We’ll Always Have Paris

More machine than man

Upon awakening, the entirety of him could be summed up by two things: he had a splitting headache, made all the worse by the too-bright room and the rush and roar of the city; and he hadn’t a clue where he was — the bed foreign and the room unfamiliar and the city glimpsed through squint eyes an alien landscape. There was a third part of his awareness – indeed the most important part – which he was ignorant of until he rinsed his mouth at the pedestal sink and stood looking in the the mirror.

Who am I?

The face was unfamiliar, lean and sprinkled with graying black stubble. The dark eyes. A nose that had been broken a few times. He ran an uncertain hand over the head, shaved close and gleaming, then studied his hands. Knuckles like tank treads and a phantom ring on his fourth finger.

He probed his memory but it was still as a placid pond. Whatever lay in the depths was lost to him. He hadn’t even a name.

He found a bottle of aspirin in the cabinet and shook out four tablets and chased them with water from the sink. Wandered naked into the living space, shading his eyes from the sunlight.

He somehow knew this was a hotel. A nice one, too — plush couch and a widescreen TV and a balcony overlooking the city. A silver wine chiller on the polished mahogany table, the bottle within empty and the ice gone to water.

Well that explained the headache.

And then there was the box.

It was small, wrapped in brown paper, and covered with a mad circling of words. The words flowed one into another, and as he looked closer he could see some had been written over the faded ruin of older words.

Don’t Open!

Resist the Urge!

Throw this away!

Whatever you do, don’t open this!

He shook the package. Something shifted inside.

He found a pad of paper with Hilton letterhead and a matching pen. He wrote ‘Don’t open’ on the pad and compared the handwriting.

It was a match. He was no expert in this sort of thing — at least, he didn’t think so — but it was close enough.

He sat heavily at the table and stood looking at the package a long time.

He dressed in the black suit he found hanging in the closet. No cufflinks. There was a black leather wallet in the jacket’s inside pocket, seven hundred Lira folded within. Turkish money. He stepped out onto the balcony and looked at monuments of the old city, and he knew them by name: Arc de Triomphe, La Tour Eiffel, and in the distance, Cathédrale Notre-Dame.

He did not think he was French, but he wasn’t sure.

He poked his head into the hall. A long length of burgundy carpet and dozens of identical gold-accented doors. His was room 419.

He sat on the bed and picked up the phone.

“Hello,” a man said in heavily-accented English. “How may I help you?”

“Can you send up coffee and some bacon?” The sound of his own voice deep and low, like the rumble of a distant train. “And a copy of my bill.”

“Of course, monsieur.”

While he waited, he rifled drawers and pulled down cushions and crawled around the floor. Nothing.

He met the busboy at the door and took the covered cart and shut the door in his face. He wheeled the cart to the table and took his breakfast.

He poured a second cup of coffee and glanced over the bill. It was invoiced to John Smith. He somehow knew that wasn’t his real name. An alias? He glanced at the package and wondered if he wasn’t some kind of spy: Smith. John Smith.

He’d checked in three nights ago, and ordered coffee and bacon every day.

He put aside the bill and picked up the package. He suspected there were answers inside. But the warnings, written in his own hand, troubled him. How long had he been at this? Did he have some kind of amnesia? Why hadn’t he written something more specific on the notepad?

He worried the edge of the package, trying to peek inside. The fold came undone, laying bare the end of a white box.

In for a penny…

The brown paper gave way easily, eagerly, folding open as though it had done this all before dozens of times. The white box was a standard mailer. He pried open the end with a fingernail and shook the contents onto the table.

Half a dozen passports.

Bundles of US Dollars wrapped in cellophane.

A USB drive.

A small, snub-nosed pistol. Loaded.

A switchblade.

He flipped through the passports. The same likeness paired with different names.

So he was a spy.

He slipped a bundle of cash into his inner pocket and pinched the pistol between his belt and the small of his back. He palmed the USB drive and threw everything left back into the box, then hid the box under the mattress.

The hall was empty. Silent. No distant doors closing or the roar of a vacuum. It was nearly 11. Where were the housekeepers? Where were the customers rushing to checkout?

He bypassed the elevator and took the stairs down four stories to the main level. The business center was just off the lobby. He let himself in and stood in the dark listening. None of this felt right, but it was getting stranger by the minute.

He sat at a PC facing the door and nudged it awake. Slid the USB drive into the slot and scanned the contents. A single file named ReadMe.

So he did.

If you are reading this, it’s already too late.

I was hoping you’d heed the warnings and leave the package alone. I can’t really blame you though. I did the exact same thing. Look at us now.

You might as well head back to your room and wait for the reset. You won’t, of course. You still think you can find a way out of this purgatory.

Here’s the proof you are even now looking for: at 11:10 a maid will enter the business center and find you sitting in the dark. She’ll startle and retreat into the hallway. You’ll notice the military-grade earpiece and the sidearm she’s hiding under a towel, and you’ll make the wrong conclusion.

Why am I bothering to tell you all this? I know how it plays out. I just hope you are smarter tomorrow.

He closed the file and placed the USB drive in his pocket. It occurred to him that if all this was true, he needed only to exit before the maid found him there to prove this person wrong.

The monitor switched itself off, plunging the room into darkness. He stayed put.

At 11:10, the door opened inward. The silhouette of a woman framed in the opening. She turned on the light and startled when she saw him.

“Oh! Pardon, monsieur.”

As the maid backed out, he clocked the earpiece and the gun. And he knew he’d stumbled into something far stranger than he’d first thought.

It was nearly midnight when he returned to his hotel room. Suit torn and bloodied. He bolted the door.

They were coming. Whoever the hell they were. There was only one way out now.

He retrieved the box and placed everything back, save the pistol, which he’d lost while jumping from boat to boat on the Seine. He searched for the pad of paper but it was mysteriously gone. There would be no note, then. Of course not.

He wrapped the box as it’d been.

The door thumped under a heavy fist. “Open the door at once!”

He found a relatively empty corner of the box and added his contribution to the mosaic: Please don’t open this.

He stood to face the door and suddenly tipped headfirst into the void and was gone.

“He’s under.”

“Good. Scrub his memories and then prep him for tomorrow.”

“Standard parameters?”

“Let’s introduce a variable in his morning routine. See if that gets him to veer off track for once.”

The phone was ringing.

He woke up with a splitting headache. He had no idea where he was, who he was, or that he’d been here many times before.

This story was originally entered in Vocal’s summer contest.

Eric most writes about pop culture here at Medium but sometimes imagines he’s an international spy on a really mundane assignment. If you’d like to see what else he’s working on, check out his newsletter.