Dream

By Han Ong

There are 315 rooms in the Dream Hotel. I wouldn’t be able to verify that, I’m only repeating what the manager spouted on one of my training days. I have charge of a fraction of that, mainly floors seven and eight, the cheapest rooms as well as the tiniest. The room assignments are made a week ahead, but those can change because additions and cancellations are the norm of the business. I started as part of a pair. This is how they train and keep an eye on the new employees. I was fixed up with a senior worker, who gets time and a half for the first two days and then extra vacation bonus for the days after that, for up to two weeks of training. The degree of attention to cleanliness is understandable, being the kind of business that it is, but the way they communicate it to the employees is like trying to scare children: If customers see this — dirt, hair, grime, unwelcome signs of a previous tenant — they will demand a refund, they will post horrible online evaluations, word will spread, the business will slow down and eventually the hotel will have to close… What am I doing talking about cleaning toilets and vacuuming the carpet and running a rag across the flat-screen surfaces and the tops of the bedside tables… You clean at home. You know what that’s like. It’s the same thing, just amp it up by a degree of two or three, in terms of length of time, of the grade of the cleaning products, of the effort and vigilance, of being answerable for your efforts, in our case to the anonymous reviewers from management, who claim to undertake unannounced checks of the rooms at regular intervals… What I really want to talk about are the clientele, predominantly men, overwhelmingly men. There are wives and mothers, also girlfriends, of course, but rarely single women. Single men do the bulk of the checking in, of the leaving things behind for us to clean. When the cleaning staff encounters anyone in the hallways, anyone waiting for — or alighting from — the elevators, it is almost always men. Men who have taken out hotel rooms to be adjacent to Chelsea and the Meatpacking districts, to have a convenient room for sex when returning from clubbing — Chelsea for the gay men, Meatpacking for the straight, although perhaps people will say such a strict distinction is no longer true. Foreign men traveling alone — although these are in the minority; very few tourists of either gender take on New York solo. Men who travel from other cities on business. Businessmen. These are the bulk of the Dream Hotel’s clientele, but a certain kind of businessman, as the Dream Hotel is more expensive than the standard option of a Hilton or Holiday Inn; although the Dream is not as expensive as the conventional luxury option of something along Fifth in Midtown… Where I work, men come and go, making usual male sounds as soon as they close their doors: tuning the televisions to fictional or sports-related violence; barking on the phones; tuning the televisions to the sex options on the hotel channels; actual sex. Or they’re the most quiet, using the rooms merely for sleep, awake time amounting to an hour spent in front of their laptop screens in the morning before they charge or slope out into the day… Men are the most likely danger for the women on the cleaning staff. This is relayed not by the management but by the members of the staff. Passes are made, which range from groping to propositions of sex for cash. No rape has ever been reported but you can imagine that at a hotel larger than the Dream, with miles of corridors and multistories between the distressed party and the in-house security, how much more feasible and frequent such a crime might be. Not only the younger women are in such sexual danger but even the older ones, some, you would think from the looks of them, improbable candidates for harassment: grandmotherly types or maybe not grandmotherly, but old aunts, frumpy neighbors; the nunlike, the nurselike — and not the nurses of jack-off scenarios but those you find in old folks’ homes, giving you extra sleep medication so you won’t wake up in the middle of their soap opera marathons and need to be ministered to… Pablo, my familiar from club days, who conspired to get me the job, is an even better guide to the byways and back alleys of the Dream gig than the management or my other coworkers. You’re Pablo’s friend, is how I’m referred to in my first days at work… There is a woman in her 60s among the cleaning staff, name of Rosario and who lives in Queens. She is a veteran of the industry, having spent 15 years before the Dream Hotel working at the Times Square Hilton, and 15 years before that at the Hyatt in the Financial District. According to Pablo, she had left each of those jobs claiming that she’d been the object of frequent sexual harassment, and the pattern of her claim-making has not changed at the Dream. The difference being that now she no longer reports such occurrences to the management but rather to whoever might lend her sympathy among the coworkers, which largely means the other females. None of the men pay credence to her stories; they talk behind her back about her head not being right, that she might be living without a sense of distinction between past and present, or simply that she is looking for attention. But the other women — each with some skittish story about men — defend her, despite some of their own misgivings about the likelihood of her claims. It’s her grandmotherly appearance, her vibe of joylessness and sexlessness — these stand in marked contrast to the stories she tells of being looked