Jiffypop popcorn leaping over the heat of the stove's burner, the expanding of the aluminum foil cover into a crown, and his sister, Jung- Jun (that girl sister as dead and yet phantomesque as the murdered adult) tacit and waiting anxiously to be the first to pierce into the crown to obtain its edible jewels -the early days of her teaching him how to catch a baseball, how to tie his tie before they went off to Sunday school… He woke up from some forgotten but unsettling dream with a few thoughts of her trickling into his consciousness. His thoughts were uninvited and he tried to shake them off like a wet dog. As much as they were the past, they materialized through distant, sealed corridors to haunt him. Anything could be remembered. One thought slapped into another in a restrained domino effect in the primitive human psyche. Human will was like meat skewered and cooked on the rotisserie.

He had only recently moved to Seoul. Desperate for work, English had delivered and cursed him once again; although this time he had become a clerk in a convenience store in the American military sector of Itaewan. He had a room in the back area. It was really an extra stock room. The owner had been so insistent in the interview that any employee he chose would need to live in the back area as an extra security precaution. Sang Huin didn't have the inordinate money required to obtain an apartment since in Korea deposits on apartments were like the purchases of condominiums and so, not wanting to live in a yongwam, he had agreed. So upon waking this night, he did not immediately recognize where he was. Waking in darkness and wondering where he was at, it was Gabriele who dominated over his thoughts of Jung-Jun.

Gabriele's mind was sticky in malaise. The child that she had had not grounded her. It's crying was without rhyme or reason. It spouted out vehement, hellish, and non-stoppable roars like a locomotive. The malaise was hot and sticky. It was as if all of his insatiable needs were like a vomit-smelling glue and it was in her hair, on her face, and in her clothes. She could not escape. Her intellectualism was being stunted to this exclusive task of being an infant's caretaker. "I will surely snap like a twig on a crisp winter morning if I do not leave this trailer," she thought to herself although she did not completely believe it since solitude did not have much of an effect on her. In this moment of weakness where she did feel the need to depart from all the responsibilities and the cacophony that was her son, she looked at him disconcertedly. He was no more family than the one she had come out of. "I am like this lone soul that is forever seeking, although not expecting, the one true friend that wants nothing from me other than to be with me…that person who will love me for just that." She further thought, "I shouldn't have had this accident of conceiving a child…this mistake of giving birth to one. However, here he is. I can't exactly return him." Sang Huin recollected where he was. He got up and opened his door. He saw the aisles of groceries. Living here, he thought, was like living in a storage area or a gigantic pantry. He sighed. He grabbed some milk and a package of Oreo cookies that he would have to pay for later. Then he sat on his bed and took notes on what he had been thinking concerning Gabriele.

But it was his sister who haunted him more. As teenagers, they would jog together at the high school track and in school she looked so beautiful wearing a skirt and her hair in a bun. She was experimenting with makeup at the age of 14. She never did like it, dabbing it timidly over her beautiful face. She didn't need it any more in her late twenties. With their mother she would continue to talk in that mysterious language of Korean (Hangkuk-mal) that he did not understand. It was their secret language. It was their girlish society that he had been excluded from. As a family they functioned fine. However, he and his father never had connected personally when they were apart from the others. The man had always absconded from him. He had been aloof. Both of his parents were so aloof and so aged during the 14 months of Jun-Jung's disappearance and seemingly elderly at the discovery of the skeletal remains and the ensuing trial.

Gabriele felt as if she were at an amusement park and that her own little world were nothing but a house of mirrors. Each subsequent mirror (despite her youth) cast an impression of more furrowed wrinkles on her forehead, seemed to expand the appearance of bags under her eyes, and made her hair look increasingly gray. Life was nothing but a bottle, a diaper, burping, feeding, and washing. The robotic movements he demanded her to do to take care of him went on perpetually. His crying went on perpetually.

