In one perspective she believed that these circumstances not so much governed by choice turned out to be quite liberating: the lackadaisical dereliction of motherhood which came about from that love of a man, and the divestiture of her life in Sapporo the result of a divorce from him. Within that perspective she was a child humbling herself to circumstance as if it were the mandate of a parent or god who would supply routine to process her directionless whims. In such a frame of mind she would think thoughts similar to this: "It doesn't have to be seen that way — as child abandonment—that sort of thing. Only simpletons would judge me or any other thoughtful woman considering and doing the same. This taking off of a role that does not fit me is just a disrobing in dawn to take a shower — and who is to say that my departure is not a predestined conclusion? I really didn't take off anything. Adagio is the one who took me off and took off to Kansas. Then I took the flight to Tokyo and then — What does any of it matter anyway? I haven't bothered to put on the mother garb equating it as garbled garbage but who is to say that it is not better for the boy in the long term? I would need a lower IQ to constrict myself in instinctual roles like a content biological robot. It is no more preposterous to believe in fate allowing me this contemplative time than it is to think that slipping $50.00 in a homeless person's cup would release him from pain and vice, that altruism perpetuates good, or that a loving god allows planes to slam into the World Trade Center Towers. If I am bad the creator of time and the universe is worse. Maybe any being that thinks outside the box would be perceived as bad by these simpletons — even God were these simpletons not so simple as to fear thinking Him evil." The failure of Her Vastness, Ms. Sangfroid, in motherhood and marriage the result of an adulteration in mixing, had been more than a bit discombobulating at the times when they occurred and they were even discombobulating now; but then and now she tried to address them as external details like an uncomfortable raincoat that she would wear for a time during a storm which she wouldn't be able to wait out. Since that time when she was a girl watching her reticent father's rejuvenation from a commune with himself in his solitary walks on the beach she had sought this acme of aloneness. Here it was, albeit in a warmer environment than the Antarctic camp she envisaged for herself, and she shouldn't have been happier.
In a sense this disconnection that had her abscond across the border like a fugitive at large was as harmonious as the breakers which she would watch for an hour each late afternoon on the Tijuana beach: harmonic and not missing a beat; the mesmerizing splashes cleansing the conscience; the optimistic fizz; and the inconsequence of her seemingly insouciant or reckless actions when measured against this seemingly infinite and permanent body of water. The solitary disconnection of the lonely sea was the reflection of her self and together they whispered inscrutable truths to her consciousness; and surely if she needed anything to comfort her, she needed the Pacific Ocean. But storm clouds often coalesced around her diurnal sunsets on the beach before dissipating into the desert city's heat, seagulls seemed to have a wailingly ominous sotto voce as they spiraled about in the winds, and her thoughts dwelled on this Berlin wall which sliced through the Mexican-American shore. The drab wall with its painted words of "El Mundo partido" reinforced by a picture of the broken egg shell of a world became uglier and more piercing as gigantic stakes or prison bars standing out of the water. Each time that she saw these divided territorial waters they constantly reminded her that the city and her departure — really her quasi-belief that circumstances dictated her withdrawal — were far from an oasis. She would recall the words of Herodotus that "No man steps into the same water twice" and this would aggravate a restlessness in her restfulness prompting her to arrange more frequent meetings with Hilda than she would have done otherwise. Through socializing, she hoped to get a reprieve from the bites of conscience that came upon her as stealth as a vampire.
Certainly Tokyo to Tijuana hadn't been a gentle transition with serendipitous fate disgorging onto a life the way that it did. The molten heat had changed the landscape of the self and as its only cartographer she, a divorcee who regretted having ever mixed with a man, was now beginning to map out who she was and it wasn't easy.
Now with Hilda at an outdoor table of a lesbian pub, both eating their nachos and cheese and drinking their tequila diluted in Sprite, her happy demeanor was a little bit affected. As Hilda renamed the food ("tomales" henceforth to be called "tofemales") it bordered on giddiness. Happy as she was or was not on this day of her birth, she could not deny the fact that the ineluctable stirring of memory was scathing her. Some late nights in her solitary bed it was more of a lacerating pierce of claws. Before the divorce she would at times wake up from a dream of a tank running down her son and pulverizing him into layers of permafrost. After the divorce there were these same dreams but with him pulverized into dust; and they were mixed with those of finding herself naked in Isetan Department Store — Japanese clerks, doormen, and beautiful bowing welcome-ladies all staring at her in consternation until an Ikebana instructor in the flower shop threw a blanket over her that was woven in American dandelions.
