Chapter 44

To the ancient Egyptians man died each night in this void absent of the sun god and then each morning was resurrected in daybreak. She thought of this; and it seemed to her as she was driving home at 3 a.m., hair blowing and mind mesmerized in prevailing darkness, that this particular myth was as all religious balderdash that justified one egregious proclivity or another in the natural state. In Christianity this was myriad: everything from man's god-given dominion over animals in any arbitrary whim to the Lord's omnipotent power to part the Nile one moment and turn someone to stone the next (indiscriminate aiding of some and annihilating others). As the deliverer who cared so much about individual man as to intrusively know the amount of hair strands on each head He was the perfect god; and his conspicuous absence or non- involvement on 9-11 and countless other occasions of inhumanity of man to man was merely his allowing free will to command human affairs.

The ancient and relatively forgotten myth of the Egyptians explained man's mysterious absconding from the night in seven or eight hours of sleep as a partial death when apart from the vanquished sun. Its innocence had charmed her for years, but now it just seemed as one more vapid fable with no redeeming qualities. Going home circuitously, the idea of sleeping away one more night seemed as a reprehensible closing of one's eyes to the night's gilded silence. Long hours of atavistic sleep to keep the body still and hidden from barely visible predators had been utile in prehistory but now it was an anachronistic vestige of adaptation. Thwarting nocturnal consciousness of this fragile animal, man, sleep inadvertently obstructed an appreciation for all that was black — and she did want to appreciate all that was black.

Outside of bubbling in champagne and a bit of public relations to secure a sale what had this party been, she asked herself, unless it were to reclaim the night; and what had this bathroom rendezvous been but to cease to abscond from that which was black? She laughed at her joke, which she mumbled aloud to herself. Half drunk, she was inexplicably pleased with herself. She told herself that her adulterous tryst with this twenty minute black friend had been her refutation against the notion of ugly-bodied darkness. She inanely told herself that by brushing naked against his skin this making herself one with what was black had made the intimacy a higher accomplishment than mere banging. She was even amused by how easily amused she was in her self- containment in the car. For her, happiness was not dependent on external playmates although something vaguely similar to happiness was sometimes facilitated by them.

There was nothing like back roads so bare of automobiles. Driving made her feel as if she owned the night with the wide stretch of her headlights that were only deferentially dimmed at the encroachment of other automobiles on her terrain. She loved the peace and the vastness of these strips of road in the heart of unpretentious night; and if she had her way about it the universe would be purely black without the tawdry dappling of stars. It dawned on her that moving through night at sixty miles per hour her very movement was in opposition to what was splendid in the night. If Aristotle were right in saying that happiness was greatest in contemplating this non-changeable entity that had tossed the chemicals of inchoate matter, then cloistered artists, philosophers, and other contemplatives would be the dominant force on the planet. If contemplation were the highest pleasure in life wouldn't her canvas be more eagerly sought than her hedonistic flings or that which she was now pursuing: a sense of freedom by sipping a beer and riding around in a Ferrari. Being blown in all directions from the open windows of her car, she was half tempted to drive all the way into arctic Canada instead of returning to the odious smells of her paint—chemicals that were no doubt carcinogens if the nose were to express its opinion on the matter—paint once vibrant in her perceptions but now the mental strain of attempting to reestablish success.

She again contemplated the night. If only man had not had this fear of being eaten, sleep, if it were needed at all would be merely sporadic naps for the restoration of energy instead of this long withdrawal from the black of night. Then she thought about this twenty minute chocolate candyman, whom she named as Candyman II (Roman numerals giving him a sense of eminence). She told herself that she should have made him withdraw before being allowed to climax within her. He had worn a condom but it was doubtful that condoms were meant to stretch so far or be unbreakable when the long black horn was impaling with such force. How would she know whether or not it had ruptured? She would only know with the advent of symptoms from AIDS, syphilis, gonorrhea, and that whole list of undesirables.

She and her husband had an "open" relationship so long as neither one of them fell in love with someone else but she didn't want to die for the periodic cravings of sex and more importantly she did not want to harm her husband with a lethal touch. Like a postulant at a convent, she might well have relinquished such meretricious spells of lust months ago had she not held two opinions in favor of this "open relationship" remaining such. This sauntering away from domestic life always brought newness to marital vows upon one's return; and being shaken up in promiscuous rendezvous made the brain more lithe in generating ideas. Ever so often a woman needed to remove a man like her dirty panties for the required laundering. Ever so often a woman needed to put on some fresh panties when allowing the old ones to spin around in the wash. It was an ablution in a sense—this running barefoot in dirty fields to exorcise her demons of passion. When the exercise or exorcism was completed it allowed for domestic life there in its small space demarcated within drab walls. Sordid nights were a bit like wallpapering anew the old shack. But she did not think about the primary motivations for her adultery: the wish to not cling to this concept of a relationship as if it were an actual reality, the wish to debunk this notion of permanence in a mutable world, and that desperation to repudiate her vulnerability as one who would like to cling to such things, to cling to her man.

