I'M ALMOST DONE EDITING THE NOVEL. I'll be able to finish it in a week at the latest. I turn off the computer and step out onto the balcony to breathe in the change in season. It's already spring. I have more clients this time of year—because people are afraid of spring, not because they're reacting to the tedium of winter. It's not unusual to be depressed in winter, but with the advent of spring, people are expected to perk up. This expectation makes my clients feel more isolated. Everyone is imprisoned during winter; only those who can't help but be trapped are imprisoned in spring.

I remember once seeing a farmer's squat shanty, roofed with shingles, deep in the mountains. The house was particularly memorable because it contained everything under one roof: animal pens, kitchen, living area, heating system, and a storage room for grains. Because of its confined structure, the smoke coming from the furnace couldn't easily escape the house. The smoke leaked out only after going through the chimney and heating the interior of the house. The snow, the first of which fell in October, kept the family inside. But as soon as it started to melt, all the farmers would rush out of their shingled houses and set fire to the mountain greenery to clear the land, like they were taking part in a festival. The crackling flames would shimmer between the valleys. But nowadays no one can hold such a festival. You can't burn up the land just because the dull winter has passed. Now people resort to setting themselves on fire.

I met Judith in the spring. It was April; the sun was warm, but there was a nip in the wind. That day, I was watching a movie in a theater on Daehak Street. Three characters were in the movie—two men and a woman. One man is the woman's relative as well as the other man's friend. The woman works at a burger joint, and the two men are unemployed. The three rent a car with money they won gambling and go on a trip. The movie was Jim Jarmusch's Stranger Than Paradise. Not once do we see the main characters close up. The moviegoers get bored because they can't really see the actors' expressions, and the actors themselves appear to be just as bored. The only escape in their dull lives is gambling or going on trips. Even if they win money by gambling, they then gamble it away again. Even when they go on trips, nothing is ever different. "This is the lake," the woman says in Cleveland, but the lake is indistinguishable: frozen over in a blizzard. You can't see a thing. One of the men grumbles that nothing's changed even though they had come this far. In this movie, there aren't even any of the romance or sex scenes that proliferate in modern cinema. I'm sure the audience wouldn't notice if you swapped the last scene of the movie with the first.

Not surprisingly, only three people were in the movie theater that day. A woman sat three rows in front of me. It was Judith. She dozed off throughout the movie but didn't leave the theater. She didn't even get up after the movie was over. So I watched the movie twice. When the woman said for the second time, "This is the lake," Judith got up from her seat, stumbling a little. A sudden clatter reverberated in the theater; she must have stepped on an empty can. I followed her out. It was just after ten. She walked slowly toward Marronniers Park, bumping into people twice. She went into a phone booth, picked up the receiver, but then put it down.

She walked on for a long time, finally settling down at an outdoor concert in Marronniers Park. Two men with acoustic guitars were singing onstage.

"You come to some place new, and everything looks just the same, right?" I asked, sitting down next to her.

"Yeah," she replied, continuing to gaze at the singers. "Hey," she said, taking out a cigarette.

"Yes?"

"Have you ever wanted to go to the North Pole?" She blew out white smoke.

"You want to go to the North Pole?"

"I went there for a few days once," she said, giggling. "It was really nice. The whole world was covered in white snow. If you stare at the snow for a long time, everything turns dark. Did you know the sunrise is different there? It rises from the sky and falls back into the sky. During winter, it comes up from below your feet and sinks down into the ground. Isn't that amazing?" She looked at me for the first time.

I nodded, agreeing with her. "People say that nobody dies in the North Pole. I know someone who's been there. When she was young she went on a cruise in the Arctic Ocean with her husband, but the ship struck a rock and her husband fell into the ocean and disappeared. In her sixties, she went back on a cruise ship touring the Arctic Ocean, probably to remember her late husband. She was on the deck, looking out to sea, when she saw an ice floe coming from a distance. Her husband was lying on it. When she saw him close up, she jumped into the water."

