1.3 Alone in the dark

1.3 Alone in the dark

Tyler tossed the phone aside, landing it in a tangled pile of stiff sheets, facedown, glow extinguished. He closed the lid of his laptop, where twenty or thirty unread wikipedia articles had been staring back at him, mildly accusing. He wished, vaguely, that he had paid more attention in undergrad, or, perhaps, had just been more attentive in a general sort of way.

Sighing into the hotel room dark he stretched out in the bed, feeling the unfamiliar roughness of sheets that wrapped up hundreds of bodies a year, bleached to oblivion and back. There was some novelty in his discomfort, as he closed his eyes and listened to the late night business traveler hotel sounds of the space–a door banging closed somewhere up the hallway, an occasional lonely elevator ding, a hacking cough originating from some undefinable space, impossible to pinpoint. 

He thought of home and wasn’t sure what to make of the word given his present circumstances. He thought of things, tangible, his bed, an easy compare-and-contrast point with the one he was presently stretching out in. The mattress had been a sort of pseudo-gift of his father, who had tasked his assistant with finding the absolute best mattress the world had to offer, and once she had he immediately ordered a dozen, dispersing half to his kids.

It was exhausting, this search-acquire-dispose cycle his father was always in some phase of, whether a car or a media company, a cell phone factory or a toothbrush, the hunt was always on. Fluffing and refluffing the too-soft pillows he kept sinking into like cartoon quicksand, Tyler grudgingly admitted to himself that as much as he hated the process, he never appreciated the results of it more than when he was absent from them. He missed his bed, unsure of where it was in the world, when he would see it again.

All at once he was up, having not been conscious of the decision to move, and he caught a toe on a dresser he hadn’t bothered to unpack into on his way to minifridge. It was bare, and he wasn’t sure if he felt relief or disappointment, both were secondary to the confusion he felt–why have a minibar if you don’t even put some overpriced peanuts and chocolate bars in it? He pondered the opacity in his understanding of the worlds beyond his personal, immediate, experience for a few minutes, reached no conclusions, gave up, returned to bed.

Someone was coughing again. Tyler picked up his wristwatch from the nightstand, eventually realized he was squinting to read it in the glow of the standard-issue hotel room alarm clock. It was past two AM, though his exhaustion had burned itself down to a place of weariness without drowsiness, his fatigue felt entirely in his limbs, far from his eyelids. Back home, even with whatever undefined uncertainties in the term, it was only just past eleven PM. 

He thought of texting or even calling his sister, Mona, and realized his phone was still floating somewhere in a sea of starched sheets. He fished it out, opened his texts, realized he hadn’t responded properly to her messages for weeks now. He wondered if she had talked to their father, if she knew the latest assignment he had been dispatched on. What she might have to say about Dave, and whatever his role within the man’s team was meant to be.

Thumbing through his phone, he dismissed messages, ignoring emails, opening a map, typing out a search term that the app translated to three bars and two liquor stores within a thirty minute walk of his hotel room. He tapped the open now button, and they all disappeared. He sighed again, closed the phone, plunging back into darkness, parking lot lighting glowing at the edges of the heavy blackout curtains in tasteless patterning, darkness without depth.

Finally feeling his eyelids beginning to slide down, the head jerk nods of half-wakefulness, he counted days in his head, the distance between here and there, wherever that end point was. Six months. He could do six months of shitty hotel rooms and uncomfortable pillows, storefront bar meals barely meeting his working definition of food, of Dave’s wisdom spun out in speeches for no real audience, an avalanche of verbiage burying him. It was just six months, he told himself, and then he was gone.