The Dark Rooms
Joshua Vigil
What would you do, who would you turn to, if you sought to rid yourself of every memory you’ve ever had of your father? That question is at the center of Joshua Vigil’s The Dark Rooms, a story about what it means to feel like a stranger, and about learning to forget.
Happy hypnotizing,
The Editors
I could easily be corrected. The stranger outside, homeless but not exactly a beggar, could sense this. After I’d given him a cigarette, he told me a reckoning was coming my way.
It’s coming for all of us though, isn’t it? The storm? I tapped the end of my cigarette and watched a large ash cylinder get picked apart by the wind.
I’m not talking about the storm. Don’t you know anything? Tonight is the night!
His face had grown strange and tight; the veins on his temples rose to his skin’s surface. He tossed his unlit cigarette to the sidewalk smothered with a dusting of snow and hobbled up the street until he turned the corner, where he shot one final angry look in my direction before shaking his head and disappearing. What had I done wrong?
When I told Sandy the story in our hotel room, he said the man was obviously just crazy. Homeless and crazy. They go together, don’t they? he said.
Unhoused, I said.
What were you doing outside anyway? Sandy asked, narrowing his eyes. I thought you were quitting.
I am quitting, I said. It’s a process. It takes time.
We were in Baltimore for the weekend, an impulsive decision we’d planned early into dating. We agreed we wanted to get away from the city and agreed that going to some quaint little town upstate was overdone. What other city was accessible by train and not entirely expensive? What we hadn’t planned for was a weekend storm to keep us trapped inside the hotel, with its narrow lobby and eclectic, if a bit garishly designed, rooms. One bar was a kaleidoscope of mirrors; on our first night, I bumped into my reflection three times, muttering apologies until I realized it was just me and not some stranger. The other bar was floored with salmon-colored linoleum, the walls hammered down with plastic sheeting of the same color. From afar, there was something beautiful to the room. All the fixtures the same color. But once you sank into the sofas—there were no tables—you noticed how cheap everything was. Not only the floor and walls, but the lamps that smelled of burning plastic, the stools that squeaked and wobbled, the worn sofa, its filling spilling from rips in the fabric. Even the bar counter looked cheap, tilted and with gaps between the rail and corner moulding.
In the bathroom, I scrubbed my hands clean with the hotel’s signature soap. Brought my fingers to my face, sniffed. The stench of cigarettes remained, if somewhat muted. From the toilet seat, I fished out my phone and re-read the text messages my sister had been sending. This was partly why I’d gone outside in the first place—I needed privacy—and partly why I’d purchased a fresh pack of cigarettes too.
I didn’t like weighing Sandy down with my family’s troubles. How my father had threatened to finally abandon my mother and sister with some half-assed plan to move to Minnesota. I’ll attend the protests, he’d said. I’ll become the man I’ve always meant to become.
His plan wasn’t only absurd but impractical: he could hardly stand for more than ten minutes at a time. How was he expected to protest all day, let alone in below freezing weather? No part of me found this admirable. For one, he wasn’t particularly political. When my sister first told me about his plan, I used words like stolen valor and performative activism and virtue signaling, also crazy and what an asshole! Now, she was telling me about the latest drama. How they’d found him after a fall outside. Drenched from the sprinklers, he couldn’t lift himself up. Didn’t have the strength in his arms. She sent a ten-minute long video of him army crawling. Not one foot of progress during the clip’s entirety. It was strange and pathetic, and deeply unfunny. Yet I heard my mother and sister gawk at him between sobs. From the floor, still getting sponged with water, he told them to leave him behind. Just give me a towel, he said, and let me be.
When I returned to the bedroom, Sandy stared at me with momentary confusion. The soap smells so good, I said. Everything in the hotel does.
The clouded look on Sandy’s face receded. It’s frankincense, he said. I’m not sure I love it.
Sandy suffered from prosopagnosia. Face blindness. Every time I entered a room, he’d lift his face up and stare at my looming figure until I was close enough and he’d say: Martin?
When I wore a hat, or got a haircut, or shaved my beard, it was especially uncanny. Though I knew Sandy cared for me, the peculiar tilt to his face in those moments, where, for a second I’d become a stranger, never failed to turn my head sideways. Even in bed, when he stared into my eyes, I sometimes wondered if he knew who I was.
