"That's right. We bothered with you when no one else would so how dare you call your uncle a bad name. We loved you."
"Your love for me, your niece, was to approach me like a servant girl. I dare because it is my telephone call at my expense and I'll call anyone I want and remind him, her, or them that they are old farts if they are indeed old farts." Gabriele chuckled. So easily did she amuse herself and how little did anyone else move her. "And if anyone tries to finger my clit the way your husband did they should be happy to be called old farts."
"Shut up! Shut up now! Shut that wicked mouth! This is my telephone and you talk to me respectfully or I'll hang up on you right now. Your son hates you, you know. Always talks of hating you everyday — sickening but probably for good reason; and we got the effects of your unwed mothering experiment — a kitchen in flames and one wall in the living room —"
Gabriele hung up the phone and paced the floors like a mad woman. She was infuriated and yet ecstatic to have at last treated her aunt to the contempt of words. Virtually all other times had merely been cold and supercilious looks. Still it was a hollow victory so she set about destroying all of her photographs—those that she had with her and those that she pulled out of a lock box at Daiko Ginko. She stripped away each plastic sheet that contained them — relating to Michael and Nathaniel or not — and threw them away. She did that for all but one. The exception was a close-up of herself and her mother. Her mother's eyes were sparkling and, within the middle-aged face, decades earlier could be seen. Gabriele, who was three, was standing next to her near their home in Bucyrus, Missouri. It was a link. It was a connection. It didn't exist any longer but she couldn't release it any more than if she had been an immortal proprietor of the heavens.
The washer began to spin and kick like a drowning animal caught and fighting to get out. Its squeaking was wild with its vibration but in tone alone it was similar to the calm, mechanical chirping sounds of pedestrian streetlights in Sapporo.
She had a child and yet a whole realm of connectedness had escaped her. There were only failed possibilities now. Nathaniel hated her throughout most of the year before she "abandoned" him. She had felt it. Now, he had all the reason in the world to hate her. She looked out to the distant machines—the medley of Mexican people folding dry clothes; putting wet ones in their carts, seated and bored; reading newspapers; watching the television that beamed over their heads or falling into the rhythms of dives that their clothes made in the dryers; and those purchasing the tokens, soap, and bleach that they would put into their washers. How human and divine they were! She felt cheered and soothed to see their distinct faces. They wandered around lost, too. They yearned for something more, as she did, if only an empty dryer. They yearned to hear the morning buses that would excrete their dark toxins and take them to their agendas. They yearned to see the morning sun and the little barefoot boy in one of the distant colonias staring as the calafia (mini-bus) and the water truck with its men yelling "El Vagon!" moved up a gigantic hill in a pueblo of polvo and desert. They yearned for the exchange of ideas that would pull them out of the sense of being vanquished to the misery that was part of one's fate. But they were also, in their own limited ways, capable of being Bin Ladens responsible and exuberant about killing thousands of Americans. Maybe in just a thousand angry looks toward gringos who purportedly had better lives than themselves there might be something destructively vile in them. They, like all perfidious males, no doubt followed feelings of love (homosexual or heterosexual bliss) abandoning earlier partners who were no longer exotic dopamine inducers. Maybe, she thought, the vile was inside herself. If the English language had a word for hating men she felt it now and she knew it was vile.
She tried the best that she could to pull out of herself but the self needed to burn away both the past and the pain. Still she tried to ameliorate these feelings in reason. "So, my Ex has a gay lover…So I am dismissed…What of it?…The marriage wasn't real anyway; and Michael does not belong less to Kato just because I once had a signature on a marriage certificate." She couldn't see how anyone belonged to anyone else, anyhow; and recalled that throughout most of her life she had been glad it was that way. She tried to let the morning grace her with its fullness of life. She thought of Tijuana's tamale and hot chocolate vendors of early morning, the restaurant workers and the newsstand operators, the pharmacy managers and the street salesmen. They did not insatiably yearn for more to make themselves happy. They accepted reality's mandate that there would be no aspirations, no prosperity, and no urgency. There would just be standing alone seven days a week allowing the stimulus of sights, sounds, and smells to fill the senses and rescue the mind that tortured itself from the knowledge that there was deterioration and death, brutality and natural disasters, apathy and injustice, personal defects that were both mental and physical, and yearnings for closeness and permanency in the midst of void. She did not want to think of her husband—her ex-husband, the fact that she did not feel as if she had a last name (Quest or Sangfroid no longer suiting her, and "Bassete," the surname of Michael's family before his legal change of it for himself, not doing anything for her either), and that she was now ripped from the life of Kato and the imagery of the Orient.
She put her clothes in a cart; and then following her feelings of hunger, she pushed the cart in front of the row of stools that were near a counter. She ordered a quesadilla and glanced at the cylindrical twisting carcass on a spit that would be used for tacos. She listened to the sizzling savagery of pieces of meat dying a second death within their own grease and slow Mexican music that moved her like the blowing fronds of palms.
Still her redundant thoughts reeled across the screen of her brain like the repeated broadcasts of the two jets crashing into the towers. She had gone with him to Japan on the assumption that the boys would soon follow. She even made up her mind numerous times that she would obtain them regardless of Michael's objections and put them in an international school. She was planning to contact Rick's sister but the months went by so fast. It wasn't much of an excuse. She had to admit that. Had the two of them really neglected to contact the boys all this time —she with hers and he with his? They had; for they wanted to find a part of themselves not linked to them. For him it was the success of this business enterprise and obviously to engage in the taunting of his untapped homosexual fantasies toward these boyish Asians. Such was done within this nice ostensible marriage and partnership with his wife. And for her it was the specious believability of that rush of energy that was the suppliant groping of love and to find a less lonely version of happiness in a group which together were humanity's greatest bondage. Such abandonment was done under the ostensible label of "demonstrating a creative and independent existence" to her son.
Seated at the counter she felt a contentedness in being near a beautiful woman around her age. She even found a contentedness in hearing the meat crackle as if behind the apparent truth of the injustice of the powerful overtaking the less-abled in the slaughtering of its life there was another truth that this was the design and essence of life with a cryptic purpose that perhaps she would know with a little bit more age and maturity.