The phone went silent, but soon started ringing again. Trevor, in a bathrobe and with a towel draped over his head, approached the bed and picked it up.
"Good morning, Victor… Sure, in an hour… Thanks."
The line went dead. Amanda’s assistant reminded Trevor about the time of the session.
Trevor dropped the phone and threw open the curtains. Light broke into the room. The windows of the Beau-Rivage Hotel on Lake Geneva revealed a fountain and the snowy mountain peaks of the Swiss Alps. On the bed, snoring softly, a young girl with long dark hair was sleeping. A gray, silk sheet enveloped her naked body like second skin. Breaking his gaze, Trevor recollected the previous evening at the nightclub he frequented whenever he was in Geneva.
Last night the club featured some band that was probably quite popular, judging by the two hundred young people who crowded the stage, singing loudly along with the vocalist to the deafening accompaniment of drums.
The thick blue and yellow beams of projectors caught the faces and hands of the fans in the crowd. Laser chasers were blinding Trevor, so he turned away from the stage and headed to the nearly deserted bar. The young bartender with short, bleached hair and a colorful tattoo took his order and poured a glass of whiskey. A girl sat alone at the other end of the bar, watching Trevor. When their eyes met she smiled and looked down. But then she looked at Trevor again with a tenacious, penetrating, somewhat inquisitive, even defiant look. Trevor slammed down his drink and confidently approached the girl.
In the morning, he could not remember her name, where she was from or what they had talked about at that club. The several glasses of whiskey he had consumed scorched his memories of that night, melting away all that was unnecessary and leaving only fragmented, disconnected shots of their embraces and kisses. Trevor could not remember how they left the nightclub, how they got to the hotel, to his room, but his memory shamelessly continued to show him moments of their lovemaking. Trevor remembered her as passionate, bathed in sweat in his arms, illuminated by a narrow ray of pale moonlight, and he smiled.
“Chloe!” The name of the stranger struck him like a bolt out of the blue. “I think that’s what she called herself? Right, it was Chloe.”
Trevor dressed and opened his wallet. A plastic window revealed an ID with PRESS written in big letters on it. He pulled out four hundred Swiss francs, placed them on the bedside table next to the girl and quickly left the room. Soon, he was outside the hotel on the street.
Christmas was fast approaching and the weather in Geneva was warm and autumnal. At night the temperature would fall to near freezing, which was unseasonably warm, but for Trevor, who had recently flown in from the Sahara, the weather was quite pleasant. The temperature in the desert at night also rarely rose above 3–4oC.
Beau-Rivage Hotel to Rue du Cendrier is about a twenty-minute walk along the city’s promenade.
Trevor felt very agitated before the second session. Until this point, he did not fully understand what had happened to him the day before. Over the past twenty hours, he kept thinking about the office of the psychologist Amanda, listening over and over to his own voice broadcast by the speakers of a small portable recorder, telling an incredible story of a part of his life that nobody knew about, hidden somewhere deep in his subconscious.