"Why?"

"He was still in his twenties, frozen in time, and she had gotten old."

She nodded. "That makes sense. I understand how she felt."

Sometimes fiction is more easily understood than true events. Reality is often pathetic. I learned at a very young age that it was easier to make up stories to make a point. I enjoy creating stories. The world is filled with fiction anyway.

We watched the guitarists sing their last song, pack up their guitars and mics, and leave. I stood up and handed her my business card.

"Give me a call if you want to tell someone that you don't want to talk."

She looked down at the card. "What if I don't even feel like saying that I don't want to talk?"

"Is that how you feel now?"

"I don't feel that apathetic. But I think I will soon." She laughed for the first time. It was crumbly like days-old snow.

"Follow me," I ordered, grabbing her hand and pulling her up. She walked beside me without a word. She sank into the passenger seat of my car. When I turned on the engine, we heard Chet Baker's low, gravelly voice.

"Do you know who this is?" I asked.

With difficulty, she slowly shook her head. "I don't know who it is but he makes me feel like the core of the earth is sucking my body in, like I'm going to disappear."

"It's Chet Baker, a jazz musician. He didn't lead a very illustrious life. He was famous for some time, but he won't go down in jazz history. He didn't sing that well and he wasn't the greatest trumpeter. He only played to pay for his drug habit in the sixties."

"Then why do you have his CD?"

"I came across this album cover in a record store. It was a picture of this old, scruffy, unshaven man, his hair slicked back, showing all of his wrinkles. A black-and-white photo reveals a person's shadows. You can understand someone's life from each wrinkle. But his eyes had caught the flash of the camera and were sparkling, and they were so clear. I knew as soon as I saw that picture that this guy was ready to die."

"How could you tell?"

"His eyes were shining with a final hope. Some things can't be hidden even by fatigue-soaked wrinkles. That kind of hope is for rest, not for life."

The second track of the CD came on. It was Baker's famous "My Funny Valentine." The title indicates a light theme, but his voice is low and sorrowful. The song isn't sweet or cheap. It reveals the maturity of a man who has suffered, the generosity of a man who has transcended greed.

"This is a live album of his final concert. Two weeks later he jumped out of his hotel window," I explained.

"Why did he jump?"

"The Amsterdam police concluded it was an accident. But I don't think it was. The more I listen to this album and look at his picture on the cover, the more I think he chose to go."

"Did he leave a will?" she wondered.

"No, but I think this album was like his will, his last words. Some people communicate through writing, but others through their music. I think it's significant that it was recorded at a concert, not in a studio. The texture is different. Don't you think there's more feeling involved if you perform your last song in front of an audience instead of playing it in a sterile studio for some unknown future listener?"

"I guess you're right."

I drove her home. She lived in a rental apartment in the suburbs. I drank coffee in her living room, surrounded by cheap metal furniture and a fourteen-inch TV. She sat by me with a Chupa Chups in her mouth. And when dawn neared, Judith decided to be my client. Three days later, I executed the contract. I boarded a plane to Vienna with her story nestled in my heart.

Vienna is a charming city, with ideas and people trickling through to other places. Ideas like religious reform, Expressionism, and Nazism spread to the rest of the world through this city. Now they call it the gateway between Eastern and Western Europe. Most travelers get visas in Vienna to go to the Czech Republic and Hungary. In Vienna, Hitler aspired to be an artist. "If fate didn't choose me to be the Führer, I would have become Michelangelo," Hitler announced confidently. Mozart also studied in Vienna. Hitler showed a knack for fascism and mob mentality while Mozart earned fame as a composer and performer. Both held an innate talent for captivating the public. But it was easy to move people back in those days, like the way Anne Frank's diary touched a nerve because of the Holocaust. But now it isn't so easy. Death has become pornographic, shown live on TV. Massacres, which used to be unearthed through rumor, are quickly reported in detail via satellite.

