Chapter 37

Candymen copulating everywhere, their women and their offspring rife, each family wrapped in its monad, and each monad making up the celled outline of the lonely fervor of the monstrous universe as her febrile imagination conceptualized it; and there she was defying her wish to run away from an obsession to paint something seemingly important that was as enzymes on the hours of her life. She stood on a small ladder slavishly painting on the gigantic canvas in her garage as if this one obsessive idea could finally hold the elusive truth once and for all on why she, her 6 billion contemporaries, and all previous generations had bodies so easily worn away and existed so briefly within this recycling of life and as to why they rotated about the sun like hostages in a driverless bus that incessantly moved around the city square without any purpose. As she stared at her creation she ruminated that nature was so foolishly wasteful in formulating these tenuous beings who spent a fourth or more of their lives trying to acquire sufficient knowledge so that they could begin to think for themselves, and thereafter most of their energies in copulatory obsessions so that they could replicate new know-nothings. And yet if we were just cells in this mad, growing universe, she thought, none of it mattered anyway.

But at 2:30 p.m. she took her usual respite from her creative labors to meet the man with the unmemorable name at one of the less bourgeois coffee shops, not within the Starbuck franchise. She knew that in part she came here regularly not so much because she wanted to understand a Russian man's mentality or friendship, but to summersault from the diving board of another's ideas. For it was by this that she could free herself from lonely stagnation and the frustration of attempting to find genius from within. This sense of being alive was only possible when two or more were present (action being the body of all things) and so she came here to spring into life that was only in consort with another. After sipping her marginally bourgeois coffee gained from the exploitation of poor South American mountain farmers and their factory worker counterparts, she showed him a slide that she had taken of her inchoate work but then interrupted him as he tried to view it against the brightest part of the shop's light. "Do you think Michael knows you meet me here?" she asked sheepishly. They had been meeting there for a month without straying away from issues but now here she was focusing on their friendship like a weak female who went under the label of a woman. She felt that her question was a petty one formed by those who could not see themselves beyond their relationships and, embarrassed by inclinations that lowered her to mere mortals, she had been barely able to ask her question.

"Do you want him to not know?" he asked.

Her face cringed. "You mean, would I care to keep him from knowing this. Oh, I don't know." She shook her head indifferently and then smiled. "It isn't an issue for me -- just wondering."

"It's not, it isn't important for me either. I'm nobody -- just an investor. I didn't even invest all that much. I only go to his fitness center to lift weights. I am -- how do you say -- one of his more silent of silent partners; and I involve myself -- I don't involve myself in his business or his personal business and hope he isn't involving himself in mine. My life for now is a lot of books in my graduate studies and not so many dates. "

"Good for you -- I mean for both things" she said. "Women and business might make a man look good on the outside but it's cancer on the real human being inside. You don't need a woman."

He was sullen for a moment. "You and I are just friends anyway," he said irritably and avoided looking into her face.

"Yes, but there is no 'just.' Friendship is the only thing that has the possibility of being pure--people who enjoy being in each other's company and admire each other without thinking about the advantages and opportunities to be gained in a merger, people who aren't needing the presence of some partner to get the addictive high of this love rush, and all the rest of it." She looked toward the front of the coffee shop where a teenager was squeaking the soles of his tennis shoes against the floor while he waited for his order.

"That's a god awful sound," she said.

"Do you think God is awful?" he asked.

"I said that the squeaking sound that guy is making is god awful- 'God awful' is a colloquial expression. It just means very bad. The noise of those shoes is incessant." She smiled awkwardly at her irascibility, her innate peculiarities that weren't so pleasant and difficult to part from. "I'll turn the tables on you if I can. Do you think God is awful?"

"I do, if He exists!"

"You go to church."

"With my sister, brother-in-law, and their family. We go on occasion. We aren't believers. Catholic Mass is similar to Russian Orthodox services and it makes my sister feel like she is back in St. Petersburg."

"Not Christian or atheist, but a devout church going non-believer." She inadvertently mumbled the assessment of the man that she had meant to be an internal summary. She paused for a second and then decided to disclose the rest. "And one with a penchant for investments despite being one of the last vestiges of Russian communism."

He didn't grasp her concept since it was muddled in large vocabulary that he did not understand; but he felt that he was being criticized. "Do you not like something about me?"

"No, why would you think I'd feel that way? I like the mix. Still, let me be the Devil's advocate and ask what right you, a man, have in judging this potential God."

"What?"

"You said that you think God is awful if he exists. Tell me, now that you are in this one nation under god, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all and the rest of this gunk how you, a mortal, indict this god. I mean you are a myopic person as we all are so what right have you or I to judge this bigger entity whom we presume to have created the two of us and everything else. Surely this God envisions a greater picture? Am I making sense--what right has a little man in judging a God who might understand the bigger picture on why things are the way that they are. Also, as a sociable animal, don't you feel the need to follow the herd? In this country the herd eats from the Christianity trough-- the Bible is like ground up bone marrow and the least edible parts of already decayed carcasses but these Americans devour it nonetheless. Don't you want to follow this God unquestioningly and eat the fables that are thrown in your trough?"

He guessed what she meant and laughed. "Not really. I am a human being, a rational creature, a creature that looks at evidence and thinks about it...I assess it."

"Yes, yes; I agree. Only by turning off our intelligence do we actually believe in such things."

"I don't understand. Are you a believer or a non-believer?"

"Well, certainly a non-believer; but I don't adhere to anything including non-believing. I let ideas whisk across me, weathering my obdurate convictions. What I am today is me now and what I am tomorrow is me then. There may be a God that is the cause of it all or some large thing that a human brain can't conceptualize enough to peg it with a label and if so I want an impression of the real one as much as I can and not the anthropomorphic god that society is trying to install into my head."

"I see," he said.

"Do you?" She giggled.

He smiled and then sunk morosely within deep contemplation. "I was quickly looking through a Newsweek at a newsstand while I came here -- sorry, while I was coming here. Let me start again. While I was coming here I glanced at a Newsweek."

"Bravo. Finally, good grammar!," she bantered.

He smiled morosely. "The article said that in the Democratic Republic of Congo a door of a cargo plane fell open. The article said that most of the soldiers and their families who were inside were-" He could not think of the words so he used a gesture.

"Sucked out?" said Gabriele colloquially.

"Did you learn of it?"

She thought of it for a few seconds: the consternation and yet cognizant beings nonetheless understanding what was happening to them and their families as they freefell into the abyss, the wailing and the flailing of limbs, the sense of being a morsel swallowed into an atmosphere that was so smothering in its vastness, the sense of complete hopelessness, the horrific winds, the passing through layers of clouds with the specious illusion of nets, falling concurrent with the rain, each human being hopefully experiencing a heart attack or stroke before the stroke of death, and the plops of red raindrops flying into the air at impact. She knew that the world had not been gently patted together and shaped like a piece of clay. It had been smelted in violence and chance. This being so, so it was with an individual life. "How horrible!" she gasped. "No, I didn't read anything about it." She slowly lifted her face and resurrected her sunken eyes. She even feigned a smile. "I am bad that way: I'd rather listen to classical music and read a book than know the news. Knowing how violent the world is does violence to one's need to believe that life is essentially good."

"If God didn't care about those people why should I think that he cares about me?"

"Absolutely. I agree." She tried to extricate herself from morbid thoughts by altering back to a more frivolous topic. "Do you agree that that squeaking is God awful!"

"I do. My nephew does that all the time, you know, squeaking his tennis shoes. You can scold him but he doesn't stop it. Squeaking tennis shoes, playing with balls all day and most of the night, running around -- I think motion gives him and all boys self-confidence."

"So this kid is squeaking -- "

"To prove to himself that he exists."

"Yes; but if a boy never stands still -- and this one would annoy virtually anyone he encounters with feet like fingernails on a blackboard -- he will never think beyond his own little movements in the movements and changes of this world. Furthermore he'll never conceptualize permanence and truth and his ideas will be myopic and short term. Even if there aren't solid Platonic ideas out in Never- Never land and all ideas are just attempts at understanding what passes through the senses, standing back and contemplating life at least allows a person to think about the various perspectives of an issue before making a decision. It improves the ability to make good decisions. My theory is that for every twenty minutes of inordinate movement that a boy or a teenage boy carries out he should be put in shackles and fetters in a closet for the other forty."

He smiled admiringly at her words despite not understanding many of them.

She simplified her flurry of words. "Maybe movement gives a boy self-confidence that he exists but unless he is put in chains and kept in a closet half the day, he will think that there is nothing else beyond movement."

"Is there?" he asked.

"I don't know," she confessed.

"Do you do that to your son -- put him in chains?" He chuckled.

"Coming soon," she kidded. "Aren't I right to contain males and movement?" she nudged him with her fist and then tucked his hand into her own.

"As our Russian poet, Alexander Pushkin says it -- if I can quote what I memorized in an English translation, 'How smoothly, rapidly, and freely the sleigh glides in the moonlight when you are with a friend and when, warm and fresh beneath her sable fur, flushed and trembling, she squeezes your hand.'"

"Lovely sweet talk but it won't help you. You know what I want to do? I want to put you in chains too. Come on." She put their mugs into his hands and led him to an outside table. There, she had him put the mugs down and led him into a luscious and verdant yard mixed with yellow dandelions. Even though it was late autumn, the climate was arraying the landscape with warm rains and the dandelions of April. Seated on the ground she tied together a makeshift flower bracelet that soon became handcuffs.

"And what is that supposed to do to me," he asked

"Maybe slow you down a bit. Nothing much since it is made from flowers. It is just a reminder that there are flowers out there to be seen."

"As Dostoevsky's character, Razumikhin says 'You can talk the most mistaken rubbish to me and if it is your own, I will embrace it. It is better to tell your own lies than somebody else's truth.'"

She laughed, put the back of her hand thoughtfully under her chin, and compressed her lips into a smile. She felt rejuvenated in this exchange of ideas that were as tangible, palpable, and succulent as sucking on lemon drops. They left and walked into a nearby park where the fountains splashed water into the air making a rainbow.

"Are you still planning to go back to St. Petersburg?" she asked.

"Yes, just for a couple months."

"Are you still planning to go back next week?"

"Actually, I changed the date to tomorrow."

"So soon? Well, I'm sure you will be glad to see your family."

Yes, but I'll miss our times together. I'll hurry back as quickly as I can."

When she finally left the coffee shop she headed toward the nearest Wal-Mart, the shopping oasis for the underdeveloped bourgeois. Within this desert oasis she bought some sheets and, in an aisle for Halloween products, a witch's hat and some green gunk from which to soil her face. In the car she applied the paint and cut holes in one of the sheets. When she drove up to the house, she honked on the horn repeatedly until the boy finally came out of the house begrudgingly.

She rolled down the window. "Did you lock the door?" she asked.

"Yeah," he said, and got in the car lethargically.

"All of them?"

"All of them. They're locked," he said petulantly.

"Do I need to check?"

"No, quit bothering me!" he said insolently.

"Poor Mr. Petulant--always doubted and examined in these unjust inquisitions. Okay, I won't doubt you this time; but I must tell you this: in the event that we are robbed I will hand you over to the man with the unmemorable name with an unburdened conscience. He has connections with slave labor camps in Siberia from the way I understand things."

"I know that you don't understand anything. You are lying. There aren't any of these connections."

"Lying, never! Fibbing, maybe or maybe not. How do you, Mr. Petulant, know what I know?"

"How do you know that I don't know what you know?" he countered. It was an old argument that she had excavated from one of the many miscellaneous parables in the thickets of pages that comprised a Chinese literature anthology; however, she had never radiated the enlightenment of her findings onto him. Such was the brilliance of an original thought; and so her hope for him was restored. Strangely, this argument seemed like a means to a new dimension albeit a golden key to the nihilistic abyss; and she was a radiating mommy for the fact that he had coughed up such an instrument out of the static charge of one thought banging against another one--the being incessantly comparing, contrasting, and categorizing various thoughts silently inside itself. "To think that Benjamin Franklin brought down lightning with a key and Nathaniel has made a key out of lightening!" she thought facetiously. She smiled and reprimanded him banteringly. "Well, Adagio, you didn't tell me what you wanted to be or I would have bought a costume."

"I don't want to BE anything. Trick or treating is for kids and I don't want any of that stuff anymore."

"So, because you didn't make your request, all we have for you is a tacky sheet. You will be a ghost; and you see that I'm a witch--always have been and always will be." She ignored his complaint. She knew that a ten year old stood on the back of his nine year old carcass and that a being's development involved using all former selves of earlier ages as steps toward these adult pleasures of lust, greed, movement, and conquest. She knew that condemning the innate discontent within her son, society, or to some degree within herself seemed as mad and railing ramblings of a madwoman and so she chose to have no reaction whatsoever. As an artist she believed that her mission was to thread a new logical relationship of old ideas or facts if not formulate new ideas themselves, and to add some flash and color to the ordinary. Whether or not she was marginally successful at altering perspectives, one thing was certainly not within her power at all. She could never adjust the base instincts of one's physiognomy. All she could do with the latter would be to accept it as if it were the third, dragging leg. Cutting off this limb, with its major artery, would be certain death if done to another or society at large. Base instincts were the guardians of the species. Selfishness to suck out the bone marrow of life, survive, and fulfill one's pleasures were the means by which this species perpetuated.

"I just want to finish my video game."

"Your brain will do some serious rotting with much more of that shoot and kill stuff. With this outing only your teeth will rot."

She was reminded of a few weeks ago when she had taken him to a professional baseball game which Michael had promised to him before this dissolution of family. She barely managed to acquire tickets by offering to pay exorbitant sums if the ticket office were able to get them into a couple seats; and yet this Adagio, Nathaniel, this Mr. Petulant, was saturnine the whole time. "What's your problem?" she asked as they were leaving the parking lot following the game. "You shouldn't be the one I go with. You don't even like these games," he said; and, true as it was, there was nothing for her to do but stuff the remainder of the hot dog into her mouth and drive home.

She drove him into more affluent areas and took him from door to door as if he were five years old, and as if she were trying to make herself that age in the process. She too had a plastic jack-o-lantern pail. She too got chocolate thrust into the pile within her pail. Experiences accompanying him in a childhood that had been robbed from her, for whatever embarrassment they caused him, were a million times better than being a mother waiting on the sidelines with vicarious yearnings. The quest of a chocolate mendicant, a ghoulish monk seeking alms, was leading her into the simple pleasures that were the foundation for appreciating life, from disengaging out of one's limited perspectives and hopeful adult futuristic conquests, and to be in awe of the entity. And yet with each new house his aversion to say, "Trick or treat?" increased as with his tacit animadversion of his mother. House after house there were chocolate benefactors and benefactresses with similar wisecracks: "You are a little big and old to be trick or treating, aren't you -- I can't see how old your ghost friend is but he seems a bit tall too." As much as he tried to suppress it, his loathing of her was ready to disgorge from his mouth like vomit.

