So Mike goes to the club, Z Club it’s called, and stays all night, wondering at first if he is really working or just having another green beer. It’s a dance club, could have been London or Paris or New York, where he is from, but Mike doesn’t really know because he doesn’t go to clubs.

The strobes illuminate the dancers in smoky flashes, sunburned Europeans and black Africans so dark they almost disappear. Where are those guys from? Mike wonders. It’s like they’re from the surface of the sun. Mike doesn’t dance. He stands at the crowded bar drinking beers, and then sometimes he walks to the wall and leans there drinking, watching the sinuous dancers. He is trying to pick up the signals, what is what, trying to pick out the tourists from the locals. Easy. Tourists talk to him because he looks like them. A South African relates how a woman shot a dart out of her pussy the night before at a club in Patpong.

Three dumpy Kiwi girls pull him to a couch and talk to him about how cheap everything is in Thailand and how much they like it that foreigners come up and talk to them. In the end they tell him he’s cute and they’ll look him up when they get to New York at the end of their holiday. At first Mike thinks maybe this would be fine. Maybe he wants to fuck one of these girls, or even all three at once. But not really. He has a girlfriend, Jane, back home, and that was complicated enough already. Plus he is working, isn’t he?

6

During his freshman year, Mike sometimes studied in a wing of Widener Library named after the nineteenth-century historian Robert Benson Ames. The name meant nothing to Mike when Analect told him to look up Christopher Dorr, but then it did because on the Internet he found out that Dorr’s full name was Christopher Ames Dorr. Mike wondered if the two were related. Probably, he figured.

Supposedly the Ames wing was haunted, and there was a tradition, a joke really, about making Phi Beta Kappa or something if you had sex there when you were a freshman. When Jane visited him over a long weekend that fall, he mentioned this to her and she said it sounded like a good tradition. Mike said he only mentioned it because it was so ridiculous, but then he was pleased when Jane insisted on seeing the library. After all, it was very old and very famous. So she and Mike walked through the stacks, talking in low voices as the motion sensors clicked and lit lamps above the rows of books they passed, until they found a place.

Jane froze in the middle of their sex. The light in the next aisle clicked on.

“Did you hear that?” she whispered.