Haunted

The man at the desk gives you each two thousand dollars, cash.

Outside, on the street, a guard flags a cab for Angelique.

Getting into the back seat, Angelique hands you a business card. It's the phone number for a holistic-healing clinic. Under the number, handwritten, it says: “Ask for Le

The soft leather glove of her hand, the roses of her perfume, the sound of her voice, it all says, “Call me.”

People have a lot of reasons they get into giving foot jobs. The idea that you can give your family a better life. You can give your mom and dad a little comfort and security. A car, maybe. A condo on the beach in Florida.

The day you gave your folks the keys to that condo, that was the happiest day of your life. That day they cried and admitted they never thought their baby would ever make a living just rubbing people's stinky feet. That's a day you'll pay for for the rest of your life.

Don't laugh, but it's not illegal. You're doing a simple foot manipulation. Nothing sexual happens except your client has an orgasm that leaves them too weak to walk for the next couple days. Men or women, it doesn't matter. You work the right spot on their feet, and they come hard as a seizure. So hard there's a smell when they lose control of their bowels. So hard most clients can only look at you, drool ru

Le

Don't laugh, but the downside is, you never have time to go shopping. The money just piles up. Your uniform is a fur coat. To fit into this new world, you get good gold and platinum jewelry. You keep a head of perfect, glossy hair. Sitting in the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton, you might see a few kids you went to reflexology college with, now wearing Armani suits, Chanel cocktail dresses. Kids who used to be vegan bicycle-commuters, now you see them climbing in and out of limousines. You see them eating alone at small tables in hotel dining rooms. Drinking cocktails at the bar in private airports, waiting for the next chartered jet.

What used to be idealistic dreamers, now lured into professional footwork.

These hippie dreadlocked earth mothers and goateed skaterpunks, you hear them on the telephone giving sell orders to their stockbrokers. Stashing money in offshore accounts and Swiss safety-deposit boxes. Haggling over uncut diamonds and Krugerrands.

Boys named Trout and Pony, Lizard and Oyster, now they're all called Dirk. Girls named Buttercup are all called Dominique.

This flood of people doing footwork, it brings the price down. Soon enough, instead of software billionaires and oil sheikhs, you're loitering in a hotel bar, wearing your last year's Prada and turning foot tricks for twenty bucks a pop. You're slipping under tables to manipulate the feet of conventioneers sitting at restaurant back booths. You're bursting out of big fake birthday cakes to do the feet of whole football teams, bachelor parties, just to keep up the payments on your parents' retirement home.

It's just a matter of time before you contract some incurable toenail fungus under your silk-wrapped French manicure.

You do all this just to pay the interest on money you borrowed from Le

You're in the lobby bar at the Park Hampton Hotel, trying to talk a drunk businessman into a ten-dollar foot job in the men's room. That's when you see her, Angelique, walking across the lobby, headed for the elevators. Her hair shining. Her furs dragging on the carpet behind her high-heeled feet. Angelique still looking great. Your eyes catch her, and with one gloved hand, she waves you over.

When the elevator comes, she says she's going up to Le

She looks at you in your scuffed high heels, your fingernails chipped and jagged, and she says, “Come see what the next growth industry will be . . .”

The elevator stops on the fiftieth floor, the whole penthouse leased to Le

Inside, it's just you and Angelique and Le

Don't laugh, but, lonely and isolated as your life is, doing footwork—Le

Le

In her high heels, Angelique must be a head taller than him. She smiles, saying, “Le

And Le

Holding one gloved hand to her cheek, hiding the red print of Le

And Le

“Baby,” Angelique says. “Let me show you something new.”

Angelique looks at me.

She goes to stand next to him, putting her gloved hands on his shoulders from behind, and Angelique says, “Let Mommy show you how much she still loves her baby . . .”

She steers Le

“Come on, baby,” she says. Taking off her gloves, she says, “You know I give great foot . . .”

Then Angelique does what you've never seen before. She gets down on her knees. She opens her mouth, her lips stretched wide and thin, and runs her tongue along the bottom of Le

Don't laugh, but there are jobs worse than the worst job you can imagine. A media mogul with no history of high blood pressure, he's found dead of a stroke in a room at the Four Seasons. A rock star in perfect health dies of kidney failure after a foot massage in the Chateau Marmot.

We have access to the feet of presidents and sultans. CEOs and movie stars. Kings and queens. We know how to make a paid hit look like natural causes.

This is what Angelique tells you on the way down in the elevator. After Le

On the way down in the elevator, Angelique tells you this was her last foot job. This kind of foot hit paid a million bucks, cash. A rival agency had hired her to bump off Le