Guilt…there was none—not even when arriving at the house. She was, of course, surprised to see her man's car parked in the drive but it was not a catalyst of guilt per se. While the solitary newlywed was getting out of her car she considered a half imagined societal measurement of her actions. It was from it that there was a mordant gnawing within that might be labeled as compunction. She doubted it at first, but then why should she doubt? She was not totally immune to others. As much as she might claim that feelings were her own self-manufactured car that she drove around in, she would be a veritable lunatic were she to have feelings that were little else than her own imagined whims. Also her art would not pertain to anyone if she were not to some degree a product of her world, as repugnant as that thought was to her.

As she stepped into the parlor the compunction exacerbated exponentially. Seeking to be unperturbed by conscience, she told herself that having sex with a hundred men in a hundred days was no different than being loyal to one spouse for a hundred and some odd days. She argued that one behavior was no more or less slutty than the other. It was true in a rational context; but on the other hand sexual loyalty was a way of discerning this feeling-based abstraction of a relationship which otherwise would diffuse as a cloud of smoke. She went into the family room where she saw a light ("family" seeming a misnomer since she doubted that there was such a thing).

"Hey! You are here!" she called as she went through a hallway to this room where her husband and son were standing at different sides of a billiard table. Obviously they were there to play against each other but seemingly it was as if they were together brandishing their cues, their phallic sticks, which would be used for her flagellation. As titillation and inebriation were falling flat with each passing moment, so her smile at imagining her forthcoming beating was momentary.

"What are you smiling at?" the man with the unmemorable name asked.

"Nothing." Acerbic guilt was bubbling within her.

"I decided to come back this weekend," the man said.

"What a surprise. Grading completed?"

"Some of it. I guess you are okay. Why is your hair this way? What's the word?" He said something in Russian that she did not understand.

"Disheveled. In the car-- windows down, me blowing in the wind. Guess I look a mess. Don't worry. I wasn't in an accident."

"Okay, I'm not. I wasn't."

"Seems that a late night pool game has stretched into early morning," she said. There was no response so she feigned a beautiful wide smile as she slouched into a vinyl couch --vinyl like that she had withdrawn into when parting from Nathaniel's father with his dividing cells within her—cells that were either cancerous or salubrious divisions although now it was perhaps too early to predict which or the denouement of this dabbled experiment. "Don't you think it is a little bit late for my two boys to be playing billiards like they are at a poker party?"

"No, I don't Gabriele; and do you want me to tell you why?"

"Please. More than anything else on the planet, I live for it."

"Both of us had to do something while we waited and waited for you, didn't we? We couldn't stare at the door all night. Folk dancing to balalaika music seemed out of place and we didn't know the phone numbers of hospital morgues to see if you checked in with your bags."

She chortled. "Uh oh, facetious and angry. Looks like I've been grounded and will have the car keys taken away." But grave memories were flung into her consciousness that sobered her frivolity: she remembered being in Japan waiting for Michael to return from his dates with Kato. Sitting on her futon on the tatami of her living room, she would blow into the shakuhachi, that wailing instrument that was the only thing she could communicate with in a grief so tacit and incommunicable.

"Do you want me to not care?"

"Huh?" She was recovering from damnable memories that were running over her the way swathes of the Earth's hardened vomit, continents, moved, reshaped themselves, and demarcated anew its body of water. Then it occurred to her what he said. "Sorry. I thank you for caring. I really do. You are a good guy."

"You left your son here all alone."

"Are you kidding? Hardly that! After hearing from Peggy about his penchant for arson, I wouldn't be that crazy. Where is the babysitter, Nathaniel?"

"I didn't like her so I got rid of her," said the boy. "I fired her but I paid her off first."

"With what?"

As she waited for him to speak she saw him scratch one of his earlobes. From this she imagined him saying that he paid the babysitter with money he made from selling earrings like the ones she was wearing. Then, in the daydream, she demanded to know whether or not he had been pilfering bits of her jewelry all along and what he did with the money once he sold them; but in the daydream he did not answer either question leaving inconclusive speculation to run rife.

But she told herself that the daydream had no significance. Once in February when not able to find various pairs of earrings and blaming herself for having lost them somewhere between Tokyo to Tijuana she had engaged herself in comic anecdotes of the boy sneaking into her bedroom in leather gloves and pajamas so that he might mail some of her jewelry to Hispanic Betty before Valentine's Day. She told herself that this daydream was merely the rebounding of her dismissed caprices. And yet she couldn't help wondering if this particular daydream was, as Freud would say, a resurfacing of repressed fears, unwanted knowledge, or strong convictions about a given matter of importance.