***
The snow had begun piling up when I told Sandy I’d made a last-minute appointment with a masseuse. Sandy frowned. How did you manage that?
I was just as surprised.
And you only booked it for one?
It’s all they had available, I said, slipping on my coat, and I left Sandy there, still frowning, and as I withdrew from his view, I wondered what he saw. Just a glimmer of the person I was. Just a shadow.
From the hotel, I thumped down uneven cobbles, a monument from the Civil War towering ahead, slivers of the rocky water glinting from afar, and I shuffled past it towards the hypnotist’s address.
This was also why I’d suggested Baltimore, at least partly. The hypnotist who had helped a friend grieve from her mother’s death. Before, she cried savage tears through all our dinners, a kind of uninterrupted heaving that lasted hours at a time, and now she stared at me with dry eyes as she spoke about her mother’s passing, and with such shocking clarity, and distance. I didn’t mind that distance. I wanted it myself.
I rang the buzzer to a narrow townhouse with blacked out bay windows. The hypnotist was a squat woman with blunt bangs that framed her round, pale face. A blanket of wrinkles sagged from her clavicle and hands. She said she was ready for me, I didn’t actually have an appointment, but she knew about me.
She led me into a living room packed with tchotchkes. Colorful ceramic hamsters in all shapes and sizes lined the counter and rose from the nightstand and coffee table. What do you want out of this? she asked, gesturing to the sofa. I sank in and felt an immediate comfort—this was what a real couch was meant to feel like, not like whatever contraption the hotel’s salmon room held. She continued: I mean, I know. But I need you to tell me.
I felt myself drift further into the couch.
I said, Help me forget my father.
That the words came out so easily shocked me. Was the couch responsible? The couch and the hypnotist’s softly commanding voice.
The hypnotist leaned forward, folding her hands together, the wrinkles bunching up in peaks. You want to fully forget your father? she asked. Her lip twitched and she stared at me with a combination of doubt and pity. Are you sure? she asked.
Yes, I said.
She nodded. All memories?
When I told her yes, all of them, the hypnotist pushed me further into the sofa and told me to close my eyes. She spoke, words I immediately forgot, and I entered a dream space, a million dark rooms I couldn’t make my way out of. I’m lost, I said. She told me I wasn’t. She said, Walk forward. Allow it in. And once I did, a blackness swallowed me, and I felt my chest, my soul, get knifed with a blankness I’d never known before, perhaps not since birth, and when I woke, the hypnotist told me that by the end of the day I’d no longer remember my father.
Is it so easy? I asked.
For fifty bucks, sure, she said.
I handed her the money.
***
Snow coated the sidewalks. Not a single footprint in sight. Where did everyone go? I asked as Sandy and I shoved our feet into our boots, finally having made the decision to try our luck with the crab place by the harbor. It was something I’d jokingly suggested while planning for the trip—how I wanted so badly to be given a bib to keep from the mess, a hammer to smash at shells, and to eat without plates but straight from the table—and which Sandy grew intent on us doing. I wasn’t the type of person who particularly grew attached to plans. That Sandy had to cancel our first attempt to take a trip didn’t bother me. I always let him curate our outings; I could eat anything, anywhere.
A car rolled up to the hotel’s entrance. There were no plates and the car was not the same model listed on the app. The driver lowered his windows and said it was him. Car’s in the shop, he said.
I wanted to exchange a look with Sandy—were we really going into this stranger’s car?—but Sandy jumped in before I could do anything.
Sandy asked the driver his thoughts on the storm—no one in New York was so worried, we could handle snow there, but everyone in Baltimore seemed to be driven towards some shared psychosis about their first storm in a decade, possibly the worst of their lifetimes. All the grocery aisles stood empty.
I can drive through snow if that’s what you’re asking, the driver said. Outside, gusts of wind blew white flakes against the window, the bird shit that had been so prominent across parked cars the day before slowly disappearing below the white.
