The Blooms receive their new names on the shortest day of the year. Six women in total. All strangers. They stand in an empty parking lot and wait to be checked in. Snow has scrubbed the landscape clean, capped the roof of the run-down mall that is one of the few buildings still standing on this frozen stretch of highway.
The Bloom last in line pauses to appreciate the freeze. It's colder in the North than she expected, and the snow is more delicate. She takes off a glove and watches a flake vanish in the palm of her hand. She's never seen snow before, and the snowflake feels refreshing on her skin, like a cool cloth pressed to a feverish forehead. When she reaches the entrance to the mall, her new Madam introduces herself as Judith. She is nothing like the Bloom's previous Madam, who drifted around in a linen caftan and calfskin sandals. Judith wears a fur-lined parka, black snow pants, and a pair of steel-toe boots, as if she was hired to demolish the dilapidated mall they're standing in front of. Judith reads off a clipboard. "Your name will be Rose." "Rose," she repeats. A cloying, sentimental name. Like a grandmother who keeps apple pies in the deep-freeze. She had expected one of the pseudonyms shared among the "Asian Girls" in the Loop where she used to work: Jade, Mei, Lotus.
It never mattered that the names were cliché, or that she is as white as she is Korean. Back in the Floating City, ethnicity was a ready-made brand. Judith lowers her voice. "I wanted to let you girls choose your names for yourself. But Meyer likes things his way." "Is Meyer my client?" Rose asks, careful to sound casual. "He doesn't want us to use that word here, Rose. Think of him as your collaborator." Judith opens the front door of the mall and Rose follows inside. "Welcome to the Millennium Mall." The Blooms' quarters are at the back of the mall in a department store that has long since been pillaged. Metal clothing racks are scattered in jumbled piles, and the beauty counters' mirrors are mottled. Rose can smell the faintest trace of artificial gardenia as she rolls her suitcase past a perfume display, where an ad of a woman's glowing face pressed against the bristly cheek of a male model still remains. Her mother never wore perfume and hadn't allowed Rose to either. She wanted them to smell as they actually did, like the saltwater breeze of the peninsula. "When did the mall close?" Rose asks. "Fifteen years ago," Judith says. "It was the first place to shutter when the rigs stopped drilling." Judith leads Rose to the former furniture section where the Blooms' lodgings have been built out of plywood along an echoing corridor. Each room's entrance is framed by light, and Rose can hear the sounds of the other Blooms unpacking behind the closed doors. Judith opens Rose's door and deposits her single suitcase on a mahogany four-poster bed. A bear pelt is splayed across the floor, and a rickety plastic chandelier is bolted to the ceiling. A vanity mirror with a small, upholstered stool in front of it is against the wall. The room reeks of damp pleather. Damien, her former client who set her up with this job, warned her that the camp would be spare, but he said nothing about squatting in a derelict shopping mall. It's too late to give Damien shit now. Rose won't speak with him again until her assignment is complete.