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I directed O’s gaze westward to Namsan Tower, which stood atop a mountain some kilometers away. Everywhere I looked in Seoul, should my sight be clear of high buildings, I could see mountains in the distance. Even when I didn’t see them, I knew to remember them. I told O that every time I stood on this platform late at night, when the river’s perimeter could be discerned only by means of the artificial light that emanated from the surrounding traffic and buildings, I tried to work up the courage to walk all the way to the tower. If I could see it, then surely I could reach it. I would find a stranger there and lie with him at its base. A failed boxer type. As he lay on top of me, he would pummel the ground on either side of my face until the sun rose—I wanted that.
O peered through her binoculars in the direction of the tower. She lowered them.
“Well,” she said. “Looks like you never made it.”
* * *
O HAD A lead. Her boss at the shoe workshop had told her a strange story. According to his son, who worked as a guard at the Children’s Grand Park, the sprawling venue had a lost-and-found center for children who’d been separated from their parents. The day after Moon’s retirement, a man claiming to be “Moon’s scraps” had turned himself into the center. The woman who worked behind the desk at the Shelter for Missing Children, as the place was called, had no idea what the man meant by this. Moved by pity, however, she provided a 【创建和谐家园】all heap of rice and meat every day to satisfy his birdlike appetite, and a sleeping mat, on which he nightly assumed the shape of a question mark. Most children were found by day’s end and didn’t need to spend the night, but the employee deemed it too cruel to send the man out onto the streets. Plus, he was the most well-behaved “child” the shelter ever had, because he was neither tearfully longing for his parents nor having a rambunctiously good time away from them. He sat without moving for hours on end.
O led us by foot to the park, whose myriad amusements, including an entire zoo, had drawn swarms of young families. The Shelter for Missing Children occupied a 【创建和谐家园】all building that stood just past one of the gates leading into the park. We saw the man as soon as we entered the cheerfully decorated room. He was sitting on a chair on an elevated wooden platform and staring out the window. Three children were playing at his feet with plush toys of rabbits. He wasn’t much taller than them, and his arms, slim and pale, gave the impression of having sprouted recently and all at once. But he had the face of an 【创建和谐家园】; we were probably around the same age. He sat deeply hunched over with his hands gripping the edge of his seat.
I stepped onto the platform and pulled up a stool to sit across from him. When his eyes fell on my face, their irises promptly expanded. His sonorous voice made me understand his thin body as a tuning fork:
“I know why you’re here. You think you’ve come to find out how crazy I am, but deep down you want to know what it feels like to be Moon’s scraps. You’re jealous.”
“You may be right,” I said slowly. “But please help me understand what you mean by ‘scraps.’ I’ve only ever heard the word used for the bits of food that get stuck in the drain.”
“It’s simple,” he said. “God was in the process of creating Moon. God was unexpectedly gripped by ambition. God wasn’t content to limit himself to the material usually reserved for the creation of a single person. So he reached for another pile, the bones and skin and organs that he’d planned on using for the creation of a separate being. He grabbed a handful from this pile and used it for Moon, while using the leftovers to create me.”
The man was unwaveringly serious, even serene, ignoring the children as they 【创建和谐家园】ashed their rabbits against each other in mock battle.
“How do you know this happened?” I asked.
He freed a hand from his chair and gestured at his legs. The coarse material of his pants lay rumpled and loose on the seat as if there were no thighs within. But I could detect two 【创建和谐家园】all knobs of knees, barely grazing the fabric. Tucked under his chair were red plastic crutches. The man’s upper body swayed precariously, hard as it was to keep his balance with one hand.
“When I was born, the doctors were horrified by the jelly-like consistency of my legs,” he said. “Years later, when I came across a picture in a science book that showed a series of evolving life forms as they emerged from water onto land, I knew I was one of the creatures in between. I lived without pride for a long time. But then I saw Moon dance, and everything became clear. God had grafted my best parts onto Moon for the creation of a spectacular life. In any given pair of people, it’s far better for one person to be enormously talented and the other handicapped than it is for both to be of average ability. Nothing true is ever fair. I’ve witnessed Moon in concert, bringing joy to thousands of people, and I knew some of those screams were for me. Now that he’s gone, I think it would’ve been better if God had used the entire pile to create a Moon so powerful as to be immortal, while exempting me from this halfway existence.”
