remote and depressed, could be fully occupied year-round, at least not since the middle of the century, when she can imagine families coming up from New York to spend their vacations in the country. Her skin prickles and she stands. A tomb. That’s what it reminds her of—a mausoleum. Nicely appointed, but not meant to be lived in so much as lain in, forever.
She’s cold suddenly, cold and shivering, and she has to get up. She has to get out. She pulls on a pair of jeans and a plain black shirt and leaves her crypt, shoving the key in her back pocket and the
Do Not Disturb
hanger on the doorknob. When she was a kid—the kind of kid who went to recitals not unlike this—she and her friends would giggle whenever they passed a
Do Not Disturb–
tagged room, knowing, in their infinite teenage wisdom, that it was code for
Do Not Disturb the Sex We Are Having.
Today her tag is code for
Do Not Disturb My Firearm.
If nothing else, being a grownup meant having the freedom to speak euphemistically.
She walks down the hall. The farther she gets from her room, the more the sharp pain in her middle subsides. As a child she loved to explore, to peer into the deep cupboards and closets at her grandfather’s farmhouse in the Central Valley. There were very few old places—by East Coast standards—in the Bay Area; California looked like it had been built in the twenties and repainted once in the sixties. When she came east as a teenager with her parents to visit her father’s sister in Boston, she had been shocked by how old everything felt, how lived in and wise, marked by the people who came before. The past was layered under the present like sheets of tissue paper, still visible if you focused your attention long enough to see below the surface.
The elevator panel tells her she’s in the main tower of the hotel, that the tower has eleven guest floors, one basement, one lobby, and one rooftop lounge. She presses the top button. The car, after a gut-dipping moment of weightlessness, ascends.
For the second time that day, she’s unprepared for what the parting doors reveal. She’d assumed the lounge would be an abandoned general-use area—an ancient, chugging sauna reeking of chlorine, an assortment of treadmills and stair steppers all turned toward one television, closed captioning scrolling—but it is a jungle. A forest. She allows herself a short befuddled laugh and walks into a giant greenhouse. The ceiling is made of glass panels held in place by a web of cast iron. Around the perimeter are ferns in enormous clay pots and shrubs and bushes, heavy with flowers, planted in low beds sunk into the tile floor. The moon is full (she frowns, knowing the seething mass of hormones on the floors beneath her will be powerless to resist its tidal pull) and illuminates the lounge with cold light. Stars wink across the surface of an enormous round swimming pool in the center of the room, blue-tinted bulbs wobbling just below the surface.
Natalie might as well be standing on that moon. She feels light. She feels—she swallows—she feels almost good. It’s a physical memory, this feeling: a phantom stirred up. Standing in this bizarre and beautiful moonlight, high above the hotel, alone and unknown, she almost remembers how it feels to—
How it feels to be—
She raises her arms and dives headfirst into the pool. The water is icy, sharp, and every part of her shrieks happily. Her clothes are made of lead. She didn’t even take off her shoes. They tug her down but all the rest of her resists. It’s incredible to feel so lifted, so buoyant. She opens first her mouth, strange chemical water rushing over her tongue, and then her eyes. She twists onto her back and looks up at the night sky through the water and the high glass roof. The sensation of coldness is starting to subside. Natalie spreads her arms and legs wide and imagines the calm of flying underwater. Then she kicks her legs together and propels herself along the bottom
She’s cold suddenly, cold and shivering, and she has to get up. She has to get out. She pulls on a pair of jeans and a plain black shirt and leaves her crypt, shoving the key in her back pocket and the
Do Not Disturb
hanger on the doorknob. When she was a kid—the kind of kid who went to recitals not unlike this—she and her friends would giggle whenever they passed a
Do Not Disturb–
tagged room, knowing, in their infinite teenage wisdom, that it was code for
Do Not Disturb the Sex We Are Having.
Today her tag is code for
Do Not Disturb My Firearm.
If nothing else, being a grownup meant having the freedom to speak euphemistically.
She walks down the hall. The farther she gets from her room, the more the sharp pain in her middle subsides. As a child she loved to explore, to peer into the deep cupboards and closets at her grandfather’s farmhouse in the Central Valley. There were very few old places—by East Coast standards—in the Bay Area; California looked like it had been built in the twenties and repainted once in the sixties. When she came east as a teenager with her parents to visit her father’s sister in Boston, she had been shocked by how old everything felt, how lived in and wise, marked by the people who came before. The past was layered under the present like sheets of tissue paper, still visible if you focused your attention long enough to see below the surface.
The elevator panel tells her she’s in the main tower of the hotel, that the tower has eleven guest floors, one basement, one lobby, and one rooftop lounge. She presses the top button. The car, after a gut-dipping moment of weightlessness, ascends.
For the second time that day, she’s unprepared for what the parting doors reveal. She’d assumed the lounge would be an abandoned general-use area—an ancient, chugging sauna reeking of chlorine, an assortment of treadmills and stair steppers all turned toward one television, closed captioning scrolling—but it is a jungle. A forest. She allows herself a short befuddled laugh and walks into a giant greenhouse. The ceiling is made of glass panels held in place by a web of cast iron. Around the perimeter are ferns in enormous clay pots and shrubs and bushes, heavy with flowers, planted in low beds sunk into the tile floor. The moon is full (she frowns, knowing the seething mass of hormones on the floors beneath her will be powerless to resist its tidal pull) and illuminates the lounge with cold light. Stars wink across the surface of an enormous round swimming pool in the center of the room, blue-tinted bulbs wobbling just below the surface.
Natalie might as well be standing on that moon. She feels light. She feels—she swallows—she feels almost good. It’s a physical memory, this feeling: a phantom stirred up. Standing in this bizarre and beautiful moonlight, high above the hotel, alone and unknown, she almost remembers how it feels to—
How it feels to be—
She raises her arms and dives headfirst into the pool. The water is icy, sharp, and every part of her shrieks happily. Her clothes are made of lead. She didn’t even take off her shoes. They tug her down but all the rest of her resists. It’s incredible to feel so lifted, so buoyant. She opens first her mouth, strange chemical water rushing over her tongue, and then her eyes. She twists onto her back and looks up at the night sky through the water and the high glass roof. The sensation of coldness is starting to subside. Natalie spreads her arms and legs wide and imagines the calm of flying underwater. Then she kicks her legs together and propels herself along the bottom
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