Friday, August 26, 2005
Room with a View
I’m sitting in the conference room - a long, narrow chamber filled with several rows of banquet chairs, just barely comfortable enough to endure for 90 minutes at a stretch. I’ve been here for about an hour, and my ass is starting to get tired. “Oh relax,” my brain tells it, “at least we scored a good spot here.” Most of the people strugging to stay awake in this room are starting to run low on oxygen and are getting uncomforably warm as they listen to the panel discussion; they’re trapped in interior loocations with insufficient air circulation and too many bodies heaving too many sighs for the hotel HVAC system to accomodate them. But me, I’ve got the sweet deal - I picked a chair right next to a window that’s letting in the cool fresh outside air, keeping me refreshed and alert as the speakers drone on. Plus, I can probably look out this very window next to me and see something - maybe even something interesting. Perhaps I’ll give it a try.
My eyes are tired of staring at the four people behind the long table set crosswise at the front of the room, so I gently shift my gaze ninety degrees to the left. That’s not so interesting, after all. It’s another hotel, and since it’s just slightly downhill from us, I’m looking straight across, not to an ornate lobby or elaborate facade, but to residential floors, mostly curtained, mostly devoid of personality and activity. It’s a solid wall of little curtains in little windows, filling my range of vision as I look out across the street. It’s almost as boring as the panel discussion I’m attending, and to which I feel obliged to return my attention.
But even as I look back at the talking heads, I notice movement at the corner of my peripheral vision. There is a little something going on at the hotel across the street. I can’t see much of it, but I can see this:
* A young girl with headphones and a black t-shirt stands at curtains that are barely opened; she gazes skyward and bangs her head rhythmically against the window.
* A man sits at a desk adjacent to his window, his profile to me. He wears a white linen shirt with a collar and a necktie. His face is gaunt and shaveshadowed. He hunches forward, peering intently ahead. Suddenly he rears back, pushing down and away from his desk, craning his back and neck behind him. It lasts a moment or two, and then he returns to his typing, shaking his head slowly back and forth. His posture is that of a question mark.
* A man of mature but indeterminate years, cherubically round-faced and anachronistically long-maned, is positioned before his window at a strange, low level, so the sill barely reaches his collarbone. His eyes, behind round spectacles, are closed; his head rolls back and from side to side, a beatific smile plastered on his face. He holds drumsticks and is pounding a beat on the windowsill, pumping his head to the rhythm, his long curls bouncing sympathetically off his sloped shoulders.
* A stout woman with a white headscarf and black robes clasps her hands before her and gazes quietly and motionlessly down to the street with dark-ringed, dark eyes. Suddenly, she turns away as if called, and a man takes her place: short, stout, and balding, scowling in a sleeveless undershirt. He glares two or three times up and down the street below; then, turning with a sneer, his mouth opening and lip curling, he snaps the curtain shut.
* A woman, perhaps in her 20s, in a black dress with a small white apron, stands in front of a window, the curtains pulled back. The room behind her is dark. With her hands on the sill, she gazes vacantly across the street at the building from which I am watching her. Her eyes seem unfocused and her mind, untroubled by thought. Her shoulders heave with a deep, visable sigh but she is otherwise motionless.
* A dark room, the curtains mostly drawn - the drapes are left only a few inches open. The room is directly across from me, though, so I can see that in it, on the other side of the smoked glass, in a space that merely simulates reality and thereby makes all that happens in it, fantasy - in that room, I can see the red ember of a cigarette flaring every several seconds as somebody stares back out at me and smokes.
Stares right back at me. Self-conscious, I realize I’ve got no idea what the panel is currently discussing. I return my attention to them, and strive to find them interesting.
