A Hotel in Hannover

I think it was Oscar Wilde who wrote that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. That’s BS.

Stalking is.

My glance caught hers, and I turned my head as I sensed the surprise changing to puzzlement, to acknowledgment—and then again, to surprise. It is quite a specific chain of expressions. I suspected most people recognized it, but few had been on the receiving end.

As the train stopped at the Hannover main station, I grabbed my suitcase and walked into the perennial gloom over Northern Germany. That faint hue that precedes the short summer nights painted the streets. Before going down to the main hall, I looked over my shoulder at the train—and there she was, hurriedly bringing her suitcase with her, dark circles underneath her eyes and a discreet limp in her left leg, trying as hard as she could not to betray her imaginary inconspicuousness.

I stopped and grabbed a Burger King meal, Googling how to get tram tickets in Hannover. Walking past a bookstore, there it was, looking back at me amidst self-help titles with swear words on their covers: my last book. Out of pure egocentrism, I told my editor I’d stop at five hundred tomorrow. He laughed at the expectation of so many signatures. Not that I thought I’d be a Stephen King myself and sign so many books I’d literally bleed, but this is the glitter of hope that deceives any author with more expectations than sense. If you don’t believe me, go out and try it. Ten bucks says you’ll be full of yourself before you even get your first pet stalker. Or you get five hundred people to a bookstore. Voluntarily. In summer. In 2024.

I’ve done what I suspect many writers do and lost myself in self-importance again, so much so that I almost forgot about that girl. As I was about to get onto the tram to my hotel—it was easier than anticipated, Google had told me—I saw her standing with one of my books clutched to her chest, her eyes on me.

***

Stephen King wrote that the basis of all human fears was a closed door, slightly ajar. Again, that was BS. The basis of all human fears is a person standing outside your room at night. We don’t fear the door, the gate to the security of our home. We fear those who hang out in the darkness, peeking inside now and then.

The sky was a dark shade of purple as I pulled the curtains and took in the incredibly unremarkable Hannover landscape. I looked down, from the stars to the streets. There she was, grasping her luggage, limping in the hotel courtyard, hidden in the half-light of the streetlamp. I shut the curtains before she could see me.

Had she seen me, though?

I sat on the bed and lay back. I turned to the open bathroom door and the oddly placed full-body mirror.

I stared at the ceiling, then at the raw concrete walls and the lamps swaying in a barely perceptible pendulum. Nobody thinks that a person who gets so much attention can be so lonely, but that’s the thing about pursuing a career you’ve always dreamt of: there isn’t much space for anything else. Not for yourself, let alone others. Loneliness is being surrounded by people all the time, having to deal with at least two dozen calls a day, and yet missing a single person. Or worse still: missing the concept of a person. Someone coming straight from make-believe and climbing all the way up to your ivory tower. To intoxicate yourself with your self-proposed grandiosity that nobody can peek through, not even yourself. And you stay there, on a Friday night just before something you’ve chased after your whole life, staring at the ceiling.

If I were a character in my books, I’d go for a nightly stroll in this unknown city, and then the Plot Event would happen, and my main character would meet Supporting Character Number Three. Plot threads tightly woven together, no mention of a happenstance. But no. This wasn’t fiction. Random shit happened.

And the not-so-random shit now was the sound of steps in the corridor—high heels—and the limp. I jolted upright and went to the window to witness the night further darkening and the streetlamp illuminating the empty path before the hotel.

High heels stopped just before my room. I stood motionless, pretending not to be inside. Somehow, it dawned on me that I finally might’ve gone loony. Too much random shit. I hadn’t been followed all the way to this hotel at the crossroads between Nowhere and Far Away, no. Have I been spending too much time alone? Have I been losing it? I could still be a famous author if I had some undiagnosed mental illness, though. Zelda Fitzgerald. Hemingway.

I covered my face with my hands, ashamed of my existence. Really, man? Locked in a hotel room, possibly stalked, surely lonely, and all I could think of was comparing myself to cornerstones of American literature. If anything, my illness was pathological self-delusion.

As the steps limped further down the corridor and I heard a door open, I went to take the longest shower of my life. There were deep cracks in my fingers, and my face looked bloated. The bathroom had so much steam that I worried I’d drown in it.

I contemplated the irony of this—and, why not, the utter absurdity. What was I thinking, really? Oscar Wilde, Stephen King, Fitzgerald, Hemingway? People would forget me in two or three years, tops. At best, I’d be an abridged Chuck Palahniuk, except the top wouldn’t be as high, and the buzz wouldn’t last as long. With some luck and self-disrespect, some kid on TikTok would pity me and tell their two million followers that this book was dope (fire, in Z-English), and then they’d pour some money into the account of a Millennial author who still thinks blogs are a thing.

I took the sleeping pills and wished for oblivion.

Steps floated in the corridor, lighter than the raindrops caressing and snaking down the windows. Except it wasn’t raining anymore, and the steps were beside me, by the bed. Inside my mind, too, for everything had become the same.

***

I think it was Fran Lebowitz who wrote or said that the best fame was a writer’s. It’d get you a good table at a restaurant, but it wouldn’t be enough to interrupt you when you eat. That’s, of course, BS.

Maybe I was overstepping the reach of my incipient fame, but there were no good seats to begin with. They must have been trying their luck at contemporary fiction on that booking website because the tables were small, the coffee lukewarm, and there she was, that young woman, High Heels, by herself at the end of the hall. She didn’t even pretend not to look at me. She stared, and I sustained the stare long enough for it to become mutually uncomfortable.

