Tokyo to Tijuana: Gabriele Departing America | Page 2

skeleton. The police had looked for his sister's body in the park but obviously not

thoroughly in the ravine. In one year they had only searched that park once and in the
meantime her body had decomposed. He dreamed of those photographs of skeletal
remains and the other photographs of more than a few bones that had gone off from the
rest. They were marred too but by the fangs of dogs or other beasts dragging them around
before dumping them away from the rest of the remains. He dreamt of these photographs
exactly as they appeared from the slide projector and in that sequence as one of those
most godless days of that long trial when one's whole body trembled in continuum
through bits of the hours with stolid, cadaverous expressions throughout the ordeal. He
assumed his parents had also behaved the same. Before the real confirmation of her death,
all three had been functioning with such dead but hopeful words and perfunctory gestures
which were then ripped out of them as the program, memory, and energy cells can be
pulled out of robots and soon they were thrust in their own personal black abyss with
none of the three able to see outside of blackness and pain as much as they might have
wanted to offer solace to each other.
Who could offer solace when the conclusion of life as an evil and godless place had
solidified into consciousness like Death etching her name in wet cement? Back then, it
had been obvious that the trial, a pantomime of the mute for justice, could never be
allocated to the dead under the best circumstances, and this particular trial was going
nowhere. The conclusiveness of the evidence and motive had been defaced with time that
had entirely decomposed her form. There had been theories. Plenty of circumstantial
evidence had been presented. Her employer had done it to her as conclusively as a feeling
could testify. Then and now there was plenty of indication that she had been pregnant
with his child. Twenty years ago Sang Huin (Shawn then) had swung a golf club into her
eye and the blood had splattered everywhere. On that day, as a boy, he had thought
nothing could happen worse than that; but back then there was blood and back then there
was composition. He woke up and once again knew that even in sleep there wasn't
always repose. Sometimes, without finding a way of sealing memories in tidy body bags,
one's inner voice was as active in sleep. He said to himself that he shouldn't be surprised
by such restlessness when life's conundrums were so horrific. The passage of a few years,
and the passage through a thousand times of falling asleep could not even restore one's
equilibrium in something so horrific. He shook off his sleep like a dog its wetness. He
tried to think of Yang Lin whom he had left: that mild voice so slow and deliberate in its
intensity, the morbid and thoughtful eyes like an ocean containing its ecosystem, the
muscular young body that had an orange hue like a Chinamen who had sucked up too
much sun.
After the revelation he had listened to him repeatedly talk about wishing that he had been
born a woman; and except for once of saying, "Well...I understand, but" (and stopping
not knowing what to throw in as the "but"), he had been silent with eyes of empathy. It
was painful to see a perspective; and Sang Huin broke out of his skin like a reluctant and
tortured snake but accepting the inevitability. He just stared at the fountain for many
uncomfortable minutes hoping that the mouth of the fountain could articulate a statement
that would solve the situation as well as ease his discomfort.
At the fountain, in silence, he had thought of rigid Texan horses and the lazy meditative
cows of his home state in warm fields at mid- afternoon--creatures of the gods with no

sense of the vile practicalities behind their domesticated state. During his times of stress
long ago they had often seemed to Sang Huin as so aesthetic that one could wish to slip
within them for an hour or a bit of the day; and surely after having done it one might
instantaneously wish for the freedom of whatever was beyond the fence. Maybe, he had
thought to himself, something like this was how Yang Lin felt.
He had suddenly blurted out, "You commented that the pigeons and the fountain in the
pond are beautiful. Maybe they are." He had hesitated feebly. The coarse words and tone
had surprised both of them. "I hear that doctors can now make a man half pigeon if he
dares to have a mixture of pubic hairs and pubic feathers; or