The phone is ringing. It’s ringing, and I’m taking a shower.

I know why it’s ringing, of course. I also know, because the bathroom I’m in is a futuristic, clinical one-wash all in white tile with integrated shower, toilet and sink, that the phone on the wall of the bathroom will be waterproof.

I really don’t want to answer it, because I know why it’s ringing. They think there’s trouble. They think there’s trouble because I saw a long length of cord wired to a switch on the wall, and I pulled it. Curiosity got the best of me then, as it does now, as I pick up the phone.

“Room 212,” I answer. Maybe the guy on the other end will be fooled by my professionalism and, instead of telling me what he’s going to tell me, he’ll go “oh, you’re the guy in room 212? Let me tell you, you’re alright.”

Instead: “Hello – this is Stephen at reception. Is everything okay? Your alarm has just been triggered.”

Earlier

Vienna strikes me as a chemical city – in the midnight nearness there’s really only the forests of great industrial gas pipes and hulks of liquid storage tanks along this stretch of highway. There is a materials-processing smell that hangs about.

We are driving under blue neon-lit underpasses, while I scribble notes in my notebook in the dark. One day, I realize, I’d like to get really superb at writing in the dark. Right now, it ends up listed off to one side like a badly-drawn ship in child’s crayon seas.

Long stretches of grassland along the highway sprout wind turbine stalks occasionally – the European kind with the three blades that never spin faster than you could do by hand. Well, if it were smaller. These are a few stories tall.

With the city looming ahead and the background sparse green and farm, I realize where I’ve seen this before. Fort Worth, Texas.

I’m in Fort Worth.

Panic Room

I shake the memory and realize I’m still on the red phone to the front desk, talking life and death. Not thirty minutes ago I met Stephen for the first time. Tired from a long day, but jovial, he offered us free airline miles when we checked in. Now, he’s wondering one of two things as he waits for my response:

  • God, I hope he’s alright. Did he fall? Is there a burglar? Can he speak? Maybe he’s being held hostage…
  • Those goddamn Americans always pull the alarm cord.

But he can’t say those things. He just tells me my alarm has been triggered, and waits for me to make the next move in the conversation.

Note the tone and the inferences here – your alarm has been triggered. Nothing accusatory here even though I did the boneheaded American thing to do and pulled on a rope for no discernible reason other than that it had the bad fortune to exist within arm’s reach.

As I explain down the situation to Stephen and try to keep dripping water and shampoo out of my eyes, I look down and notice that the cord just about reaches the floor, where someone – if they had fallen down during a shower, would be able to crawl, and with their last vestiges of strength, pull down the cord and trip the tiny switch. A lifesaving device – and I fiddled with it.

Don’t blame me – I’m an American, and life-and-death stuff is always painted red. This was white cord with a black knot. And who the hell expects an alarm cord?
I pull on things, press things, try things.

Hell, there was no way to have known how to turn on the lights in the room by any amount of reading, and I would have been reduced to exploring the minibar in absolute darkness if I hadn’t looked at the little black box by the door, my keycard, and felt like it might be interesting to put one inside the other. The screwer-abouters influence never dies; Et in Arcadia Ego.

“You can press the green button by your door to deactivate the alarm.”

Very staid. Adopting the stance myself, I assure with Stephen the non-emergency nature of the emergency, hang up, shake off the excess water and resolve to turn off the alarm immediately and save good-natured hospitality rescue teams from destroying their own double-peepholed door.

As I step naked out of the bathroom and cross to the door, I freeze. My feet, still wet, are making a cold pool underneath me, but I’m motionless, as if tracked by a Tyrannosaur; my eyes catch two red lights that weren’t lit before on the head of my bed, and below them, the unfeeling diode eye of a camera.

I have just activated an alarm-based closed-circuit recording. I am naked. In front of the camera. And in the interests of litigation that may ever rise from even trivial or false alarms, I know instinctively that this footage of me, frozen in horror and naked, will be stored forever.

At least I got a shower.