This is a hybrid SPASM, in which I wrote the first hundred words, Tim X wrote the second hundred, I wrote the third, and so on until I got to five hundred and stopped (the maximum for a SPASM). We’re still working on the other piece from this collaboration (which Tim started and I did the second hundred, etc.), but it should be up in the next couple days. Enjoy!

He came to stay at the hotel in May. It was the coldest summer we ever had. He wore his hair in long, lank locks, always looking as though he’d just come in out of the rain. He brought the sound of trains in the distance. The railroad hadn’t run through here in years. Sometimes, at night, when it was dark and stormy, he went outside the hotel and stood shivering in the downpour, staring into the lobby with a bleak expression on his face. He was a good guest because he was a quiet guest who paid his bills.

I could never shake the feeling that he was waiting for something, especially on those rain streaked nights. Whenever Iris, who used to work down at the old depot, catches sight of him she mumbles madly and walks the other way. I’ve never heard what she says, but Tony Ostero told me that she repeats “we buried him” over and over again. Our guest doesn’t seem to notice though, he just stares down the street and then, like clockwork, goes back up to his room. His silent room, the one on the seventh floor, five doors down, that we can never seem to rent out.

Some described a vague feeling of nausea whenever they chanced to be near him. I never felt that. He didn’t stink, though he always seemed damp. What I felt was something different, another sort of illness. Whenever he came to pay his bill or pick up his mail (not that he ever got any), the sense of melancholy was overwhelming. No. Not melancholy. Abject despair. It was like a sickness gripping him, eating away at his being, and utterly contagious. The lobby was once a sunny place, but that summer, it was cold and hollow. Lonely and empty. Like him.

It’s not that the lobby is completely dreary now. The sun still comes in. Though it’s not like it used to be, especially in that one corner, that one easy chair over there. That used to be the greatest spot to sit and read, or talk, or just…but now…well, that’s where it all happened. He had just come out of the rain. I was sitting in that chair, reading, tuning out what was going on around me. I didn’t hear it until he looked at me. The screaming. The screaming from outside. And I thought; this is it, this is why he’s here.

There they were, thousands, maybe, running down the streets toward the hotel. Screaming at a pitch I’d never heard. “They’re here for me, you know,” he said miserably. Suddenly faces appeared at the windows, pounding at the glass. One girl in front fainted and was trampled. Young women, tears streaking their faces. Young men struggling to open the doors.

Sadly, he turned to the elevators. He was here for a reason, all right. Ours is the only hotel with locked doors and bulletproof windows in Chicago. Anyway, that’s how I know Paul McCartney. He stays here whenever he’s in town.

Copyright 2005 Amy Frushour Kelly and Tim Mucci. All rights reserved.
Reproduction by any means prohibited without prior written consent.