Evan is poking randomly at the computer and you are misfiling thousands of tiny little oaktag cards, the color of old bananas, in a small wooden drawer.

I inhale and open my mouth to say excuse me, but Evan cuts me off:

"Customerrrrzz... gotta love 'em."

You grin wickedly and give him a nice flirty conspiratorial look. No one has looked at me yet. That's OK. I recognize your technique from the surveillance camera: good clerk, bad clerk.

"Reservation for Stark," I say.

"Stark," Evan says, and rolls it around in his head for a minute or so, unwilling to proceed until he has deconstructed my name. "That's German for

'strong,' right?"

"It's German for 'naked,' " I say.

Evan drops his gaze to the computer screen, defeated and temporarily humble. You laugh and glance up at me for the first time. What do you see? You see a guy who looks pretty much like the guys you hang out with.

I shove the sleeves of my ratty sweater up to the elbows and rest one forearm across the counter. The tattoo stands out vividly against my spudlike flesh, and in my peripheral I can see your eyes glance up for a moment, taking in the black rectangle, the skull, the crossed fish. Then I pretend to get self-conscious. I step back and pull my sleeve down again - don't want you to see that the tattoo is only about a day old.

"No reservation for Stark," Evan says, right on cue. I'm cool, I'm expecting this; they lose all of the reservations.

"Dash these computers," I say. "You have any empty rooms?"

"Just a suite. And a couple of economy rooms," he says, issuing a double challenge: do I have the bucks for the former or the moxie for the latter?

"I'll take one of the economy rooms," I say.

"You sure?"

"HIV-positive."

Evan shrugs, the hotel clerk's equivalent of issuing a 20-page legal disclaimer, and prods the computer, which is good enough to spit out a keycard, freshly imprinted with a random code. It's also spewing bits upstairs to the computer lock on my door, telling it that I'm cool, I'm to be let in.