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elbows, and she seemed to be concentrating entirely on the music. Sometimes she'd move her lips to form fragments of lyrics.
    "Lemonade," the bartender volunteered, as if to excuse the presence of a minor. "The girl's waiting for her mother."
    "Hmm," I answered, noncommittal. Certainly, you don't go into a hotel bar after ten at night and expect to find a young girl sitting by herself with a drink and a Walkman. But if the bartender hadn't broached the subject, I probably wouldn't have thought anything was out of the ordinary. The girl just seemed a part of the place.
    I ordered another drink and made small talk with the bar-tender. The weather, the view, assorted topics. Then noncha-lantly I dropped the line that, hey, this place sure has changed, hasn't it? To which the bartender strained a smile and admitted that, until recently, he'd been working at a hotel in Tokyo, so he scarcely knew anything about Sap-poro. And at that point, a new customer walked in, termi-nating our fruitless conversation.
    I drank a total of four vodka-and-sodas. I could have drunk any number more but decided to call it quits. The girl was still in her seat, grafted to the Walkman. Her mother hadn't shown, and the ice in her glass had melted, which she didn't seem to notice. Yet when I got up from the counter, she looked up at me for two or three seconds, and smiled. Or perhaps it was the slightest trembling of her lips. But to me, it looked like she smiled. Which—I know it sounds strange—really shook me up. I felt as if I'd been chosen. A charge shot through me; my body seemed to lift up a few centimeters.
    A bit disarmed, I boarded the elevator and returned to my room. A smile from a twelve-year-old girl? How could any-thing so innocent have set me off so much? She could have been my daughter.
    And Genesis—what a stupid name for a band.
    But because the girl had that sweatshirt on, the name seemed somehow symbolic. Genesis.
    Why do rock groups have overblown names like that?
    I fell back onto the bed with my shoes still on. Closed my eyes and the young girl's image came to me. Walkman. White fingers tapping tabletop. Genesis. Melted ice.
    Genesis.
    With my eyes shut, I could feel the alcohol swimming around inside me. I pulled off my work boots, got out of my clothes, and crawled under the covers. I was too tired, too drunk, to feel much of anything. I waited for the woman next to me to say, "Had a bit too much, have we?" But there was no such conversation.
    Genesis.
    I reached out to turn out the light. Will my dreams take me to the Dolphin Hotel? I wondered in the dark.
    When I awoke the next morning, I felt a hopeless empti-ness. No dream, no hotel. Zilch.
    My work boots lay at the foot of the bed where they'd fallen. Two tired puppies.
    Outside my window the sky hung low and gray. It looked like snow, which added to my malaise. The clock read five after seven. I punched the remote control and watched the morning news as I lay in bed. Something about an upcoming election. Fifteen minutes later I got up and went to the bath-room to wash and shave, humming the overture to The Marriage of Figaro as a wake-me-up. Or was it the overture to The Magic Flute? I racked my brain, but couldn't get it straight. I cut my chin shaving, then popped a button from my cuff getting into my shirt. The signs for the day were not good.
    At breakfast, I saw the young girl I'd seen in the bar, sit-ting with a woman I took to be her mother. Wearing the same genesis sweatshirt but at least without the Walkman. She'd hardly touched her bread or scrambled eggs, seemed absolutely bored drinking her tea. Her mother was a small-ish woman in her early forties. Hair pulled into a tight bun, eyebrows exactly like her daughter's, slender, refined nose, camel-colored sweater that looked like it was cashmere over a white blouse. She wore her clothes well, clothes that suit a woman accustomed to the attentions of others. There was a touching world-weariness in the way she