In the shadows of that little entryway that was neither hallway nor bedroom, standing a few feet from the mirror, I almost felt I was in the boy’s presence. The rectangle of light that framed his body blocked my way like a brick walclass="underline" I couldn’t go into the bedroom without pushing the slightly-open door and interrupting the scene inside, and I couldn’t go back out into the hall without putting myself between the boy and his double. After a few seemingly endless moments — I scarcely dared breathe — I heard the dripping of the bathroom faucet again, the strap of my bag dug into my shoulder a little more, and I knew that I was going to get tired of standing. Perhaps a space of even more senseless boredom was going to open up in the midst of my foolish anxiety. There was the darkened room, the awful paralysis of nightmares or children’s games; more than anything, I noticed that the knot in my throat had been slowly tightening its grip and would soon resemble a sort of black, infantile panic.
The boy was now masturbating openly. For a second or two, I found myself watching everything without really seeing anything, and he and I gave the same start when we suddenly heard the voice of another man in the bedroom.
“No, no, this is good. Don’t turn around, keep looking over here.”
There was someone else in the room. The boy turned around again, looking away from the mirror. I started breathing again at this point (and realized I had gone some time without remembering to do so).
“That’s better. You’re right, it is cold. You keep going, I’ll shut the door.”
And maybe I shouldn’t have started breathing again, because the new air in my lungs made me let my guard down. Panic gripped me harder and shot straight to my head — I felt its hands squeeze my shoulders, stroke my neck, and push into the corners of my eyes before slapping me silently. It had understood what those words meant before I did. Now the owner of the voice would come up to the entryway door and find me and it would be terrible. I pressed my back to the wall. There was nothing in the mirror now. On the other side of the cracked door, I heard footsteps approaching on the carpet — of course, I may have imagined them, or felt them in the soles of my feet or somewhere in the deepest reaches of my hearing, because I think that carpet would have smothered the sound of an entire army marching over it. I saw myself from outside my body — or from above it, to be precise — and it felt as though I had a whole eternity to calculate what was going to happen (and what wasn’t going to happen). There were many variations of my imagined confrontation with the owner of the voice: angry—“What are you doing here!”; surprised—“What are you doing here?”; ominously cruel and ironically amused—“Well, well. Look who we have here …”; or worst of all, there was the possibility of absurd astonishment from both parties—“Oh—!”
It is only now, as I write all this down, that I realize the one thing that didn’t occur to me was that the room was mine, after all, and that the law, as they say, was on my side. Of course it was, there are no two ways about it; and yet, at that moment, the no-man’s-land of that little entryway was beyond the reach of almost everything, and certainly beyond the reach of the law.
Then the door closed. Someone pushed it from the inside, and it closed just like that. I didn’t see a thing: not a hand, not so much as a shadow. I felt a sense of relief mixed with hints of a sort of bewildered disappointment. On the other side, the footsteps of the voice’s owner withdrew. I could still hear him.
“There really was a draft.”
I heard nothing more — neither the voice of the boy or the girl, nor the porn soundtrack. I breathed deeply again, and just then, my accumulated panic overflowed. For another endless second, I felt my feet welded to the floor. I would never be able to quit the limbo of that cramped, little entryway — which was terribly dark, more of a purgatory, really — now that the mirror was no more than a black surface. Then, suddenly, a few miraculous strides and I was back outside the room again, closing the door very slowly. The hallway was still deserted.
Only then did I notice the red Do not disturb sign hanging from the handle. I even pretended to get upset with myself: Oh, sure, now you see it, I almost said aloud. My heart was returning to its normal rhythm, and I felt the euphoria that had always followed in the wake of my rather modest troublemaking when I was a child. And now I realize that I was still thinking from a child’s point of view: I was OK, I was in one piece, I was alive, safe and sound. They—the bad guys, the grown-ups — hadn’t caught me.
At last, the adult took his rightful place again, rolled up his sleeves, and banished to some dark corner the brave, faint-hearted child who had taken the reins for a moment. After all, I thought, I had surely not done or seen anything wrong. An odd scene, true. Difficult to understand. Strange.
I didn’t feel up to getting in the elevator, so I looked for the emergency stairs. No carpet, air freshener, or piped-in music. It was cold, and my footsteps rang out over the dull hum of muffled machinery at the bottom of the bottomless stairwell.
“No, not strange — really strange.”
I think I said that out loud as I continued down the stairs. I took them two at a time, until I got to the basement and had to come back up them one by one.
~ ~ ~
Yes, that’s right, and would I please excuse them. The receptionists smiled at me — just a little, but both of them at once. It’s a rough day, they said. They looked around as though the lobby were heaving with complaining guests, as though we, or they, were still in the old hotel, at peak hours on the day of the season’s biggest bullfight. In addition to cards for specific rooms, the machine can also create master cards that open all the doors. Like old housekeepers’ skeleton keys, they told me.
I suppose they thought that nostalgia for a more handcrafted world was reassuring. It wasn’t, but I didn’t have time to look alarmed; they’ve promised me that only authorized personnel use those cards. I can rest easy, the privacy of the rooms is absolute. The operating system was unoperative due to a routine reconfiguration. This has never happened before and they don’t expect it will ever happen again.
Their lack of surprise surprised me. They didn’t exchange a single look of mutual reproach or shared disdain throughout the whole conversation. Nor did they say anything else about it, and I didn’t go into any awkward details. The three of us just stood there in silence — the scene from my initial check-in was replaying itself identically. As though I were arriving at the hotel again, once again for the first time.
It didn’t last long; in a strict division of labor, they each went to opposite ends of the counter. The one on the right operated the card machine. “Operate” may be an overstatement; he pressed the same button as before and then stood there staring at it. And the one on the left had only to pick up the telephone for a bellhop — also short on smiles — to materialize at my side. He’ll accompany you to your room, one of them told me. I don’t remember which. Or perhaps neither of them said it, and it was just understood.
“It’s 206, not 207.”
They didn’t apologize again. I think they considered the extravagant gesture of summoning a bellhop to be contrition enough.