"Five."
"You said something?"
"Huh? Oh yeah, it was nothing. Sorry, I guess I woke you—mumbling aloud as I was like an old woman."
"Wake me in a half hour. I forgot to set my alarm."
"PLEASE wake me up, don't you mean?"
He chuckled sleepily on the border of wakefulness. "Don't go back to sleep and forget." He rolled onto his side in a solitary departure, and now it was just a back that was before her. It didn't even seem to be his. It was just a man's back and it didn't have an owner.
She pushed back the curtains of the window and watched the heavy traffic moving along a narrow stretch of road. She knew that she was also just one of the horde moving up and down the streets searching for something while, in arrant foolishness or within august foibles, claiming others and being claimed by them.
She deliberated on sleep and dreams, that mysterious enigma which she had wondered about so often. It dawned on her that sleep was the burning of subconscious fuel—it was the burning of myriad crowding and conflicting whims within the confines of the brain so that some type of civil existence might prevail.
She thought of her dream in which she waited for the Russian near the monkeys. She wondered if she was like the specimens in Harlow's monkey experiments. From a German upbringing, had she not become the misfit monkey—the one that had been denied the touch of a mother or surrogate mother and so always kept herself at a distance in the social world. But she did not abuse her offspring like the misfit monkey. No, she had given to her child adequate enough touch even though touch, in her younger days had been so repugnant when imposed upon her without payment. She took a shower and went to work like all other mental prostitutes.
It was her sixth day as a replacement for a cashier in the foreign food store. The other cashier had been fired because of three consecutive days in which she had attended to a sick child instead of coming to work. Gabriele did this for 12 hours and then around 9:30 p.m. as she began to close down her cash register in the habitual manner of ringing up all sales Michael began to engage in small talk to pacify the other cashiers. He thanked them for their hard work. He told them that as indispensable as they were to the Arkansas mother company they were always welcome to be with the sprawling newborn in Sapporo. He said that the store in Sapporo would never shut down and it would eventually become triple the size of this one.