francisco javier es una (pesadilla) wrote in doorslogs, @ 2013-05-17 17:38:00 |
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The place was dark. Twilight-dark, dusk stealing in through slatted windows, warm-oozy air filtering in from desert-warm evening; air that clung to skin and coaxed sweat. It was a lazy cadence of a night, promises that walked up flesh like fingers and held themselves there, all would-bes and won’t-bes and will-you, twined up in one another like a net. Just a regular hotel room, anonymous as plastic keys on the bar downstairs; anonymous as beige drapes and the city behind the blinds, sheets that rustled as she moved. She was a twist of limbs beneath cool white cotton, sleepy tangle of could-be sin: a corolla of blond curls on the pillow crushed beneath her arm and hunched shoulders twined in the sheet as she slept - lightly, lazily, the quiet hush of the night before the night and a dress cast on the floor, skirts spread like the faded petals of a bloom long since thrown aside. The door caught, the electronic click of a keycard, perhaps exchanged over drinks downstairs, perhaps mentioned in good-old-boys conversation as their wedding rings glinted on the sides of their glasses, but paid for upfront. Anonymous as the Gideon Bible in the drawer: Ella-beneath-the-blanket stirred. Before the door opened, it wasn’t as if he existed. He didn’t. He hadn’t. But he did now. It was a strange sort of consciousness, but it was consciousness all the same—the same kind half-remembered from the womb, as sense of being there with awareness that was so finite, so small it was a universal perspective in itself. Lin felt the cold, impersonal metal of a lever-knob under his hand, the kind put on doors that were opened when arms were full, he saw the taupe door opening inward, numbers wrought in fool’s gold twinkling in his eyes. His ears heard plastic sliding in plastic, and realized he was driving the sound, a square card in his hand blinking a green light on the already ajar door. In the dimness of the room, under the whirring of hotel air conditioning, there was a bed, businesslike and frank in its size and shape, neutral bedspread of a washed-out spring palette meant to appeal to masses rather than individuals. A dress lay discarded on the floor. Lin’s eyes surveyed with interest and his mind buzzed emptily—full of nothing but surprise at the shock of the cold air. He wore only a t-shirt and slacks, both inoffensive, as anonymous as the temporariness of the room. There was a woman in the bed, he realized slowly, startlingly. She was a fine splay of white limbs on white sheet, flaxen hair bright and beaten into sleep-tousled curls. And she was like, 100% not wearing clothes, he was like, 300% sure. Lin immediately looked away and flushed, his embarrassment out of place and out of character. The keycard in his hand was abandoned in the door. It swung shut heavily, the impassive door weighted to close on its own, to keep out those without the right key for the lock. He backed into it, against it, cotton to skin, cotton to 21st century synthetic wood blend. A knowledge filled his brain and told him he couldn’t leave. He’d left the key. The door shut. And he was here now. Fuck. “Um.” Lin didn’t understand the setup. Not yet. He saw no correlation, as there was nothing to compare. There was no before to set against the now, no place to connect the few dots freckled in front of him. Instead, his eyebrows rose in an expression of perplexity, but he tried a smile. “Room service?” He was a sputter of sound in a room set up for something a little more wordless, something a little less bashful. Ella was sat up now, as the door clicked back into place with a weighted swing - the sheet wound around her but with little concern for what it covered and what it did not; it had slipped, her right shoulder was bare, and she was weight on her hands, a curl of knees and not entirely upright but something suggesting an ability to slide right back into the sheets if given the right cue, the right moment. He’d flushed; she smiled gently, amused at that, the kind of thing that pulled at female lips a world of first times. (Was it? Her mind was a muddy drift of first times and last times, of times with cash in hand and times with accounts dialed in before hand, numbers read off as smooth as Swiss bank accounts). He wasn’t dressed like a businessman; they were, usually. Neckties knotted, cool-eyed; they undid their cufflinks before they took off the wedding ring. It was a transaction, for men used to flicked beads on the abacus, to counting pennies in the dollar and signing thousands with a stroke. “You’re not wearing a suit,” she said, sleepily. A long, slow smile, invitation extended with a curl of the mouth. “Why are you all the way over there, honey?” And then a perplexed blink, all warm honey cooling quickly; the suit wasn’t the only thing not quite right, “Are you in the right place?” He wasn’t dressed like a businessman. Lin