Chapter 1: The Doll's Hour
Danger City isn't really a city. I learned that watching my mother give everything to the people who haunted the streets and walked through the gaping doors of the businesses that ate them. She did it three times over, three jobs in the grit, feeding the neon until the neon burst and rained sparks down on me. I was small enough to think the sparks were stars.
The city feeds on all of us. It pretends to offer new shiny things. Holographic phones in the same hand as a paperback. Cars that get stolen before you can stain the seat. Alarm systems shaped like dogs that bark but cannot bite. Every shiny thing in this city has a price tag, and the price tag is never money. It is blood, time, effort. Sometimes a name.
It is why people like me take control where we can. My mother dragged her aching, zombie body to and from jobs that never remembered her name, and that nearly killed me to watch, but she did it because she refused to let the streets wear me down like sandpaper. She refused to let the conmen and drifters in the alleyways see me as an appetizer. She refused to let anyone own me.
If the only thing I own is myself, then I am living up to my mother's legacy.
Clients can have my company. Clients can have my body. That is what I choose to sell them. My feelings are mine, kept somewhere inside the cage where I have tamed them with domestic living and the kind of quiet a woman builds with locks and lullabies. The cage is small and the cage is mine and the cage has held.
It is a Tuesday. There is nothing special about a Tuesday in the Bottoms. The medicine on the receipt in my coat pocket costs three hundred and forty. I had two-eighty when I left the house this morning. I will have more before I sleep.
I count the men in the room before I count my drinks. The room is a hotel suite I have never been in before, four floors above a noodle shop on the edge of the Bottoms, and the man in the room is not new. He is named Daniel and he is on his fourth appointment. The fourth appointment is the one where they start to believe they know me. I make sure they keep believing.
Daniel likes me to lie back. Daniel likes to be told he is good. Daniel comes quickly and apologizes about it as if I am a wife and the apology is owed to me. You are wonderful, I say. You are wonderful. You are so good to me. He has a wife. He has a wife in the Core. The wife does not know what he is wonderful at and would not, I think, find his wonderfulness wonderful. I do not say this.
He pays in cash. He always pays in cash. He folds the bills the way men fold bills when they are pretending they are not the kind of man who does this. Too neat, into thirds, the corners aligned. I put them in my coat pocket on top of the receipt.
In the elevator going down, I look at myself in the brushed steel and I look like Asami. Asami is what I look like at four o'clock on a Tuesday in a hotel hallway that smells faintly of bleach. Asami is the lipstick that does not smear. Asami is the small black dress under the long black coat. Asami is the woman who can be alone in an elevator with a man who has just been inside her and not flinch when his elbow grazes hers because the elevator is small.
I exit at the lobby. He exits at the parking garage. We are not seen together. That is part of what he pays for.
Outside, the rain has not started but is thinking about it. The Bottoms at five in the evening is the city pretending to wake up before its real work begins. The vendors are stacking crates. The drones are low. Above the noodle shop a Watchdog drone hovers, the soft red eye of it sweeping along the awning, and I look up at it the way a person looks up at weather. As a thing that is happening to me and not because of me, and as a thing I can do nothing about.
The drone moves on. Three streets over, somebody screams in the way a person screams at a friend across a market. Not the other way. The market kind. Danger City has at least four kinds of scream, and a Doll learns to tell them apart faster than she learns most things.
I tighten my coat. I walk toward the Black Wire. There is a name in my throat I sing only at home, and a name in my coat pocket I will not look at until tomorrow when the pharmacy opens, and there is a man behind the bar who pours my drink before I sit down. Tuesday is the kind of day where I get to want all three.
Chapter 2: Mother's Lullaby
The apartment is on the third floor of a building that used to be a textile mill and now is what it is. The windows are wide. The radiators bang at night when the heat decides to come on. The hallway smells like the curry from the unit two doors down, which is the best part of the building, and on a good week I bring 4B a small box of pastries from the bakery downstairs as my way of saying thank you for the smell.
I take the stairs because the elevator is loud and my mother is sometimes asleep at this hour. The stairs are not quiet either, but the stairs are mine. I know which one creaks. I know which one to skip. I have been climbing them every night for five years.
The lock takes two tries. It always takes two tries. The key bites, then catches.
"Freya?" my mother says from the bedroom, soft.
"It's me, mama."
