"I sarem i irum Seong Seob imnida. I sarem i Seong Seob imnida." He paused and turned to the older Seong Seob. "Go ahead. You've been introduced. You both are each other. Ask him how he is. I can't speak Korean as you well know every minute of everyday." The older Seong Seob laughed and then began to flutter within the native language that animated him most. Sang Huin watched as the three creatures (his friend, the mother, and her son who was also named Seong Seob) expressed their color and movement in Hanguk-mal. He felt as if he were in a flower market instead of a hospital. Flowers encompassed the boy in all directions. Sang Huin remembered being sick himself and hearing the cryptic language that his mother and sister spoken around him. That cryptic language was now there in the confines of the walls of this hospital room and unable to escape it he felt as if he were a minority within it. It was the ethereal language that had soared his family above and away from his terrestrial boundaries. Sang Huin thought about that time at the English winter camp when he first met this now hospitalized boy, Seong Seob. Everything proceeded fine for a few days and then one night Seong Seob scathed his knees in play and suddenly pulled off his pants in front of the school children and staff. The boy exposed his vulnerabilities. He showed the flimsy mortal creature of man for what he was. Horror and tempestuous hatred toward the mincing of one's boyhood innocence was in his animated eyes and it mixed into his cries of despair. Five seconds earlier he had been running and wrestling with the other boys and then with a little pain and the rolling of a small stream of blood came the memories of being run over by a truck and all of its ensuing surgeries. Saeng Seob had not wanted to come; and even in the hospital room he and the dog wanted to stay aloof. Despite his more gregarious tendencies and his smile so wide to compensate for the lack of expression in his sunglass-confined orbs, Seong Seob and his dog stood away from the railing of the bed. The dog perceived its master's nasocomial fears but instead of looking at the atmosphere as something that might alert its senses, its face, every few moments, made movements toward the door not much different than the master. It had led the way through outpatient units of hospitals before. It knew its master's aversion to places of suffering and could sense the gloom that pervaded all rooms and corridors in a hospital. The surgeries on Seong Seob's eyes had been performed when he was a boy to no avail. The dog had escorted the master from the ages of 12 to 15 on subsequent visits that procured nothing but the dread of hospitals.