Flights

NINE

In a cheap little hotel above a restaurant, in the town of X, I was assigned to room number nine. The porter, handing me the key (made of ordinary patent silver, with the number attached on a ring), said:

‘Please be careful with the key. Nine gets lost the most.’

I froze with the pen raised over the form I was filling in.

‘What does that mean?’ I asked in a state of internal alert. He couldn’t have aimed better, this man behind the counter – me, a homegrown detective, a private investigator of signs and coincidences.

He evidently noticed my unease because he explained soothingly, almost amicably – it means nothing. Simply by the eternal laws of coincidence the key to room number nine gets lost most often by distracted travellers. He knows this for sure because every year he replenishes the stocks of keys and remembers that he has to order the largest quantity of nine. Even the locksmith was surprised.

I was careful with the key during my entire four-day stay in the town of X. When I’d return to the hotel, I would always put it in some visible place, and when I would leave, I handed it over to the safe hands of the receptionists. When once I unintentionally took it with me, I placed it in the safest pocket and made sure it was there with my fingers over the course of the day.

I wonder what law governed the number nine key, what cause and what effect. Or maybe the receptionist’s spontaneous intuition was right – that it was a coincidence. Or maybe it was the opposite – it was his fault; he was choosing without realizing it for room number nine particularly distracted guests, untrustworthy, susceptible to suggestion.

After a rather hurried departure from X because of a sudden schedule change, several days later, I was shaken to find the key in the pocket of my trousers – meaning I had inadvertently taken it with me. I thought of sending it back, but, to tell the truth, I no longer remembered the address of the hotel. My only consolation was that there were others like me – a small group of people leaving the town of X with a nine in their pockets. Perhaps even unconsciously we create a kind of community, the aim of which we cannot guess yet. Perhaps in the future it will be explained. The porter’s prophecy, however, did come true – he would once again have to order the key to number nine, to the unceasing astonishment of the locksmith.