The vending machine cast a fluorescent triangle into the darkness of the hotel lobby, a glow that seemed not to illuminate the floor but rather to float millimeters above it. We stood in the empty doorway. No other lights were on, inside or out, and the night sky behind us was a wash of black against black mountains. The space was completely silent. Hefting my bag, I crossed the lobby and bought a packet of chicharrons and two beers. My companion followed and asked me to pay for his meal, punching in the numbers for a sleeve of donuts, spicy chips, sour jelly ropes, and two plastic bottles of chocolate milk. The packets piled up in little heaps at the bottom of the machine. With a scooping motion of his arm, he tipped his things into a sling made from the upturned edge of his shirt. A night clerk materialized from behind a desk to our left, his face held in neutral symmetry, the line of his mouth completely flat. Whether it was the hour or from force of habit, he appeared unused to speech and instead gestured to the empty space around us with a wide shrug. He selected a key from a large rack and passed it over to me. I understood we were his only guests
My companion and I proceeded down a long hallway and up a flight of stairs into a haze of blueness. At first, I thought it smoke, but the air was still and clear, smelling faintly of solvent. It was the strangeness of the architecture, I thought, modern, angular, glass where it shouldn’t be and metal all around. The stairs bent back on themselves up to the second floor where a vacuum cleaner stood abandoned in the hall. Its sagging cloth bag had hard, angular lumps in the fabric as if something unnatural were inside, debris and shattered bits of lumber, maybe, small, impossible ruins. In the room we found two twin beds with matching floral sheets beneath a wide window. The shades were pulled up and the cord was jammed. Outside I could see the last dark of the night, the sky lightening at the edges, then below, the great emptiness of the airfield, the mountains beyond. My companion hunched himself up on his bed and busied himself making crumbs of his meal. Sugar dropped from his mouth and I saw it fall as if great drifts of snow, ash, a pale dust.
They were not mountains outside the window, actually, but volcanos. I’d read about them earlier on the plane as we dipped down from the sky into the inky basin of the city unfurling beneath us. A city ringed in fire, the possibility of it, larger than any other on the continent. As the hills and the lights rolled past the window of the plane, it felt more natural to say that the city reached up and enveloped us than it did to say we landed. And when we left the airport in a taxi to the hotel, the driver veered through what seemed a disused industrial district of silent factories. Huge pipes loomed above us, over and across the road. I felt we were still descending, that the road would swallow us up, that we would remain hidden beneath the earth.
I sipped my beer on the other bed, felt the fried pork dissolve in my mouth. From my bag, I removed a novel and began to read. It was a story about the yearnings of poets, vortices of desire and ambition, dissolution and rage and shame. After an interval of silence, I noticed that my companion had fallen asleep, snoring and scratching himself amid his pile of candy wrappers, his bottles empty, his dusting of sugar and crumbs. I saw the banks of ash surrounding him, rising higher and higher on the bed. I put down the book and stared, frozen. It poured from him, dry and terrible, an avalanche filling the room with a sound like grass in the wind, his hulking form turned to rock in the middle of it all as if he himself were the ash, compressed, as if the origin of all dust. He snored louder and the sound stuck in his throat. I recoiled. His wet gurgle resonated like the impact of a boulder crashing into scree. The room felt cold, I felt I was stranded, the air thin. I looked away. Outside the window, the twin summits took on the dull light of morning, the blue of the night hanging pale for an instant, and then gone.
Soon, the dust reached the bottom pane of the window, the sound gone quiet save a rumble buried deep in the center of the room. I scrambled backward on the bed, pushing myself up first on top of the pillows and then, as the rising mass consumed them, up onto the thin lip of the padded headboard above. I watched the gray swirl beneath me. A suitcase drifted in a slow arc around the room before the dust swallowed it, shuddering as it tipped up on its side just like how ships sink in movies. The luggage tag on which I’d written my name and address, which I’d looped onto the handle with a silicone strap back in the airport before our departure, was the last of it to go. As it disappeared beneath the surface, its clear plastic caught the light of the sun cresting from behind the far peaks. For a moment, I thought it beautiful, as if I could see on its surface reflected in miniature the shadows racing down the volcanos, the valleys all gone orange and brilliant.
When the dust reached my feet, I let it pull at me, felt the sucking mass slide me off the headboard and toward a declivity in the center of the room. From above, the churning surface had seemed flat, but now that I was in it, now that it had me, I felt myself tipping inward. The windows were obscured now and in the dark between the dust and the ceiling, I lay on my back, arms spread out wide. I’d read once that this is how a person might survive quicksand, to cover so much space with one’s body that it becomes buoyant, that the earth might see the shape of a man and reject it, that it might let its prisoner float on the surface until either help or exhaustion decides what’s next to come. A chance, at the very least. I watched the pockmarks of the ceiling go by as I drifted on my back and felt the rumble, steady, unchanging, beneath me. And when the current took me and I reached the center of the room, the dust pulled me down all the same.
Current reads, in no particular order: The Hotel Years, Joseph Roth (trans. Michael Hofmann); Mystery Train, Can Xue (trans. Natascha Bruce); The Lover, Marguerite Duras (trans. Barbara Bray); Fabulae, Isabella Streffen; We the Parasites, A.V. Marraccini; Death by Water, Kenzaburo Oe (trans. Deborah Bolicer Boehm); The Birthday Party, Laurent Mauvignier (trans. Daniel Levin Becker); The Collected Poems, Marguerite Young
