There had been no real reason for him to go to Seoul this time. There were no private lessons there. His reactions toward Umsong also did not have much of a rationale. Occasionally, even when there were no private lessons in that area he sometimes got up around 4 a.m nonetheless; took an hour long bus ride to that small town he had once lived in; walked near bowing rice and corn; crossed the bridge around a thin circular lake at a small park; and stared at the Korean moon bolted tightly against the Korean sky. He wanted for the night to capture him somehow--for a drunk motorcyclist or a lazy trucker to whisk a wild adventure and physical intimacies upon him and yet, in full wistful innocence, he equally wanted what he would always go there for: to hear nothing but birds and a whisk of wind in the tranquility of that sleepy town in one of its most tranquil hours. Nothing of the former ever happened and he would always come from the impulse to a feeling of loss. His impetus to go to Seoul this week had come from a dominant feeling of disconnection experienced by one who knew the extreme violence of the world, who knew the madness of hope for anyone, and felt being buried alive in that one perspective that the world was an evil place-a perspective that was not ethereal but solid as a coffin even if it did spill over into other things. A further disconnection of any significance would cause such an individual to let a numbness and deadening of the concept of self to take place. The day before his fleeing to Seoul, his platonic friendship with Kim Yang Kwam had gone awry and he found himself floundering in suffocating despair as that time years earlier at the trial. Yang Kwam was asleep with his hand in his underwear when Sang Huin awakened. Sang Huin touched him. It was the end of the closest Korean friendship that had been his life support in the six months he resided in this foreign country, South Korea, which was his birth home and the source of his nationality. Now it was Kim Yang Kwam he kept thinking about in the bus. Sang Huin was labeled as dirty a few nights ago: the way he walked on the floor with his shoes instead of taking them off at the door; the half open window that allowed any insect an easy passage; the fact that he didn't have any rubbing alcohol to cleanse the mosquito bites that his friend gained while sleeping in Sang Huin's room; the fattening mess of pancakes with half burnt ridges in place of rice which Sang Huin prepared for him despite the criticism; and then came questions about the nature of his relationship with Sung Ki.