"Thanks. So are you."
"What do you do here?"
"Just teach English."
"What about you."
"Work for the Korean Herald."
Chapter Thirty-Four
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."