The Nearly Empty Hotel

I remembered a time in the recent past when I stayed in a hotel with only one other occupant. I was assigned to the first floor and the other hotel guest was spending time on the sixth floor. There was a wealth of space in between us, and it was as if I could feel the distance every time I brought myself off the bed and walked to the wash closet.

I didn’t know what the person looked like, I didn’t even know if the guest was a man or a woman, I wouldn’t even have known that there was only one other person if the concierge hadn’t leaned in close with a mischievous look and whispered, “There’s only one other guest here, on the sixth floor.” I had asked what room number they were in, and the concierge had leaned back, feigning shock and insisting that that kind of information was strictly confidential. The concierge assured me that she would not be providing the guest’s name either. I couldn’t figure out what the big deal was. Surely it wasn’t a big leap to go from the sixth floor to the room number. And after all, I wasn’t the one who started any of this in the first place. I wasn’t nosey. 

I remembered that the room had a creepy feeling that evening. At 11:34pm I left my room to make a telephone call. For some reason, the hotel didn’t supply the rooms with telephones, only housing one at the end of the hallway on each floor. The windows on either end of the hallway were closed, and yet I could have sworn that it felt as if some kind of a draft was coming in from both sides. There was not just air, but wind. Short and powerful gusts, you know. And as I walked down the hallway to reach the payphone at the opposite end, it was like I could feel the empty space and the not-people, the presence of no-guests, in every closed room that I passed. It was as if the door to every room not only read “115, 114, 113,” and so on, but also read “Vacancy, Vacancy, Vacancy.” When I reached the payphone to make a call, I dialed the number by rotary and slipped in the required amount of quarters. I could hear the operator saying “Connecting your call, please standby”, but even as she was saying it she seemed to be saying it from a distance, like she was either far away on the opposite end of her room on speakerphone, or she was speaking through a cloth mask of some kind. I waited, standing there awkwardly, feeling the presence of no people and the great distance between me, the graveyard shift concierge, and the mysterious guest on the sixth floor. The operator seemed to be much closer to her speaker when she said, “The call cannot be completed as dialed, goodbye.” The quarters came clanking down and I collected them. I redialed the number, the number that I had called so many times before, and I re-inserted the quarters, but this time the operator didn’t even answer. And the quarters came down again to meet my hands, like the quarters were carefree children going up and down a playground slide and my hands were the parents to meet them. 

And as I walked back down the first floor hallway, the front doors of the empty rooms seemed to not only advertise their numbers and the vacancies, but also seemed to be showing me a new message: “Goodbye. Goodbye. Goodbye.” And as I seemed to see this word on each one of the doors, I could hear the operator saying “Goodbye” in her high and lilting voice. And I went back to my own room, 117, and when my head hit the pillow I could instantly feel the great distance between me and the mysterious sixth floor guest again. I picked up the mystery novel I had brought with me and picked up where I had left off, so that my eyes and mind were closer to the pages than they were to the absences around me.