Many different things coexist in Vienna. The traces of the Roman Empire, Nazi relics, and the glory of the House of Hapsburg are all jumbled together. Many people treat this small neutral country's capital as a stopping place, a place to go through on their way to elsewhere. In Vienna, I feel like I could sleep with anyone. I imagine meeting someone, going to a musical like The Phantom of the Opera, drinking a glass of beer, having sex on a creaky bed in a pension nearby, and in the morning, each boarding trains headed opposite directions.

I went to Vienna because of my client, Judith. As soon as I carried out my contract, I felt an urge to go to the homeland of Gustav Klimt, who painted the historical Judith. Klimt, who painted in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, was an aesthete, a typical fin de siècle artist. He created exuberant paintings. His Judith depicted the peak of decadence, enhanced by its background of decorative, dazzling patterns.

"He called me Judith," Judith told me.

"Why?"

"He said I looked like the Judith drawn by some artist."

That final night with Judith, I understood who that "some artist" was. "It's probably Gustav Klimt."

Inspired by the Bible, countless artists drew Judith, but she resembled Klimt's Judith, no one else's.

"It doesn't matter who the artist is. But I'm glad I know his name, now. I'm sure I'll forget it, though." Judith laughed.

To see Klimt's Judith, I went to the Museum of Applied Arts in Belvedere Palace. The palace appeared in the distance as the tram looped downtown and entered the southern part of the city. I entered the museum slowly. It was crowded with children on a field trip and tourists sweeping the scene with camcorders. The Japanese cameras that used to proliferate in these places have almost all been replaced by camcorders. Like a magic lamp, the camcorder swallows the palace and sucks in the pond in front. In these tourists' minds, the Belvedere is reduced into an unfocused square image, cast with a bluish tint. The present is re-created to immortalize memories. It's pathetic, but that's human tendency now.

Fortunately, most people were clustered around Klimt's The Kiss. Judith drew far fewer viewers. Her dark hair is unrealistically big and puffy. Behind her, the gold patterns turn the ornate painting even more extravagant. And her eyes. Her cheeks are flushed, but her eyes are downcast, perhaps open, perhaps closed. She seems to be welcoming the sensation right before orgasm, reveling in that moment. Her lips are slightly parted, relaxed. Her revealed breast is tinted blue. That bluish color, subtly, oppressively radiating, is the energy of death. Judith looks dead, though she is too sensual to be a corpse (or maybe that makes her more attractive). Her left hand holds up the head of Holofernes, whom she has beheaded. The black-haired man is dead, his eyes closed.

Judith killed Holofernes, an enemy leader, after seducing him. But it isn't clear if she still felt traces of desire after his death or if she had reached orgasm at the exact moment of his decapitation.

I was completely captivated by this painting when a woman stepped in front of me. She was Asian, short, and her straight hair was cropped into a bob. She was blocking the bottom of the painting. I moved to the side. Her eyes and face suggested Southeast Asian ancestry. At that point, a guided tour group streamed in to stand in front of Judith, so I left the room. I was parched. My client Judith and Klimt's Judith danced in front of my eyes and made me dizzy. I went down to the café in the basement and ordered an Evian and a salade aux lardons. The Evian, collected in the Alps, tasted a little strong compared to Korean water. But it was lucky that I was able to get an Evian. I often have to settle for carbonated water in Europe.

Once, I went to Prague with a Dutch woman I met traveling. Before disappearing into our respective hotel rooms, we agreed to have tea in the downstairs lounge the next morning. We got to the lounge around eleven. It was a fancy establishment, with a string quartet and a cover. I was shocked when the Dutch woman casually ordered mineral water at a high-class place like that.

Around the time I finished my salad, the Southeast Asian woman entered the café. She bought a Coke and two croissants, and ate slowly. I looked her over carefully. I was sure there had to be something about her that resembled Judith, but I couldn't put my finger on it.