Like with other late evenings that week, at 11:30 p.m. Saeng Seob and his seeing-eye dog took the 40-minute subway ride over to meet him, who would be waiting there in the terminal. Saeng Seob resented him some for quaking and thwarting the direction of his passionate river that most men felt, rode, and defined themselves from. Still, he kept the resentment mute. Being corrupted was a marginal thing when confronted daily with oceans of loneliness. Consciousness needed an object and he needed a consciousness that wasn't always disconcerted, diffident, and being thrust about like a lost, lonely man sucked up in the waves. When he finished dabbling in some work for his cousin at the university it was good to go someplace where he was wanted-someplace away from the campus where friendship gave him identity that an indifferent cousin cajoled or coerced into helping him failed to do. Sang Huin had the need to impress him with the material that he had written from the previous day or two. For Seng Seob, listening had become a means of inveigling those who needed to feel that someone cared to hear them-a lifebuoy that he could embrace around himself when encountering the waves. Sang Huin was not frightened away by his dead orbs and so Saeng Seob let swimming, eating together, listening to the recitation, giving Sang Huin brief tutorials in Korean, and this peculiar sleeping together become the activities that bonded them. Each needed to chisel his name on the other one's brain in a city of ten million strangers. In a world of 6 billion people, each one needed a special lure, and for him it was listening intensely to others. He saw himself as a demure epicure with no published writing and nothing outwardly erudite to show for it. He in his reserve believed that in a world of nonsense spoken by barbarians little outside of human culture had a positive worth except for friendship, and if he needed to listen all night to someone he cared for, he would do just that.

In the back of the convenience store it was hard for him to critique Sang Huin's prose. After all, it was a foreign language being read to him but despite its blur to his mind it dazzled him in new vocabulary that he would look up in his dictionary later. The role of boyfriend to Seong Seob was peculiar but the human gourmandized touch above all ambrosia. It was a special sensory input to the reticular formation of the brain. Touch gave a consciousness of relationship and belonging that were the highest goals of all such humans, hominids, and primates creeping their way to godhood. He hadn't felt particularly inclined to be homosexual and yet that had little meaning when one needed touch and friendship. Being blind made touch even more of an instrument of knowing something although all grabbled around in darkness.

The next morning was Sang Huin's bit of a weekend and so Seong Seob feigned sickness in a phone call to his cousin. The cousin was indifferent and if he questioned the logic of calling in sick while being absent from the home that both of them shared, he did not mention it. So Seong Seob and Sang Huin went out to experience the changing of the guard ceremony at Toksugum Palace: the soldiers in their colorful ancient garb and round black brimmed hats, the horns, the drums and the changing staffs. At first they went to Lawson's convenience store and bought some kim bop (a Korean version of sushi), potato chips, and cola. They took the food to a stack of lumber that had been piled to the area opposite of the ticket counter and, for some minutes, plopped themselves on top of it and witnessed what their senses allotted. Later, they went to the amusement park, Lotte World. For each ride they stood in line over half an hour. Once, as they were going into the bathroom, Sang Huin kissed Seong Seob hurriedly before more men entered. Saeng Seob disliked the intrusive act that brought the acknowledgement of his aberration if not perversion into the light of day but the hot mouth was full of molecules and passing of molecules in a kiss was an intoxicating thing that took one away from the mundane aspects of reality. Further, he knew that the only wrong was in judging one Epicurean quest over that of another. It was an inconsequential thing.

Chapter Twelve

Gabriele smashed a corpulent ant into her second composition when neither flicking it away with her fingertips nor blowing it off her paper was successful. She was writing a second story to put her son to sleep after finding the first composition ridiculous. From this action the insect was nothing but a brownish green blotch on her new work. "Thai Tiger," she rewrote after scratching out the earlier paragraph that had the blotch in it, "waved goodbye to his mother and father from the window of the plane. He was both sad and happy because he was leaving one thing he loved and going to another. The plane went into the clouds and came down in Sri Lanka. Tamil Tiger was waiting for him. Tamil Tiger's mother took Tamil Tiger and Thai Tiger to her home in downtown Colombo. What is Colombo like, asked Thai Tiger from the backseat of the car where he sat with Tamil Tiger. It is full of wars, said Tamil Tiger. What are wars, asked Thai Tiger. Let's change the subject, retorted Tamil Tiger."