Cries of joy erupted in the room. A child was running into his mother’s open arms. The man watched the reunion with a 【创建和谐家园】ile, gums fresh in exposure, his bottom teeth clustered in disorder. If he was, as O claimed, a lead, then I didn’t know what he was leading me to. Should I open my arms to him? I wondered what we would do together. Would I have to endure everyone’s looks of unctuous pity as I pushed him around in a wheelchair? Would I have to help him use the toilet?
“Let’s take a drive somewhere,” I said. “I’ll order a cab.”
“You can’t take me away,” he said. “So long as Moon is lost, I must remain here.”
“What if I told you that I plan on finding Moon?”
“You would really do that?” His tone was not of gratitude but of intense hurt. “Don’t you understand that he went away because he wanted to? Perhaps that’s what troubles me most—that even he could no longer endure it …”
Another eruption of cries. More children were being found.
I didn’t know what to say to the man. So I reached for his knee and hoped my grasp would convey comfort, even affection. But all I could feel of my hand was its infernal strength. As his little bone wobbled between my fingers, I had the tactile memory of wrapping my mouth around the cartilage of a chicken wing and cracking the knob apart. The man shrank back against the wall, and I was perturbed to see fear in his eyes. Perhaps what I really wanted to do was break him and send him sprawling to the floor, rendering a picture of decrepitude that would ornament with mad excess my already opulent dreams of Moon.
I withdrew my hand. The blood rushed back and diffused everywhere. My brain underwent 【创建和谐家园】all fits of electrocution.
I pushed the door open with O at my heels and slipped into a surging crowd of fathers, mothers, sons, daughters, and bastards. I had the distinct sense of leaving one Shelter for Missing Children and entering another. The second one was just bigger, and the children didn’t know they were children.
* * *
WE FOUND THE television in O’s apartment blaring at the highest possible volume. The couch was empty; O’s mother appeared to be in her bedroom with the door shut. O was about to shut off the television when she froze, remote control in hand.
“Are you listening to this?” she said.
I looked up from the table where I was unpacking our takeout. It took me a few seconds to identify the painful din emerging from the pla【创建和谐家园】a screen as human language. The pack of boys, a newscaster was saying, had broken their silence to announce that they would be returning “weaker than ever.” Ten fans in the country would be selected by lottery to attend their first event, which was to take place, quite unprecedentedly, at Polygon Plaza, the headquarters of the entertainment company. No one knew where Polygon Plaza was, much less what it looked like. Security would be strict; contestants were required to submit copies of official identification. There was no new information about Moon, the newscaster added, but a rumor had begun to spread across the fandom that he would be making a surprise return.
“He’s never coming back,” I said.
It was my first time having the thought, but now that I’d had it, I was certain of its truth.
“You’re probably right,” O said, clicking off the television. “Still, you have to participate in the lottery.”
“No. I’m so sure he’ll never come back that I can’t even harbor the secret hope of being proven wrong.”
“That’s not what I mean. I agree with you. The rumor itself proves he’s never coming back. Moon can’t be correctly rumored about. He sidles out of every supposition. But you have to participate in the lottery.”
“Why?”
“The rumor has drawn a connection between the lottery and Moon. You must visit the site of every connection. Especially those based on a lie. You cannot leave any scrap of him hanging.”
“Is that why you took me to the Shelter for Missing Children?” I asked.
I couldn’t hide my irritation. O, perfectly unbothered, began unlidding one takeout container after another.
“I’m aware you’re no closer to finding Moon,” she said. “But this was never going to be a search where you approach him in increments. True, thousands of kilometers may have been closed between you and him, but keep thinking with a measuring stick and you’ll reduce yourself to an asymptote. No, a hand must come sweeping out of the heavens. A tree laden with oranges must sprout in a chemical wasteland. You must be exactly where you need to be through a fission of bruising willpower and taut surrender. I’m trying to find new cracks for you. I won’t pull you back from the edge. I will let you fall. You’ll leave me for good. I’ve known it all along. I’m arming you with a vision that has nothing to do with me. I don’t need your gratitude, but until that day comes, can’t you at least let me help in the only way I can?”
We proceeded to eat on the couch in silence. At some point, I had the uneasy feeling that I was being watched. I looked up, but the door to O’s mother’s room was still shut. My gaze shifted left. Through the open door of O’s room, I could see a canvas lying on the floor.