An hour into this childish foray, she still did not have any Reese's Peanut Butter Cups and so she told him that with ten or fifteen more houses there would be a probability of acquiring her favorite brand of candy. Somewhere after the fifth extra house he felt a full abhorrence for the witch who put spells on men, drank their pee, had men, lost men, made a family by abandoning him when she went off to Europe, lost a family, found him an irritant when she was acting the part of the artist, suffocated him in embarrassments like this when she was trying to act the part of a mother, who never connected him to outside relatives like his real father or Peggy, and when he finally had some semblance of a father she caused his departure.

"I'm sick of you," he said. I want to go someplace else but I don't have an aunt, an uncle, or anybody to go to. Nobody cares about me."

"What is your problem?" she asked.

"You taking me to trick or treating like I am six years old is pathetic. That's my problem. Pull it over. I'm getting out and walking home."

"Christ, why can't you just be happy?"

"Don't take the Lord's name in vain," he said.

"Don't bore me in Michaelish babble," she told him.

"I want to go see Aunt Peggy."

"Go then," she told him. "She's in Kansas. The walk should be good for you. Be careful not to take the detour to Timbuktu." She pulled off the side of the road and let him out; waited in dismay for a while as he went some blocks within a premature bout of independence; and then stalked him for another six blocks despite the fact that he was trying to make himself stealth through the yards of homeowners. At last, tiring, he got inside the car. She laughed hysterically, slipped a wad of chewing tobacco into her mouth, and continued on her quest for Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.

Despite genuinely believing that his sullen hatred toward her would go on forever in obdurate wordlessness, the need to dig himself out of the coffin and dirt of silence exhumed him. "I want to go see Aunt Peggy," he said in an exasperated monotone.

"Well, you see her every time you open those Christmas cards of hers and those scary photographs of her fall from her flowery notes of love as well as all those exotic European stamps and paper currency from her trips here and there."

"I never meet her. She wants to meet me and yet I never meet her."

"We live kind of far away."

"You have money. I want you to put me on an airplane and fly me to Kansas."

"I don't have much money anymore. I won't until I sell some paintings; but you are a child. What do you know of any of that? Your concerns are keeping a kite sailing in the breeze. What do you know of finances and paying bills? What do you care about it?"

"I want to go there for Thanksgiving."

"You, my dear, are free to want whatever you please but getting it is another matter."

He fell into his morose ruminations. "What about my father?"

"I wouldn't know anything of him." It was a preposterous claim; and to think that such an easily scaled wall would stop the besiegement was even more absurd. Quickly recognizing her underestimate she fortified the wall. "Some cowboy intellectual who mounted me or I mounted him one time. I don't remember which. I don't remember anything about him."

"Mounted?"

"Sex. Do you understand what sex is?"

"Of course."

"You know only the word--you can't define it and have yet to experience it."

"I know more than the word--a guy wanting some fun from rubbing his smelly penis against somebody else's naked body--white liquid comes out."

She was surprised to hear such a perfectly barbaric definition that few adults would care to espouse and she looked on him admiringly. "Did one of your friends say that?"

"Yes," he lied.

"Out of the mouths of babes," she said. "Come on. Just cheer up and let's enjoy our time together."

"Where are you going?" he demanded.

"I don't know. I'm just looking at houses. If there is one shaped like a Reese's Peanut Butter Cup let me know and we'll go inside."

As she began to hum a tune on the radio random ideas pillaged through her perspectives like unwanted guests her belongings: she wondered why it had so far been a futile prospect to get her son to befriend the boy with the unmemorable name; she thought that since both boys were champion sneaker squeakers little else was needed beyond imagination and good will for children to declare friendship; she pondered how despite the disposition of Mr. Petulant and the forthcoming departure of the man with the unmemorable name, she was still glowing from her time in the coffee shop; how her painting needed some feral red brush strokes to increase its beauty and complexity; how each night her exalted ideas imploded to recurrent nightly dreams of Candyman riding in the white silk of her bare skin; how her recurrent dreams of Candyman were not only of his physical touch but ones in which he made her perceptions coruscate in the gleam of moonlight; mornings wondering whether the real truth of her life was just those meager sordid yearnings for sexual intimacies; that potential conclusion that intellectualism was nothing but one's own pretentious wish to appear to herself as more than motion and rampageous sexual urgings, hatreds, and fears that were vital to the survival of the species -- this all flitted through her mind a second before she struggled to regain control of her car.

Nathaniel's hands were grasping the steering wheel and there she was trying to counter this jerk of the car to the right and contend against his Freudian death wish. The memories of the many versions of Nathaniel at various ages fleeted through her mind. What he was doing now was clear. Why he was doing it was unfathomable in her consternation. A couple of seconds later the car darted over a triangular cement slab and onto a yield sign. Like the car beaten down in inertia, they were as sedentary as death and as inanimate as rocks. They stayed this way for half a moment and then, when meaning to ask him if he was all right, she reached over and slammed him hard on his face with one of her strong German polar bear paws and his head slammed against the door. He took the knock with tacit defiance and locked in whatever whimpering existed within. It was one of his last Halloweens as a boy and perhaps his last time dressed for trick or treat and it had come to this.

With the car towed off to the mechanic, she hated him for a week and then it slowly abated, lost and tangled within new neurons, new electronic circuits with thoughts successfully attempting to understand his bitterness, and with new emphasis to forgive and forget. But he, on the other hand, hated her for her 7 days of cold Antarctic ponderings at the dining room table and in her director's chair. Betty wouldn't even talk to him by the orders of General Sangfroid and, finding it hard to swallow food or understand anything on the television beside images running amuck, he hated his mother with incremental emphasis and duration. Knowing this, she began to consider taking him to the airport to send him away.

One cold day she was on the roof nailing a border for the wires of Christmas lights to lean on securely. She was looking out over her acres of land like a lonely Martha Stewart when she felt the need to stretch her cramped legs. She tried to call him on her cellular telephone to have him come out and hold the ladder so that she could get down. It was only after the fourth time that he bothered to answer. "Is Betty busy cooking lunch?"

"Yeah, shit on a shingle."

"Could you ask her to come out and hold the ladder?"

"No, I couldn't. I don't want my food burnt."

"You don't want your food burnt," she mocked.

"That's what she was hired for: to keep my food from burning."

"Your food?"

"Yours too."

"Well, there's got to be a reason for me having your ass around so you come out here and help me get down from here," she said. But when he finally came out and she looked down upon him she saw virulence in his sunken eyes and she wondered if he could be trusted to hold the ladder safely. She wanted to call Betty to have her come out but she knew that she would never pick up a telephone no matter how many times it rang.

"Get Betty over here to hold the ladder."

"No, she's busy," he said. She was surprised that he was impudent enough to address her this way in person.

"Get her now!" she commanded. "Get her and then, maybe…maybe I'll come down to get you your airline ticket to Kansas."

"You'll buy one?"

"It is already bought. If you are eager to get rid of me I am eager to get rid of you."

"Okay," he said happily.

"Sure," she said acrimoniously, "if that is what you want. And if that is what you want why should I put these lights up for you?"

"Yes, why do it when I don't care," he said.

"Well good we agree on something. I'll look forward to hearing the results of the experiment: paradise or penitentiary in Kansas. Feel free to email me through the process. Go on and get Betty." As he left she knew that fear had motivated her to mention the plane ticket. The thought of cajoling a response from a child by appeasing him, and doing it from a legitimate fear or, worse, perhaps a baseless one, appalled her. Her will and her foundation of motherhood seemed to be collapsing. She could no longer move him by her words any more than an old woman could twist a lid off of a jar; and for the first time in her life she was losing confidence in her own will.

Betty came out to her.

"You gotted all of the lights up there, Miss?"

"Yeah, well...enough. I guess too much, Hispanic Betty. Todo las luces para esto ano de navidad estara poco y yo tengo miedo que poco esta desmasiado. We will be the only people who will enjoy them. Nathaniel is going to visit his aunt in a few days."

"Miss, we need to talk orita. You pay for me for to have my own apartment but I never go there. Nunca, nunca! No tengo una vida. I'm illegal but I should not a slave. There should more to my life than the two of you. Quiero permiso para un vacacion pagado para dos meses."

"Dos meses? Do I look mad? Dos semanas okay."

"And where you will get other slave? There are many masters to be gotted and not many slaves." Gabriele thought about this crucial fact: Indeed, there were many masters to be had but few slaves. The idea resonated off the inner walls of her brain.

"Y entonces tu volveres a nuestra hogar?"

"Si."

"Okay, Hispanic Betty, stay until Christmas Eve and then you are free as a bird hasta luego Febrero. 2 months of paid vacation. Here, hold the ladder so that I can get down."

Soon Nathaniel, as well as the man with the unmemorable name, was gone; and seeing the vacuous ruts that they had made in spinning away from her she was reminded of the fact that the outside world was changeable and that only weaklings and fools placed happiness on others. And yet with Michael out of her life, and worse, Rick and Nathaniel who were as much as lost to her now, her world was unsettled in a four-fold loss.

She tried to avoid this feeling of loss for as long as she could. She first coerced an interest in Russian literature to be interested in something. She became fixated on drawing two sketches each morning and two each evening as if the world required myriad more still lives of apples in charcoal; and as if all that paper for the redundant work in drawing her owls was justified by the infinite variety of their poses. She suddenly became preoccupied with the pleasure and health of her hound. She felt that by feeding, walking, and washing it with more responsibility and care she could extend the life of this big German shepherd that they still called "Cat." She occupied herself with its pleasure (an ice cube habitually given for it to munch on as she was preparing breakfast, and an extra dog walk in the mid-afternoon). She viewed her actions as a humane gesture as if from the first attempts to domesticate the canine, securing the contentment or felicity of so many temporary generations of dying beasts, had been a constructive use of their masters' precious moments of life.

And yet as buried as she was in the rubble of family, where shoddy and experimental construction was done without the mathematical formulas of engineers, her hobbies were natural. They were diversions and she knew that her diversions were a means to stop the pain.

Suffocating as she was in that rubble, she could have come alive in a diminished form like all other creatures of chemosynthesis. Such translucent beings never considered their unhappiness. They never considered anything at all but just engaged in their habits, instincts, preoccupation, and general movement. She was just beginning to get the knack of avoiding her stray thoughts through Gin Rummy games, and winning some of them too, but then Hispanic Betty also left. Gabriele was surprised that she, an anti-social person who had mixed, gyrated, and blended with such aversion, had become such mush. She was a bit like one of the herd. She did not know fully what to do with herself or who she was. Most people might be that way indefinitely, but for her the few days that this lasted was an appalling time. It was made all the worse by a temptation to find herself in her former boyfriend within fantasies of him running toward her and sheltering her under his umbrella and within one of his arms. Eager for sanity, she decided upon another trip abroad.

At first she yearned to return to Buddhism and saffron or deep dirt-orange robed monks to find an equilibrium and harmony within herself. She thought about going to Laos. From photographs on the Internet it looked like a little bit of Paris and a lot of dirt. She believed that its simplicity would be to her liking. She was eager to visit its communist museum and experience its photographs denouncing the French and American imperialists (the former having recuperated from the fever that caused delusions of grandeur, but the latter so delusional to think that it was God that granted such dominion). But as she was sitting in the travel agency ready to buy a ticket to Bangkok with the expectation of taking the train to Nongkai, the sister city of Vientiane Laos, she suddenly changed her mind and decided to buy an airline ticket to Jakarta.

Arriving on a garuda (GA flight 543), she ensconced herself in a hotel room long enough to take a shower for five minutes and look presentable with an additional three. Then she wandered streets like a dog following novel scents, and quickly became elated in a puff of sound and sight of hawkers stretching out into a street and causing the traffic to squeeze through a narrow area that was still not annexed under their squalid occupation. In a little park where all areas of grass were fenced off, near Pasaraya Grande, the shopping mall of he truly affluent on Blok M, she sketched Moslem women wearing their Haji or jilbab and glossed in beautiful makeup or not wearing headscarves and makeup at all but allowed to toss long and beautiful hair. She contrasted the two and was fascinated by this attempt of Indonesian society to allow women to be modern as long as they stayed demure, and how an individual was dangled by the invisible gossamer strings of this great puppeteer, society. Maybe, she thought, when encountered anew most cultural traits were romantically virtuous. She also sketched conservative men wearing their little oval shaped hats called kopias as they went to a little mosque near the department store; but mostly she sketched the throngs of park people whom she mingled with: guitar boys who, when not on buses, practiced versions of their beggarly tunes in the concrete park; a transsexual dancer with bizarre movements; the umbrella shelterers who eagerly extended an aegis against celestial darts; and that area seen with myriad candles from the nighttime hawkers who sold their goods on blankets and sheets, each with its own candle.

Finally finding her way back to her hotel room, she was amused and puzzled by this Christopher Columbus syndrome of adoration toward her white flesh. Had she been a superstar instead of an obscure artist, she told herself, she would not have been accosted any more than this. Having a good night's sleep, she woke ready to start it all again. On buses that took her through the streets of Jakarta and in the company of the musician/beggars who always boarded for a couple minutes, she was impressed by how remarkably talented some of them were even though the majority were as discordant as the howling of wolves. She almost wished that she were a talent scout to deliver the best of them from the streets. Then it occurred to her that by choosing winners for prizes she would be as vile as nature itself with its stance of survival of the fittest. She saw a 5 and 6 year old brother and sister team--the girl doing the most sensuous dance and then her brother turning off the tape recorder and collecting the Rupiah after the dance. In all, the children might have collected a tiny 500 Rupiah in loose change no differently than the guitar boys or the adult poetic orators who gave renditions of their tragic lives to extort sympathy and a bit of loose change. 8000 Rupiah were equivalent to a dollar and those who sold drinks and pens could at least get this sum if assiduous for a period of hours.

