The Blumhouse Book of Nightmares by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-07-07T00:00:00+00:00

I’ve been staying at a hotel in Munich where many people come to commit suicide. It’s a tall postwar building that rises above a flat stretch of concrete patio. A person can come into the hotel lobby and ride the elevator to the nineteenth floor, where there is a medical clinic and easy access to a balcony that has a very low railing. From there it’s a quick jump back the twenty floors to the concrete patio. Quick but, I imagine, with enough time for you to think a bit on your way down. Every time I go to my room on the twenty-first floor, the elevator stops at the nineteenth floor and the doors open, but no one gets on or off.

The hotel is just across the river from the center of Munich. It’s a fairly expensive hotel, and I’m staying there only because an acquaintance of mine, not even an acquaintance really, just a man I met on the train coming here, has gone out of town for a month. We got to talking on the train and he offered me the use of his place. About half of the rooms in the hotel are rented by the month as apartments and his is one of these. It’s been more than two weeks since I got here and I don’t have much money left. I have no idea what will happen when he comes back.

It’s interesting, isn’t it? The immediate bonds that you form when traveling. We found ourselves in the dining car, this man and I. He was about my age, maybe a little older, and was what I’ve heard French people here call sympathique. We fell to talking. His name was Friedrich. I told him about being asked to leave the band. Said that I’d gotten a Eurail pass, thinking that the train was as good a place to stay as anywhere else.

“If you don’t mind Munich,” he’d said, “I have a different idea of where you belong.”

There’s nothing much to do here. If the weather’s good, I sit in the English Garden and watch people drink beer. If the weather is bad, I sit in the room and watch television that I don’t understand, or I listen to American Armed Forces Radio. There’s a DVR hooked up, but the movies that are saved are all in German. It has some sort of pay-per-view system as well, but I don’t know the password. It’s late April now, and most of the days are still wet and gray and I seem to spend a lot of my time in the room.

A lot of fashion models take apartments here when they come to work in Munich. Sometimes I sit in the lobby and I watch them come in and out. It’s like standing in the street and looking through the display window of an expensive shop. I don’t enjoy being out of money. At thirty-six, I’m far too old to find anything romantic in poverty.

There are clubs in town and maybe I could go to one, and maybe meet a girl.

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