"The delirium of dis-ease. That week of June 2000 in a very Bostonian grand hotel built in the 1920s, city within a city, with echoes of the turn of the century, you knew, didn't you? Peeking your head out the door and down the interminable corridor that was terminal nonetheless. Terminal like so much of our existence lately, though no one particularly wants to admit it, or, if they do, it's to flick on the TV again and settle a whiplashed neck on the curve of a vinyl couch. But you knew." This is what the brunette woman in a dress whispers to the blondish woman in a suit and a man's shoes. Or what the blondish woman imagines the brunette says to her as she watches her secure a camera to a tripod with irresistible, she was about to write feminine, grace. If ever someone could make a klein bottle out of a camera, turning the inside out, the outside in ...
 
 

Know what? That the days flow swifter than Laurie Anderson's white lily, "what flower expresses days go by, endlessly pulling you into the future," or the liquor sliding down Don Birnem's throat in Billy Wilder's end-of-the-war film about a double-minded man who could not stop the war within--the mysterious drive, the undertow, that would drag him and everyone around him down. State of the man, state of the nation, writer who wanted to be a hero who wanted to be a writer who was neither or, the trouble was, both at once. The pen is, after all, a pistol purchased with Helen's pawned leopard coat. Helen in Henry Luce's employ, educated magazine woman and Gloria, call girl at the local bar who might have been seeing each other instead of flipping the inverted cigarette between Don B., Esq.'s lips. Not to be confused with Dombey and Son, though why not, as it is a story of failing fortunes and gentlemen going bad while women wait on them. What ever for? Perhaps out of pity or a strange sympathy with some man's delirium tremens, some man on shaky legs or rather on "Sunset Boulevard" in a has-been actress's shoes who steps out of the grand hotel room no longer himself but other. But how? For why would he poke his head out the door anyway? Because he has dredged the bedsheets off the kingsize mattress and toppled the lamps and stood a chair upon the coffee table to reach the ceiling light and hide a bottle in its basin? Or made more of a mess of it than Lord Berners riding a horse into a drawing room, and now he's on the lookout for maid service as if God were a cleaning lady and the cleaning lady could sweep mayhem and madness under the proverbial rug?
 
 
 
 
 
 

But he sees no maid, only a long stretch of hotel carpet buckling, wallpaper peeling, plaster cracking, the corridor corroding into a universe of repeating squiggles, like the arabesque of wet circles left by the whiskey glass on the bar counter in that film, or a New York street broken up into a series of services and things beginning with the letter "b"--barber shop, bar, baby carriage, Bloom loan office, blocks, and blocks, and blocks, and the three balls of time (past, present, and future) hanging over Don's desperate head, ready to fall. Because it's later than it seems  despite the persistence of the past, the persistence of memory, the persistence of an image on the retina, and the man with delirium tremens is clumsily hanging a "'DO NOT DISTURB" sign on the door while the sober man in the old actress's shoes sashays down the hallway on tipping heels.
 

 
 

Lost Week at the Grand Hotel,story and image, Copyright © 2000 by Jill Casid & María DeGuzmán,
SPIR: Conceptual Photography. All Rights Reserved.