I do not turn the front light on. I never do. I cross the living room in the half-light of the streetlamps coming through the window. The bedroom door is open. The bedroom light is the small lamp on her nightstand, the one with the cracked glass shade that throws a yellow that makes the ceiling look warmer than it is.
She is propped up on three pillows. Her hair is loose. Her hair is going more gray than it was last month but the gray is the color you see in expensive paintings and not the color of being tired, which is a small kindness. She is wearing the cardigan I bought her two winters ago. The medication on the nightstand is in three bottles. The blue one she took with breakfast. The white one she takes at sundown. The amber one. The one Kane writes the prescription for himself, the one that costs three hundred and forty, is the one she takes with the food I cook for her.
I have not eaten yet. She has not eaten yet. We will eat together. That is the rule on Tuesday.
"How was your day, mama?"
"Mrs. Park came by." Her voice is thin but lucid. Today is a lucid day. There are days that are not, and on those days she calls me Aeliana, which is her own name, and I sit on the edge of the bed and let her hold my hand and call me her own name, because the alternative is correcting her, and I will not correct her. "She brought soup. She said her grandson is getting married next month."
"That's nice."
"He is marrying a woman from Silica."
"Mm."
"Imagine."
She says imagine the way a person says imagine about a planet. Silica is a thirty-minute train ride and may as well be the moon.
I put my coat on the back of the chair. I take the bills out of the pocket and put them in the tea tin on the dresser. I do not count them. She does not look. We have an agreement we have never had to say out loud. The tin is the tin. The pharmacy is on Wednesday. The pharmacy is always on Wednesday. The amount in the tin is whatever it is.
I heat the soup Mrs. Park brought. I add rice. I cut a green onion fine on the cutting board, because she likes a thing to look like a meal even when it is somebody else's leftovers. I bring two bowls in on a tray and we eat in her room with the news on low. The news says the river was high this week. The news says a councilman from the Exchange has resigned. The news says nothing about Dolls, because the news never says anything about Dolls. The news skips us the way you skip a stone over a body of water, touching down only on the things that will skip again.
She eats half her bowl. That is a good day. On a bad day she eats four spoonfuls. I do not comment on the half. I take the bowls back to the kitchen and I rinse them and I sit with her until she begins to hum.
She hums in French. She always hums in French when she is comfortable. The lullaby is the one her own mother sang to her. J'ai trop besoin de toi pour vivre sans toi. I do not know if she knows she is humming it, or if the song just lives in her throat now the way some songs do. She was a singer once. She sang in three languages in a brothel where the men paid extra to be sung to before they were given anything else. She gave me the lullaby and the French and most of what I know about how to be alone in a room with a man without becoming a thing he can take.
She hums. I sit on the edge of the bed. I do not hum back. I never hum back where she can hear me. The song is hers. I keep my own version of it for the kitchen, where she cannot hear, where I sometimes hum it to a tea kettle.
Her eyes close. The cardigan rises and falls.
I turn the lamp off. I leave the bedroom door open.
In the living room I sit in the dark for a long time before I get up to leave again. There is a man behind a bar across the city who pours my drink without asking, and a woman who will sit beside me and call me honey, and that is what Tuesday looks like. I do not feel guilty for wanting the bar after I want my mother. I have stopped pretending I do not need both.
I take the coat off the chair. I do not take any of the bills from the tin. I lock the door behind me on the second try.
Chapter 3: The Litany
River.
It is the hour at Black Wire when the bar is full of nobody in particular. The serious drinkers have not come down from work yet. The casuals have gone home to whatever they pretend is a home. The middle hour is when the music is low and the light is the color of a bruise that is healing, and Rowan has time to stand at the end of the bar with a glass in his hand and not move for a long minute and look like he is doing nothing. He is not doing nothing. He is doing his job, which is watching the room.
I am at the bar. I have been at the bar for an hour. My second whiskey is gone and my third is in front of me and I will not finish it. I do not finish my whiskeys at Black Wire. Rowan pours them small enough that I could, and I do not, because finishing them would mean wanting them, and wanting things in front of a man who pours your drink without asking is a habit I do not let myself acquire.
The door opens. The door has a small bell that Kenji put on it forty years ago to keep his wife happy and that Rowan has never taken down. Asami walks in.
She walks in like she always walks in, which is like a woman who has done her hour and washed her hands and is here to pretend she is not the woman who did the hour and washed the hands. The coat is the coat. The hair is the hair. She slides onto the stool two down from mine.
