"No, I'm sure it is a bit of resentment about me going on this trip."
"Won't Hispanic Betty answer the telephone?"
"Are you kidding? No, she refuses. She dusts around a telephone like it's a snake and moves to a different room when it rings." He laughed.
She led them into color, perspective, and forms of Masters who had died long ago. They led her to a planetarium, the coliseum, and then a small amusement park on the outskirts of Rome. After Ferris wheel and a roller coaster rides she and they were addicted to motion and so they went on the water log ride as well. As they came down a miniature waterfall they were drenched. From these rides she knew that she was thrust into further action. Without consciously choosing it, she was now on a womanly ride of feeling great pleasure in the company of a man and something resembling family. It occurred to her that this was the ride that all broken adults with battered children inside them went on. From love and establishing a family of one's own one could break from the wretched past. One could remove the glass fragments from the exploding glass house of family, bandage wounded childhood, and could at last distance oneself from memories of the guardians of hell. The ride would be that of a new family and beginning, a type of forgetfulness.
All this time had gone by and still Sang Huin woke up from nightmares with a sweat glazing his forehead. He could not help but remember driving his battered sister to her lover's mansion, dragging her up to the door, watching her faint on the stoop as he pushed the doorbell, and then watching from his car as the wife discovered his delivery.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Sang Huin had a very strange dream one night. It was a night in which he had experienced a cancellation of a lesson and instead of returning home he had gone toward the Myong Dong area of Seoul to a gay Turkish bath, which he hoped would exorcise him of the void.
Like any explosive, the chemicals for the detonation were inside the container (himself); and all it required was a small sensation as its spark. It always struck him as peculiar and intriguing how a sexual feeling that was so internal should be linked so indelibly with the external like a woman's ability to produce milk, which required birth and a baby to suckle if it were to not dry up.
There, once again in the Turkish bath (as if this time would be a less specious form of intimacy than all others), he had sought excitement — fireworks of sensation within a dark room for orgies. There, like a balloon, he had blown his body in titillations and desire only to be deflated to a moment or two of tameness and godhood and then an equilibrium — this concoction of a little god and a lot of animal called a human being.
And when he returned home to Seong Seob, there was a contrived inflation and deflation of the phallus in the ersatz of coerced will. Then he lay there like a squeezed orange, albeit a discontent one. He was unable to sleep for countless minutes that seemed as hours. And when he did go to sleep he dreamed strange and erratic things. At worst these images burst and burned against the walls of his brain like jets against the World Trade Center. At best they expanded and contracted nerves in his brain like the coldness of an ice cream headache. Accelerated by too many graphic CNN reports and satiated in anxieties and guilt within his own life, he dreamed that Gabriele was living in an isolated area in Pakistan with her cat, Mouse. One evening there was knocking on her door and when she answered it a stoic Rita/Lily with obdurate, mechanical, and glazed eyes injected a drug into her arm. When Gabriele woke up she was staring into the face of Osama Bin Laden. "Where am I?" she asked as she lifted her head and wiped the pallid dirt from hair and face. A translator relayed her voice to Osama Bin Laden. She recognized him too. He was Khalid Shaik Mohammed. Osama said something and the translation was "Al Qaiida Hills in what people wrong to call Afghanistan behind Tora Bora. You relatives must pay big ransom or we cut off you head."