wasn’t a businessman. He was hardly a man as it was, and there was nothing business about him. There in the dark safety of the alcove, he was nothing more than a cowlick of black hair, skinny arms and skinny legs, and big, big eyes, anything but cool, trying very hard to parse that nectar-sweetness that bottomed out sleepy questions. He tilted his head to the side as a child might, trying (and failing) not to stare at the woman, at the nakedness of her shoulder and the color she brought into the drab paleness of the room. He almost came closer. “I left my apron and headpiece—” Lin’s voice trailed off as quickly as it started, a jagged spike of the QRS complex on an invisible electrocardiogram. Rapid depolarization of the left and right ventricles. There was something here, something that suddenly fit, like a little white bit of plastic in a big faceless door. Click it went, and the green light blinked, and the door opened. Lin frowned. A woman, completely disrobed, with eyes half-lidded and ...persuasive, in a nameless bed in a nameless room in a nameless hotel expecting a nameless man in a suit, expecting... business, and the confusion at the sudden appearance of a most certainly not nameless boy who was far too tentative to be owed something. Oh. Right. Okay. Uh. Um. Fuck again. “I don’t know. I—” Lin twisted on firmly planted feet to gaze conspicuously around the featureless space. He looked slowly back to the pretty woman in the sheets. His smile watered down. He realized he really didn’t know. He didn’t know where he was. “I don’t know where I am. Besides here.” The sheets rustled: Ella twisted, one bare calf and then another slid down from the bed to bland, colorless carpet, thick enough to soak sound, to dim down a night to nothing but stains for someone else to scrub out. He didn’t look a bit like a client might but it could have been a purchase on his behalf... Her head cocked, Ella’s gaze was true blue, unblinking and thoughtful. “You ever spoken to someone called Anna, honey?” She stood, turned, slow as a spoon dragging through molasses and presented him with her back, bare, smooth skin scooped beneath the sheet which dipped for a moment, altogether dangerously, before raised, twisted firmly. If he hadn’t come but he had the card, then who would? It was a pattern, chequers on a board, pieces slid together in a line. They had the key, they came. She checked in at the desk, they did. Passing ships gliding soundlessly alongside one another momentarily and then apart. She turned and the sheet was knotted above her breasts, Roman toga in hotel-crisp white cotton and something suggestive about the puddle of it at her feet. Languid clung to her, the dregs - like the cast off dress on the floor: Ella wasn’t certain whether unwitting client or client with a game to play, but the lock had clicked. He had the keycard, he was in the room. That was how it worked. She was a pad of bare feet over carpet, trailed sheet and the bed behind her, shadows and dusk and the glint of Vegas beyond the slats - the glint of something, tinsel-bright and tooth-sharp - but she stopped, and the suggestion fell apart like torn silk. “Just another hotel room.” She lifted her shoulder, dropped it; she looked suddenly ordinary, young. “Any of ‘em, sugar. They all look the same.” In this new cognizance Lin had no recollections. There were echoes, afterimages, ideas he knew he’d had at some point, rooms papered with wood pulp Anaglypta and things more interesting than nothing, ports open, should anything occur to him, but there was nothing seeded here. He was Tulcholsky’s impossible Neuschnee. It was extremely eerie, actually, and uncomfortable. Anna was as unfamiliar as the room, as unfamiliar as the white-pink stem of a leg that dipped so smoothly from the mattress under the semi-soft touch of hotel cotton, and Lin’s expression, the way his smile continued to thin, the way he let his eyes tip to his toes in papier-mâché privacy, and the way his black eyebrows met, was as much an answer as anything else. He refused to look at the sheets and at the black shadows that pooled in the folds invitingly. “No...” He couldn’t remember the reference he wanted to make. There was an Anna somewhere he meant to say something about. An Anna for a joke that waited at the tip of his tongue, but beyond his memory. She was maybe Russian? He didn’t know. God, that was infuriating. Lin was used to knowing and to remembering and the blank expanse of his mind was overwhelming in its underwhelming amount of knowing, as was this newfound sense of whatever it was—shame? embarrassment? Outside of the hotel room, where he came from, the place he couldn’t quite recall, he knew wouldn’t have cared. He would have been surprised, but he wouldn’t have cared. There was nothing there to worry about. But here, he did worry. “Fuck.” The boy was frowning to himself and his hands fidgeted with one another, preoccupied by this sudden spotless blindness. When the woman drew in