"To Sharon's"
"You despise her."
"Yes," he said. He fired one shot and it went into the window. He fired a second, and a third time at the fleeing owl and the bleeding corpse plumped onto the earth like a water balloon.
Although he saw it flounder in the skies as he floundered around on the Earth, Sang Huin was not exactly sure where the kite was struck to the ground. He thought of how so many years of his life were struck down in silence. Only June, the basketball star, had voice and opinions that could sway the parents. He was inconsequential, relegated to shadows. He upbraided himself and stymied his thoughts immediately. He didn't want to think any bad thoughts about his sister. He had no right to think them. Instead, he desperately thought that he should marry a woman and have a family of his own, thereby enveloping himself in a world of forgetfulness. His buttocks were hurting from where he sat and the wind was beginning to sweep down its polluted grit of rain. He got up. He needed to go downtown to Myong Dong and try to find a birthday present for Seong Seob, but first he needed to pick up an umbrella.
Chapter 42
"…No," she thought, "those disconcerting eyes would not leave…will not leave…wouldn't want them to leave….He is here a part of my fate….Spots over my eyes, hypersensitivity to sound as well as light…ideas so painful, and yet I drag them about…pounding thoughts of raw sensitivity and I drag these sickly bodies to have something to do…and to clog the empty space of the hours. Before this I was thinking of my son and now I am thinking about my thoughts…a concentration on anything to forefend this unreality of everything… every item in this dark tomb, and the air and light within it are so distant like trying to remember the details of a dream weeks earlier…brain insurrection, and stomach like when I was carsick with Michael in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, sick as when I was pregnant with Nathaniel Adagio Sangfroid…inert as if dead…dead as the owl plopping onto the ground…lack of energy…enervation not of being drained but like it just suddenly packed up its bags and went, leaving behind the barren house, now looking like a dilapidating hut…Need to think of something placid, pellucid, permanent." She meant that she needed to imagine a tranquil and permanent entity, God, by which to ease her pain, and yet being an atheist there was none. For atheists like her there were just ideas to be posited as if raising these walls, these labyrinths of logic, and then running in them, would lead her to some advanced destination. And so she posited that man, being such a dodger of pain, would inevitably become religious within sickness. She posited that even the most intransigent atheist was susceptible to the god of his own making. But thinking about thoughts was making the migraine even worse. Ideas were making the bulimic sick and she felt like she was ready to vomit them up. She again tried to find a benign image exempt of painful words that she could rest in while in these vapid hours.
And she could only think of her grandmother who, with Peggy, arrived that one time at the Emporia Kansas bus terminal to pick her up. Those eyes were so empathic to her, the young girl who was just beginning to recuperate from having been run over by lieutenants Mom and Dad as they went off into the sunset on their tank; and this grandmotherly empath could transmute pain and make it her own better than any mood ring. She thought of the feel of her grandmother's pantyhose when sitting in her lap and the appearance of that ceramic cookie jar in the form of a piggy with a chipped ear and a vest. When her grandmother removed his head all of those chocolate chip cookies that she baked were there. Still, this sole, loving and loveable relative was not permanent. She too was fleetingly mortal. Gabriele thought of a more permanent entity, a tree, but its leaves were deciduous and it had no power to alter its environment or to love selflessly. Then she thought of the sky: it was permanently sky; but it was rarely placid and only pellucid to meteorologists, and of empathy it had none. Men died in hurricanes, typhoons, lightning strikes, floods, and heat strokes. She wondered if she was going mad. "Need to go to the shop… I need to get off this sofa," she thought, but the thought was barely pressed together under the butcher knife of the Migraine. Still she thought it nonetheless, and others as well, to fill the stillness of the hours of pain.
Alone: When not having a father or any type of a male role model the "differentiation" of a boy in his stages of disengagement from his mother have no other course but through these addictions to titillations which compel him to climb each and every pleasure until at last falling into the crevasse of family himself and all of its falling debris of obligations. This being such, she knew that her time within her own crevasse would not last; and that to be inextricably attached to these selfish and impermanent beings who had fallen in with her would merely be a form of weak clinging. It was bad enough in stability searching herds but for a goddess like herself it would be a particular debasement.
Family: Her aunt had believed in it enough to take her into her home despite the objections of her husband; but then she had also believed that Heaven was a better place than the Earth without having gone to the former and rarely getting out into the latter with Wal-Mart shopping centers so nearby, that openly communicating one's filthy mind about misinterpreted gestures like avuncular touch would be conclusive proof that one was a hateful girl indeed, and that only within muteness locked in immeasurable and inconclusive memories was one showing love toward all members of this sacrosanct organization. This, the incommunicable utterance, was the only means to exist successfully for they who, to acclimate, were ensconced in safe perfunctory movements within the crevasse.
The mutability of family: Wasn't it apparent that her man had snagged himself on his tree of recently ripened campus fruit and that this adulterous delay in the Big Apple might go into a third week and beyond? And last week what had been her role of chauffeuring Nathaniel and his giddy date to an amusement park unless it were the beginning to that end? Evidence for both came in the form of flinging more and more TV dinners into the oven and eating them saliently alone in her dining room. Not that she felt uncomfortable uncovering the aluminum foil and eating her food all alone. She loved her ruminations more than any other earthling she encountered. So wondering what her man was uncovering and putting into his mouth and what bimbo her son was chewing on like a chicken bone as she removed the foil of the TV dinner was a very enjoyable activity. It was enjoyable for she was intrigued with all of life's curiosities.