Sit and Spin // Brian Conlon
The concierge told us to “sit and spin,” which we didn’t really appreciate at the time.
We booked with the hotel’s proprietary cryptocurrency through an app we were required to download and authenticated our sense of self by listing, under oath, all the subscription services we had used in the last ten years. The app reassured us in no uncertain terms that our booking was complete, and if we wanted balloons sent to our home as confirmation, we could do that with our leftover Bonsai Bucks. We declined that invitation, my wife and I not really being balloon people. According to the concierge, we did not read the fine print, which said that the only acceptable proof of booking was the batch of balloons we declined. Otherwise, he said, we’d have to go home, accept the balloon delivery, and come back.
“We’re not close to home,” I said.
“That’s why we booked a hotel,” said my wife.
It was our first trip in years. A road trip to somewhere young people lived, and people like us sometimes visited. Recommended by our therapist to spice things up, to give us some perspective on what he called our co-dependent relationship with our cat Alex, who slept in our bed, and whose feline malaise we’d both, according to him, to varying degrees, co-opted.
“I’ve experienced situations like this before, and it almost always ends with the hotel winning a corporate defamation lawsuit,” said the concierge.
“Let me speak to your manager,” said my wife, outraged.
“She went on vacation some time ago, some years ago. I still have her cell if you want it. She responds to texts,” said the concierge.
“No thanks,” said my wife, “Let me speak to someone in charge.”
“The app is in charge,” said the concierge.
We tapped at our phones and realized we could not access it.
Apparently noticing, the concierge said, “Once you leave the premises, you can re-log in through someone else’s wi-fi.”
“What about the hotel wi-fi?” I asked.
“It is immaculate.”
“Great,” said my wife.
“It will not be sullied by your online presence.”
We were insulted. Our online presence had never been questioned before, and was, in fact, as tame as Alex, whom we tamed before he could walk, and now was so tame that though his gait was majestic when he chose to use it, he generally chose not to.
Just then, a man walked out of the elevator.
“Are you a guest?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“How’d you book?”
“The app.”
“You accepted the balloons?”
“Of course.”
“And you brought them here?”
“Of course.”
“Of course?”
“It was seamless.”
“Balloons rarely have seams,” said my wife.
“Some do,” said the concierge, “but not ours.”
By the time we turned back around, the guest was gone. I told my wife that I thought he had nice khakis and that, for Christmas, maybe she could get me a pair like that. She said she didn’t remember the man’s khakis, but if I sent her a link, she’d look into it. I told her I didn’t have a link to those khakis at this time, but if she reminded me to research where to find the link, I’d look into it. She told me that she didn’t have the bandwidth right now to remind me about anything, let alone researching pants links, but when all this was resolved, I could remind her about reminding me to look into the khaki link, and she’d look into it. I asked her what she meant by all this resolving, and she told me that she chiefly meant the booking, right now, but also climate change, world hunger, the national debt, war, both as a concept and those ongoing, and our marriage. I told her all that would have to wait for now. She agreed.
After the guest left, the concierge said, “Our lawyers say I have to take a lunch break soon. Do you want a copy of our employee handbook?”
“No,” we said.
“We’re going to tell all our friends about this,” said my wife.
“You don’t have any friends,” he said.
“We don’t appreciate your tone,” I said, rather than detail our extensive friend list. There were several, at least four.
“My voice is quite lovely, I’ve been told,” he said.
We thought about it for a while and responded that we had no desire to insult him personally, though we would if that would help. He told us it might. We told him that his tongue split in the middle like a snake or a satan. He told us that if it were, which he officially denied, it was intentional, mandatory at his level of hotel management. He also told us that his lovers liked it a lot, which was an added bonus we should be aware of.
Stepping away from the desk to cool our nerves, my wife told me that she believed he was exaggerating about how much his lovers liked his split tongue. I confided in her that even though we had been married for many years, I did not consider her my lover, and that the only thing that loved me the way I thought a lover would was our cat Alex, but not in that way, of course. She agreed that we were not lovers, and that Alex was a much better lover than she was to me and that I could ever be to her, but that Alex preferred fish really. I nodded. She credited me for not being jealous of her or Alex, no matter how many people or things they collectively and individually preferred to me.
“Your eyebrows are uneven,” I said, upon returning to the desk.
Rather than respond verbally, he spat into a cup filled with cheap hotel-branded pens. He offered us the wettest pen. We declined. It was at this point that he invited us to sit and spin.
“On the pen?” we asked.
“If you like,” he said.
“No thanks,” we said.
“No, please, sit and spin,” he said again.
“No,” we said, resolute in our resistance to the idea.
“I have things to do,” he said.
He then refreshed his email seven times, flipping his screen to be sure we saw that he had no new messages.
“You see, there’s no way around it,” he said.
“The balloons?” I asked.
“Yes, then. Now, the sitting and spinning.”
“Don’t worry,” he continued. “None of this is sexual, legally, cannot be. Would you like to see the handbook?”
“No,” we said.
“We’re not even thinking about that,” said my wife, looking at me with fresh eyes.
“You know,” he said, “I’m not attracted to either of you. I don’t really like the way you look.”
“Your eyebrows don’t really do it for us either, so it’s fine,” I said. I looked at my wife. She nodded.
“That’s weird. Previous lovers, many say my eyebrows are fire.”
Skeptical, we asked to see the data. He refused and recommended we take an online tutorial available exclusively through the hotel’s app, Modern Sexuality and You: A Guide to Hotel Etiquette.
“If we agree to sit and spin, will you check us in?” I asked.
“The app will ultimately decide unless I employ a manual override, but I don’t want to, so I won’t,” he said.
Noticing that none of the lobby chairs were spinnable, I asked if we could sit on the floor and spin. He said, technically, yes, if we were strong enough. We knew we weren’t. We asked if he had any spinnable chairs we could borrow. He said that they had two chairs specifically for that purpose, but insisted that they had to be reserved at least twenty-four hours in advance via the app. We had done that, he said.
“You sure?” we asked.
“Of course,” he said.
He invited us behind the counter because, according to him, the chairs were too heavy to lift and too annoying to drag. The chairs were red, leather, high-backed, and swivelly. We sat. We spun. I saw a lilt of joy in my wife’s eyes I hadn’t seen in years. It was the lilt I hoped for when we planned the trip months ago. The lilt I fell for all those years ago, before Alex, before apps. Was I lilting too? We spun and spun until the concierge physically stopped us. I’m worried you’ll vomit, he said. We would never, we assured him. After regaining our balance by grabbing each other by both shoulders, we kissed.
“Gross,” said the concierge. “I told you it couldn’t be sexual.”
“It wasn’t,” we lied. Hand-in-hand, we walked out of the hotel and into the neighboring pet shop, where they were selling cat beds and live fish.
Brian Conlon is a fiction writer from Rochester, New York. He studied at Harvard Law School and the University of Rochester, where he learned to name-drop the academic institutions he attended. His fiction has appeared and disappeared in various still-going and defunct literary magazines, including Prime Number, Blue Lake Review, and The FictionWeek Literary Review. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and three illiterates—two young children and a Samoyed named Mookie.