When she finished eating, she flipped through the museum viewing guide she'd purchased. Her gaze didn't leave Klimt's works. I initiated conversation. Vienna, especially in a Viennese art museum, is a good place to chat up strangers.

"Do you like Klimt?"

The woman looked me in the eye and answered, "No."

"But why are you only looking at his paintings?"

"It's none of your business."

Her accent soared with a Chinese inflection. She might have been from Singapore, or Hong Kong, or Macao. She poured Coke into her glass and drank it. Thanks to my attempt at a conversation, I could now stare sitting across the table from her. Her unmade face was freckled and darkly tanned. It dripped with unhidden fatigue. I wanted to spend the night with her, to welcome dawn with my arm under her travel-weary head. I focus on myself when I travel. My life in Korea is devoted to separating those who could become clients from those who couldn't. I don't live that way when I am abroad.

"Where are you from?"

"Hong Kong," she answered curtly. "What about you?"

"Me? I'm from Hell."

She frowned, then laughed. "So you live in an interesting place."

"It's boring there. Nothing ever changes. So, I guess you're traveling. Where were you before coming to Vienna?"

"Berlin. It rained for three whole days. The only thing I saw was the hotel bar." She closed her visitor's guide, took out a Marlboro, and lit it. "What do you do?"

What do I do? Sometimes I say I'm a therapist, sometimes I say I'm a writer. But I still pause every time I get this question.

"I'm a novelist."

"Have your books been published in English or Chinese?"

"No."

She appeared to lose interest. I get this a lot when I travel. A novelist without a book published in English is treated like a bum.

"What about you?"

"I've done a lot of things. I worked in a department store, for one. There are a lot of department stores in Hong Kong."

"Can I ask how old you are?"

"Twenty-one."

I was a little taken aback. She looked too unhappy to be twenty-one.

"Is this your first time in Vienna?" I asked.

"Yeah. It's not easy to get out of Hong Kong. This is my first time abroad."

Some people live in one city their entire lives. For people in Seoul it would be unimaginable to stay put for two whole decades. I studied this woman from Hong Kong, a part of both Britain and China; a city and a country at the same time. She told me she'd lived in crowded Hong Kong her entire life.

"Where are you staying?" I asked.

She took out a map to check. "A pension on Mariahilferstrasse."

Mariahilferstrasse connected the heart of the city to Vienna's western district. A lot of cheaper lodging was clustered there, and her pension wasn't too far from my hotel.

"Do you want to go sightseeing with me tomorrow? This is my third time in Vienna," I offered.

"Sure, why not."

"Let's meet in front of the Vienna Opera House at ten." I marked the location of the Opera House on her map. She opened her small eyes wide and looked at the map, then stood up. I went back to my hotel, packed, and went down to the bar for some beer. A fat old woman tending bar poured me a beer, topped with dense foam, with an experienced air. I took out the Judith postcard I'd bought at the museum and gazed at it.

"Is there any special way you want it?" I asked Judith on her last day. Judith stared at me blankly, as if she didn't want to think about it, then pushed the decision on me. This happens quite often, so I wasn't flustered.

"What do you think would be the best for me?" she asked.

"Why don't we start by eliminating the methods you don't like?" I took out my laptop and opened images I presented to clients.

"You don't want to be hanged, do you?" I double-clicked on the first picture file, a picture of a dead person hanging from a tree on a hill.

"No, I don't think I'd like that feeling on my neck." She touched her neck with her left hand.

"It's actually pretty simple. People think you're in pain for a few minutes and die, but that's not right. If you put a noose around your neck and kick away the chair, the noose catches your neck and breaks it. At that point, most people lose consciousness. That's why some people die even though their feet are on the ground. If it took three or four minutes of kicking around to die, that wouldn't be possible."

"I still don't like that option."

I opened the next file. A man was sprawled in a tub filled with pink water.

