He felt a headache and imagined Gabriele's as well. He tried to shrug off both but was only able to dismiss what he imagined hers as being. He looked at the rising and falling of Seong Seob's chest within the silvery tinted shadows of twilight that fell through the curtain of their bedroom. The breathing of this friend was harmonic beauty and, at that moment, he halfway yearned for him. Evading Gabriele motioning for him in the hallway as if he were supposed to go into the bathroom to help her vomit, he went into the living room and turned on the American military station, AFKN. New divisions of soldiers were being sent to Kuwaiti bases for another confrontation with Iraq. Pyongyang had recently dismissed nuclear monitors. The troops at the Itaewon base and at the DMZ were on a heightened alert to North Korean actions. They were the same old unresolved conflicts. "Feelin' good," said a soldier in military uniform before a television camera. "Feelin' the adrenaline. Glad I'm here to serve American interests and the people of South Korea, practicing war games and the like. I and my unit - all these great men from every division - are ready to go into action any minute we're requested to fight." Peace, thought Sang Huin, was not the natural state. Being titillated by the infinite possibilities in sexual liaisons with strangers and a propensity for violence were both the natural state. Sang Huin turned on his computer. He could only jot down Nathaniel's thoughts. "The car is hot. He feels the burning sensation of his legs against the upholstery. He likes the heat. It prompts him to not delay by thinking, but just to move quickly. There is something pleasing in the car passing the world as wind. It almost makes him feel that he can pass through anything: through another car, or through the side of an embankment. He does not know where he is going." Sang Huin stopped. He was being taken downstream with his memories. They pulled him into them because they were the substance of who he was. As the founder of philosophy, Thales, stated, everything was made of water. Sang Huin, this Shawn or Sean depending on how he spelled his nickname, had returned home from one of his last days of his senior year in high school to find his sister, Jun Jin, crying on the bottom step of the staircase. Her eyes were black and swollen and they were as dark as marble. She didn't seem real.