Lippe Simone - Blank

Honor found herself in the drunkenly ill-focused former downtown Los Angeles which looked like the genteel founding quarter of a much nicer metropolis that had lost most of its treasures in a rigged game of chance. The proudly patchwork gothic/deco/Spanish-residential Los Angeles City Hall and the comic-book detail of the Hall Of Justice seemed to be justifiably embarrassed to share their neighborhood with the obstinately dull Civic Center and aggressively ugly police services building. But the courts and the county jail and sheriff’s office and LA Detention Center gave Honor a subversive thrill that she only partially understood, and she decided to play out her next adventure here.

She rolled to a stop outside the Regent Hotel because it looked old and expensive and the sort of place that would have an absurdly over-priced wine list and just enough caviar on hand.

The hotel was an immaculate relic of an age when what things looked like mattered. Honor entered through a revolving door of wood and brass and beveled glass into an age when it made sense for a hotel to have a two-story, rosewood paneled lobby overlooked by an expansive mezzanine accessible by twin staircases, all resting on a tiled mosaic of Poseidon rising from the surf accompanied by a dolphin. The maritime theme was repeated on the walls by commissioned floor-to-ceiling paintings of ships in peril and bustling seaports. Poseidon's realm was scattered with deep velvet armchairs meticulously disordered so guests could read their newspapers and plan their trysts and doze in peace in what would normally be a crowded LA hotel lobby. The only light was from enormous leaded glass windows facing the street and the suspended dust particles gave the abandoned foyer the character of something frozen in aspic and undisturbed for generations.

Honor was alone in the lobby. To the left was a bank of house phones and to the right the curtained entrance to a darkened restaurant with a brass sign on a pole “Welcome to Milo’s. Please wait to be seated.” Beneath the mezzanine was a marble-topped reception with cash registers and a brass desk bell. Behind that was a swing door and a key rack with old-school metal keys. On a whim which seemed ill-advised the moment she pursued it Honor struck the desk bell and was astonished by the sharpness of the peel such a little bell could produce in the awesome quiet. The door behind the reception desk pushed slowly open.

A gangly young man in an ill-fitting brown plastic tuxedo moved tentatively into the narrow corridor behind the reception desk, his eyes fixed intently on the bell. His name-tag said “Darryl” and beneath that were little American and Spanish flags denoting the languages he spoke fluently yesterday, when he knew what languages were.

Darryl took in the reception area as though seeing it for the first time and indeed he probably was. He’d only become aware of existence this morning and since that time doubtless assumed that the staff office with its seemingly unlimited supply of crackers and chocolate-covered mints and bottled water and monogrammed hotel pens represented the generous limits of the known world. The ringing of the desk bell gave him cause to doubt a lifetime of assumptions.

Honor stepped back from the desk, unwilling to break Darryl’s trance. The clerk tentatively approached the bell, raised his hand, and struck it. He showed no change in expression but Darryl was clearly pleased with the effect and he repeated it, again and again, until the overlapping, high-pitched frequencies became in that space and time the most annoying thing the world.

The curtains to the entrance of Milo’s parted and produced a large sphere of a man in pristine kitchen whites and his own nametag, “Milo”. He also had a butcher’s knife and the universal empty stare but his version was humanized slightly by the permanently furrowed brow unique to heads of state and accomplished chefs.

Now Milo was newly born, seeing the world a few hours ago for the first time standing upright in a kitchen with a cleaver in his hand. He’d always had that knife in his hand. It was part of him, and quite possibly the most important part. It was certainly the only way he knew how to communicate. And there was something that he wanted to say.

Milo walked slowly but deliberately to the reception desk, across from Darryl, who continued to entertain himself with his new form of self-expression. Milo seemed to see only the bell until he looked Darryl in the eyes and calmly chopped off his hand.

The clerk managed to fuse shock and fear and pain and a soupçon of genuine curiosity into one extended and unidentified vowel as he picked up his right hand with his left and tried to put it back on. The chef observed the carnage he’d unleashed with the blank detachment of a lab technician noting the result of a satisfactory but largely predictable experiment. The clerk’s labors grew more desperate and unfocused and, in addition to describing a graceful arc of blood across the key rack, he knocked the desk bell to the floor where it bounced twice on its side and rolled to Honor before having a little wobbly spin and settling at her feet, dinging merrily all the way.

After a brief internal struggle the chef formed another isolated thought — the immutable conviction that Honor and the bell were conspiring against him. He began maneuvers against them both. Honor backed toward the door, leaving the bell to fend for itself and very deliberately moving slowly and, even more deliberately, quietly. She waved a hand blindly behind to sense for unexpected chairs or the door. This was somewhat liberally interpreted by the chef as an act of aggression and he lunged, leading with his cleaver.

Honor dodged and danced and behaved as randomly as she could muster, hoping to leverage her steep experience advantage against Milo’s decided lead in the sharp object category. She jumped from chair to chair and kicked over tables and tested the weight of an indoor palm before abandoning it as a potential weapon, all while offering what she hoped would be interpreted by a mindless chef as encouragements to return to his kitchen and see to his soufflé.

“Milo? Is it?” said Honor when she’d put a divan between them. “Milo I need you to know, whatever happens between us, that as God is my witness I did not touch that bell.”

If the chef was moved by this or disappointed in the small fib he showed no sign of it. He received it all as though it was perfectly normal and indeed from his perspective it might well have been — he was, in this regard, entirely non-judgmental. He wanted simply and exclusively to cut something off Honor, something that would give the same type and degree of satisfaction as that provided by the clerk’s right hand, and he redoubled his efforts. He also learned quickly and soon he stopped following Honor the long way around chairs and being startled by the mirror behind the counter of house phones.

Honor’s advantage was rapidly fading so when she found herself with her back to the door it was an effort to resist the urge to dash through it. Instead she stopped and faced Milo and raised her hands in surrender. Milo raised his knife.

“Okay Milo, that’s it. Let’s take this outside.” Honor turned and pushed through the revolving door in an easily duplicated maneuver that the chef didn’t hesitate to follow.

And Honor was back in the lobby, having exercised her advanced understanding of revolving door technology to leave the chef blinking on the sidewalk at the sorcery that caused his adversary to literally and completely disappear. He looked back on the enchanted door with a melancholy nostalgia for the good times he’d had within, judged the past as lost forever, and turned to face an uncertain future for man and cleaver.