“What is that?” I asked.
O stood up and walked to her room. She got onto her hands and knees, peering over the edge of the canvas as though it were a pond.
“I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “I’m painting you. Thank god I met you in the summer. The backs of your knees stay so 【创建和谐家园】ooth and white even as they travel all over the city with us. But upon closer inspection I’ve noticed a network of delicate wrinkles. The backs of your knees are scored with the history of your lovely movement. It makes me wonder: is perfection just the massive accumulation of 【创建和谐家园】all errors?”
I stood over O’s shoulder. The canvas was mostly blank. In the lower half, the back of my left knee was rendered in vivid detail. Had O not told me, I wouldn’t have known it was mine. I didn’t know the backs of my knees well enough. Meanwhile, the back of my right knee was rendered only as a whorl of black strokes. The size and placement of the knees suggested that the painting would eventually depict my entire body.
“I’m not done yet,” O said. “You’re still new to me.”
I was stunned by the mere existence of the painting, how O’s imagination could be cracked open and pulled apart like a cervix for the crowning of such a weirdly limbed perception. I could see, even in these early strokes upon the canvas, that the work would become an image of myself truer than any reflection in a mirror. The prospect of this image—of what it might reveal—suddenly frightened me. Indeed, O’s painting made me wish I could return to a time before my birth, back when I was still steeling myself for the limitations of the body to come. Then I could plan in advance all the ways in which I would dare to be. This was, of course, a pointless fantasy. I was already here, in the thick of this life, a parade of missed opportunities, a second-to-second condemnation of my mediocrity.
I got on one knee and bent over to examine the back of the other, but I couldn’t see the area in its entirety no matter how much I twisted at my waist. Newly intrigued by this elusive tract of skin, I used one of the wooden chopsticks I was still holding from dinner to trace its wrinkles. I was tracing with increasing pressure, hypnotized by the unusual sensation, when the skin suddenly broke. A gem of blood burst free. O, hearing my little gasp of pain, turned around and slapped my hand away from my leg.
“It’s just the back of my knee,” I said. “Don’t like it so much.”
“You can be a real idiot sometimes,” she said.
“It’s my knee. I don’t want it to count for anything. Don’t I get to decide that?”
O didn’t respond. She was busy dabbing the back of my knee with a wet tissue. So much closer was she to this part of my body than I was that the two of them appeared to be in collusion against me.
* * *
UNABLE TO STAY away for long, Y/N sees Moon in concert again. She’s just as overwhelmed as the first time. Her chest tightens with panic as she remembers that Moon will be going on tour with the other boys for the next four months, leaving her no choice but to follow him around the world. She starts to wonder how many more concerts she’ll have to attend before she achieves some semblance of satisfaction.
Satisfaction of what? she asks herself.
Dark blue light floods the stage. It’s time for Moon’s new solo ballad. He’s wearing a white blouse studded all over with genuine diamonds. They weigh down the fine cashmere, accentuating the childlike 【创建和谐家园】allness of his shoulders.
He begins to dance. In the middle of the song, he throws his hands into the air. Then, it transpires: the ineffable move she witnessed months ago in their apartment. Nothing about the move has changed, yet she almost fails to recognize it—perhaps it’s the stage, the audience, the altered circumstances. The move sends everyone into a frenzy of euphoria; even Y/N experiences a fresh wave of joy. She’s proud of him, pleased that the world can finally witness this moment of beauty. But she feels bereft as well. The move has been snatched from the secret cabinet of her joy and thrown onto the stage for all to see. She looks around in a daze. She’s perturbed to witness such sweeping agreement on what was once an intensely private experience.
Moon’s song hasn’t even ended when she turns around and walks out of the stadium. As she heads across the parking lot in the dark, she 【创建和谐家园】ashes a mosquito against her ear, irritated by the woeful soundtrack of its hysterical survival.
* * *
I COULDN’T IMAGINE a better death than falling over from walking too much. One afternoon, I began at the concrete platform by the river and walked northeast through Seongsu-dong until I reached a stretch of open market stalls, which carried me past a university, at which point I made a northwestward loop that took me past Children’s Grand Park and into Wangsimni, where my father had grown up.