The dreams were not from guilt — or at any rate not much conscious guilt. She told herself that a little responsible compunction was fine for it reminded her of others' unfulfilled wishes that in an ideal world she would have liked to see herself obtain for them but further guilt was unwarranted. She didn't even believe in guilt — a goddess balancing so many perspectives and antithesis perspectives as she was. Sure, the ideal for her son would have been for her to be a Betty Crocker/Dr. Spock hybrid and to give herself exclusively to motherhood and child development. However, responsible as one should be to others how could she have disregarded the strange novel sounds that splashed in her imagination? If happiness was not in devouring sensual experiences that brought about pleasure but being a kind, contemplative juggler of human perspectives (watching, meditating, and loving all passerby) surely this realm of the divine that separated gods from self-centered beasts could not be willfully disregarded. Still, even she was a social creature. Despite her cold independent aloofness she could have had a self easily demarcated by others — a self that to ever be real at all needed to see itself beyond others' use of it. For someone like her who was infinite and without parameters, pinning oneself onto a man's last name was the action of being Mrs. Nobody and so this Kato and Michael relationship had been the magic pill restoring her to herself after a bout of a needy illness called love.
That being the case she shouldn't have been happier. So the envisaged Antarctic seals and walruses were really myriad Mexicans wallowing languishingly in another overpopulated city. So, the only penguin she saw from the outdoor table of the lesbian pub was a green uniformed motorcycle cop trudging as quickly as he could in his boots toward a public restroom where he might lawfully urinate. So the unadulterated snowy landscape, untouched and untainted by human hands, was lucky to have very few palm trees as deeply rooted in hard clay soil as it was — soil arid as desert sand. And peaceful Camp Gabriele in Antarctica turned out to be TJ, a city filled with drug addicts, drug lords and perhaps one or two intoxicated goddesses like herself.
Tonight with Hilda, shaking her booty in the pub's adjacent lesbo- disco hall as if both had anything outside of contempt for men in their minds, She drank more booze like all goddess predecessors from Hera and Aphrodite to Shirley McClain.
Her afternoon had been spent depicting miscellaneous individuals waiting in a queue in front of the immigration building which was the portal to their jobs in San Ysidro or San Diego; and from there, like a beggarly Indonesian caricature artist instead of the successful artist that she was, she would sell her paintings on the street "for nickels and dimes," (each a hundred pesos or some such sum if subtraction for policemen extorting money were figured into the calculation). She addressed such policemen in a taciturn manner with hard stony supercilious eyes made all the harder by that male look of wanting to fuck the Gringa with the attitude.
Head and body spinning separately on the dance floor with a shot of pure tequila in her hands ready to be devoured so she could be devoured in its fire (the base instincts of mankind wanting to mutate an individual into flames), in one moment she was telling herself how relieved she was to no longer be the inane thing in this little box of the personal life and the next moment she was reminiscing about the past foolishly. She thought of romantic walks with Michael through cherry orchards; their long hours in partnership at the store; she, her husband, and Atsushi Kato eating sushi, soba, mizu soup, and okanimiyaki in museum restaurants; she and Kato making deformed sumo wrestlers out of ice; she and Kato's sister scrubbing each other's backs in a sento; and of course Kato leading them to sites and to her newly founded interest in the native people of Japan, the Ainu.
But her best memories of then, as with all sundry memories in general, were of being alone for she was always trying to squeeze her head and neck through a small portal to the entity. She was always trying to glimpse ideas and still depth beyond this world and deep within the self. Back then there were solitary ponderings in summer walks along the coast of the Sea of Japan. There, walking on prodigious cement slabs shaped like tacks, which stopped the erosion of the beach by high tide, she turned toward ocean pointing to America and contemplated all. She took long walks in street markets and along shipyards, each street of the metropolis smelling like fish. She was alone then and it had been good. Now it was dirt and pinatas; colina deserts and an eternal sun; and Mexican drunks, beggars, and vendors along the bridge that went over the contaminated river. As the cool air seductively concealed the breadth of its heat in the dirty desert called Tijuana, so she shrouded herself in a sense that she was free from the powers of men, sexuality, mythology, motherhood, and all human concern that gnawed into one's entrails.