ft ground

The next stratum of furniture I move stacks above the guardrail and I can’t see the doors across the atrium at all. I clamber over what is left in front of the door, turn on the light, hesitate, the voice still hums. The form isn’t moving. The curtain bulges in more detail with soft square edges like broken limbs. Hello. Why did I wait so long to speak back? I don’t speak to empty rooms, sometimes not for days anywhere. Nothing. Just pulling the leading edge of the curtain away from the tile I slide my head in slowly. A silent tumbledown column of bedding, cushions, and towels fills the tub and limply offers a drapery hand over the curb between porcelain and oilcloth. Mandalas on the bedding of felled cypress clearings burned so black as each shivered in funereal drafts everything in my eyes was swelling with an empty white light. It made my face ache like daysleep and my eyes dry and the wall of furniture where the front doors were and the wall still whispering to me, louder now, I am disoriented and breathless in a rhythm of words that repeated like a chant, I don’t want to be, I don’t want to be. Between the two identical walls of furniture I rear back. All paths are the same, all accidents but I choose and throw myself into one rickety mess that topples into the sunlight like powdered milk on death rattles floats. The television in the room sings to me, a chorus of women and men that I ignore, that I can’t help but ignore. My limbs hurt and my lips are bleeding onto my tongue. A lumpy long form is bound down in the center of the impeccably made bed I dream of in the final moments of each night of sleep, when I sleep in the summer sun frozen with panic of this failure. I fold my arms in some sagging arch over the furniture scree, put my face in my hands, the sunlight skin red, and sleep.

Inhale a voice muffled not sharp enough to form words. Spirits deep beneath a grave or people in next-door rooms don’t speak in words, they speak in masses like tides invisible but creeping and irrefutable because the ocean is so black and silent without them. I would have screamed but I do this job alone. I threw the doors back open. Although a voice with no face floats through my mind and eyes without wake, and I couldn’t articulate something in this way if I could stay it, I knew the voice came from behind the furniture. The wood grain in a low desk quivered with its vibrations. I reached the front edge of the bathroom door jamb about six feet into the room. The dislodged furniture now formed complete barricades on either side of the door in the ambulatory. Only a running dive tumble over the guardrail absolves me of putting all the furniture back in place. Right now is the time for a choice. To excavate the bathroom door will fill the niche in front of the doors. The voice from the furniture has grown clearer. I don’t recall which side of the bathroom doors opens. If the voice is coming from the bathroom and the handle is on this side of the door I only have to move a few pieces of furniture. A circular writing table on a metal pedestal, a bale of cushions, and two luggage racks and there is the silver handle. It swings in and through the slot of space between the sculpture and the door jamb the full mirror reflects obliquely back to the shower curtain, bulged out, the mass slumped over the curb of the tub I think is moving but the voice is still lost and sexless. The sink is filled black and slick but the room is dark, it is probably water. It smells like soap. The lightswitch is over the counter not on my side of the jamb; I can’t reach it.

Suite doors are set back into deep niches. Master key opens the door. No faintly melancholy sunlight I assume is drooped about the city today but a wall of furniture packing the throat of the doors like the most ordered vomit of wooden and upholstered geometry sheared by guillotine in the paralyzed instant of disgorging. As flat of a thing as could be built of irregular things, it must have amassed from inside using the door like a mold. I do this job alone. The first piece I dislodged was an upended cherry-colored coffee table, worn tabletop first. Loveseat cushions with a strip’d pattern were packed between the legs of another table nested the opposite direction back out to the atrium. Even suites only have one coffee table. I set the table aright on the floor of the ambulatory and blocked most of its width. I pushed it a bit further down the walk for some space to work. I squinted at the sculpture in the door and it was black. No dust caught sun secreting through. When the furnishing stacked above the guardrail in the ambulatory I moved to the opposite side for my bone pile. I was three feet into the room. I stood in that space and pulled the doors shut behind me and it was silver. The heavy whip stitching on my shoes was visible from light beneath the doors, nothing else. Shielded from the atrium seashell sound my breathing was overwhelming. I drew in deep and exhaled slowly, quietly.

