Gabriele paused from her writing and remembered her time in a Moslem country. For three months, when she was almost 6, she was in Turkey. She remembered that day when her mother suddenly came to Kansas for her. It had been nearly a year since she had seen her and she felt a mixture of fear, surprise, and happiness at the thought of having the fragmented pieces of her life reassembled. She did not know if this interruption of her adaptation to her aunt, uncle, and cousins had some permanency. She was already speculating that there was no permanency- only being banged in the buttocks with bumper cars or being run over by tanks. She was only told that they would be going on a trip to the other side of the world. The potential of seeing something outside of Kansas made her very happy. Like any child, the discovery of flight was a marvel and she stared out of the window as much as she could. It was a subject of curiosity that the clouds she had always looked up to (a good many in the shape of the philosopher, Heraclitus) had really been nothing but footstools with wooly sheepskins on them all along. It was quite a surprise and shook her hypothesis that her mother was mistaken in saying that there wasn't a Santa Claus. She had formulated this hypothesis erroneously by the evidence of some irregular clouds that seemed as if they were Santa's frothy sugar castles.

In Istanbul she became reacquainted with her father again. Like in olden times when she was four, he began to take her on trips to the beach to pick up seashells or shop for groceries. Once they were shopping for some vegetables in a tight labyrinth of a crowded and dusty outdoor market when suddenly they heard the sound of that Moslem call to worship (a hybrid sound like of an instrument and a human voice) but the call was at the irregular time of 3:00 on a Friday afternoon. Pandemonium was in the streets, but everyone was going in the same direction so actually Istanbul was less helter-skelter than usual. Pushed with the herds, she and her father walked 5 blocks to an ornate mosque. She wanted to know what was "going on" so her father put her on his shoulders and told her that a special Turkish custom of a beheading was to begin shortly. "Beheading?" she asked. "Yes," he said with a wry and troubled smile. "To be without a head like the headless horseman although I suppose a less animated one." For a moment she was so pleased and excited that she would witness such a splendor until she saw a man with a bag over his face dragged up against his will onto the marble stairs leading to the temple and a third man with a huge scythe in his hands. A second later she witnessed the burly third man swing, with all his round, bulging, muscular might in one fail swoop and the head part from the shoulders which the second man placed in a basket. There was surprisingly little blood at first. Then the arteries disgorged their content while the body fidgeted a few times on the holy marble.

She suddenly knew that adults were monsters and that they ran amuck in the world inimical to human decency. In deep pain of one fragmented and grieving for this man and the human race, she nonetheless controlled her urge to cry. She assessed her situation. If indeed she were in a land of adult monsters, outwardly she had to acclimate to their mores and yet do the best she could, while growing up, to refrain from becoming a monster herself. If one couldn't withdraw from a situation, she felt more than thought, a girl must play the game. If she were to leak out her pain by blubbering, they would hate her and she would be perceived as foolish and weak. Crying would never help. It would only get her into trouble. She asked herself how best to achieve this ostensible aim and she told herself that she should be inquisitive. She calmly asked why the beheading had occurred, the reason for the timing of the occurrence, the exact nature of the crime, if beheadings were permitted in America, and the final resting place for a 2 part individual. The questions made her father, a USAF officer for NATO, and her mother, a USAF soldier's housewife, so happy. The next day as her mother was with curlers in her hair and her head in tact and under the dryer at the beauty parlor, the young mother pointed out her daughter and boasted about all the questions she had posed regarding the beheading the previous night. They boasted about her often; however, two more months passed and the clarity of the ephemeral nature of the reunion with her parents became clear. After her summer holiday was over and their honeymoon reunion with their child had ended, Gabriele was sent back all alone in a jet to New York City and then a second connecting flight that would lead her back to her aunt in Kansas.