closer, it startled him, and he tried to take a step backward, only remembering there was nowhere to go as his occipital bone cracked on the door. “Jesus—” With one eye open (the other obviously closed in a starburst of pain), he looked at the woman in her makeshift toga (which reminded him of something else, something else set on a beach with a girl with red hair?), and Lin rubbed the back of his head where a knot was already growing. He hadn’t known that could happen in rooms like this. Still the plainness in the woman’s words, the stripping of pretense was something. She was small, too, sloping shoulders still bare, dressed only in those curls. Something dawned on Lin and he smiled. “There are other rooms—almost rooms. In other hotels. With doors. And behind them there are worlds. Can you believe that? Shit just blows my mind.” He paused. “No room service though.” He wasn’t sure why he was saying what he was saying, but it seemed to be the right thing for the moment. His eyes listed sideways and for that she was grateful - gratitude was easy, gratitude was candy-sweet, it fluttered to the floor as she tucked the sheet more firmly beneath her arms; gratitude wasn’t used in rooms like these, no turn down service or thank-yous to the staff. It wasn’t pay by the hour but it was close, bland and inoffensive paintwork and the deadening of sound in the heavy drapes. “He ain’t around,” she said dryly, of Jesus and she turned back toward the bed, discarded clothing lost beneath the bed, a sway of hips and scooching downward to fish it out. “Seeing as y’all not the one paying for it, honey, you mind turning? Thank you. I don’t think he’s coming.” The silky hiss of fabric as it unraveled - if he’d looked, it was the competent wriggle of someone used to taking things off and dressing with haste: dress first, then underwear. Who he was, she didn’t know; the virtues of anonymity. She didn’t expect boys who blushed like they remembered how. Ella turned, scooped up the sheet and tossed it over the bed to the accompaniment of the failed wheeze of the air-conditioning, muted, sluggish air pushed around the room once again. “I can believe it,” she said, sinking down onto the mattress, all frankness in the curl of her hand around her knee, the shrug of shoulders. “Worlds within rooms.” Ella laughed; it was a soft wisp of a sound, light. “I don’t think this one got the notice.” Lin laughed at the Jesus joke, pinning his eyes once again to the shoes—shoes he’d never bought—on his feet as the woman left him in the palm of the recessed door. He listened to the shuff and whispers of cloth on skin, the heavy draping weight of the sheet, but he didn’t look up, not until it stopped and the room was once again filled with artificial, refrigerated air and the light summery sounds of Southern words that came from the bed. He crossed the unremarkable desert of cardboard carpet, chosen, if it was chosen at all, for its shortness and its endurance, surely, rather than for its color or texture, and seated himself on the queen’s ruff of that bed, the bed whose original intent was lost in that cold, little room. Lin crawled in a few feet and sat cross-legged. He fiddled with the edge of the ex-toga. His head still hurt, but almost as a memory now. His first memory. “I don’t think so either.” Once again, the boy peered around the space, this time from a new vantage point, and he considered the unobtrusive, glass-topped desk that stood in the corner near the window. It seemed too small. There was a phone on it, a phone that some part of the boy insisted was old. It had a pig’s tail of a cord and was the ugly color of the inside of a pear whelk shell. And then his brown eyes found the woman’s blue, an ocean for that shell. She was pretty, sun-dipped, warm, and in the dress, he felt he could look at her without the need for a bloom of heat in each cheek. He held out a thin-fingered hand, his palm lighter in color, like sand. “I’m Lin.” Too much in the space was without a name. Too much was like the white expanse of his mind. It needed tracks, some trace of existence to mar it and make it feel like it was his. The sheets curled, bunched as Ella wriggled backward to make room on the bed; it was inelegant, it lacked grace, the aware sensuousness of the deliberately provocative. She was bare feet scuttled back on smooth cotton, the drape of worn dress over her hip, pulled down chastely over her knee. He wasn’t the one - the One, shadowy in business-suit grey, hollowed out in the shadow behind the door, the would-be could-be of money sliding over wires, coolly insubstantial. And if he wasn’t the One, there was nothing to give. He held out a hand and she looked at it, at the long fingers her teacher would have said made him a piano player (the soft roll of syllables above music, the list and sway of paper fan in the summer torpor) and the splay of his palm. It was right, the gesture - polite as cookies and tea for visitors and she slid her own palm snug up