lobby
The night is too late and the
city is too small for anything to happen tonight, she knows. She just keeps
waiting—waiting for everything and nothing, for a night that she doesn’t spend
drinking herself dizzy and slithering through the cracks of this godforsaken place
in front of the bartender that knows her too well. There’s another vodka tonic staring
at her from a soggy napkin and she downs it, sheltered by this sick kind of
temporary home.
She stays until the room smells of blown-out candles. Thick and gray and
bittersweet-smoky wisps drag ghosts of fingers across her cheek while she
watches the last of the embers crackle away. The slow-burning black-orange is
mesmerizing, more so than anything she remembers seeing lately. She wants to
press the smoldering wick to her wrist, wants it to rip her raw. She wants to
feel something for a divine little change.
After
a stretch of a thousand more of these foggy evenings, there might come a
night that doesn’t make her scrape the bar-top with a diamond ring she doesn’t
need anymore. The jewel leaves the bar with fierce animal scratches that she
knows would get her kicked out had anyone cared to look. But it’s been fourteen
years since anyone cared.
between the lobby and 4
The only other person in the
elevator is a guy that looks like Maeve’s ex-boyfriend and she thinks of all
the things she could say to this man that she didn’t say to him.
You’re a fucking whore-face scumbag and you’re a scumbag fucking
whore-faces comes to mind first, but she decides that wouldn’t be the best as
far as first impressions go.
room 418
An anonymous He steals away an
anonymous Her, nabs her by a bony wrist on her prom night and drags her to a hotel
room (the cheapest one in the place) for his permanent maculation of the last
creamy vestiges of her virtue. He is a serpent, blown-black eyes simmering and
forked tongue darting at the side of his mouth between hisses and kisses; she
is his prey, but she is armed with no strategy. Splotches of her pale neck stain
a mottled purple-red and they don’t disappear when she flicks off the crackling
lamp and they plummet onto twisted sheets (with a cacophonous clatter that she
hears in her own head). Arms do not hold her. Lips do not meet. She does not
protest, for she does not know how. She never has, and his cumbersome curtain
of vodka-drowned breath wouldn’t allow for it anyway.
between 4 and 7
A woman with fried strands of
blonde hair and a greasy, sneering man pressed to her back lets out a shameless
belch and the three other people pretend, absurdly, not to hear it: the sign
displaying a safety inspector’s signature and a 2,200 pound weight limit suddenly
looks terribly interesting.
room 703
Hypothetical morbidity hypnotizes
Fiona. She spends hours inspecting her hotel rooms for bloodstains, every
single goddamn time. She’s skating on the verge of hour 2 in this particular room,
and there’s a televangelist hollering faintly on the Sony mounted on the wall,
a white-noise soundtrack to her secret insanities. A dirty, ridged thumbnail
runs over the edges of the carpet, and she finds nothing but old Doritos crumbs,
and the carpet turns into dull white tile, and she sees Sid stabbing Nancy on
the bathroom floor of the Chelsea and both of them drowning in misshapen moonlight.
Her blood looks beautiful and utterly terrible against the tile. Fiona thinks
she might love most the fact that these tragic humans sunk knives into their
girlfriends, into their husbands, into their own trembling abdomens while
hundreds of others simply slept folded into their bleached sheets of false
purity.
between 7 and 13
For once, it’s just her in here:
she likes it like this most of all, when she doesn’t have to avoid any eyes.
room 1304
2:07 in
the morning: the faucet starts to leak in rhythmic drops against porcelain when
Ira has finished washing his hands and settles onto rough white sheets with a
novel about the Cottingley fairies. It starts to leak, and Ira feels it low in
his stomach: a chaotic, thrilling little twist that tells him something superb
is festering nearby. For a burst of one ignited second, where the room floods
with angry moonlight and the cosmos rumble behind his eyelids, the television
flashes on-and-off and Ira refuses to attribute it to faulty wiring. No great
purveyor of the pseudoscientific has ever attributed it to faulty wiring. Ira
believes there is no feeling more beautiful, more delectably consuming than the
one of a room submerged in ectoplasm. He imagines that the silvery, viscous
film of the almost-there would taste exquisite—like pure marrow of the most
bewitching bones, like a daydream.
But he
gets ahead of himself.
“Sir, I
do hate to bother you at this time of night—but there is clear, undeniable,
irrefutable evidence of the
supernatural in room 1304.” His eyes brighten, fists tighten on the concierge’s
desk. A tendon on Ira’s hand pulses when he squeezes too hard on his pen after that
tired look of condescension.
The
next morning, he imagines the stale conversation that he’s overheard too many
times by shrill middle-aged women in their nightdresses after these fantastical
happenings of the paranormal: “The thirteenth floor must be removed, shut it
down, just shut it down, for Christ’s
sake.”
Ira
murmurs it into the pillow to the voice inside his head: “Immortalize it.”
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