"Honey," I say.
"River."
Rowan slides her drink across the bar. Honey mead, real sugar rimmed on the glass. He has done this a thousand times. He looks at her face and does not look at her face. He nods. He goes back to the end of the bar and to the glass he was polishing, which is the same glass he was polishing when I came in.
I let her have the first sip in peace. The first sip is hers. The second sip is mine to interrupt.
"Bad client?"
"Daniel."
"Mm. Daniel."
"He apologized."
"He always apologizes." I tap my cigarette out into the small dish Rowan keeps under the bar for me. He hates that I smoke at the bar. He has never said so. "The day Daniel stops apologizing is the day you raise his rate."
She laughs once. It is a small laugh. It is the laugh of a woman who came here looking for a small laugh and found it.
We sit. We do not look at each other in the mirror behind the bar because Rowan has had the mirror taken down and replaced with a row of bottles, which is one of the things I like about Black Wire and one of the things that took me three years to notice. He took it down before he met me. He took it down for somebody else. I have not asked.
The girl two stools to my left is new. Not new to the trade. I can see it on her, the way she sits, the way she does not look at the men at the booth behind her, but new to this bar. She has a glass of water. She is waiting for somebody, or waiting for something, or waiting for nothing, which is the saddest of the three.
I will not talk to her tonight. Tonight is Asami's. The new girl will be here next week, or she will not, and that will tell me something I do not need to know yet.
I light another cigarette. Asami watches me light it. She does not smoke. She has watched me light cigarettes for three years and has not asked.
"You should write yours down," I say.
"My rules?"
"The ones you tell yourself. Pin them to the inside of your closet. So when you start to forget, the closet reminds you."
"I don't forget."
"Everyone forgets, honey."
She takes another sip. I watch her not finish it.
"Tell me yours, then," she says.
I take a drag. I let it out slow. I have said the rules so many times my mouth knows the rhythm without my brain weighing in. The rules are not mine. The rules are everyone's. I learned them from a woman who learned them from a woman who learned them from a woman who did not survive long enough to teach anyone, and at some point in the chain somebody put them in an order, and the order is the order.
"Don't fall in love," I say.
She nods.
"Don't forget your mask."
"Mm."
"Don't hope."
She does not nod this time. She picks up her glass and puts it back down.
"Don't kiss."
I let don't kiss sit between us. Don't kiss is hers. She has told me don't kiss is the one she holds first, and I do not know if she still does, but I watch her face for the half-second after I say it, and the half-second tells me she does.
"Don't believe."
"Don't bargain with hunger."
"Don't give him your name."
"Don't ride alone."
There are others. There are always others. The Litany is older than I am and longer than I have time for and women add to it every season the way women add to a song. But those are the eight I say to her, in that order, because those are the eight that matter at twenty-five, and because there will be time later to learn the others.
She does not say thank you. She does not have to. The Litany is not a gift. The Litany is the railing on a staircase that does not have a wall.
"You forgot one," she says.
"Did I."
"Don't trust softness."
I do not look at her. I look at the bottom of my glass.
"That one's mine," I say. "You can borrow it."
She laughs again. Smaller, this time. She lifts her glass an inch off the bar in something that is not quite a toast.
The door opens. The bell again. A man neither of us has seen comes in and looks around the room the way a man looks at a room he is going to remember, and Rowan looks up and does not move and watches him over the rim of the glass he is polishing.
I file the man for later.
The girl with the water finishes her water and leaves. She did not meet anyone. The saddest of the three.
I stub the cigarette out. I lean my shoulder into Asami's for one second, the way an older sister leans in a doorway, and I get off the stool.
"Don't ride alone tonight," I say.
"I won't."
"And honey."
"What."
"If the new one starts looking at you like he's making a list, finish your drink and walk out."
She blinks at me. I do not specify which new one. I do not need to. She will know if she sees him.
I walk out into the rain that has finally started. Behind me, Rowan pours her another small whiskey. I do not look back. I know what the bar looks like with me leaving and her staying. I have looked at it before.
Chapter 4: The Man Who Pours Without Asking
Asami.
Rowan slides the second whiskey across the bar without asking, because he has done this for three years and he knows that I will not finish the first one and that the second one is for the company of the glass, not the drink. The second one I will not finish either. He pours them small. He pours them the way you give someone something they do not need but might want, which is the only way I take anything from anybody, and he has figured that out, or it is just the way he is. I am not sure.
