you are a bit wiser, eh? You know the situation with Santa. Life is going to be full of sobering face slappings like that .I am very glad that you are clogging your tears like a good girl. I'm proud of that fact. I was a little worried that you would be bawling like stupid little thing. Crying about such things like this would be bad, bad behavior when there are so many bigger things one shouldn't cry about either." The girl couldn't help having watery eyes even though she did not release the tears and soon mucus began to run from her nostrils. She wiped it onto the back of her hand. "Heavens, Gabriele, that's nasty. Remember to not get into the cookie jar without scrubbing those hands of yours thoroughly. Well…now, you are wiser for knowing the situation with Santa so I can tell you things, eh? You have a wiser and smarter brain than any other 4 year old who has ever walked the planet, don't you think so? Now I can tell you things because there won't be any damage, eh? Oh, why won't my mouth work right at getting this out? " Gabriele stood stiff. Questions were piercing into her as if she were target practice but she stood stiffly not feeling a thing accept the demise of Santa Claus. "Christmas is so lovely with everyone being together, don't you think so? Still that doesn't always happen, eh? When this doesn't happen there is no weeping. In this case, there will just be smiles on the kitten's face, eh? I'm sorry but we will not all be together this Christmas. We are parting our ways. Your father and I will be experiencing something new and you will be experiencing a different thing that is something new. In experiencing something new, you've got to be bold and take one's stance with a smile on the kitten's face. Some things are the way they are. No wishing will bring Santa Claus into existence and wishing won't stop new things from happening. You will soon go live with your Aunt Peggy. Your father and I are going back to Germany. He is going to be stationed there again. Your father is a great American patriot and has been asked to return to our motherland of Germany on important duties. You like your father's sister so much. Am I right? Your aunt Peggy: we are lucky to have her. Really, we are. Strange lady though; but with all those horses, maybe she'll take you for a ride sometime. Horses have ponies. They could give you one. You never know. She will have a tutor to help you to read and do math and will let you play sports in her yard under the supervision of an athletic trainer. The yard is large and fenced in nice. You know that. You will be happy there. The house is near a Catholic school. You will go there each day with those monkeys of hers. Much better than being here and there with us; and with this plan, you get two mommies instead of just one. That makes you better than the stupid little rascals your age."

If the little girl within Gabriele had been born a boy and that boy hadn't slipped away from the influence of the mother toward a male role model, she would have been branded a homosexual by one impact of the brain onto another. It would have been a gradual but ineluctable branding within a few critical years. But these few minutes of a girl's life at the clothesline with her mother made her into a misogynist, a stoic and an atheist. From this time at the clothesline she learned that everything was a myth or prevarication and the only kind of reality that existed was her own self and the natural forces that beamed onto her. Romanticizing the sun that burnt her face and could end up giving her skin cancer was better than the self-defeating flames of hate that might have been a force inside her consuming what could have been her. This silly, and barely believed myth gave grace to her infrequent social interactions and regulated her sleep patterns.

Chapter Ten

(1989: Houston)

Turning away from the cooked bacon strips dripping grease on their paper towel bedding, he walked to the bathroom. He hoped that she would come into the kitchen while he was away. He hoped that she would swig her juice in one gulp and quickly eat her share of the bacon and toast; and once finished, that she would quickly go out with the garbage of the early morning that would soon be picked up by the sanitation workers whom people crudely referred to as garbage men. He hoped that this could be done while he was in the bathroom and while his new bacon began to sizzle in the skillet. She knew this as much as one knew anything. She believed that it came to her intuitively without the use of her faulty senses that were capable of adulterating reality; or, if sensed, that it entered her consciousness ineffably similar to the passing dog that recognizes the pheromone spray of a much earlier dog. She did not mind. Non-romantic conclusions were non-confining. They were spring breeze declaring the end of winter. This was a beginning and an ending of a relationship within the space of 6 or 7 hours and she did not mind that at all. All relationships were the beginning of an end and the quicker expedited the better off she thought she would be.

She was in the bedroom dressing herself in a very faint light of early morning and she could not see him return from the bathroom to cook the last of his bacon where the strips shrank phallically in the heat. But from the smell she, of course, knew that was happening and she could imagine that he was analyzing their experience together in front of his skillet, and sinking into a void. She could guess this because he, like all humans, was incapable of reliving the frenzy through a precise memory of it; and he was now trying to find some sensibility in his voracious, self-consuming frenzy. She wanted to laugh out loud the way she had laughed out when they were in bed together and she seeing his body, less real in the darkness, become wholly stiff before her. Yes, she thought then scoffingly, he was a holy stiff. Now, kitchen-bound, he was no doubt using logic to create a sententious wallowing where the act was more hallowed in the past. She presumed that he was thinking back on his experiences with his wife and comparing this one without "love" to the separated wife's loving caresses. She thought about the way he looked ten minutes earlier scrambling around for his clothes that were by his bed in almost arthritic movements. Even as she slipped on her skirt, she still felt the same repulsion and indifference toward him because of this action. Certainly no friendship could ensue from this intimacy with the young assistant professor. It was always a bit disappointing for her, really, that physical intimacies were so gluttonously selfish and fully incompatible for caring relationships. She knew that reality every time she engaged in such activities and yet she somewhat inaccurately told herself that with each new sexual experience she acted like an innocent girl in her first sexual foray. Following a mirage, she told herself, was just an inane pitfall to being human, and only a fool was disappointed in human vulnerabilities-as slight as she told herself hers were.

She hadn't run over him with a car to create those arthritic movements in the bedroom nor had she cast some spell on him although she was loosely affiliated with bewitching organizations like WICCA despite their ecclesiastic and congregational ambiance. His pathetic reaction was strange although undoubtedly provoked. Sure, in bed together she had guffawed at his ridiculous post-sexual statement that he could not leave his wife as if women could not have sex with handsome men for pleasure. She apologized to him immediately afterward for this egregious chortling. After all, he wasn't so mistaken. Most women were there to mate with a man for the purpose of perpetuating their selfish genes by breeding. Most could not sense themselves beyond that feeling, that rush of love, that dopamine addiction that was cajoling them to breed. In fact, she had to admit that she had never met a woman who was not like that; but then, unbeknown to him, she never categorized herself as a woman. She was a female with nothing womanly inside of her. To her knowledge, there was no pathetic lonely neediness or "womanity" that brewed within her. Hearing her guffaw in bed an hour earlier and her bashful apology afterward, he probably did not think about anything in particular except how best to create an amicable departure. But then, still in bed, she made an analogy of sex to stale potato chips, which upon occasion she did not mind eating for the salt that was contained there. This faux paus must have made him feel as if he had had intercourse with a cannibal for soon there was that arthritic rustling with his clothes. The corollary of seeing him look for his clothes feebly was the igniting of her "miso-him-ony" (a word that she coined gabrielishly).

She went into the kitchen and to her satisfaction she found the man transformed into bacon. Anyhow, he wasn't there so she ate her breakfast snack, went to the bathroom, and then came out only to imagine that she heard him crying in the closet between the muffling of jackets, with empty hangers lightly clanging against each other. She felt a sorrow for him and took on his mental void. She saw, however, that he was outside and felt foolish. Had her senses been more astute than her cognition? It sometimes happened. From the window she saw him in the tiny park swinging alone with the full moon diluted by the rising sun.

Sex, she thought, as she watched his body hit the winds, was being massaged by one's own hormones, turned on by oneself, or more accurately one's sense of pleasure, and making love to fantasies of one's mind rather than the individual locked into one's body. Yet she was titillated if not inveigled by such physical pleasures that kept her imagination more bound than what she would have liked. Sensate hungers of animals and men were ineluctable but inconsequential "things" that she would not allow to be the synopsis of herself even if upon occasion she explored these appetites fully. This night was more than just diving into sensual experiences when she could no longer stay logical without slipping into a philosophical void: it had been a sociological experiment of seducing the opposite sex in a gay bar called "Heaven" more from compassionate and empathic dialogue than sexual ploys; it had been because of the humidity of Houston; it had been…she was not sure what it was. She, having gone with some of her gay friends to "Heaven," had become one of those "fag hags" that such non-lesbian gay bar-going women are often called. Ostensibly, the night had been so different and so speciously amusing but really any nightclub was the same: that same loneliness and that same sense that appetites were fueling a human form like a smart bomb that was out of control. She scorned having had sympathy for him. She rebuked herself for having sympathy for situations that did not exist, which was so much worse. To think that he had been in a closet crying was worse than insane for one who was so proud of her logical skills, and so believing that she could stare down the eyes of wild leopards and not shirk from the eyes of lepers. Sorrow for him, she told herself, was a brief misfiring of neurons in an awkward situation that brought on a second of a brief hallucination and an emotional barricade that she now had to scurry around.

