Keycard Access

I'm Chester, 54 years old, and I've worked in a mailroom for 26 years. My girlfriend Elise is 48. We've been together three years. We met at a pottery class for adults who can't do pottery. Neither of us can.

So when the union sent me to the Upper Midwest Postal Workers' Conference at the Radisson Blu in downtown Minneapolis, she came with me. She's an office manager. She didn't need a reason. She said a hotel is a hotel.

The conference is four days long. We are currently in day two and it is killing both of us.

*

The seminar was called "Flat-Rate Packaging: Efficiency at the Counter." I want you to sit with that for a second. Two hours on cardboard boxes. The speaker had a laser pointer and he loved it.

Elise leaned over during the second hour. "If I hear the word 'irregular parcel' one more time I'm going to scream into my badge."

"Then we leave," I said.

"We can't just leave."

"We're adults. Watch."

We left. We walked out during a slide about tube mailers and nobody even looked up. The hallway outside was carpeted and beige and completely silent. Hotel hallways during a conference are like that. Everyone is in a room somewhere, being bored on purpose.

"There's coffee down there," Elise said, pointing.

"There's always coffee. It's the same coffee."

We walked the other way instead.

*

The fourth floor was quieter. Nobody was up here. There was a row of meeting rooms, all locked, and then a door with a brass plate that said HOSPITALITY SUITE.

I had my room key in my pocket from checking in last night. For no good reason I put it against the reader.

The light went green. The lock clicked.

"Huh," Elise said.

"Huh," I agreed.

"That's not supposed to happen, right?"

"Not even a little."

I opened the door anyway. (I know. But it clicked, and I'm a man who works in a mailroom, and things rarely click for me.) We stepped in and I pulled the door shut behind us.

The room was dim. Curtains mostly drawn. It was small, smaller than our actual room, with a table, some stacked chairs, and a big tinted window taking up one whole wall. The glass looked out on darkness.

"Creepy," Elise said. She walked up to the window. "It's just... black."

I flipped a switch by the door. Nothing happened. Then a small lamp on the table came on and we could see the glass better.

"Wait," she said.

She put her palm flat against it. And I watched her face change. "Chester. It's a mirror. It's one of those two-way things. I can see myself."

I came over. She was right. Her hand faded and there she was, 48 years old, blond going gray at the temples, staring at herself.

Then past her reflection, the image shifted, and we could see through.

The room on the other side was a meeting room. Long table, a projector screen, a water pitcher, chairs stacked in a corner. A placard taped to a door inside read something we couldn't read from this angle. And it was empty. Completely empty. Lights half on, nobody in it.

"Well," Elise said.

"Well," I said.

"Somebody made a mistake with your key."

"Somebody made a great mistake with my key."

She was still looking through the glass. "Whoever sits at that table can't see us. Can they?"

"I don't think so. That's the whole point of the glass."

"Uh huh."

She tapped a nail against it. "So we can see everything. And they see a wall."

I didn't say anything. I was thinking the same thing she was thinking, or I thought I was. We've been together three years. Sometimes I'm wrong about that.

She looked at the placard on our side of the room, taped by the door. We both read it.

RECEPTION DISTRICT MANAGERS. THURSDAY, 9 PM.

"Tomorrow is Thursday," Elise said.

"It is."

"So tomorrow night there's going to be a room full of managers over there." She pointed through the glass. "Drinking. Talking. Being important."

"And we'd be in here."

"In the dark."

I looked at her. She looked at me. Neither of us laughed, which is how I knew she was serious.

"We'll talk about it," I said.

"We just did."

What I should say about Elise is this. When she gets an idea she doesn't let it go. She turns it over like a parcel she's inspecting for damage. That's her job and it's also her personality.

That night in our actual room, she brought it up twice. Once while brushing her teeth, once in bed.

"It's not like we'd be doing anything wrong," she said.

"We'd be spying on a managers' reception from a secret room."

"We'd be in a room. They'd be in a room."

"You've thought about this."

"I've thought about this," she admitted.

*

* * *

*

Thursday afternoon. Keynote speaker. "The Future of Last-Mile Delivery." The ballroom had about four hundred people in it and the speaker had a laser pointer too. I don't know where they breed these men.

Elise sat next to me in the row of chairs, taking notes she wasn't taking. Her pen was moving but the page was blank-ish doodles. Then she leaned into my shoulder.

"Nine o'clock," she whispered.

"What?"

"The reception. Nine. I checked the board by the elevators. District managers, meeting room four-twelve, nine to eleven."

"Okay?"

"Okay, so here's what I want."

Her voice was low, right against my ear, and the speaker was droning about route optimization, and I felt a little dizzy from the combination. "I want us in that room at nine. With the lights off. Watching them."

"Watching them do what?"

"Whatever they do. And while they do it..."

She paused. Her hand landed on my knee. "While they do it, you and me. Right there. In the dark."

My pen stopped moving.

"Elise."

"Say yes!"

"Somebody could hear."

"That's sort of the point, Chester."

She squeezed my knee. "Glass works one way. Doors don't. There'll be a room full of managers forty feet away and a wall between us. I keep thinking about it. I've been thinking about it since yesterday. I can't sit through one more slide about parcels knowing that room is sitting empty all day."

"Your face would be against the glass."

"My face can be wherever I want it to be."

I looked at the speaker. He was pointing his laser at a graph. Four hundred people nodded along. Elise's hand was still on my knee, warm, not moving, just there.

"Is this a fantasy thing or a you thing?" I asked.

"It's an us thing. It's an us thing we haven't done in three years and I'm 48 and tired of safe."

She sat back a little, still watching the stage like she was paying attention. "Also I get a vote and my vote is yes."

"That's not how votes work."

"It's how votes work in this marriage."

"We're not married."

"We're not married," she agreed. "So there's nothing to feel guilty about. Just a room with a keycard that likes you, and a window, and nine o'clock."

The speaker changed slides. The graph turned into a bigger graph. Somewhere behind us a man laughed too loud at nothing.

"Nine o'clock," I said.

She patted my knee once, twice, and went back to pretending to take notes. Her doodles had gotten a lot less abstract.

I sat through forty more minutes of last-mile delivery and thought about nothing else the entire time.

That night. Nine o'clock came and went. That was the plan, nine sharp, lights off. But there was a breakout session till eight forty-five, then a cash bar, then a woman named Phyllis from Duluth cornered us to talk about her union grievance. So it was ten o'clock by the time we drifted toward the elevators like two people going to bed early.

"Phyllis," Elise muttered as the doors closed.

"Thirty minutes of my life."

"You could have escaped."

"She had my arm."

We went up to four. The hallway was empty. Beige carpet, beige walls, a housekeeping cart parked against the wall. Elise walked ahead of me and didn't say a word until we got to the door. HOSPITALITY SUITE. She looked at me. I swiped the keycard. It clicked green, same as yesterday, same little accident.

"Still likes you," she whispered.

I pushed the door open. Dark inside. She reached past me and shut it soft, and we stood there a second listening. Ice machine down the hall. An elevator somewhere. Nothing else.

"Okay," she breathed.

"Okay. Now we wait."

We didn't turn any lights on. There was a loveseat by the window, the one-way glass looking into the meeting room. The meeting room was empty still. Long table, projector screen off, that water pitcher. Elise sat down and pulled me down next to her and