Rowan in neon is the color of whatever is behind him. The blue of the sign that says BAR in the window paints him on the right side. The red of the sign over the back door paints him on the left. Tonight, looking at him from this stool, he is a man who is half one color and half another and entirely black underneath. He has worn black since I have known him. He has the round dark glasses on, even at this hour, because of the bar's lights or because of his own reasons. I have never asked.
He polishes a glass. The same glass, or another glass shaped like the same glas. I cannot tell, and after three years I think the point is that you cannot tell. The polishing is the thing. The polishing is what he does so he does not have to do something else with his hands.
"Quiet night," I say.
"Tuesday."
"Mm."
He takes the polished glass and puts it on the shelf and picks up another. The cloth he uses is folded once and once again. His hands are steady. His hands have always been steady. The first time I noticed his hands I was not the kind of sober that allows noticing, and the noticing happened anyway.
There is a story I do not tell. The story is that I came in here once, four years ago, with two clients who had wanted a Tuesday hour with two Dolls each and had picked me at a bar I no longer go to, and I drank too much honey mead because I was new enough to think drinking would make the hour go faster, and I broke a glass on the bar — this bar — and I do not remember anything else. I have been told that I came up here, by myself, and that I would not have made it back to the apartment. I have been told that whatever was in me on top of the whiskey was bad and that I would not have woken up.
I have been told these things by no one. Nobody at the bar will say them out loud. But somebody carried me to the back room. Somebody sat in a chair by the couch I was on. Somebody made sure I did not stop breathing.
I came back to the Black Wire the next week because it was the only place in the Bottoms I could not remember leaving, and Rowan poured my drink and did not say anything, and I have been coming back ever since.
I do not bring it up. He does not. We have a thing where we do not have a thing, and the not-having is the thing.
"You know the guy who came in," I say.
"No."
"He looked at me."
"He looked at everyone."
"He looked at me like he was reading."
Rowan polishes. He does not respond to like he was reading, because Rowan does not respond to half of what I say. He responds to the half I would say to no one else. The half I am hoping he hears, the half I do not let myself ask for a response to. He picks up the same glass I was watching him polish a minute ago and he sets it down again and he wipes the bar between us with the cloth.
"You drinking that," he says, nodding at the second whiskey.
"No."
"Mm."
He does not offer to take it away. He leaves it there in case I change my mind about a thing he already knows I will not change my mind about. The leaving is what I came here for. The leaving is the thing.
A booth in the back laughs too loud at something. Rowan's chin lifts an inch. The booth quiets. I do not know how he does that. I have watched him do it dozens of times. It is not a look. It is a presence the way a thunderstorm is a presence, and the men in the booth feel it on their skin without knowing what they felt.
"How's your mother," he says.
It is the only question that anyone is allowed to ask me about her, and only Rowan is allowed to ask it, and I do not know when that became the rule, only that it did. River does not ask. Lacy does not ask. Nobody at the bar except Rowan asks. He asks it the way you ask after weather. He asks it because he is the only person who knows that the answer is not weather.
"Lucid today," I say.
"Good."
"Soup."
"Good."
He polishes. He polishes. The cloth moves. I watch his hands and not his face. His hands are the steadiest thing in the Bottoms. If I had to pick a thing about the bar to take with me on the day the bar is gone, which is a day I will not let myself imagine but sometimes imagine anyway, I would not take the bell. I would not take the bottles. I would take a memory of his hands polishing a glass and the way he never looked up while I was watching him do it.
"Long night ahead?" he says.
"Don't know yet."
"Mm."
He does not ask which yet. He could mean which client or which decision or which version of myself I am going to be tonight, and he does not specify, because Rowan never specifies. The not-specifying is, again, the thing.
The door opens. The bell. A man neither of us has seen comes in and looks around the room.
Rowan looks up. Rowan keeps polishing.
I do not turn yet. I let the man look. I let the man pick. I am at the bar with my drink and my coat and my hair and I am the woman who came here to be looked at by a man who pours her drink without asking, and now there is another man looking at me, and the small thing inside me that does not get to want anything wants to keep my back to the door for one more breath.
I take the breath. I turn.
Chapter 5: A New Client
Asami.