Gabriele ate a piece of cold toast abandoned near the bacon. She did not delude herself: he had prepared this meal (such as it was) to minimize his feelings that he had used her, although really she had used him. She was hungry so she ate. The fact that it was cold showed his hostility toward her. She knew this but ate the toast with a smirk on her face. A minute later, she took out some snuff from her purse and a cold beer from the refrigerator and then went onto the porch. Outside, the wind was still bringing the coolness of winter nights that the sun beat down with the days. She drank and watched him. She felt repulsion for her one-night stand and wanted to get into her car, which would move her to her apartment, exclusive to herself and her logic. The impulse to play, however, was too much; so after mildly draining the tobacco-saliva from her mouth into the beer can, she crossed Dunlavy street to join him on the swing set.

"Y-e-s!" said Gabriele in a tone of affected romanticism of the trivial, kicking the air beneath her as his swing lost momentum. She giggled like a schoolgirl. She reduced her swinging gradually to cessation careful to not just stop because he had done so. After her feet were dragging and cutting into the dirt, he pulled out a cigarette to hang in his face.

"I fixed some bacon," he said indifferently after she was equally stagnant and inert.

"So you did," she responded less zealously.

He didn't say anything but she could read it all the same. He didn't say, "I'm sorry, but could you go?" He didn't say, "We enjoyed each other's company, I think." He didn't say, "I've got a relationship, more or less, with my wife although she doesn't know my other side." He didn't say, "I thought being with you might make me feel more desire for women, be more romantic, and get her back into my life again. I hope you don't think I've used you." He did not say that predominant thought that was in his eyes, "I'm sorry, but could you go, please?" There would have been a pleading "please" in it if he had been able to "find the backbone" to articulate his request. There was none of that "stuff" said among nearly all men from one generation to the next with a few extra contemporary novelties that saved men from being completely trite. She liked wordless empathy. It could be shut off at any second like tap water."

"Relationships: they are plural, complicated, and opposing for you, it seems." Gabriele said this with her hand under her chin as if her lover were an interview for a dissertation. "Don't be so worried." She smiled. "My fear of you hunting me down has more merit than any fears you might have of me." She chuckled at herself. Her mind repeated his laconic words: "I fixed you some bacon." They began to echo in her mind. "What is this?" she thought. "Does he want me to think this breakfast of his is my reward for this bit of a roll in the hay?" She snickered to avoid piercing him with dilating eyes of hate. Then she smiled at her former professor. It was a contrived smile and although she hated artifice, in a world of getting one's needs met one needed to behave insincerely.

"Complicated and opposing, are they? Okay, if you want to look at it that way," he retorted. "Well, you can't exactly say that you weren't in Heaven, can you?"

"Si' estaba alli tambien. Eso es innegable"("Yes, I was there also. This fact is indisputable"). She spoke to his dark Brazilian skin. She spoke to all of his Morris codes and secret languages that she understood all and had contempt for everything that he was. She wanted to speak to her former psychology professor as a cheerful therapist but such nascent words when she tried to formulate them in her mouth became dying winds over the rubble reef of her tongue and the sea of her saliva. Still she smiled although a supercilious undertone tried to gain beastly dominion. "The sport of seduction was all I had in mind, Mr., and then you went ahead and gave me more. You cooked some bacon and toast. I thank you." When his face again fell, as she wanted it to fall, she raised herself from the swing. The tree limbs seemed to wave goodbye to him. Then they bent as she walked away from him; and as she, on reflex, glanced back, they ricocheted and then folded back like a curtain which had material composed of the darkness of the limbs and the sketchy sunlight. She could not see him, and she appreciated this fact. The vinyl and its coolness, within the car, made her upper body shiver—how she sank into it and felt soothed. She thought of the waves of the Gulf, at Galveston Bay, pulling at her legs with cool and non- scathing talons. Although she was attracted to the Gulf of Mexico, and felt befriended by an identity of its vastness synonymous to her own, at this moment she preferred how she felt from the vinyl, which was limited and all encompassing. It snuggled around the back of her throbbing head and body.

The accelerator, firm and responsive to pressure, was freedom that the social instinct (what little she had) and society at large robbed from her. It moved to the embodiment of her will, propelling her from anything she chose to disregard. She turned onto Westheimer Street. She had gone as far as the thirteen-thousand block once, a year ago, after enrolling at Rice University to pursue her graduate studies. Someone had told her that Westheimer finally turned into a farm road, but back then she decided to let her experience testify otherwise by choosing to not go that far.

She drove on and on and soon she could see the roof of a church. In an hour, she thought, there would be the culmination of activity from the followers (the sheep) and the fully arrayed morning. Inside the cathedral of Santa Anna, which she was now approaching, a priest would soon begin to prepare himself for an early mass after the golden curved roof began to reflect the sunlight in a seductive glare. The marble walls would seem steady to these followers as if prayers said within these corridors would cause one to be as steady and seemingly everlasting as those very walls. The church would shelter the convictions of the myth reinforcers who actively promoted their religion so that anxieties of injustice, the vulnerability of the human form, the madness of a violent world and violent thoughts and feelings from within, and the issue of mortality could be eased. In the face of challenges from other ideologies, Christians protected their God and religion with defensive armament of an anxiety-ridden people. It wasn't so hard to keep an individual-caring God inculpable of genocide, typhoons, and plagues. In modern times, those issues occurred in underdeveloped foreign countries among heathen populations. But car accidents, cancer, high mortgage payments, a fire gutting a family home, and stock market decline made the firm arms of a loving god into a tenuous thing. It shook the marble walls of the church. Further, made insecure by the believability of alternative religions with scriptures or some dogmatic premises that were also claimed as infallible, the Buddhist and the Moslem were threats for an American Christian no less than the witch. She wondered why she did not hate religion more than what she did. She asked herself why she did not circle around the block for an hour and then grind a soul or two to the pavement. Now that she was thinking such peculiar things she continued with them. She assumed that driving through a crowd of people was a lot like bowling only the pins weren't stationary. Actually, she thought, it did sound more of a sport than bowling ever did. However, the thought of doing such things out of the context of her playful inner world was so repugnant to her that it struck a chill down her spine. Only an unequivocal nervous breakdown would cause her to obey the savage and crazed thoughts that ran amuck in one's head. Like any German dam, such energy was a trickling stream next to the mammoth structure that contained and regulated it. She not only was her own effective dam and continually building upon it, but she constructed worlds of ideas there. From the mammoth height of intellectualism, her turbid passionate waters seemed almost puny. German people, she thought, did not camouflage their barbarity in "goodness." Early in history, except for notable flare- ups, Germans were aware of their barbaric impulses so, like Nietzsche, they coldly refined all emotions into philosophic rationales.

The idea of wanting to preserve oneself in the spirit made her face cringe. She had often felt this way throughout her life, and it seemed so alien to her that those people who could not create their own sense of truth regardless of man's basic purpose (which was never known), desperately sought immortality.

Myths, themselves, would give half-rational women and men artificially solved philosophical truths that would ease their minds into their jobs, their families, their adultery, their small capitalistic ventures with large levels of greed, and their soap opera, small-life concerns; but she could not conceptualize why their myths had the element of self-preservation. She did not care to preserve herself. Just in dying, and letting microorganisms rot her body away, she would give her energy back to the world that would radiate it again elsewhere in another form. If she had a child, she thought, she or he would not be allowed to be subject to this Christianity, which had the plagiarism of Ancient Egyptian Literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh, Plato, Confucius, and God knows what as scripture. Still, there was no escape from the West for fresher lies. The whole world was western now. All that was possible was to abscond from it as much as possible.

Friendship, as that with her roommate, Betty, would be plugged up in smiles and feigned promises to write. A day earlier she was folding, sealing away, and throwing away material things and now it would be states of mind. It was very exciting-more than even a racket ball game with Betty whose African American skin, muscular physique, and strong competitive strife got her equated as the sister of many famous sports legends. This bantering was a subject for mutual scowling since both wanted "female" sports to be "on an equal footing" and for races and genders to not be stereotyped to certain activities. With a thesis accepted, the fourth largest city in America was to be nothing but a folded map forgotten in the outside pocket of one's suitcase. What would she do now that her graduate studies had ended? She did not know. She had gained the knowledge by which to do nothing with complete confidence and so taking it into a PHD level seemed redundant. As much as a human could be free, she was now free.

She wondered if the homosexuals at the bar last night were free. She had enjoyed the men in colorful briefs-some who had danced on wooden platforms covering two juxtaposed pool tables to be more into the crowd. When someone of her own sex had introduced herself with lust in her eyes, Gabriele had wanted to sprint a quick exit through the wall but, instead of cowardice, gave her a quick kiss on one of her cheeks and declared, in her giggling, that this would be as far as she would go in that type of liaison. At the same time she wondered a little whether that woman felt more free by subconsciously choosing the type of sex she wanted to copulate and then following the dictates of her own hormones instead of having hormones dictated by social mores.

