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.