"This method has usually been used in the West. Roman aristocrats favored it. Your blood circulates faster when you're immersed in hot water and your death comes quicker. It takes a lot to cut your artery, but once you do it, it's very relaxing. You can die watching your blood seep into the water. You'll be in a state of shock because of the amount of blood you lose and you'll feel weaker and weaker, and hazy. But I don't recommend it."

"Why not?"

"A few of my clients insist on slitting their wrists but then ask me to do the cutting. I don't like to have blood on my hands. And participating actively ruins the significance of my work."

"I guess that's true. So you don't do it?"

"I never do anything I shouldn't do."

"So did they end up choosing another method?"

"No. They were able to do it on their own. Though we had to talk more before they could."

"I see."

The way Judith looked right at that moment is seared in my memory. She was vivacious. She was showing me a side of her that made her a completely different person from when I first met her.

"This is exciting. My life has always been an uncontrollable mess. I'm always somewhere I don't want to be. But it feels different now," she said, minutely upbeat.

Her excitement validated the importance of my work. She no longer had a Chupa Chups in her mouth. She didn't take her eyes off the laptop screen, as if she were eagerly learning how to use the computer.

It's thrilling to have a client like Judith. I felt comforted when I thought of her. I ordered another beer and sucked it down in one gulp. I went up to my room, took a shower, and fell asleep.

The next morning, when I got to the Vienna Opera House, the woman from Hong Kong was already there. She had on dark sunglasses and was holding a Coke can.

"Where are you taking me?" she asked.

"The Art History Museum of Vienna."

"Sounds good."

She downed the rest of her Coke and followed me. If you walk to the west away from the Opera House, you hit the Art History Museum and the Natural History Museum. April in Vienna was still chilly, the wind strong and piercing. We had to hunch against the wind.

The Art History Museum housed the Hapsburgs' fine art collection. Facing it was the Natural History Museum, which used to be a palace. Standing in Maria-Theresa Square, looking at the majestic Renaissance architecture, we agreed that the art inside would be comparatively boring. But we decided to go into the warm building to get away from the gusty wind. We checked our coats and belongings and, feeling unburdened, walked down the corridor that aristocrats would have sauntered through ages ago.

Like we expected, the pieces on display were nothing exciting: mummies of Egyptian pharaohs, jackal statues guarding the mummies, castrated but grand limbless Greek warriors.

We lingered in front of a Kuros statue, excavated in the fifth century B.C.

"Isn't that amazing?" I asked.

She shook her head. "No. I hate dynamic statues."

We went up to the second floor, which displayed mostly post-Renaissance works. We wandered around casually as if we were looking at scenery. A special exhibit, Eroticism in Masterpieces, was in one corner of the gallery. We entered the room without much thought.

There were paintings by Titian, Rubens, and Caravaggio, with characters like Mars, Eros, Venus, and Zeus. I felt for the artists who couldn't depict love between real people and could only show eroticism through the prism of mythology. I wasn't turned on no matter how hard I tried to get in the mood. The eroticism in the paintings was too refined and cloistered to affect me. I pulled on her arm.

"Let's go."

She nodded. "I'm hungry."

We bought sandwiches at the museum café. I drank the water I had been carrying with me all day and she had a Coke. She looked more tired than she did the day before.

"Is it true that the night view of Hong Kong is amazing?" I asked.

"It's probably better than Hell."

We laughed.

"But that's a dumb question. Nobody thinks he lives in an amazing place," she countered.

She was right. I took another sip of Evian and lit a cigarette.

"Where are you headed after Vienna?" she asked.

"To the same place you're going."

"Where do you think I'm going?" Her eyes widened.

"Florence."

Since she came to Vienna from Berlin, I was certain she would go south. From here, Florence is the only southern city for which you can leave at night. If she were heading to Eastern Europe, she would have left from Berlin.

"How did you know?"

"People from Hell can read minds."

"I think Florence will be warm. Berlin and Vienna are too cold."