He is the kind of man you can tell does not buy his coat where I buy mine. The coat is black. The coat is unmarred. The buttons are intact. The shirt under the coat is a deep green, opened at the throat, and the throat is unscarred and untattooed and the kind of throat a man can have only if he has never had to fight in a way that left a mark.
The hair is dark and looks rumpled in a way that is not. The beard is a beard that has been groomed by somebody who is paid to groom beards. The eyes are green. There is a sharp glint buried in the green that I can see from here.
He sees me see him. He does not pretend not to. He walks across the bar with the kind of walk a man walks when he is used to rooms knowing he has entered them. He stops one stool away. He does not sit yet.
"Bar's open," I say.
"I know."
He looks at the stool River was on. He looks at me. He sits.
Rowan slides over. He has not slid over for any new man tonight, but he slides over for this one, because this one walks like a man who wants something and Rowan likes to put a glass between a man and the thing he wants. Rowan does not greet. He raises his chin half an inch. Drink.
"I'd like whatever she's drinking," the man says.
"Honey mead," Rowan says.
"Then honey mead."
Rowan pours. He pours into a frosted glass. The frosted glass is for non-regulars. The frosted glass is Rowan telling me, without telling me, that he has filed this man and that the file is not yet warm.
The man does not pick the glass up.
"Mind if I sit," he says.
"You're sitting."
"I meant the next stool over."
"You can sit wherever there's a stool."
He moves over one. He is now beside me. He puts his hand on the bar near my hand without touching my hand. His fingers are long and his nails are clean and there is a callus on the side of the index finger that does not belong to a man who buys his coats where this man buys his coats. The callus belongs to a man who does something with his hands that he does not let people see him do. I file that.
"You're celebrating something," he says.
"Am I."
"Honey mead is a celebrating drink."
"It's a Tuesday drink."
"What's the difference."
I sip. I let him watch me sip. I am Asami, and Asami is on a stool at the Black Wire, and Asami has been doing this since seventeen, and I can do this conversation in my sleep.
"On a Tuesday you celebrate being here on Tuesday," I say.
He smiles. The smile is not what I expected. I expected the smile to be the practiced one, the one I have seen on enough men to count, the smile that says I am charming and you can put your guard down. This smile is something else. It is slower. It does not reach all the way across his face. It is the smile of a man who is amused by his own answer and has not decided yet whether to share it.
"You always sit alone," he says.
"You don't know that."
"You're sitting alone now."
"There was a woman a minute ago."
"I saw her leave. She told you not to ride alone."
"You're listening to other people's conversations."
"I listen to all conversations in a room I enter."
He says it without weight. He says it the way you say a thing about yourself you have noticed and decided is not worth fixing. I take another sip. The mead is the mead. The mead has not changed because he is sitting beside me. I have changed because he is sitting beside me. That is a problem.
"Are you a regular," I say.
"No."
"Are you going to be."
"That depends on you."
He looks at me when he says it. He does not look at the bottles behind the bar. He does not look at Rowan. He does not look at the door. He looks at me and his green eyes have that glint and the glint is not unkind. The glint is somebody underneath the rest of him watching from a window I cannot see into.
"My name's Liam," he says.
I do not say my name. I lift the glass. I touch it to the rim of his glass. Tink.
"Tuesday," I say.
"Tuesday."
He drinks. He drinks the way men with money drink, which is to taste the drink and not to need it. He sets the glass down. He turns the stool an inch so his knee is closer to mine and not touching.
"Are you a Doll," he says.
I have had this conversation in three forms. Form one is the man who hears Doll and gets up. Form two is the man who hears Doll and starts naming hours. Form three is the man who hears Doll and does not change anything, which means he already knew, which means we are pretending he did not know, which is a different kind of conversation.
He is form three. He knew. The bar told him, or River told him on her way out, or the way I am sitting told him, and he is asking because he wants me to say the word out loud. The word out loud is what he is paying for, before he pays for anything else.
"I am," I say.
"My time comes with a fee. My attention with a bigger one."
"I'd assume so."
"Then you're not asking the right question yet."
"Which question is the right one."
"Whether I'm working tonight."
He thinks. He thinks the way a man thinks who has been told no enough times to know that the answer is not always the question he expected.
"Are you," he says.
"That depends on you."
He laughs. It is the first laugh I have heard from him, and it is a single small laugh, and it is. I notice with some annoyance. Not a bad laugh. It is the laugh of a man who has been beaten at something and likes it.