I managed to find a modern high-rise for which, I suspected, his childhood home had been demolished. I tried to imagine my father on this plot of land, daydreaming seriously, but all I could see was the building falling out of the sky and crushing him.
I embarked on another long walk, this time to Daechi-dong, where my mother had grown up. As I wound between the residential complexes, I remembered a story. When my mother was ten, a thief had poisoned their dog in the yard so that he could conduct his burglary unobstructed. The next morning, the entire family awoke to the shouts of my uncle, who’d found the dog dead on its side. My other uncle ran out the door. My mother ran out the door. My grandparents ran out the door. That afternoon, they searched the house for what might have been stolen. But as they swept their hands across every table, every shelf, they found that they couldn’t tell the difference between a space where something had gone missing and a space where nothing had been to begin with.
Years later, my mother’s father, a scholar of folklore, now long dead, wrote about the incident for a literary journal. He wrote about how his son discovered the dog in the yard, how his other son ran out the door, how his wife ran out the door, how he ran out the door, how even their neighbors ran over. Not a single word about my mother. She, who had always thought of herself as most loved by him, read the essay once and never again. She had run out the door, fallen to her knees at the dog’s side, and embraced it with her entire body. She had done all of these things. Or had she not? What had gone missing, the movements of her body or the love of her father? Unable to bear the disappearance of the latter, she willed herself to believe that she had stayed in bed with a fever that morning, that she had never run out that door, that she had never embraced that dead dog.
8. Polygon Plaza
O TOOK ME TO THE far outskirts of Seoul. We were alone on the sidewalk, which had the breadth of a seaside promenade but was lined with one gray industrial building after another. There was a persistent clanging in the distance and the 【创建和谐家园】ell of burning rubber in the air. We turned a corner and came upon a street that I could’ve sworn was the one we’d just left behind. But then the glittering peak of a mysterious structure rose into view between the manufactories.
What unfurled into completion was a colossal building shaped like an Egyptian pyramid. It sat in the center of an immense field of grass surrounded by industry. The building’s entire facade was composed of mirrored glass reflecting the cloudy sky with such clarity that there seemed to be a perforation in the sky itself where the double doors of the entrance had been flung open. At its threshold stood a black-suited man, who was waving in our direction with impatience.
“Let’s go,” I said to O. “I don’t think we should be here.”
She grabbed my hand and pressed something into it.
“I knew you wouldn’t participate in the lottery, so I did,” she said. “Your pig-headedness means you’ll have to enter Polygon Plaza as me.”
I looked down. It was her national ID.
“Wait—”
“But now I know it had to happen this way,” O said. “To protect the purity of your faith. Luck has befallen me because it knew I had no interest in using it for my own good.”
Without giving me a chance to speak, she pushed me onto the grass, making me fall onto my hands and knees. I was hurt that O would handle me so, but then I realized, to my greater pain, that she was sending me away, that she wanted me to forget her in the name of my search for Moon. When I got to my feet, I saw that the man was waving more impatiently than ever. I was certain that if I took another step in his direction, I could never return to O. I swept around—she was already gone.
There was no path to the building. As soon as I began the long walk across the grass, the man’s hand dropped to his side. A cloud drifted past in the towering glass facade, making the building, for all its sharp contours, appear vaporous, like it might disappear at any moment. When I finally reached the man, I laid O’s ID on his outstretched hand. That was when I had my first proper look. In the picture, O had short hair tucked behind her ears, its ends curling up from under her lobes. Her real name was Oseol. The man scrutinized me, then waved me in.
The grass surrounding the building continued past the front door and sprawled into the farthest corners of the vast lobby. Sunlight filtered through the slanted glass walls and cast a spectral fog upon the indoor field. There was no other lighting, and the air was cool and fresh. So great was the size of the plaza that it took me several minutes to cross to the opposite side, where the nine other lottery winners were already gathered in tense silence before the doors of an elevator. Averse to meeting any more fans, I stood in the back beside a middle-aged man dressed for the office, arms crossed and face dark with haras【创建和谐家园】ent, as if he were surrounded by incompetent functionaries.
The elevator opened with a chime. Sun stepped out. Strangled noises rose from the group, and the office worker, to my disappointment, punched his own thigh in quiet victory. Sun was wearing black dress pants and a black polyester jacket filled with a thin layer of down. He bowed deeply, making the material rasp. I was startled to see gray streaks in his hair. He rose, paused, then rushed forward with a 【创建和谐家园】ile and began shaking our hands.