She was almost at her apartment when she consciously noticed Betty's cigarette butts in her car ashtray. She chastised such vile and unaesthetic habits, but really it was her own maudlin oozing that she despised. Needing some time alone to sink into herself, she decided to procrastinate packing and her last meeting with Betty by going to Allen Parkway. She parked her car in a lot nearby and told herself it was time for her one-person celebration and to ensure that the past would not be left in abeyance suffocating her in sentimental mush. She wanted people of the fading present to depart from her like releasing a deep breath. She sat in an obscure area of the Buffalo Bayou away from the bike trail and a herd of morning bicyclists approaching the fountain. She sat in the grass and allowed her body to be prey to fire ants, which, like a goddess, she would then smash with her fingertips or gently remove to blades of grass. She meditated on the theme of chance that was so intricate in the fabric of all things. She picked clover and dismembered their leaves, gladdened that the little girl flattened out as she had been by the tank, still floated like a ghost in the ethereal parts of her imagination. She told herself that she would be an empty shell of an adult to be bereft of her.

She again thought of the go-go boys dancing both on stage and on pool tables. They had been such titillation but as different as they were, she doubted that they were free. By their freedoms, they were imploding into their own hungers just as she was imploding in memories of last night that she couldn't quite shake. She remembered how with each beer her mind lost the paralysis of logic and she began to be more sociable and pay less attention to the flickering icon, on the wall, that was shaped like a wine glass; the queer associations of social butterflies known as transvestites; the mirror which gave a blurred version of this other part of humanity; and of course the dancers, who were rather boring after a few minutes of seeing the ends of their briefs sag from being paid for non-sexual tricks. Except for glances at the surreal mosaic fragments of commercials and video music that played on television sets, which were on the far corners of the walls, she sometimes stared at men throughout the night with a specific intention of wanting to copulate with one or all of them, but enjoying the aspect of feeling sensual regardless. It was there that she met her professor. He was someone who, according to her friends, often came to the bar, and yet he looked lost. The seduction was easy. She asked if he wanted to go with her, and he said that he did. Nothing was simpler and more exempt from life's energy consuming, cat and mouse games. She thought about the butts in her ashtray. She wasn't sure the reason. Maybe the thought of the smoke filled bar triggered this memory. Betty should have cleaned out those cigarette butts, she thought. What an ugly reminder of herself. She looked at the grass all around her and then at the traffic speeding by. The creation was sublime and chaotic. She pondered how simplistic human logic was: the eyes taking in the light, the image of the object refracted on the retina, the mental image playing in the brain, recent memories regarding that object, and an abstract idea. She didn't want to think of anything. She just wanted to watch the early morning sunrise over the bayou.

Chapter Eleven

Jiffypop popcorn leaping over the heat of the stove's burner, the expanding of the aluminum foil cover into a crown, and his sister, Jung- Jun (that girl sister as dead and yet phantomesque as the murdered adult) tacit and waiting anxiously to be the first to pierce into the crown to obtain its edible jewels -the early days of her teaching him how to catch a baseball, how to tie his tie before they went off to Sunday school… He woke up from some forgotten but unsettling dream with a few thoughts of her trickling into his consciousness. His thoughts were uninvited and he tried to shake them off like a wet dog. As much as they were the past, they materialized through distant, sealed corridors to haunt him. Anything could be remembered. One thought slapped into another in a restrained domino effect in the primitive human psyche. Human will was like meat skewered and cooked on the rotisserie.

He had only recently moved to Seoul. Desperate for work, English had delivered and cursed him once again; although this time he had become a clerk in a convenience store in the American military sector of Itaewan. He had a room in the back area. It was really an extra stock room. The owner had been so insistent in the interview that any employee he chose would need to live in the back area as an extra security precaution. Sang Huin didn't have the inordinate money required to obtain an apartment since in Korea deposits on apartments were like the purchases of condominiums and so, not wanting to live in a yongwam, he had agreed. So upon waking this night, he did not immediately recognize where he was. Waking in darkness and wondering where he was at, it was Gabriele who dominated over his thoughts of Jung-Jun.

Gabriele's mind was sticky in malaise. The child that she had had not grounded her. It's crying was without rhyme or reason. It spouted out vehement, hellish, and non-stoppable roars like a locomotive. The malaise was hot and sticky. It was as if all of his insatiable needs were like a vomit-smelling glue and it was in her hair, on her face, and in her clothes. She could not escape. Her intellectualism was being stunted to this exclusive task of being an infant's caretaker. "I will surely snap like a twig on a crisp winter morning if I do not leave this trailer," she thought to herself although she did not completely believe it since solitude did not have much of an effect on her. In this moment of weakness where she did feel the need to depart from all the responsibilities and the cacophony that was her son, she looked at him disconcertedly. He was no more family than the one she had come out of. "I am like this lone soul that is forever seeking, although not expecting, the one true friend that wants nothing from me other than to be with me…that person who will love me for just that." She further thought, "I shouldn't have had this accident of conceiving a child…this mistake of giving birth to one. However, here he is. I can't exactly return him." Sang Huin recollected where he was. He got up and opened his door. He saw the aisles of groceries. Living here, he thought, was like living in a storage area or a gigantic pantry. He sighed. He grabbed some milk and a package of Oreo cookies that he would have to pay for later. Then he sat on his bed and took notes on what he had been thinking concerning Gabriele.

But it was his sister who haunted him more. As teenagers, they would jog together at the high school track and in school she looked so beautiful wearing a skirt and her hair in a bun. She was experimenting with makeup at the age of 14. She never did like it, dabbing it timidly over her beautiful face. She didn't need it any more in her late twenties. With their mother she would continue to talk in that mysterious language of Korean (Hangkuk-mal) that he did not understand. It was their secret language. It was their girlish society that he had been excluded from. As a family they functioned fine. However, he and his father never had connected personally when they were apart from the others. The man had always absconded from him. He had been aloof. Both of his parents were so aloof and so aged during the 14 months of Jun-Jung's disappearance and seemingly elderly at the discovery of the skeletal remains and the ensuing trial.

Gabriele felt as if she were at an amusement park and that her own little world were nothing but a house of mirrors. Each subsequent mirror (despite her youth) cast an impression of more furrowed wrinkles on her forehead, seemed to expand the appearance of bags under her eyes, and made her hair look increasingly gray. Life was nothing but a bottle, a diaper, burping, feeding, and washing. The robotic movements he demanded her to do to take care of him went on perpetually. His crying went on perpetually.

Like with other late evenings that week, at 11:30 p.m. Saeng Seob and his seeing-eye dog took the 40-minute subway ride over to meet him, who would be waiting there in the terminal. Saeng Seob resented him some for quaking and thwarting the direction of his passionate river that most men felt, rode, and defined themselves from. Still, he kept the resentment mute. Being corrupted was a marginal thing when confronted daily with oceans of loneliness. Consciousness needed an object and he needed a consciousness that wasn't always disconcerted, diffident, and being thrust about like a lost, lonely man sucked up in the waves. When he finished dabbling in some work for his cousin at the university it was good to go someplace where he was wanted-someplace away from the campus where friendship gave him identity that an indifferent cousin cajoled or coerced into helping him failed to do. Sang Huin had the need to impress him with the material that he had written from the previous day or two. For Seng Seob, listening had become a means of inveigling those who needed to feel that someone cared to hear them-a lifebuoy that he could embrace around himself when encountering the waves. Sang Huin was not frightened away by his dead orbs and so Saeng Seob let swimming, eating together, listening to the recitation, giving Sang Huin brief tutorials in Korean, and this peculiar sleeping together become the activities that bonded them. Each needed to chisel his name on the other one's brain in a city of ten million strangers. In a world of 6 billion people, each one needed a special lure, and for him it was listening intensely to others. He saw himself as a demure epicure with no published writing and nothing outwardly erudite to show for it. He in his reserve believed that in a world of nonsense spoken by barbarians little outside of human culture had a positive worth except for friendship, and if he needed to listen all night to someone he cared for, he would do just that.

In the back of the convenience store it was hard for him to critique Sang Huin's prose. After all, it was a foreign language being read to him but despite its blur to his mind it dazzled him in new vocabulary that he would look up in his dictionary later. The role of boyfriend to Seong Seob was peculiar but the human gourmandized touch above all ambrosia. It was a special sensory input to the reticular formation of the brain. Touch gave a consciousness of relationship and belonging that were the highest goals of all such humans, hominids, and primates creeping their way to godhood. He hadn't felt particularly inclined to be homosexual and yet that had little meaning when one needed touch and friendship. Being blind made touch even more of an instrument of knowing something although all grabbled around in darkness.

