Steven David Justin Sills

“ The landscape seen from the moving bus was unremarkable but still the beauty that was there dazed him into self-reflections. More than the physical response what did he crave? To be loved and to love was like a dog chasing its tail; and if his tail were long enough he would have it in the mouth. He would have it there in his mouth if the mouth liked the taste of the tail and the tail the feel of the mouth. Foolish as he was going to Seoul once again for his fun, he wasn't a fool. ”

“ Gabriele, not knowing how to really touch her, patted her on the back. She felt as if her body were being traversed by a colony of ants; and yet as repugnant as it felt being hugged in such a way, she kept this feeling enclosed deep in her inner self for the purpose of going beyond it and perhaps illustrating some sense of human kindness. "When you do obsessive acts it isn't exactly nutty. You are trying to seek order in past trauma. It's okay. It will be okay."
Gabriele let her sob on her back until the catharsis was complete. ”

“ Her shadow was poised like the Statue of Liberty — the liberty which had inadvertently created her unorthodox perspectives, but hers was an inconsequential adumbration. Americans were a provincial people as all bullies of the world were provincial, and the thought of mixing with an American (even one as Italian as Michael) seemed nasty indeed. The nastiness of being here in his home came upon her like the sticky wetness of a man's semen. The nastiness of debasing herself from loneliness by coming here was to walk on the same spit and urine evaporating pavements within the swaths of mankind. ”

“ Gabriele felt as if she were at an amusement park and that her own little world were nothing but a house of mirrors. Each subsequent mirror (despite her youth) cast an impression of more furrowed wrinkles on her forehead, seemed to expand the appearance of bags under her eyes, and made her hair look increasingly gray. Life was nothing but a bottle, a diaper, burping, feeding, and washing. The robotic movements he demanded her to do to take care of him went on perpetually. ”

“ Back then the horror, the senselessness, the rape and the slaughtering that were alleged but unproven with the rotting and effacing of time, the acquittal, and the general emptiness carried him off to a horror and disconcerted void worse than death. It was a disconcerted space of months as a walking mannequin with that one keen perception of seeing how the darkness of selfishness and destruction were there in all human pursuits. ”

“ Michael was lovingly amuck in her thoughts and since she would see him in a few hours she was in a heavenly abyss greater than having the license to do some Italian stud fishing in the pool of her hotel. She loathed how the chemicals of this infatuation had been detonated in the Leaning Tower of Gabriele causing major structural damage. Furthermore, the smoke of the aftermath distorted the world in such a fervent red mist. If she hadn't been on her guard or had been born a half-wit she could have easily believed in love and bliss at every turn. ”

“ None of them thought of the ultimate corollary that human life and endeavors would go back to nothingness and the entity that brought it all about. She felt compassion for him, for all of them, like a goddess looking on her pathetic children. To some degree, she was pleased that he emulated her myth of the sun. Within moderation it was a good and humane fabrication. The creation of her version of the creator was a meaningful and benevolent lie of universal brotherhood and it seemed to her that the ultimate goal of motherhood was to nurture humane behavior even if one had to lie upon occasion. ”

“ It was a mere caprice, she argued, like disliking a passing woman for wearing the color, pink, or wanting to make love to all sailors for wearing their clean, white, and neatly pressed uniforms. Heretofore such whims had not defined her despite the harmony of her solitary meadow being continually littered in the blowing of these deciduous scraps. Heretofore she had been able to find that higher authority that willed to know a self outside of winds and blowing rubbish; a self that would gain immediate and indelible awareness from the cookie cutter of his or her experience, and only this. ”

“ It was a bizarre version of stagnation in a life that by its prime purposes should not have been stagnating at all: by being a mother, she nurtured; by reading she was nurtured in the profound, and the profound was so unlike the pointless levity of socializing with living creatures; and by painting she rose into Godhood in the realm of ideas. And yet being wholly purposeful was such a solitary domain relegated to gods and not to creatures of movement who needed frivolity and interplay of ideas of the most shallow domain to feel alive. ”

“ They thought that pampering the pleasure-seeking savage was the acme of nurturing motherhood and the making of good human beings. She thought to herself that such mindless bitches, doting as Aunt Peggy had done with her children, were an embarrassment to this word love. Love in its purest sense (what little one was humanly capable of) would be a selfless caring of another without such instincts to keep one's genes replicating for all eternity. It was not suffocating one's children in dependency so that one could have the role of mommy to avoid rolelessness and void. ”