Over a period of weeks she became enamored of long back-alley vegetable markets and ghettos of the night. Here, like in Thailand, it seemed that those who had little resources were more interconnected and, from their makeshift huts they would smile to just see the presence of her makeshift life. And yet the Christopher Columbus syndrome was from a discontent and an eagerness to pass out of one's own domain to that archetype of American wealth and prowess that bedazzled the entire denizens of the world no matter how much they hated the hegemony of the American government and its people. Even here, she thought, children probably yearned to grow out of their age and adults dreamed of business empires, a corporate legacy from which to defy mortality. She knew that in this sense it was probably no different than anyplace else for even here discontent had to be in everything since all were creatures of movement. These ghettoers in particular were spewed around bridges and railroad tracks; and she boldly walked into their throngs in the fullness of night, intrigued and enticed within the mysteries of life, that black and white which were the rich hue of gray enlightenment. And, were it not for the serendipitous beckoning of two hedonistic smiles, she would have foolishly continued this way (potentially to a lethal end as a mugged and raped female lying bludgeoned along the train tracks, obscure in the thickets of an oblique area of weeds). This dual smiling was too conspicuous. With one man's smile an ordinary woman might fall prey but never with two of them; and she was tiers beyond the ordinary.

Self-declared as a female who was not a woman, Gabriele was a hard block of ice to thaw. Even an exceptional Adonis with a coruscating and speciously ingenuous smile did not have a chance with her. Only such an Adonis as Michael, with a familiar and sweet son whom she had already thought of fondly, had the potential to do the worst damage to her pristine Antarctic surface; but such happenings were rare indeed. The two strangers instantly made her circumspect and guarded by accosting her with their sexual innuendos, which she did not even have to understand in words. The nuances were rife like the sounds of locusts in the unfolding and draping blanket of night. They were there to be extrapolated in the intensity of lust-filled, hungry-hound looks and the flippant glances and general levity of the two males toward each other. And she knew that, as adept as she might be at defending herself with a bit of judo and karate, that she could never ward off an army of rapists. That being the case, she backed away to belong only to the day.

By day she was enamored by all of the mom-and-pop shops cobbled together from wood and tin and the activity that was bustling around them including the orange cockroach tricycle motor taxis a bit like Thailand's tuc tucs. She wanted to sink into the skin of those whom she encountered and to know of their lives intimately. The thought even occurred to her that she should get her boy from the provincial rednecks of Kansas and transform him with exposure to the world; and she would have done just that had there not been such a cloying and bitter after- taste to all this enlightenment amassing itself within her. It was a sickeningly aggrandizing clump that was exacerbating itself within her stomach; and it made her doubt the efficacy of the plan. It was getting so large that she, who grazed on the weeds and fodder of stark reality like a wild mare, was finding what she saw and her ruminations of it virtually unbearable.

In Buddhism good actions perpetuated good outcomes for the giver and motivated goodness in the receiver. And yet as important as it was for fools and the ignorant to believe in this replicating of virtue when with each new century mankind moved the world closer to the abyss, the reality was that they who had education and wealth gave both to their children for that accrued competitive advantage, that the poor floundered about trying to free themselves from a vortex, that suffering did not propitiate any god, that the meek did not inherit anything, and that they who were literal throwaways as children would sell themselves as prostitutes, get AIDS, and die hideously in the streets, emaciated incrementally like starving dogs. She could see the prostitutes near the National Monument with its hard rockish flame like the torch of the Statue of Liberty. She felt empathy for them as deep as the gods and it was a torturous perspective indeed. When she saw a bare-breasted homeless woman running down the sidewalk outside the monument, all depraved from wandering around aimlessly, screaming and looking behind her as if chased, Gabriele had a mixed reaction. In a small way, she saw sanity in this defying of convention that a woman's boobs were erotic armaments which, unless locked away in a blouse and a brassiere, would thwart assiduous man to recidivistic patterns where his amorous instincts would cause him to malinger from work. But there was nothing sane in this woman's plight, and any thought suggesting that there was such had been from a desire to fortify herself from the perspective that the world was a bad place. She imagined her face on this woman and wanted to abscond from Jakarta and life as a whole. She just wanted to rest her head thoughtlessly against a man's chest. She wanted to close her eyes to the injustices and the inequality of life and to float in the levity of dreams this way. Lonely as she was, the net was pulling her back home to America and New York State.

Left in the discontent of her own thoughts and finding the gift of solitude equivalent with insanity, she sensed a major polarization of her ideas and she knew that her own civil war was in the making. Two opposing armies were deployed around the frontline under the scalp of her own head, and each was trying to intimidate the other in the hope of gaining a painless victory within the dominion of thoughts. Either from consciousness absconding in a self-imposed exile in order to avoid conflict, or from finding her true self usurped by impulses, willessly she drove up to the home of Michael's parents as lovingly as a Moony. She told them that she was Michael's girlfriend even though she could have as easily meant the man with the unmemorable name. After requesting to see Michael, she awkwardly offered the whole family her love even though none had wished for it. The sentiment had been contrived for the purpose of breaking the cold silence but thinking onto it now with chagrin she felt that this foolishness had surpassed any she had done in the past. By her own estimation she hadn't been foolish since early childhood and the consternation of it all seemed like being tortured in the pits of hell. This torture lasted for a couple minutes and then she didn't care about what others had thought or were now thinking about her. Her life, she told herself, was her own and poised or plodding, flying or floundering it was her own and no one was worthy of scrutinizing it. She waited in their living room for nearly two hours until he at last drove in.

"This woman wants to talk with you Michael," said his mother.

"I know. You called me."

"She wouldn't leave. I didn't want to call the police. I didn't want a scene."

"You told me that," said Michael. "That's fine. Can we have some privacy?"

"Well -- " She then spoke fervently in Italian.

"That's not going to happen," he said in English and then switched to Italian. Gabriele had already understood little words from the entreaty of Michae'ls mother like "money" and "bad women" and could extrapolate that mama was worried about a potential extortion and blackmail of her baby.

"Whatever! I give up," said the exasperated woman in English and then started to leave.

"I'm pleased to have met you," said Gabriele. "I hope that we can become further acquainted and that I may one day secure your trust." Her words were formal and archaic like a nineteenth century novel. If subconsciously done to impress others, they impressed no one. The woman stared at her with that apathetic and supercilious hardness that they, who identified wealth as a unique DNA of a more developed species, always did.

When his mother had left the room he closed the door, and then tried to camouflage the obdurate hardness of his apathetic eyes with a contrived smile. Closure was nonetheless in those eyes. They were hard and hallowed and they were permanently enclosed like tinctured and opaque glass windows. How, she remonstrated against herself, had she debased herself by knocking on a door of this family home and why did she stay here with him whose orbs were like slammed doors in one's face. How was it that she continued to knock? He smiled since there was every chance that she could rectify herself in his eyes through discomfort and contrition. Seated with this nemesis, he gained pleasure at the thought that she had been allowed to squirm in a seat for over an hour the way her son had waited and squirmed in the principal's office while dreading the forthcoming paddling.

"I tried to call you," said Gabriele, "but I think you were trying to avoid me."

"Possibly," he said. He could have told her lies that his mobile telephone was not functional or he could have prevaricated beyond the emphatic use of perhaps. Instead, he had made a truthful statement. She thought that she had to give him points for at least that; but as she pondered this he pulled out a cigar, lit it, and blew the smoldering flames into her face. That face turned red in anger and hate. It just bit a lower lip as an arm fanned away the smoke. These were hard gestures that were in part flailing against the personal life sucking her into its vortex of winds, and in part a protest of a man's insolence toward this womanly weakness that he correctly presumed to ooze within her. He saw hate in eyes harder than his own and finding not only them erotic but also the breath that was trying to extricate itself from the inhalation of smoke, he wanted to exercise against her will. He wanted to use her as if she were the gravity and the bar by which he might do pull-ups to claim masculine strength and virile complacency. He wanted to toss her onto a mattress and rape her like any gentleman.

She feigned a smile unsuccessfully. It was a hateful smile of hubris against him and all his male counterparts to whom a woman, and a female to a lesser degree, supplicated herself. Even more, it was a hateful distorted smile against herself who, no matter how hard she tried, could not fully exit the trivial sphere of the personal domain any more than an obese woman could easily leave her apartment.

"Monogamy, what a premier virtue, it is!" she thought sardonically. This denunciation was a defense against her feelings of guilt over the sexcapade with Candyman. She knew that it was so, for the guilt was spraying out onto consciousness with that constancy of a fizz of breakers on a beach. She knew that it was so, for there was a feeling disgorging within her that was a nasty flair of a warm shaken can of beer oozing from between the closed tab.

She wasn't married or engaged to Michael--matter of fact, hating her as she knew that he no doubt did, she wasn't in any type of relationship with him unless that envisaged by an overactive imagination off and spinning downhill like a rolling wheel of a flipped car-- and yet society's prudish stipulation that a woman be faithful to the partner she was with, or had been with, nonetheless had some sway of her movement and thought as it had at previous times when they lived together. Back then she would always try to restrain herself from those cans of beer that preceded her chewing tobacco snacks in order to be spared from his scowling, to continue to seem attractive to him, and to appear less extreme and headstrong than what she really was. Such was the influence of this mixing intimately: this blending of pathos and petulance blurring boundaries; this nastiness of prudish society inflicting one with guilt for pursuing more than the allotted share of the love it had espoused; and these incessant compromises of herself in order to keep a relationship with a man.

She was but a tiny shadow of original and independent thought that was dwarfed and absorbed by the massive conservative shadow of America. Her shadow was poised like the Statue of Liberty -- the liberty which had inadvertently created her unorthodox perspectives, but hers was an inconsequential adumbration. Americans were a provincial people as all bullies of the world were provincial, and the thought of mixing with an American (even one as Italian as Michael) seemed nasty indeed. The nastiness of being here in his home came upon her like the sticky wetness of a man's semen. The nastiness of debasing herself from loneliness by coming here was to walk on the same spit and urine evaporating pavements within the swaths of mankind.

Her ideas rambled on fervently. "The whole thing is a laugh. If where one aims body fluids determines a relationship and love, this sorry world is in for more gory times....How on Earth is being faithful or not being faithful a measurement of this amorphous, multi-definable emotion called 'love?' How is it, or lack of it, relevant to anything at all? Hedonism causes one to accidentally fall into the obligations of child rearing and a marriage certificate is society's glossy endorsement of contained hedonism to perpetuate the species....Confinement is not compassion; hunger for that other one to stop the pangs of loneliness is no different than a hunger compelling one to eat...any hunger really-- hunger is just there to motivate one to clog an emptiness....Empty heads need to be filled with empty people. Even if they are only speciously tangible and as impermanent as gusts of wind, they need them like the air they breathe....Mortal bits of dust feel more solid in a family unit.... And although I don't believe in being faithful as the measurement of a caring relationship I can't see what I'd replace it with. I'm not even sold that love exists...I mean outside of compassion and this nurturing-of-the-young thing, I think that this medley of different selfish emotions hiding themselves under the guise of love don't have anything good in them. And if I can't believe in the measurement of love as being faithful or that the thing proposed for measurement is lovely I might as well shoot for the moon by denouncing relationships altogether. This adulteration of oneself in these incessant compromises and mixing never enlarge a person. They mitigate a being." She was thinking about her tree planting days with particular abhorrence, and hardly thought of the old duties of being a home teacher, an errand wife/mom, and a wall decorator for Michael's school since now, when assessed from a distance, they were trivial discomforts by comparison. "Infatuations in fatuous humans foster the illusion that great things can come from human coupling as if hitching can concoct the Orient Express...Am I the only person who believes this way? I am. It is no wonder that most people I encounter think of me as a bitch.... Can't blame it on menstruation every day of the month. No, I take pride in my bitchiness. I relish having such an accolade. No, I can't blame it on a period every day of the month.... What am I doing here? Am I just wanting to wear a white wedding dress with my tampon the way little girls are conditioned to believe that marriage in a white dress is the portal to an epiphany? This ceremony of holy matrimony is ludicrous as if a god, if He were to exist, didn't have bigger things on his agenda than to sanctify the act of disgorging liquids on this one spouse....this crazy aiming of body fluids at this targeted spouse...Oh, this monogamy is sickeningly unnatural! As if signing a name on a piece of paper can contain or clean out the filth of a thousand daily fantasies and instinctual hungers....And then there are all these primitive jealousies to this pleasure bonding: monkey woman not wanting to lose her hunter who brings her and the children their meat; and monkey man needing to ensure that there is a female possession as loyal as a domesticated hound to satisfy him on evenings when his erotic hunts have eluded him, and that one who would not burden him with caring for children not of his own genetic transfer."

He had gone into the kitchen to fix some coffee so, alone, her ideas spun quickly on the axial of ruminations.

"Love, love--the means to everything! The things we are taught in music television videos and Hollywood movies. And then we emulate them in monkey see, monkey do....Okay, my perspective is strange but strange things have half a chance of being right. At least it isn't the stuff of idiotic masses. Am I such a libertine--I don't really think so--well, probably not. I am just an old fashioned, conventional girl who believes that sex only happens on a mattress of a bed and have never once used a car's gearshift as a dill-dough--I cannot even spell the word."

For all her cynicism that long-term relationships were of individuals who stymied and quelled their thoughts to live numbly with their partners and took on joint tree growing activities to have something in common with them, she did know that there were some happy marriages out there. Such marriages were unions of individuals who sought to edify the world meaningfully with their contributions and admired this trait in their partners. They were more than ordinary but not as extraordinary or extraordinarily peculiar in quite the way that she was. She felt that she was without a similar peer in the world and that from some snowy mountaintop closer to the sun she was peering onto the world and deigning her thoughts upon those who were less peculiar than she was. Her weirdness droned on: "For those less extraordinary/more than ordinary couples who believe in their oxymoron of a happy monogamy, I tell them it can only be had provided they do a bit of front seat/back seat sexcrobatics in a car and some rape role playing once or twice each week within the comforts of their bedrooms. Excitement allows for longevity--it isn't the love of Buddha that the better-than-the-masses (hereafter called the Betthams) are after, but excitement. They, the Betthams, are no different than any of the wallowing pigs in that respect."

Only briefly did it fleet through her mind how ludicrous it was for the damaged monkey that she was to define love at all. With not even a residue of "real love" there to her observation early in life, these speculations now were merely word play in her brain. They were the mere friction of cold, solid sounds and the static of them slapping against each other in their empty abstractions as she juggled them in her ennui and rained her sour stoic perspective down on them like tears of knives. To her she was a bored goddess making lightning and her unique take on love was the rightful striking of Zeus.

