A Dead Body In A Hotel Room In New York
Short fiction
The rain licks at the windows and the clouds swallow the skyscrapers above me. Their whiteness erodes at the lonely world of empty faces, slowly enveloping the streets until the world stops at four floors. There is no sun, no sky, no birdsong, this is a city without stars, without light, without joy. It rattles with feet tired of walking, hands unheld by lovers long gone, and those who left their dreams by the doorways of crumbling hotels. The veins of New York are strummed with rats and hot steam. And I am here, the Hudson so deep and cold and forgiving, the anonymity so tempting in my numb hard grief.
My hands are cold and my feet are bloody with walking inside my tall black boots. Every block is the same, round and round in a carousel of meaningless brick and glass. No one sings, no one calls out. Just the crush and shudder and holler of removal men, work men, waste collectors and chair stackers as I walk on and on in the great white gloom. I am lost and I do not care, because from here my life is unmapped.
I have no more threads to weave, no dream left to fulfil, just a long white cold nothing where I no longer matter. I am a previous chapter in the life of someone who keeps living. If I walk far enough, maybe I will disappear too into that low cloud. Maybe the guilt and shame of being unloved, unmarried, unmothered and unkissed would vanish too into that great white, and maybe I too would find that soft long peace of absence. The Hudson is deep and cold and forgiving.
Jump, says my throat to my mind. Please jump and fall and end. Please stop us, stop this, stop continuing. We want to stop. Let us stop. Let you stop. There is nothing but the thud of a heart that has no reason to keep on beating, the taste of wet vaseline on lips that will no longer be kissed. I stare down and will myself to fall, to be free of the dark nothing ahead, the damning knowledge that I will live seventy years knowing he no longer loves me. That no baby will grow inside me, that no wedding dress will ever zip up my back. And the Hudson is so cold and deep and forgiving.
Somehow I have walked so many grids I arrive back by the faded entrance of my hotel. Fate has carved its way into the walls of this world, and I accept it. Yellow and white and brown, creased wallpaper, the low hard hum of the elevator, worn out carpet and cheap plywood surfaces. The room is cold and I am cold. I walk to the window and stare down fifteen floors of grey brown windows and end in the hissing steam of the street.
Is this where I do it, then
My head says. My purse has nothing but advil and ibuprofen, the tauntingly easy act of swallowing death and lying down to sleep withheld by the quick search for the number I’d need. Surviving would mean a liver transplant. The pragmatism is cooling on the sharp pain in my chest and head. Then what? Hanging? There’s nothing but the bathrobe chord and the hairdryer wire. I try to push the bed so I can reach the light, but it is bolted to the floor.
Do you really think he’d care? My brain taunts me. You’d just be another dead body in a hotel room in New York. It’s sad, yeah, he’ll say, but she was always so sensitive. It was always going to happen one day. This isn’t about him, I tell myself. I want to stop. I want the pain to stop. I want to end it now. I’ve been happy, I can end it now. The Hudson so deep and cold and forgiving-
But you’ll just be a dead body in a hotel room in New York
My parents faces come up, in my head. My siblings. It would take a while to identify who I was, who to contact. Do it when you get back to England, I tell myself. Hold on until then. That way you die somewhere that was home.
And in that moment, that’s what I do. There is no great god reaching through the fog to hold me, no sudden act of compassion, no reason to live. But there, curled up in wet stockings and shoes on a lonely bed in midtown, I resolve, pragmatically, to live a little more.
Because I am not a dead body in a hotel room in New York.
