"Sure, but take this" said Gabriele. She wrote down her telephone number on a sheet of paper that she pulled out of a pocket. "Call me anytime, any hour, if you need a listener." "All right," said the woman. She shut the door. Gabriele went back to bed. The sun dominated through the covering of the drapes. She took her quilt and draped it from the curtain rod. She could not see the point in anything other than sleep. The experience of the senselessness of the girl's death had just fused into other elements of the void and stunted her. If her son were here and continued to be absolutely unaffected by what had occured she would have been tempted to allow him to bring in orange juice and burnt poptarts to show sympathy for herself who was a woman in a philosophic void. She might have done this despite knowing that he would never be empathic to such philosophic quandaries. He was a product of motion and he hadn't experienced enough of life to understand something like this. Like now, each time when the void descended upon her she told herself that she could not fight it off anymore than one could avoid inclement weather. She would just have to ride through the fog that permeated it all. She let the void devour her energy, and then she fell into the sleep that the Ancient Egyptians thought of as the death of the soul. When the quilt fell from the curtain rod she woke up to a tepid rejuvenation. She got up to fix herself something to eat. The cat was on the table eating the left-over pancakes that she had fixed for her son before he went off to school. Instead of shaking the cat in the air, making it appear to be in the midst of convulsions, she just sat down and watched it eat. Then she tossed the dirty plates into the sink--a function that was not habitual to her, but one that she didn't mind taking on this day when washing them would add to her mental void. She didn't have him go into school for any part of the day even though the funeral wouldn't take place until 5:00. Instead, long before sunrise she loaded up kid and canvases into her old car. Then they began a long ride that would take them briefly into Syracuse, into Albany, and then back to Ithaca in a circuitious meandering of interstates and main streets. She had that pivotal expectation that if she were able to find the addresses of art galleries the curators there would guide her toward various amateur art fairs so that she could sell her work. There was, however, that less realistic hope that they would have customers who might like the "sui generis" of a Gabriele Sangfroid enough to ferret out the libertine creator from obscurity with this needed substance of money. For their purchases such members of the apparatchik would find a link back to originality and freedom that would assuage their banal and stressful existences.