For someone from Hong Kong, even this weather would feel severely cold. That night she didn't go back to her pension.

The next night, in a train to Florence, we got a six-person compartment for just the two of us. She fell asleep as the train passed through the plains of Lombardy. I kept shifting around in my seat and gazed at her sleeping figure, instead of staring out the window.

The previous night, in Vienna, she'd fallen asleep like that. As soon as we had sex, she greedily gulped down some Coke from a plastic bottle. It seemed her thirst was unquenchable. She drank and drank until she could see the bottom of the bottle. When she was done, she fell asleep, as if she had finished all she had to do.

It's easy to have sex when you can't really communicate. I can focus on the sensations without thinking about anything else. She mumbled a few phrases in Cantonese and I was happy that I didn't have the need or the duty to understand. She probably felt the same way.

When the train arrived at the Italian border, customs officials and police officers boarded to check passports. Her passport had been issued in the name of Queen Elizabeth II. She looked for her Coke on waking, but her bottle was empty. She became flustered. I offered her my water bottle. She grimaced and refused it.

"No. I don't drink water."

True, I hadn't seen her drink water. She always drank Coke or some other soda.

"That's strange. Why won't you drink it? Don't they drink water in Hong Kong?" She glared at me. The hatred in her eyes was so piercing that I leaned back despite myself. "What?"

"Never offer water to me. I don't want to drink water. Ever!"

I was irritated, and also taken aback by her tone. The train crossed the border, stopped briefly in Padua, and continued on to Florence.

I fell asleep for a little while. When I woke up, it was still nighttime. The stars outside the window shone brilliantly. I cracked open the window. The noise of the wheels clattering on the tracks got louder. But she was sound asleep. The night air didn't feel chilly. Was it because we were getting closer to Florence?

At that moment, there was a loud bang accompanied by screeching brakes and falling bags. She woke up. I stood up and stuck my head out of the window, but couldn't see anything. The conductor said something hurriedly in Italian and German over the PA system, but I couldn't understand it.

"Do you know German or Italian?" I asked.

"No."

We sat there, waiting for news. It seemed that either the train had collided with something or someone had activated the emergency brake. We sat in our empty compartment, blankly staring at each other. One hour went by, then another.

"Have you ever loved anyone?" she asked me.

"No."

"I have. When you work in a department store, a lot of men hit on you. We can't turn them down because we're in the service industry. We have to just smile and not get angry. I used to sell tea at the department store. This one guy bought tea every day, and talked to me. I never knew whether he wanted to buy tea or talk to me. Then one day he stopped coming. That was my first love. Because of that I don't drink tea."

"Did you sell water after that?"

She glared at me. "You're a fucking asshole."

I was shocked at those words. She knew how to swear in English. She grabbed my Evian bottle out of my hand and guzzled the water down, as if on a dare. I watched her, feeling nervous. She emptied the bottle, glared at me again, and went out to the corridor. I followed her with my eyes. She headed toward the bathroom, swaying, then collapsed in the middle of the corridor. People, who had been milling about outside, tired of the delay, rushed over to her. I ran out, pushed through the crowd, and held her. I tried to get her on her feet. She bent over and started to throw up. I didn't know what to do. I ran to our compartment for some tissues and a plastic bag.

It had been two hours since the train stopped. So she wasn't motion sick. What was it? She yanked the tissues and plastic bag out of my hands to clean up her vomit. She disappeared into the bathroom, snapping, "I told you not to give me water!"

"I won't in the future," I murmured, chastised.

The train started moving slowly while she was still in the bathroom. Another announcement was made in Italian and in German.

I caught myself thinking of Judith again. After mulling over several methods, she finally chose gas. I expressed my reservations: "That's a little dangerous."

"Dangerous? Ha!" She laughed. It was a little funny. I was warning of danger to someone dreaming of suicide.

"Gas sinks to the floor because it's heavier than air. It could leak downstairs or even explode if someone breaks down your door."

