Mr. Loveless in Room 719

It’s not looking good for the Angels. Top of the seventh, Game 6, series tied up at three a piece, and the Giants are leading 4-0, just ten outs away from winning it all. Francisco Rodríguez is struggling on the mound after allowing a home run from Barry Bonds in the top of the sixth, and now, insult to injury, an RBI line drive single from Jeff Kent. Kenny Lofton scores easily. 5–0 Giants.

Does it sound like I know a lot about baseball? Because I don’t. Three weeks ago, gun to my head, I could not have told you who won or even played in the 2002 World Series. Finger on the trigger, hammer cocked, I could’ve named maybe eight or nine Major League Baseball teams at most. So you would be right to ask why I’ve watched the entirety of the 2002 World Series approximately five times, all the way through over the past twenty-three days. Answer: It’s the only thing I’m allowed to watch. By which I mean, it’s the only thing they’re piping through my hotel TV, and I’m trying not to go crazy. You might then be compelled to ask why I don’t simply leave this hotel room. Answer: They won’t let me. Who are ‘they’ you ask? Another great question. They are, as best I can figure it, the man on the phone and whatever governmental or extra-governmental entity he represents. FBI, CIA, some other acronym I’ve never heard of. On this, your guess is as good as mine.

The Angels rally in the bottom of the seventh, setting in motion a remarkable comeback that would finish in an improbable 6-5 victory over the Giants, before going on to win Game 7 and along with it, their first World Series. Maybe you already knew all that, but I didn’t. Not until three weeks ago anyway, and watching the crowd go absolutely wild during that Game 6 rally is enough to put a smile on this non-baseball-fan’s face, even in spite of everything that’s happened to me. And yet: If I ever get out of here, the first thing I’m going to do is find a television and watch something—anything—else. Right after I suck in a few hundred lung fulls of fresh air, of course. When I get out of here. At least that’s what I keep telling myself.

I turn off the TV, hop off the bed, and walk over to the window. I draw back the curtains and find the lone lit room on the 9th floor of the Marriott, just across the courtyard from where I’m standing on the 7th floor of the Crowne Plaza. I wait there for a few minutes before I see her silhouette appear, pitch black against the yellow light of her hotel room. I’m surprised when she pulls back the curtains. This is the first time I’ve seen her in days. I extend my arms up in a Y shape, and she begrudgingly, eventually puts her own arms up, bending her elbows to place her hands on her head. M. I curve my arms to the right. C. She reaches up, forms a mountain peak. A. Our little tradition. I think I’m going to die in this hotel room.

****

Here’s what I remember. I checked into the Crowne Plaza in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania around 5 pm, after a two-and-a-half-ish hour drive from Washington, DC, where I live. I was in town for a medical technology conference—please don’t ask me to explain it in any detail beyond that, it will bore you to tears—and after getting settled in my hotel room, I showered, watched a little TV, and then left around 7 p.m. to meet up with a couple work acquaintances (I guess I could call them friends) at a bar called McGarry’s, just a ten-minute walk from my hotel.

At McGarry’s I had a cheeseburger and fries, half a dozen beers, and more than one shot of tequila. For whatever it’s worth, I’m not usually a heavy drinker, but my friends are, and I’ve always been what I would self-charitably describe as a go-with-the-flow kind of guy. And everything that particular night flowed toward me getting very drunk. I stumbled back to my hotel around 1 a.m., set my alarm for an unreasonably early hour, undressed, and promptly passed out.

For obvious reasons, everything between falling asleep and my alarm going off is a blur, but there are a couple things I vaguely recall that didn’t seem like anything terribly important at the time—more like temporary interruptions to my drunken stupor—though of course now I know differently.

The first: Early in the morning (I’m talking, early, early, like before 5:00) I was woken by what sounded like a group of three or four people rushing down the hallway, and the hushed, frantic urgency of a father scolding what, I assumed, was his children. This was followed by several more groups of people, their footsteps rushing past my door. If I felt any alarm about this, I don’t recall it. In truth, I was only half-conscious of this happening.

The second: A little after 6:00 a.m. I was more completely woken by the sound of power drills and hammering from what sounded like directly outside my room. I braced my throbbing head and checked the time, laying there in total disbelief that anyone would be doing construction this early. I put a pillow over my head to block out the clamor and try to steal at least another hour of precious sleep. To no avail. I’m hardly a confrontational person, but the drilling and banging quickly became too much to bear, and I made moves to get out of bed and tell whoever it was to consider doing this some other time when 99% of the hotel wasn’t fast asleep. But as soon as my feet found the floor, the construction abruptly stopped. I crawled back under the covers and tried in vain to fall back asleep, before finally deciding to wake up and confront my raging hangover with a shower and a cup of shitty hotel coffee.

Dried off and dressed, and more or less ready to greet the world (or at least a sleepy medical tech conference that promised to have more coffee) I grabbed my phone and wallet, slung my messenger bag over my shoulder, and made to leave my hotel room. But by now, you know, I never leave this hotel room. When I tried the door, it was completely sealed shut. I jiggered the lock and deadbolt, preposterously waved my room key around the handle, before finally trying to pull the door open with brute force—an image that would surely make you laugh if you could see me. The door did not budge at all, and my hangover quickly dissipated as I started to connect the construction I’d heard earlier with my current predicament.

