There’s no right

way to buy a hotel room. I have so few times. Standing at the glass, waiting for the girl to give me a key, I pulled all the cards out of my wallet. Crossed and uncrossed my ankles, wondered if that had gone noticed.

When I finally got inside, found the wall next to the door, put my back on it and presented myself as I could, as someone, a person who was there, and the room — not that I had ever seen it, but the idea of it, we’d created that — I was no less possessed than I had been at the station, on the steps, in the hall: the right way to be here, some best way to give over what I understand to be myself. I don’t know what that is, only what it isn’t — and so everything that it isn’t felt all spread out around me, this knowable absence that brought a little relief to the unknown of perfection.

The only time I got out of bed I wandered into the bathroom, like I knew him enough for that. Why not start. The window had been left open to the alley between corridors, and I stuck my arm out there into the heat. The shock against my skin, the instant sweat and haze, should have reminded me: that we’d exchanged more letters than sex, that my body is newer than anything I could have said.

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