Still there were doubts. She did wonder whether the smudge of light penetrating her consciousness was enlightenment or peering onto the stars with damaged retinas. To be laconic, she wondered if her judgment calls were merely the moody caprices of her imagination. For in Houston, that Houston of long ago with a Gabriele that was a spasm then of myriad spasms in the lost dimensions of a changing life, hadn't she seen a fellow student as small as a boy and as limp as a sack of potatoes being picked up by his father, taken from his classroom at Rice University, lowered into a wheelchair, pushed toward a vehicle, and then driven off to the next classroom in a different part of the campus? She had; and it was only from her own obdurate bitchinesss that she concocted a barrier to keep herself from consciously recalling this father's spending of money and time to enlighten the dying. It was love in the best gesture mortals could do, and it went contrary to her assumption that human society was a loveless "hell-hole" that was beneath her.

Yearning to depart from the bathos of contemporary society for the sublime colors of Titian, the circular idealism of Raphael, the ugly angular and emaciated forms of El Greco in that complex inner intensity that rendered beauty, the mysterious shaded faces of Caravaggio, and the true internal lives captured in the words of Shakespeare and Hardy, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Melville and James, Plato, Parmenides, and all dead contemplatives, she snobbishly wished to remove herself from the masses of men. Her contemporaries seemed to be moving like that loose downward tire of a flipped car and she seemed to only favor the stagnancy of deceased enlightenment. For a moment, she was as much as wishing to die to be raptured into their thoughts, and they into hers, the way a normal person yearned for shared physical and emotional intimacies. Dying young might be preferable to decades of being pinned into a stall hearing the shallow grunting of one of those male members of the porcine herd. Isolation in Antarctica without seals and penguins would be a hundred times better than that indelible connection of producing for him more grunting piglets; however death was not rapture but rupture.

"How is Rick?" she asked after he was seated and she had sipped a bit of the coffee that he had prepared for them.

"The same. Growing."

"And the dog?"

"Growing more quickly. He shits a lot, too. Thanks for asking. What do you want?"

She smiled bashfully as if she were an errant child whose laziness or mischievousness had been exposed. She noted the peculiarity of her erroneous reaction: a fixated response that she had comported in girlhood. Back then it had always preceded an impetus to be diligent so that she might propitiate a teacher's wrath and regain favor with one of those rare individuals whom she admired in her more credulous days. "I hate how this ended," she suddenly confessed in womanly neediness. "I don't know why you just pulled out like that."

"Pulled out like what? I proposed and you said no, so that was it. I decided I needed a wife who would be supportive and that you were right all along: it wasn't you."

"I think I was supportive."

"Why would you think that? You were never interested in any of my plans--at least not in the later stage of things. Maybe you just aren't interested in the business aspects of life, although I at least thought you were about selling those paintings of yours--at least at the beginning of knowing you. Maybe nobody changes. It is just what we know of them at different stages of expressing themselves--that changes. Just ideas of people at different stages...ideas changing."

She now felt that being here had not been such a mistake after all. Even though she repudiated superstition in all of it derivative forms from anthropomorphism to destined fate still she couldn't help but feel that she was meant to be here hearing his profound utterances and perceiving him anew.

"Yes, how can it be anything else? An individual is too large. So what were these ideas of yours about me in my many stages?" She really meant, "...my many stages as perceived by you in your stages" but she cut it short.

"I don't know. At the time I admired your ability to rise up in the world...the business savvy to do that, and how people were interested in your strangeness. Before that I thought of you as a caring mother and before that -- "

"A disgusting whore?"

"No, not disgusting."

"Why not?"

"I liked it -- the thought of you with many men. I imagined the smell of your skin afterwards ...I don't know. It was sexy."

"Hmm," she thought, "latent homosexuality. His river is not damned for it flows both ways." She spoke, "What am I now -- this sexy art mom weirdo -- this idea of yours now at this stage?"

"I don't know that I have one. I don't know who you are now."

"No, you don't know who you are being without a woman all these months. Men need women, you know." The words belied the womanly slime oozing within her. "They put on women. Just like you needing symbols of importance as that attachZ case of yours, those flashing appointments in that PDA of yours, and that cellular telephone of yours. If you did not have money and things to flash at others how different would you be from any naked Etruscan savage apart from not being dead and living in America?"

" I don't need a damn thing," he said coldly. "You are the one who's here. You are the needy one." He laughed at her. She knew that to him she looked foolish even though that time of the Turk's execution in early girlhood had made her immune to the opinions of others.

"You're here," he repeated.

"So I am," she said in her cold hubris.

He blew his smoke into her face. "Well, with the gender factor alone no man and woman are interested in the same things nor are they all that compatible. That's for sure." His voice drifted slowly on the stream of smoke flowing from his mouth and from the effluvia of his lackadaisical scorn. "But to make any type of relationship work -- even the most pathetic -- neither of them can just stare at the walls day-in and day-out. One has to be interested in something -- business, rearing kids, teaching, arts and crafts stuff, something. I'd say it was me, that you didn't care to live with me, and that's what made you so moody and useless in a sense; but it wouldn't explain your unwillingness to paint, would it? -- You who just sort of sit around claiming that you are an artist all hours. I guess you can sell some of that stuff -- what little you do so I guess somebody likes it. It is a shame that you don't draw more still life. Your artsiness was really beginning to have something in it." He stopped for he knew that he had run over her with maximum efficacy since gratuitous plowing through flesh and blood would not make it any more contrite.

Knowing how a hurt, rejected, and emasculated ego sought to maim others in speech, wisps of air, like a diffident eunuch brandishing a butcher knife, she let him disgorge his acrimonious sound. What was it to her? It was an amusing psychological study and only this. The petty utterances he would try to use to inflict misery commensurate with a rejected proposal intrigued her. He was no more dangerous than a child running around in an Indian costume and brandishing his rubber blade.

"Go on. No need to be bashful. We can't work on problems if we are ignorant of them." She meant "Go on. No need to be civil, you hateful bastard." But this would be repressed to a dream and there it would be in the flames of enactment and reenactment until the combustion was complete.

He continued. "Anyhow, you just looked bored all the time toward everyone including your own son. We were your headaches; and I looked like I was wasting my time with you."

The trivial bits and pieces of a personal life projected in acrimonious speech were often expressions of anger toward that other one whom these intense shared pleasures were dependent and the whole thing disgusted her. Cast from the two parties, the personal life was not merely a mosaic of selfish inconsequentials of bad off-moments nor a heavy shadow of two lighter shadows but, together, were the adumbration of the entire scaffolding of a being: the contorted and disgusting skeleton of instinctual drives to gain pleasure, to hate those who might hinder pleasure, to hunt, to harm, to eat, and to possess. This was the personal domain and as disgusted as she was with it, her disgust was not as solid as she had wished it to be. It was weakened and attenuated by the pleasure of having a significant other know insignificant things about her like where she hung her bra. To have him know such things made her feel a little less cryptic. She had scoffed at his proposal so it was no wonder that his bitterness disgorged upon her. She understood male pride and excused his caustic utterances. "I think I put aside myself for everyone," she said. "It was all new to me, you know, and it took some adjusting. I've always been a rather independent being. Still the family that we were was the only family I and Nat have had besides each other. I even went to your church, you know. How supportive did you want me to be outside of becoming you? As you say, no two people are alike--not even if you were to meet some docile little Betty Crocker Helen homemaker type with her certificates in cooking and ductility."

"Ductility? No woman could ever come as well prepared in big word armament as you. You are one of a kind for sure."

She smiled. It was the first dubious compliment that he had extended to her for so long.

" As for Mass, it is is important to Italian American families and you only went when you were forced to go--those times that it was too apparent that there were none of these headaches of yours and that faking one at the last moment would have looked ridiculous." She tightened her lips in consternation. His ignorance was that of the droves of men who believed that migraines were feigned. Even if she were to enlighten him there would be myriad others yet to step out of themselves. She couldn't change them all. She told herself that society's reaction to those like herself was no different than how the government treated Gulf War veterans. But in fact there was a major difference: when it came to going to church, those headaches were really feigned unless all unpleasant situations were headaches, which they were in a sense. He went on: "I wouldn't know. Maybe you did go once in a while and maybe you did help me plant a tree or two. Still that doesn't exactly make or break a relationship, does it?" She would have reminded him of their bedroom intimacies but she knew that he, a man, was already thinking of that which he most revered; and by mentioning it she would be opening herself up to a comment that one couldn't expect anything else from a professional. She nearly reminded him of those intimacies anyway just to taunt a response from him and thus free the hubris that she was barely able to contain within her. "-- You know, there is no point in going into any of this."

"I'm beginning to draw again. I believe I'm painting some works that will outdo anything I've accomplished before. I feel so creative now like I'm about ready to produce something that could be my magnum opus. Before, I was just going through a phase where I couldn't draw and didn't know what I was all about. It wasn't you. It was me."

"I don't know that we are a good match, to tell you the truth."

"Why do people have to match? Why can't they just love each other and appreciate their differences?" She said this while knowing that finding a perfect match for herself might be impossible and that in her present mood any man was better than none. Now with her youth waning she knew that sexual liaisons with beautiful forms would become more and more like hunting for mushrooms in an area with a worsening annual rainfall. "I don't know if you have a new girlfriend now but -- "

"I don't have one."

He blew more smoke into her face. "So what are you wanting?"

"Let's do it now, Sweetheart. Let's just get married -- no fancy, pretentious stuff, just a quick run to the justice of the peace …maybe today or tomorrow…the sooner the better."

They were married in the early afternoon and a day later he moved many of his things back into her home. Since the wedding had been as bland as she had requested it (a justice of the peace and a couple of Michael's employees who acted the part of witnesses), she told herself that a permanently delayed honeymoon would be a matchingly dull complement. To her this honey and moon composed a word that was no misnomer: it implied a bee addicted to a nectar-induced high and she knew that even a minute of that unreality would have cloyed her sanity. Being with that same man 24 hours a day at a Kentucky Derby, an Indianapolis 500 or other non-Parmenidetian activity that was paradise to the masses and vile to philosophers and contemplatives would have caused her to grab the nearest Time or Newsweek as quickly as most women reached for sanitary napkins. Still the human goddess who once dressed Barbie dolls for imaginary weddings couldn't help but yearn for a honeymoon all the same. She was mystified why Michael did not move Rick's belongings with his own; and yet partly assuming that this would happen after the honeymoon and partly from a desire to not know, she did not ask. Then the saturnine groom took her to the airport to watch the airplanes come and go. They looked through the glass cages at these volant pterosaurs with American Airlines branded on their skins. At first she thought that he who was so parsimonious about the amount of water that could flow from a tap had decided upon this watching of the airplanes as the honeymoon but then he left and came back with something worse than nothing: tickets to Little Rock, Arkansas. She had no luggage but he told her that they would pick up some clothes in the capital city and she smiled. She told him that it had been a long time since she had flown in a plane as if Jakarta had been nothing but a dream.

The first day after their arrival they took a small plane to Bentonville, Arkansas and then walked through the Wal-Mart museum witnessing different possessions of Sam Walton's humble beginnings and listening to the story of his ambition to become a multimillionaire. She disparaged her disparaging thoughts. She blocked the formulation of negative ideas and smiled at each new exhibit.

"To think that he addressed the first consumer inquiries on a manual typewriter like this," she said at the typewriter exhibit.

"Isn't that the truth," he told her. "A man who in later life could have bought a factory to manufacture the most sophisticated supercomputers used by the government and here he was in younger days pecking on that old thing."

They spent the second day of the honeymoon in a rented car going up snowy, mountainous hills through forests of dangling icicles as thick as stalactites and as lush as its lost verdant facade, traveling by the most winding and treacherous roads until they were at last in Eureka Springs, Arkansas.

On the third day of Christmas he gave to her the reverberating cacophony of country music, torturing an already queasy stomach that had just experienced car-sickness earlier that afternoon. From the front row of the concert she managed to smile without wincing noticeably from this howling through nostrils via song. The discomfort from her own disingenuousness in maintaining this coerced smile was as reprehensible as the sound; and yet it was nothing to her who had seen a decapitation in early girlhood and spoke of it like an inquisitive little scholar. The bombardment of senseless noise was the stuff migraines were made of; although fortunately for her none ensued.

On the fourth day of Christmas they were at this new business "of his." There was a ribbon cutting for this international gourmet supermarket which would soon be replicated in Japan. He showed her through the aisles and pointed out every item on the shelves as if the stuff one crammed down his or her gullet needed such elaboration.

On the fifth day it was Christmas and so they decided to travel around the area of Eureka Springs. They drove up and down the niveous and tortuous hills in and out of the town. Tree gazing from the more scenic back roads was his truth beyond the corporeal greed and ambition of financial enterprises (this world) and unempirical religion (the make believe world), and she was pleased that he had it. As his woman, she wanted to nurture a greater purpose in him. As a somewhat solipsistic being she wanted to stake a purpose in being with him beyond more intense pleasures of shared experiences which she knew were erroneously pinned on mutable others instead of the constancy of self. During this car-bound time she held her loose stomach successfully, stifling its rebellion through the exertion of will. She again smiled: It was a complaisant facade of any common soldier.

Then he took her to the town's shoddy replica of the statue of Jesus that was meant to duplicate the one that stood over Rio de Janeiro. The diminished Christ didn't have the efficacy of the original since it lacked omnipotent and sturdy immutability over the natural world and beauty. Still, with a hand pressed into his, she couldn't help but feel that specious illusion of God being up there in the sky caring about the ethical decisions of her little life. Of course, it was all conditioning: the warmth and strength of a man's hand being transmitted into her own, the sun upon her skin, and, from them, a glazed, ethereal staring at the statue as if it were radiating blessings upon her.

Side by side with her man in their warm winter coats, both like little furry animals against the kneecaps of this stone or fiberglass man-god, she did not mind succumbing to religious delusions. She was married now and all other suppositions and attempts to make her stance, her sense of the world, were nothing. All ideas that went contrary to his expectations were dust that her mind needed to sweep away. Marriage was reality. It was the psychological and physiological completeness of two people, and as such there was a necessity for compromise no differently than the appetites of the body being catered to by the brain that developed pleasure receptors to tolerate this incompatible coexistence. She argued to herself that it was an incontrovertible truth that a man's bedtime dominion transferred to all else. A woman, by getting married, either gave her tacit approval of this natural inclination or gained enjoyment from the ongoing challenge to minimize it.