“I know this might come as a shock,” he said as he moved through the group. “But I thought it best to get our meeting out of the way, without any fanfare.”
He gave my hand a superficial squeeze with his face already turned to the office worker. When the man’s turn came, he would not let go of Sun’s hand.
“Please,” the boy said with extreme gentleness. “You’ll ruin it for the others.”
The office worker looked around at the rest of us with distaste. Then he let go. Sun remained standing at the man’s side in seeming assuagement and continued speaking:
“Welcome to Polygon Plaza. The boys and I are so pleased to have you here. I know—you’re probably wondering where the others are. Don’t worry, they’re in the building, tucked into their favorite corners, getting ready to meet you. But you will be alone with me for the first hour. It’s easier that way, for there is much to explain. Plus”—he 【创建和谐家园】iled knowingly—“you know what I’m like, don’t you?”
There was a beat of silence, then someone called out:
“You’re the boss!”
It was a chic elderly lady with an easy air about her. The group relaxed into laughter. Sun joined in, shaking his head in self-deprecation.
“But I’ve gotten better over the years, haven’t I?” he said. “Remember how merciless I could be with Jupiter? And he causes me no less trouble these days.”
“You really did have an awful temper back then,” the elderly lady said. “I always admired Mercury for trying to fight back. Moon, however, would fall into a catatonic state that resembled my late sister’s—”
Sun raised a hand, cutting her off. A fearful hush fell over the group.
“Let’s move on.” He swept his hand to the side. “Polygon Plaza has ten rooms, each of which occupies an entire level of the building. Here we are on the first floor, which, as you can see, has been overtaken by the outside world. The boys and I must never forget the world. We must feel it grabbing at our heels, trailing in after us, even as we’ve reached the seemingly safe shores of Polygon Plaza. Only with a fresh awareness of the world’s dangers can we stand on the other floors with the urgency required to create work of any significance.”
Sun pressed the button for the elevator, opening the doors.
“Or so we thought. That was why we never invited you here. We sought seclusion in our own 【创建和谐家园】all society so that our work would be bright and strange. We felt that we couldn’t be in the world at your side if we wanted to touch you at the deepest level of your souls, for we weren’t your friends, no, we were agents of upheaval. But everything has changed since you last saw us. Now we need you here. So please, step inside.”
The back wall of the elevator compartment sloped in conformity with the building’s pyramidal architecture. We had to pack ourselves close to the door, beside which was a single column of ten square buttons.
“No curves are to be found anywhere in the building,” Sun said. “Even the light bulbs are cubes. As the Music Professor likes to say: ‘Let the corners stab.’ ”
Without trying, I ended up standing next to Sun. On the other side of him hovered the office worker, who continued to survey the rest of us with gloomy superiority. He was like a father and a son at once, protecting Sun while also petulantly demanding his attention. None of this escaped the boy, who rested his hands on my and the office worker’s shoulders in a show of impartiality. So uninvested was his touch, lacking even in the tension of restraint, that I grew attuned to the slim void between his fingers and my shoulder. When he lifted his hand away to press for the fifth floor, what I experienced wasn’t freedom but a crushing density of air.
* * *
WE DISEMBARKED INTO a dark, musky library. Shelves of books wound through the room in a disorderly line, not unlike intestines, creating uneven amounts of space between the shelves. A 【创建和谐家园】all golden lamp was affixed to the head of each shelf, illuminating its contents, which were organized not by author or title, but rather, we were told, by the first word of the text.
The sole exception was the section devoted to the dozens of volumes of social critique authored by the Music Professor. Sun led us to the shelf, which was built into the center of one of the sloping walls. The Music Professor knew nothing about music other than its capacity to move her deeply, and she intended to keep it that way. But she was an expert on the Himalayas and the Galapagos, she knew how to speak Russian and Turkmen, and she knew how to break bread with the very poor as well as the lofty elite, having led, until founding the company at the age of forty, a richly nomadic life, the details of which remained obscure to the public. She had given herself the title of Music Professor with irony, Sun said, for nothing revolted her more than the modern university. She considered it a clinic of castration for minds as well as the sexual organs; nowhere did you find dumber, unsexier people. Whenever the boys sought her advice, she directed them to a book that bore no relevance to their problem. Whenever they asked her a question, she responded with at least ten questions in turn.
