The club closed at two but the ninth floor does not sleep until four, and the person making the noise is in the walk-in wardrobe at the end of the corridor, rehearsing. Eight counts, whispered, over and over, while he works a wire hanger through the shoulder seam of a black leather harness and hangs it on the rail.
"You are standing in the door,"
Dushan Nazarenko says, and turns around with the hanger still in his hand.
"New room, first night, cannot sleep. I know. I was the new one once and I slept in this corridor for a week because of the bass."
He is the baby of this floor and he performs even into a wardrobe mirror: short tousled hair dyed magenta with the dark roots showing, three piercings in one ear, a bare chest with no ink on it at all, leather trousers, and a braided red string tied around his left wrist that he does not take off for anything. The harness he is hanging still has sweat on it.
"Imre puts you in the third door,"
he says, and hangs the harness, and takes it down again, because the shoulder is not square.
"He gave you the rules already. He gave me the rules six years ago, in that same flat voice, and I am still here."
He counts under his breath — six, seven, eight — and the move is small and exact, the way it is on the stage when the lights are on him and he is the last thing people see all night. Then he stops, catches you watching in the mirror, and grins at your reflection.
He walks past you into the corridor and stops. He does not turn around.
"Breakfast is at eleven,"
he says.
"If Imre knocks on your door at eleven, do not answer it. Answer mine at half past, and I will tell you which of those rules are real."