Chapter Twenty-Eight
Sang Huin had a very strange dream one night. It was a night in which he had experienced a cancellation of a lesson and instead of returning home he had gone toward the Myong Dong area of Seoul to a gay Turkish bath, which he hoped would exorcise him of the void.
Like any explosive, the chemicals for the detonation were inside the container (himself); and all it required was a small sensation as its spark. It always struck him as peculiar and intriguing how a sexual feeling that was so internal should be linked so indelibly with the external like a woman's ability to produce milk, which required birth and a baby to suckle if it were to not dry up.
There, once again in the Turkish bath (as if this time would be a less specious form of intimacy than all others), he had sought excitement — fireworks of sensation within a dark room for orgies. There, like a balloon, he had blown his body in titillations and desire only to be deflated to a moment or two of tameness and godhood and then an equilibrium — this concoction of a little god and a lot of animal called a human being.
And when he returned home to Seong Seob, there was a contrived inflation and deflation of the phallus in the ersatz of coerced will. Then he lay there like a squeezed orange, albeit a discontent one. He was unable to sleep for countless minutes that seemed as hours. And when he did go to sleep he dreamed strange and erratic things. At worst these images burst and burned against the walls of his brain like jets against the World Trade Center. At best they expanded and contracted nerves in his brain like the coldness of an ice cream headache. Accelerated by too many graphic CNN reports and satiated in anxieties and guilt within his own life, he dreamed that Gabriele was living in an isolated area in Pakistan with her cat, Mouse. One evening there was knocking on her door and when she answered it a stoic Rita/Lily with obdurate, mechanical, and glazed eyes injected a drug into her arm. When Gabriele woke up she was staring into the face of Osama Bin Laden. "Where am I?" she asked as she lifted her head and wiped the pallid dirt from hair and face. A translator relayed her voice to Osama Bin Laden. She recognized him too. He was Khalid Shaik Mohammed. Osama said something and the translation was "Al Qaiida Hills in what people wrong to call Afghanistan behind Tora Bora. You relatives must pay big ransom or we cut off you head."
"Relatives?" said Gabriele. " If you mean Peggy, you inane turbaned bearded little freaks, she wouldn't give you a nickel or a dime to save my head. She wants every cent to go to Wal-Mart to buy toys for her beloved grandbabies so they will smile at her and reach for her before they do their own mommies. She likes babies: the thought of them fills her with dopamines and endorphins; and the inveterate shopper that she is, buying for them couldn't make her much higher. Such neurotransmitters run amuck in her. Mama bird must do what she is created for. Anyhow, nobody's getting rich off of my head and I want — no demand — I demand to know how I got here and I further demand that l be transported back immediately."
"Remember Rita/Lily, devout Moslem sister: she inject you with tranquilizers, give you swallow sleepy pills, and then put you in trunk of you car. There she drive across border," said Khalid Sheik Mohammed."
"Thanks for the info, Shake!" said Gabriele. "She always was a crazy; and crazies are always religious—no offense." Gabriele heard Osama's palaver in Arabic."
"Osama wants to know if you play volleyball with us." said Khalid Sheik
Mohammed. Khalid Sheik Mohamed smiled widely with his fangs.
"Volleyball?" asked Gabriele. "It's a bit strange, but what the fuck. Will it expedite me getting out of here?"
"No doubt! Osama want to be a good host while you here. He want to have fun with you."
"All right, if I must."
"Splendid," said Khalid Sheik Mohammed. "You must."
Osama slapped a desert mosquito that kept circling around his big nose. He flattened it on his face. Then his large tongue came out with the twitch of his face and the mosquito fell onto its waterbed coffin. No sooner had the Al Quaida mastermind eaten it than the Taleban cleric, Mullah Mohammed Omar, snuck up like Death in a brown hood and robe. The one eyed reptile then cut off Gabriele's head with his hatchet. Osama Bin Laden and Khalid Sheik Mohammed then began their game of volleyball. Mullah Mohammed Omar stood at the side of an invisible net counting score as the two other men volleyed the head over the line which he had dug into the dirt with a stick. There was talk of getting access to North Korean nuclear fuel rods, a strange epidemic that they had manufactured and proliferated in East Asia, and assassination plans for George Bush. The face of Gabriele's head kept staring at them while she volleyed about. Gabriele thought, "Talking politics and playing ball: these inane turbaned bearded little freaks can walk and chew gum at the same time."