An idea trespassed through the meadows of her mind that he had taken her here to force upon her a spiritual awakening and to test her obsequiousness to him and his god in action if not thought (she who, when logic domineered over all else was a lone, frigid polar bear who didn't even care that much for the sexual awakenings). Then another idea encroached upon her. She wondered whether having been awakened so often sexually had put her in a coma to all other forms of awakening. She disparaged the fleeting thought. It was a mere caprice, she argued, like disliking a passing woman for wearing the color, pink, or wanting to make love to all sailors for wearing their clean, white, and neatly pressed uniforms. Heretofore such whims had not defined her despite the harmony of her solitary meadow being continually littered in the blowing of these deciduous scraps. Heretofore she had been able to find that higher authority that willed to know a self outside of winds and blowing rubbish; a self that would gain immediate and indelible awareness from the cookie cutter of his or her experience, and only this. Heretofore she had been impervious to the intensity of the hot sandstorms of raw emotion and the blizzards of refined emotion, thought.

But now all was different. She, an American, had knocked off her insular American shell (the little she had possessed) while in Jakarta. She had gone there thinking, according to her culture, that Moslems were extremists who hated Americans; but never believing the ideas that she was brought up with or the ones spewing out of this invisible mouth, society, she had disregarded the idiocy of fear and bias for the splendor of reviving truth. There she had met a gentle people; there she had been naked with easily torn skin; and there she had felt the hurt and the injustice of the masses, compassion and enlightenment seeming a great and insufferable travail. Then and now she needed to go to him in the hope of forgetting life's injustices within the softness of his skin massaging her own.

Since, subtly within her compromises, she was now emulating him for an "understanding" of religion and was now beginning to reflect upon her Aunt Peggy as a paragon of marital sustainability, somehow following the herd seemed less reprehensible. A being was born, grew up to reproduce, and then died. How could she, the maverick that she might be, add more purpose to the state of mankind than this? Could she be so supercilious as to think that the common experiences of those normal or normal acting people counted for nothing? These actions existed since the beginning of time so who was she to disabuse pragmatic, time-tested ideas that were passed down through the generations?

She maintained her glazed, ethereal stare at the statue; wanted to rapture herself from discomfort equivalent to those pews in a chapel; felt the mistake of being here with him bury her in the fragments of herself like the rubble of the Afghan Buddha; and yet feigned a glowing ember of yearning within this contrived display of contentment. She played the part well enough to believe it herself. She did not want to upset him as she had before, for not only would it suggest to him that he should not have married her but it would aver to herself her own intransigence and a social ineptness that was of damaged whores and spinsters. She argued that marriage was a union built on incessant compromise and flexibility and that she wanted to be as adroit at it as she was in spitting chewing tobacco. She could have gone through a ceremony of marrying herself as the more outlandish Dutch women did. She could have rented out a large area for the ceremony and paid for a lavish, catered banquet, a wedding dress, and confetti. The recurrent idea of it was tantalizing. Even if marriage to oneself would lack some sexual exhilaration it would be a singular form of epiphany. The publicity would have been good for the sales of her art and there were days, upon her return from Jakarta that she taunted herself with this possibility as a viable way to keep herself from showing up onto the doorstep at the home of Michael's parents. But she ended up telling herself that she wasn't Dutch enough for such libertine experiments.

And so she believed in a religious delusion that was no different than all other delusional zealots. She believed the way one might well believe that cavemen were devoured by dinosaurs, that Shirley McClain was god as proven by having written it in a book, that out-of-body experiences for near-deathors were proof that there was a soul, and that people were actually napped by aliens into these fancy UFO space shuttles.

In a cheap hotel room in Eureka Springs, they sat on a bed and watched television. Sedentary as he was staring into the box, he was animated in his mesmerized state. But for her, it almost seemed that he and his television gained their animation from sapping away her energy. Boredom was so enervating that it wouldn't have been preposterous to think of one's energy being snatched and diverted elsewhere. Money, ownership, tax loopholes, investments, televised games, tree planting, and this, watching the Tonight Show, were the same recurrent life themes of this man.

She sat there as listlessly as a catatonic. Images from the television trodden here and there on the surface of her brain but the earth underneath did not register the burden of these fleeting forms. Looking at the cramped room, which exacerbated her discomfort, she tried the best that she could to wrestle and pin to the floor her critical thoughts. She was married now so surely she should try. Still, she couldn't help but think that he was just an ordinary male in his obsession with ownership, his unwavering interest in action or jokes in a box, and his pursuit of other innocuous pleasures that became the man. Furthermore, she couldn't help but think that he was parsimonious, like now as evident by the cheap hotel room, and thriftless like in Rome, all at the wrong times. But for a year now she accepted the inevitable conclusion that showing to him her books on art or dragging him to symphonies or exhibitions would never deliver him to urbane habits that could be mutually shared. If he dabbled with the arts enough to attend an exhibition it was as one of the rich who gained an enhanced status from rubbing against its colors. He did not gain it by being a patron of artistic merit through a scholarship or foundation in his name or by spending inordinate sums at art auctions (after all, as rich as his family was, it was not as rich as this) but by copulating with an artist and owning one in marriage. And yet he was the person that he was, and, within the little womanly weakness she possessed (this love/this neediness that flared up in even females like her to entice breeding) she half believed that true love was accepting him for better or for worse because this was who he was. She no longer believed that changing someone was love or that the environmental spark of love (in her case going with him through art museums in Rome or witnessing his bold reflection come into the bathroom of her hotel room and urinate as she was applying makeup in front of a mirror) had much legitimacy. Love was a commitment toward compromise and sacrifice.

So, while the thick cloud of his flatulent odor was beginning to dissipate and a steak sauce commercial was interrupting the Tonight Show, she became drowsy. At one moment she heard him say, "That steak sure looks good on the TV, doesn't it Honey?" and then in the next she fell off a precipice into a vacuum of wind that made up dreams. Like women who when experiencing prenuptial jitters have nightmares of their wedding ceremonies being interrupted by dark revelations, she dreamed something similar to this belatedly. She dreamed that she and Michael were at a diner in the John F Kennedy International Airport. They were getting married there before departing to Tokyo. Suddenly the airport security guards, all of whom were Japanese, interrupted the ceremony, whispered something to the potential groom, and gave Polaroid photographs to the Catholic priest. She wasn't sure what they said but she did hear the words "airport bathroom graffiti" which made her grimace not for the ignorance of those who were part of this consensus (she didn't "give a flying fuck" about what they thought in the slightest) but that these bereft hollow heads epitomized what the droves of men would think. It didn't depress or upset her: it was just like being a sole life form on Mars. It was uncomfortable as hell but she was quite used to it. MF, after being shown the photographs, asked the priest if he should go through with a marriage to a woman who had drawn such unregenerate images on the doors of the women's toilet but the priest ignored his maudlin whining as if annoyed by any distraction that would delay his inquisition. Gabriele could sense this priest's yearning to put his fangs into her for she knew that the taste of blood was sweet and that the blood of a unique being would be envisaged by such savages as the sweetest yet. "Tell me, did you do this?" he asked the dark veiled woman but he did not give her time to respond. "Who is this black man that makes up the face and body of a savage God in this grotesque and blasphemous mural?" demanded the priest.

Gabriele lifted the veil on her burka. "There isn't anything depraved or unregenerate in it," she averred. "I don't know who he is. It is just my imagination." Her lie was phlegmatic. She would have willingly given the truth but she wouldn't be goaded into it or humble herself to such pernicious and puritanical Taleban. She wouldn't even humble herself to God if she were to see him. She and God would just have to introduce themselves as two strangers, neither one better or worse than the other. "The larger image is whatever one wishes the larger image to be, I suppose."

"What I want it to be?" mocked the priest acrimoniously. So, I suppose, if I want it to be the Virgin, Mary -- "

"Then it is Mary."

"Mary sure has a lot of naked images of black men with grotesquely large genitalia running through her head," said the priest.

She smiled. "Of course she does, as all women do. Have you never heard of Masters and Johnson? Surely Kinsey could not have eluded a person of your type. If I were to dig up the foundation under that hairy grandfatherly veneer of yours who knows what I'd find."

"Aren't you smart? To think that we could have naively put your name in holy matrimony. But do tell me, now that God is generously revealing all of your perverted ideas, what you think is in my heart!"

"I wouldn't know. I don't read minds or hearts. I imagine it is the same stinky muck that is in all men's cravings. If you pay me money, I wouldn't oppose letting you confess your sins to me. Now the price to absolve sins and blowjobs are both the same: 500 dollars -- US, of course. With handsome Adonises, it is a packaged set but not with old goats like you."

He shook his head. "To think that I would have married this fine gentleman to such a blasphemous whore."

"Maybe I can read minds, hearts, or what-not. I'm reading big breasted women there washing each other's bodies as they do onstage in makeshift showers at Go-go bars in Bangkok; but only because you are too scared of burning in hell for your homosexual inclinations. Rivers run both ways, you know, but socialization on a teenager can alter how it flows. For old goats like you, nobody built your dam when you were young so now there is only cobbled will. Your will tries to redirect the flow since. You know that you cannot stop it entirely. Say 100 Haila Gabrielas and pay me my money."

The priest shook his head at the foul fiend and turned away. "Bangkok?" asked the priest. He was directing his question to Michael.

"She went there once," he told the priest. "She is always making contrasts of Thailand to Western civilization."

"Did she meet this black man there?"

"Who knows?" said Michael.

Gabriele guffawed. "Why not address me?" she asked.

"Then answer for yourself, you disgusting tramp," said Michael.

"Maybe I did or didn't," she prevaricated. "Maybe I don't need to meet anyone or do anything. I witness life. If I read something or see something that is happening in my world (even if from a distance) it touches me and I'm inspired by it. I'm not afraid of it no matter what it is."

"She's your betrothed," said the priest. "What do you want done."

"Let His will be done. She hides her profanity, promiscuity, and obscenities behind art. She never admits anything," he whined sobbingly. "I don't know what to do with her."

"Apple her?" asked the security guards.

"Apple her!" reiterated the priest.

The cooking staff, under their burkas, began to fire apples and soon everyone within the room appled her skull.

"Why couldn't you have just drawn still-life or landscapes?" whined Michael.

"Join your Turkish friend from long ago!" shouted the Ayatollah- garbed priest.

Gabriele was now lying on the floor with her forehead bleeding profusely. Still she could eke out faint utterances and so she projected her words like a song. "You wouldn't have loved me if I hadn't been somebody-- you thought it was a thrill to see one of whoredom reach stardom. It was like being in the Astrodome. Like any carnal male, a woman's glitter is to your liking--it is your pleasure dome but to me it is not striking."

Then she dreamed that there was an anniversary party, which Michael held to commemorate himself and the longevity of his schools and stores. There, in her home on the day of the party, she noticed that blonde-headed, frosty-pigmented man with the unmemorable name sitting there in his own separate space within her living room. He had large, thoughtful, eyes; and to her he was exotic and unpretentiously wholesome like latent mushrooms in a vast field. He was silent in the noise; and she loved this superhuman trait as she had loved it of her father--he who used to part from her on the beach and pursue the silent wading of his nothingness into the vastness of the entity, he who had been her Parmenides despite having long ago abandoned her as one who had indifferently tossed out grass seed. Having fought in war and having foolishly devoted his life to contrived ideals of patriotism, these life scatterings nonetheless made her father into the pensive German that he was. She had silently abhorred him all these years for his neglect and for severing her innocence in the coerced witnessing of the Turk's execution; and yet everyday she was grateful to him. Not only had her time in Turkey made her a snug albeit hurting occupant of self- containment within Fort Gabriele but his hard high browed arrogance had inspired the high stain glass windows of her facade from which she observed all earthly creatures below. Also it was from him that these sanguine characteristics had been hers. As she looked over the guests to that serene bit of nature within the smoke and voices, she saw eccentric greatness within him. She knew that his philosophy was hers: for those individuals who could accept silence and not cling to others they would never be lost from themselves; and that whoever gained the bliss that was there in solitude, descending within one's own fathoms without inordinate hungers and movement, he or she would be one of the savants who moved perception. An insect moving on an ambulatory man in ignorance of his movements; a moving universe that does not jolt the self-centered movement of its ignorant beings--so the savants seemed not to move while they carried all these insectual entities with them.

She dreamed that because of the potential inaccuracy of first impressions, she was reluctant to instantly accept her own favorable preliminary conclusions and yet the frosty man with the unmemorable name seemed to her as so ingenuous. Within the cigarette smoke, the wine, and the smiles, he was not eager to take his turn in the continual sallies of one monkey-man attempting to conquer another one by being the wittiest of all Neanderthals. He just smiled a contrived smile onto the games that these barbarians played with each other. He smiled the way all brilliant people had to do.

While she was stripping a head of lettuce he escaped to the kitchen and got some fresh air on the balcony. She pulled him in to chop carrots. She asked where he was from initially. He told her that he was from everywhere. She probed this concept of an everywhere man in German but then changed to Spanish. In both languages he told her that everywhere was a concept that wasn't necessarily linked to a place. Later on in the evening when everyone had gone she found a note on top of a stack of dishes that he had washed for her. She looked at the scribble of a telephone number. "Please, my Miss, call my mobile or send me an SMS." She did, and then they met at the zoo in front of the spider monkeys. From there they went to the ballet. At the ballet he spoke to her in Russian. She thought of it as the preferred world language because it was nonsense to her. Had it been sensible it no doubt would have reflected a language of ordinary minds and so she preferred languages of the nonsensical variety.

Then she dreamed that she and Michael had never been linked together, and as such neither union nor separation with and from each other was engraved indelibly upon either of their brains. As such, she was an enlarging puddle being fed the rain. She was an innocent girl in goulashes feeling the vibrations of ripples and stir caused by her feet, and watching the ambulatory movements of birds feeding in the respites of a shower. She was all of these birds scavenging in the dirt for their prey for she herself had scavenged in demeaning mental and physical prostitution before becoming one of the rare goddesses of men whose novel ideas were a commodity.

The dream became one of a Gabriele who was an even younger girl. Enthralled with the rain, the rainbow, and the reflections of branches in the puddles, she was nonetheless distraught over not finding the cracks of ant corridors in what was once the parched earth. It did not occur to her that avalanche and drowning were the natural order imposed by merciless creation against these superfluous breeders. She kept looking for the cracks within the dirt but it was to no avail.

