She excused herself and retreated into the bedroom while they ran to the refrigerator to put their ravenous fangs into the carcass of the chocolate bunny.
In her bedroom she listened for the door of scurrying boys to open and close. Then she began to smoke her cannabis like Shakespeare and let words in thoughts rise from the ashes of the mundane. As they rose in a cani-beer cloud with the levity of laughing gas, she stayed in the bedroom and began to write. She did not feel sick enough to go to the bathroom this time. She thought that she should really lock the door of the trailer but she knew that the Nathaniel would stay outside busy unto himself or with his friend. Less and less would her company be needed. She wrote: "Dear journal, I've been thinking that the personal life should be banned. This socializing and lovey-doving just slows down society's progress. Everywhere, clogging sidewalks, there are these Cornell University girls holding hands with their guys. Makes me sick. If I go to a waterfall or a park to paint or pick up some milk at the 7-11 I have to wave my hand and shoo them away like pesky flies. And you know that each of them is thinking about what he's thinking about her. So apparent! They are orbiting around their guys at all moments of the hours. They are everywhere subservient to chemicals of love in their heads that make them subservient to his whims; and I want to be the demolition of those ties. I see my vocation as roller blading down sidewalks through those linked hands while I get to my destination. I see myself on sidewalks leading to the grocery store. I'm on roller blades and I'm breaking a few arms and blading a few lovey-dovey hearts. Sometimes I dream of shouting through a megaphone, 'About relationships and needing people I caution everyone to be circumspect. Can another be water or oxygen? Can another one be your sustenance? Stop this delusional MTV thinking! You are letting one simple neurotransmitter banging against a pleasure receptor control you. Females, don't be foolish enough to be women! What are you doing wasting all the minutes of your life trying to get someone to be with you? What on Earth makes you want to block off your own thoughts this way? A man won't stay with you forever. They never do and sooner or later you must confront your own inane foolish selves that have been underdeveloped and unchartered all this time. Find a deeper awareness than the personal life. Find a vocation that will allow you to tap into the entity. Tap, tap to not be the whimsical dictates of a selfish man. Tap and confront one's real aloneness. Be intrepid by aloneness for from it one finds oneself. It is by being gregarious that you lose yourself . Befriend your aloneness. To do otherwise makes men think that your highest duty is to be ridden in like riding on a horse. Tap Tap. Buck the man from vaginal penetration. Watch him run away like a horse slapped on its side. Plug into your special talent that links you to the entity and you will never be lost again. You will be part of the new invincible species.' Still, what can I do? I'm just a mere me. I mailed some photographs of Adagio to Peggy and her gang. Sort of appearance only. Decided it was best to keep up their interest in him. Promised that someday they would not only see him but keep him for a while. Don't know why — True, I don't like them despite that they are his his godparents and all—but sometimes the idea of a hiatus from this Mommy game is a bit tempting. I could dump him on them. Antarctica — Antarctica. It's still in my dreams —"
"What about me? Willya' take me with you when you go off to the seventh continent?" The voice was that of Smokey-The-Bear in the "Don't start forest fires" advertisements.
"Up here, youn' lady."
She looked on the shelf. "Well, fuck. You're not Smokey at all."
"No, youn' lady, I'm not. He's just a distant cousin." Gabriele looked at the foot long stuffed polar bear sitting on a man's handkerchief on a shelf above the dresser. She had bought him one time when she went to Buffalo, New York. "Poor Gabey, nobody loves ya' 'cause ya' don't love 'em. Going to restaurants all alone isn't no fun. Parks alone, waterfalls and painting with your paint brush, even fornicating alone. Even when you are with people you are separate. Poor Gabey." Suddenly the polar bear began to change into the higher authority.
"Gabriele, it is me" said the higher authority. " Look at yourself, held together by the stitching of hate-the plastic-eyed polar bear with the stiff arms that the factory of the human race mutantly created — it will be you who shall feel the walls of artificial fur ripped from its threads, and your stuffing falling out. For a little beer on top of four joints makes a person see the unsealed human fragments that had been smoothed over in time. Come on Gabriele, the gal who still chews tobacco and spits it into an empty beer can…the gal with the deep dark-ocean eyes…the gal bereft of what the normal means, grip that other beer bottle now. Together with the joints, this is the only medicine devised to rebreak the strangely concocted pieces that have been glued into the broken you. Drink and smoke! Become fragmented again with the hope that you will heal and be normal. A 17 year old girl goes to eat a meal in her boyfriend's home and a wife to her in-laws. How is it that such simple pleasures continually elude you? How is it that you have made such cynical and erroneous views of the world?" No sooner had her higher authority spoken then Gabriele heard a skid of a fast moving car suddenly stop and a child scream. The polar bear and the handkerchief with the initials embroidered on it tumbled from the shelf. Gabriele quickly stabbed the marijuana to its ashtray of death and flew out the door.
"Who is this mother fucker?" she mumbled to herself. Then she knew. Here was MF, the vice principal of her son, her former client, shouted at hysterically by the mother of the dead little girl. Gabriele held the woman who was deranged in bereavement and sunk into gravel and dust of the trailer park. She was her bulwark.
"So, he will be her lover — this MF?" scoffed Saeng Seob in their bed upon hearing his last chapter.
Sang Huin regretted having begrudgingly read him this chapter. He only read parts of the manuscript when asked to do so. Seong Seob could only understand the superficial aspects of the story at best and he only asked to hear those bits of it read out when Sang Huin seemed to preoccupied with writing it. Sang Huin supposed it gave them something in common. "Maybe. I don't know, really," he said evasively. He removed his computer to a table that was adjacent to the bed and picked up a magazine. His eyes began to peruse the photographs of male models in Gentleman's Quarterly who if known and involved in his life would pull him out of his numb abyss of insipid days into the vibrancy of desire in nightly embraces.