Sang Huin suddenly woke up and went into the bathroom where he splashed some water on his face. His face looked heavier when he stared at it in the mirror. He realized that as much as he had hoped to hold onto youth, it was already shed and blowing around like fragile leaves within another time and space. He chastised himself. He was getting older by the hour and yet he had no career aspirations. His Bachelor's degree in music history was worthless. He probably had no special aptitude for teaching and even if he did, he doubted that being this native gypsy who appeared on people's doorsteps at their request counted him within the ranks of teachers. What did he know that he could teach? There was nothing he was trained for, he had no competitive strife, and he did not know of anything worth doing.
He heard the sound of rain and so he went to a window but could not see the substance of this harmonic pattering in external darkness. He listened to its orphic sounds, inventing reasons to go into this gentle falling of sky: milk for his cornflakes or batteries for his Walkman that he could purchase at the AM/PM or the 7-11.
He wrote: Gabriele put on her hat and sunglasses and went into the rain with a bag carrying her keys, passport, wallet, sketchbook, and charcoal pencil as well as makeup and a bottle of this newly acquired substance, perfume. She had been told that there was a park near her hotel where she could see the ruins but, despite floating on cloud nine, when she arrived there all she could see were the ruins of her own life.
Michael was lovingly amuck in her thoughts and since she would see him in a few hours she was in a heavenly abyss greater than having the license to do some Italian stud fishing in the pool of her hotel. She loathed how the chemicals of this infatuation had been detonated in the Leaning Tower of Gabriele causing major structural damage. Furthermore, the smoke of the aftermath distorted the world in such a fervent red mist. If she hadn't been on her guard or had been born a half-wit she could have easily believed in love and bliss at every turn. She, the master of reality, guessed that she was walking on a precipice: that very soon if she were to part with him for a week she would be there in the pangs of the travail of loneliness — a most lost and forlorn creature and an ignominy to herself.
And yet despite her higher authority and monitor wanting her to discard this man sooner rather than later, she regretted that she had resisted the idea of him getting a room in the same hotel where she was staying. She could have made his trip less lordly and more "in touch" with the common man if he had stayed with her instead of ensconcing himself in four-star hotels. Also she would have saved him money, not that saving money was so essential if he were indeed part of the wealthy Quest family of Albany.
She thought it was noble that he, a member of the wealthy class, had chosen to be a mere educator to help young minds. " In a sense," she thought, "we are both educators but he has chosen to not make business and money a priority whereas I yearn for money and things. I am just a fool who has gone from being impecunious to an upper middleclass snob — okay, a bitch with a servant even if I call her my assistant. And I am not free. I'm always fettered to canvas." She meant that as free as she was she always had to be unique, clever, and technically masterful at all times to have a reputation and to pay her bills—one of which was her tuition. She could have gained a "scholarship" but she did not care to have strings attached. She did not want to teach pathetic dilettantes in some basic class what a paintbrush and pallet looked like. She didn't want to sing to them, "This is the way we paint a pig, paint a pig, paint a pig. This is the way we paint a pig so early in the morning."
Perambulating through the park, attempting to conceptualize the internal and external reality she wanted to transpose to canvas, she became distracted by Italian lovers. Strangely, for her, she looked on them in joyful awe. Unlike in America when she had wanted to roller- blade through their interlinked arms or sweep away these lovers who littered the world with their specious illusions, she now appreciated them. These Italian couples abetted her fantasies of she and Michael strolling together under one umbrella instead of the solo half being under there now. She could sense that her rule in the crumbling and further leaning tower of Gabriele was faltering, floundering, and foundering. This, while she walked, was evident by her sporadic humming of Joni Mitchell's "Michael from Mountains."
