A Thing That There Will probably be more of

[robertsona]

I am standing in a seventh-floor hotel room in Wilhelmshaven, Germany, waiting for a ship. The ship will arrive in seven hours, at 8 o’ clock in the morning, and I am standing to the right side of the bed in the hotel room, staring out through a large window at the sea below. The night has an air of preciseness about it--the sky is a uniformly dark blue without changes in shading or texture while the sea stands unusually still. The world is inertial; it is not moving as it should; the night seems to have actually set everything into complete motionlessness. The vague, penetrating awareness of Wilhelmshaven’s other citizens and their night-time movements has disappeared completely, replaced by moon- and star-light, placidly casting a floating beam of white light--amorphous, seemingly tangible--onto the bed behind me. The bed, as viewed through a reflection in the window, seems to be pierced through with this light, its structure now cloudlike, only a mist of threads and sheets and quilts that come together to convincingly resemble a bed. I start to resolutely believe that, were I to put my hand on the surface of the bed, it would pass right through. This is the strongest of the feelings and thoughts that this unrelentingly still night has given to me--that my bed is no more than a facade of a bed, and that it would fail any given Bed Test that I could administer, and that it is an artifice in an almost sinister way, given this artificial nature by the thoroughly un-sinister (almost anti-sinister, in its utter calmness) night but then detaching itself from that night, existing in its own distorted plane of existence. I do not turn around to test whether or not the bed is real because I, like the bed, am pierced through by the night’s light, which seems firmly established in the space between my bed and the window. I feel as if my limbs are thoroughly frozen by this light.

In seven hours the ship will arrive, and even before that, probably, the motionlessness of everything that surrounds me will be broken and the world will start again. Perhaps a woman will walk her dog early in the deepness of the morning, and the bed will suddenly be concrete again, given form by this seemingly meaningless event. A woman will walk her dog, and the bed will solidify, and I will be able to move again. I will be able to turn around and lie on the bed, or go downstairs and talk to the hotel manager and tell him how beautiful the view from my room is, and how much I love being able to see almost all of Wilhelmshaven (he will smile here, feeling a certain alliance with the whole town; feeling the sort of quaint significance of his role as the affable hotel manager in town) and ask him for a good place to get breakfast before I board my ship. The woman who will walk her dog has not yet arrived. I am waiting for her to do so now; the waiting for the woman and her dog has now superseded the anticipation of the ship’s arrival. I, in my motionless, now nearly somnambulant state, am dependent on this hypothetical woman and her dog--now I need not just any event to break the tense tranquility of the night but I need her, specifically, and her dog, and the two of them walking together in view of my hotel window. I am not entirely sure whether or not, if I saw it arriving in front of my hotel, I would get up and board the ship which I was just a few minutes ago so deeply anticipating. I begin to think that I desperately need an implicit permission to start moving from this woman and her dog. I believe that I am wholly locked into place by the woman and her dog; or rather, by their lack of visibility in front of my hotel window, and that if and only if they appear and I can see them and they--both the woman and the dog--are clearly there in front of me, walking together, the white light will finally loosen its grasp of my arms and legs and I will be set free.

I turn around, suddenly and without thinking, absentmindedly breaking the rules of this nonsensical game. I know I will be somehow punished for moving. Perhaps the act of playing this game, of not being able to move until an almost certainly illusory goal is reached, is punishment enough. At the time, though, my sudden movement is not a lashing out against the unfairness of such a system or even a conscious action on my part at all, really; I simply move. I turn around and the room suddenly forms itself. It had slowly disappeared--melted, perhaps--while I was facing the window and it reappears before my eyes just as I turn around and look at it. The door is covered in shadows. The desk, upon which a note from the hotel cleaner lays, seems sturdier and darker than it was when I had last seen it. The painting over the bed, of a Paris cafe at noon, paints itself quickly. The bed, drenched in white light, floats.