Fortune favored me on Wednesday, 06 November 2024 (visit 14) to Sleep No More NYC and the McKittrick Hotel.
I landed three 1-on-1 encounters on that serendipitous night.
The first was my years-coveted Malcolm 1-on-1 encounter; this turned out all the more special since it was with my favorite Malcolm performer—Tim Jones.
The third and final 1-on-1 encounter of the night was with the sixth-floor nurse, played by the wonderfully eerie Noah Wang.
But the second?
Why, it happened the best way possible: completely at random and by total surprise. I took a stroll past the Matron’s hut in the birch forest outside the King James Sanatorium. I was still very much riding high from my 1-on-1 encounter with Malcolm.
The shuttered window of the hut opened as I approached. And there, peering out, was a young brunette woman in a nurse uniform.
The Matron (played by the enchanting Illana Gilovich).
She scanned her surroundings with large brown eyes. She surveyed all onlookers with the slightest of smiles on her lips.
The Matron fixed her stare on me. She did not break it until she turned from the window, opened the hut’s door, and held out her hand to me.
No fucking way is this happening, I thought to myself as I took her hand and stepped inside a sacred occurrence.
The Matron shut the door, closed the window, and sat me down opposite her rocking chair.
“That’s better,” she said as she lifted off my mask.
The Matron moved toward a tea set situated on a vanity. She poured me a cup and gestured toward milk and sugar (no to the milk, yes to the sugar). She didn’t make direct eye contact with me, though. Instead, she cast her piercing gaze at me through the mirror of the vanity.
When I found the courage to look away from her, I scanned the hut’s walls. They were plastered with torn pages. I assumed then (and still do now) that they were verses from the King James Bible, hung from the walls as talismans to ward off the evil of the hotel.
The Matron seated herself opposite me and started feeding the tea to me on a spoon. Some of it dribbled into my beard; I guess you can’t take me anywhere. But the Matron only smiled at me and wiped my face with a cloth napkin.
And then she took my hands and began telling me a story softly.
“Once upon a time, there was a poor little boy who had no father or mother. Everything was dead, and there was nobody left in the whole wide world. Everything was dead, and he went away and searched day and night. And because there was nobody left on earth he thought he’d go up to heaven. And the moon looked to him so kindly!”
The Matron’s gentle tone started turning colder and colder as she proceeded with the tale.
“But when he reached the moon, he found it was a piece of rotten wood. And then he went to the sun, and when he reached the sun he found it was a withered sunflower. And when he came to the stars, they were little golden gnats that a shrike had stuck on a blackthorn. And when he wanted to go back to earth, the earth was an upturned pot. And he was all alone. And he sat down and cried, and he’s sitting there still—all alone.”
The auditory ambiance of the McKittrick Hotel rumbled louder and louder. And as the sound rose, the Matron threw herself back in her rocking chair and gasped as she fell into a trance.
A crack of thunder crashed. She pulled me in close.
“Blood will have blood, they say,” the Matron said in a raspy and ecstatic voice.
The trance lifted and the Matron righted herself. She wasted no time putting my mask back on, and then showed me the door.
I was sent back out into the birch forest, taking with me a prophecy I could do nothing about.
In the end, we all bear the curse of eternal recurrence within the McKittrick Hotel’s walls.
