Zero History

11. UNPACKING
Heidi’s room looked like the aftermath of a not-very-successful airplane bombing.
Something that blew open every suitcase in the luggage compartment without bringing the
plane down. Hollis had seen this many times before, touring with the Curfew, and took it
to be a survival mechanism, a means of denying the soulless suction of sequential hotel
rooms. She’d never actually seen Heidi distribute her things, nest-build. She guessed it
was unconscious, accomplished in the course of an instinctive trance, like a dog walking
tight circles in grass before it lay down to sleep. She was impressed now, to see how
effectively Heidi had created her own space, pushing back whatever it was that Cabinet’s
designers had intended the room to express.
“Fuck,” said Heidi, ponderously, apparently having slept, or passed out, in her Israeli
army bra. Hollis, who had taken the key with her when she’d left, saw that there was
barely a finger of whiskey left in the decanter. Heidi didn’t drink often, but when she did,
she did. She lay now under a wrinkled pile of laundry, including, Hollis saw, several
magenta linen table napkins and a cheap Mexican beach towel striped like a serape.
Apparently Heidi had dumped the contents of the laundry hopper at Chez Fuckstick into
one of her bags, departing, then pulled it out here. It was this she’d slept under, not
Cabinet’s bedclothes.
“Breakfast?” Hollis began picking up and sorting the things on the bed. There was a
large freezer-bag full of small, sharp-looking tools, fine-tipped brushes, tiny tins of paint,
bits of white plastic. As if Heidi had adopted a twelve-year-old boy. “What’s this?”
“Therapy,” Heidi croaked, then made a sound like a vulture about to bring up
something too putrid to digest, but Hollis had heard it before. She thought she
remembered who Heidi had learned it from, a supernaturally pale German keyboardist
with prematurely aged tattoos, their outlines blurred like felt pen on toilet paper. She put
the bag and its mysterious contents on the dresser and picked up the phone, French, early
twentieth century, but covered entirely in garishly reptilian Moroccan beading, like the
business end of a hookah in the Grand Bazaar. “Pot of coffee, black, two cups,” she said
to the room service voice, “rack of dry toast, large orange juice. Thanks.” She removed
an ancient Ramones T-shirt from what was then revealed as a foot-tall white china
reflexology model, an ear, complexly mapped in red. She put the T-shirt back, arranging
it so that the band’s logo was optimally displayed.
“What about you?” asked Heidi, from beneath her laundry.
“What about me?”
“Men,” said Heidi.
“None,” said Hollis.
“What about the performance artist. Jumped off skyscrapers wearing that flying-