Acrophobia

Posted on September 17, 2009 in Anxiety Travel - Conferences

We arrived after midnight, our flight having found the tarmac about fifteen minutes past schedule due to a takeoff line in Houston. The pilot could not find space in all that sky between Texas and Indiana to pick up time in or else he wanted to be sure that the stewards had enough time to pass out the mushed sandwiches that were the snack. It looked like we were the last plane to land in Indianapolis’s all glass airport. We waited for our checked bag, then caught an expensive cab that brought us to the Hyatt downtown.

Two stories of conference space, a mystery floor without an elevator exit, a revolving restaurant, and fourteen floors of rooms loomed over the open lobby. The desk clerk sent us to the seventh floor.

The elevators opened out onto contained space, but my hopes for a room that wasn’t facing the atrium were fractured and spewed like projectile vomit when I saw a sign directing us to the right and again to the right. A low wall separated the “hall” from the atrium — a black bottomless pit ringed by faintly lit balconies. Along most of the length of these terraces, the wall was solid. The sadist who designed these lofts found it fit, however, to install glass walls right next to the elevators (which had glass back walls themselves). As I edged toward our lodging, a large picture window directed at the Indiana State House opened on my left. I scurried past it and, keeping the wall near to my left, I crept towards door 729.

Lynn, wont to help, stepped between me and the outer wall in an attempt to shield me from the yawning maw of the hotel’s central courtyard. The reptilian part of my brain saw no charity in this: a feral impulse suggested that her move would tip the contents of the terrace down where our remains would be gawked at by the last people in the hotel’s bar, so I waved her back, back. We reached the door, stuck the card in the lock slot, and rushed in. With the door closed behind me, I felt safe from the abyss.

Over the course of the weekend, I dreamed of the empty darkness beyond the door. As I opened it, the floor would slant and I would be consumed by the motionless mouth of the hotel. I would wake up just as the wall shattered and my fall commenced.

Daytime wasn’t so bad a time — as long as I could see down into the lobby beneath me, the dread took deep breaths and enjoyed the play of light from slotted windows that the architect had obviously thought to entertain visitors with. At night, the terror returned. Once I went to get ice from the ice machine and returned a broken man. That fear — that fear of the whole structure collapsing beneath me persisted despite the inn’s solid construction and the certainty that there would no earthquakes. I was safe my feet averred, but my head swung in awful ellipses about on my neck and I wouldn’t believe them.