Since she did not know many words, she didn't have any critical judgments and, inept at linking words together, she was not thrust on that one-way track of probable outcomes for the future. Still free from being socialized and not having sexual drive that equated being with others as appetites, she was more inclined to mourn a few days of not climbing trees than someone's absence from her life. Cared for, she was not fixated on survival so she stayed in the present moment where smallness percolated through the orifices and oracles of the senses. Scavenging on pink and yellow-stick legs like the birds, and flooded out with stunned worms and insects, she was these things. She was a Piaget child. Then she was as an adult form. The man with the unmemorable name was posing nude for her paintings; and when she was ready to pack up the canvas and paints one evening, he brooded charmingly. "When will I see you again?" he asked like a pensive and hurt child at the thought of her leaving him.

She felt irritated that he could ask such a question even if the female within her coruscated within a man's neediness for a woman no differently than it would within the light of flattery.

"When?" he asked again.

"When Russia becomes a member of NATO or returns into the Soviet Union."

"Why don't you stay?"

"Why? It is a loaded question. Why?" and she kissed him and sucked in his breath as if it were needed more than her own. Then she pulled away. She thought, "To never know how to marry oneself in ideas and endeavors that bring new ideas into existence, to just claim another person's rotting flesh to not wander around lost and vertiginous--no I'm not one of the sorry herd!"

"You really won't stay?" he asked.

She was tempted. She thought about staying like a fat woman would chocolate in a grocery store. She rejoiced in the fact that she did not need to be any man's woman. Sex could be obtained without actually living with someone. Matter of fact it could be obtained all alone and she would have opted for it done in this solitary manner within her own privacy if fantasies could be developed for oneself and a fuller pleasure could be gained in masturbation.

"No, I'm afraid not," she replied. I want to think of things other than you. Besides, I sleep better alone. After all, sleep is a solo activity."

"Other men?"

"Probably," she chortled. I'll see you tomorrow," she said.

"Meet me at the zoo and then we will walk over here--Meet me in front of the cage of the spider monkeys like before. Be prepared to know every obscure zoo animal by its scientific jargon in the Russian language," he told her.

And then the dream had her meeting him the next day near a baboons' cage. She could tell that her profound buffoon had only feigned this drowning in a sensitive abyss. There were no complaints, there was no rehashing of insignificant past events, and no attempt to demand more from her within a jealous male atavism that was instinct. They just touched each other's bodies like children the feel of their grandmothers' panty hose.

She woke up, startled to find herself with Michael in a strange bed. She propped up her pillow and sat up. She thought about where she was at: here in this poorly paved state of Arkansas a little south of the middle of nowhere, the yodeling of bluegrass and country music reverberating off the Ozark mountains. Ensconced with her man in a blanket that had southern flowers on it, she still felt cold; and part of the blanket was wrapped about her like a southern damsel's dress. "Good lord," she thought as she looked at her thick makeshift dress, "aren't I the Great Motel Lady, Belle Gaw-brE- el." She picked up her purse from the end table, took out some snuff, and lodged it into a cheek. "Belle Gabriele," she mumbled aloud, "the motel Belle."

"What'd you say?" he asked.

"Are you awake?" she prevaricated.

"Sort of," he said. "What time is it?"

"Five."

"You said something?"

"Huh? Oh yeah, it was nothing. Sorry, I guess I woke you--mumbling aloud as I was like an old woman."

"Wake me in a half hour. I forgot to set my alarm."

"PLEASE wake me up, don't you mean?"

He chuckled sleepily on the border of wakefulness. "Don't go back to sleep and forget." He rolled onto his side in a solitary departure, and now it was just a back that was before her. It didn't even seem to be his. It was just a man's back and it didn't have an owner.

She pushed back the curtains of the window and watched the heavy traffic moving along a narrow stretch of road. She knew that she was also just one of the horde moving up and down the streets searching for something while, in arrant foolishness or within august foibles, claiming others and being claimed by them.

She deliberated on sleep and dreams, that mysterious enigma which she had wondered about so often. It dawned on her that sleep was the burning of subconscious fuel--it was the burning of myriad crowding and conflicting whims within the confines of the brain so that some type of civil existence might prevail.

She thought of her dream in which she waited for the Russian near the monkeys. She wondered if she was like the specimens in Harlow's monkey experiments. From a German upbringing, had she not become the misfit monkey--the one that had been denied the touch of a mother or surrogate mother and so always kept herself at a distance in the social world. But she did not abuse her offspring like the misfit monkey. No, she had given to her child adequate enough touch even though touch, in her younger days had been so repugnant when imposed upon her without payment. She took a shower and went to work like all other mental prostitutes.

It was her sixth day as a replacement for a cashier in the foreign food store. The other cashier had been fired because of three consecutive days in which she had attended to a sick child instead of coming to work. Gabriele did this for 12 hours and then around 9:30 p.m. as she began to close down her cash register in the habitual manner of ringing up all sales Michael began to engage in small talk to pacify the other cashiers. He thanked them for their hard work. He told them that as indispensable as they were to the Arkansas mother company they were always welcome to be with the sprawling newborn in Sapporo. He said that the store in Sapporo would never shut down and it would eventually become triple the size of this one.

After the store was closed he and Gabriele were driving back to the hotel room when they stopped for a few minutes in a McDonald's Drive- thru. There, waiting at the window for their Big Macs, Michael asked her if she could mortgage her house and sell "that nude thing" in the garage to "offset" the expenses of the new business. For some seconds she was discomfited if not dumbfounded, and then she scowled at the thought of having been dumb enough to marry him.

For a moment, the consternation was incommunicable. All that she could do was to turn her high head away from him, and allow her neck to remain stiffly turned. She smiled contortedly in nominal pain before releasing it in a guffaw. She faced him directly. His absurdity as a being seemed to exist for her insolent jeering and only this.

"What are you laughing that way for?" he asked. She stared into his eyes rudely and laughed contemptuously at the absurd monkey that was sitting next to her. She knew: every relationship was a self-interested transaction. There was nothing new to her in this assessment. She had known it since early childhood when she found out that her aunt was being paid by her parents, and that this was the impetus for the love and generosity of letting her stay with this second family. Maybe recently she had pretended to not know. For a while there had been that repudiation, that obfuscation of self, so that she might fit into a wedding dress as well as marriage. But now she was back home within the real perceptions of her brain.

She again deigned the hard plastic eyes of her stuffed polar bear countenance down upon him. They glittered a hardness that was like those of sapphires. "When is this Sapporo thing going to happen?" she spitefully abraded the contumacious Earthling coldly.

"Well, soon," he said mildly. He feigned a diffident smile as if he should not be asking for such a favor but would do it nonetheless. She, the new wife, took notice of this. He almost seemed contrite and she wondered if his bashfulness was less contrived than what she might suppose. Soon her insular hubris of indomitability began to thaw like Arctic permafrost. Then he went on. "There won't be any difficulty in expediting this from what I see. I mean an agent could sell your paintings. One of my assistants could have power of attorney to go to the bank and try to obtain a mortgage--I mean if you want to help in that way. I know it is a lot to ask. Of course it is your choice. The way I see it we'll need that money as living expenses for a short while until everything starts moving. The cost of living in Honshu is notorious but it is worse on the northern Japanese islands like Hokkaido."

"Well, I'll give it some thought. I'll decide when Nathaniel gets back." She stressed "I'll decide" obdurately but she had in principle made up her mind. She had in theory (there was nothing but theory in this interrelating) decided that if she were to go with him she could sell off her Jakarta paintings as well as the huge one in the garage but this would be all. There was an institution called a bank and to her it should not be a spouse no matter what self-interested gunk was naturally in a man's calculative logic of advantageous maneuvers when proposing to a woman -- in this case an interest free loan to which even the capital amount might well be neglected; and in this case she had made the proposal.

"I was thinking that we might fly from Little Rock to San Francisco and then over that way." His hand pointed to the McDonalds arch and she smiled good-humoredly, careful not to insult the phlegmatic one by laughing at him because he just might scowl at her. "I mean without going back. Betty of course would pick up Nathaniel from the airport and she could help take care of both boys at my sister's estate. It might be better this way."

"Not see Nathaniel and Rick?" she roared incredulously.

"Good byes are messy," he said.

She thought for a moment. What did she know: Rick was well mannered and Nathaniel was restive if not intractable. Maybe Michael with his quick draw of the belt and his willingness to take his son on trips abroad was a better parent. A caring albeit phlegmatic male disciplinarian seemed to play the notes of fear and respect in male children with a greater sense of harmony if obedience to adult might were that one important anthem. She had to admit to herself that a sudden departure wasn't nonsense for she was ready to listen to the proposals of abandonment by a father of a well brought up boy when her own experiments in child rearing seemed effete and unsuccessful. She did not, for all her education, know anything much more than the average parent and what little she knew was theoretical. Ideas of child psychologists like Piaget were mere abstractions, premises like ghosts without flesh. Maybe, she thought to herself, Nathaniel needed a different influence since she was apparently not much of a role model. Maybe pursuing a floundering maternal role for the sake of a child, who would in a short space of years be engaged fully in instinctual and hedonistic pursuits, was foolishly myopic at best. At worst it might stunt her from any form of enlightenment and she would appear foolishly gauche and inept to herself. Was her reasoning so fallible? She knew that it was. She wondered whether she was just trying to justify the desire to jump on a tank with her mate and roll off into the sunset. Maybe she would be running over her child no differently than her craven and neglectful parents except that their rationale was to fulfill duties whereas hers would be less definable.

"But Rick is with your parents."

"They got fed up with him. Now he is with my sis."

"Fed up with gentle Rick?"

"Kids are dirty."

"We should take them with us." Her thought was of rescuing her favorite from such in-laws to her and laws to him.

"Honey, we can't afford them initially. Do you know how much international schools cost?" She at last saw his point. She felt apologetic. Maybe his reason for this marriage had not been to get her money after all. "Besides," she thought, "whatever dilemma he might have in obtaining liquid assets, I'm a pauper in contrast. Maybe there is nothing to it at all but my own overactive imagination." She looked at him again. She saw the eyes of a man who yearned for money. She saw the eyes of Venus who would have said anything to woo Adonis, and she felt that his love for her, if it existed, was not good.

"Go by yourself then. I'll stay with the boys. When I sell what I have painted -- I can pull in 20,000 more or less--I'll send it to you. However, regarding the mortgage of my house you can get that out of your thoughts! The day I'm expected to mortgage my house is the day I file the divorce papers." She smiled malevolently.

"Of course. I shouldn't have asked that. Please come to Sapporo with me. It might be your only time to actually live outside America."

He was putting the taste for new experiences back within her palate, and to her the taste of it was uniquely tactile and sweet like a wad of chewing tobacco. The possibility of going elsewhere potentially out of the reach of America's long shadow made her soar as invincibly as an archaeopteryx departing from a tyrannosaurus, if indeed these two creatures were coeval.

Like a massive billowing wave of dark cloud overtaking the top stories of a skyscraper, the prospect of opaque drama in unknown foreign adventures animated her lofty imagination. She half believed that a time in Hokkaido would send a beautiful mix of color rushing like a torrent from her pallet. It would coruscate her in warm intimacy the way, to a swimmer, the 5:30 sun appears to immerse itself whole in a pool of water. America exported greed and violence in cinematography, had sovereignty in technological exports, dictated world affairs, overthrew leaders, craved for energy to give to its race horse economy despite its havoc on the environment, and believed with certainty that God gave hegemony in this superpower status to they who relentlessly pursued gluttonous freedoms in a world of misery ridden masses. If she were to live elsewhere experiencing other cultures fully she felt that the inhabitants would be a "totally different fish;" and being exposed to a different fish would be her mutation into something higher.

The idea kept reoccurring to her that children were temporary objects in her domain but experiences of this kind were transformational. For so long she had wistful thoughts of departing from America in a more permanent way than one could do as a mere tourist. She yearned to abscond from this country of sensationalized serial killers, child abductors, murderers in school yards, random shooters, Al Queida and Timothy McVeigh car bombers, and America's obsession with those of fame and power who lusted for more and more until plunging so fully in their passionate energies fell into jealous fits, white color crimes, or murder related to that above. Already the enemies were gathered outside the American gates and at any moment they would storm the Bastille. A war with such poor masses would siphon away the coffers of the US treasury to the point where the superpower status would be gone. There would just be mountainous rubble of debt on the great debtor country.

There came a day somewhere in the middle part of January when she called the man with the unmemorable name from Arkansas. She did not tell him of her marriage but she did tell him that Michael had asked her to go to Japan with him. He told her to go. He said that one should always use any opportunity that came along to be exposed to a new culture although both of them knew that there was little else in the world but America's capitalistic shadow and that little enlightenment could be gained from any other source than stagnant words and pages of the books written by the dead masters. He said this with such conviction that she almost loved him for not holding onto her.

Tijuana, Mexico September 17, 2001

It would be 90 degrees later that day and she had come to do her laundry earlier than usual. Her mind swished like her frothy socks that foamed and compressed, were locked in and were often lost. Somewhere, on one continent or another, something severed within her. She told herself that she would not blame Atsushi Kato, and especially at this late date. She tried not to think of this matter by watching the diving dances of her laundry, but it was not at all helpful. She imagined two men's socks of different colors and sizes intertwining within the fast movements of her wash. No, she again reminded herself as if needing to reiterate a truth so that feelings did not overtake her with their mendacities, Kato was not the source of her disconnection. He had merely been a stock boy for the foreign food store that was partially owned by her husband. Perhaps he was that still. Certainly he was more than that role.

His face always smiled widely when he saw her or her husband. He had an affinity for foreigners and she, in particular, needed his friendship. His English was excellent; and he finally brought life to their stagnation by getting them involved in an understanding of Oriental antiquities.

The weather was inordinately cold, and the city was so large and congested; but they nonetheless needed their outings, and he took them to museums and Japanese theatres within the inner city of Sapporo. He was so eager to use his English. He translated the signs under the artifacts and became aware of the styles of Japanese calligraphy. When they pelted snow from the soles of their shoes before entering the theaters, he seemed grateful that such experiences were resuscitating him from the continual repetition of counting and stocking inventory. From these invitations to escort the couple he began to see a newness within his ancient and isolated people on this one of myriad islands. He said that he studied the English language and had kept it within himself for so long; but it was really perceiving his race and culture anew that seemed to revive him with a real personality. Michael was not inclined to befriend a Buddhist this lifelessly innocuous and bereft of money and status so she pushed on her husband's association with him, this "subordinate. " She asked Kato to accompany her husband in the barroom business meetings. He would just be a human speck in these overcrowded places. His shyness with those of his own race made them not pay attention to him. He would understand the implications to the meetings that her husband found opaque. She would not blame Kato. He might even be doing Michael's laundry right now as she pursued her own, but he was not her disconnection -- not really.

