As I lay sweating

Some people have fever dreams. I have fever thoughts.

This week I caught the flu that is hitting people faster than a zombie outbreak. I flew up to San Francisco for work on Monday with a slight scratch in my throat. By Tuesday afternoon, I was running a high fever.

I thought that maybe taking a bath would help me sweat it out and relax me at the same time. Instead, I had the disconcerting feeling of stepping into what was obviously hot water, steam and all, and wondering why it felt so tepid.

For the next few hours I shivered and sweated, and sweated and shivered. I lay in  bed with all four pillows propped up so I could breathe, as by this time my sinuses were clogged. My body would reluctantly unwind for a moment or two. But any sort of movement (lifting the cover, taking a sip of water from the bottle on the bedside stand, grabbing a cough drop or turning on the light or finding a different YouTube video to watch) would send it back into spasms.

When I have a fever, my mind goes everywhere. The first topic on the agenda was the hotel itself. A pleasant enough one, situated in the same neighborhood I’ve managed to stay in for the bulk of this freelance contract. I’d eaten in the downstairs bar before. But I’d never stayed there. And this made my illness all the worse, which is ironic, considering hotels-especially higher end ones-are designed to be comforting.

Even when I’ve stayed in the same hotel a dozen times it always feels disorienting because it’s the opposite of home. Adding sickness to the mix compounds the feeling. I couldn't stop from thinking that if I took a turn for the worse, there wouldn’t be anyone I knew who could help. The friends I have up here aren’t physiclaly close enough to make a drug store run. I didn’t even know where the closest drug store was, let alone a hospital.

I lay there staring at the décor which was trying hard to be hipster elite but not quite getting it right. The clock on the wall looked like an Eames inspired knock-off you’d find at Target. The desk was too narrow. Not a work desk, but a surface meant to display coffee table books like A Thousand Albums You Must Hear Before You Die. The flat-screen TV didn’t face the bed. Instead, it pointed in the direction of a small, uncomfortable chair. I’m sure the TV could have been repositioned, but I never bothered because I pretty much never watch TV on actual TVs.

My mind shifted gears after that. In A-Sides & B-Sides, there’s a short story called “Glass Hotel,” which is the title of a Robyn Hitchcock song. Tinged with melancholy, the lyrics are directed at one person. A lover, or friend, or relative. It isn’t clear. But even in the wistfullness there’s a note of hope in it, too.

Well there’s nothing in the future and there’s nothing in the past. There is only this one moment and you’ve got to make it last. And you were laughing. In a glass hotel.

For my story, Glass Hotel became a metaphor for an inverted greenhouse, where the protganonist is either on the inside, protected from the harsh environment, or watching from inside as the environment hopefully comes back to life. It's like instead of plants, we're the ones who are living in a terrarium.

It’s a story set in the future where a toxic yellow cloud covers the atmosphere, the result of bio-hacker eco-terrorists who wanted to hasten the world’s demise. A great swath of the population has been wiped out. But a group of computer scientists and software engineers have developed a program that will reverse the destruction, if they can launch it in time. It’s also one of a handful of stories I’ve written where the ending came first. I could picture it clear as day.

I briefly considered pulling up the Robyn Hitchcock track, but at this point it was two thirty and I knew any sort of movement might start the shiver quakes again, so I just stayed still and my mind found something else to occupy its time with.

The previosu week, I was in a different hotel, one a server in my favorite restaurant up here describes as having the décor of a Singaporean bathhouse. It is certainly funky in gold and hot pink. Despite this I enjoy staying there as it gets closest to feeling like home for some reason. Probably because the rooms are big and the square footage feels more like that of a large studio apartment.

Unfortunately, during this particular stay, I was cursed to a week of no sleep thanks to a string of loud neighbors. The first night, a prolonged argument broke out. From what I could gather, it took place between a father and his transgender kid who had taken offense to some stranger’s real or imagined comment in a bar. The reason I say "kid," is because I don’t know if his kid was a man or woman and I'm not about to guess at such a thing just from someone's voice. The reason I say "real or imagined," is because of the dad's reaction.

I know from the slurring they were both drunk. After trying to explain to the kid that what was perceived to be a slight was nothing more than a misunderstanding on the kid's part, the father got angrier and angrier. He just wanted to sleep and he was tired of the conversation and exhausted from the stress. Whatever the stranger said was not worthy of such a late-night freak out. Things would start to settle and the kid would bring it back up all over again and the volume would get  louder and this ebbed and flowed for a few hours until either I managed to sleep through it or they finally calmed down.

The next night was just as loud but not as intriguing. Just a regular drunk couple who came home late and talked about their plans for the next day. I don't remember the substance, only that the conversation should have taken ten minutes, not two hours.

The final evening was another drunk couple who were quite horny and had intermittent sex throughout the night. While this was more amusingly frustrating than anything else, after a few nights of horrible sleep I was ready to bang on the walls. The only moment I laughed out loud was when the man suggested “watching a porn,” and was quickly rebuffed.

Despite the clarity with which I am able to recount these moments, and the mental picture I can paint of the people I never once saw in person, it still dawns on me that you are never more anonymous then when you are in a hotel room. Particularly when you are on your own.

Unless you order room-service or call for someone to do your laundry, no one sees you or interacts with you. The maid is a ghost who appears and disappears when you aren’t there.

Unless you have friends coming over, no one comes to a hotel room who isn't staying there. They don’t come to see you. They always find you.

They found her in the bathtub with a syringe in her arm.

They found him dead on the toilet.

They found him in bed with three prostitutes.

They found them in the middle of the suite, in an above-ground pool, waist-deep in Jell-O, wearing a derby hats made from someone’s hair.

When my mind exhausted this topic, I moved on to Pink Floyd’s “Comfortably Numb,” and the lyrics that have stayed with me since the first time I heard it.

When I was a child, I had a fever. My hands felt just like two balloons.

I rolled it around in my head for a while, trying to decide if Roger Waters meant his hands felt like rubber, or if they felt weightless like they might float away at any moment. I assume the latter. I know the song was inspired by Roger once getting a tranquilizer before a show and having to perform in that strange state where your body can’t move correctly. But once a song is out there, it’s out there and we're allowed to interpret how we see fit, just like any art. I personally like the less obvious interpretation. Your hands don't feel weightless, so much as you feel as if your body is mutating. With all of my shivers, I certainly felt like that was happening to me. Maybe, you're molting, my mind thought.

I eventually slept for a few hours, waking up in a pool of cold sweat-soaked sheets, feeling bad for the maid who would find that and wonder who the hell she had to clean up after. Who, indeed. I'll ask my mind and see if it knows.