During the last recession, like thousands of others, I was sacked first and then kicked out of my house; now every few nights I slept on a different friendly acquaintance’s couch. I spent my days in hotel lobbies; unlike most of the houses in the city, they still had functioning air conditioning. I snuck in through emergency exits that closed poorly. If I wore the only three-piece suit I owned, I could even pass as a paying guest for a while.
I met Greta at the Babylon, a gigantic four-star hotel of which she was the manager. You always heard her coming before you saw her.
‘What are you doing here?’ The click-clacking of her heels had come to a halt a few paces away and then came back in my direction. ‘You’re not a guest here.’ The pointing finger meant an observation, not a question. One green eye and one brown eye were looking at me sternly. ‘Greta’ I read on her name tag, and it made me think of the climate activist she bore no resemblance to whatsoever. I shook my head and mentally prepared myself for vagrancy, and for the heat waiting for me outside, when Greta asked me whether I had ever unclogged a toilet.
In exchange for doing the occasional chore, Greta tolerated my presence on the beige sofas in the lobby of the Babylon, where I worked my way through a stack of magazines to kill
the time. Leafing through glamorous film star lives and an endless number of fashion tips, with a continuous stream of piano music rippling over me, I was almost able to believe that nothing was the matter outside. In here, you could forget the fires plaguing the country every other day, the smog covering the city like a blanket and the fact that, even with a mask on, it made you cough your lungs out. In here, you could forget the millions of people set adrift by the fires, the homeless persons occupying the streets in search for a handout. In here, you could still believe winters existed, or night skies dark enough to see the stars. But of course that was the idea: if you were willing to pay for it, you could maintain any illusion.
The first time it happened was in 304. I can’t remember whether I saw it coming. A light bulb needed changing. Usually Greta barked out a room number at me, but this time I was following her hair bun, pencil skirt and heels up the stairs, to the third floor. The first thing Greta did once we were in the room was close the curtains – not to conceal us from the outside world, I think, but to conceal the outside world from us. I flicked the switch and the light came on effortlessly. When Greta turned around, the manager had evaporated from her face. I couldn’t even find any trace of the seriousness that usually fumbled with her bottom lip. Her mouth was soft, a ripe plum. I’m not sure if she had taken off her mask or had just put on a different one; I only knew something had shifted in the space between us. There is a point at which desire turns dark, turns into despair. A step in her direction. Another one. Her green and brown eyes looked at me as if they were two separate entities.
I remember her tongue, a lot of it in my mouth. That she shivered as I slid my hands underneath her blouse, moved my lips from her neck to her collarbone. She smelled strongly of the hotel, of lemons and coconut, but even this wasn’t enough to mask the tenacious scent of soot, penetrating everything. A fire truck drove by outside, the sixth one I’d counted today. Greta stuck her fingers in her ears. I stuck my fingers in her mouth.
In the months that followed, we kept meeting up in different rooms. I believe this supplied half of the magic: after all, it’s easier to efface the world and yourself in rooms that are so generic they could be anyone’s, anywhere. If you don’t know when the fire will start on you, your lizard brain takes over. The best possible thing is a bed and another person to forget yourself with for a while. Each time there was a different Yayoi Kusama picture on the white wall above the bed, a collection of dots strung together into ‘infinity nets’: something to stare at while fucking.
The last time I saw Greta was in 410, one day before the hotel went up in flames. I can only recall flashes of that day, impressions severed from chronology. Greta, towering above me like a marble statue in the darkened hotel room. My hands, which she placed around her own neck. My suit, draped over the back of the chair like a human shadow pulled apart. My tongue against her firm, wet clit. The dildo, kept in place in front of my throbbing crotch with the help of a strap-on. Greta sticking it in her mouth, moving her head up and down until it was no longer an object but had become my body, my cock. And I remember this dildo, as my moaning intensified, beginning to light up – hesitantly at first, but shining brighter and brighter until it emitted a blue light and I came.
The next day I was watching the Babylon from the street corner. Twilight was thickening and the lampposts cast their orange, sodium vapour light on the pavement. Black plumes of smoke were spiralling through the air above the building. Probably some guy who hadn’t fully stubbed out his cigarette. I pictured the beds where Greta and I had been doing it, on fire. There was the sound of approaching sirens, but apart from that it was unnaturally quiet; no screaming, no crowd storming out. The homeless guy sleeping against the wall next to me woke up and lifted his middle finger to the black sky. I looked on, frozen, unable to move, and thought about my shining blue cock. Maybe it was some kind of illusion, a hallucination, my synapses short-circuiting; who cares, because at that point I was gone, somewhere far away on another planet. A planet where blue ice floes float around on lakes and men like me don’t spill seed, but light up in the dark when they come.