Disclaimer: this is a work of fiction. It is a draft; there are mistakes, many misspellings and sometimes long periods of no updates. copyright: ion fyr 2025
The lobby of the place–Pool couldn’t think of it as anything other than a grand hotel–was fancy in a revisionist way, that, to his eyes. The walls were decorated with a pattern that looked like the background of a photograph of his father’s mother’s flat in Muskovy, a repeating print of, in that case, of black and white opium poppies, but here, offensively red-orange on a bare yellow background.
The room was grimy and spare. There were indentations on the threadbare carpet indicating missing furniture. A couch or sofa there. Next to a central table, with a few smaller tables between. Some sort of complex layout by the street-facing window.
Interspersed along the walls, were thin panels, as one would have on a “modernistic” artwork, but these were screens, large versions of the scrolls everyone carried. Moving images splayed across them. Plastic faces hawking objects and opinions Pool could not identify.
In Pool’s mind he imagined a Study of Chopin, a solitary cello to block out the noise from the walls.
“Is this place I am to stay cursed with these…spewing paintings?” Pool cringed. He remembered the obscenity covered walls of Nila’s degenerate friend, Mr Maron. “If it is like this I must surely die.”
“Surely, you will not, Mr Pool. The room will be silent as you request.”
There was no concierge or anyone living or dead in the lobby of the place.
The overly large elevator was empty but for them. The hellish noise receded and Pool felt more at ease. Never before had such things made him suffer so. He wondered if it was the newness of the location, but after some thought, he came to the conclusion that it was just the simple fact of the ever present noise.
The elevator ascended for ages. At the end of the ascent–the projected numerals–were they pneumerals? The spirits of numbers. Representatives of the spaces they were in.
Hades, I need sleep, Pool thought as Philoctetes led him by the elbow to a door.
The room was more a cell, not in the ‘containment of unwanted people’ sense, but a monastic place: a bed, a cylinder structure, which reminded Pool of his recent experience inducing a warriness that he did not appreciate–and nothing else.
There were no other rooms, no closets, just this single rectangle of floorspace. A bed and a shower.
“But where will you sleep?” Pool said as he collapsed on the bed, to a plastic rustle, pulling Nila’s raincoat over him as a blanket.
“But, Mr Pool, I do not sleep…” Was the last thing Pool heard, drifting off into dreams of the deep, of elegant, beautiful marine beasts so long in their arms, they could astride Londbridge, but instead sat silent in the depths. “I will stand in the corner…”
Ion Fyr 