You’re in a hotel with Hick’s Hexagon carpets that you wish were a different pattern but the past is set and so is the designer’s choice of Hick’s Hexagon carpet and vertical-striped wallpaper alternating cream and gold that lands at each door with a maddening precision, making you feel like you’re Wile E Coyote creeping past an infinitely-repeating background – the most relatable character of the Looney Tunes universe because he gets nothing but pain and bad luck as all his carefully-laid plans fall apart and backfire usually due to his own inadequacy and he’s also relatable because of how he does pretty much all his shopping on Wish.com and how he’s always one moment away from going over the edge.
You swipe your swipe card and the door to your room unlocks with a clack that you’d usually associate with a door locking and when you step inside the burgundy-painted room and shut the door and put the swipe card in its little cradle on the back of the door the lock clacks locked in a way that makes you feel so satisfied with the accuracy of your own conclusion that you finally let out the wisp of a breath you’d carried since before the plane took off because even though the plane did touch down safely there are so many things that could have prevented you from reaching the hotel room complete with a wood-laminate desk with a phone on top that you can’t help but stroke lightly because it’s so shiny and smooth beside a laminated list of nearby 24/7 restaurants that room service would prefer you use instead of calling for room service at 4am and panoramic views of city rooftops out through the windows that don’t open in case you decided to jump although hotel rooftops are often accessible through an alarmed door with the alarm disarmed because hotel staff sometimes duck out for a sneaky smoke so if you were determined to jump you wouldn’t have much of an obstacle, and a king-sized bed with perfectly-tucked-in sheets like only hotels can do with a side table on each side and each side-table with its own lamp so oh-so-happy couples can sit in their pyjamas in perfect silence except for the gentle rasp of paper against paper as one of the couple or the other turns the page of their own book and then when one of the two is done they can turn off their lamp and roll over to sleep and the other one of the two can stay up all night with their own book and their own lamplight if they wanted, and its bathroom with frosted glass instead of walls in case things get sexy and one of the two is a voyeur up for some shadow theatre foreplay and a marble sink with complementary soaps, shampoos, toothbrushes and shower caps that you won’t use but will take home and eventually throw out after they’ve sat in your own bathroom like a showpiece of A Nice Time until, just like your memories, they’re coated in more dust than they contain product and you finally throw them away while relenting to the fact that hotels are over-romanticised anyway, and a shower big enough for two with two neatly-folded towels so you take one of the towels and unzip your suitcase and stuff the towel and toiletries into the bottom and then leave the thing open on the floor beside the tallboy that you’re sure nobody ever uses except for maybe standing-up sex because, honestly, who is going to unpack for a stay of tops 3 nights?
You decide to have a nap, and you dream that you’re Wile E Coyote being chased by Wile E Coyote until you realise that, despite any omnipotent force or hand-of-god/author, you are the arbiter of your own repeated misfortune and so you jump off the cliff and this time it’s for good which makes you wake up and it’s so dark that you just know you’ve completely fucked up any chance of fixing your jet lag today but at least you get to see the city at night which, really, is the only reason to be in a city other than for work or to get a hangover brunch and coffee while you smoke a cigarette the morning after a big night out and, Christ, the cravings are kicking in and you’d decided to not bring a deck from home because here they don’t tax out the arse so a deck is cheap as chips in a way that actually does justice to the saying ‘cheap as chips’ so you get up, brush your teeth, pull on your denim jacket, grab your wallet, and pluck your swipe card out from its little cradle on the back of the door which closes with that definite clack when you step into the dark hallway.
There are no lights on in the hallway.
There are no windows in the hallway.
You didn’t notice this on your way in because you were preoccupied by the Shining-esque décor.
But there must have been lights on when you came in.
Right?
Consider the hallway as a space in between: in between windows, in between rooms, in between ‘here’ and ‘there’, ‘now’ and ‘then’, in between ‘not smoking’ and ‘smoking’, a place of transition that smells of the stale musk of new carpet which settles in the back of your throat and you can taste it as you wait for a moment to let your eyes adjust while you wonder why there aren’t any lights on and consider the hallway as a space in between and wish there was a light on but that won’t change anything because the past is set just like your smoking habit so you take a step and at the end of the hall a light turns on, just like you wished, and the idea of having willed the light into action is so unfathomable but somehow the idea of some other hand at play is even more disconcerting and the floor turns to jelly, rippling under your weight as though those Hick’s Hexagons are reconfiguring beneath your feet like Harry Potter stairways so you steady yourself against the wallpaper and find it’s pleasantly waxy on top of its cross-hatched texture a bit like denim, and you bite into the denim of your jean-jacket sleeve and it feels like your teeth are softly, gently collapsing in on themselves and into your skull rather than the material of the sleeve giving way and the thought always makes you shiver with an uncanny bodily repulsion and so does the light at the end of the hallway but the denim tastes a bit like cigarette smoke and in between ‘idea’ and ‘reality’ falls the shadow so you make your way towards the elevator whose doors close not with a bang but a whimper.
Daniel T Car is a Melbourne-based writer and graduate of RMIT’s Associate Degree of Professional Writing and Editing. He has been anthologised in Rise and [untitled] issue ten, was a judge for the 2021 Shadows Awards and is editor with The Write Stuff Melbourne. He hopes his writing, however dark, might help to add some magic and vibrance to the world.
TIL that its called hicks hexagon