The next morning was Sang Huin's bit of a weekend and so Seong Seob feigned sickness in a phone call to his cousin. The cousin was indifferent and if he questioned the logic of calling in sick while being absent from the home that both of them shared, he did not mention it. So Seong Seob and Sang Huin went out to experience the changing of the guard ceremony at Toksugum Palace: the soldiers in their colorful ancient garb and round black brimmed hats, the horns, the drums and the changing staffs. At first they went to Lawson's convenience store and bought some kim bop (a Korean version of sushi), potato chips, and cola. They took the food to a stack of lumber that had been piled to the area opposite of the ticket counter and, for some minutes, plopped themselves on top of it and witnessed what their senses allotted. Later, they went to the amusement park, Lotte World. For each ride they stood in line over half an hour. Once, as they were going into the bathroom, Sang Huin kissed Seong Seob hurriedly before more men entered. Saeng Seob disliked the intrusive act that brought the acknowledgement of his aberration if not perversion into the light of day but the hot mouth was full of molecules and passing of molecules in a kiss was an intoxicating thing that took one away from the mundane aspects of reality. Further, he knew that the only wrong was in judging one Epicurean quest over that of another. It was an inconsequential thing.

Chapter Twelve

Gabriele smashed a corpulent ant into her second composition when neither flicking it away with her fingertips nor blowing it off her paper was successful. She was writing a second story to put her son to sleep after finding the first composition ridiculous. From this action the insect was nothing but a brownish green blotch on her new work. "Thai Tiger," she rewrote after scratching out the earlier paragraph that had the blotch in it, "waved goodbye to his mother and father from the window of the plane. He was both sad and happy because he was leaving one thing he loved and going to another. The plane went into the clouds and came down in Sri Lanka. Tamil Tiger was waiting for him. Tamil Tiger's mother took Tamil Tiger and Thai Tiger to her home in downtown Colombo. What is Colombo like, asked Thai Tiger from the backseat of the car where he sat with Tamil Tiger. It is full of wars, said Tamil Tiger. What are wars, asked Thai Tiger. Let's change the subject, retorted Tamil Tiger."

Gabriele paused from her writing and remembered her time in a Moslem country. For three months, when she was almost 6, she was in Turkey. She remembered that day when her mother suddenly came to Kansas for her. It had been nearly a year since she had seen her and she felt a mixture of fear, surprise, and happiness at the thought of having the fragmented pieces of her life reassembled. She did not know if this interruption of her adaptation to her aunt, uncle, and cousins had some permanency. She was already speculating that there was no permanency- only being banged in the buttocks with bumper cars or being run over by tanks. She was only told that they would be going on a trip to the other side of the world. The potential of seeing something outside of Kansas made her very happy. Like any child, the discovery of flight was a marvel and she stared out of the window as much as she could. It was a subject of curiosity that the clouds she had always looked up to (a good many in the shape of the philosopher, Heraclitus) had really been nothing but footstools with wooly sheepskins on them all along. It was quite a surprise and shook her hypothesis that her mother was mistaken in saying that there wasn't a Santa Claus. She had formulated this hypothesis erroneously by the evidence of some irregular clouds that seemed as if they were Santa's frothy sugar castles.

In Istanbul she became reacquainted with her father again. Like in olden times when she was four, he began to take her on trips to the beach to pick up seashells or shop for groceries. Once they were shopping for some vegetables in a tight labyrinth of a crowded and dusty outdoor market when suddenly they heard the sound of that Moslem call to worship (a hybrid sound like of an instrument and a human voice) but the call was at the irregular time of 3:00 on a Friday afternoon. Pandemonium was in the streets, but everyone was going in the same direction so actually Istanbul was less helter-skelter than usual. Pushed with the herds, she and her father walked 5 blocks to an ornate mosque. She wanted to know what was "going on" so her father put her on his shoulders and told her that a special Turkish custom of a beheading was to begin shortly. "Beheading?" she asked. "Yes," he said with a wry and troubled smile. "To be without a head like the headless horseman although I suppose a less animated one." For a moment she was so pleased and excited that she would witness such a splendor until she saw a man with a bag over his face dragged up against his will onto the marble stairs leading to the temple and a third man with a huge scythe in his hands. A second later she witnessed the burly third man swing, with all his round, bulging, muscular might in one fail swoop and the head part from the shoulders which the second man placed in a basket. There was surprisingly little blood at first. Then the arteries disgorged their content while the body fidgeted a few times on the holy marble.

She suddenly knew that adults were monsters and that they ran amuck in the world inimical to human decency. In deep pain of one fragmented and grieving for this man and the human race, she nonetheless controlled her urge to cry. She assessed her situation. If indeed she were in a land of adult monsters, outwardly she had to acclimate to their mores and yet do the best she could, while growing up, to refrain from becoming a monster herself. If one couldn't withdraw from a situation, she felt more than thought, a girl must play the game. If she were to leak out her pain by blubbering, they would hate her and she would be perceived as foolish and weak. Crying would never help. It would only get her into trouble. She asked herself how best to achieve this ostensible aim and she told herself that she should be inquisitive. She calmly asked why the beheading had occurred, the reason for the timing of the occurrence, the exact nature of the crime, if beheadings were permitted in America, and the final resting place for a 2 part individual. The questions made her father, a USAF officer for NATO, and her mother, a USAF soldier's housewife, so happy. The next day as her mother was with curlers in her hair and her head in tact and under the dryer at the beauty parlor, the young mother pointed out her daughter and boasted about all the questions she had posed regarding the beheading the previous night. They boasted about her often; however, two more months passed and the clarity of the ephemeral nature of the reunion with her parents became clear. After her summer holiday was over and their honeymoon reunion with their child had ended, Gabriele was sent back all alone in a jet to New York City and then a second connecting flight that would lead her back to her aunt in Kansas.

Chapter Thirteen

It is 2008 and he, sometimes Adagio and sometimes Nathaniel or various nicknames, still doesn't even have a consistent label for himself. Not even a consistent name has stuck on him all these 18 years; and the half hour that he has sat in the library there is that same mental numbness of all other previous half hours. It is numbness as empty as a pit in the mouth from an extracted tooth. He knows that most men wander around the world untouched, unknown, not touching, and not known or knowing. He knows that such men use girlfriends to prop themselves up in order to feel fortified outwardly in 6 billion mostly "nobodies" within a universe of continual flux. He knows the selfish jaundice of both men and women in a relationship and how with any length of time it inflicts the relationship with the disease that is an extension of the two. He has been there and done that. He had one steady girlfriend but the relationship was hard to maintain when swirling colorful treats in many edible shapes, smells, and voices of varying feminine nectar fell through the orifices of his senses. It does not bother him to be no one special. It does not bother him to be the same as "regular guys" although most of them have consistent names, nicknames, or aliases they do not cower from. They make up the masses; and the masses are a brute force to which he is one of the billions. When a thing or a way of being exists in large numbers, he supposes, it is bound to be right. At a large table in front of an open book, with fingertips he grazes an area of skin above his upper lip. The facial stubble, when he rubs it, gives him extra reinforcement in his vain embellishment of masculinity. It is a vain reinforcement that the litter of pornography he perused like a philomath in his car a few minutes before entering the library did not do. Even the insouciance that he artificially concocted there with the puff of a cigarette while waiting for the rain to soften enough to drive did not make him more conscious of his male vigor than a brief feel of facial stubble. There is little beyond sexual energy to define him. No fields, no disciplines, have awakened an internal voice. Not yet, not ever, he thinks. He is a man without a voice and such a man is most conscious of the primordial emotions of hating those who bar his pleasure and love toward those who facilitate it. Adagio-it was a somewhat forgotten word, which once popped into his head for the creation of an email address. The word has inadvertently been a perfect epitome of his slow mental activity for books. Slow in that respect, academics with their words and numbers in infinity have stood out like the awkward anachronisms of hieroglyphs chiseled into stone. It would seem ironic that someone who perceives books to be as lifeless as stones should be in a library watching the pages of a book occasionally turn under the draft of the ceiling fan when not under the directive of his own will. The book is of 20th century American art and contains a few examples of his mother's work. Only pleasures from pictures have had some vague calling or tugging; but then it has been pictures that have composed so much of his existence.