"An explosion would be interesting. But I don't want to go with so much fanfare. Isn't it your job to make it work?"

There was a way to do it. After a certain time, I could call the police. She liked that idea. I explained the procedure.

"Around eleven P.M. you seal the door and windows so the gas doesn't leak out. Next, you unplug everything, including the phone. If something sparks it could blow everything up. Then go next door and ask them to keep an eye on your apartment because you're going out of town. So if someone comes by, they can tell him you're not here. Then you write a will. You could also write it in advance. If there's a will, the cops will quickly determine it a suicide. It's good to write a will in detail. The police are suspicious of vague wills. If a murderer wrote the will, it's usually vague. You should specifically mention people close to you. Like, so-and-so, I'm sorry for doing such and such. That will make things easier for me to deal with."

"That sounds hard."

"If it's too hard, you can choose something from examples I have, but I think it's good to write your own will since it's the last thing you'll ever write."

She sat down to write her will right away. She tore up a few drafts but diligently wrote away. I watched TV and drank whiskey.

We arrived in Florence, the city of flowers, around eleven in the morning. We were three hours late. As soon as we got off the train, we got her a Coke. She chugged it greedily. We walked leisurely over to the Duomo, the symbolic structure of Florence. In front of the majestic church, decorated in white and green marble, there was a baptistery made from the same marble. Carvings in relief by Renaissance sculptors like Ghiberti graced the doors on four sides of the masklike Duomo.

"I don't like towers," she said, glancing up at the bell tower of the Duomo.

"Why?"

"They make me sick."

We sat on the Duomo steps and smoked. She snuffed her half-smoked cigarette out and remarked, "When I love deeply, I vomit."

"You loved a tower?"

"Dumbass. Nobody loves towers. I want to see the Ponte Vecchio." She showed me a picture of the Ponte Vecchio in her guidebook. We passed the Galleria degli Uffizi and arrived at the bridge lined with disintegrating, generations-old shacks.

"I've wanted to see this bridge for a long time," she told me.

"How did you know about it?"

"I had a British Airways calendar, and January was the Ponte Vecchio. I liked those rickety houses. That picture had the sun setting over the bridge. Isn't the bridge beautiful?"

But the bridge wasn't that beautiful in real life. It looked like a shantytown about to be dismantled. It failed to hide the hardships it had gone through over the years.

"I like how everything is mixed together and mismatched. And it's warm here." Her voice was tinged with suppressed tears. It was true; Florence was much warmer than Vienna. We went to the flea market and a couple of art museums, then back to our small and shabby hotel. She showered and changed as soon as we entered our room. I drank a lukewarm beer I'd bought at the store.

"How do you have sex in Hell?" she asked, sipping beer.

"I don't have sex in Hell."

"Liar. I think the only thing you do is have sex."

"Why do you think the only thing I do is have sex?"

"Because you make me sick."

"Then why did you sleep with me?"

"You know when you feel like throwing everything up? My stomach is always filled with weird things. That's when I feel the urge to have sex."

"What did you do after you quit your job at the department store?"

"I worked at a bar."

"Were you a bartender?"

"No, I was too young. They wouldn't let me mix drinks."

"Then what did you do there?"

"I was a mannequin."

"A mannequin?" I thought of the movie Mannequin. It was about a man who loved a plastic model who turned into a person. Are humans that much better than mannequins? Why do cartoon monsters and cyborgs want so badly to become human?

"I was a mannequin sitting on the bar. I wasn't sitting at the bar, I sat on top of it."

"What were you doing up there?"

"I was wearing paper clothes."

"Huh, that's funny."

"The clothes were made of pieces so that you could take them off, one by one. And each piece had a price written on it. People would drink, look at me, then pay to take off a piece of paper corresponding to that price. I wasn't supposed to say anything. People always wanted to talk to me. They wanted to see how my expression changed whenever they took off a piece of paper."