at, groped, propositioned. Not that men act out sexually only because of lust. There’s power. And recklessness, drunkenness. It could even be the particular influence of being inside a hotel, which seems like a vacuum of time and of consequence. And which reeks of sex, so heavily of sex, illicit and thrilling and, again, without unpleasurable consequence… Pablo warns me about the devil Jack. That’s what he calls this guy who checks into the hotel once every month. He stays the length of a weekend, after which he’s gone for a month’s interval, and then suddenly there’s a new sighting of him. These sightings occur not in the hallways, not by or on the elevators, not at the pool or rooftop lounge, not at the check in desk — an area we hardly see anyway — but in his room, which is the same each time. Room 789, on the seventh floor. He leaves the door open. He waits for one of the cleaning staff to pass by with our carts. And we would be passing by because a call had been placed downstairs. Somebody broke a bottle in the seventh floor corridor. The mess is right by Room 789. The door ajar is a spyhole. If the devil Jack sees that a female cleaner has been sent, he closes the door. If the cleaner is a man, he opens the door wider, using his foot. He is seated on a chair, in close proximity to the door. He knows you can see him, even if he pretends to be looking at some far point on the wall of his room. He is wearing a bathrobe, which is open. His hands are in his crotch and his penis is erect. It takes him less than a minute to masturbate to climax. He does this very silently, beginning as soon as he senses your eyes on him through the door he has manipulated wider open. He never looks at you and the whole time you are more than usually aware of your heartbeat, of the sound of the air conditioning coming through the vents — you’re aware of where the vents are for seemingly the first time — and the whir of the elevators going up and down the floors. A whole minute of looking is longer than just being stunned by disbelief, it is actual spectatorship, participation, encouragement. You are encouraging him and turning him on. He is doing it for you, this sexual act, this brazen exhibit. He needs you. Your eyes. Your stamina for suspense, all the while wondering, Is the elevator going to disgorge witnesses catching me catching him? Are any of the doors on the seventh floor going to suddenly swing wide open? He is doing it for your presumed interest. By watching, you are saying Yes. But you do it. You are not offended. It is not within your scope or your rights to be offended, to have any rational thought, that is to say, any judgment. Because when he’s done, he will get up from the chair. Well, first, he will look down at his crotch, he will look at his hands, as if to ask, What just happened? As if he’d been in a dream and is still in a dream. In a state where motive and malice are suspended. Then he gets up from the chair, ostensibly to go wash himself in the bathroom sink. And then not so ostensibly, because you hear the bathroom tap running. And when he gets up, you see two one-hundred dollar bills, which he’d been sitting on all the while. It’s meant for you. That’s why you stayed. That’s why you looked. He gets up and disappears from the room to wash himself but also to allow you to snatch up the money and leave. He allows you to do this surreptitiously, just as you helped maintain the illusion that, by not looking your way, he couldn’t have known you were there and was therefore in a private, innocent moment, intending nothing more than what many men do in their own time. Two hundred dollars. Pablo has tipped me to the devil Jack and I arrived at the corridor right outside Room 789 last night upon receiving the call. Two a.m. I stood. I watched. I took the money. And on my feet today, I have new sneakers. The first new sneakers I’ve bought in five years, the soles of my old pair smoothed like the surface of a pebble you find on the beach. It’d been such a long time since I’d been able to acquire and enjoy anything extra, that I relished the call at two a.m. — having been tipped off by Pablo, I made sure I was by the phone at two a.m. — I relished the elevator ride up, the pretense at cleaning the mess in the corridor, I relished the stillness and stiffness of my body, riveted by the obscene spectacle of a man who was neither good-looking nor not-good-looking, whose body was average, whose penis was average, masturbating, pretending to be alone and turned on by the flimsiness of the pretense. He was a man in a room with all the lights turned up and yet there was something hazy about his face — a mustache, a weak chin, nice nose, jowls on the side, unruly eyebrows — features that could reconfigure themselves endlessly into various versatile planes of normalcy, all producing the same effect of not-thereness… Jack the devil. Two hundred dollars. New running shoes: Mizuno. After which purchase, I still have 70 dollars left over. In a month, Jack the devil will return to the Dream and I will await his call at some ungodly hour in the morning and I will be back to collect another 200 dollars and afterwards, when he walks to the bathroom to clean himself up, the belt in his terry cloth bathrobe will flap out behind him like the tail of some giant toy animal, but I will already be wheeling my cart towards the elevator, my back facing everything that just happened.

Han Ong is the author of the novels Fixer Chao and The Disinherited. A MacArthur Fellow, he was most recently awarded the Berlin Prize from the American Academy in Berlin.