The Room Will Still Be Here

Cole came back to the office on Saturday morning, which he did not normally do, because he wanted to be the one to turn the lights on for the last time before the room went quiet for a while.

He let himself in the same way he always did. The room looked the way he had left it. The chairs were where he had pushed them. Clark's notebook was still on the corner of the desk where no one had read it. The light through the front window came in long, the way it does on a West Texas Saturday when nobody is asking it for anything.

He made coffee. He did not need coffee. He made it anyway because the act of making coffee is the act of saying out loud that the place is still a place.

Travis came in around eight. Cole had not asked him to. Travis came because Travis was the person who showed up when something was happening, even when nobody had told him.

"You're closing it up," Travis said.

"Putting it on hiatus," Cole said.

Travis poured himself a cup. He sat down across from Cole at the front table and did not fill the room with questions, because Travis was not a person who filled rooms with questions when the answer was already moving toward him at its own pace.

"The whole point of this," Cole said, after a while, "was to see if a creative agency could run as a serial. The way a television show runs as a serial. Whether you could build the world specifically enough and write the characters honestly enough and automate the production well enough that the thing would feel like a real place to anyone watching."

Travis listened.

"And it does. Anyone who watched this season knows it does. The proof of concept worked. The cast held. The voices held. The shows held. We learned what we needed to learn about how this kind of project gets built and how much of it can run on its own and how much of it requires a hand."

"How much of it requires a hand," Travis said.

"More than I have to give right now."

Travis nodded. He looked at the front window. He looked back.

"And the other work."

"The other work is the work that pays. The other work is the reason I built any of this in the first place. To learn the craft so I could bring the craft back."

They sat with that for a minute. Outside, a truck went down the main road and the sound of the truck took a long time to fade, the way truck sounds take a long time to fade in towns that have a lot of sky.

"What do we tell them," Travis said.

"We tell them what's true. This was a proof of concept. It worked. The shows go on hiatus, not into the ground. If the moment comes when the room is ready to be open again, the room will be open again. If it does not, the season we made stands on its own."

"And Eleven Eleven."

"Eleven Eleven keeps going. Hope keeps writing. The diary stays."

"That's the part you wanted to keep."

"That's the part I wanted to keep."

Travis finished his coffee. He set the cup down with the careful sound a man sets a cup down with when he knows the cup is going to sit unwashed for a while.

"You want help locking up."

"I locked up last night. I just wanted somebody to be here when I turned the lights off this morning."

"Yeah," Travis said. "I know."

Cole walked through the room once, the way you walk through a room you built. He looked at the chairs. He looked at the front window. He turned off the light.

The room did not feel sad. The room felt like a room that had done what it was supposed to do.

They walked out together. Cole locked the door. The key turned the way it always turned. He got in the truck. The truck started on the first try.

He drove the long way out, the way he had driven home the night before, because the long way had the stretch where there was nothing but the road and the sky.

What was true was this: the room was good. The room had done its job. The room would still be there. He had other work to do.

He turned onto the highway. The sun was already high. The desert went out flat in every direction.

He did not look back. He did not need to.

This entry is part of The Marfa Mavericks, a daily fiction podcast from The Marfa Strategy.

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