They have been checked into a hotel for some years now. The building is badly weathered and at some point during the nineties an abortive attempt was made to do it up in the Raygun Gothic style, which was by that point already a naive vision of a future which had not come to pass. All the furniture has fins of no discernible purpose. The television, which only displays in black and white, is rounded and built into the shiny plastic wall.
The hotel, at three floors, is the tallest building in the small town, itself little more that a petrol station and a few houses on the road through hundreds of miles of scrubland.
They sleep in six hour shifts like submariners, endeavouring to never be awake at the same time. You cannot design a complete reality, you have to start small. A beating heart in an otherwise empty room still implies the existence of walls and floorboards, construction materials, the networks and supply chains required to deliver and assemble them. A few fingernails and teeth in an empty void betray knowledge of voids and teeth and the presence of something to know them. Start small. They miss each other terribly.
Their suite has two rooms connected by a door and a bathroom. Sometimes one of them will hear the other stir in the other room and overcome with some emotion will step through the door into an invariably empty room. The other always knows they are coming. They switch rooms through the separate doors and apart from a few crumbs of room service sandwiches leave no trace of themselves.
At first there was a dream of a single cell and nothing in which to contain it. Decades ago there was some kind of car accident. Their future hit a tree at seventy miles per hour. Three seconds faster than death. The hotel suite is registered to one name only but neither of them can remember whose.