“ Back then there were solitary ponderings in summer walks along the coast of the Sea of Japan. There, walking on prodigious cement slabs shaped like tacks, which stopped the erosion of the beach by high tide, she turned toward ocean pointing to America and contemplated all. She took long walks in street markets and along shipyards, each street of the metropolis smelling like fish. She was alone then and it had been good. Now it was dirt and pinatas; colina deserts and an eternal sun; and Mexican drunks, beggars, and vendors along the bridge that went over the contaminated river. ”

“ Tell me, now that you are in this one nation under god, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all and the rest of this gunk how you, a mortal, indict this god. I mean you are a myopic person as we all are so what right have you or I to judge this bigger entity whom we presume to have created the two of us and everything else. Surely this God envisions a greater picture? Am I making sense—what right has a little man in judging a God who might understand the bigger picture on why things are the way that they are. Also, as a sociable animal, don't you feel the need to follow the herd? ”

“ He had thought that living together would smooth over everything and felt dismayed that a year later Sang Huin still touched and spoke to him with the uncertainty of the two belonging to each other. And yet in bed it was compensated by desperate and passionate thumping which was the best kind of love making there was. Seong Seob needed to feel that another person hungered for him for this was the contract. This was the binding of love. It was a covenant with this relationship-being that virtually all people deemed as higher than themselves. It was a belonging that all humans sought. ”

“ His impetus to go to Seoul this week had come from a dominant feeling of disconnection experienced by one who knew the extreme violence of the world, who knew the madness of hope for anyone, and felt being buried alive in that one perspective that the world was an evil place-a perspective that was not ethereal but solid as a coffin even if it did spill over into other things. A further disconnection of any significance would cause such an individual to let a numbness and deadening of the concept of self to take place. ”

“ Everything in the mind of a 5-year-old from the smells of greased telephone polls to the sounds of the school bus that picked up his older 7-year-old sister, and everything in the mind of a 10-year-old from getting his first b-b gun to spending his first time away from family at a summer camp was like walking barefoot on sharp gravel. ”

“ If they were human, what did that say about being human?" It had been their first unshared question easily sensed in the eyes of each other. "Are all Americans like this?" they had all silently thought. No one would have said such a thing. "Was all humanity this way?" It was in their eyes—that and the wish to escape the species. They were there: in this word "hell" that all had talked of and few had ever gone into. Hell was full meaninglessness and savagery without rationale and with a judicial system forcing the mutilated further into unprecedented horrors. ”

“ She swung a fist in the air and, as if she were a female version of Zeus, the lightning pierced the sky. Still, this did nothing for her. Would she act the maternal part of worrying, crying, and feeling angry and betrayed? Such a part was too ludicrous to conceive. "What if he gets lost? What if he gets hit by a car? What if he does?" she thought to herself. "I'm not linked to him forever. Even good mothers can't monitor a child's movements every second of the day. A child obeys his own self-centered little voice despite a guardian's best intentions. The world is a risky place. ”

“ Like a massive billowing wave of dark cloud overtaking the top stories of a skyscraper, the prospect of opaque drama in unknown foreign adventures animated her lofty imagination. She half believed that a time in Hokkaido would send a beautiful mix of color rushing like a torrent from her pallet. It would coruscate her in warm intimacy the way, to a swimmer, the 5:30 sun appears to immerse itself whole in a pool of water. ”

“ She supposed that this question was the predominant experiment of her life, and it incorporated Nathaniel into it. The redundancy of the cat's disharmonious songish cries grated her gray matter. She filled up a bucket with water and threw it onto the steps to cause Mouse to abscond to happier fields.
As if both were very young boys, she wanted to make playdough for her son and this other little entity that he had dragged back with him. She yearned to foster in a small way those who could still mingle within the solitary wanderings of the mind. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It is no more preposterous to believe in fate allowing me this contemplative time than it is to think that slipping $50.00 in a homeless person's cup would release him from pain and vice, that altruism perpetuates good, or that a loving god allows planes to slam into the World Trade Center Towers. If I am bad the creator of time and the universe is worse. Maybe any being that thinks outside the box would be perceived as bad by these simpletons — even God were these simpletons not so simple as to fear thinking Him evil. ”

“ Cast from the two parties, the personal life was not merely a mosaic of selfish inconsequentials of bad off-moments nor a heavy shadow of two lighter shadows but, together, were the adumbration of the entire scaffolding of a being: the contorted and disgusting skeleton of instinctual drives to gain pleasure, to hate those who might hinder pleasure, to hunt, to harm, to eat, and to possess. This was the personal domain and as disgusted as she was with it, her disgust was not as solid as she had wished it to be. ”

