As It Pass'd Me Flying By

The young woman raised the blinds. It was not yet sunrise. Down along the street, the silhouettes of the trees were all bowed in one direction. It was Saturday and this wind had been blowing for a week now.

She stood watching from the window and felt on her face the faint glow of cold that came in through the glass. Her coworkers had written her a list. There were food tours, hikes, museums. There were line-dancing classes and a mural walk. There was a shopping district. Over the course of a weekend one could experience any number of these exciting possibilities. On top of that, the hotel had a gym and a rec room, and there was a new show out on Netflix.

She started a phone call. It was her mom’s birthday. The ringing went on and on. Finally she hung up. Her mom was hard to reach these days; she had taken up Buddhism, and now she prayed for two hours daily and attended online study groups five evenings a week. Some things you never saw coming.

She cleaned up. She spritzed perfume onto her wrists. She put on her wool coat and high-heel boots and took the elevator down to the lobby. A receptionist sat behind the computer at the front desk, chin in hand, clicking around. “Morning,” said the young woman.

The receptionist looked up. “Morning.” She raised her eyebrows. She went back to clicking.

The young woman made coffee and brought it to one of the circular tables in the lounge by the front desk. It was a three-star hotel. Nothing was wrong with it. The tables were frosted and clean and each one had a laminated card on a wire stand which showed a photo of the hotel lit up at dusk and the Wi-Fi credentials. They were standing tables. For anyone who didn’t wish to stand, there was a cluster of sofas in the corner. These sofas were also clean, with the appearance of efficient, affordable luxury. Along one side of the room was a floor-to-ceiling window. The blinds were raised on the thick polished glass. Outside, it was still black and starry. Leaves and shadows of leaves whipped around.

“Hey,” said the receptionist. She had her cellphone to her ear.

“Great,” she said.

“I know,” she said. “I can’t wait.”

The receptionist’s voice echoed in the lobby. The space was vast and vacant and the distant walls raced up to a ceiling far away. There was no one else. The young woman stood at the table and held one hand to the side of her cup.

“I wouldn’t say so. It’s not bad at all. There aren’t a lot of people, so I just read, watch a movie, message the kids, you know. Check in.”

The receptionist touched the neckline of her vest. The vest was pink with daisies made of green yarn and yellow yarn and purple yarn. The buttons were brassy. She laughed. “I am still seeing him. Matter of fact, he’s on his way here as we speak.”

“Isn’t it?” she went on. “No, just to say hi. He’s got a Saturday morning shift and he stops by on the way. I mean, early bird gets the worm.” And she laughed again.

“I am,” she said.

“That’s right,” she said.

“Hold on,” she said, “I think I see him. No, no, don’t worry about it.” She was gazing straight ahead, smiling. “Sure, I’ll give you a call,” she said. “Bye, dear.”

The young woman looked away. At the desk, the clicking sounds resumed.

No one new came into the lobby. The young woman opened two packets of sugar into her coffee and stood at the table and watched the white piles grow heavy with liquid and sink beneath the surface. She swirled the cup a few times. Most of the sugar didn’t dissolve. She drank the coffee anyway and left the sugar at the bottom. The receptionist had stopped clicking, and the only thing to be heard now was the air whirring steadily out of hidden air vents, and the occasional whistling of the wind.

The young woman checked her watch. It was 6:34. The receptionist had put in earbuds.

At 6:47, she walked to the front desk. The heels of her boots were loud on the floor. The sound went through the entire lobby. She waited as the receptionist removed one earbud. “Hi,” she said, “are the muffins over there complimentary, by any chance?”

“They’re not.”

“How much are they?”

“Let me check.”

The receptionist pulled out a drawer and ran her finger down a sticky note taped to the bottom. “Four-fifty.”

“Wow,” said the young woman. “Okay,” she said, “do I pay here?”

The receptionist held up a card reader.

“Oh.” She got her wallet out of the pocket of her coat and tapped her card. “Thanks,” she said. “I like your vest, by the way.”

“Thank you.”

“It’s very festive.”

“Well, sometimes you need some extra festivity in your life.”

The receptionist started to turn back to her monitor. The young woman said, quickly, “Did you make it yourself?”