"Fair," he says.
I let him sit with the fair. I do not lean. I do not turn the stool. I let him do the work.
He does the work. He shifts. He takes another small sip of his mead. He sets the glass down. His finger taps once on the bar, near my hand, not touching it.
"What's the rate," he says.
"For an hour or for a night?"
"Whichever you'll let me have."
"An hour."
He names a number. It is high. It is not as high as a man like him could pay and not high enough to insult either of us. It is the kind of number that says I have done this before, I respect that you have done this before, and I am not going to be one of those.
"An hour," I say.
"Yes."
"With conditions."
"Name them."
I name them. I name them quickly, the way I always name them, because the naming is the railing and you take the railing in your hand before you walk down the stairs and not after. No mouth-on-mouth. He nods. Nothing left behind in my apartment. He nods. The hour is the hour. He nods. Payment first, in cash, before the door of the room closes. He nods. He nods to all of it without making me feel like I am the one being graded, which is a small skill, and small skills are the ones I notice.
"One more," he says.
"What."
"Your name."
I look at him. He looks at me. The bar is the bar. Rowan is at the end of the bar polishing the same glass. The booth in the back has gone quiet. The bell has not rung in a while.
I have given my name to clients before. The name I give is not the name on my building lease. The name I give is the name a woman gives in a room she is being paid to be in. It is a name. It is a sound. It costs me nothing.
"Asami," I say.
He nods. He does not push for more. He does not ask if it is real. He does not say I want the real one. He just says, "Asami." He says it the way a man says a word he plans to remember.
He pulls a roll of cash out of the inside pocket of his coat. He counts under the bar. He folds the bills into thirds, neat, the corners aligned, and slides them across the bar to me with two fingers. The folding does not bother me. The folding is just the folding. Half the men in the city fold bills this way. I file it anyway.
He stands. He waits.
I finish the inch of mead in my glass. I do not finish the second whiskey. I leave the second whiskey on the bar so Rowan knows I am coming back.
I get off the stool.
Rowan does not look up.
Chapter 6: Half-Truths
Asami.
We take a cab three blocks. The cab is unnecessary. We could walk. He gets the cab anyway. He gets the cab because he does not want me to walk, or because he does not want to be seen walking with me, or because he has the kind of money that calls a cab for three blocks and does not think about it. I do not ask which.
The hotel is the one I have used before. The one above the noodle shop. He does not ask if I have been here before. He does not say I picked it because it's clean or I picked it because it's discreet or any of the lines men use to explain a choice that is theirs and not mine. He hands the desk woman a card. The desk woman does not look up.
In the elevator he stands a polite step away from me. He does not look at me in the brushed steel. He looks at the floor numbers. The floor numbers climb. He is not nervous. He is not bored either. He is somewhere between, and the somewhere-between is harder to read than either edge.
"You always this quiet?" I say.
"In elevators."
"What about not in elevators."
"That depends on the room."
"What about this room."
The number pings. The door opens.
He gestures for me to go first. I go first. The hallway is the hallway. The door of 412 is the door of 412. He uses the key card and the door opens.
Inside, the room is what these rooms are. A bed, a window, a chair, a small table with a kettle on it, a bathroom with a tile floor I have stood on before. The window faces the alley behind the noodle shop. The noodle shop's vent is below the window. The room smells faintly of garlic and broth, which I like, which is something I have never said out loud about this room.
He closes the door. He locks it. He turns.
"What do you want me to do," he says.
It is not the question I expected. The question I expected was can I take your coat or can I get you a drink or any of the small openers men use to pretend they did not pay to be in a room with me. This question is the question after those. This question is the one I usually have to nudge them toward.
"You're paying," I say.
"I am."
"You get to want things."
"I do."
"So want one."
He looks at me. He has the look of a man making a decision he has already made but wants me to think he is making in front of me. Maybe he is. Maybe he isn't. I am not sober enough or his enough to tell.
"I want to know who you are," he says.
"You're paying for an hour, Liam."
"I know."
"That's not enough time."
"I know."
"And you're not getting the real name."
"I know."
He says I know three times. He says it without irritation. He says it like a man who has been told no enough times in his life that I know has become a word the way other words are words. He takes his coat off. He hangs it on the chair. He sits on the edge of the bed.
He does not pat the bed beside him. He does not ask me to come to him. He sits and he waits and he lets me decide where I will stand.
