A week or so had now passed; I had heard nothing from the secretary at the department, nothing on when I might begin my role, nothing on when I would be moved from the hotel into the furnished flat I had been promised.

At least a couple of times a day, I would enquire with the proprietor as to whether any messages had been left for me at reception. No, he told me (though I perhaps had reason to doubt this, given the haphazardness of his record keeping). He promised he would pass on any messages, or put any calls through to my room.

It was true what Mr Rosenwasser had said: the majority of the literature in the lobby consisted of short stories (I continued with my assumption, though, that these had been discarded or forgotten by those passing through).

I took a couple of volumes from the shelves, to read in the quiet of the lobby, but neither held my interest. I instead took a sheet of the hotel’s headed notepaper, and began writing.

Dear Penelope

I took the new job I wrote to you about. I don’t know if you’ve written back—the new tenants said they’d forward on any post, but the truth of the matter is you can’t rely on those you’ve never met.

As I was packing I found myself sorting through some old papers. I came across the postcard you’d once sent me: you’d dreamt of me the night before, demonstrating how to separate the yolks from the whites. You never told me if you ever dreamt of flying, or breathing underwater.

I miss you dearly, but when I think of you, I find we’ve shifted another tense. Before, I’d think back to when we telephoned each other, when we said “I love you”. Now, when I think of the old faculty, or hear Charlie Parker on the radio (again), I mouth the words “we used to call each other”; “we would say ‘I love you’”.

I stopped writing there. The truth of the matter was that, after all the time that had come between us, we had shifted another tense, a tense where imagination and memory are near indistinguishable, where we might as well have been characters in books we had once read but since forgotten.

I asked the bartender for a Braulio over ice. She made the drink without speaking nor looking at me, before returning to polishing and replacing glasses behind the bar.

Published in Hotel #4, 2018 and collected in Droll Tales, Turtle Point Press, 2022