Ultraluminous

A high-end, girlfriend-experience prostitute called K has just returned to her native New York City, after more than a decade abroad in Dubai with a man she recalls as the Sheikh. She sets up a rotation of clients—all of them in finance, each with different delusions of how he is important to her—and makes time for a former Army Ranger who served in Afghanistan, whom she doesn’t charge.

Her days are strangely orderly: a repetition of dinners, personal grooming, museum exhibitions, sex, Duane Reades (she likes the sushi), cosmology, sex, gallery shows, nightclubs, heroin, sex, and art films. She finds the pattern substantiating, but does she really believe it’s sustainable? Or do the barely discernible rifts suggest a pattern within the pattern, a larger scheme she’s not showing us, a truth that won’t be revealed until we can see everything?