"I would have wanted the same thing."

"Yeah, but I was too young to understand. You know, humans are really strange. I became very different when I was wearing that patchwork paper dress. I didn't like it when guys took off a piece of paper, leering, but then I would wish someone would take off all the pieces. I was sad when there still was paper stuck to my body after we closed. I was the sum of ragged scraps of paper, and I was sitting there, a mannequin with pieces of paper that couldn't be converted into money. Do you get that feeling? I doubt it. It's hard to understand a mannequin."

"Uh-huh."

"One day this guy came in. From that day on, he sat in front of me every night and drank. He didn't talk to me once. He drank a beer and took off a piece of paper from my left breast worth thirty Hong Kong dollars. He drank another beer, looking at my bare breast. He would do the same the next night, and the night after that. He was only an unimportant salaryman. He wore a wrinkled suit and a cheap tie. I wanted to give him my left breast. I wanted him to fondle it all night and suck it and fall asleep doing that. But I couldn't. If I got caught sleeping with a customer, my breast would be cut off. For a month, he came in, looked at my left breast, and went home. I thought I was going to go crazy."

She grabbed my beer and took a sip.

"Then one day another guy showed up. He was wearing an Armani suit and looked like a small-time gangster. As soon as he sat down in front of me, he took off the three-hundred-dollar piece, the most expensive one. He left all the other pieces. I actually felt less humiliated. He then took off all the other pieces, all the way down to the cheapest scrap. Then he beckoned, someone ran over, threw some clothes on me, and put me in a car. He was the first man who took all the pieces off. I thought I should love him."

She gulped Coke straight from the bottle.

"I started living with him. I wore a paper dress at home. Only for one person, for him. Each time, he paid and took off the scraps. Then I would work for him. But I never slept with him. Instead, during the three months I lived with him, I drank his sperm, probably more than a liter. He didn't ever try to screw me. After he took off all the paper clothes, he made me kneel and eat his cum, then fell asleep. Afterward, every time, I drank the water he had in his house—Evian. My mouth always smelled like his juice and later the Evian started tasting like it. I began to collect it. He thought it was funny. I told him I would save it and drink it later. Whenever he came, I would funnel it in an empty Evian bottle and keep it in the fridge. Finally, when the bottle was full, I put on the paper dress again. He paid for all the pieces. He sat in a chair and waited for me to kneel. I went behind him and put a gun to his head. I forced him to drink all the stuff in the Evian bottle. He threw up. I left him there and ran out. Then I came on this trip."

Her story smelled of fiction. But I couldn't tell where the lies ended. The last part might be a lie. Maybe that guy dumped her. She might have fantasized every night about threatening him with a gun and forcing him to drink his own ejaculate. But it didn't matter. Whether her story was true or somewhat false, it was clear that she vomited whenever she drank water—something must have happened to her to cause that kind of reaction.

"I guess we're both fugitives," I commiserated.

"What are you running from?"

"I'm not in such a desperate situation as you. I always run from myself. I have to do that in Hell."

"Try drinking your own sperm. Then you won't have to keep running away."

She smiled bitterly and climbed on my lap, facing me, and kissed me. A gap persisted between us, as vast and fundamental as the ability to drink water. Even though our lips were joined, even though we had sex, there was a river we could never cross.

After, we stumbled out of the chair. She reached for her Coke, but grabbed the Evian. In the dark, she might have thought the water was Coke. I left her alone. Keep vomiting, I thought. You'll stop when you can't anymore.

The next day we parted ways. I went to Brindisi to go to Greece and she left for Venice. Luckily, the train to Brindisi came first. She waved from the platform. I wonder if she went back to Hong Kong.

I return to the computer and reopen the file. I have to edit the last part of the novel. I hope I can finish before dawn. When I work at night, I'm disrupted only when the sun rises. I banish thoughts about Judith and the woman from Hong Kong and settle back to work.