To have the monogamous prototype of a gay couple for others to emulate there needed to be something giving it at least the suggestion or illusion of stable ground. And yet there was no higher entity to suggest such a bonding. There were no symbolic marriage certificates suggesting that society and the creator of the universe gave their implicit endorsement of such mergers to which logic would say that they would be no more preoccupied with than a man the mating habits of a rat in a city park. Also, within this alternative channel of one's sexual energy there were no children to rear, not that children remained such forever. Instead, for one who was gay there were only appetites and one's erratic but less illusionary emotional responses as the substance of a relationship. These were one's only sense of being in a gay relationship and as such they were the only compasses to find one's way around. In some ways it was worse than a bathhouse labyrinth of complete darkness for being in a relationship of this nature was not walking around lost and trying to find the perfect form. It was being disgorged in passionate love for another human being and only this--this spray of molecules, which lasted as long as the spray. That is not to say that heterosexual couples did not experience the sense that these foundations of relationships, family, and reality could never be shaken. They too were sentient beings. They too knew that they were constructing homes in the San Andreas Fault Line. The shaking was quite palpable but what could they do other than pretend that what they were creating was forever? They too felt the rumblings of the separating earth that they stood on. Had it not been signatures on tenuous pieces of paper and the responsibilities of children who again would not be such forever more of them, thought Sang Huin, would feel as he did. What he was experiencing, he told himself, was the exemplification of the human condition itself and so he comforted himself that he was not strange. One evening on his free day when the cello would not play for him anything other than just notes and Gabriele was nothing but words of clutter like the dirty socks he seemed to strew across his room, he tried to avoid the callings of desperation and the wish to escape his lonely malaise by changing a few florescent light bulbs that had been flickering in the convenience store. He was changing the second bulb on the ladder, absconding from his temptations to go to a sauna, when he heard a flurry of tapping as if the limbs of a tree were knocking against a window. It was a tapping or a light knocking. He got down from the ladder and followed it into his room. He opened the door and there was Saeng Seob. Sang Huin's bereaved mind had already buried him as one more corpse of friendship that had amassed in a huge burial hill since early childhood. He did not know what to say. "Can I come in?" asked Seong Seob.