He had detoured from the interstate and came into the town to buy a sandwich and cola at a convenience store, which fostered the purchase of the newest issues of Playboy and Hustler as well. He is downtown because the heavy diluting of rain in this small town necessitated him to pull over to the side of the road and park his car. He is in the library because it was a two-block run from where he parked his car. The continual pounding of rain caused him to have to go to the bathroom sooner than what he would have done otherwise, for he is in all respects a follower of nature's suggestions. The bathroom was his impetus for entering the library. In the process of staring up at the fan to focus a second of hate toward it he sees a woman straightening her body after rising off the seat. She is at a table around 50 feet from that of his own. Her table is near a small wall of books. He regrets that he has not seen her legs slide on the shiny wood of the chair or her thighs rising up to him although imagined action can be continually repeated and he continually repeats it. Bound in black stockings, the legs go to the front desk where some hands scan titles of her videos.

"It seems nobody checks out books any longer. We've had to restrict the kids use of the internet upstairs. They'll do nothing but chat the whole day if nobody catches them and then before they leave they check out videos to take back home."

"Well, guess I should feel honored to be thought of as a kid when I'm nearly 42. I am really in a hurry so could you please…"

"All right."

For a minute if not longer there is a momentary lapse in the present before he becomes conscious of it again. Fueled on adrenalin and hunger, he finds himself walking behind her in the rain. He imagines himself catching up and offering his umbrella to her but she has one of her own and so he timidly tracks her from a distance. He imagines her dropping the keys to her car but the fates also do not allow him this prop. He sees her get in but imagines her already seated with the door shut but unable to start the car. This does not happen either. He is unable to monitor himself. Like a child he distances himself from his actions. He is feeling the movements of someone else's body. Will has been frozen in time. There is a cold frozen constancy in his consciousness of the present moment. He finds himself knocking on the window. She rolls it down. He does not know what to say. She hasn't dropped one of her videos in the rain. He is as if naked and without a gift or prop with which to make a confidence. He stares at her mature beauty.

"Yes?" she asks.

"Looks like the air in one of your tires is low-this one on the driver's side."

"Oh. That shouldn't be the case. I filled them up yesterday. Do you…" She hesitates. "Do you think I need to come out and look?" Her words are circumspect. They are of one who does not trust his intentions. If only she could have said this with confidence, he thinks. He means that then he could have gotten the opportunity to have her outside. He could have pushed her under the car and accosted her with his body.

"No, maybe you'll get back home okay. I think you will. I just noticed it looked down a little."

She smiles. "Maybe because I am sitting here. Don't you think so? - Or maybe not." Her tone reflects more confidence in him and she treats his ideas with deference. She defers all mechanical judgments to men whom she supposes to have such genetic predispositions.

"It's low," he says, "but I think you'll get back fine. In the morning you can put air in it."

"Thanks so much. Okay." She pushes the button to roll up the window. He wants to stop its progression. He wants to put his hands in what is left of the closing hole and break out the window. He wants to shove himself on top of her, slap her down onto the passenger seat, and have his pleasure. As strong as that urge is, he is too socialized and can't break in. He retreats to his car. He subconsciously pushes in the lever of his umbrella and carries it, compacted, within his hands despite being drenched by rain. He feels the tightening of his sinuses. He is getting ill but he isn't aware of this. He passes a music store. He notices that his shoestring, to the left, is dragging onto the wet pavement like broken strings of a guitar. Passing an alley he envisions her there to be grasped like a guitar's case; yanking the instrument from its case; and letting his tongue strum. He feels incontinent and he notices his erection. He imagines her without ablution, naked to smell, touch, sight, and taste. He gets into his car, ties his shoe, pulls a handkerchief out of the glove compartment, and wipes the sweat and rain from his forehead and face. For a moment he rests his aching forehead against the rim of the steering wheel.

Chapter Fourteen

(1989: Houston)

Back from Allen Parkway, Gabriele pulled into the driveway of the house she and Betty rented. She drove beside three black girls at an adjacent property who were tilting back a large stone. As Gabriele opened her car door, she wondered what was underneath that had gotten their attention. It had to be a salamander, a gecko, or a swarm of large fire ants. A two-part skeleton of a midget in a partially underground ossuary wasn't in the realm of possibility; but whatever existed there, it caused their squeamish giggling. She felt a little squeamish, herself, at the thought of children grotesquely disgorging into her senses. What made it worse was the fact that they were there doing this when she was in such a need of finally reaching her home-her sanctuary. She thought about the Turk that had been decapitated twenty- three years earlier, although it seemed only days ago. Back then she had been as young as the youngest of the three girls whom she was now looking at.

She remembered how one of those bedeviled executioners let the head roll out of the bag, took it by the hair, and displayed it to the crowd before returning it to its basket-a basket that looked to the very young Gabriele as if it should be used for apples. Even so long ago she tacitly condemned the adult monsters that enjoyed the macabre and applauded such savagery in the name of justice. Still her monstrous father, her teacher, had inadvertently led her into that large life- changing enlightenment that was always arrived at from a corridor through the darkest abyss. Partially from being pushed along with the crowd and partially from human curiosity, he had shown her the loss of innocence through the realization that society, that lovely refinement of conveniences and kind neighboring policemen, was a horror. Even when so young, she intuitively guessed that Turkey was just an outward display of a refined and obscure savagery that had to be in all adult institutions regardless of what they were or the nations they were in. She didn't exactly think it but she felt it all the same. With tears that she could never shed and by grief, full empathy, and comradery for this unknown individual, she had walked into the full darkness of enlightenment. The sentiments for the slain man would remain dormant and mute in her thoughts all the rest of her life but the enlightenment, the darkness, would be more active in its behavioral influence.

Twenty-three years ago she imagined all children as the good and the innocent as she believed herself to be back then. That was before she went to school and learned what egocentric sadists they really were. For they, the masses, enjoyed the ruthlessness of the name callers whose arrows and vitriol of "Four eyes! Four eyes!" and "Piggy! Piggy!" toward two of her classmates was inexorable. How deeply ingrained was the hunter and the competitor in every child. She could see it in the sports they played together. She could see it in the spelling bees. She could see it in the name-calling, which was an aversion toward anybody who was different. Differences might be deleterious to the concept of the tribe. It was the corollary of the need to survive that existed atavistically and came about instinctually as a response passed on from the youngest of the earliest Homo sapiens. It was they who, as sexually reproductive adults, passed on the knowledge of their inner children. Gabriele was so fortified that attempts at name-calling directed toward her personally did not even scathe her. But when the name callers and all their tacit accomplices shot their arrows and threw buckets of vitriol at the fat girl and the girl with glasses, her wrath was also implacable. She would beat up the worst of these tiny savages. Innocent expressions and gauche interactions of ostensibly pure children belied what the offspring of these adult monsters were really like; and as if misogyny and mis-himony were not enough, such incidents caused both mis- girlony and mis-boyany. Normally such an abnormality of four misses would constitute the misanthropy of serial or spree killers but Gabriele did not feel much misanthropy.

Her ideas, she knew, were as rare as a Tennessee Coneflower or a Black Outhouse Hollyhock-both of which bordered on extinction. They were as ineffable as the very universe she resided in and as pessimistic as Hobbes' social contract theory (although to her who often liked dressing up in black, black was not pessimistic being the color of intrigue and enlightenment). She believed that Hobbes was somewhat wrong in thinking that humans suppressed their own savagery through the common necessity of not wanting to be murdered in their beds. The contract wasn't as simple as that alone. The adult Gabriele thought that through society small doses of competitive cunning could be exuded in basic business competition and politics for the whole duration of one's long life. The common workers left out of both, if given a high enough salary, would not be anarchists or proletariat revolutionaries if they had enough money to go to action packed movies or sports stadiums, buy whores once in a while, or other benign conduits of savagery. In short, she believed that society came about for the purpose of giving its members a long lifetime of small doses of savagery instead of a few episodes of gluttonous devouring that could cause one to be murdered rather easily. She wasn't sure of the specifics. She hadn't thought it worthy of her time to think them out in an obscure philosophical treatise. Besides, figuring out why the dog bit the bone wouldn't stop the biting.

"What are you doing, girls?" Gabriele smiled at them and walked toward the stone.

"Wer' gonna killem, Lady," said the eldest girl.

"What per se are you hoping to rob of a life?"

"Lady'speakin' Shakespeare," said the eldest.

"Wer' gonna open these lizzardheads like coconuts and pull out the brains and give'em to you, Lady, so that you can have breakfast," elucidated the second one.

They laughed and Gabriele smiled widely, fully amused by their non- feminine creative play. "My ladies, methinks thou art so nice, but unfortunately I've already had breakfast."

"Lady'speakin Shakespeare again," said the first one.

"Oh, that Lady," scowled the second one playfully.

"Yeah, it's the Shakespeare language," continued the first, "But I'm good at figerin'out Morse code so I can do this. There's more English in Shakespeare than in Morse code. She's meanin' she already had breakfast but I don't think that matters none. It ain't an issue."

"Yeah-ain't anissue— any o'that," mimicked the second one.

