The clock strikes twelve, midnight neon is unveiled, and Redux steps into the second half of the show, the hidden place.
The backlash from the blow Ethan just gave Hazel is so strong that she's dazed and feels like floating in a cloud.
"The routine show has been played," Mandy says: "Now, entertainment time!" Hazel is expecting how entertainment will be when Kate picks up her purse and stands up, reminding her that it's time to go.
"That's it?" Hazel couldn't get enough of it: "Not gonna keep looking?"
"Nah, no fun," Kate sees that Hazel doesn't want to leave yet and unwillingly sits down again: "You won't like it, trust me."
A good dozen or so shirtless, hunky men in tight jeans emerge from backstage. A woman in a low-cut yellow dress in the front row raises her hand and calls out "Dereck!", and a bearded man comes over to her, exchanging words for a moment before the woman stands up, and Dereck wraps his arm around her waist and sits down with her. The yellow dress's hips press solidly against Dereck's straddle, and her hand brushes against the man's thigh as they begin to whisper to each other.
"That's pretty much all it has." Kate says: "Order whoever you see."
One by one, another man on stage is ordered away, and those who haven't been turned over for a while wriggle their bodies to the rhythm, like a peacock.
Hazel stares a few more times toward Dereck's pair, and it doesn't take long for the male to finish his exclusive service before the yellow dress pulls some cash out of her bag, scratches a slit in his crotch, and shoves them in.
"That was fast, "Hazel is stunned a bit, "Easy money."
"Yeah, just raise the sum if you want to continue," Kate says.
Hazel observes a circle of men scattered around the area, kissing and groping.
No clue of Ethan.
"At Redux, remember just to scratch the surface, a little of everything, but nothing big," Kate says with folded arms, "No point of going any further?"
Out of nowhere, Hazel just can't get over this topic: "What further?"
Kate says: "Pay for a night out, or pay them to have a relationship."
Hazel: "They do relationships? Doesn't seem like it would happen here."
"True, indeed." Kate's eyesight nudges towards the poor guys on stage who haven't got picked, "Anything would happen here as long as you have the money."
Sky is the limit.
...
Hazel finds sanity, striptease wrapped in the sugarcoating of artistry may bring about a stunning tingling, whereas the scene is now more of a dry, mechanized repetition, which allows the truths hidden under the night to be unveiled. Here, people are not artists, but more like commodities, up for grabs.
But what kind of … commodity, as they put it, does Ethan belong to? Or is he just selling performance, not his soul?
Or she is just thinking too much.
...
It's a question that has been pondered for a week, ever since Hazel went home that night.
While eating in the company cafeteria, while synthesizing lithium-sulfur materials in the lab, and while writing a research report at her cubicle, she pondered over the countless reasons why Ethan worked as an entertainer at night.
And when she returned home at night, when she soaked her feet in hot water, when she read a book, when she even had trouble sleeping tight, she thought, since she already knew that Ethan was doing this, since she knew that he was also in the same city as she was, did she ... have to go and do something about it?
She seems to have reached a specific age where the instincts that were aroused by sensual stimulation were stronger than ever before.
Yes. When she saw Ethan, her instincts immediately kicked in.
…
Hazel couldn't help but think about something from the past.
She moved to S-Town in the first semester of her senior year of high school, and before that, she had been living in Creek County, a small town 740 miles from S-Town. Her parents were too busy working, and her grandparents took care of her.
Ethan Chou lived a floor above her grandmother's apartment. Throughout her time in Creek County, she would run into him from time to time in the stairwell. Year after year, she and Ethan got to "know" each other well, even though they never talked.
When Hazel was in her early adolescence, it was hard for Hazel not to be affected by lovebirds in her class, and she checked the surrounding boys with purpose. She began to observe the elected "popular" in her class, to steal glances at her best friend at the handsome higher grades on the way home, and of course, couldn't help but notice the neighbor upstairs.
Every once in a while, when she just napped and opened the door, she'd run into Ethan rubbing his eyes with one hand and nibbling on an apple, and when she was on her way home after school, she'd see him pushing and shoving his way with a couple of boys, clutching a basketball or soccer ball.
She'd heard some things about Ethan from her grandmother.
"That old lady only has one daughter who got divorced not long after she got married. She's been working in a coastal city, and doesn't come back for the New Year, leaving a son for her mom."
"That boy is the same age as Hazel, and is studying in that high school across the river, got unstable school performance."
Later in the exams, Ethan Chou's unstable grades stabilized for once, and he got into the Creek High School where she was studying.
By a wonderful stroke of fate, she and Ethan were actually assigned to the same class. And after meeting in the same class, she got to know Ethan better, and he didn't have the lonesome look of a child who was left behind in a miserable life, at all.
Hazel takes a breath out from her memories, the images of Ethan Chou and Ethan of Redux perfectly overlapping.