against his, small and pale and a vague suggestion of callouses about the fingers. “Lin,” Ella tried it on her tongue, lemon-sugar and bright blue skies in a hotel room without a name, light limmed down to the edge of a doorway, to the soft-subtle glow of Vegas shuffled behind slatted blinds (kept out as if the city could be kept out, as if she wasn’t everywhere women who rolled on their backs and made no sleepy protest but held out open arms, might be). The name that belonged to bedrooms, that was oiled-silk-easy for introductions that were left aside like worn out paper, like dirty sheets floated beyond reach; Ella was dream-hazy when she smiled, “Ella.” She looked around at bleached-bone beige, at a room given over to discard and the light leached away anything but the silver candy-floss fluff of curls and the cant of her head; cut-strings marionette regarding her stage. “I think it’s my dream. That you’re in. There’s been a lot of dreaming.” It was a dream, Lin knew that now. He felt it deep within and it fastened to his bones with the vague sort of certainty that flourished in unreality, the kind that let you look at a stranger’s face and think, ‘ah, yes, there’s my mother now’ or let you blink at manic black lines and scratches made seemingly at random, by some unknown hand, and say, ‘this is very important information I’ll need to remember.’ There were a few hints that tipped him off. The windows were one—the aura behind their plastic blinds, the radium halo of lights, of some city that made no noise as it didn’t exist. There was also the door. The drabness of the room, and the woman herself who was too real to be any figment of Lin’s own mind. And he knew too, as his not-knowing dissipated (little by little by little), as thoughts inched into that head one by one, that he was far too lucid to be dreaming. He knew he was out of place. “Ella. Nice to meet you,” replied the boy with more formality than was normal, but he didn’t care. He shook the sparrow-boned hand, enclosing it in his own, just briefly. The name, a name Lin thought fit for a snub-nosed fairy or the cool, green underside of a leaf, rang a distant bell, one he knew he should listen to, but couldn’t seem to bring himself to. He nodded and grinned, his freed hand returning to the fringe of the sheet to pick at it. “I think you’re right. You dream of... men? And doors?” The smile paled, pared down with each word, a little hesitant as to whether the question was too much. Lin felt himself here as something tentative, something more human than he ever felt in reality. He blushed politely, shook hands politely, and even asked too personal questions politely. It was his awareness of this fact, an awareness that lacked ambition to change, that had him most unsettled. The question was intrusive, dug around in dream-murk and delved for all things real, for the dregs of bones, of hearts, of thoughts and things that beat beyond the ether-saccharine fug of magic sleep. Ella was opium-sweet smile, drugged on dreaming, the warm press of fingers on back of her hand and her own ice-slide of palm free; she was chilly, bare-prickled flesh and the loose summer-skirts of soft cotton. She sat with hands slack on thighs, same as a child curled on a carpet; her toes were painted candied pink as sugared almonds. “I dream of it,” the fine bones of shoulders, the disjointing of dream with butcher’s knife, clarified and starkly real, “It dreams me.” He pulled at hotel-sleek cotton; Ella imagined it fraying, the loose unraveling of twists of cotton spiraling and watched it happen without incident or comment, the elision of dream and thought until the two were slickly one. Not often, not long; enough of anonymous rooms and prosaic dates, of chilly hotel showers beyond dreaming to allow them invasion. Her smile glittered, he was hesitant, like an easy night, like gin-soaked laughter in a bar, hand curled on a suit-sleeve. “I dream all of it,” she said, and she drew one knee up to her chest and leaned her cheek against it, played her fingertips over the dandelion sway of the frayed sheet’s edge, “Wish I didn’t but it’s mostly true. He’s not coming, whoever he is.” A loose shake of shoulders once again; the anonymity of the shadows a dream didn’t pick out. “Who are you, Lin?” Wide-wondering eyes. Everything moved slowly. So slowly. Life through the Planck Epoch (a contradiction of the highest order), before cosmic inflation, there was only homogeneously and isotropically high energy density, high temperatures, and high pressure. Astrophysical plasmas. It was syrupy and sweet and altogether disturbing. Lin watched Ella, he watched her dream, and he watched her sit and smile and lie her cheek to her knees. The ex-toga was quickly becoming undone (10−36 seconds post Big Bang), and what started as one starched thread blossomed into a flower’s head of loose ends in an eye blink, a universe that could fit through the eye of a needle. Lin just kept tugging at it, destroying it, distracted, eternally