"You can put it in your 'frigerator," said the oldest

"Pootit in your 'frigerator" said the third and smallest of the girls. The two eldest girls laughed at her intrusion into the conversation. Everybody began to laugh including Gabriele.

"No," Gabriele said, "The refrigerator is full." She was quickly becoming serious. She saw sharp little stones in the hands of the eldest one. Even a child was a brutal force or, at any rate, immolated in play the brutality of life on the planet. She sighed and took away their instruments of war. She wanted to scold them but there was no way to scold all humanity of the past, present, and future. Only a crazed individual would not be cognizant of their limitations.

"Damned if she done takenway the lizzardknife," said the second one in disbelief. To the luck of all concerned Gabriele didn't hear them and wasn't even aware that one of them tried to spit at her from behind as she was walking toward the house. She climbed up the stairs to where she and Betty were living.

She hoped that Betty would not be there. She needed some time alone to be in that harmony within and to probe the endless fathoms of her probity and intelligence without the intrusions of the outside world. Even in childhood, Gabriele thought, she had projected an aloof quality of a stereotypical German. A sotto voce current in her brain called "conscience" when in fact it was nothing but a less dominant or minority opinion that was disgruntled at being such chastised her for her "bitchiness" (an indifference that both barked and bit). Still, she told herself, it did not matter. How was a self an extension of others? When she was born did she bring them into existence, and when she died would the human race cease to exist? People came and went as they should and friendship was merely for those of feeble ideas needing to be reinforced by the herd. For her whose ideas were such steady companions and was real within herself without needing to be reflected in her associations with others what need had she of the Betties of the world. She had never met a German whose example confuted the stereotype. She remembered the few times that her father took her to a beach along the East Coast and the myriad times when he took her to the beaches in Turkey. She always wandered to one side of the beach, culling certain miscellaneous seashells to examine as her father sojourned away from her with pensive and hard expressions, sunk in his own mind. The expressions told her that he savored the idea of being alone in his own cold, watery depth. Despite the fact that he had taken her to the execution, she loved him most as far as people were concerned.

She turned her key in the doorknob and opened her part of the house. She thought, "The human mind when opened up has, at its crypt, humanity." Particularly for herself she loathed the idea of being a social creature. She often thought of her roommate each day of each semester, the homeless grass chewing Filipino whom a woman at the Laundromat nicknamed the botanist, professors, her family, and acquaintances: they all made up her reality. She did forget about Betty during vacations and she forgot about her aunt, uncle, and cousins except during the vacations but she couldn't quite escape thinking about them altogether. Overall, she didn't have much sentiment toward anyone, and they could easily be shaken and faded from her memory once she was away.

Betty was usually an early riser, but not hearing any noise in the kitchen or living room, Gabriele at first assumed she was sleeping. She checked all the rooms but they were empty except in sound, where a small television remained turned on. A newscaster was discussing the economic powers of the East with reference to the new economic experiments in the Soviet Union and China. "The whole f— world is West," thought Gabriele. She felt that democracy was as much an experiment as communism: an experiment on how free to be greedy things could get without entirely destroying the ecology that was the base of it all whereas the original communism of Trotsky was an experiment on how equal life could get and still be bearable in its world of frightened and impoverished clones. It all missed the mark as far as she was concerned. If each and every person was not granted food, shelter, and a profession by which to feel worthy (if indeed there were worthy professions, a question that she posed to herself) all of these socioeconomic systems were nothing to her but debauchery. She contemplated the fate of the homeless Filipino: wasn't she quite the hypocrite to say that the world was wretched to not offer him assistance that would pull him from the streets and away from feeling disoriented and hearing voices in his own head when she didn't care to bring him into her apartment. Still, she didn't want him any more than she would want a tick, a cockroach, or a bedbug. If he wanted to come into her apartment and be Betty's lover, after the last bag was put into her car, that was another thing altogether.

The living room had the smell of light and stagnant smoke of Betty's cigars. Betty, she thought, must have recently gone to another final examination. It was best that way. With her gone Gabriele would not have to coerce some giggling and mild sighs as she packed her racket ball paddle with other items. There would be pleasant but vague and generalized memories of their racket ball entertainment together but, to be sociable, she would have to affect some maudlin sentiments of loss. She would need to feign loss particularly about them living together as if it had made them conjoined spiritually although obviously not Siamese twins. She would have to use the width of her arms to symbolize an embrace (a real embrace would have been impossible when a sexual embrace with a man was bad enough). She quickly entered the bathroom to take a shower that might wash away any odor of the man she had slept with; packed more of her things; saluted the new communism in her heart; snickered inside at the thought that Japan had out-capitalized the West the way it tried to out-imperialize the imperialists; turned off the television, and left with the remaining two boxes. She swerved off the drive, veering somewhat near the girls in her eagerness to leave.

"What's wrong with you, woman?" yelled the eldest one.

"What's wrong with you, nigga" yelled the little black girl full of energy. The girl did not know the full pejorative nature of the word nor the fact that Gabriele, being white, could not be a Negro unless one were to label her such for the black clothing she often wore. The other two stood with legs arched and bulging hominid-like—the eldest with right arm erect and out from her body and the hand half-clenched into a fist. Gabriele saw this from the mirror. She hadn't driven that close to the girls so she thought their reaction was unjustified. The fact that she thought they looked like hominoids had nothing to do with their skin color nor their nonstandard use of language but her own aversion toward children and adults based upon the sensitivities she had as a young child and the fact that these girls were pelting the top of her car with clods. She returned to the drive. "Hey!" she yelled from the window. "Your mother's insurance is gonna pay for any damage. You are lucky that I'm not opening my car door because if I were to get you I would -" she had to stop herself. Whatever she said under these circumstances could only put violence and hatred into their callow minds, exacerbating their nature as hers, so prone to its aggressive flares. She could only make it worse than what it would be if these children were merely left to glower and ponder in silence as she was now doing. And yet there was little delectation in self-restraint. A fully sociable being was one who liked to provoke responses positive or negative like billiard balls banging against each other. One felt alive based upon the vibrations gained from being knocked around; and as eremitic and misanthropic as she was, Gabriele was a girl who liked her fun. She saw the clods of dirt in their hands and the dirt on the windshield. She slowly got out of the door, which caused them to back away a few steps. She didn't look at them but instead walked around her car. Seeing that no damage had occured, she then returned to the driver's seat. She decided to leave the matter alone so she spit a cannon ball of chewing tobacco toward the girls and ventured onward. The cannon ball was the penalty phase. After all, she did not want them to think that they could pelt motorists with impunity. Still she imagined the sullied tribulation that she must have caused the younger one. She could feel the devastating humiliation that perhaps they all felt at a wad of snuff coming at them like a projectile. She hoped that they would not interpret it as racial hatred. She felt the horror behind what she had done and yet there was nothing she could do. If she were to stop the car and return to them to apologize they would probably pelt her and the car both with stones. She disliked egocentric children. She even disliked the refugee children whom she worked with part-time until two days ago although she camouflaged it in professionalism. She knew that if only human beings were able to pierce their protective bubbles they would find that one genuine love within, that innate tender need to be liked, cared about, and have one's human worth confirmed and an identification of this sentiment in other sentient beings. Still the world was what it was and she told herself that if she were to return she would be stoned or clodded based upon their whims.

In this odd corner behind the skyscrapers and away from the Houston Symphony, the Meneil Collection with its engravings of Aten and Ptah, the Rothko Chapel, the Astrodome, the Miller Theatre in Herman Park, the University of St. Thomas, the University of Houston, and her Rice University, nothing touched her sense of imagination so much as the ghettos strewn around them. She admired the simple life burrowed away from the congested avarice of the city's center. She felt compassion for the poorest of the poor who had to be in bleak circumstances but she could not do anything in her two years in Houston but take photographs of the infamy of the free enterprise system and continue with her job working with refugees. She didn't do all that much. She sat with the Ugandans and the Kenyans on the porches of refugee houses and with them looked onto the skyscrapers at the approach of dusk. Driving in her car, she could remember the Vietnamese families clogging the sinks of the refugee houses with rice; the sight and smell of the blood of rotting vegetables in the refrigerators of those houses; the fire ants that stung her around the refugee houses; mowing the yards when she couldn't budge the refugees to do it; the disputes over whose food was in the refrigerators or how much clothing she was supposed to supply them with, and how the Ugandans tended to accumulate trash without ever emptying it. She remembered Senor Sanchez. Making a detour back into the city from the interstate, she decided to go to the refugee houses and say "goodbye" even though a couple days ago she had chosen not to tell the refugees that she was leaving in her usual obdurate opposition to sentiment. She could imagine herself telling Senor Sanchez about her immediate departure and him saying, "Heaven forbid, you are really leaving us now that you have a Master's in psychology from a great university?." She would say, "Yes, I always leave when I get Master's degrees. This one from a great university equalizes a not so great one in criminology at Emporia University." "Do you have two Master's degrees?" "Yes," she would say, "I collect them." "What will you do with your knowledge?" he would ask. "Be a better person for it and that is all. I'll sit on my butt in the future." "Oh, very good," he would say. "Maybe you can put Fidel Castro on your lap while you sit and get him to purr like a kitten." "Oh, what an excellent idea," she would say.