At the double door to the first suite I park my trolley against the solid balustrade on the ambulatory which is just a few feet wide and then empty vortex, an assumption of space because I wouldn’t dare hang down over its entreaties. Those murmuring voices mill and become a single syllable sustained at my altitude above the lobby floor, vaulting a few hundred feet in threads their tracery intertwines into something approaching me, a very large gauge needle leaning against my skin but not entering. I blink at the black peephole. In the fleshtone of the door I don’t see faces but from the pale effuses a faint green like a tire wracked copper Christ I recall. It might have been my eyes dying, seeing dying colors. I brace myself, at every door. Every door could be a stumpy infinity of tales in decimated rooms under vile stains of unhinged lifestyles. Mostly the saddest to me, the most quietly descriptive of some fallen angel daily facing a world that fights with its essence to besmear the modest prints of her tunics and skirts with the byproducts of their shortcomings, are the meticulous made beds, perfect in execution but combated still by the rumples she can’t avoid without freshly laundered sheets. I don’t cry when I am pulling the comforter back and quickly stripping the bed or anything so emotional. I can’t picture the range of people who might have stood back from the bed after it was made to survey it before turning to walk out of the room and return their key. Hateful faces and hateful eyes might also hide the same old bland necessity that draws them back to make a bed that God they hope will be stripped anyway because they wouldn’t have wanted to lay down in someone else’s soiled sheets no matter how anaerobic their hospital corners had been. It usually looked like me for a moment.

Eyes open and just some voices somewhere in the atrium. Across the scabby earth crust a soft fading of voices can be sensed by those of us who could have once heard them still in a locked room, beneath even the folding sound of cloth. Whether the bodies faded with the voices or the songs of their organs were hackneyed into fatuity I wasn’t able to judge. Those who died in the hotel left a likeness of their silence, or at least an intractable gasp of the earthly air stuck in their lungs that I couldn’t cease tasting in my throat. But those who merely disappeared, whose voices I simply forgot, and can’t reasonably think they had ever existed as the erstwhile peopling of the hotel, prevented my recognizing any ebb in the nation’s population. When the same face began to appear regularly, independent of the necropolis of faces yet within it, and then ceased to return, the panic all at once of the lives felled by the inexorable present claimed me as well.

Where probably unreal green ocean and white sand shown through the glass wall that opened from a buried storefront in the Marquis lobby, that I passed every day twice in dazes, mauve fabric on the tackboard panel stops my eyes, my fantasies. The U.S. Virgin Island tourism office closed months ago. In the service elevators my bowels tighten against a metallic salty whisper and the terror without the sun of swimming down to clutch the seafloor instead of up through the black to a breath. But I think it is all a choice. Even the worst lots are choices: the seafloor always sunken there tempting freezing or other elevations of diggable earth. I close my eyes and my fingers over the pushbar of the trolley I and it revolve in a murky falling drift through the atrium, trolley and I change places and my smock hanging loosely over my back like we were floating in that ocean but looser, without a body or a timecard and all the doors open and the iron maiden sun from every isolated window impossibly disintegrates my insides floating too around me in a cloud of mauve giblets. Breathe out, keep blowing and it scatters my confectioner’s guts like some dirty fake gold bolts of lightning shooting back toward every door. Blow harder and my eye sockets see black stars and I sink against whatever direction I and trolley helicoptered and blow until there is no air left and I don’t want any more or we stop still in the space left behind by all breath. The elevator door opens and the trolley holds me out along the precipice walk around the atrium. The action of the big casters is peaceful on the loud carpet. I fell asleep in front of the TV last night and I see a flashing of hundreds of smiling faces when I blink, all lit up blue and looking insane with happiness.