What did her disconnection matter at all in the scheme of things, anyway? When she asked this question she was not able to concoct a truthful answer that was at all savory. In the scheme of things her disconnection was just more worthless tripe as insignificant as a gum wrapper blowing on a sidewalk. As intangible as a "state of mind" was, she knew that for all its intricate and fascinating complexity it was less significant to the outside world than a gum wrapper.

Thousands had lost their lives in the World Trade Center towers in New York City just days earlier. No one could ever know the panic and hopelessness that they felt at the travail of being cognizant and on fire or seeing someone else who was ablaze and being unable to do anything. If there were any continual evidence of those who had become a gas it would be the sounds of their panicked utterances of love and farewell or the light that made visible those horrified countenances leaning their ears as hard as they could into their cellular telephones. By this time, she supposed, those sights and sounds would be at the edges of the Milky Way before moving further into deeper space, the gray matter of this black god. She still thought about September Eleventh every few minutes: those repeating images of the two jets flying into the skyscrapers and people jumping from the upper stories. What did her disconnection matter to the gods, who if they existed at all, despised life?

She remembered: on the Eleventh (9-11) she sat on the bed in her little room. A bowl of vegetable soup from her crockpot was on an end table and a tofu taco was on a plate that was on her lap. She was just about ready to put some food in her mouth when she used the remote control to turn on the television. For a few moments she was incredulous and just stared motionlessly aghast. Then she suddenly stood up from the precipice of the mattress and rushed to the telephone to call Michael's sister. The line was disconnected as it had been the past few times she tried to call. She tried email but again her letters to her son came back to her. Nathaniel ("Adagio") still had too much email clogged into his Yahoo account--no doubt all the unopened letters she had emailed to him from Sapporo.

Somewhere something had severed. Was it here in Tijuana, in Tokyo or Hong Kong, Seoul or Sapporo, or a mezcla (mixture)? It was a gradual harvest of disconnection invisibly sewn and its fulfillment placed in her hands. She had accepted her divorce stunned and numb, but not disbelieving. She had been there throughout his travels. Her mind had been scrambled in different languages and her environment splintered like Kanji, Hirigana, and Katakana.

She was lost then, and she was lost now. People were temporary entities flitting around in her imagination as solid substance but it had been an illusion. Why she had come to Tijuana was even more difficult to isolate. It had less shape and size than even the divorce of intimate parties. It was a shirt of a distorted form. Here, she could more easily stretch the money that she had fully withdrawn from the "grocery and household account" which Michael had put in her name at Daiko Ginko (Daiko Bank). It was around 3000 dollars. Within Albany she had her real money and property but she had not seriously thought about those resources for nearly a year. The passbook and ATM were lost to her now and she could never access those resources from here.

It was a most mortifying fact that upon telling her he had filed for divorce and his reason for doing such that she just stood there so numbly like a driver witnessing a falling bridge. She had not laughed or accepted it with a smile, which would have been her typical reaction--a reaction she had toward all absurd caprices of a human race that she still believed was beneath her. But within the daily work at managing the store and fighting along with him to secure a profit, she had unwittingly married him in her heart; and all those outings with Kato sealed the three in work and pleasure. It was her first time of really feeling as if she belonged to a group and the explosion of it wounded her in shrapnel.

Upon entering the states she was too fragile and too mortified by all that she had abandoned to go back to her son in New York State. She spent a few days in Los Angeles and a few more in San Diego. Then she pushed the rotating gate in San Ysidro and found herself in Tijuana. She had always wanted the chance to recall her college Spanish and to somehow use it. American cities seemed so large and so full of violent accosting figures; but she did not reason that this large south-of-the- border city that she had chosen to reside in, which had its toddler days as American military barrooms, had the crime level of LA and Chicago combined. She didn't really have a reason for her inability to acclimate. She told herself that Ithaca was too cold but Sapporo had been colder yet. The bench at the zoo before the spider monkeys had been her favorite spot in San Diego but the monkeys reminded her of the man with the unmemorable name.

For a few moments she hypnotically watched her towels and clothes through the window of the double-load machine. Washing clothes was a dollar and sixty-five cents per load. Most of the customers paid in dollars, but not all of them; so the machines needed special tokens to fall into the slots. To her knowledge doing laundry here was the only thing that was more expensive than in the states. A teenager was seated in a laundry cart. Her hand leaned on the lever of the dryer and she pulled and pushed herself in a gentle swinging movement as if it were a hammock. Two children on roller skates created a roller derby for themselves but they walked and stumbled more than they rolled and the force in which they ran into people was nominal.

Just as she was glad that her ex-lover, Candyman, had not been allowed into her body during one of her more fertile dates and had been kept as syrup on her tongue, she was glad that throughout the time of living together with Michael as lovers and then as husband and wife, that no daughter or son was concieved (for once concieved the embryo never would have been aborted since her principle of being humane would have been the overriding consideration at the expense of all else). She was also glad that she and her husband had not amassed any common property within their nine months of marriage. She liked a disconnection--a dismembering--that was made neatly in one quick motion of the knife. She felt that it was good even when the knife was not sterile.

She thought of the salient, life-changing conversation that she should have laughed off with the frivolity worthy of all human considerations. At the door of their room in the lodge Michael said to her, "Yesterday while we were snow skiing and Kato broke his foot, I lifted it and touched him in front of you without wanting to hide anything. Do you remember? You stood above us. You were wearing a cap and your bangs were in your eyes; still I could see that you understood fully. I knew that you had known all along. Can you really say that you haven't known anything all these months?" He asked her this as if she were the one who was culpable. He asked her this as if she were the one who made him feel guilty by this contrived performance of consternation and shattered innocence.

The stoic that she was, she had not created a dramatic or melodramatic spectacle unless an ingenuous sense of confusion was a spectacle. There, in the hallway outside their rooms at the lodge, he condemned her, the victim. That which preceded it had been Michael rummaging through his pockets, handing her their key, and then announcing that he would stay with Kato. Naturally, she had been disconcerted; her feelings had been dominant and ineffable; and the scenario of them talking like this with their friend on his crutches gazing at them both in a horrified expression had been so surreal. Her true self would have laughed and relinquished him. She would have even bought the gay couple a housewarming gift of his and her bathrobes (maybe just his and his) with minimal bitterness that would have animated her in light-hearted mischief-making. Instead a bomb detonated.

Time moved by like a shell-shocked soldier and it dragged her along as a war prisoner tripping recklessly over landmines. She was battered in shrapnel but she knew that her wounds were figments of the imagination since they were merely psychological ones. With the right idea she knew that she could wedge herself from the microcosm of being a casualty of an imaginary war, escape from its hatch, and be herself once again. If she were just to open the hatch she would be out of jealous instincts and the pettiness of a personal life.

Whenever she got bored with reading Mexican newspapers and memorizing new Spanish vocabulary she would go into San Diego and take bus #9 from Broadway Avenue until she was in Old Town. Her favorite building was Casa De Miguel Pedona y Maria Antonia Estudillo. Maybe it had been restored long ago, but now it retained its tattered walls once again and no refurbished items cluttered the dense emptiness. It was time: empty and tattering. She felt less alone seeing it exhibit that, which in an abstract way, was in her own heart. To her the dilapidated structure was good.

She could easily enough replace a husband. When she was in Asia she had often sent e-mail to some of those whom she met in chat rooms. There were lonely males out there just as there were lonely females. She might find an exceptionally attractive man with responsibility, status, and initiative who would infatuate her and, if she were lucky, seem like a comfortable friend. Perhaps they would have a rapport even if their hobbies were different and the degree of seriousness that she gave her art disconcerted the domineering male who could not understand the independent fullness of self in ideas. She could find a man just as she could get rid of her old clothes and replace them with new ones.

She hadn't bought many new clothes for some time. Her budget wouldn't permit such purchases now--not even here. She could, however, give some English classes and with a few hundred dollars each month she could have been one of those common consumers in outdoor markets, the real people. However, it all, seemed as if it were clutter (tangible things like clothes and the intangible things of the mind like relationships).

Once, a musical group from Ecuador was playing in Old Town in front of the historic buildings, where inside them everything was sold from candles to homemade fudge. Three old ladies ran up to them before leaving. They stood beside the musicians who were dressed in red and blue ponchos so that someone could take their photographs with them. They did not stay for here was proof that they had encountered another culture in passing. The picture was solid: more solid than months of experiences in a culture.

Two days before she left Sapparo, she spent hours in an exhausting search for her son, Nathaniel, the best one could from a distant continent. She called Michael's sister, Janet, several times but that line was disconnected. A couple of operators reaffirmed this fact. She went through people search engines for her ex-sister-in-law whom she never met but whom she believed to be keeping her son. Still these attempts were futile. She called the numbers of myriad businesses owned by Michael's parents in the hope that the managers and directors there might link her to these unlisted, affluent proprietors; but once she got the directors or operational managers of these organizations on the phone with trying effort, they would never disclose any information on the owners who had been her in-laws. She used email search engines in the hope that Nathaniel had a second account but all those individuals with his name lived in states other than New York and Kansas. At last she called her Aunt Peggy.

"Peggy, this is Gabriele. How are you?"

"What? Where have you been? We haven't been able to reach you for nearly a year."

"I have been living in Japan but I'm coming back home soon."

"How long have you been over there?"

"For nine months or so."

"Doing what?"

"Painting."

"Is Nathaniel with you?"

"No." Gabriele was disappointed.

"You haven't contacted that boy in all this time?"

"No. I've tried so many times but it gets me nowhere. I was hoping he would contact me on his own. Obviously he is not there with you, but maybe he has given you Janet's number."

"Janet?"

"It's a long story." This call was another dead end.

"He set fire to the house. We sent him back two weeks after he came. We don't want to see him back here again. I don't know where he is at--Janet or whoever he is with. No wonder he hates everybody with a mother abandoning him."

"I didn't abandon him; but since when were you so worried about condemning abandonment. My parents just went on a working trip forever and to you they are remarkable people; I was shipped off to you, and your old fart of a husband."

"What did you call him?"

Gabriele laughed. "Let's forget the past. It shapes us but doesn't behead us, so to speak. You clothed me, sheltered me, and gave me food."

"That's right. We bothered with you when no one else would so how dare you call your uncle a bad name. We loved you."

"Your love for me, your niece, was to approach me like a servant girl. I dare because it is my telephone call at my expense and I'll call anyone I want and remind him, her, or them that they are old farts if they are indeed old farts." Gabriele chuckled. So easily did she amuse herself and how little did anyone else move her. "And if anyone tries to finger my clit the way your husband did they should be happy to be called old farts."

"Shut up! Shut up now! Shut that wicked mouth! This is my telephone and you talk to me respectfully or I'll hang up on you right now. Your son hates you, you know. Always talks of hating you everyday -- sickening but probably for good reason; and we got the effects of your unwed mothering experiment -- a kitchen in flames and one wall in the living room --"

Gabriele hung up the phone and paced the floors like a mad woman. She was infuriated and yet ecstatic to have at last treated her aunt to the contempt of words. Virtually all other times had merely been cold and supercilious looks. Still it was a hollow victory so she set about destroying all of her photographs--those that she had with her and those that she pulled out of a lock box at Daiko Ginko. She stripped away each plastic sheet that contained them -- relating to Michael and Nathaniel or not -- and threw them away. She did that for all but one. The exception was a close-up of herself and her mother. Her mother's eyes were sparkling and, within the middle-aged face, decades earlier could be seen. Gabriele, who was three, was standing next to her near their home in Bucyrus, Missouri. It was a link. It was a connection. It didn't exist any longer but she couldn't release it any more than if she had been an immortal proprietor of the heavens.

The washer began to spin and kick like a drowning animal caught and fighting to get out. Its squeaking was wild with its vibration but in tone alone it was similar to the calm, mechanical chirping sounds of pedestrian streetlights in Sapporo.

She had a child and yet a whole realm of connectedness had escaped her. There were only failed possibilities now. Nathaniel hated her throughout most of the year before she "abandoned" him. She had felt it. Now, he had all the reason in the world to hate her. She looked out to the distant machines--the medley of Mexican people folding dry clothes; putting wet ones in their carts, seated and bored; reading newspapers; watching the television that beamed over their heads or falling into the rhythms of dives that their clothes made in the dryers; and those purchasing the tokens, soap, and bleach that they would put into their washers. How human and divine they were! She felt cheered and soothed to see their distinct faces. They wandered around lost, too. They yearned for something more, as she did, if only an empty dryer. They yearned to hear the morning buses that would excrete their dark toxins and take them to their agendas. They yearned to see the morning sun and the little barefoot boy in one of the distant colonias staring as the calafia (mini-bus) and the water truck with its men yelling "El Vagon!" moved up a gigantic hill in a pueblo of polvo and desert. They yearned for the exchange of ideas that would pull them out of the sense of being vanquished to the misery that was part of one's fate. But they were also, in their own limited ways, capable of being Bin Ladens responsible and exuberant about killing thousands of Americans. Maybe in just a thousand angry looks toward gringos who purportedly had better lives than themselves there might be something destructively vile in them. They, like all perfidious males, no doubt followed feelings of love (homosexual or heterosexual bliss) abandoning earlier partners who were no longer exotic dopamine inducers. Maybe, she thought, the vile was inside herself. If the English language had a word for hating men she felt it now and she knew it was vile.

She tried the best that she could to pull out of herself but the self needed to burn away both the past and the pain. Still she tried to ameliorate these feelings in reason. "So, my Ex has a gay lover...So I am dismissed...What of it?...The marriage wasn't real anyway; and Michael does not belong less to Kato just because I once had a signature on a marriage certificate." She couldn't see how anyone belonged to anyone else, anyhow; and recalled that throughout most of her life she had been glad it was that way. She tried to let the morning grace her with its fullness of life. She thought of Tijuana's tamale and hot chocolate vendors of early morning, the restaurant workers and the newsstand operators, the pharmacy managers and the street salesmen. They did not insatiably yearn for more to make themselves happy. They accepted reality's mandate that there would be no aspirations, no prosperity, and no urgency. There would just be standing alone seven days a week allowing the stimulus of sights, sounds, and smells to fill the senses and rescue the mind that tortured itself from the knowledge that there was deterioration and death, brutality and natural disasters, apathy and injustice, personal defects that were both mental and physical, and yearnings for closeness and permanency in the midst of void. She did not want to think of her husband--her ex-husband, the fact that she did not feel as if she had a last name (Quest or Sangfroid no longer suiting her, and "Bassete," the surname of Michael's family before his legal change of it for himself, not doing anything for her either), and that she was now ripped from the life of Kato and the imagery of the Orient.