She thought about how little of a human's mercurial life was grounded in the present moment: an athlete was in the rush of his adrenalin, a conversation consisted of past events and future expectations, and a current event was impinged by pertinent hunches exhumed from the subconscious in daydreams. Even if she were to have conclusive knowledge about her son's actions throughout each and every day, and even if she were to find him as innocent as a babe, the correct way of dealing with him would still be guesswork. Such was the peculiarity of the human condition.

"With Monopoly money," he chuckled

"With what?" she repeated irascibly.

" Twenty bucks out of my allowance money. Are you going to take my head off for that?"

"For twenty bucks, never. Thirty, maybe." She turned to her husband. "Didn't he tell you where I was at?"

"He said that he didn't know."

"I don't know," said the boy.

"I told you."

"I wasn't listening. Was watching a movie. Didn't hear," he spoke with cold indifference. Only his eyes were visceral and they were directed at the billiard balls while he daydreamed phantasms of men and orgasms in which his mother copulated with male partygoers in a back bedroom. Bending toward the table and aiming his cue stick he murmured inaudibly, "I never listen to where anyone is planning to cat around to. It's none of my business." Then he shot the balls. "Your turn, Comrade."

"Cat around?" said Gabriele. "Is that what you said? I think it's time for you to go to bed." Angry as she was, she laughed awkwardly to give the impression that she construed it to be one more impertinent statement having as little significance to her as others he had said previously.

"Go on! We'll finish in the morning, I promise," said the man.

"Game over permanently," said the boy in decisive coldness. He hastily garnered the balls into a tray and then began to descend into his room. As he did so he heard: "I want to know where you have been!" "I was just at a buyer's home. A kind of show and tell party." "You hate going to those things." "Yeah but I sometimes have to: smiles, and small talk. One has to suck up to these people for cash. I don't have any money, you know — well, not completely that way but coming soon. And if it gets any worse Adagio'll have to go to public schools and I'll sell the house. Maybe go back to Mexico and this time live in an Adobe hut." "Well, if that came from another person it would be a joke but since it is coming from you it would not surprise me if you mean it. Remember that any crazy action like that would be the end of us." "I'm joking. I don't want an ending of us but a forever of us. I just mean that money has become an issue. I have to rebuild my reputation — not from scratch, but still reestablishing it is a struggle. It ain't easy." "Get a job." "No, I detest jobs — especially professional jobs. I would rather be an automaton in a factory than a paper pusher or a money hording entrepreneur. All of them have such wasted lives." He laughed. "I have such a wasted life then."

The words did not fall into place so much as they just fell profusely like a mist that kept her obscure from her spouse. By their mere arrangement, their emphasis, and their plausibility, deceit was done without the need for prevarications, obfuscations, mendacities, and outright lies. She felt delivered from being thought of as the slut that she was beginning to feel that she was.

Later, while the two were asleep and she was reading on her vinyl sofa and occasionally peaking out of the curtain into the darkness, it seemed to her that with sordid thoughts and deeds being such it was a good thing that communication conveyed so little of life and reality. In her own brain there were these incessant skirmishes to separate herself from her environment, the tacit hostile intent toward others expressed in the coldness of her eyes, and all these indefatigable hungers of base instinct. The loneliness of philosophical ponderings, the ineffable brooding, and the meticulous details of producing life and personal statements in her art forced her to take dives ever so often into these wild sexcapades. Sometimes one needed to have those moments of feeling, although never believing, the specious inebriation of mutually shared physical intimacy.

She thought about telling him the truth. She believed in honesty but as she pondered doing so honesty didn't seem to her as either all that pragmatic or virtuous. If one were to convey her more carnal side to any of these judgmental and precipitous creatures they would believe it to be the full summation of the confessor. She was a faithful wife: faithful to her intent to care about a man, and this faithfulness did not require ridiculous sexual fidelity as its measurement. She told herself that a higher being, a licentious goddess, was able to sculpt a higher authority within all this effluvium, this muck of feelings and thought.

So, what if she were unfaithful in a sense? It was not she who had amended the marital vows. His utterance was partially made in jest, but having made it changed the nature of the contract. Being faithful was no longer an indefeasible Claus. It was he who had begun it all. "So many beautiful women are on campus. Sometimes they look like babies and sometimes they look so ripe." "Well, don't famish yourself on account of me." "You wouldn't mind?" "I guess not. Not if it didn't mean anything. If a man sits in a box for some hours he would need exercise. If hungry enough you would chew on a shoe if there weren't anything more edible in sight. What right would I have to stop you?" "Good, that is what we should do if it becomes hard to control, and I promise that it won't mean anything." "Fine," she had said; but surely he wasn't so na•ve as to think that it would be an amendment giving privileges that would be exclusively his own.

