These Delicate Creatures

The difficult part was not finding Anna.

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The picture showed enough of LA from a distance that he could estimate the approximate area of the hotel she was staying in. He knows it’s a hotel, because the reflection in her glasses just about reveals what looks like the hotel door. The handle looks thick, the kind that might receive a key card. The bed, also just visible in the reflection, is also neatly made, with an attention to detail that only hotel staff can achieve. Anna’s body language and attire is also a give away to how long she’s been there. The way she is posed seems to suggest “look where I am”, as opposed to a kind of easiness you might expect from someone enjoying their second week in a foreign place. There’s also the corner of what looks like the pull out handle of a suitcase, which again, suggests someone having just arrived.

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Once he had got through arrivals, he finds a café and orders a green tea while he connects the Wifi. The place is deserted. It’s only 3am, or thereabouts, but his body is at 4:30pm. He feels himself operating faster that his fellow coffee drinkers. Two girls sit opposite him. A couple, by the looks of how they’re seated. One of them swipes on her phone while the other snoozes in her lap. An old gentleman in a high fiz jacket drinks a large black coffee while staring at a paper he’s clearly too tired to properly read. Even the barista, surrounded and infused by the mere presence of caffeine, looks vacantly out of the window while she sorts spoons into metal racks. The place feels like it’s running out of steam, grinding slower and slower until eventually it will peter out and die.

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Michael is the beating heart of it all. His glasses are pushed determinedly up his nose as he fires up his laptop. Even as he sips the tea, he appears to be continually moving, rapidly blinking, his hands darting across the keys, his gaze flitting from one side of the small café to the other. He feels a kind of ineffable excitement. Though there is an aching kind of sadness that tugs at him occasionally, he wonders if perhaps seeing Anna might unveil an unfortunate misunderstanding. Perhaps the topless man in her picture was actually some PR manager from LA? Perhaps it was a friend, gay perhaps? He played the situation over in his head more positively, imagining her delight when she saw him. Her giggling and hugging him and asking how on earth he managed to surprise her like that. Her blushing and collapsing at the waist and muttering how that was so sweet of him, and what about your work, and was it expensive, and please, can she please split the cost of the ticket with him?

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He placed the photo face up on the table in front of him. The first thing he looked at was the time it was uploaded. 5:30pm, just as he was getting home. He did the maths – LA morning, around 9:30am. This baffles him. He can’t work out the timings exactly, but he’s sure that would have meant that she was boarding the flight when he’d messaged her yesterday morning, if not already flying. And she still didn’t think to mention it?

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Once he had established it was morning, he then looked at the angle of the sun. It trickled in from the right of the picture, which meant hotel, or at least Anna’s balcony, was North facing. He zooms about experimentally on the photo for a moment more, before determining that, in the top left, he thinks he can make out a beach of some kind, but it still doesn’t tell him a huge amount about the exact location. So, he focuses instead on the buildings. Slowly, but calmly and meticulously, he begins to identify and label them in his mind. First, he sees the ghostly silhouette of the US Bank tower, then sees a building not too far away from it that shimmers like the flat edge of a polished knife. Google tells him that’s the Wilshire Grand Tower. He slowly begins to construct an anatomy of Los Angeles in his head, labelling roads, buildings, estimating the distance of Anna’s hotel room from the distant shadow of Mount Hollywood.

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Then, once he’s certain of the area, he swoops around on google maps, ducking and swerving over the streets, pubs, cafes, bars, cruising at skyscraper altitude like a hummingbird around a honeysuckle. Until finally, he clicks on a hotel. The Hard Rock Hotel, Long Beach, LA. He smiles, closes the laptop, and leaves the airport, striding with a renewed sense of purpose, towards the cabs.