Sitting on a bench in the gentle rain, she watched the heavy traffic and the shuffling array of Italians through the iron bars of one of the many walls that went around the park. It seemed to her that it all had the splendor and significance of love. She was not at ease in this rosy/fiery way of looking at all things and yet she couldn't quite see the harm in such elated perspectives. If all people were like Moonie cult members avoiding negativity wouldn't the illusion transform reality? If love were an illusion, she couldn't see how it was different from anything else. Each generation of people were passing shadows thrust out at dusk before being swept into darkness. Everything was an illusion although it seemed to her that some things were more real than others or at least less illusionary. Shadows were illusions of tangible things and perhaps these blocked rays of light or diminished forms were of something bigger. Was life just a pale version of what was really out there? She did not know. She was still waiting to get an email from God.
This inchoate friendship/ relationship was releasing her from the manacles of heavy, oppressive, and dragging thoughts and so in certain moments she couldn't see any reason to oppose it. Did she care to be as dour and sour as a spinster? Such women became more acrimonious with each new birthday.
Before she had time to go back to her hotel room with only a couple rough drafts to show for her efforts, they came for her in the park. Although he, like his son, preferred motion, Michael had persuaded his son to sacrifice a bit more of their time before her beloved alter of art. The taxi's meter was aggrandizing numbers for some time when they finally found her and took her away with them.
He believed that his closeness to Gabriele would increase if he showed himself as someone willing to enter her hallowed institutions — institutions he came here to see but on the fifth or sixth time these buildings were like visits to a mausoleum.
Only as they were trudging up more concrete steps did it occur to him that he should have asked her if she wanted to do something different. And yet when he looked at her smile that was so radiant from being linked to art and linking it to them he could tell that she would never find art museums boring let alone cloying the soul. He was the deferential gentleman, and his inveterately shy son tolerated the museums with little fidgetiness.
After they were inside for an hour she began to lean on him the way he liked women to do even though he had not let them do it for many years. But he detested how she was dressed. Like at the park, she was still wearing sunglasses and a hat that coaxed upon itself and draped down as if it had been thrown into the wash too many times. She would pull the glasses down to the tip of her nose when they came to a work of art, talk about it and what she knew about the artist (if anything), and then move them up her nose. He did not understand this flagrant violation of femininity. It was as if she wanted to be as inconspicuous and stealth as a bag lady for fear of being mistaken for Michelangelo. He had avoided the subject in the taxi under the belief that she would remove them once they were in the building.
"What is all this?" he at last asked as he pulled on the brim of her hat.
"Oh," she interjected and acquiesced wordlessly as she smoothed out her hair. He was pleased. She was transforming from a sallow and destitute street person back to an image more suited to be loved. Within the machinations of self-centered man, each saw the other as an "opportunity" and each one contemplated and re-contemplated what that opportunity was in vain.
He wanted to move about and change visual images as if he were in front of the television with his remote control, but she wanted to stare for a few moments at these portals into the entity.
When they were outside again she put on her sunglasses so as to counter these feelings of "tenderness" which could misdirect her down a long and dark labyrinth of tight one-way back-alley actions leading further into her own obscurity and to prostate positions at a man-god's feet. For he was already becoming a bit of an extension of her own little life and a medium for more intense pleasures that she could not reach alone, and so she put on glasses that he disapproved of so that she would not lose herself to him even in the most miniscule way.
As with the brain that made deals and compromises to reconcile contradictory opinions within itself, she knew that a woman would need to be deferential in a relationship that was that extension of herself. She told herself that she would try to be as little accommodating as possible. She smiled as if ready to laugh for the two of them at this stage were nothing. They were merely accidental traveling companions. She thought that even if they did become involved with each other the myopic perspective of a personal life and love might be nothing in reality but attempts at cell replication in this organ of the Earth in this organism of the universe. Such was the human predicament of not knowing anything of reality but one's own caprices. Her levity was transient. She became serious.