I take my coat off. I hang it on the same chair, on top of his. The black on the black. I take my shoes off, which is a thing I do in hotel rooms because the heels hurt and because the not-wearing-them is the first piece of being undressed and it is the piece I get to give myself.
I do not sit on the bed. I sit on the chair across from the bed. I sit sideways with one leg over the arm. I am Asami in a hotel room with a new client and the new client has not made a wrong move and the not-making is making me uneasy, because the wrong moves are the ones I know how to handle, and the right moves are the ones that get under my coat without my noticing.
"Tell me a true thing," he says.
"That's not how this works."
"I'm asking."
"You can ask. I can lie."
"I know."
"You keep saying that."
"It keeps being true."
I look at him. He is sitting on the bed with his hands on his knees and his green eyes are watching me the way a man watches a thing he is afraid will leave the room before he finishes looking at it, and the fear is the part I had not expected, and the fear is the part I do not like.
"What's a true thing about you," I say.
He thinks. He thinks long enough that I think he is not going to answer, and then he answers.
"My mother used to make tea for me when I was small," he says. "She'd put the kettle on and let it whistle for too long because she liked the sound. She'd let it go until I would come into the kitchen to see why it was screaming. That was the joke. The kettle would scream and I would come. She thought it was funny."
I look at him.
"That's a true thing," he says. "Now you."
"That wasn't a question."
"It was an offer. Take it or don't."
I do not know why I do it. I do not know why on a Tuesday in a room above a noodle shop with a man whose coat I have not seen the inside of, I tell him.
"My mother is sick," I say. "She has been sick for a long time. The medicine costs three hundred and forty a month. I pay it."
He does not say I'm sorry. He does not say that's a lot. He does not say let me. He nods once, slow, and his eyes do something I do not catch in time.
"Okay," he says.
"That's the true thing."
"Okay."
He stands. He crosses the small carpet between the bed and the chair. He does not touch me yet. He stops a step away.
"Can I touch you," he says.
It is the right question. Asked in the right voice. Asked at the right distance. I do not know who taught him to ask the question this way. I do not know if he taught himself.
I nod.
He touches my jaw. He touches my jaw with the back of one finger. He does not move toward my mouth. He moves toward my temple. He brushes hair behind my ear like a man tucking back a curtain to see a window.
"Asami," he says.
"That's not my real name."
"I know."
I close my eyes.
The hour begins. The hour is the hour. I will not put the hour on the page. The hour is mine.
Chapter 7: The First Night
Asami.
I wake before he does.
The room is gray. The kind of gray that means the sun has decided to think about coming up but has not committed. The kettle is on the table where it was. My coat is on the chair where it was. His coat is on top of mine.
He is asleep on his side. His face is toward me. One arm is folded under the pillow and the other is along the sheet between us, palm open. The palm is open the way a hand is open in sleep, not asking, just resting. The fingers are curled a little.
I do not know what time it is. The hour was longer than the hour. He paid for two. He stayed for the second. I let him stay for the second. He did not push for a third. He did not push for any of the things men push for. He did the things I let him do and the things he did he did slowly and without making me feel like I was being inventoried, and somewhere around the third small thing I stopped counting the time, and somewhere around the fifth small thing I stopped thinking about the time, and somewhere after that I think I slept.
I do not sleep with clients. I do not sleep in client beds. I do not sleep with my back to a man I have not known for at least three appointments. Rule. Mine. Older than the Litany. Older than River.
I slept.
I look at his hand on the sheet.
The hand is open. The hand has the callus on the index finger I saw at the bar. The hand has clean nails. The hand has a thin pale band of skin near the knuckle of the ring finger, lighter than the rest, like a ring used to live there and does not anymore. I file that. I file that the way I file all of it.
I do not move closer. I do not move away. I lie on my side and I look at the hand and I think the smallest thought I have allowed myself in a long time, which is I could put my hand in that hand for thirty seconds and he would not wake up and I would know what it felt like.
I do not put my hand in that hand.
I lie there and I think about putting my hand in that hand for what is probably ninety seconds and is probably nothing and might be a year, and I do not move, and his hand stays open on the sheet, and the gray gets a little less gray, and outside the noodle shop vent is already running.
He shifts. He does not wake. His hand closes a little in his sleep. The closing is not toward me. The closing is just the closing of a hand that is sleeping. But it answers the question. The hand is gone.
