Sing goes up into the mountains. He leaves in the night and keeps walking until sunrise. On some days he comes home with an extraordinary lightness in his body and barely more than a sheen of sweat on his skin. On other days the heat steams through his cotton shirt and soaks his chest. He notices the morning sunlight glancing through the dense crowns of the magnolia trees, and on one occasion feels a moment of panic when he mistakes this brilliance for wildfire as it gleams off a piece of glass. Sometimes the wind teases his skin like a mosquito; at other times it eludes him, the air damp as a sponge. Once in a while, he experiences brief moments when all these sensations melt into something altogether antiseptic and characterless; he’ll suddenly feel free and undisturbed, empty of thought and emotion. But as soon as he becomes aware of how free and undisturbed he feels, he’ll see a hand in the water or her black hair pooled below her neck. Turning onto a particular path or rushing past a certain home, he’ll find himself in a deserted alley or under the tendrils of a banyan tree that he can’t remember taking himself to.

Kit eventually moves the gaming room to the kitchen, where he installs a velvet curtain for privacy and a mean-looking ex-con for security. The bedrooms they rent to their guests in thirty-minute slots during the party. Wai Lan expresses some reservations at first, but since Kit and Ga Ling seem to think nothing of it, she lets it go. It brings in extra money after all, though she doesn’t like returning to her bedroom at the end of the night and being faced with the leftovers of other people’s desire. She pulls on a pair of gloves and collects all the junk into a wastebasket—underwear, wine glasses, cigarette butts. Sometimes she comes across a lost earring or a scarf that she thinks is pretty and might consider keeping it for herself. But she knows that the only occasions she would have to wear such items would be at the parties, where customers are likely to recognize their lost items. And while she knows enough to project confident innocence in the face of accusation, she still can’t bring herself to feign ownership of something she has no original claim to. So rather than hoard these items away, she throws them in with the junk and tosses everything in the public bins in front of the building.