Maybe this is because it smells like every other cheap hotel that ever existed. Because it gives you the distinct impression that even if you managed to remove the smell from this particular room, it would only be the beginning of all the rooms and all the smells that exist, and will always exist, in rooms just like this one.
—What is it exactly?
Years of tobacco, inexpensive food, and—in equal parts—sex and loneliness suffused into the carpet and the ceiling tiles.
—At what point did it fix itself permanently there? By what process of slow accretion did it collect, and in what moment did it become inevitable that it could not be scrubbed out?
These are the great mysteries; the boys do not contemplate them. They push their way steadily into the middle of the room.
It is empty. Or appears to be. Just the breeze blows through, stirring in the dank air, which has never been stirred, only the idea of movement.
The small boy looks at the tall boy; the tall boy looks back.
What is the point of an open door, their looks seem to ask, if there is nothing to open upon?
The small boy is about to turn, assuming the tall boy will follow, when a noise startles them.
They turn.
There is a third in the room. A man. Sitting slouched so low in his chair that all the boys are able to see are two thin legs and the slanted brim of a hat. This is evidently why the man was not immediately observable to them—although now that he is, neither boy can understand how they failed to notice him before. His legs stick out well past the frame of his chair—not to mention the brim of his hat. How the boys had seen both the legs and the hat without connecting them to the idea of a man is a question that, for the briefest of moments, puzzles them both.
But then they forget the question and the man becomes a man. Now it is as if he had never been a pair of legs disconnected from the idea of a man, or no man at all, because they had failed to recognize him.
As soon as he becomes a man, he rises to greet them.
—If they had never recognized him, would he have continued to sit, disconnected even from the idea of himself? Never to raise himself, if shakily, on thin legs, to greet them?
The boys do not contemplate this, or any other thing.
The man has risen. Shakily, on thin legs. He extends his hand. He is glad to see them.
When he speaks, his voice is rough and old, as though he has never spoken.
The tall boy does not accept the man’s hand, however, and the small boy does not accept it either. Pretty soon the hand is withdrawn.
When he sits down again he is facing the two boys.
There is not much to say.
The small boy fetches a glass from the cupboard.
So there is a little kitchenette in the corner, and the boy is already there, fetching the glass. The glass is ringed on the inside like the high-water mark on a dock or a quay. The small boy runs the glass under the tap and attempts to scrub the ring from the inside of the glass. It does not come off easily.
He fixes a drink and drops a few pieces of ice in the glass. He brings the drink to the man.
All the while, the man is speaking to the tall boy, who is relieved when the small boy returns and hands the man the glass. If the man takes a drink he will be required to pause. He will not be able to say anything for a little while.
—What has the man been speaking about all this time? What could he possibly have to say to the tall boy—or to anyone?
The man takes the drink. His hand is not steady, but it is steadier now that he holds the glass in his hand. He puts one thin leg over the other and takes a sip from the glass. He takes only one sip, but he swallows twice.
—How long has the man been in the room before anyone entered and recognized him there?
Evidently, it has been quite a long time. It is difficult, in any case, to imagine that he has ever left the room, and the boys do not. It is enough to say that he has always existed in that room. Just as the smell has always been suffused in the carpet and in the ceiling tile.
The man begins to speak again, but his words are slurred, and what he says makes little sense. Is it, the small boy wonders, not knowing what the man has said before or not knowing what he will say next that makes it so difficult to understand what he is saying now?
The more the small boy thinks about it, the more confused he gets, until finally he is no longer able to discern the difference between not making sense and failing to understand.
In either case, he does not understand. He realizes this and, abruptly, the man stops talking—his last sentence left dangling in midair. He lurches forward as though his drink has been knocked from his hand and he is trying to catch it before it falls. But the drink has not been knocked, and only his own action threatens to spill the contents of the glass.
The ice rattles in the drink, startling both himself and the boys.
“Wait,” the man says. He looks at each of the boys in turn.
Who are you? his look seems to say.
The boys blink, and do not answer the question that has not been asked.
The man’s eyes are very blue and marked at the edges with small pink veins. The veins are like the crooked maps of rivers that spread their way from the eye’s dark centre toward its unmapped edges—toward what is literally unseen.
The man looks at the glass as if noticing it in his hand for the first time. He puts it down. Then he looks around the room as though noticing it, and everything in it, for the first time. The print on the wall above the bed. The dark water stain on the ceiling tile, which, though it appears to belong to the room in a fundamental rather than a merely circumstantial way, must have appeared slowly over time—as generations of hotel guests alternatively cleansed and drowned themselves in the leaking faucets and undrainable bathtubs of the upper floors.
If the man could relieve himself of these and the other objects in the room as easily as he put down the glass, he would. He looks at the ceiling again and now he is quite certain that the mark he sees is not a trace, a stain, accrued slowly over time, but instead an expression of the room as it is, and will be, and has always been.