I get up.
I am quiet. I have done this in other rooms a hundred times. The shoes first, on the floor by the chair. The coat over the arm. The bag from the table. The bills he gave me are still folded in thirds in the inside pocket of my coat. I do not count them. I never count them in the room.
I look back from the door.
His face in the gray is the face of a man who is younger asleep than he is awake. The line between his brows is gone. The set of his jaw is gone. He looks twenty-two. He looks like somebody's son, and he is somebody's son, and I will think about that sentence on the walk home and not know yet why it bothered me.
I leave the door unlocked behind me because the lock would click and the click would wake him.
In the hallway the carpet absorbs the heels. In the elevator the brushed steel gives me back to me. Asami at five-fifty in the morning is Asami with smudged lipstick and a coat that smells like a hotel room above a noodle shop and an inside pocket full of money. Asami is the woman who almost held a hand and didn't, and the not-holding is what she will keep.
Outside, the rain has stopped. The street is wet. The Watchdog drone above the noodle shop is gone. Another drone is two blocks over, low, sweeping a corner. I do not look at it. I tighten my coat. I walk.
Chapter 8: Drone
Asami.
The third-floor window of my building faces east. East at this hour is the gray getting lighter and the gray getting lighter is the only good thing about the hour. I stand at the window with my coat still on because the apartment is cold and the radiator does not come on until six. The kettle is on but I have not yet poured.
My mother is asleep. The bedroom door is open the way I left it. I can hear her breathing if I stand very still, which I am.
Three hundred and forty dollars, folded into thirds, is on the counter beside the tea tin. I have not put it in the tin yet. I will. In a minute.
The thing I am not thinking about is the hand on the sheet.
The thing I am also not thinking about is the kettle her mother used to scream at when he came into the kitchen as a boy. The thing I am especially not thinking about is whether the kettle is true. The thing I am not thinking about is whether anything he said was true. I am, in particular, not thinking about how my mouth tasted last night when I almost forgot to keep it shut, and how I told him a true thing about her, and how the true thing left my mouth and went into his ear and is now somewhere in him I cannot reach.
I should not have told him.
I am alone at the window thinking I should not have told him, and I am putting that on the list of things I will tell River, and then I am taking it off the list, because River will say I told you without saying I told you, and I do not need that from her this morning.
Below the window, on the street, nothing is happening. A man is throwing a bag of trash into the dumpster behind the noodle shop two blocks over. A cat is sitting on a hood of a car. The Watchdog drone passes.
I do not register the drone at first. The drone is the drone. The drone is part of the sky. The drone is part of the Bottoms the way streetlamps are part of the Bottoms. It comes from the south. It travels the line of my building. It sweeps left to right and the small red eye of it moves the way a drone's eye moves, which is unhurried and total.
It slows.
It does not stop. It does not hover. It is not the kind of pause that would be a pause. It is the kind of pause that is a fraction of a slow, the kind that on any other morning I would not notice because I would not be standing at the window watching.
The eye sweeps. The eye sweeps across my window. The eye sweeps past my window. The eye keeps going.
The drone moves on.
I stand at the window with my coat on and the kettle starting to whistle behind me and the bills folded in thirds on the counter and the small light over the stove humming the way it always hums, and I watch the place in the sky where the drone was, and the place in the sky where the drone was is empty, and the place in the sky where the drone was stays empty.
The kettle reaches the part of the whistle where my mother used to wait for him to come into the kitchen.
I move. I move toward the kettle. I lift it off the stove.
In the bedroom my mother stirs and says nothing and falls back into sleep.
I pour the water over the leaves. I do not hum. I stand at the counter with both hands flat against the wood and I look at the bills folded into thirds and I do not pick them up.
The drone does not come back.
It does not need to come back. The drone has already done what it came to do, which is to be the small new thing in the sky on the morning a Tuesday became a Wednesday, on the morning after the hour was longer than the hour, on the morning after the hand on the sheet was open and I did not put my hand in it. The drone has already done it. The drone is the drone.
I drink the tea standing up.
The radiator comes on. The pipes bang once and then again and then settle. The light outside the window goes from gray to a different gray. The kettle cools on the stove.
I put the bills in the tin.
I lock the door from the inside. I do not take the coat off. I sit in the chair by the window and I watch the sky.
I am still watching the sky when my mother wakes.
End of Episode 1.