Seob his own need to make more friends, but that wasn't meant to negate the friendship that he had. He didn't know. He turned on the television to obstruct his thoughts. "Oh, no," thought Sang Huin. His customers had talked about buildings on fire in New York. He had been so busy all night that their words and horrified expressions hadn't penetrated him. Moslems (the speculation was Al Queida) had flown two jets into the World Trade Center in Manhattan. The American military channel was showing CNN coverage of people jumping out of hundred story windows. Their bodies were flailing against the winds as if they were having second thoughts. He sat down on the edge of his bed. The quandaries of his personal life vanished and he became numb. He kept saying to himself, "Oh, my. This is the empirical evidence that there is no god." Solipsistic for a second, he then thought, "It is as if God is proving to me that he doesn't exist-that I am right in what I recorded in the Gabriele and Lily chapter." The incident itself shouldn't have been altogether shocking. America was an arrogant country. It thought that it was the godly power that was allowed to prosper while God subjected heathen people to dire circumstances. America felt it was entitled to bully all nations and befriend Israel beyond human decency to keep the Christian constituents, brethren of Israel, happy. Its political engagements were for its own economic and military hegemony instead of fairness and the greater good. It would be understandable, he thought, how the Moslems might think of this as a reckoning of justice. In ways it was no surprise. The real surprise was that there was no large palm of God out there hovering like a cloud capturing these falling people within it. What was incredible was that the power that would make a universe couldn't capture a few humans into its clouds like nets. Numb, he knew without thinking of himself that this numbness would continue on for many weeks and, to less extreme levels, for months and years. It was an eternal sting. When he did look at his manuscript again to expound upon it he thought, "Gabriele, sitting in the living room and waiting for a customer, jotted down some notes about how to live godly in a godless universe. However, at present her time to really write it was being usurped by Adagio." Then he deleted it. Chapter Seventeen Out of the bus, she trudged back home in early evening through the marshland of the melted snow that was refreezing treacherously. Then she detoured a block west from the trailer park to the apartment complex where Rita/Lily resided. Gabriele heard popular music playing in Lily's apartment. She knocked. "Uh...just a second," said Lily. Gabriele heard the movement of papers and magazines being suddenly assorted and things being scooted. "Who is it?" "It's me. I don't give a flying f-- what your apartment looks like!"