The meeting happened. The aunt, who was usually such a martinet, asked about her niece's weight gain as if it could be anything other than pregnancy. Choosing chocolate as a more viable lie than a tumor Gabriele lied in speech but Peggy lied in belief. Worse, when pressed on the issue, Gabriele promised that she would come back for a visit and seek employment in Kansas. It was a successful meeting of active but coerced lies and passive, cajoled mendacities. There was a facade of feigned smiles throughout the day despite a sense of consternation and loss. It was a day of many awkward and reticent moments of not knowing quite what to say.

Now she was to be awarded a Master's degree in art history. For her it was an eventless day without ceremony. It was a normal day of putting up new wallpaper in one bedroom and then cleaning up to help Hispanic Betty with dinner but interrupting the latter task from incompetence and the need to drive the boys to little league practice. Even until now there were no cards or special letters sent to her, and this was as she liked it. She did not need anyone to congratulate her because she did not feel that there was anything to be praised for. She might have learned the history of art but she had lost the sense of herself as an artist. The cracks of her damp coldness had been filled as complacently as a warm moss. In family there was no discontent with the world and within these heavenly cellars all else seemed musty and art the specious delusions of crack addicts.

Heretofore most of her paintings had such a still contemplative depth within the glint of the eyes of prostitutes and street people who could pull down lightning; movement had the fading lines of ripples in a pond; hard movements belied the simple pleasures; pallid colors delineated the richness of form in a world of vanquished color; friendship was portrayed with discomfited and inexplicable sense of betrayal; people were stoic mannequins straining about in contorted action and exhibiting eyes of consternation at being in ceremony and societal roles that were not what they had imagined them to be; Antarctica was a resplendent distant background in contrast to the war ravaged Middle East with its oil wells ablaze; and in stores where customers headed for scanners with an incessant array of things, these people were as blue as waves, curled and dashing as foaming breakers, in movement seemingly happy but in practice discontent. Sometimes the dominant colors were tawny but pert, ruddy and pale, and recalcitrant but with lament. Often her protagonists possessed the ideal curves of Raphael paintings and her antagonists had the angled linear depth of El Greco portraits or of distant cars. Her protagonists had a resistance against the social instinct; but she had succumbed to its truth like an insect to the light of a lamp. She was flitting from one specious light bulb to that of another: now not able to contemplate and finding sitting still to paint a torturous sensory deprivation; and now with endorphins and dopamines uncorked, she was oozing in the unbearable lightness of being.

Chapter Thirty-Two

By night she would lie with him in this hunger of flesh, pleasure, and merger; and after the cessation of sexual intimacies she would still feel undulations. She would snuggle up to his body and drowsily sink onto his chest while his head turned away from her, parting to other dreams and other illusions since the fire for this one had burnt itself out. The odors of his body would merge into her, and they furthered her illusions of a metamorphosis into something greater than the concoction of reason and the attempts at making sense of the world, which had to be done alone —a sense that she engraved onto the interior walls of her brain the way the ancient Egyptians chiseled eulogies in the tombs of the pharaohs. The smells of his body brought to her a pleasant titillation if not love of all things that were caught randomly by the magnet of her pondering. As she snuggled there she was reassured that there were possibilities of loving the world in ways she had never imagined by extending herself to him and becoming something different than a stuffed polar bear with the stiff arms that the factory of the human race mutantly created.

Then they would sleep some moments and his chest would no longer be her life buoy at all but a magic carpet ride or a Shuttle flight as gentle for her as if she were an insect on an eagle. She would be taken to where one's head might brush against the stratosphere before descending in an arch back into wakefulness. Upon them both awakening there would be frivolous pillow talk. He would sometimes narrate snippets of his life in a cathartic random response to whatever idea preceded it. In some ways he was like those who could not tolerate the impersonal aspects of self-consuming jobs and would affirm their existence to a psychologist or a priest at a confessional. She learned of the attitudes that drove his interaction with the world—a family's overemphasis of money, which made him become an educator, and yet a belief that owning and operating a business was one's only means of success. He was cognizant how the force of one's family caused one to emulate and oppose its attitudes and had a sense of humor about this, which she admired.

Often these talks were of irrelevant and petty matters that were amusing on the pillow but so easily forgotten off of it. One time he asked her what she would be doing the following day; she told him that she had to go to Wal-Mart to buy the boys some underwear and socks and some paint for the deck, and that she might look around for some clothes for herself at a mall; and then he expressed how once a cleaning lady who was doing her work in the men's bathroom in the mall had caused him to be unable to relieve himself. She giggled like a schoolgirl at a slumber party. She reciprocated by telling him that in "Bang-COCK" cleaning ladies "go in and out of bathrooms with their mops with impunity." She teased him that maybe there were these ostensible cleaning ladies everywhere whose real duties were to cause inhibition, clogging, and insecurity within the male gender. From this her mind took a tortuous and serious linking of ideas. She began to ruminate that society was upside down. Cleaning ladies in men's bathrooms, forced to smell urine, soap, and bleach all day should be paid the most and that they who were the benefactors of the world like presidents and prime ministers should be paid the least. She argued that only then, when equality was gained and each person given either money or admiration as compensation for their work, would the world be a just and harmonious place. He laughed, thinking it was another joke, but she was deadly serious.

And yet once he told her something significant. He told her that his mother was not his mother at all but his aunt; that his real mother, suffering from post partum depression, suffocated his baby brother in the bath water, dumped him, Michael, in the bracken waters of an abandoned well at her parents' farm, and hung herself in a shed. After the funeral, his aunt was urged to come to them from her home in a small Italian town. Gabriele felt an empathy as deep as the gods for she too had been run over in family which for her made hugging, touching and feeling emotions such an alien plain to this date. She too had been recalcitrant and had done antipodal actions to thwart this Aunt Peggy and Uncle Jake but for all her freedom the actions had been emulation or rebellions against this absurd, vague memory of family. Thinking of him at the age of three clinging to rope and pail she knew that she loved him.

Hate was everywhere. It was the striving to exist and to have a dominant importance in the inconsequential affairs of man. Just as the provincial Korean bravado within Sang Huin or Shawn had made him so mercilessly obdurate in administering justice against his sister and her pregnancy, so the Americans camouflaged innate aggression behind terms like axis of evil, rogue country harboring weapons of mass destruction, links to Al Queida, and liberation for the Iraqi people. They and their preemptive strikes, they and their selective targeting with improved smart bombs, were killing and harming thousands of civilians after evoking psychological trauma in this failed shock and awe campaign. They, by heat and explosion, decimated myriad soldiers who either chose to be such to secure a decent livelihood or were conscripted with threats; and yet the Americans melted their bodies in this internecine campaign sending them up amongst the other gasses the way thousands of their civilians had been melted within the World Trade Center towers. The Saddam Hussein regime, for all its internal atrocities, had posed no new threat to the world. It just had the potential for potential and this was enough because the days were dark indeed. One group of tyrants and their sadistic entourage holding a nation hostage for decades had to be the example for the capabilities of their virulence was greater than that envisaged by Al Queida — at least so the George Jr. administration, for all its cowboy stuttering, still glibly and volubly conveyed.

He thought this as Saeng Seob sat down in the living room and said, "Can you really think with that thing on?" Sang Huin knew that he couldn't—at least not well—but the television was their child from which conversation was begotten and extant. Without it their intimacy would have exhausted their conversation long ago.