"From the window? It is three stories high."
"Yes, if we just jump we might miss the exit. We will do it together and depart from all of this death."
Chapter 44 Conclusion of Gabriele
Then she was looking up at the unhinged diagonal teetering of the bookshelf and glancing back at this strewn rubble of books girded about her on the floor. She judged that the bookshelf and the diagonal teetering of a mind were analogous to each other not so much from what they lacked as from what they possessed. Both were on one last hinge really, neither one was completely gone, and both could continue on in this state for as long as the elements that made them did not unravel by decay or degeneration.
She guffawed and the guffaw droned on monotonously into a dry acrimonious hysteria precipitated by a need for relief from loss, lament, and this feeling that she was vile for being violated in this most repugnant way; but this laughter was essentially the revelatory irony that madness, in whole or in part, was willed into existence, or at least hers was — she who was a consummate actress unto herself.
She had missed her suicidal exit from sensing that the right bounce before the leap would bring it all down, and it had, making the wish to live more dominant than the wish to die. Now with bruised buttocks there in the rubble of ideas, unable to think of any reason that she had averted her demise, pain tore at her inside and out.
Conscious will had devised suicide that the instinct to live had thwarted. Before this, somewhere early into the "madness" when the shock of this horror had passed, her ongoing madness into the hours had been merely a conscious choice. Both had been her own scheming, her own devising.
She got up in full recognition of herself, her surroundings, and the memory that thumped inside her brain. This memory of the rape played over and over and the monotony exacerbated the thumping. As a living entity, one lived without a clue to the reason of it all. One rose in pain and moved as she was doing now, for how could even a creature of contemplation contemplate without movement away from the sedentary gaze of one specific thing? Did she really contemplate more than others, and were here contemplations more trenchant than others? She assumed so and that it was a mixture of her own genius and her obdurate wish to not be one of the herds. It was her wish to be a unique person who was not afraid of homesteading in the self and listened to and experimented with original thoughts that a good intelligence removed of cacophony devised. It was her belief that this was the only real life for it was beyond delegated roles and instinct.
But as she went into the bathroom to vomit she thought such a reaction was as feeble and absurd as homesteading within the herds. Should she throw up what little energy she had? Would she let an external event discombobulate her in such a nervous disorder? This thing that happened to her was repugnant rape but, she argued, only societal norms made it viler than other forms of rape. It had not harmed her irrevocably. Only the horrific memory would harm her and it, memory, was within the self. Only she could create pain to herself. Only she could continue self-flagellation lodged there in the brain whipping herself in memory. No, she answered herself, she would not let memory maim her.
She filled up the tub with cold soapy water. Going to extremes by the attempt at sterilizing herself in hot water would have been a natural response, and it was in the fear of scolding herself that she avoided the tab controlling the hot water altogether. She liked the coolness and the vibrant stimulation that it saturated onto her body. In the frothy suds she tried to sculpt the rough external shapes of the ice sculptures that she and Kato had made during the snow festivals of Sapporo. With her fingers she traced these suds-sculptures the way they once were as ice, but the suds only lasted for a moment, a reminder that time went by like a shell-shocked soldier.