Wasn’t doubting that, Sandy said, his attention on his phone, the itinerary he’d so meticulously planned now turned upside down. What could be salvaged from his plans? The rabbit salad he wanted to try? The spicy oil chili pierogies? The cassoulet? That he’d now prioritized eating crabs meant something. He didn’t even particularly like crab, said it was too fishy, had only eaten lobster once too, said it wasn’t worth all the work for so little flesh. That he couldn’t recognize me in the street didn’t mean he didn’t care. I had to remind myself of this. I had to remind myself I should be more fixed in my opinions and emotions. It was why I was here in the first place, wasn’t it?
Do you think the Crab Shanty will be open? Sandy asked.
The driver shrugged. If you want real crab, I’ve got a place for you.
I texted Sandy. I think he’s going to murder us. What if this car is stolen?
Is this because he’s black?
Between Sandy’s texts came updates from my sister. Now, she was telling me how my father had told the nurses it was all her fault. His alcoholism, his falls, his secrecy. All was her fault.
I thought of when my father and I had our first bad argument. How he told me he didn’t even know me. The person I’d become. He said I wasn’t his. Though he didn’t mean this literally, I couldn’t help but wonder. My worldview, my whole sense of history, broadened for a moment. Was this why I had none of his features? His ginger hair and skin that always burned easy. Everything else of his I’d inherited: his love for booze, his short fuse. His habit of walking around barefoot, detritus pancaking the soles of his feet until they became all but black. Sandy hated this. So did I. Over the years, my skin there had grown so thick I sometimes felt like this was how it was supposed to be. Like primates wandering the Earth. My feet made me strong.
It’s not your fault, I typed.
The Crab Shanty wasn’t open after all. I insisted we hop out of the car and walk the boardwalk anyway.
Wind whistled and smacked our faces as waves hammered into the concrete, spritzing us with freezing water. We shuffled beside the boardwalk, huddled together, the only ones out. Storefronts shuttered, not a single food cart on the horizon. My face burned. Sandy said his did too.
***
Should we try to find a third? Sandy asked, looking up from his phone. I took a sip from my martini. Only two and we were back in the salmon room. Trapped, like everyone else in the city.
Like the crabs, the threesome was also something I’d conjured into being. I’d only been somewhat joking a few weeks ago that, though I didn’t particularly like threesomes, I could imagine having one with Sandy. Now, Sandy seemed intent on accomplishing this. Because I had so few wants and needs, because I was so flexible otherwise, he always seemed to want to follow through with the few things I did suggest. I found this impulse to be sweet but also a little pathetic.
No one is here, I said. Everyone’s gone because of the storm. Holed up in their apartments with their needless grocery binges.
Sandy opened up one of the hook-up apps he still kept on his phone. There are people here, he said, showing me the grid of torsos. Should we?
After my phone buzzed with more updates from my sister, I wondered when the hypnotist’s work would kick in, or had it all been a scam? Now, my sister was telling me how the nurse had been administering a stress exam on our father to test his withdrawal symptoms. How my father, familiar with the exam, left in the middle to go to the bathroom, where he washed his hands and pits so the nurse couldn’t measure his sweat. I pictured his hands: rough, like his feet. Shaking from withdrawal.
Found one. Sandy showed me a man’s picture, the brief messages they’d exchanged in such a short time. He’d sent the stranger a picture of us both, asked if he was interested in being our third. He was. The man was beefy, bigger than either of us, with a chest splattered with tattoos and a head shaved clean. He looks like he’d kill us, I said.
In a good way?
Like he’s already murdered before, in Afghanistan or Iraq or something. Besides, all we’ve done is eat. Which of us is gonna do the bottoming?
Sandy handed me his phone again, the messages they’d continued to exchange. The stranger said he’d be happy to be our bottom.
Okay, I said, draining my glass.
He’s staying at the hotel too, Sandy said. He’s coming down.
What?
Sandy tossed me a smile. I thought you’d be more excited.
I am, I said. Let me just go to the bathroom.
The bathroom smelled of frankincense. It wasn’t only the soap that smelled this way, but the shampoo and conditioner and whatever they used to clean the lobby. The near constant smell of it left me lightheaded, and a little delirious.
When I returned to the salmon room, Sandy rose from his seat and reached out his hand.
It’s me, I said.
Sandy’s face grew a little pink, like the room, and he shook his head. Sorry, he said. You have your hoodie up.
The lobby is freezing. They’re like reinforcing the doors or something for the storm.