Yes, for a moment he is quite certain: everything is as it is and will be and always has been. And yet…
If this is so, the room should at least seem familiar, he thinks. In fact, he cannot ever remember having entered it, and is now surprised to find himself inside. He is surprised to look down at his body and find his own thin legs beneath him. Surprised to see his hands shaking slightly at the end of his arms—ever since, having set down the glass, he’s had nothing to hold.
The small boy shifts uncomfortably. He looks in the direction of the tall boy, and the tall boy looks back.
Again, the man lurches forward in his chair as though his glass has been knocked from his hand, but now he isn’t even holding on to anything. The glass is on the table beside him and there is nothing to spill. Still, the man lurches forward as though the glass has been knocked—then he steadies himself again.
“I know who you are,” he says, looking back and forth between the boys.
The boys shake their heads, no. But the man gets up. He stands unsteadily.
“Give him something to drink,” the tall boy says. He takes a step forward, touches the man on the shoulder, tries to settle him again in his chair.
The small boy picks up the drink the man has set down and offers it to the man. The man looks at him, then at the drink extended in the small boy’s hand.
“I know you,” the man says.
“Have something to drink,” says the tall boy.
The man looks at the tall boy, then again at the drink in the small boy’s hands.
It is, very briefly, possible that the man will not take it. That he will instead hit it angrily out of the small boy’s hand. For a moment, anything is possible. But then the moment passes and the man takes the drink. He sits down, laughs, then drains the glass.
“Yes, I know you,” the man
says again, when the glass is empty. “I know why you’ve come.”
He tries to explain, but the boys are not listening. They can’t wait to get out of the room now, to go back the way they came. They catch only a few words the old man says—words that, on their own, make very little sense, because they’ve missed everything in between.
But it is not only that. By now it is clear that even if the boys had been properly listening, everything would still be missing. The man continues to speak, but he is not making sense. Even he understands that now.
The boys move slowly in the direction of the open door. If the man notices, he does not let on; he continues to speak.
The boys edge their way backward, one small step at a time. They do not want to startle the man. They do not want to appear to be leaving too soon.
They wish desperately that the man would stop talking; that the man would drink quickly; that they had never entered the room.
The small boy reaches the kitchen, takes a bag of ice from the fridge, and empties it onto the floor. The tall boy picks up a can of soda from the counter and pours it on the ice, between himself and the man.
The carpet darkens. The waning light, streaming in from the window at the end of the room, glints off the ice that’s been scattered on the floor.
The man watches as the boys retreat. He does not appear to be surprised. His eyes are pale at the edges, though, as if they are suddenly seeing farther—and you can see he is afraid.
SABRINA LOWE-MACKEY WAS STILL IN HIGH SCHOOL, finishing out her final year, when the contest was announced. She was a solidly average student with, ahead of her, a solidly average set of expectations. She’d take a few business classes at the community college, probably; major in hospitality. Briefly—rebelliously—she’d considered becoming an aesthetician after picking up a brochure at the annual job fair hosted in the school gymnasium, but no one else she knew was going that route, and she had quickly put the idea out of her mind.
When considering a career as a hair and nails specialist is the only way you can think to beat the system, it’s time to seriously reconsider your options. That’s what Sabrina thought when she first heard about the contest.
It was a chance in a million. By the time Sabrina sent in her name—roughly fifteen minutes after the contest was announced—entries already numbered close to 25,000. It was almost comforting to watch the figure on the contest website continue to climb: 36,000…47,365…75,892…438,478…1,034,349…The number, superimposed in white over an image of the red planet, flashed above the banner heading that ran across the centre of the screen:
The printed reminder—in smaller font, at the bottom of the screen—that “anyone can become a pioneer” seemed logically supported by the continuously rolling numbers just above. All you had to do, the rules stipulated (after you clicked on the text block “anyone”), was enter your email address and, in 140 characters or less, your reason for leaving planet Earth.
Sabrina and her friend Amanda entered as a kind of a joke. “What do I need a hundred and forty characters for?” Sabrina had said. She’d typed out, “Why the hell not?,” shoved her screen at Amanda, who laughed, then hit Send.
Two weeks later, she got a call from the TV station. She’d been randomly selected to attend the first elimination round. She’d nearly hung up. The pert voice on the line had opened with “Congratulations! You’ve won…” sounding just like one of those telemarketing calls she regularly hung up on. There was always some catch: even if they said that it was, nothing was ever actually free.
Later, Sabrina found herself going back to that moment. Over and over, in her mind, she received the call: “Congratulations! You’ve won…” And over and over—without knowing what bogus offer was going to come next: a contest she hadn’t entered, a subscription she didn’t want for a magazine she’d never read—she practised hanging up the phone.