That’s when my body stood up and dragged me to her, as my eyes looked away—having lost that imaginary, spontaneous game of chicken. As I neared her table, her wet eyes—circles darker than before—betrayed her tentative smile.

And then, the realization of having doubled down on that madness. Who stands up and goes to have an awful breakfast with a random stranger—considering there weren’t more than a few people here, with a seat-to-person ratio above ten? If she was indeed the person who was following me. A lookalike would have been more likely. Here I was, again, in a delusion of grandeur. Of course, this woman wouldn’t—

“Are you—”

There you go. I wasn’t completely delusional, after all. She asked if I was the guy who wrote my books.

“Well, yes,” I said. “By the way, may I sit with you? Since, you know, you’ve been following me since yesterday.”

“I haven’t,” she said. “I mean…” She looked around and couldn’t help but smirk helplessly. “It’s just, you’re my favorite author.”

“I’m flattered,” I said, and I really was. Again, don’t listen to Oscar Wilde. “But let me ask, did you come to this place just because I was here?”

“No, of course not. I had a long train ride and decided to stop in Hannover. Then I—I looked up this hotel,” she said. “And decided to stay here.”

I nodded. I’d fall for this lie, all right—what else did you want me to do? So there we were, strangers, staring at each other, just waiting for the pretext to spout off the next strange shit. And I’d mustered the courage to come up here and confront her—if that was the verb I was looking for.

I stood up and went for the machine that spits out undersized waffles at a pace that would drag behind the worst-paid part-time Joe. When I returned to the table, and that miasma of discomfort hung over us again, I remembered what Chuck Palahniuk once wrote: that you just have to shut up. Try writing a book, having some people like it, and then meeting said people randomly on the street. You’d be as speechless as I was. So I recalled his saying that you’ve done the heavy lifting already: you already threw in more psychological stuff there than you’d probably had for any ex. Even if your book is about pancake machines. So, let the person talk; I let her talk.

And boy, did she talk. She delivered lectures about my books—better than the BS I’d be capable of coming up with. Then, she stopped at a specific character.

“She’s me,” she said, and at first I smiled. But after having a good look at her face, I decided that no, she wasn’t kidding me. “You based the character on me, didn’t you?”

I wanted to point out the fact that, you know, it’s usually hard to write a character based on someone you’ve never met before. And now, people might assume writers are articulate people, but the most intelligible sentence that came out of my mouth was, “What?”

She described how she found herself in the character and how even her black clothes matched hers. Sure, that character would wear high heels come hell or high water, and I even thought about scrapping it for fear of becoming some Dan Brown Two regarding female characters. The character had the same bangs as hers, the lipstick was slightly tinted blue, and even the fact that someone would wear lipstick to eat breakfast at some suburban hotel.

“Look, I don’t know you,” I tried to argue.

“You’ve been watching me,” she said. Just like that, I was the stalker. “That character even had a car accident.” The limp, I thought. “I had one, too, a year ago.”

A year ago. Delving face-first into the absurdity of it, I went for the Dropbox app on my phone and showed her the finished first draft—dated one year, eight months ago.

This wasn’t fiction, remember. Random shit happened.

“Still,” she said. “You could’ve edited the draft.”

“Look,” I said, glancing around to make sure no one was following this, “this character isn’t you. She isn’t anyone, really. None of my characters are.”

“They must be someone.”

“Well, of course, they are someone,” I said. “It’s just that I get bits and pieces from different people and arrange them into fictional characters.”

“You see, I don’t believe in coincidences,” she said. As if. “This character is me.” How she talked about it made it seem like her life depended on it. “Even…even my mom.”

You see, in my book, that character’s mom died of cancer. So, as hesitantly as I’ve ever been, I asked, “What about your mom?”

***

“Neil Gaiman once said that what inspires him the most is desperation and deadlines. And I think that’s not BS,” I told the small crowd at that bigger bookstore in Hannover. Fifty, maybe. Not five hundred. They laughed as if I or Mr. Gaiman were joking. The joke was on them, of course. After your editor sends you the fifth unanswered email asking about your progress, that’s all the inspiration you’ll ever need.

So that was one of the questions, and the most predictable one. It never fails to come around. I looked at a man at the back, scanning through the crowd again to see if I could find that woman. I hadn’t, so I prompted him to ask me a question. And he did: did I get inspiration from someone to write that female character?

At breakfast, some ten or twelve hours ago, she’d told me that her mother's funeral would be today. But her mother had been abusive all her life and cut ties with her after she stopped sending money. That young woman, the one who’d been stalking me, needed money herself. To raise her child, who was staying with a friend in Southern Germany while this woman was bound for Kiel, further north—and still a few stops away from Hannover. When she saw me on that train, magic sparkled over a dull life.

Not fiction. Random shit.

She wasn’t sure about attending her mother’s funeral, she said. She thought about stopping in Hannover to meet me at the bookstore event. My books had been the ad hoc light at the end of her life's dark, damp tunnel.

You see, Chuck Palahniuk was right. I just kept listening, listening. Never would I be capable of delivering a powerful tale about the power of fiction like this.

In the end, when I had no choice but to speak, I told her I was very sorry. Just like that: stumbled, cliché words. Then I asked what she'd do. She’d still have time to travel to Kiel and put a full stop to a story that had been dragging on all her life.

“Actually,” I said at the bookstore, “I based that character on a person I had barely known,” I lied. All those people were there because of lies I’ve put to paper, so don’t go on judging me now. Also, lies and made-up characters are enough to make someone go through life sometimes. “I thought she’d be here.”

I looked around. Scanned the crowd, now silent enough to become a snapshot.

“I think she isn’t, though. She must be in Kiel.”