She put her clothes in a cart; and then following her feelings of hunger, she pushed the cart in front of the row of stools that were near a counter. She ordered a quesadilla and glanced at the cylindrical twisting carcass on a spit that would be used for tacos. She listened to the sizzling savagery of pieces of meat dying a second death within their own grease and slow Mexican music that moved her like the blowing fronds of palms.

Still her redundant thoughts reeled across the screen of her brain like the repeated broadcasts of the two jets crashing into the towers. She had gone with him to Japan on the assumption that the boys would soon follow. She even made up her mind numerous times that she would obtain them regardless of Michael's objections and put them in an international school. She was planning to contact Rick's sister but the months went by so fast. It wasn't much of an excuse. She had to admit that. Had the two of them really neglected to contact the boys all this time --she with hers and he with his? They had; for they wanted to find a part of themselves not linked to them. For him it was the success of this business enterprise and obviously to engage in the taunting of his untapped homosexual fantasies toward these boyish Asians. Such was done within this nice ostensible marriage and partnership with his wife. And for her it was the specious believability of that rush of energy that was the suppliant groping of love and to find a less lonely version of happiness in a group which together were humanity's greatest bondage. Such abandonment was done under the ostensible label of "demonstrating a creative and independent existence" to her son.

Seated at the counter she felt a contentedness in being near a beautiful woman around her age. She even found a contentedness in hearing the meat crackle as if behind the apparent truth of the injustice of the powerful overtaking the less-abled in the slaughtering of its life there was another truth that this was the design and essence of life with a cryptic purpose that perhaps she would know with a little bit more age and maturity.

The warmth of her mother's kitchen when she was a child as snow pelted against the windows; the smell of bacon in the skillet; the smell of coffee and the sight of her mother in a thin nightgown before the stove while her father coughed away, distant and withdrawn behind a newspaper--how beautiful her mother was in so many ways in that short time together. Her eyes watered slightly, and then she had control and the present moment. She excoriated her maudlin, womanly tendencies and worried that her refusal to fall apart in front of Michael was catching up with her now. Could the cold tacit hubris that she superciliously blasted onto Michael a day after the shock dissipated have just been the facade of a woman ready for a nervous breakdown?

She avoided such thoughts by telling the woman drinking coffee at the counter some jovial comment of how at this corner of the room the scent was a combination of soap and bleach blended with those of tortas and tacos. It was an introductory comment of the environment similar to parties experiencing it, and as she wished it, it invited a smile of that one individual. Certainly a conversation beginning with "Hello; how are you?" might die at the first moment of life. The woman responded with a trivial comment that such smells might help in digesting the barely digestible.

"I am a bit surprised by the amount of meat that is part of the Mexican diet. One torta has more meat than I could think of eating for a full month, although I have to admit I do have a grease addiction for the quesadillas." Aware that, in bits, her conversation was like an American snob who could not stand anything other than her own quick, thoughtless tripe of a culture, she wished that she had said something that was different than this. Then a minute later she didn't care quite as much. She told herself that having spoken her partial gripe in Spanish instead of English might have ameliorated any negative interpretation of her critique to some degree. As she was thinking this she suddenly realized that she had just taken a glimpse of this woman's larger breasts that bounced around in a V-neck shirt. She had done this in a subconscious but still intentional manner the way Kato might in the comparison of his penis size to that of his new husband whenever they were side by side at urinals in a public bathroom. Then she looked down at a plate with some leftover food on it from a previous customer. She scooted it away and then did not look up for some moments. She was amused and a little embarrassed by her earlier action. She tried to hide her latent grin. Had her repugnance for men caused this? She would not be surprised if it were true: sexuality was just a river of energy that would move in areas where it was less impeded.

A minute later she was still concerned that she had come across as another snobbish American passing through one of the few cultures left that, for the most part, retained its essence despite being so near the superpower. She didn't give a damn what this stranger thought of her but the last thing that Americans needed were more people hating them.

"What does the H.E. Stand for?" Gabriele continued on to rectify what might have been a negative impression. She was making reference to the initials on the woman's blouse.

"Hilda Estrella." The stranger said her last name like she was a glamorous movie star.

"Are you a star?"

"In everything I do in my small way."

"In a family of stars or with a husband who is a star?"

"My husband is a fizzled firecracker with no bang. It is his name though. I robbed it from him. It should only belong to me. Don't you think so?" Gabriele laughed.

"American?"

"No, Gringo," said Gabriele.

Hilda laughed. "Your Spanish is excellent, as it is my English," said the woman in the world language that had been tossed from American hands out onto the denizens of the world like a net so as to pull all in one direction. She spoke in English because, although Gabriele's Spanish was functional, her vocabulary was callow with a thick American accent.

Gabriele introduced herself as Gabriela and the Mexican lady introduced herself as Hilda...de da la de Estrella. The whole name flashed before Gabriele like a Japanese bullet train (or Shinkansen). She couldn't catch much of it.

"Mucho gusto," said Gabriela.

"It's a pleasure to meet you," said Hilda.

"You are the first person in T.J. to speak to me in English.

"They don't know it very well. Most of them are poor so they don't go to universities none and English isn't taught so often in high schools--not well and nobody wants to learn it none. They want to know it and not know it. They don't want to lose their ways. Culture is language and they don't want Spanish to collapse like a pi-ata. In their ideas of things, the Gringos took away enough of their land--they don't want the culture to go--out would go mariachi, bull fights, Juarez Day with children in Indian feathers, Cinco de Mayo celebrations, and traditional Mexican ballads. In would come George Bush Jr. signs and the American navy ships. It is a choice like the people in Paris, France." Gabriele didn't think that there was much of a similarity between the urbane Parisians and the dust city dwellers of Tijuana but what did she know? There might be some truth to it so she kept her opinion sealed.

Hilda explained the education which allowed for her fluency in a second language. Her father, a poorly paid public defender, didn't have the money to send the youngest to college so he paid for her to study at a language school.

"Did you resent your sister getting what you couldn't have?"

"No, I was very muy muy glad for her. She felt more bad than I did about it so she introduced me to her boss's bear friend--an old bear who was a friend of her boss--how ever you say it. That is another story. Where did you study Spanish?" Gabriele just said that she had dabbled in a few Spanish classes long ago in school but that she was now living here to give the language a try.

"An American living in Tijuana, asked Hilda.

"Stranger things have rocked the planet, I'm sure," said Gabriele coldly. She then ordered two quesadillas and two cokes for herself and her friend.

"You Americans are lucky. You can go here and there and stay as long as you want-- wherever you dream. Most Americans just step into Tijuana just to say they have been in Mexico but you dream about studying here and do it. It isn't much of a paradise--this place. Maybe you have gone to other places." Gabriele gave an abridged account of the places where she had lived.

"To travel is good; but if it was me to do something as this I think I would be dizzy to stay a long time in one place and then another place to meet and to lose people."

"Strangely, it has made me dizzy; but not from the travels really. Maybe a bit from the travels -- a combination of things. Before this I never needed anyone. I had my own convictions, my own ways, and my own mode of life. When I was younger I removed men like ticks a lot of the time, screwed and bit off their heads some of the time--not really but metaphorically, and thought of them -- everybody really -- as unwanted distractions on my studies and independence most of the time. I never felt lost and lonely until I was married and was living in Japan."

"There isn't a more lonely thing than this to live together with someone," commented Hilda. She changed to Spanish. "People don't grow together. They grow apart if they are capable of any growth at all-- especially if they started out as strangers." To Gabriele nothing could be said that was any truer. These ideas were identical to her own even if hers were as yet kept confined into the cellar of her thoughts (a place she restrained all ideas until they seemed more incontrovertible). To hear these secret ideas that still had not dispersed widely in her own brain come from someone else's mouth was startling. So rarely did Gabriele hear truth that she often imagined it as something that only she conceptualized or fabricated. Her muddy puddles of cynicism were evaporating under the light of the sun. Gabriele smiled her first real smile in months.

Hilda elaborated that this friend of the sister's boss, Stranger X, also from Guadalajara like her family, promised to her father that if married to Hilda he would contribute to the family's household expenses and pay for Hilda' s education. The father told him that if Hilda consented so would he.

"It was a practical decision, really."

Gabriele nodded distastefully. The calculative and the irrational were always in a woman's head when entertaining marriage. All people had to prostitute themselves a little to make a living but, according to Gabriele's assessment, women who contemplated marriage were complete whores. She almost felt sorry for men if it were not for loathing them so much. Hilda was a whore for knowledge and so this got Gabriele's approval. "Go on. I'm listening," said Gabriele.

Hilda told her that she had majored in health and physical fitness at the community college. She graduated but any plans to teach went awry in a pregnancy, a miscarriage, and then some years of housekeeping. But when her husband lost interest in her for her infertility and inability to carry a child when they had undergone such expense and effort to conceive one through a fertility clinic, she stopped taking care of the house and got a servant. This allowed her to teach aerobics.

Gabriele listened intensely while her eyes glanced at the cart of wet clothes, which seemed to her like the great hills of Tijuana dirt but in a medley of colors and fabrics.

"Why are you really living here in Tijuana? Why not Puerta Vallerta or Mexico City?" Hilda suddenly asked.

Gabriele began spacing her words into fragments and some of the fragments contained space as if her mind were moving up and down those hills across all of the distant colonias, the ocean, and into the past. She said that for a few weeks, now, she had been staying in a room of a house owned by a "nice woman." She just wanted to learn her Spanish here and she wanted to learn of simplicity. "I thought moving here would improve me somehow-- Suppose it hasn't," she prevaricated. Hilda, who now doubted the sincerity of the conversation, was beginning to withdraw her attention; so sensing this Gabriele confessed. "The truth is that when I got married I lost myself to a wifely role — domesticated Betty Crocker crap and being an unpaid cashier/assistant manager for my husband's business. When I wasn't at my shift I was learning how to cook regular western food since he hated Japanese food--sushi, mizu soup, soba, and all that stuff. Of course, washing his clothes and ironing his shirts. In the meantime he was seeing someone--a friend...an employee who was dear to us." She chuckled. "Not someone but the same gender -- a man. He was seeing a man. After the divorce I came back to the states. I didn't know where to go so I followed my own shadow and came here."

Hilda looked at her empathetically. She spoke softly. "So many people come to this ugly place for one reason or another. Some work in the American and Japanese factories. They often live in groups so they can afford rent. They earn 150 pesos each week, but what can they do? They tell themselves that a job like this is better than none. For others Tijuana is a place to sell souvenirs to the American gringos. They sell this and that on cardboard tables and they survive. It is a place for a young woman to hope that one of the American naval officers that she sells herself to will actually want more than a...como se dice... Anyhow, not being used for sex -- a real relationship. It is where those lacking emotional resources can recover."

Gabriele caught the air before it came out of her mouth as rude chortling. "Lacking emotional resources" …th she hadn't heard a more apt and erroneous phrase to describe herself; but she liked how artfully Hilda used such laconic sentences to show understanding, to make the two women's experiences cognate, and to pull the conversation out of the dead-end of the personal domain.

Gabriele smiled thoughtfully with her closed lips. She was pleased that the serendipitous heat so early in the morning had carried her here the way birds, without having to flap their wings, soared on waves of solar energy that were refracted from the ground. She now felt that she was soaring away from the flares of tortured memories--memories that if personified, seemed to think that she could somehow rescue them when the only rescue to be had was their own burial. She was at last leaving the pine trees and the snowy slopes where she had once skied with Kato and her husband. She was razing that raised foot to its burial pit and raising herself out of the inundations of yearning in the pools of Michael's retinas. She was no longer drowning in the deprivations that had fathered his unfulfilled pent-up yearnings or trapped in her own eyes and ideas for witnessing what she didn't care to see and, at that point, couldn't conclusively know. She was demolishing the ski lodge where her former self stood in front of that door of what was their room with mouth agape, key tightly clutched, and thoughts wandering lost here and there but aggravating her with recurrent questions of where she would "fit into the picture" should her husband's homosexual liaisons be more than a temporary and belated experimentation. For the first time in so long she no longer felt the inclination to pull a ski cap down over her face.

For Hilda sentiment had risen the previous year for warmth and stability and she clung to her husband's side, the old ogre that he was. She begged him to not leave each night and see this other woman or to see her but to not treat their marriage with such total indifference and contempt. If she had not loved him before she loved him desperately then; for to be rejected by an ogre made her feel uglier than the one rejecting her. She pontificated that love was a shared experience that could not be dropped one rainy Sunday when it was apparent from the first ten minutes of the televised soccer game who would be the winners, clearing the way for daily habitual liaisons thereafter.

She told Gabriele that, while they were living together that last year, she never knew who her husband saw. "It was probably a woman. I don't know. A Mexican man, when he is horny and bored, would get off in a hollow log but never his wife if she has disappointed him."

One night on the Guadalajara beltway, while she was returning to her empty home with her bags of groceries, there among distant lights in clusters like grounded stars, Hilda's headlights beamed on the sign "Tijuana." She felt that second where the new could not be avoided and that out there might be a little compassion toward her. She headed north to Baja California and then got a job as an aerobics teacher for the Municipal Sports and Cultural Center of Tijuana.

When their clothes were dry Gabriele invited Hilda to go to the movies. There in the darkness of the theatre she felt happy but uncomfortably pinned in by the wistful desire to touch the leathery silk of her friend's skin and this sense that to do so might bring on the demise of the friendship. As strange as this yearning, the fear, and the polarity of these opposites experienced together, was this peculiar sensation of needing to be embraced in the cocoon of Hilda's arms whereby she might, in this unconditional love of compassion and understanding, more smoothly reconnect the ridged pieces of self that she had cobbled together from a fragmented state early in life. She did not know if clasping her hand would endanger the friendship so she sat there and sweated with her hand in between both seats. And yet, strangely somewhere in the middle of the movie she coalesced Gabrielishly. She was restored in shared experience and understanding and this was all that she required.

She had felt similar emotions of physical repugnance toward Michael. Often, in their bed, with the enjoyment of feeling her body again after sex as his motives, she shunned him like a picnic that was infested with ants. The need for autonomy, hegemony, and harmony that comprised self-containment became her.

Still, in the last moments of the movie she curled her hand on her chin, smiled, and absorbed herself in light and sound presented as form. She thought about how Hilda had waited around for her clothes to dry and had helped her put them in the back of her car. The mystery of possibilities and implications to subtle gestures dangled above her like a toy of a musical crib.