Camp zero a novel, p.16
Camp Zero: a Novel, page 16
With the Barber, she feels more open for the first time. But she knows that if she wants to keep him safe, she can never tell him why she’s really here.
* * *
When Rose first arrived at the Loop for her hostess interview, she felt incredibly self-conscious in the old jeans and T-shirt she wore, no makeup or heels, just green rubber boots and unwashed hair. This was a mistake, she thought. She clearly didn’t belong here. She rose from the bench, but the security guard was already walking toward her.
“Avalon likes what she sees,” the guard said. “You can follow me upstairs.”
“She saw me?” Rose asked, looking around. No one had entered the lobby since she arrived.
“She sees everything.” The guard pointed to the glass ceiling where the green dot of a surveillance camera pulsed on and off steadily.
She followed the guard upstairs. The bedroom he left Rose in was small but elegantly appointed. A low teak bed, neatly made with cream linen sheets, was positioned against the wall. Two egg-shaped chairs were clustered in the corner next to a table set with champagne flutes and a bowl of prickly dark red fruit. Like the rest of the Loop, the floor was reflective white tile, the oval windows fashioned out of tinted glass. In the garden below, two women reclined nude on sun loungers in the shade. One of them languidly applied sunscreen to her shoulders, and then turned onto her stomach. They seemed to exhibit no shame in lying exposed for anyone in this building to see.
Suddenly, her clothes and boots, even the loose elastic in her hair, felt uncomfortable and heavy. She looked at herself in the mirror and saw a peninsula girl, dressed in utilitarian clothes, worn at the knees and elbows from work. A girl who never allowed herself to dwell on beauty in the real world, only the beauty she found in the pages of books. She thought of the women who worked in the garret house during the high season, how they seemed to have formed a bond with each other but didn’t remain tethered to a place because they left when the season ended. She could take this job for a short period to see if she liked it, and then decide what she would do with her life.
She pulled the elastic out and smoothed her hair with a hand. People rarely remarked on her appearance, and she had always assumed it was because they thought her odd-looking. Her black hair, which she rarely combed or cut, was thick like her mother’s, and her face was dotted with freckles. But she had her father’s physical stature, tall and strong, with a tendency to hunch her shoulders to compensate for her height. Now she stood up straighter as she examined herself in the mirror. She pulled off her clothes and left them in a grayish pile on the marble floor. Already she felt lighter.
The room’s closet was filled with gauzy dressing gowns, shimmery cocktail dresses, and sets of sheer lingerie. She touched a pale green gown. The material was cool and impossibly soft. She took the gown off the hanger and held it against her body as she stood, still wearing her plain cotton underwear and bra.
“You can try it on,” a voice said from behind her.
Rose turned around and saw a handsome woman standing in the room. Avalon wore a slate-gray tunic that reached to her ankles, and her silver hair was twisted into a long braid. A set of golden bracelets clinked as she extended a hand. “Green will look good with your skin tone.”
The way she said skin tone bothered Rose, but she tried not to show it. Instead, she slid the gown on and tied the silk belt at her waist.
“See, I was right. You look radiant.” Avalon smiled. “What do you think of the Loop?”
“I’ve never been in a building like this,” Rose said, and looked around. “Do all of the hostesses live in similar rooms?”
“Of course. Everyone in the Loop is treated as an equal.” Avalon folded herself elegantly into one of the egg chairs. “Like the Loop itself, we try to be as transparent as possible as to what this job entails, and what it can do for you.” Avalon gestured to the chair next to her. “Please, sit with me. Have a rambutan and a glass of champagne. You must be exhausted.”
Rose sat down and watched Avalon expertly unpeel the prickly fruit. She handed the iridescent orb to Rose. The rambutan was sweet, almost creamy, and at its a center she tasted the bitter pith of the fruit’s seed.
