Finite Fine Night by Brian J. Buchanan
The hotel lobby lights go down slowly, for intimate darkness. I dim them. I’m the bar hostess.
Lobby busy, a dark business, me conducting famous people to private, shadowy tables in the lounge. One guy glances at me. Musician, famous.
Can’t think of his name.
Do I even want?
[She tall and thin in black velvet top and tights, little black cotton flared skirt, sheen of long fine platinum hair tinted violet in the middle of her back so she looks spotlit on stage wherever in darkness she goes. Her hair a keen fall of stage lighting, though she was aware of no such effect when she chose the color —]
Do I even want to get into something? Now that I’ve broken up with Clark? It’s been two months. Do I want to risk attraction, love, the whole business? I want something. I survey elegant black desolation. Glints of something, hints in the wine glasses and silverware.
Famous musician, immediately recognizable, whoever he is, writes his room number on the bar receipt. 1512. Do I? Want to go up there? Want a finite fine nite? I could get fired. And?
My shift ends. Shift drink at the bar, as we’re encouraged to do. Eyeing the freight elevator near the kitchen—
Heavy drugs in Room 1512, and the booze. The suite is too bright, floodlit like a state penitentiary. Music way too loud. Champagne esteem—bubbles rushing to invisible heavens. Expanses of food on a long draped table, light-blue couches. The musician gives me who knows what pills. Unknown doses take hold.
Extremities of strange spoken expression by me. I hope this isn’t fentanyl.
He’s stalking around the suite, on the phone, watching me from under his perfect surf of brown hair. Hangs up. The city spangles below. Do I want to be up here, or down there? Quiet café maybe, alone? To continue to reckon with the Clark fiasco?
Rock music pounds Room 1512 to smithereens. Famous musician starts talking, talks nonstop, talks over me, responds to nothing I say, possibly because I’m making no sense. Traipses around, hands in his thick hair, raving about some album-production deal gone wrong. I am the irrelevant sounding board. Back and forth, ranting. I try to comment, it’s like talking to a steamroller. I am a smithereen.
I spill gin on my blue panties —
I’m spreading my fingers as the stoned sensation radiates in the music, dissolves.
The music starts to eat away at me. My fingers dissolving, it seems. Don’t like this but too wrecked to leave —
TV news on, sound off, aftermath of a drug-gang shootout. Pools of blood, yellow crime-scene tape, police markers at each spent shell.
Famous musician approaches slowly, grinning fondly, as if seeing me for the first time.
Do I want?
Sometimes I get this glimmer, like, of something important, I tell him, to knock him off course.
… Important how?
I don’t know, like a longing. I don’t know what it is. Some knowledge coming through me, or trying to come through me.
… Knowledge?
Or someone else I’m supposed to be. Someone hidden I’m supposed to be. Or portray. In all this darkness.
[It’s still far too bright in Room 1512 – track lighting, everything seeming spotlit from every angle. Her black velvet dress draped over an ottoman, looking deceased —]
Famous musician is perplexed.
… Portray, like an actress?
It’s difficult, I say.
Everything is, he says.
It’s like I’m contending with something outside me. Or struggling to accept it.
Famous musician says something to match my important thing. He’s writing a song, I think. I listen hard but can’t reply, my head now aching on an armrest —
[Sheen of silver-violet hair on the light-blue couch, spilling over the armrest. Blue panties all she has on —]
The thing about Clark, was that he was a different person from what you’d think from the things he said. Like there was this person underneath that I couldn’t get to. A secondary person, who maybe was the real person. Like the feeling I get sometimes that there is something happening underneath or behind what I’m doing and seeing, something mysterious and important, that I can’t get to.
Plus, I could never make him laugh. And I can be damn funny —
Famous musician is traipsing around again, perplexed. Phone rings, he shuts it off, staring out the window. Substances on the low glass table.
What is the ultimate substance? I say, and he whirls around.
[High as he is, he’s enough of a songwriter to know —]
Maybe Clark couldn’t take it, my mind of stage darkness. I’m taking form in some way I can’t see for the dark.
This isn’t love, I say, as famous musician approaches again, no grin this time.
Then why, dear oracle, come up here?
He stops, middle of the room.
Mistake on my part, I say. Mistakes were made.
Then get. Go on, get.
As I get dressed he says, But I’d like to see you again, out somewhere, maybe for coffee? You could be brilliant trouble.
Maybe, I say.
Here’s my cell, he says.
I take the freight elevator down, unseen. Maybe I’ll turn up in a song, a puzzle for all the ages of man. For now, I recede into dark exhaustion—
Brian J. Buchanan is a writer in Nashville. His work has appeared in CutBank, Tupelo Quarterly, Literary Imagination, Crannog, Blue Mountain Review, Hamilton Stone Review, Literary Matters, BULL, Modern Age, National Review, Cumberland River Review, and elsewhere. Buchanan was co-winner of the 2017 Meringoff Fiction Award for “Wisdom Teeth.” Judge: Brad Leithauser.
