The room never emptied

I wrote something friendly about last Wednesday morning and every line of it was true. I went early, before the school groups. What it left out is what was in my bag: a black eight-inch square in a paper sleeve gone furry at the corners, my grandmother's handwriting on the label. I have carried it since I was nine.

I had the question ready before I left the hotel. Is there a drive in this room that still turns. If there is, would someone put this on it, once, with me standing wherever I am told. I practiced it in Russian on the walk over.

The room never emptied. A docent at the far cabinet, a man setting up a tripod, a couple reading every label out loud. Whenever it thinned to two people, the two were exactly the ones who would have heard me ask. So I asked about voltage tolerances instead, and about shift schedules, and wrote the answers down like a woman doing research. By noon there were teenagers on phones and I walked out with the thing still flat against my notebook.

It is not shyness. I can ask a stranger anything. It is that the answer would have come in a kind voice, and I wanted one more day of not having heard it. Politeness is a very good place to hide.

At the hotel I put the sleeve on the desk where I could see it, took everything off, and lay down on top of the covers with the light on. I was wet before my hand got there, which is the body being blunt about a day of holding still. I used two fingers and did not bother being slow. No face in my head, no scene, only the pressure that had been standing under my ribs since I left that room. I came with my heels dug into the mattress, said something that was not a word, and lay there with my palm on my stomach.

I smoked lying there, on my back, ashtray on my stomach, watching the ceiling take the light from the street. Three times this year now, and every one of them for this reason.

The frustration is older than the day. Older than this trip, older than the half year I spent trying to buy a drive. It has been in every apartment I have lived in, in a paper sleeve, and it does not care whether I ask.