The proprietor called me Mr. Park and held out his hand. This unexpected hospitality brought another awkward smile to my face. His French-accented English. His name card slipped inside my passport. When he asked how the friend I’d come with before was doing, I just kept smiling. And simply said, as clearly as possible, with no awkwardness in my manner or voice, the room number on the thirtieth floor and Habibi’s name.

When the doors to his room opened before me, I was surprised again not only because Habibi seemed more tired and older than when I had first met him, but also because the layout of the suite was so familiar. Sometimes, the memory of a space can come to us faster than that of a person or a scene. Half-opened motorized drapes, fabric sofas that smelled new, a bathroom laid with black marble. The same as the suite I had stayed in a year ago.

Habibi put his hand on my shoulder and we embraced. I didn’t know much about him. A financier who had studied economics at an American university. Thirty-nine on Tinder, but much older in reality. He wore formal attire, even a necktie pin and cufflinks, a Rolex watch, and had various currencies in a Louis Vuitton wallet. The only other thing I knew about him was the fact that at the end of October, late into vacation season when I had nothing special to do, he had called.

But it wasn’t as if I had realized that much about myself, either. Just a few months ago, I never would’ve thought that I would, at thirty-two, be going on a late-rainy-season vacation at the end of October.

◊

After Gyu-ho left, the first thing I did was throw out his mattress.

Until not long ago, there was a super-single mattress and a queen-size Tempur bed lying side by side in my tiny studio apartment. There were also two bookshelves and a desk, as well as a refrigerator, leaving almost no room to move about. Gyu-ho had brought the super-single mattress when he moved in, the same brand that not long ago made the news for having carcinogenic compounds in its materials; I recognized the Taegeuk-style logo underneath. I kept thinking of Gyu-ho complaining about how his back hurt the longer he slept, which made me smile. The Tempur bed had been gifted to me by my father, when I was first published in a literary magazine, because I had a bad back. Father had expanded his business despite the bad economy and was going around with a wallet stuffed with so many checks he couldn’t close it—while nonetheless giving off all kinds of ominous vibes. And of course, not even a year later, he’d been accused of evading taxes and embezzling funds through a dual contract and was currently on the run.

There was a stain somewhere on the mattress from soy sauce we’d spilled on it.