Avalon peeled off the gold foil around the opening of the champagne bottle. “We specialize in a boutique experience here in the Loop. Everything we source is of the finest quality—single-origin coffee beans, champagne from prominent producers, even the sheets on our beds are handspun with the highest thread count. We think these small, thoughtful choices mark a different kind of life—one focused on wellness, equity, and honoring the traditions of those who came before us.”
“What kind of traditions?” Rose asked. On the peninsula, tradition was a word she associated with church or sports or drunken hazing rituals out on the dunes.
“The traditions of a world that no longer exists.” Avalon examined the label on the champagne. “This is a millennium bottle. Year 2000. I remember that year clearly, even though I was just a child. It was the first time I ever truly thought about the end of the world.” She popped the champagne and poured it into the flutes. “Nothing happened, of course, and the clocks moved forward at the stroke of midnight, so it was easy to forget the fear we felt. Looking back now, it’s clear that the year 2000 was an early warning.”
What Avalon said interested Rose. She had never heard anyone speak in such grandiose and vivid terms before. She took the flute of champagne and enjoyed how the bubbles delicately popped on her tongue. “And who visits the Loop?”
“Engineers and entrepreneurs, mostly,” Avalon replied. “Long-term thinkers who are tackling the big questions head-on. Amos Rust often stops by. As does Damien Mitchell.”
Rose set the flute down. “As in the Damien Mitchell? The one who invented the Flick?”
Avalon laughed. “So you have heard of him.”
“Of course I have. What’s he like?”
“Brilliant. And cunning.” Avalon tipped the champagne back and sipped. “Creators are the ones who can best see the flaws in their designs. Parents are the same—they tend to notice a child’s weaknesses first. While the Flick is good for many things, experiencing intimacy it is not. Here in the Loop, no one uses their Flick. When each hostess is with her client, she is completely and utterly with him. There is no flickering to and from the feed. Our clients expect that when they are here, our attention is focused entirely on them. Most girls keep a rotation of regulars and see a few clients a day. You’re paid per client, not by the service, so it’s really up to you as to how many clients you take on. Room and board are also covered, and you’re given two days off a week. It’s a very humane schedule, not anything like this line of work on the mainland. And it’s perfectly legal, so no need to be concerned about raids or arrest. We maintain a security detail in-house, so you can be assured of your safety while on the job.”
“And what do the Floating City citizens think of the Loop?” Rose asked.
“We are as much part of the city as they are. This is real work, and you’re respected for it.” Avalon smiled warmly. “Many girls are in your precise situation when they arrive in the Loop. They have certain conceptions of what we do. But you need to understand that we’re cultivating more than sexual intimacy. We’re offering a return to a physical bond that many people feel they have lost post-Flick. If you’re interested in the job, I can offer you a test run. See if your talents are suited to this type of environment.”
Rose tried to imagine what it would be like for a man to take possession of her body, and then leave. The relationship would be clear, delineated, not like the muddiness of dating a boy from back home. A transaction occurs in any relationship, Rose justified. Even her mother would agree with this fact. At least here she would have a lovely and clean room and a good salary to send back home. Maybe she could even save up enough money to take her mother to Seoul one day.
“I’m interested,” Rose said.
Avalon reached for Rose’s hand. “Good. We’ll get you settled.”
* * *
Her first client was a well-known Founder who’d made his first million marketing cold vacations. He had the muscled and evenly tanned body of someone who spent a lot of time in the gym, or sunbathing nude on the roof-deck of his penthouse. In his publicity shots, he stood with his fit arms folded over his sculpted chest, wearing a tight T-shirt and tailored slacks. He had a bombastic head of hair, which he took no small amount of pleasure in raking his fingers through.
He walked into the room like he owned it, immediately made a pot of sencha tea, and served it to Rose in a porcelain teapot and two dainty cups. After, he instructed her to take a bath, and leaned against the counter to watch her undress.
“Avalon always has the finest taste,” he said as she dropped her clothes to the floor. “Half Japanese?”