When the man arrived a few minutes later, I caught Sandy’s eyes. He was much bigger in person. He really could kill us both, I thought. With his arms, thighs, even his fingers. Taking him in, I felt a mixture of fear and arousal, my heartbeat quickening, the rush of blood from my head to my groin. Thin trickles of sweat slid down my chest.
Sandy asked if he wanted a drink and the man shrugged. Happy to just go upstairs now, he said.
What are you doing in Baltimore? I asked, wanting the moment in the salmon room to linger, wanting somehow for the man to change his mind. If I did enough talking, maybe he would.
Considering moving here, he said. Wanted to check out the vibes.
Why Baltimore? I mean, of all places.
Properties are cheap. I work from home so could really live anywhere. But I’m thinking of the future. A home I can properly call mine.
Though the man was not as rough around the edges as I expected, the immensity of him still carried a waft of danger. He crossed his arms, his hands digging into his pits, his chest bulging out from his shirt, and a shiver tore through me.
After a lull in the conversation, Sandy suggested we might as well get along with it. A silent elevator ride up, where pink cherubs and pink flamingos floated from the walls, into the bedroom, where a pink cheetah print carpet ran across the floors and flamingos perched from the nightstand. The man pulled off his shirt, and gave Sandy a long, sloppy kiss before doing the same to me.
We hopped into the bed, quickly, the choreography of it all somehow smoother than I had anticipated. As if we were pros at threesomes, though I was certain none of us had many under our belts. We were simply following the patterns we knew from porn. Changing places. Exchanging the man. It was between these movements, when I was flipped belly-up, that I noticed the ceiling mirror for the first time. Between all the flesh, I couldn’t be sure who was who. All I saw were ripples and tufts of hair and the sheets all coiled at the bed’s lip. Until Sandy turned to his side, meeting my reflection. And when his stare lingered, when we’d by now already diverted from the plan, where suddenly any of us could take it, I wondered who he saw. Was I a stranger or was I Martin? Did whatever history we’d developed over the months matter if I could be just anyone? He kissed me and he kissed the stranger and I said his name. Sandy.
I said, It’s me.
A puzzled expression took over his face, his face that turned pink once more, like the wallpaper filled with small hearts. I know that, he said with an edge to his voice.
I felt myself grow tiny as we continued.
I felt myself recede to the brink of the bed.
I felt myself cum, alone, and watched Sandy and the stranger continue. My thoughts drifted to my phone. I didn’t want to think about my father. Though we rarely spoke, though the distance between us was immense, I understood him to the core, knew the bumps and grooves to every aspect of his being. I would never not know my father. That he said he didn’t know who I had become was probably a lie. I wasn’t a stranger to him the way he wasn’t a stranger to me. In fact, I was deeply embarrassed by how well I knew him. There was nothing surprising about him and his moods. We knew every decision he was going to make before he even made them himself. Probably this meant we could have been doing more to begin with. Could have stopped him from continuing to torpedo his life. This glacial nosedive of his. What was he doing now? Death was not far, we all knew this. Probably could place bets on the exact date. Not today, not tomorrow. Maybe next month, or the one after.
The stranger’s rolling grunts snapped me back. He came into Sandy’s mouth. I told Sandy I wanted to finish him off, and I drew him close, waited for him to fill me up.
Was that okay? I asked afterwards, when the stranger had retreated to his room.
It’s what you wanted, he said.
You wanted it too, I said. Didn’t you?
From the nightstand, my phone vibrated. It was my sister.
You’ll never guess what Dad did, again. He pulled out his IV and walked home, fully in his hospital gown. Bare-ass out on the highway.
My head grew light and dizzy. I felt the room turn dark, and I remembered the hypnotist, and I remembered the black rooms, and the comfort that followed, though I could no longer remember why I’d gone to her in the first place.
I began drafting a response—was she crazy? what father?—when I felt Sandy pull me in. I shut my phone off and returned to the room and Sandy. He was staring at me, his usual startled stare, and I told him it was me. It was Martin. How could he forget?
-30-
Joshua Vigil is a writer and educator living in New York. His writing has appeared in the Cleveland Review of Books, Joyland, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. His story collection, Bastardland, is out now