Chapter Thirteen

It is 2008 and he, sometimes Adagio and sometimes Nathaniel or various nicknames, still doesn't even have a consistent label for himself. Not even a consistent name has stuck on him all these 18 years; and the half hour that he has sat in the library there is that same mental numbness of all other previous half hours. It is numbness as empty as a pit in the mouth from an extracted tooth. He knows that most men wander around the world untouched, unknown, not touching, and not known or knowing. He knows that such men use girlfriends to prop themselves up in order to feel fortified outwardly in 6 billion mostly "nobodies" within a universe of continual flux. He knows the selfish jaundice of both men and women in a relationship and how with any length of time it inflicts the relationship with the disease that is an extension of the two. He has been there and done that. He had one steady girlfriend but the relationship was hard to maintain when swirling colorful treats in many edible shapes, smells, and voices of varying feminine nectar fell through the orifices of his senses. It does not bother him to be no one special. It does not bother him to be the same as "regular guys" although most of them have consistent names, nicknames, or aliases they do not cower from. They make up the masses; and the masses are a brute force to which he is one of the billions. When a thing or a way of being exists in large numbers, he supposes, it is bound to be right. At a large table in front of an open book, with fingertips he grazes an area of skin above his upper lip. The facial stubble, when he rubs it, gives him extra reinforcement in his vain embellishment of masculinity. It is a vain reinforcement that the litter of pornography he perused like a philomath in his car a few minutes before entering the library did not do. Even the insouciance that he artificially concocted there with the puff of a cigarette while waiting for the rain to soften enough to drive did not make him more conscious of his male vigor than a brief feel of facial stubble. There is little beyond sexual energy to define him. No fields, no disciplines, have awakened an internal voice. Not yet, not ever, he thinks. He is a man without a voice and such a man is most conscious of the primordial emotions of hating those who bar his pleasure and love toward those who facilitate it. Adagio-it was a somewhat forgotten word, which once popped into his head for the creation of an email address. The word has inadvertently been a perfect epitome of his slow mental activity for books. Slow in that respect, academics with their words and numbers in infinity have stood out like the awkward anachronisms of hieroglyphs chiseled into stone. It would seem ironic that someone who perceives books to be as lifeless as stones should be in a library watching the pages of a book occasionally turn under the draft of the ceiling fan when not under the directive of his own will. The book is of 20th century American art and contains a few examples of his mother's work. Only pleasures from pictures have had some vague calling or tugging; but then it has been pictures that have composed so much of his existence.

He had detoured from the interstate and came into the town to buy a sandwich and cola at a convenience store, which fostered the purchase of the newest issues of Playboy and Hustler as well. He is downtown because the heavy diluting of rain in this small town necessitated him to pull over to the side of the road and park his car. He is in the library because it was a two-block run from where he parked his car. The continual pounding of rain caused him to have to go to the bathroom sooner than what he would have done otherwise, for he is in all respects a follower of nature's suggestions. The bathroom was his impetus for entering the library. In the process of staring up at the fan to focus a second of hate toward it he sees a woman straightening her body after rising off the seat. She is at a table around 50 feet from that of his own. Her table is near a small wall of books. He regrets that he has not seen her legs slide on the shiny wood of the chair or her thighs rising up to him although imagined action can be continually repeated and he continually repeats it. Bound in black stockings, the legs go to the front desk where some hands scan titles of her videos.

"It seems nobody checks out books any longer. We've had to restrict the kids use of the internet upstairs. They'll do nothing but chat the whole day if nobody catches them and then before they leave they check out videos to take back home."

"Well, guess I should feel honored to be thought of as a kid when I'm nearly 42. I am really in a hurry so could you please…"

"All right."

For a minute if not longer there is a momentary lapse in the present before he becomes conscious of it again. Fueled on adrenalin and hunger, he finds himself walking behind her in the rain. He imagines himself catching up and offering his umbrella to her but she has one of her own and so he timidly tracks her from a distance. He imagines her dropping the keys to her car but the fates also do not allow him this prop. He sees her get in but imagines her already seated with the door shut but unable to start the car. This does not happen either. He is unable to monitor himself. Like a child he distances himself from his actions. He is feeling the movements of someone else's body. Will has been frozen in time. There is a cold frozen constancy in his consciousness of the present moment. He finds himself knocking on the window. She rolls it down. He does not know what to say. She hasn't dropped one of her videos in the rain. He is as if naked and without a gift or prop with which to make a confidence. He stares at her mature beauty.