Eleanor dreams.

In the dream, there is no getting there. She is just there. All around her, framed vintage posters, pre-rusted metal signs painted up to look decades old. Conflicting decorative elements. A brass spyglass. A Miami Dolphins jersey. A blown-up “Starry Night”, the shimmering, watery stars replaced with menacing, tin-can UFOs. A long oak bar, a reef of cheap wine glasses dangling above. Orderly rows of tables, each displaying tattered oceanographic maps and snips of netting and starfishes and sand dollars, all encased in an inch of scratched-up lucite. Flipbooks of cocktails and desserts on the tables. Exclamation marks everywhere she looks. But there is no one around.

She walks through the front doors. The glass is etched with the restaurant logo: a chicken wearing a cowboy hat, pointing his feathery wings like pistols. Smirking.

Outside it is morning, but very early morning. The sky sullen and gray. Something feels off. There’s no wind. A parking lot, but it is empty, a checkerboard of white and yellow stripes and scuddy oil stains. A town unfolds like cards in all directions from here, small office plazas and a McDonald’s and a park with a bench and a swingset. The swing hangs straight and still as if tethered to the earth. The street that runs beside the restaurant is empty. It is so quiet that she can hear the click of the traffic light bulbs winking from red to green to gold. This is the only sound.

Eleanor is naked. She knows she is dreaming, and so does not feel out-of-place. There is no one around to stare at her, so she does not feel a spectacle. Under her bare feet the sidewalk is cool and gritty. Her shadow stretches away from her feet, lean and straight and dark. Her hips, her breasts, are just anomalous jags in this dark silhouette. She has always thought of herself as plain. Her shadow only agrees with her.

She walks. Down the sidewalk, around the restaurant. She steps through a bed of woodchips and square-edged bushes. The street reveals itself to be an intersection. She crosses diagonally beneath the clicking traffic light, looking both ways for cars that are not coming. There is a traveler’s hotel opposite the restaurant, ten stories with balconies and ivy. She walks across its empty parking lot and goes through the big front doors into a lobby with a fireplace and a large printed rug and three soft beige leather couches. The fireplace is unlit. The reception desk is unmanned. She walks around the desk. Two flat computer screens stare blankly at her. She can see her reflection in the smooth black surfaces. She pulls open the drawer beneath the first screen. It is full of money, ones and fives and tens and twenties stacked in little compartments. Tiny treasure troves of coins. She lifts the plastic money tray. Five hundred-dollar bills and a neat pile of credit slips. Eleanor replaces the tray and closes the drawer.

Across the lobby is a bank of elevators plated in brass. She goes to them and pushes a button and a door slides open instantly. She hesitates: what if the doors close and never open again? If she is trapped inside, she could die. There is nobody to find her. Then she remembers: it is a dream. And she steps inside. She pushes the button for the highest floor and her stomach sinks gently as she rises into the sky. When she reaches the top, the doors open and she stares dumbly at a single hotel suite door. The scripted plate beside the door reads Penthouse. Of course, she has no key. Eleanor rides the elevator down again. She goes back to the desk and looks for room keys. There are none. There is only a box of blank white plastic cards with electronic strips on the back. She knows they do not belong to any particular rooms, that they are programmed for any room a guest is given. She keeps searching and finds a small office behind the reception desk. Here she finds a burgundy sport coat hanging beside a tired metal desk. Pinned to the breast of the coat is a small silver tag. Hotel Manager, it reads. She feels inside the pockets. All of them are empty except for an inside pocket, where she finds a blank white card with a metal clip attached. She turns it over. Beneath the electronic strip it reads Master. She knows this is convenient, but it is a dream.

Up the elevator again and into the penthouse suite. It is unlived-in. The heavy drapes are open on the far side of the room, and she navigates the expensive-looking sitting-room furniture and stands at the window. The sun is beginning to rise now, scorching the dismal gray sky a warm orange. Eleanor can see a good distance from here. The town is not as small as she had imagined. On the horizon, dim except where the sun glances off of their glittery exteriors, she sees a grove of towers. Too small to scrape the sky, but taller than anything else by far. She tries to trace a route to the buildings through the town, picks a street and follows it with her eyes, but she loses it as the buildings grow slightly taller, obscuring her view. All of the streets that she can see are empty. Dozens and dozens of stoplights flick between colors. This is the only motion in all of the town.

