"She's your betrothed," said the priest. "What do you want done."
"Let His will be done. She hides her profanity, promiscuity, and obscenities behind art. She never admits anything," he whined sobbingly. "I don't know what to do with her."
"Apple her?" asked the security guards.
"Apple her!" reiterated the priest.
The cooking staff, under their burkas, began to fire apples and soon everyone within the room appled her skull.
"Why couldn't you have just drawn still-life or landscapes?" whined Michael.
"Join your Turkish friend from long ago!" shouted the Ayatollah- garbed priest.
Gabriele was now lying on the floor with her forehead bleeding profusely. Still she could eke out faint utterances and so she projected her words like a song. "You wouldn't have loved me if I hadn't been somebody— you thought it was a thrill to see one of whoredom reach stardom. It was like being in the Astrodome. Like any carnal male, a woman's glitter is to your liking—it is your pleasure dome but to me it is not striking."
Then she dreamed that there was an anniversary party, which Michael held to commemorate himself and the longevity of his schools and stores. There, in her home on the day of the party, she noticed that blonde-headed, frosty-pigmented man with the unmemorable name sitting there in his own separate space within her living room. He had large, thoughtful, eyes; and to her he was exotic and unpretentiously wholesome like latent mushrooms in a vast field. He was silent in the noise; and she loved this superhuman trait as she had loved it of her father—he who used to part from her on the beach and pursue the silent wading of his nothingness into the vastness of the entity, he who had been her Parmenides despite having long ago abandoned her as one who had indifferently tossed out grass seed. Having fought in war and having foolishly devoted his life to contrived ideals of patriotism, these life scatterings nonetheless made her father into the pensive German that he was. She had silently abhorred him all these years for his neglect and for severing her innocence in the coerced witnessing of the Turk's execution; and yet everyday she was grateful to him. Not only had her time in Turkey made her a snug albeit hurting occupant of self- containment within Fort Gabriele but his hard high browed arrogance had inspired the high stain glass windows of her facade from which she observed all earthly creatures below. Also it was from him that these sanguine characteristics had been hers. As she looked over the guests to that serene bit of nature within the smoke and voices, she saw eccentric greatness within him. She knew that his philosophy was hers: for those individuals who could accept silence and not cling to others they would never be lost from themselves; and that whoever gained the bliss that was there in solitude, descending within one's own fathoms without inordinate hungers and movement, he or she would be one of the savants who moved perception. An insect moving on an ambulatory man in ignorance of his movements; a moving universe that does not jolt the self-centered movement of its ignorant beings—so the savants seemed not to move while they carried all these insectual entities with them.
She dreamed that because of the potential inaccuracy of first impressions, she was reluctant to instantly accept her own favorable preliminary conclusions and yet the frosty man with the unmemorable name seemed to her as so ingenuous. Within the cigarette smoke, the wine, and the smiles, he was not eager to take his turn in the continual sallies of one monkey-man attempting to conquer another one by being the wittiest of all Neanderthals. He just smiled a contrived smile onto the games that these barbarians played with each other. He smiled the way all brilliant people had to do.