That was key. She had to not know what was being offered—what was on the other end of the line. Because even now, even after everything that had happened, she knew that once she knew, once she heard the words “out of millions of applicants, you…” there was no going back. That even after the fact, in her mind, she would never be able to put down the phone.
* * *
—
It had been exhausting and humiliating. There was no other way to put it. The first elimination round had been a whirlwind of trivia and strength competitions, dance-offs, cook-offs, and empathy trials. But despite a gruelling seven hours deliberately designed to wear down both her physical and emotional endurance, Sabrina had endured. In part, this was because she still couldn’t see the whole thing as anything more than a terrific joke. Sooner or later, she thought, it would all be over, and she would only laugh about it all. As she cleared away someone’s dishes or checked them in or out of a hotel, she’d say: “I came this close to leaving all of this behind…”
In the evenings she would post a comment or two online, then for an hour or more continually press the refresh button on her screen and watch as the comments poured in. She’d barely read them—she just liked to see the number of responses steadily rise. It was amazing to think that all those people were out there. In any given moment. Watching and listening, cheering her on—toward what? It had been impossible to think past the bright lights of the set, the studio applause, the rush and confusion of being ushered on or off stage. It had been equally impossible to think of her followers (which now numbered several million) as anything more than mere numbers—filling seats, or ticking steadily away on the screen.
* * *
—
After making it to the fourth qualifying round, Sabrina and the rest of the eighteen remaining contestants were provided with a personal coach. Sabrina was assigned Dana Skools, a retired marketing analyst who meticulously debriefed each challenge with her and discussed strategies for the next. At the end of the day, though, it always came down to the same thing. Skools repeated it like a mantra. “Just keep doing what you’re doing,” she told Sabrina. “Be yourself.” It was important, Skools explained, that Sabrina not “over-perform.” If possible, in fact, she should aim to perform just an (almost imperceptible) notch below average. This was the sweet spot, counselled Skools. It accessed audience sympathy without tipping into disdain.
What was extraordinary about Sabrina was that, without really trying, she hit the sweet spot every time.
If, at the end of each successful round she felt a mounting dread, it was always inextricably tied with a dizzy delight. She had never before won anything in her life—not even a raffle or a door prize. She had never been the one called up onstage at a community function to accept a wrapped box of chocolates or a screen-printed hat. The few times she had participated in team sports at school she had, without ever really contributing to it, found herself on the losing end. So this was really the first time she felt what it meant to win. The surge, the rush…a sort of explosion in the brain. Once or twice, it occurred to her to regret that she’d never felt it before. Perhaps she would have pushed herself a little further, tried a little harder. But then again, she would think—with a distinct mixture of dread and delight—how much further could you get than Mars?
* * *
—
It lasted six months, but at the end of it, it was “without really knowing how it happened” that Sabrina Lowe-Mackey found herself preparing to leave the planet Earth.
There were seven of them in total who had made it to the final round—a contest that would take place, over an indefinite period of time, on the surface of the red planet. There was Hisham of the photographic memory; Lupe, the earth mother; Greg, the survivalist; Mary Ellen, the computer whiz; Brock, the nurse and all around “good guy”; Nadar, the diva. And then Sabrina, who was just…Sabrina. Really, there was nothing to distinguish her in any way. And though her ratings had never exactly soared like Greg’s or Nadar’s, they had remained consistently just above average, securing her an all-round third-place finish and a spot on a sp
aceship headed to THE LAST FRONTIER.
* * *
—
Of course she had reservations. Plenty of them. She was frightened half out of her wits, and was not ashamed to say so. Her candidness on the subject had in fact earned her major points in the final elimination rounds. When she met with her friends and her family in those last, weightless months before takeoff, she would tell them—admittedly, only half-convinced by her own words—that the fact that she was scared was precisely the reason she had to go. What if Galileo had hesitated before announcing that the Earth revolved around the Sun? If Vespucci had decided to stay home instead?
“For the first time in my life,” Sabrina told her mother, father, and her old friend Amanda (now at the local college, completing the first semester of a hospitality program), “I have the opportunity to make a difference.”
All this was televised of course—broadcast in real time into roughly a billion homes. For the seventy-two hours leading up to the actual moment of takeoff, there was constant coverage: interviews and “pioneer” profiles; features on space food, technology, and entertainment; mental and physical training sessions; team-building initiatives. Even when Sabrina and the six other pioneers went home for a final meal with their families, the camera teams hovered above them like hungry, uninvited guests.
It was amazing how quickly they got used to it. When Sabrina had watched reality shows in the past, she’d always imagined that everyone was actually talking to the camera—even if they weren’t supposed to be, or thought they weren’t. But it was easier than she’d thought to just be herself—as Dana Skools had instructed. And she could nearly always count on becoming (thanks to a brilliant team of editors who—except when the show was in real time—expertly cut and compressed everything into fifty-minute blocks) more “herself” at the end of the day than she had been at any point during it.
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