Senor Sanchez came from Havana. On that first day of their meeting she gave him clothes from the Welcome Center, which he took. She put food in the refrigerator and yet he would rarely eat it. "Necesito volver a Miami, orita! Esta lugar"-and there he rambled off in passionate Cuban speed which she did not understand. They sat on the porch to the Welcome Center. Gabriele handed him a pen and paper but his calligraphy was not legible. "Orita? Que significa "orita?" she asked. He snapped his fingers fiercely and then rambled incommunicably. Her eyes became stiff and large in her detest of his irascibility. Sanchez would always whistle for her attention. Then he would laugh at her hating eyes; whistle again; look up in the air, and flap his arms in an attempt to have her get him something. Partial or complete hunger strikes, she told him in Spanish would not hasten his trip back to Miami but only make his stay intolerable for everyone.

"But you buy shit for us to eat!" he stormed one time.

"I'd have trouble getting it down too," she admitted. "Suit yourself. If you die defiantly you will be my personal hero but the carcass will stay in Houston. We don't ship carcasses to Miami," she said. He was her personal favorite.

The Cubans told her one time that the U.S. was responsible for putting Fidel Castro into power since the Cuban masses needed to support any man whose rhetoric condemned American investments and the American control of their economy; and her response was, "Well, which is it-if you hate the guy so much it seems ridiculous to use such an argument even though it does have some truth. I know if I were to engage him he would be a pussycat purring on my lap and you guys could make any political cartoon on him you pleased." The Africans once said that the military cost of their civil wars were the result of Western colonial boundaries fusing incompatible tribes into nations, keeping Africa from being able to feed herself; and her response was, "Well, which is it— If you hate the idea of imperialism why are we speaking in English now; and why is your government trying to lure in foreign investment?" When the older Vietnamese individuals mentioned the war she listened to their stories intensely through a rough translation. She listened to life's horror and the ensuing trauma. That was all she could do. The past and the future did not exist but traumas of the past went on perpetually. Once she had to translate Thuc's "New House Rules for Immigrants" to the Latinos as they sat before her on metal seats. They were lectured that the food given to them should be put in boxes and set in the refrigerators so that they would know that the food was being distributed equally and without a cause for bickering. Thuc nodded her Vietnamese face at Gabriele's ostensible translations when really Gabriele was only giving a synopsis of what was being said with commentary disparaging of the YMCA treatment of its refugees and a system that was generally f—

There might have been poetic significance in having done this mundane job: having taken the refugee children to the zoo with seventy year old Jesus and the fifty year old Sanchez; having said the names of the animals in English and the girls giving the Vietnamese equivalent; having taken them to the social security office to get them cards with designated numbers; having taken the Cambodian boy into the clothes room of the Welcome Center to try on pants of various sizes but when he would not put them on and take them off with an adult sense of speed, having performed the unzipping and zipping herself; having taken the little Cuban girl to the Vietnamese doctor when she had a fever although the doctor only gave Gabriele the suggestion of Gatorade and crackers; and having often heard the little Laotian girl imitating Gabriele's growls through the tattered 1screen of a window although Gabriele's growls toward the girl were real ones. Still, all in all, she thought in the car, it had been a waste of time to have prostituted herself to such an agency. She liked these refugees for various reasons but one less altruistic reason was that she didn't have any other people whom she liked and thus she needed to like them. She chastised her maudlin disposition and returned to the interstate.

Chapter Fifteen

After washing her wounds and cursing the cat, she again picked it up by the neck. But this time she threw it outside into a light surface of snow that had fallen an hour earlier. Frothy top layers sometimes drifted about like desert sands in the occasional strong gusts. They went here and there as directionless as her mind that, in one respect, had become detached from traditional roles and responsibilities, and in another had sunk into the mire of motherhood. Inside closed doors, she was resistant against the cat's cries. Empathy, she told herself, was not in her vocabulary. But when the cat, named Mouse, could no longer be heard, she stood outside on the steps and called for it until it at last appeared from under the trailer. She warmed a bottle in one large pan and a bit of milk for the cat in a saucepan. She had never warmed milk for the cat before; but she decided that if she was doing it for one she might as well do it for the other particularly with the advent of the furriest one being subjected to the cold. When both animals were fed she watched the television but its senseless action and its fictitious and ludicrous sentimentalism were putting her into a numb and depressed apathy. It was deflating her of all energy to the point where she couldn't follow the characters or plot since the figures were now helter-skelter in the meaninglessness that was rife in her own mind.

To escape a stagnating and a somewhat discombobulating loss of herself, she grabbed her sketchbook and drew the exact likeness of her child with little time and effort. The book, like a photograph album, was filled with her sketches in chronological order: stoic and erect poses of her parents based more on childhood memories than some brief reunions when she was a teen-ager; a 13 year old friend in her bicycle club; the faces of drunken high school classmates when she was bar- hopping and ignoring most mandates of her aunt and uncle; some of a trip to Germany with her aunt; college friends; and yet some of unknown Antarctica, a dreamy non-asthmatic land of ice mountains and valleys. In such a place dreamed about and sketched from her asthmatic youth onward neither rivers of flowing pollutants nor mountainous landfills existed. Within its solitary and pristine nature, there would be no tacit or overt pressures to get a job and become someone. In Antarctica an exceptionally aware person would not have to go through the degradation of being compelled to reinforce the rules and procedures of a business or organization in order to have the income derived from a job. No professional, entrepreneurial, or common slaves would exist here.

In this place, which she fabricated as being no less habitable than Greenland, there would at least be a small ecosystem of fish and seaweed for food, and societies of walruses, seals, and penguins which she could watch and record their social interaction. Such a record would be exclusively for the one-person audience of Gabriele. That being the case, the purpose of an article to which author and reader were one person without the prospect of extending further seemed a futile waste of time; and yet if meaning in a record of the habits of species could only be gained by sharing this information with others or if the whole essence of meaning existed in edifying others and by shared experiences this would be the source of another research paper which she would conduct in Antarctica.

Daydreams gave movement and stimulation to housewives standing in line at supermarkets and provided an escape for mothers of infants who sat alone as inert and purposeless as rocks until becoming instruments to be used by their babies. To find the source of his discomfort and ease it was in a child's mind a woman's only role; and this particular one also felt that his mother could also be manipulated by slight smiles and the temporary end of tantrums. And in a sense she was manipulated to toss him in the air, albeit only in the physical gesture itself for only fools read expressions of love in these smiles and the cessation of screams. Gabriele accommodated him beyond what was necessary for his welfare only because of the horrendous nature of his cries if she didn't do so. Throughout these months of care giving she did not have any other world beyond the child. She tried to keep herself from being flattened by the perfunctory role of bathing, feeding him, and changing his diapers by telling herself that motherhood would pull her into the swathes of human experience and its interconnectedness, that it would be a novel learning experience on coexistence, that it might be a means of duplicating the ideas of respected child development theorists so as to corroborate or discredit them, and that he could be the specimen of an experiment on how the instincts and proclivities of a male child might be altered into more ethical variations although she wasn't quite able to isolate the exact nature of the experiment and its parameters. But really these ideas did little to counter this pauper's version of ennui that fogged over her perceptions. What sustained her were her daydreams and art. Once she drew a surreal image of her baby in a business suit with an attachZ case in his hand. It was a partially adult caricature of a being standing proudly alone on an ice mountain. She drew its contumely as master of itself in all of its avarice, ability to facilitate its own pleasures. It was a fragmented child glued back together as an enraged whole and she accentuated this by drawing myriad cracks within its porcelain skin. . When she finished the sketch she knew that charcoal was an ineffective tool for the ideas and the color that rushed inside of her. Still, the sketchbook was compact as an album, and a bit of paper and charcoal were affordable.

