A Hrooom of One’s Own

I know a fellow I’ll call Guy, although that’s not his real name. (He’s no longer a Boy, but not yet — not consistently– a Man, either, except in the most literal and least important sense.)

Guy recently took a weekend trip with his wife. It was a long six-hour drive in a rented car, of a US make and model which Guy knew of but had never even ridden in, let alone driven. They finally arrived, with relief, at the hotel — a chain which he had never before patronized — and unpacked their stuff in the fourth-floor room before heading out for a bite to eat.

The restaurant to which they’d been directed was farther from the hotel than they’d been led to believe, and the traffic heavier, so he was behind the wheel another half-hour before he and his wife could sit at a table, have a couple of drinks, and relax over dinner with the fellow they were meeting.

Then it was back to the rental car, back to the hotel, back to their room, and time indeed to get ready for bed. Guy’s wife wasn’t tired, and she’d be involved in a conference over the next 24 hours so wanted to prepare some materials and wind down before going to bed. But Guy himself looked forward to it after all the driving. He thought he might read for no more than a half-hour before drifting off.

He was standing in the living area in the room as his wife flipped through the channels on the big flat-panel TV. He was unbuttoning the cuffs of his shirt sleeves before getting undressed, when he felt the floor vibrate, subtly, beneath his feet:

…hroooom…
…hroooom…
…hroooom…
…hroooom…

It was a very soft vibration, repeated over and over with perhaps a second between repetitions. It felt vaguely like some sort of nearby machinery, whose motored rhythms were being transmitted through the floor. Guy remembered having passed a door on this floor en route to his room, just a little bit down the hall, a door labeled LAUNDRY, and he decided this must be what he felt: the churning and tumbling of industrial-sized metal drums, over, and over, and over…

…hroooom…
…hroooom…

He undressed, washed off, brushed his teeth, and got into bed. As planned, he read himself to sleep, although the soft so soft faraway rumbling of the bed beneath him had not been in the script.

…hroooom…
…hroooom…

He woke up twice overnight. The first time, he realized the humming had stopped. Somebody must have complained about the washing machines, he thought, and drifted off again. He woke up again a few hours later —

…hroooom…
…hroooom…

— and this time thought, Wow. This hotel generates a LOT of dirty laundry…

…hroooom…
…hroooom…
…hroooom…

It took him a while, but he eventually fell back asleep. He dreamt of being airborne; of watching himself flying overhead in an airplane; of engine noise rippling through the fuselage.

And he woke up before the alarm went off a few hours later, prepared to face the day. The laundry machines were still running, and Guy made a mental note (which he immediately forgot) to report the problem to the front desk just in case no one else already had.

Over the two days of his trip, Guy heard — felt — the noise in his hotel room’s floor whenever he was there. He couldn’t imagine no one else heard (felt) it. He wanted to ask his wife about it, but she was preparing an important speech she’d have to give the night before they left and he didn’t want to distract her with something so potentially obsession-making just when she needed to focus.

…hroooom…
…hroooom…

So he kept it to himself. And in any case, they’d be leaving shortly. The hum — the running of the hotel’s laundry appliances from Hell — would be gone, if not forgotten.

On the day of their departure, once again they drove for six hours (and then some; they took a different route to avoid construction delays, but encountered more — and slower — traffic).

Finally they were back home. Guy couldn’t wait to go to bed to try catching up on his two nights’ interrupted sleep but first, he told his wife, he wanted to check email. He climbed the stairs to his office, started his computer. Started to open his Web browser—-

…hroooom…
…hroooom…

Guy couldn’t believe it. He looked around the desk. All was unchanged from the last time he’d sat here, except for the infernal noise. He called to his wife, at last, “Can you hear that humming?”

“What humming?”

“In the floor. Hrooom, hrooom, over and over. Can’t you hear it? Feel it?”

His wife cocked an eyebrow. “Where? By your desk?”

“Everywhere!” He directed her to the middle of the floor where, if anywhere, he felt the undampened vibration would be strongest (although it felt exactly the same to him there as it did elsewhere). “Here — try here.”

His wife stood, barefoot, in the spot he indicated. “O-kaaaaaay,” she said, the last syllable trailing off into deep skepticism. “What am I listening for, exactly?”

“A hum! A… like the floor’s vibrating. You really can’t feel it? Hear it? Anything? I felt it at the hotel, too. It’s driving me crazy!”

His wife was smiling the smile she always smiled when Guy voiced one of his mild misadjustments to modern life. But her words were more reassuring, at least on the surface. “All right. I believe you. But I think if you’re still feeling it tomorrow, you need to call the doctor.”

“The doctor,” Guy repeated. “The doctor. What am I going to tell the doctor? ‘Doc, I need a brain scan’?” Then he dropped the conversation altogether, and announced that he was going to the grocery store to pick up some stuff for the next morning’s breakfast.

But he wasn’t going just for breakfast. He was going, period: away from the house for a while, away from the floors — every floor in the house vibrated — away, for a few minutes, from further questions from his wife.

…hroooom…
…hroooom…
…hroooom…

It was worse than he imagined, though. Now it was everywhere: underfoot as he walked across the supermarket parking lot, while he considered baked goods, cereal, fruit juice, and dairy items, in the checkout line, when he got back home. It was there transmitted up through the bed as he went to sleep. It was in his office building the next day. It was in his head, in his head, in his head but no, not in his head, damn it, ceaselessly, 10 to 12 cycles every minute, perhaps four to five seconds per cycle followed by a brief silence.

…hroooom…
…hroooom…
…hroooom…
…hroooom…

Finally, Guy knew what he had to do. He had to check the Internet.

Guy had recently blogged about people with alarmingly enthusiastic, off-kilter beliefs in conspiracy and faux-scientific theories. Thus, he tried not to make too much of the fact that the hotel where he and his wife had stayed was just a few miles from Friday night’s launch of NASA’s Kepler Mission — you know, the spacecraft meant to search for other habitable planets?

But he did wonder.

And having checked the Internet, and wondered some more, he knew he’d have to blog about it.