“No, Korean.” No one had ever asked her with such directness about her ethnicity before. Usually the question was cloaked with an inquiry as to where she was really from.
“Aha.” He nodded. “I should have known. You have that typically Korean square jaw.” He ran his fingers along the ridge of her jaw. “Don’t ever get facial reconstruction surgery.”
They didn’t have sex. He wanted to get to know her body, he said. To understand all her sensitive points—her skin’s innate frequencies, so that when they finally fucked, it would be “a symphonic experience.” They drank tea by the window, took long, indulgent baths, and lay on the bed as he expertly applied shea butter all over her body.
“I want you to be so desperate for it,” he said, “that at night when you close your eyes, all you dream of is me.”
That would never happen, but she knew her job was to create the conditions in which he believed this possible. She gasped in pleasure when he touched her, wrote little notes of adoration that she tucked into his pocket, told him that she thought of him in the middle of the night.
“Good,” he said, stroking her hair. “Keep it that way.”
Soon, she began to wonder if her production of longing was in vain. He never seemed to want to have sex.
“What’s the deal with him?” she finally asked one of the other hostesses.
“Who knows.” She shrugged. “Eventually he’ll get bored and move on to the next girl Avalon hires.”
“I wish all the clients were like him,” Rose said. “It’s so easy.”
“I guess,” the hostess said, “but I prefer being with someone where the conditions are clear. Drink. Fuck. Shower. Done. With him, you have to continually stroke his ego.”
After a while, Rose understood what the hostess meant. It was exhausting having to attend to his needs, to pretend that she thought only of him and that the purpose of her existence was to focus on his “essence.” As predicted, the moment a new hostess was hired, he stopped coming by to see Rose. When she occasionally crossed paths with him in the foyer, his eyes glazed over her as if she were a stranger.
“Excellent work,” Avalon said to her after. “You’re very responsive. You see what a client wants, and mold yourself to his needs.”
Avalon intended this to be a compliment, but Rose thought otherwise. To be malleable suggested a lack of definition. A lack of knowledge about one’s purpose. Was she really that uncertain who she was?
A year passed. Then another. Some of her clients preferred her to be “docile like a real geisha.” To avert her eyes when they spoke to her, to serve them tea on her knees. Others liked that her mixed race made her more “approachable.” Playing to each client’s tastes required skill and patience, and while there were aspects of the job she liked, she sometimes wondered if this would be the sum of her life. Pouring drinks. Servicing clients. Acting poised at dinner while nodding along to a mind-numbingly dull conversation about tax havens. Pretending that she absolutely loved it when a client went down on her for an hour. It was exhausting work, and while she was paid well for it, she often wondered to what extent she was interchangeable. If she were to suddenly leave the Loop, would anyone even notice her departure? Or would they immediately hire another half-Asian hostess to fill the space she’d left behind?
She spoke rarely of these questions with the other hostesses, who all seemed perfectly content to work in the Loop. Many of them loved the freedom and money their jobs provided. Most were just grateful to have a job. Others had their own families back on the mainland that they supported with their work. But for Rose, it felt like the work cleaved her heart in two—half of her was present on the job, while the other half was still searching.
She often wondered where this searching would lead her as she walked through the Floating City on her days off from work. A home, she hoped. A place to call her own. “Sanctuary” was the word often used to describe the Floating City. But sanctuary also suggested a moral imperative that the lives lived here were somehow better, more blessed than the lives lived elsewhere. No one in the Floating City thought of themselves as religious, yet the place had become a belief system unto itself, a way to justify its separateness from the mainland.
The design of the Floating City underlined the contradiction of sanctuary. When Rose walked through the cool glass plazas of the First Sector and saw families dining together in the helicopter-to-table restaurants, she wondered how many of them thought of the Loop glittering at the city’s center. Or if they ever looked at her and assumed she was paid to unzip the trousers of their husbands or fathers. Did they ever think about the armored train that brought poorly paid workers from the mainland to compete in the weekly hire to see who would work the least per hour?