Closing the sketchbook on a mental catharsis, she did pushups and situps beside her director's chair and then aerobics to the televised instructors who glowed in a little box in front of her. It all helped to extract her from malaise. She really needed the physical exertion of games like racket ball, and in a very self-centered way Betty began to permeate her thoughts. The idea of her friendship became more palatable to reminisce over. Then she fell asleep with the ideas of Antarctica in her mind. When she woke, her thoughts were disconcerted and there was a forlorn neediness sticky as the baby's vomit. She needed a break from solitude and an exit away from the obligations of motherhood that tyrannized over her. For the first time in her months of doing this she needed an adult presence in her life and she yearned for the appearance of this Rita/Lily person who lived somewhat nearby and was adult in the sense that she could be spoken to. Lily (she was mostly that and preferred this label although she was really Rita) was supposed to have come earlier and Gabriele wondered where this Rita/Lily person was. She heard the baby crying. Maybe too much light in the trailer was irritating his eyes. A silver light from the glare of the snow with its power to make objects (even the baby) seem blindingly unreal was bleeding throughout the whole trailer. It captivated her and made her think that the baby and its needs were nothing short of a dream. She stared out of the window to confirm that an outside world did indeed exist. She saw a neighbor's car pull out of a rocky driveway and one young boy unsuccessfully trying to pull his brother on a sled in the superficial layer of snow and left over hail. Too many weeds were blocking their progress. Too many diapers were blocking her own.

She packed some baby food and disposable diapers in a bag. Imitating the witch's dogma of the sanctity of the earth, for a few months after Nathaniel's birth she had been adamant that she wouldn't use disposable diapers even though she had yearned for their ease. Back then she saw mothers with money and impunity buying boxes of them at the supermarket and she loathed these vile mothers who degraded the environment. Once, however, when she had a migraine headache while experiencing some asthma problems and he was suffering from diarrhea she had trudged over to the store with him in her arms and bought a box of diapers. From that point forward it became part of her habits. To not do so now would only inconvenience her. Not even if thousands of mothers went back to cloth diapers and their plastic over-panty counterparts would such thoughtfulness save the environment. It would merely postpone the inevitable. A slight postponement could not be achieved by one alone and, even if it could, she didn't see that it would merit her discomfort.

Giving up on the idea of Rita coming to her home, she fixed a tuna sandwich for herself and ate. Then she undressed the two of them; and they sank into a soothing bubble bath. Gabriele made soap castles for her son, and smacked top stories off of them, which caused his eyes to become wider with curiosity and his mouth to become circular in the wonder of all things new. She slowly sang a choral movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, emphasizing the accent of each German vowel and syllable exaggeratedly. She internally debated the merit of giving her child mendacities as she told him German nursery rhymes and lightly washed his small body. She supposed that the sparked imagination that could deliver him from being a somber, adult zombie, alive only in insatiable hungers, was important enough that she didn't have to think of such lies as bad. Besides, if reality and goodness were perceived differently by each individual, she didn't want to rush toward an indictment even if she would be a most willing judge in rendering a verdict in the Gabriele-made indictment of the past 7000 to 10,000 years of civilization.

Drying herself and the baby in front of the window she put her fingers into the crevices of the plastic blind. She pressed down on one rectangular piece of this thing called a blind and wondered what piece, if any, her blind life had in this thing called society. She looked at the outside world. From the relatively quiet trailer park, it was hard to imagine how much all the inhabitants of Ithaca spun around in life. As futile as it was to spin, she thought, humans were not meant for thought. They were creatures meant to expend energy and to overtake their world. Maybe this was needed for the evolution of a higher species than man to exist on the planet. Sexual reproduction was not thought but illusion and frenzy, which brought forth offspring. It was overtaking women. A human (women included although she found them a bit more repulsive than the average human) was mostly all energy conquering the planet, making it subordinate to human will. If care was not given toward the environment and humans overtook the planet too forcefully, the world would expunge them from the list of species. Any caretaker of a child needed to spin from time to time too and Gabriele needed to do this to fight off sensory deprivation. She pulled up the blind. Naked, she was in a pillar of light the way the so-called prophet, Joseph Smith had been-only, being atheist, her pillar was only silver. She knew that a personification of the sun was absurd, as was all religion, which she had dabbled in knowing about years earlier; and yet she did not want to believe that this was all there was. Television, movies, billboards, and music all recorded that the rich, and happy people who played in this survival of the fittest game so successfully did so by following their desires with confidence and unapologetic insouciance. These most capable people monopolized over the world's resources leaving the vast majority of humans destitute, hopeless, burdened by hard labor for sustenance, and in some cases famished. They chased around like mad men trying to buy up the planet. Some of the mad men did so while repudiating their own mortality. Others acknowledged their mortality and so they told themselves they would gormandize while the feast was on the table. There had to be more than this.

She dressed him and herself warmly and when she was outside she realized that she had overdone it. The temperature was already above freezing and the traces of snow were evaporating tracelessly, later to be sucked up into a Heraclitus shaped cloud. The odd weather, which was becoming less odd annually, concerned her especially after the United Nations report that the world temperature would rise two degrees over the next three decades. She knew, however, that there wasn't "a damned thing" she could do about it. She supposed that she might be able to stand in front of Cornell University with placards advocating that human beings go back to being the hunters and gatherers from whence they came. She could stand there like a madwoman denouncing the past 7000-10,000 years. Nothing would come out of it but 12 hours of sitting in a jailhouse and then paying a fine.

After waiting over forty minutes for the rare and irregularly timed buses to come by within this small city, she got on a bus with her baby pouched onto her back. A seat near a young man with a plain face who was thumping his foot to the music of his portable radio was the only one left. She took it. She was grateful to have it. Having to balance herself and a baby to the movements of a bus was something she had mastered like a sport but it wasn't a preferable hobby. Adagio liked the bounces but she doubted that he would care to bounce off of a window. After the door of the bus was shut and the vehicle was beginning to roll without any sudden speed it was rapped by a hand. The driver stopped the bus and folded the door again. A woman around 20 years old entered. She smiled and greeted Gabriele with diffident childishness after shouting her name triumphantly to the back of the bus and by a wave of her hand. Then as the vehicle picked up speed her expressions became more diffident and she stumbled to the back of the bus. "What do I do?" she said. "I don't see anywhere to sit."

"You'll have to stand," said Gabriele.

"What do I do?"

"Hold onto the railing," she scoffed.

Lily grabbed it and began to dangle there like a leaf on a tree. "I guess you forgot me," she said timidly.

"No, you said that you would come in the morning. I thought maybe you had decided against coming." Her expressions were hard. It wasn't her idea to get this Rita/Lily person to come with her but she didn't own the services so she couldn't tell her to not come. "Really, you know, it isn't for everyone, Lily"

"Rita," she said.

Gabriele could never empirically detect the existence of a second personality that the girl purportedly had, and as such she could not believe that one personality came out in manic stages and the other during depression. When the Rita/Lily person called herself Rita and when she called herself Lily she was both timid and fragile, and tended to lie or imitate language like a parrot within her stages of depression. When she called herself Rita and when she called herself Lily she was even a little timid and fragile within contumacious manic fun. A month earlier she had contradicted herself by saying that she had not been sexually abused when she was young and that the patriarchal abuse she was "always talking about" was infrequent sexual abuse experienced as a teenager. The abuser was also amorphous: at one time a stepfather and another time a biological father. Gabriele again thought, "Once didn't she claim that her mother and father would soon be experiencing their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary? And yet there is a stepfather? What an interesting little liar." These contradictions were performed consistently by both of the "personalities." Furthermore, she talked of enjoyable times that she experienced with her parents. These times seemed to be ongoing. At any rate she spoke of them happily instead of looking onto happy but deceased memories sadly. It didn't appear that emotional trauma or abuse was bedizened as sexual abuse in a display to get others to empathize with her tattered past. It didn't seem that she was fabricating a happy family life scenario like someone extirpating weeds to plant flowers. That would be trauma- induced schizophrenia that would not be attributed to a manic-depressive who was being prescribed lithium. She claimed to have had a hysterectomy although neither childhood molestation nor cancer was claimed as the culprit. Gabriele thought that having advised Rita to go to a gynecologist once a year for a checkup might have brought on this comment. Maybe the Rita/Lily person fabricated information to keep a conversation ongoing. Maybe she needed continual conversation because it blocked out the moods that were a catalyst for divergent and erroneous perspectives and ideas. Gabriele's conjecture was that the split personality was nothing but the Rita/Lily person's own way of justifying why she had shifts in moods.

If she were sexually traumatized, it didn't come across with any more poignancy than her reactions toward not knowing what to do when she could not find anywhere to sit on the bus. She only became taciturn if she felt that too many questions and too much scrutiny were being paid toward her statements. None of the pieces added up. Gabriele thought that she did not know this person at all. She thought that she did not know any person at anytime in her life really. A person was never quite known. All one had were one's concoctions of plausible scenarios about the person's history and how he or she might behave from empirical personal experiences or what was witnessed when with others. It wasn't the person. The fact that one never knew anything didn't bother her. It was more of a mystery to walk around the planet in a loose blindfold.

"It isn't for everyone," Gabriele repeated.

"I want to go," said Rita. Will they tie me up until I make a vow of secrecy by signing my allegiance in blood? Something like that was on TV."