YOU will make it; i will love it

At the appointed time, I left. Within two hours I was checking into a Marriott in a small city in Pennsylvania. I chose this city because there was no reason on earth I should be there. I chose it too for what its name elicited in me: nothing. The thing I was approaching was not to be approached directly. If I got too close too fast it would scamper. What’s more, my powers were such by now I could, I believed, if I positioned myself at the thing’s periphery, make it approach me. What’s more, such things as what I was approaching are where they aren’t, not where they are. What’s more, I had only the vaguest notion what it was I was approaching. The attractive 45 year-old woman behind the check-in counter at the Marriott was needlessly rude. This was reassuring. This was one of several reactions this new version of me, one year old, regularly provoked from strangers. Another was fawning adoration. Another was determined indifference. It was this last reaction I prized above all others. I asked the woman at the counter for a bellhop to carry my single suitcase to my room. She glared hatefully at me, nostrils flaring prettily. Within several minutes a buck-toothed but otherwise attractive teenage girl in a red Nehru jacket arrived to wheel my single suitcase to the 14th floor. She demonstrated my favorite of the aforementioned reactions. When she got to my room, I told her at the door I wanted a kiss on the cheek. This, after two initial refusals and as many indignant snorts, was finally given. I gave her a twenty. Word of me, I knew, would spread. This was easy. This was not the difficult part.