Eleanor explores the suite. There are four rooms. In the corner of the bedroom is a window with a wide, cushioned sill. She sits down and lifts her feet up, and hooks her hands around her knees. From here she can see at a steeper angle. She sees a tall chain fence with curled wire on top, and beyond it a long airstrip. There is an air traffic control tower, a small one, and a terminal beyond that. But there are no planes moving on the tarmac. There are none parked and waiting. This, more than the absence of cars, gets Eleanor to wondering. Maybe the end of the world has occurred. Maybe man has taken to the skies because the ground is unsafe. But the ground doesn’t look unsafe. The buildings are all intact. There are no poisonous clouds on the horizon, no fires in the city. It is not a world with the look of aftermath. It is a world, she thinks, with the look of waiting. It is like a zoo exhibit that has not yet been populated.

She looks around the room. The bed is enormous. It could be three king-sized beds beneath one very large bedspread, she thinks. A dressing table with a large ovular mirror stands in one corner. Through an open door she can see a big bathroom with a hot tub and a glassed-in shower with two shower heads. All of the fittings are bright chrome and gold. It is the cleanest room she has ever been in. She cannot find a single thing out-of-place. She scours the room, looking for any kind of mistake. A cigarette burn on the comforter, perhaps. A water spot on the ceiling. But there is nothing. Until she bends beside the bed, lifting the thick bedspread to peer beneath. There, on the thick white carpet, she spies a small dark object that should not be there. It is just out of her reach. She pushes against the bed, trying to move it, but it doesn’t give.

Eleanor grunts but her fingers will not reach the object. She gets up, looks around. In the closet she finds hangers, but they are clipped permanently to the closet rod. Then she has it. She leaves the bedroom and goes to the fireplace in the sitting room. It is an electric fireplace, stuffed with fake logs and controlled by a dimmer switch. But there are fireplace tools in an iron stand, to give the impression that the fireplace is real. Eleanor shakes her head at the deception; it seems unnecessary. But she takes the long black poker from the stand and goes back to the bed. The poker easily reaches the object and she tries to draw it to her. The object is small and its edges catch on the carpet as she pulls, and it flips into the air like a tiddlywink. She drags the poker more carefully, and finally the object comes within reach.

She picks it up. It is an amber-colored guitar pick, its surface a marble swirl that she can see through. She recognizes this pick. She remembers another hotel room, one back in her waking life. A less-ostentatious room. A narrow, uncomfortable bed. A dentist-office art print on the wall above. A bathroom with a shower but no tub, and only one shower head. A toilet that constantly runs, even though Jack jiggles the handle. Incredible heat. They are sitting on the hard mattress with all of the lights off. The window would be open if it wasn’t sealed shut. There is a thermostat but it does not seem to work, and the hotel staff does not seem to care. Jack finally has enough and tries to repair it himself, but he cannot get to the thermostat itself, which is behind a hard plastic shell.

I can fix it, he says.

I know, she answers.

I just can’t get to it. I could break it.

No, she says.

They won’t ever notice. This place is a dump.

Don’t, she says.

He slumps and comes back to the bed. Fucking heat, he mutters.

Jack is naked and Eleanor is in her underwear. The white cotton clings to her. The both of them are damp with sweat. The heat would be bad enough, but the hotel is next to the interstate, and pinned between two truck stops. The hiss of air brakes. The whine of a thousand tires on the macadam. Engines that rumble constantly while the truckers sleep inside. Jack is in a sour mood, and there is nothing Eleanor can do about it. When he is like this, she waits him out. It makes her tired.

They each have a duffel bag of clothes. Eleanor has a guitar. She has been learning to play. All the times Jack has gone away for weeks or more at a time, she has had nothing else to do. She can strum chords okay, but her fingers hurt when she tries to pick out a melody. She is proud of the calluses on her fingertips, but Jack complained the last time she touched his face. Man hands, he had said bitterly. He was in a mood then, as now. Eleanor spends more time waiting him out than not.

The heat is suffocating. They have tried opening the door to their room, but the heat rolls up the hotel hallway as if it is a chimney laid on its end. Jack’s hair is dark and slicked to his skin. Abruptly he says, Play something.

What?

On your guitar. Play something.

I don’t want to. It’s too hot.

You never play anything for me.

I want to get good first.