extrinsic to the gauzy flow of time and the wide-eyed smile on the woman’s open sun of a face. (The Sun, his mind told him rudely, the Sun was plasma and magnetic fields. It was an apt description, he thought.) His head hurt. It throbbed. The smooth alabaster of skull within was awash with new old memories and pinpricks of ideas he’d had once, sometime, but no longer. Lin squeezed his eyes shut, just for a second. He reminded himself that it was okay not to belong somewhere, that it wasn’t so different from anything else, from everywhere else, and he shrugged. “You remind me of a caterpillar,” he said with a smile, one that curled a little too much at the corner, like a cat’s. It scared him. And then he sighed, pushing it aside, annoyed by it. “I’m...” Who was he? Lin bit his bottom lip. “You know, I don’t know. I feel like I need to know who I come from first and I don’t. Is that a cop out?” A caterpillar? She liked that. It wasn’t a flower, it wasn’t something sugar-edged. A caterpillar was, or it wasn’t. (Something, back of mind, uncurled warm-furry and said yes with a shudder of recognition, pointed toes delicate as a dancer, and went back to sleep). The wind-chill gloom of over-exerting air conditioning slid over skin and Ella’s smile shivered like ice cracking; she wrapped cool arms around herself - dream-cold was Arctic, was the pendulum swing toward nightmare. “It ain’t a cop-out if that’s what you feel, sugar,” the syrup-slow sweetness of her voice was quiet in the dark of the room, Vegas a prickle of lights behind blinds that held her out, kept her quiet like a movie played on wide screen. “You’re just Lin, then,” her fingers slid over his arm; cool, light. No touch at all. “Just Lin.” A smile, a yawn. “If he isn’t coming, maybe I’ll wake up. But I don’t know how to wake up if I’m not asleep.” “Just Lin,” affirmed the boy with his own particular brand of smile, a parabola that existed in a dimension it should not—could not—floating somewhere in the quixotic and wholly imaginary space as a thing both sweet and sly, both mischievous and guileless, open, but secretive, an endless series of contradictions that wound, eventually, into a small, black-haired boy with long-fingered hands and saddled him with the responsibility of pulling two ends of the world together all by himself. He was cold too. The sheet was lifted from the disheveled bedspread and looped around Ella’s shoulders, then Lin’s, so that they sat wrapped with opposite corners, like children huddled together, sharing their father’s coat. And the yawning—the yawning wasn’t helping. An ephemeral exhaustion swept over the boy with the blanket and he shook his head to keep himself awake. “I can pinch you,” he offered with a sleepy grin, index finger and thumb pressing together in a very impressive demonstration in the foot or so of air between them. She laughed. It was a bright bubble of sound that broke the standing-water stillness, the heavy weight of cold air and dream that held them down, kept them struggling near-surface. Ella giggled, and she closed the distance, leaned her head against his shoulder, warm cheek on tee-shirt sleeve as though she had the right to. She wound her fingers into the sheet, child who rubs the satin from a blanket with near-sleep thoughtlessness, and pulled it taut-tight over both of them, the ubiquitous fort to hide from the world in. Hadn’t she had one? She’d had one once, she’d pulled the bedspreads and quilts in the house down, made one on the rug in the living room. “Don’t pinch me, I’m real,” sleepy-solemn, “Just Lin.” Yawn-smile, all teeth; if there had been a rabbit for a brief moment of white-furred certainty, he fled. “I’m real, I’m just sleepy.” The room bowed, curved convex, distorted like a mirror tilted up to glass; dreaming dreams in dreams too complex labyrinth to navigate without losing detail. Awake, he would have done it, though, awake, he wouldn’t be here. In the dream, as a boy a little shyer and a little softer, he just continued to smile, pleased by the burst of laughter that scattered around the frigid room like so many shining pennies. Lin let Ella lean on him without complaint. Affection was never something he would turn away, in reality, in dreams, in anonymous rooms with women he didn’t know expecting men he didn’t know. She was sweet. He liked her. He laid his cheek on the top of her head a moment and tried to keep his leaded eyelids from sliding shut. It was a futile endeavor. Finally, after a moment of dozing, he shifted out from underneath the woman and laid back on the box of a bed, pulling her with him, cold fingers circling a cold wrist. And once they were lying down, with her head on his shoulder, Lin stopped fighting the pull, the undertow of weariness that sifted around the room like sand on the shore, and he let it take him to a dream within a dream or wherever it wanted to go. The empty walls gave way to blackness, the place was dark, and his crowding thoughts ceased. |