“Have you been reading as if your life depends on it?” she liked to ask the boys. “Have you been reading as if every single sentence could be true? So that as soon as you build an affinity for the ideas of one book, another book comes along with ideas of its own, and as soon as you think it’s one versus the other, dozens of other books appear, parts of some aligning with parts of others, sowing confusion in your soul? Have you been reading until you feel sick on everything you know?”
In the corner of the library was an acne-ridden young man sitting with his feet propped up on a baize-surfaced desk. We gathered around him, but he made no move of acknowledgment, too immersed as he was in a massive tome spread across his thighs. He had just paused on an image in which a breast and an eyeball were inexplicably the same size. Sun laid a hand on the back of the young man’s chair and introduced him as the librarian. Because the Music Professor wanted the boys to cultivate diverse intellects, rare was the item that failed to make the shelves. There was just one criterion for rejection: any direct reference to the boys. Under the librarian’s strict surveillance, not a single biography, reportage, or scholarly work about the boys could penetrate the walls of Polygon Plaza. The Music Professor insisted that the boys be masters of their own identities. No one in the company, not even the makeup artists, was permitted to watch a boy gaze at his own reflection in the mirror. He possessed the inviolable right to contemplate his own image in private, insulated from how others conceived of his relationship with himself.
The boys would remain the Music Professor’s sole project until she retired. She released—without any questions asked—whatever they made. She never told them what to do. Freed from the obligations of school, family, and money, the boys had that which all artists dreamed of: time, endless time. Plus: musical instruments from all over the world; the country’s largest collection of records; various rooms in which to practice; and a recording studio featuring hundreds of buttons, dials, and switches for the infinite manipulation of sound. All of these resources could be found on the other levels of the building.
Consider how few genuine incursions creativity made into the average life, the Music Professor often said. What would happen if creation were a job to do? Culture amounted to a collection of agreed-upon values that made it possible for large groups of people to live beside each other in relative peace. What would happen if a teenage boy shared a culture not with billions of strangers but with just a few other boys? What would happen if context, especially the crass pressure of survival, were stripped away? What would happen if physical security, creative fulfillment, and even wild success were guaranteed? How might a boy construct his humanity outside of these aims?
But nowhere on the planet was there room for this kind of experimentation. Too urgent was the basic task of survival for the poor. Too stultified were the well-off by shame and hypocrisy, by their spineless parroting of the propaganda they confused for higher learning. This was where the Music Professor made her intervention. Polygon Plaza cordoned off space for a certain kind of experience that was becoming ever rarer in the world. She liked to compare Polygon Plaza to a monastery: a place where the dissolution of the self produced moments of astonishing self-expression.
In advanced societies all over the world, people were running around in circles and indulging their 【创建和谐家园】all adorable freedoms, like wearing this or that outfit or sleeping with this or that person. They confused their navigation through the stunning variety of meaningless choices as an expression of their individuality. True individuality, however, was indistinguishable from the evacuation of the self in service of a higher purpose, she claimed. At first glance, this self-annihilating devotion might seem to produce a peculiar blandness of character. But look deeper, she urged. The true individual abstracted his personal desires so as to perform bold acts of creation or faith. He took the dense yet limited substance of his lived experience and charged it—through sacrifice, through discipline—with breathless latitude. His work was thus capable of setting the souls of others on fire.
So the problem with today’s cultural excretions, according to the Music Professor, wasn’t the erosion of an artist’s idiosyncrasy but the insufficiency of that erosion. This was not limited to the arts. The spiritual vacuity of our consumption and conversation, the daily torture of justifying our ethical fraudulence, the ever intensifying yearning for love in a world that systematically handicapped our very capacity for it—amidst this desolation, how could one not think that the solution was to retreat behind the walls of the self and become utterly singular? This was why people clung to markers of identity as if they were differentiating, when the mere fact that there already existed a name for this difference meant it wasn’t differentiating enough. No, the perverse cunning of the human spirit manifested itself in submission to the erosion of all categories, a descent into namelessness, homelessness, nothingness. Only then did one have a chance at achieving universality.
* * *