Why’d you bring the damn guitar? If you weren’t going to play.

I don’t know. I wanted to.

Just play something. Okay? I don’t care if it’s good or not.

Eleanor just stares at him, hurt by this. He stares back, and then looks away. She turns her back to him and closes her eyes. She feels his eyes on her, and then feels his gaze move. She sets her jaw, knowing he has noticed how sheer her panties have gone with sweat. He shifts in the bed. I’m sorry, he says, and rests his hand innocently on her hip. An appropriate amount of time for him to wait before moving his hand to her ass, she thinks, would be all night. For him it is only a moment. His fingers pluck at the elastic of her underwear. He tries to slip his hand inside, but his skin is clammy and sticky, as is hers, and his hand skids and stops and skids again.

Stop, please, she says. His hand freezes in place for a long moment, and then he roughly tugs it out of her underwear. The elastic snaps against her skin. He lays still for another long moment, and then he lurches off of the bed angrily. The bed rocks hard when he does, and she almost goes off the edge, so close to it she has moved. She hears him dressing in the dark, grunting and swearing, and then he is out the door, and she is alone with the sound of trucks and the heat. She gets out of bed and goes into the bathroom and turns on the shower as cold as it will go. She drenches herself, soaping away the sweat scum, and does not towel dry when she is finished. She is still alone. She lays still and wet and waits.

Eleanor holds the guitar pick, remembering. She goes back to the window seat and looks out at the town, which has gone dark in the time she has been remembering. No lights have come on in the dark. There are only the traffic lights, still cycling for the invisible cars. Eleanor has nowhere to put the guitar pick, so she gets up again and flicks it back beneath the bed, where it was. Then she returns to the window seat and rests her head against the wall. She watches the red and green and gold lights until the darkness is complete and they are all she can see, like colorful messages in the night.

She waits to wake up. The more time it takes, the more she begins to wonder if there is something she has not yet figured out. She thinks that she could be dead. This could be a sort of purgatory. A waystation for her bare-assed soul to while away the time. Maybe the waiting is not for waking up. Maybe the waiting is for her ride to whatever is next. She does not like this idea.

She waits. But she does not know what for.

Sunday, April 20, 2008   

1. regały przesuwne wrote:
   February 26th, 2010 at 1:15 am

   Good work i think your site is very nice and helpfull

2. Photo gallery wrote:
   February 26th, 2010 at 1:16 am

   very good site…

the blog and design portfolio of Jason Gurley. (Learn more.) This site has been around since 1998; me, since 1978. In 2005 I drove 3,000 miles to see a movie. 2009 is pretty aimless so far, but I'm sure I'll get around to something sooner or later.

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pictured here in his study
exit music
waiting, seeing
that faint sensation of loss
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Lust, Caution
Double Indemnity
Iron Man
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
There Will Be Blood
Gone, Baby, Gone
Live Free or Die Hard
The Indian Runner
The Iron Giant
Contact
An Inconvenient Truth
X-Men: The Last Stand
Superman Returns
Enigma
Nobody's Fool
Look, Up in the Sky
Numb3rs
Mission: Impossible III
Heaven
The Abyss
The Constant Gardener
The Mosquito Coast
The Hustler
Limbo
Grizzly Man
The Verdict
Superman Returns
Elizabethtown
Battlestar Galactica
You Can Count on Me
Rolling Roadshow 2005
The American President
My DVD collection

01. dreaming of falling
02. marvelous descent
03. a conversation
04. the colors
05. huffnagle island
06. a hundred million
07. sixty-six stories
08. anyone earthbound
09. a girl named eleanor
10. a route obscure and lonely
11. a certain stillness
12. this is jack
13. wide flat lands
14. going home
15. girl unscrewed
16. slow rehabilitation
17. twenty-three stories
18. a far-off point
19. fifteen years quiet
20. a one-beer fella
21. luminescence
22. one-sided conversation
23. hearts big and stupid
24. nineteen seventy-eight
25. first light
26. a hundred years
27. too long to stop now
28. plainswept
29. a widower in training
30. spies and assets
31. thirty years and then some
32. leaping over couches
33. cricket song
34. eleanor's first kiss
35. like so much ballast
36. too much
37. the longest wait
38. the second ice storm
39. rocket summer
40. waiting
41. wax wings
42. breakup
43. tough beans
43. the heavy gray sea