Only briefly did it fleet through her mind how ludicrous it was for the damaged monkey that she was to define love at all. With not even a residue of "real love" there to her observation early in life, these speculations now were merely word play in her brain. They were the mere friction of cold, solid sounds and the static of them slapping against each other in their empty abstractions as she juggled them in her ennui and rained her sour stoic perspective down on them like tears of knives. To her she was a bored goddess making lightning and her unique take on love was the rightful striking of Zeus. Still there were doubts. She did wonder whether the smudge of light penetrating her consciousness was enlightenment or peering onto the stars with damaged retinas. To be laconic, she wondered if her judgment calls were merely the moody caprices of her imagination. For in Houston, that Houston of long ago with a Gabriele that was a spasm then of myriad spasms in the lost dimensions of a changing life, hadn't she seen a fellow student as small as a boy and as limp as a sack of potatoes being picked up by his father, taken from his classroom at Rice University, lowered into a wheelchair, pushed toward a vehicle, and then driven off to the next classroom in a different part of the campus? She had; and it was only from her own obdurate bitchinesss that she concocted a barrier to keep herself from consciously recalling this father's spending of money and time to enlighten the dying. It was love in the best gesture mortals could do, and it went contrary to her assumption that human society was a loveless "hell-hole" that was beneath her. Yearning to depart from the bathos of contemporary society for the sublime colors of Titian, the circular idealism of Raphael, the ugly angular and emaciated forms of El Greco in that complex inner intensity that rendered beauty, the mysterious shaded faces of Caravaggio, and the true internal lives captured in the words of Shakespeare and Hardy, Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, Melville and James, Plato, Parmenides, and all dead contemplatives, she snobbishly wished to remove herself from the masses of men. Her contemporaries seemed to be moving like that loose downward tire of a flipped car and she seemed to only favor the stagnancy of deceased enlightenment. For a moment, she was as much as wishing to die to be raptured into their thoughts, and they into hers, the way a normal person yearned for shared physical and emotional intimacies. Dying young might be preferable to decades of being pinned into a stall hearing the shallow grunting of one of those male members of the porcine herd. Isolation in Antarctica without seals and penguins would be a hundred times better than that indelible connection of producing for him more grunting piglets; however death was not rapture but rupture. "How is Rick?" she asked after he was seated and she had sipped a bit of the coffee that he had prepared for them. "The same. Growing."