Then she went to bed. Not able to fall asleep for an hour, she just lay there with her man. At certain moments she felt reassured to be there listening to his breathing and at other moments it felt constricting to have the imposition of a man share her space. And yet she too needed her contracts. She too needed to cling to another person to seem to herself that she was more than dirt blowing around in the impermanent streets of the city. Each minute hunted and devoured its predecessor, and together all the minutes were this composite of time as the replication to replace dying cells was a collection that was the body. She listened to the clock. It too was an ephemeral device that seemed to hum as incessantly as her breath. But both, she knew, were temporary devices. The abstraction of time itself, the best a woman could conceptualize it, seemed more "eternal" just as the life of any elderly woman would seem successfully "immortal" when there among grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Still, in the scheme of things all was blowing dust.

She did not blame her morbid disposition on the night. Nocturnal stillness aided concentration and she sunk under it as if it were her grandmother's quilt. It did not evoke a mood, for her saturnine thoughts came in part from the slowing of spinning intoxication and a more sobering reality pressing upon her: that she was a fraudulent wife, an adulterous bitch, and a woman wrestled to the ground by the mundane of financial woes. How she could devise a viable, commercial art that would be easily manufactured without having to forfeit her role as a serious artist—this was her insoluble dilemma. Even though she sensed the answer to be immediate and palpable, it kept eluding her nonetheless. Seeing that her bedtime contemplations were circumgyratory spirals of thought expended without even tiring her to the point where she could sleep, she dressed and went outside.

A bike ride taking hours; hills beyond the city limits—hills gilded in sunrise; hills like that picture in her son's Book of Mormon showing the Hill Cummorah where, according to the myth, these imaginary plates were once buried; hills like that idyllic Hill that recently provoked her to say that she would rather have him study a dirty magazine than these man made scriptures; the idea, as the wind blew through her hair and massaged her skin, that physical delusions were less deleterious than mental ones; the coolness of wind blowing in her face; the silent splendor of the ride; the hat blowing off her head; halted peddling to find it; the potholes and sharp rocks of rural roads; running over some type of shard; and then there was that flat tire. She walked the bicycle for an hour before finally coming across a filling station. A worker told her that he would patch her inner tube for twenty dollars. She called him a capitalistic pig. He pointed to her long, ostentatious diamond earrings and asked her what she thought that she was. Then there was an awareness that she knew that she was that too. A fixed bicycle; slapping against the winds within her movement; a new conviction to simplify her life; a rest at a convenience store; coins into the slot of the newspaper vending machine; headlines of a man in Albany who shot his wife's lover, his wife, the children, and then himself; headlines of an overworked postal employee from Albany who began to shoot people in the queue so as to reduce the amount of packages submitted into his window; a nice elderly woman smiling at her like sunshine and asking how she was but Gabriele's cold eyes turned her to ice; an awareness of having wronged the woman, a compunction, and a recalled analogy that she was that stuffed polar bear with the stiff arms that the factory of the human race mutantly created; an elderly man wanting to change her quarter into two dimes and a nickel for the newspaper vending machine but Gabriele's cold eyes turned him into ice sculpture until he came to himself and quickly fled from the witch; and then at last a return home. Her son was there, brandishing his BB gun in late morning.

"Morning soldier! Aren't you a little old for this thing?" she asked as she got off her bicycle.

"Yes. Give me the real thing and this kid's gun can go into the trash," he said.

"No can do," she said, "or matches to an arsonist."

"I'm not an arsonist. It was an accident."

"I wouldn't know. I wasn't at your Aunt Peggy's."

"No, you were in Japan, weren't you? Where have you been?"

"Riding. It is a beautiful morning. Good exercise. And I was thinking: you know, we are living beyond our means. I've decided to sell the house. We'll look for a smaller place and we'll have money to travel around from time to time. You'll get to see other places. Maybe you'll get to see Japan too."

"You do that and I'll be gone."

"Gone? Gone where? Peggy would never take you back."

"To Sharon's"

"You despise her."

"Yes," he said. He fired one shot and it went into the window. He fired a second, and a third time at the fleeing owl and the bleeding corpse plumped onto the earth like a water balloon.

Although he saw it flounder in the skies as he floundered around on the Earth, Sang Huin was not exactly sure where the kite was struck to the ground. He thought of how so many years of his life were struck down in silence. Only June, the basketball star, had voice and opinions that could sway the parents. He was inconsequential, relegated to shadows. He upbraided himself and stymied his thoughts immediately. He didn't want to think any bad thoughts about his sister. He had no right to think them. Instead, he desperately thought that he should marry a woman and have a family of his own, thereby enveloping himself in a world of forgetfulness. His buttocks were hurting from where he sat and the wind was beginning to sweep down its polluted grit of rain. He got up. He needed to go downtown to Myong Dong and try to find a birthday present for Seong Seob, but first he needed to pick up an umbrella.