“ Behind the leather of that antique and ostentatious, patriarchal chair that had become her protector and shield she was a human being for the first time, needy, needing to be needed, and enmeshed as a member of the herd. There was even a second where Hilda fused into Rita/Lily and instead of coming to her, it was she, Gabriele, who came into that apartment in Ithaca, embracing her friend in the joy of comforting another being and just being there in the throngs of shared human thought and feeling. ”

“ 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. ”

“ It dawned on her that sleep was the burning of subconscious fuel—it was the burning of myriad crowding and conflicting whims within the confines of the brain so that some type of civil existence might prevail.
She thought of her dream in which she waited for the Russian near the monkeys. She wondered if she was like the specimens in Harlow's monkey experiments. From a German upbringing, had she not become the misfit monkey—the one that had been denied the touch of a mother or surrogate mother and so always kept herself at a distance in the social world. ”

“ Words, wisps of vibrating air, which should have been as fleetingly unreal as any passing wind, were such indelible things. They couldn't be dropped into one's shoes like doodled parodies of the teacher that he and his classmates often exchanged so that they could be perused later in the toilet and flushed away invisibly with urine and excrement. In ways, an idea in sound permeated another being immediately and non- retractably like a noxious gas.
Before school had started it was as if Gabriele and Nathaniel were completely alone except for the clients. ”

“ Losing the wonder of small things in ones adventure to know bigger truths was the act of growing up and there was nothing she could do to stop it. She knew: the loss of wonder came upon a child's innocence like a Turkish beheading. She hoed around the 10 feet patch of garden and imagined the texture of one pumpkin she had detached for him recording itself onto his psyche as he rolled on it and scooted it around. She grew flowers so that molecules of smell and sight could make sketchy replicas of flowers in his brain. ”

“ Everybody began to laugh including Gabriele.
"No," Gabriele said, "The refrigerator is full." She was quickly becoming serious. She saw sharp little stones in the hands of the eldest one. Even a child was a brutal force or, at any rate, immolated in play the brutality of life on the planet. She sighed and took away their instruments of war. She wanted to scold them but there was no way to scold all humanity of the past, present, and future. Only a crazed individual would not be cognizant of their limitations. ”

“ Within the lotusland of America, so removed from intense pain and hunger, she could hide to have a brighter perspective where some god or another was still keeping the whole creation, if not each and every individual, safely in his pocket. She did not, however, want self-deception. As much as she was able to do so, she wanted to know reality. Justice was equity but equity was not in the natural order and so the natural order was unjust. What justice there was existed as the creation of man; and so, in ways, society was more righteous than the natural order. ”

“ He would know that there was no purpose to being alive other than living and being grateful for life. Of course, in modern societies like Ithaca, Adagio, you have no merit at all-you aren't even thought as worthy of the respect of an insect-unless you have a job and are in one way or another part of the Great Factory but not in Atlantis, my little buddy. No, not there. There, to be without aim was accepted since the meaning of life was in life itself: vibrant energy for no reason bursting forth for no reason as fireworks in a desert. ”

“ She was a true woman as he liked it and yet had her own sense of being fully Gabriele within her own head. Painting would merely be a prop of a weak feminist. Yes, she could have told him that she had her art, that focus of the realm of ideas that had been her vocation before he moved in with her, and he would have scowled discreetly, never criticizing its odd feral qualities directly. But she would not have believed herself to be an artist anyhow since expressions were being effaced in each new day of life's mundane inconsequentiality. ”

“ The guidebook, written by the subconscious, would have enough veracity to be a prototype for they who also squatted on the outskirts of normal existence, or at least a means for him to lose himself —if not find himself—there, within his prose.
Writing granted a purpose, a connection beyond breeding to defy death for he who would never breed, he who would never be enslaved for ephemeral "family" and provide for children who were only a woman's pleasure—he who for not breeding had life and breath relegated to blowing dirt. ”

“ When he arrived in Chongju from the desolation of what was in between Seoul and it, the population and activity of this small city recreated an insatiable yearning for Seoul, which to him was a storehouse of all extraordinary venues to the mind (encounters both sexual and cultural) . Large buildings were like the small mountains of Umsong with a topping of cloud on a rainy day—monuments of beauty welcoming him to its domain that edified and exhilarated his appetites and his love. ”