"The skies clothed the babies of these ingenuous savages just as it did their naked mothers and fathers. As I said before, no clothes and no shame for them for they were kind and their consciences were pure. They spoke the truth as they perceived it at the moment they spoke it and no- one resented each other because they understood that each was just trying to assemble ideas together the way prisoners in a dungeon used anything as platforms that would edge them closer to the window." At this point she did not understand her own writing so she adlibbed entirely. "A given baby had the world as his own. He did not cry in the night like a baby in need of a night light since all the books created from previous centuries…all those mysterious words in all the pages from the books created from previous centuries and shipped to Atlantis…all those mysterious words in all the pages from the books of 'truth' since the beginning of time (books seen as irrelevantly reverent, and maliciously deceiving fables) were burnt each night in his world; and this did add a small twinkle in his eyes. Yet it was Mother Earth who cradled him, after his abandonment at birth and nourished him- -" Composed pell-mell and visibly entangled in nonsense, she felt that the latter part of her myth was ruined in sententiousness and knew that she was no longer believing that their words had any truth whatsoever. That being the case, she stopped babbling. When she saw that the baby was asleep she put him in the crib, disrobed, took a shower, and got dressed. She turned on the television but realizing it was Sunday and that church programming had usurped her exorcise regimen she felt disappointed. Not knowing what to do with the day, she looked out of the window for a period of minutes that seemed like hours. A car came through the trailer park lot mixing the water with dirt. One nearby puddle looked like chocolate milk. She thought to herself that she needed to warm some baby formula. Instead, she sat down in her director's chair, stared out into nothingness, and listened to tapping that seemed more like rain. Her thoughts rambled on: "800,000 African children die from dysentery each year and yet the news is about the continuing air strikes against Iraq as if American victory were something other than a foregone conclusion." At least, the bully that it was, America was a democracy and Gabriele, as hard as she tried, could not keep herself from feeling a bit fortunate to live there. She found it somewhat comforting that the murky morality of such engagements was debated by senators and talk show hosts. Protecting Kuwait or securing the free flow of oil seemed an easy riddle to figure out. Prior to the war, what American had ever known of the existence of Kuwait outside of geography teachers? Her idea was not so novel. It was the same type of thought of commonplace dissenters but, after examining the idea, it was also that of her own. This was her last thought as she fell asleep.

She dreamed that her son was the neighbor woman, Rita (who thought of herself as Lily), with blonde hair and glasses, and that a nuclear bomb had gone off somewhere nearby Ithaca—maybe Salem for the strangers on the street, bewildered and whispering to themselves, kept mentioning the name of that city. The city of Ithaca was filled with rumors that the event had occurred and the rumors were loud in an atmosphere where everything else was silent and seemed to take on a texture of emptiness. The rumors seemed tactile and to have a visible substance that was ochre but thick as a heavy fog. Although they were no louder than whispers, these whispers were cries of bewilderment albeit softer than agony since they could not be fully articulated for lack of any definite knowledge.

"They have shut us off from knowing," said one young woman desperately.

"Sure," said a man with an Appalachian draw. "The damn people up there higher than God! They don't want us to know what has happened for fear that we'll fear others are comun'… maybe make some phone calls!"

"Are we to believe this craziness we are hearing? We live in civilized times.
This can not be," said another female voice. Her accent was of a New Jerseyite.