I checked my phone, which appeared to be momentarily signal-free. I tried the hotel phone, which yielded only silence, no dial tone, and was unnervingly incapable of letting me dial out. It was then, having exhausted my other options, I turned on the television, and if there’s one major regret I will always harbor about that morning, it’s this: The first station was a golf tournament, the second station was some kind of infomercial, and the third station was a news network plastered with all of its 5-alarm-fire BREAKING NEWS panic graphics. I caught a snippet of the anchor, a woman, saying “--in hotels across the country--” and I remember she emphasized the word hotels just like that, like it was the greatest source of disbelief in the sentence she was uttering, a sentence I never got to hear the end of, because at that moment I idiotically flipped to the next station (cartoons) and the next station (weather) before realizing my mistake. I frantically backtracked to the news, but by the time I arrived, it had been replaced by a bright and empty blue screen. Along with every other station I tried after that. My cable had been cut off.

I wish I could remember more clearly what else I’d seen and heard on that split second of breaking news I’d stumbled upon, before I stupidly switched it. There was a glimpse of police cars and fire engines, I know, surrounding a building—maybe a hotel, maybe not. I remember the words “unexplained disasters” written on the screen and maybe the word “fatalities” but anything beyond that is likely just my brain desperately trying to fill in missing gaps.

I gave up on the television after a few minutes, and turned it off. And then the hotel phone next to the bed started ringing. After three rings, I answered it.

“Hello?”

“Mr. Loveless? Mr. Doug Loveless in room 719?” It was a man’s voice, older than me. Maybe in his late 40s, and a slight accent I couldn’t place.

“Yeah, that’s me. Who is this? Do you work for the hotel? I can’t get out of my room.”

“No you can’t,” he said. “We hope this is temporary but for right now, no, you cannot leave your room.”

“Who’s we?” I asked. “Is this a joke? What’s going on?” I was a dizzying font of questions. They rattled around calamitously in my skull.

“It’s no joke, I’m afraid. For your safety and the safety of those around you, you will need to remain in room 719. You will be well taken care of, rest assured. Meals will be delivered at 8 a.m, 12 p.m, and 6 p.m. You may want to jot that--”

“You’re fucking with me,” I interrupted, growing indignant. “This is a prank.”

“It’s not, I assure you,” the man said. His tone was patient and steady, as though he were addressing a child. “Look outside.”

I set the phone down and walked over to the window. Seven stories below me the street was filled with police cars, a couple fire engines, a handful of ambulances. There were military personnel in fatigues setting up barriers around the hotel and redirecting a stream of confused pedestrians. I noticed that many of them were looking up in the direction of my room, even though I doubted they could see me from their vantage point. I could hear very little through the thick and unmovable glass, but the scene below was tense. Urgent.

I walked back to the phone. “What’s going on?” I asked the man. “What’s happened?”

“I’m not at liberty to divulge much more than I already have. As I said, this is for everyone’s safety.”

“You’re just trapping us all in the hotel?” I said.

“Everyone else has already been evacuated,” the man said. “You’re the only remaining guest.”

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” I said, my voice cracking, head spinning. “I’ve never hurt anyone in my life. You can’t just lock me in here for no reason.”

“We have reason to believe you’re a source, Mr. Loveless,” the man said. As though I was supposed to know what that meant. “Breakfast will be delivered at 8:00 a.m.” And then he hung up.

Fifteen minutes later, at exactly 8:00 a.m. sharp, there was a knock on the door. I went to answer it, and this time it opened to reveal a pane of glass that had been installed on the other side of the door. I reached out and tapped on it, and immediately registered how thick it was, almost certainly bulletproof. I could see nobody in the hallway, and at the bottom of the glass there was a black box, with doors on either side. I opened it to find a tray with breakfast—eggs, toast, bacon, hash browns—a glass of orange juice, a cup of coffee, cream and sugar. I removed the tray from the box, closed the box’s door, and then shut the hotel room door behind it. When I tried to reopen the door, I couldn’t. It had already been locked again, presumably remotely.

I had no appetite. I set the food and drinks on the dresser under the television, and tried the remote again. After cycling through several more minutes of blue screens, I turned it off.

I spent the remainder of the day pacing around my hotel room, in quiet incredulity that this was really happening. I frequently returned to the window to find more barriers being erected outside, more military vehicles with more and more axles arriving, more people with big muscles and camouflage and massive weapons. By sundown, I had arrived at the most plausible theory: There was a new pandemic. Something viral, potentially quite lethal, and the man on the phone, and whatever agencies he represented, believed I was a carrier. It squared with the heavy police and military presence surrounding the hotel. It squared with the breaking news I’d glimpsed on the television earlier that morning. It squared with the man on the phone claiming I was a “source.”

Before I went to sleep that night—or tried to—I noticed that the Marriott hotel, about fifty yards across the empty lot from my window, was completely dark except for one illuminated window on the 9th floor. And then a silhouette filled that window, a person whose features were hard to make out, but I could sense that they were looking at me, just as I was looking at them. I raised an arm to wave at them, and they waved back in slow motion. I drew my curtains and spent the next two hours staring at the ceiling.

****

The next morning, after I finished breakfast, the hotel phone rang again. Again I let it ring three times before answering, and again the man’s voice greeted me.

 “How are you holding up?” he asked.

“This is bullshit,” I replied.

“Fair enough,” he said.

“Am I being quarantined?” I asked.

“Something like that.”

“Because I feel fine,” I continued. “So could you just send in some guys in hazmat suits to draw blood or check my vitals or whatever, because I’m not doing another day of this.”

The man paused and seemed to choose his words carefully. “I don’t believe that what you have is contagious. But it is deadly. And if we sent people into your room, I doubt that would be safe for them. So we’re in a bit of a holding pattern right now.”

I sat down on the bed with slumped shoulders, rubbed my forehead. “This isn’t legal.”

“We’re bending the laws a bit right now,” the man said.

“What are you? CDC? FBI? CIA?” I asked.

“One of those, perhaps. Think of me as your personal caseworker.”

“Just tell me what I have to do to get the hell out of this room. I’m going crazy,” I said.

“What would be most helpful,” the man said, “Would be if you could answer some questions for me.”