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.