Rarely, she suspected, even though workers were everywhere. Unlike Rose, whose work was done in the private quarters of the Loop, most of the contingent labor in the Floating City was on display. Workers dug ditches, irrigated the greenhouses, slaughtered pigs and chickens in the abattoirs. They cleaned the windows of the glass towers, disinfected the elevators and conference rooms, plunged the toilets, and wiped the counters of the marble bathrooms. They nannied the city’s children, worked the cash registers at the grocery store, filed dead skin and painted nails in the salons. Everything they did ensured the seamless life that the city was prized for. Flooding, fire, drought, riots, revolt, overpopulation—none of it ever touched the city shining in the ocean. And yet the city was still tethered to the mainland because it remained reliant on it for labor.
Once a month, Rose took the train to the peninsula to visit her mother, bearing gifts from the Floating City—an oozing round of raw milk cheese, a bottle of Porto, a bouquet of real tiger lilies. She’d set out the cheese as an appetizer, but what she really wanted was her mother’s cooking. Her mother would have spent the day preparing for Rose’s arrival—spicy tofu jjigae bubbling in a stone pot, a hunk of short rib stewed with soy sauce and boiled eggs, seafood pajeon cooked with long, green chives until golden and crispy, and half a dozen banchan: soybean sprouts, pickled cucumbers, dried anchovies, cubes of yellow daikon, two varieties of kimchi. The cheese would go uneaten while Rose and her mother feasted with a quiet intensity, only interrupting the silence to ask for a refill of water or rice or if the anchovies were too salty. After her mother poured them each a bowl of cold cinnamon punch for dessert, she would look up at Rose and ask her a question about life in the Floating City. “Are there really helicopters there?”
“Everywhere,” Rose said. “They circle the city like flies around raw meat.”
Her mother took a sip of the punch. “And what are they doing?”
“Delivering supplies, mostly. Sometimes citizens. Everything is delivered by air to the Floating City. Except for workers, of course.” Rose laughed. “I take the train like everyone else.”
“And they treat you well at the hotel?”
“Yes, they even said I might get promoted to manager one day.”
“I’m proud of you for finally getting away. I always knew you would find a life better than mine.”
Rose lifted the bowl to her lips and drank, the sweet, syrupy dessert the only cure for the bitterness she felt. “Your life isn’t so bad.”
Her mother laughed and called her by her Korean name. “Every year brings less and less guests.”
Rose reached across the table for her mother’s hand. “The regulars will book. They always do.”
“The ones who are still alive. They’re all getting older.” Her mother refilled Rose’s bowl. “Like me.”
That night, Rose lay awake on the stiff mattress of her childhood bed and heard her mother call out in her sleep, as she often did when the night terrors set in. As usual, the sentences were in Korean, so Rose was never able to glean what the nightmares were about. If only she could understand her mother’s native tongue, then she might know how to save her.
In the morning, Rose asked her mother how she’d slept.
Her mother responded, as she always did, “Like a baby. And you?”
Rose had dreamed of a dark tide rising, her face pushed into sand, the spray of salt and wind as she struggled to a distant shore. But she never told her mother her dreams, in the same way her mother never told Rose hers. The equilibrium of their relationship depended on a mutual deception that everything was perfectly fine.
“Very well,” she said, and poured two mugs of coffee. She looked outside at the sun rising over the Atlantic. “Looks like another beautiful day.”
* * *
Two years became five years, and Rose was growing tired of the Loop. The clients were often the same: inflated Founders who wanted their egos stroked, or depressed salarymen who paid her to feel desired. Few of the clients ever interested her in more complex terms, and the things she used to enjoy—cocktails in the sunken garden, conversation in the lounge room, breakfast in bed—began to feel formulaic and trite.
Avalon must have suspected Rose’s waning interest in her work because she approached her one day with a proposition. Would she be interested in an exclusive arrangement? One client. One job.
