‘Hotels’

“I sighed and wandered over to the mirror, in which my reflection was a pale blotch in the gloom. I wondered how many people had stood at this very spot, their lovers sleeping, their hopes and vanities turning to vapor, dust, fingerprints smudged on the mirror-glass. What a terrible place for an epiphany.”

The hotel sheets were thin and stiff, and they crackled like tissue paper whenever Helen rolled over in bed. I lay next to her, wide awake—my mind too chattery for sleep—and flipped through television channels, even though I could barely see the screen. Instead I studied its reflections on the wall, the blue and gray lights stretching and pulling at the water-stained ceiling tile like moonlight on a frothy river.

Occasionally Helen would murmur in her sleep and tug the sheets away from me. I didn’t understand how she could sleep so soundly on such a thin, lumpy mattress, under sheets that rustled like dry leaves, in a room fogged over with the unsteady whine of a wall-mounted air conditioner.

I rolled to face her and pulled back the covers. Helen lay there neatly, orderly, with her back to me and her flesh heaving in gentle rhythm to her somnolent breathing. The television light splashed over the subtle violin curve of her naked body like some narcotic wave, highlighting the quiet contour of her spine and christening her short, sandy hair with a galaxy of stars.

Ignoring the crackling sheets, I slid in close and wrapped my arm around her, resting it against her fever-hot belly and breasts so that my fingers just barely reached her chin. I kissed the nape of her neck. My lips uncovered a birthmark there, a little spot the shape and color of a Sarajevo rose. I wasn’t sure she even knew it was there.

I pressed my skin against hers and breathed deeply.

“Quit it,” she murmured, only a sliver of wakefulness in her voice.

I sighed, loosened my grip, and kissed her neck once more.

“Goodnight,” she said, louder now and with great authority.

I rolled back to my side of the bed. The flickering shadows pealing across the ceiling were distracting, so I shut the TV off and let the remote drop to the floor. In the dark I could hear Helen rustling around, see her fumbling about the floor with her left arm. She slipped her panties back on, covered herself with the sheets, and was asleep again only a moment later.

I stared until my eyes adjusted to the dark, until I could make out the faint grid of ceiling tiles above me. I was covered in beads of sweat, and without the shelter of the sheets I was growing cool and shivery.

Footsteps thumped through the ceiling, muffled as if I were underwater, and the air conditioner droned on. I knew I would never get to sleep, so I crawled out of bed and dabbed the sweat away with a handful of bedding. I gathered up my clothes, which by now were a wrinkled mess, and dressed as quietly as I could.

I strained my eyes in the dreaming sea of black, made out Helen’s form on the bed, her sweep of hair, the undulant crest of her hip. I wanted to be there next to her, taking in her warmth, holding her skin against mine, whispering confidences, but before I knew it I was heading for the door, smoothing out the wrinkles in the cheap suit I’d managed to scavenge from the carpet.

But I didn’t go out. My fingers went limp and wet on the door handle and slid off. There wasn’t anything out there I wanted to see. There would be a chill in the hallway, a lingering odor of disinfectants and cigarette smoke, an almost-silence made all the worse for its stupid pedestrian interruptions, the coughs and thuds and low rumbling flickers of conversation. I knew I wouldn’t be able to bear it—everything here reminded me of a carpeted hospital, a hospital with lovely mahogany trimmings and lush draperies, a hospital where there was always a BMW or Mercedes-Benz waiting for the parking valet. But there was that same sense of tentativeness and transience, a persistence of loneliness and nostalgia. The beds were just as bad, and I had always found it difficult to wake up in a hotel and not feel a little sick.

My head swam. Earlier, I’d spent several hours in the hotel bar, sipping prosaic brandies and eavesdropping on the other patrons. Many of them were making new acquaintances, and there was always that same question, always answered the same way: “Nah, just passing through, mate.” Or: “No, ma’am, home’s in Houston.” Or: “Just for the winter, you know?”

Perhaps I’d been a little disappointed that no one had asked me, though I hadn’t been approachable, what with my brandy and my newspaper and my silence—daydreaming of my tired fiancée, who was still resting a dozen floors away, another world.

And here still she slept. I moved to the window and parted the filmy, gossamer-like curtains. The city moved, though in a rudimentary way, like the half-flutter of a crippled wing. The block was full of hotels just like this one, glamorous high-rises with shimmering pools, artificial flora, whole parking decks full of imported sports cars, lumpy mattresses, rooms gone stale with regret, memories burned into the carpet and wallpaper.

Memories. Hotel rooms were thick with them, no matter how hard housekeeping tried to scrub them out. So many memories that the room itself may well have turned sentient by now. The human mind, I thought, was no more than a sloppy aggregate of memories, so why should this room have been any different? I felt melancholic and powerless here, as if the room—glutted on Helen’s spurns and scowls—were merely dreaming me forward, grinding my spirit against the coarse yellowed wallpaper so that some trace of me would remain long after I’d gone.

Helen shifted now and then, but she never strayed from her side of the bed. Her sleep was unbroken except for my occasional interruption, and she looked peaceful, serene in a way that only sleep would allow, that only she understood. There was a smile on her face, and I could tell she was dreaming.

In her slumber she was as distant from me as anyone ever could be—in the same room, but a separate world. And she seemed happier there, with me stranded back in the half-luxuries of some miserable hotel. In her ecstasies of sleep I wasn’t even a footnote.

I sighed and wandered over to the mirror, in which my reflection was a pale blotch in the gloom. I wondered how many people had stood at this very spot, their lovers sleeping, their hopes and vanities turning to vapor, dust, fingerprints smudged on the mirror-glass. What a terrible place for an epiphany.

Helen’s steady breathing crested in the black. I counted her breaths, shut my eyes. I wanted nothing more than to slip out of my clothes and climb under the sheets, close to her, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead I curled up on the floor and imagined I was in bed, imagined I was kissing the birthmark on her neck. I didn’t know what to make of it, but I was soon asleep, feeding on all the borrowed dreams that had accumulated for years in the dreary little hotel room.

I couldn’t dream anything that hadn’t been dreamed here a hundred times before. The room held the dregs of a thousand dreams, memories—so many that this space seemed older than the building that contained it, older than anything, a world apart from the staggering city glowering in through the windowpanes.

And Helen was dreaming herself deeper yet, further. I could never hope to reach her now. I awoke in halting flashes on the floor—my back aching, my head throbbing, my stomach turning—and pictured her resting stonelike on the bed, immovable and untouchable.

Absurd and impossible, I thought, absurd and probably futile, like being drunk and ignored in a crowded hotel lounge, drowning in an ocean of sound and conversation that likely meant very little.

An hour or so later I forced myself from the floor and crawled back into bed as gingerly as possible. I tried not to wake Helen, but I noticed an annoyed little tremor pass over her body, heard a breath that sounded like a sigh. I pushed myself close to her, close enough that I could feel her warmth. The air was sweet with a tang of absence, vacancy, and it was like she wasn’t even there.

Originally published in Panâche, Volume I, 2010.