Excerpt of "Hotels"

The disembodiment you feel in hotels is real. Lean into the freedom.

You are wearing a rented suit. You find this fact exhilarating.

Later you learn that the hotel was built in the '80s, a brutalist fortress of concrete and smoked glass. Perhaps its austerity is what lends the hotel its power. It works away at something inside you.

The lobby where you are sitting now is out of fashion. A modern hotel would not have furniture with burgundy upholstery stained with food and would not smell perpetually of lemon cleaner. Yet there is a rootlessness here that you are beginning to take pleasure in. Hotels are anywhere and nowhere, anachronistic without reference. Somehow their neutrality purifies something inside you. Your personal history falls away here. In the hotel, you are not living at home taking care of his mother with terminal illness. You are not attending the city's annual cybersecurity conference. You are not a man who spends his time alone in dark rooms.

The hotel serves continental breakfast on tables sticky with jam.

You move to the dining room. There is more burgundy furniture in here. From a glance you can tell the black wooden tables are made of cheap particle board. Sunlight filters through smoked glass windows and blankets the dining room in the haze of a decade-old afternoon. Hotel patrons move with muted purpose, hovering around the various food stations. There are heated serving trays of rubbery eggs and shriveled sausage, but you skip over these for the pastries. You retrieve a Danish from the plastic case with tongs and pour yourself a glass of orange juice. The Danish is sweet and flakey and stale. There is no kitchen in this hotel. Where did this food come from?

You notice there is a bar but no glittering collection of alcohol on the shelves. It actually startles you to see these barren bar shelves. You recognize the bartender as the man who checked you in by his weary blue eyes that never seem to be in focus. They had unsettled you when you first arrived. Here for the cybersecurity conference? he had asked, looking through you. Yes. Biggest one of the year, isn't it. Yes. You're Room 1102. Okay. How many key cards? One. Here's two. You never know. Here he stands behind the bar with a dreamy expression on his face.

He reaches under the counter and pours a Bloody Mary from a gallon milk jug.

You look at who has ordered the drink: a short, blonde woman who might have been considered too fat to be attractive a decade ago but would now be thought of as curvy. She has smile lines when she thanks the bartender. She wears a black pencil skirt, a white blouse, and a pink blazer. Her hair is wrapped tightly in a bun. You will soon know her as the Swede and will be fucking her by tomorrow night. She sees you staring and offers a curt smile and nod, which you return. The hotel has lent you and her some mystery.

You return to your hotel room after breakfast. It lacks ceiling lights and compensates with several floor lamps scattered about. A decorative mirror hangs above the bed. It is a different sort of quiet from the hum of your company's server room. How many people have slept in this room? How many people tapped into the same static? It is a room of dreams, of clandestine thoughts and acts.

Far away somebody howls with laughter.

There is a sense of possibility here. It is a plane of seclusion for $175 a night, the type of place where someone might go to die alone. You wonder if anyone has killed themselves in this room and you feel solemn, yet it thrills you to think that a transaction of life has taken place in here. Their souls must have floated away as they died, trapped on the ceiling like lethal odorless gas. It elevates the power of the room and affords you something like clairvoyance. But over what?

Outside, a child shrieks and splashes in the hotel pool.