'I see what I've always seen: shadows. Plenty of shadows—yours, hers, all the men she was with.' He was meaning love making in its full-animated obscenity of interlinked private parts and hedonism, the fundamentals of life."
Then in dreams like this he would wake up, think of this all too familiar presence, and doubt if she were his mother at all. As far as he knew she could just be an imposter after the other one's disappearance. And on his pillow he would again think about the flashlight in the cave and the hotdog in the bun jokes that he was beginning to hear in the locker rooms of adolescent and pre-adolescent boys. Precocious as he was in firsthand knowledge of some sexual issues he was still curious about more normal arenas.
Sang Huin told himself that incessantly telling himself things within the contemplation of his creation was a bit strange; that the facile, tangible thrusts of decadent titillation that he gained briefly in the shadows of the dark corridors of saunas instead of more tangible long-term relationships—even with their intangible emotions and invisible bridges of minds—was stranger yet; but strangest of all was how instead of being with a girlfriend on a roller coaster less than a kilometer away, he just stayed on his hill of dirt like any transient, the luftmensch that he was. He looked at his feet, then the dark approach of a mass of clouds and the kite. One chose any spot to sit in based upon comfort and security, and to him remoteness was both. Like his defunct father, who often sat silently in front of the Weather Channel, using this favored television station to facilitate a comatose withdraw after his daughter's death, so he watched the kite which seemed like a piece of himself drifting further and further into the unobtainable. Its erratic movements and the emergence of dark clouds with peculiar shapes seemed like a wordless oracle.
'For six long months she sensed Nathaniel's stares as eerie as a lone plastic cup rolling on an empty pavement in a breeze; and even when she went to sleep it was with her, often setting her forehead into a seat as she slept. For her, sometimes alone in her bed or with her man, it was an absurd and inexplicable feeling. But it was easy to repudiate the indecipherable. It was easy to be obtuse while pursuing her work and the occasional sZances with her higher authority, who often played hide and seek through clouds of the smoke of her burning weed. Furthermore, hostile glances and reticent words seemed of little consequence when awakened daily, despite herself, to dwindled resources dwindling further.
One morning at the dining room table, looking through the newly arrived mail half blinded in the dappled sunlight, Gabriele saw the numbers of her worsening fiscal state from a bank statement. The recent payments of her property tax and the school enrollment were just larger costs of myriad that in all, in time, would pillage a life; and her mind felt numb in the mundane. Knowing that she had to do something, she approached the art museum of Albany that afternoon. The director was willing enough to exhibit a retrospective of her work with a few new paintings of Sapporo and Tijuana amalgamated into it all. The isolationist declaring her own frigid country of one, the frigid rationalist watching the movement of instinctual creatures of romance blowing like bits of trash caught in vortexes of wind, the nighttime whore advocate as opposed to the billions of daytime whores who espoused the Puritan work ethic: she was one of their PT Barnum freaks at the circus museum and the director welcomed back that which would spark a bit of public intrigue. The museum did not expedite it. Two months of planning went into the temporary exhibit; and the financial dilemma that seemed as potentially dire now shot within her more as flares of panic. What heretofore lacked immediacy became an uppercase word in bold letters, immediacy, spilling out and hardening as the black ink of the night.
At last it passed. And in the bathroom of a purchaser, at a party in his home, which had been arranged for the celebration of this singular purchase, the brief honeymoon period for the artist climaxed with a salient 15-minute copulation against a wall near the toilet. She needed this release from worries, this demonic sensation of pleasure that was the eddy contrary to what was rational. She hoped that it was that, an eddy, but she knew base instincts were the main force despite all her rational fortifications. From time to time she needed to stop thinking and to run into the storm, allowing any large gust to bang her.
"Can I see you again?" her partner, this black stranger, asked. Even now that their intimacies had come and gone like all specious mad frenzies, like the mating of dodo birds, she did not know his name, his connection to the purchaser, or his purpose at the party unless it were in having mounted and ridden her. Did man have a higher purpose than this? She had her doubts.
"Give me your address. I wanna see you again," he reiterated.
"Maybe in corners like this," she responded coldly. "Beyond that I think my husband would have problems with it, and most importantly I would."
"You're a sassy one," said this other candyman. "Squeeze a man of his juice and leave him dry." She knew that she was a sassy squeezer but she was hesitant to say anything for she wanted him marooned in his own silent realm. This way she could dress herself in peace and quickly abscond from sleazy predilections and proclivities that might have made up the baser components of one's nature but were puny in defining herself. She wanted to return to her paints in the hope of developing a template that if not mass-produced at least could speed up her production. The time of prolific painting from ideas sketched for so long had passed. Now ideas needed to be pinched and coerced to inch forward.