The hours led into dusk and the beam of sunlight floundered behind an opaque screen and then withered into darkness. In that vacuous darkness within and without she remained a convalescent to the impairment of memory which could not be lobotomized no matter how much she yearned for it to be. As before, there were some sane and enlightening ideas in her hallucinations, which had she been able to record them in her madness, upon reflection might have shown a world beyond Fort Gabriele. But all her thoughts were merely shards within the hours. It did not even dawn on her to go to the bathroom. Without meaning to do so she urinated where she sat and even this fetid puddle soaking into the carpet seemed distant and detached as if not having been perpetrated by the self.
By this time truly crazy thoughts interacted with memory as if the mind were attempting to cause her to recognize herself in the midst of absurd fantasy. She believed that she was her Ferrari; that in each city where she drove the traffic lights always turned green at her approach; that she, the car, often reached into her window for the snuff on her dashboard which she would put into the gas tank as she drove south; that she would have gone all the way into Mexico, departing completely from the truculence of American society, were it not for that red light in Fayetteville, Arkansas; that after five long minutes she, that car, felt restless before the ongoing red, turned right, and moved up a steep hill until she was at a Confederate cemetery; and that there on a gravel road in the thickets of Elm trees, huge Evergreens, and weathered tombstones she felt a kinship with these deceased secessionists grouped according to states —
Legs on a bed (presumably her own) and ants on the sheets crawling upon those legs — empty cities and this feeling of being forlorn and banished in a world of no people — an uninhabited White House where no flag blew — flaming World Trade Center towers and her eyes looking up in horror — people falling wordlessly out of hundred story windows and herself thinking that Aten, Athena, Jehovah or some god outside of man's feeble conceptualizations of one would surely deliver them by using clouds as baseball mitts but not feeling surprised, only disappointed, to be living in such a godless realm — gluttonous nations fighting for the free flow of oil, and herself seeing them on the evening news — a maze of rooms in her home divided like Baltic states — wanting something to impale into the concrete of her makeup when she went to galleries, museums, and these art parties—herself, her complete self, with Nathaniel as the two of them watched her cat, Mouse, sniff the room for bugs; herself, her complete self, telling him that "all creatures need to feel industrious no matter whether they accomplish anything or not," hoping that subtle clues would inspire him to attempt his homework — the chest of her husband, the man with the unmemorable name, inhaling and exhaling and herself floating on it in the undulations of an ocean.
At this time she was not even aware that her fingers were pinching air as if a brush lay between them or that she was tracing out owls with her hands as if this was magically transmuting them onto the walls. Owls and more owls she patterned out — not regular barn owls, and not saw-whet owls, but Arctic owls living alone in cold snowy deserts. An hour into this some consciousness of what she was doing took place and the word "Paint!" flashed over her mind in a conflagration for she was afraid of falling into complete madness.
Opening the door, she crouched on her four legs as if in crawling through tall grass she could extricate herself from the land of her enemies to a land of lambent color. Scurrying from room to room, she at last found that which she sought; but she became terrified at finding a photograph of Nathaniel on a table near her paints and she retreated from it. She crawled into a corner and for twenty minutes she kept her eyes closed and her body shook in chills of terror before courage began to replenish within her. Reentering her fortress with color and instruments, she stood on one of the upper bookshelves that surrounded the whole room of the library. Dashing paint into solitary stoic owls, in one moment she became cognizant enough to see that each one was without any variation from the others because life was incessantly cruel without variation. The room was in total darkness apart from a bit of moonlight that kept her task possible. Then something divine came out of the moonlight. It was not a deity for it was flesh and blood as she.
"Gabriele," sang Rita/Lily happily. Then, like an empath, her visage changed as had the compassionate face of Gabriele's grandmother, and as had the mood ring that Gabriele wore as a teenager. "What are you doing?… Are you okay?… Can you understand me?"
Gabriele's bottom lip trembled and she dropped her paintbrush on the floor. Then she accidentally tipped over the paint. "My friend, my friend," she murmured.
"Yes, Gabriele, yes I am your friend. Don't be afraid. I am with you now." From at first seeming to comport her usual uncertain hesitancy, Rita was now appearing as a decisive voice according to the perspective of the child before her.
Gabriele pulled back inside herself for a moment, uncertain about swapping roles with the callow and manic-depressive neighbor whom she once cared about. The idea of friendship was beginning to befuddle her and she looked dazed, swept away in a mist of adult skepticism for that which was not in her experience. But overall she was ingenuous, and as one who was ingenuous she retained hope in foreign concepts. "Friendship. Really? I have existed all these long 39 years without any."
"No, you only thought that you did not have them."