“I did.”

“Knitting? Or crochet? I never figured out the difference.”

The receptionist stood. She leaned forward and held out a lapel of the vest. “This is crochet.” She dropped the lapel. “With knitting,” she said, “you have two long needles, and you have to move the loops from one needle to the other one. Crochet is just one hook. You use it to, okay, for instance, one of the things you can do is loop the yarn. It’s very simple. You just sort of move the hook like this and bring the yarn over the hook from back to front—that’s what they call a yarn-over—and then you rotate the hook and pull it through the loop.” She put her hands down again. “And that’s a stitch.”

“With one hook.”

“With one hook.”

“That’s pretty cool.”

“You should try it,” said the receptionist. “I only started last year, and I’d consider it a hobby now. I’ve crocheted socks, hats, scarves. This is my first vest.”

“Well,” said the young woman, “it turned out very nice. Maybe I will try it. You’ve inspired me.”

The receptionist smiled and nodded. She sat down. She looked at her monitor.

“I actually used to have a kit,” said the young woman. “But I never got past just making an infinite scarf. I’d go and go,” she said, “until it was something like ten feet. Then I’d unravel it and start all over again. I don’t know why.”

“That’s funny.”

The receptionist put in one earbud and smiled up at the young woman. Then she turned her attention to the screen.

The young woman went over to the muffins. The card on the wire stand listed five flavors. She turned the muffins so the labels faced front. They were all banana flavor. She took one at random and opened it on the way to the elevator. Passing the front desk, she said, “Thanks.”

“My pleasure,” said the receptionist.

It was 6:56. In the elevator, the banana smell was overpowering. She went to her room holding the muffin and inserted the key and listened for the soft snick. She put her weight into the door and went inside. There was light now. The underbellies of the fast-blowing clouds were orange.

She sat on the bed and ate the muffin. She was careful with the crumbs and managed to get through the entire muffin without losing a single one.

She called her mom again. After two rings, she hung up. It was night over there. Her mom was likely in the middle of a study group or already asleep.

The study groups were online; a hundred, two hundred people. Most were in their fifties or sixties. They joined from all over the world and there were all sorts of them. The common denominator was the impression that something had happened to each person, maybe at once, maybe over the course of decades. An event or simply an idea. An emotion. Something painful or unforgettable or both. And stumbling through the expanse of dark, alone, flailing, the back of one’s hand hit upon Buddhism, and finding it, flipped around and grabbed onto it, as the hand of a child who can’t swim hits and latches onto the ledge of a pool. And so, she was beginning to understand, it met all your unanswerable questions with one confident answer. That answer was like a great, sturdy wall in the dark place. Maybe the wall was not a wall but it was great and sturdy and if you shut your eyes and leaned your body hard enough into it you could trick yourself into believing that neither you nor it was lost in the darkness. One day you might even forget. Once you forgot, it became truth in your mind and since you lived in the world through your mind it became truth in the world too. That was some damn kind of trickery. It was perhaps unavoidable. You could think you would avoid it but no one ever thought they’d become the person they became. Not that it was good or bad; only that no lunch came for free. Well, there was a time and a place for everything.

The coffee was doing its work. Her veins buzzed. The sun must’ve been fully over the horizon now. She could not see it because of the line of condominiums directly across the street.

An hour later, she threw away the plastic wrap. She checked that her work laptop was in her backpack and went down to the lobby. It was soaked now with yellow sunshine and in certain places clouds of motes expanded in all directions. Light struck the row of plastic-wrapped muffins with the labels facing out. Light reflected off the coffeemaker with the hard shine of a gem. In the lounge all the laminated cards on the wire stands were ablaze with light.

The receptionist gave a little wave as the young woman walked by. “Have a great day,” she said, smiling. She was not the same receptionist as before.

“You too,” said the young woman.

She went to stand by the revolving door. She called an Uber. She put her hands in her pockets and looked out at the blue sky and the white clouds and the daylight, and the wind gusting still. She was all right. She would ride to the office. She would work for a little. After that, there were plenty of things to do. Even as she stood waiting she remembered there was a bowling alley at the end of the block.