Butterfly Effect in a Gilded Cage

In my third year as a high-end escort in Manhattan, I gradually understood that the real currency of this vertical city is not the dollar, but loneliness.

My Louis Vuitton Keepall travel bag always contains three things: business cards sprayed with Jo Malone Peony fragrance, magnetic cards that can swipe to open the elevator of Trump Tower, and a box of gilded work badges with different personalities printed on them - from a PhD in art history from Columbia University to a hedge fund compliance consultant, all depending on the emotional needs of the client that day.

Role-playing in the Upper East Side

Playing the role of his late daughter for the 72-year-old private equity godfather is the most difficult job. He always arranges Yale University graduation photos and childhood toys that do not belong to me in the suite of the Carlyle Hotel, and I have to accurately repeat the equestrian competition speech posted by his daughter on Instagram in 2014 while tasting caviar. Until one snowy night, he drunkenly handed me a check: "Don't pretend, in fact, we didn't talk for five years when my daughter was alive..." The shadows of the trees in Central Park outside the window cast a shadow like a prison railing on the check.

Mirror Game of Wall Street

A Chinese tech upstart always asks me to wear a PwC uniform to accompany him to dinner. "They think the Big Four consultants are more trustworthy than escorts," he explained while helping me adjust my badge, his cuffs smelling of starch from the dry cleaners at Brookfield Square. The most ironic thing is that once I met his real former partner, he enthusiastically discussed a fictitious IPO project with me, and the financial data I fluently responded to came from the Bloomberg news I read the night before.

Chelsea's emotional algorithm

The gallery owner born in the 1990s is a rare female client. She paid double the hourly wage and asked me to play her ex-lesbian lover. "Today is our third anniversary," she arranged a completely replica of the proposal scene in the loft next to the High Line Park, and the lipstick marks on the rim of the champagne glass were all the same color of Givenchy. When the drone delivered the virtual reality glasses to play their holographic images of the past, I realized that in this era, even sadness needs technology to bless.

Embers of Morningside Heights

What moved me the most was actually the old professor at the Harvard Club, who simply needed someone to listen to him talk about Greenwich Village in the 1950s. One day he quietly handed me a yellowed first edition of "Howl": "Ginsberg and I passed notes on this blank page..." What fell between the pages were not petals, but two tickets to a jazz bar that had long since closed. At that moment, I suddenly realized that the real escort service in Manhattan is actually time itself.