A red headed woman, next to Gabriele on a street corner, said to a grayish woman that looked like a cat, "If the president is with them on this it is true." The words in the typical New York accent for some reason seemed the most tangible element of the dream, greater than its visionary components, and the most worthy truth. Gabriele backed away from the cat, and wished for death rather than to bear this horror where not even the surety of the death of thousands or millions could be known, whether or not the people of Ithaca would eventually be radiated, or whether or not there was indeed a conspiracy to keep them ignorant that more missiles were coming. "Let others die but not me; let other cities perish but not ours" was a dominant thought in everyone's head. It was so loud and everyone could hear it no matter how hard they pretended otherwise. She loathed that wretched instinct of self-interest that was innate in a being to make it survive, prosper, and propagate dynastically. She thought to herself that survival of the fittest truly played out in all things and selfishness was its impetus. The meek, when not uneducated and famished, were so sensitive to injustice and disparity that they became neurotic and disturbed. The truly meek were too gentle and reticent to muster the selfishness to bring forth offspring, and they inherited nothing outside of their own coffins. She also loathed that small portion of her sociable will, which stooped to what they were saying, now, with complete conviction in the streets. She heard one elderly man in particular. He was like an older version of someone in her past but the dream, which was a reality of its own, did not directly make that correlation. "Come on now. Let's not panic. It's been hot in Salem with no wind. Maybe the radiation will just stay there. What little breeze there is probably is just in the upper stratosphere. My son's a weatherman, you know." The elderly man in thick glasses pointed out Gabriele's Lily shaped son as his own. "He says that not feeling a breeze means no breeze at all except way up there in the stratosphere. The radiation is below that. If it moves slightly it will go to New York City. It will never come this way. You can count on it so let's not panic." It was a hope for self- preservation. It was a hope of the deaths of millions of people rather than themselves who resided in Ithaca. She saw the cat woman crying and a man petting her back. He was comforting her compassionately; but like one who does not wish to spend resources on exploratory surgery to find out whether or not the lymphatic cancer had spread in an aging pet, the man turned away from the woman. Gabriele could see him pursuing his own private minutes of self-pity and rage deep in lost, silent eyes.

Then the cat rubbed itself against her face and she awakened, recalling that the elderly man in the dream was a distorted version of the lover who had made her into this child's mother. She had not been meek when she went to Houston to pursue a graduate degree. She had hungered after the assistant professor because he had been as inaccessible as Antarctica. She had successfully obtained him and this was due to the fact that people loved those of a strong will who seemed immortal in inexhaustible energy, swinging their machetes beyond diffidence and forging paths and realities boldly. This sort of energy being erotic to them, they were attracted, mesmerized, and orphic to the id?e fixe, which was nothing other than everlasting youthful vigor. The assistant professor, yearning for immorality, had coupled with her. It had been a successful wish and a successful coupling because from it she had gotten pregnant. With her sleeve, she wiped her face that sparkled in greasy sweat, and then gently cradled the cat to her face. The cat scratched her and leaped away to where it once again hid itself behind the books.

Gabriele's cheek bled but still she did not kill the cat. She didn't know the reason her hands, pulsating in rushes of vengeful energy, did not catch it and crush it in her fingertips. At that moment she did not know her reasons for anything. She tried to stop the bleeding with the back of her hand, for the bib near her feet was unusable since it was fuming in vomit. As she looked at the swab of blood that was there on her hand she felt a void careen into her (or herself careening into the void), heard a parents' declaration to depart from her, and again felt the impact of being rolled on by a tank. She imagined the cat deliberately paralyzing itself in the actions of the prey it had often witnessed. She imagined it praying to the earth for a delay of its execution and subsequent decomposition by having the earth force compassion on Gabriele, the executioner. She imagined it praying to the earth that magically brought it into life to shrink its size into something so much smaller than a cat in order to be at all. She did not know why it happened. She just did not kill the cat but instead watched it masquerade itself as dead. Gabriele picked up the cat by the neck and the four eyes met. The cat did not swipe. It concentrated on cowardly prayers and of remaining limp. Gabriele tossed this other "criatura." It landed on top of a book on Freud on the lowest part of her bookshelf.

Chapter Nine

The reasons for the specific elements of a myth (the cryptic reason why a given culture might have chosen a serpent god or the son of god over the sun god) are ineffable, and all attempted explanations of a myth are mythical. Scholars of myths compare religions to find that spiritual element that links and validates the human search (that search to find that which is everlasting within the brevity of a human's lifespan); and historians of recorded cultures thread together implication, meaning, and motive from a few tangible and often random happenings.