She turned her key in the doorknob and opened her part of the house. She thought, "The human mind when opened up has, at its crypt, humanity." Particularly for herself she loathed the idea of being a social creature. She often thought of her roommate each day of each semester, the homeless grass chewing Filipino whom a woman at the Laundromat nicknamed the botanist, professors, her family, and acquaintances: they all made up her reality. She did forget about Betty during vacations and she forgot about her aunt, uncle, and cousins except during the vacations but she couldn't quite escape thinking about them altogether. Overall, she didn't have much sentiment toward anyone, and they could easily be shaken and faded from her memory once she was away. Betty was usually an early riser, but not hearing any noise in the kitchen or living room, Gabriele at first assumed she was sleeping. She checked all the rooms but they were empty except in sound, where a small television remained turned on. A newscaster was discussing the economic powers of the East with reference to the new economic experiments in the Soviet Union and China. "The whole f-- world is West," thought Gabriele. She felt that democracy was as much an experiment as communism: an experiment on how free to be greedy things could get without entirely destroying the ecology that was the base of it all whereas the original communism of Trotsky was an experiment on how equal life could get and still be bearable in its world of frightened and impoverished clones. It all missed the mark as far as she was concerned. If each and every person was not granted food, shelter, and a profession by which to feel worthy (if indeed there were worthy professions, a question that she posed to herself) all of these socioeconomic systems were nothing to her but debauchery. She contemplated the fate of the homeless Filipino: wasn't she quite the hypocrite to say that the world was wretched to not offer him assistance that would pull him from the streets and away from feeling disoriented and hearing voices in his own head when she didn't care to bring him into her apartment. Still, she didn't want him any more than she would want a tick, a cockroach, or a bedbug. If he wanted to come into her apartment and be Betty's lover, after the last bag was put into her car, that was another thing altogether.