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photos, then at each of us, without apparent interest, and slowly, deliberately entered something from each passport into his computer. I was swaying with fatigue.
    Finally, he slid the passports and key across the desk.
    “Fourth door on left,” he said. “Showers last door on right. Fifty cents a shower. No music, no food, no smoking.”
    In the shower? I wanted to ask. But I picked up the passports and key—he didn’t fight me for it this time—and we headed even deeper down the Corridor of Doom.
    Nothing could be more depressing than this, I thought—until we found Room 23, managed in the gloom to work the key and banged open the door.
    I fumbled for the switch, and a harsh overhead light flickered on. Two narrow beds filled the room. You could sidle between them, butthere was no room to put a suitcase down. On each mattress were a couple of gray sheets and what was supposed to be a towel. A filthy window overlooked an air shaft. Splotches where people had flattened roaches and mosquitoes dotted the walls like acne.
    I thought it might send Ti-Anna over the edge. She pushed in next to me, slung her duffel on a bed and unfolded a towel. It was about the size of a dinner napkin.
    “Maybe it’s a diaper for the Rising Phoenix,” she said, and, to my astonishment, began to laugh. Her laughing got me laughing and, even though there was nothing very funny, in a minute we had fallen on the hard mattresses with tears rolling down our cheeks.
    “So,” I finally said. “Do you think these hotels are all like this?”
    “You mean, or did we just get lucky?” Ti-Anna said. And we started laughing again.
    “I call first shower,” she said. The real Ti-Anna was back.

Chapter 14
    I suppose you might be thinking that there could be worse things than sharing a hotel room with a beautiful girl in an exotic city a long, long way from your parents and (as far as we knew) from hers.
    I suppose, if the situation had been different, I might have been thinking the same.
    But I can promise you that if you’d been in
this
situation—scared, exhausted, overwhelmed by the foreignness of everything—romance would have been the last thing on your mind.
    We each took a fifty-cent shower—I won’t even
try
to describe the showers—and collapsed on our beds without bothering to spread out the sheets. It took somewhere between five and seven seconds to fall into a dead sleep.
    When I awoke I had no idea where I was. Then I saw the splotches on the wall.
    I swung my feet into the narrow space between our beds. Ti-Anna was in fresh clothes, her hair brushed, smiling. She must have shaken me awake. Out the air shaft, you couldn’t tell whether it was morning, noon or night. Or winter or summer, for that matter.
    “What time is it?” I asked groggily.
    “Dinnertime,” she said. “C’mon, let’s go explore.”
    After I brushed my teeth in the yellowing little sink in the corner, we stepped out and I locked the door. Before I could head to the elevator, Ti-Anna whispered, “Hold on.”
    She yanked a strand of hair from her scalp and, kneeling, wound it around the door handle and then across to a nail that was poking out of the doorframe.
    “What are—” I started, but she shook her head and shushed me.
    The looming desk clerk stared suspiciously as we walked past him to the elevators. We waited again for forever, rode the coffin down and made our way back out to Nathan Road.
    And somehow, everything felt different. We were rested, an evening breeze had cooled things off, the people around us weren’t in such a hurry. Ti-Anna seemed like herself again. Hong Kong felt like a magical place.
    We walked to the harbor. Huge neon signs made everything brighter than daytime. Across the water the skyscrapers were putting on a show—not merely lit up, but with colored patterns dancing up and down the buildings and then skittering toward us in the reflection in the water below.
    “Is it a holiday?” I asked a girl leaning on the