"G-a-b-r-i-e-l-e!" Lily said the name like music. "Please wait a minute, please," she said with childish delicacy. For a few minutes Gabriele waited and listened to the rustling. During a minute of that time she was interested because the rustling was the rustling of a mind, and the mind was interesting indeed. "I'm leaving, Lily. In the bus you dropped one of your gloves from a pocket in your coat. I'm leaving it right here." The radio music suddenly changed to classical music with a National Public Radio DJ. Gabriele waited a couple more minutes. "Goodbye," said Gabriele. "Oh. I'll come over and get them." Gabriele did not know what that meant. She heard the unlocking of the door bedizen with many bolts. The door opened. Gabriele handed her the glove without eye contact and turned away. "I'm working," she said coldly. "Thanks so much. Thank you, Gabriele...well I could fix you some coffee if you'd come in...well, I'll -- " Gabriele was already walking away and did not, by choice, register the rest except for that redundant word, "please." The word was projected in such a melancholic and extinguished tone that it caused her German heart to thaw for human suffering. After descending a couple flights of stairs she paused, thought, and then returned to the apartment. She knocked on the door and Lily opened it while trembling and in tears. "Are you okay?" asked Gabriele. "I'm nutty. Don't hate me. Please don't hate me." "I don't." "Everybody turns away from me. Why wouldn't they? I wash the same plate over and over again for an hour. I just want to not be hated. I just need a friend. I'm so scared like I'm falling in a dark pit and no one cares about me." Gabriele knew. The dark pit was the anxiety of cognizant man who knew of imminent death. It was an anxiety exuding into the bleeding of loneliness and only interaction with others repressed that anxiety. That was for normal people. For those others who did not fit easily into normality or categories of abnormality and who could not capture or claim the illusion of self the loneliness was all the more inexorable. "I haven't turned away," said Gabriele. Lily hugged her clingingly. 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."