"Why do you wear those things?" He smiled. His tone was more bantering than condemning. If it had been altogether condemning she in her moody caprice would have walked away proudly, severing him without saying a word in that behavior typical to those whose youth had been besieged in the worst of ridicule.
"I don't know. Sometimes I want to be different. Sometimes the glare of the sun gives me a headache."
"You aren't feeling sick now, are you?"
"No."
"Then take them off."
"Ask me in a nice way."
"Please do it. Do it please. Do please it." He laughed.
Her womanliness flowed in and she took them off, begrudgingly eager to please and a little excited that someone should take an interest— even a critical interest— in the mundane aspects of her life. She felt sexual energy hit her in a large wave since two wills clashing against each other was a sexy thing. They followed Rick who had run toward a hotdog stand.
"Corndogs — won't you have one, Gabriele?" asked the former MF.
"I don't eat meat, you know."
"Well, you should, you know. Its why the brain size of man is so much bigger than his hominoid predecessors."
"I doubt that much evolution can come from a corndog. And if I had a bigger head it would probably explode all over the place. Wouldn't that be a pretty sight?"
" Maybe your grandpa slaughtered your pet pig at his farm— something made you this sensitive. I wouldn't know about that but I do know that as long as the killing isn't man to man it's just nature's checks and balances." She saw that truth lay there and not wishing to dismiss it , she nodded. She wondered if he had put too many limits on his theme. Maybe murder and wars were checks and balances of man on man too. He smiled with a flippant boyish mischievousness. "You know, by walking from the museum you have squashed at least a thousand ants and other creepy things, but you haven't given up walking from what I see. Survival of the fittest, Gabriele; and the fittest animal is the one with the most bills in his wallet. If the pig had come with a wallet and could out-spend me I'd be the one on the stick. Come on. Haven't you ever eaten a corndog before?"
"Well, yes. When I was a girl, I guess."
"That's probably the best life gets as an adult: secondhand experiences, reliving childhood." He ordered three corndogs and soft drinks from the vender and gave each their share. "Here!" She took the corndog and began to eat with them. She imagined the corndog as a vegetable. She imagined it as an important experience.
"Good?"
"Yes."
"More ketchup?"
"No."
"Rick?"
"Yes." And she watched the bloody substance squeezed onto the boy's phallic symbol.
"See, you enjoyed it as a girl until you thought that your pet pig would be next. Associationism."
"David Hume?" she chuckled.
"John Locke/David Hume—I'm not sure which. "
Rick had to go to the toilet and so Gabriele was left in awkwardness at being with Michael all alone. He grabbed her hand and led her to a bench. He kissed her and she liked it even though the nearness of him felt as if she were being stung by Houston fire ants. It was a sweet inimical sting. It was a contract of mouths and joint breath, of two becoming one but not of equal parts—more of a stronger company forcing a large competitor in a merger.
And the days of the week proceeded on—that day closing most eventfully on a surrey, a four seated bicycle, peddling and encircling Roman sculpture at the Borghese Garden, and then watching a mock chariot match in a field known as the Circus Maximus. The ensuing days were of seeing the bones of 400 monks at the Cappuchin Cemetery, going to the ancient Pantheon temple of the gods with its open portal to the sky, sitting in outdoor restaurants near fountains still spurting from ancient aqueducts, St. Peter's Basilica in Vatican City, and the catacombs. Their final whole day was filled with Etruscan art, a return to the Coliseum, another meandering around the ancient statues at the Borghese Garden, and back to Laneur Parco di Luna amusement park for a ferris wheel ride and trampolines. For all her brooding on life she realized that such contemplation was just hiding from it. She thought that motion and community were natural and having opposed them all along had been foolish. Like diving into a pile of leaves, these simple pleasures were transcendence into the entity. When she was again alone at the airport showing her boarding pass she walked to the plane like a propped up cadaver.