The Benevolent Old Vulture: Not so benevolent?

So, the BOV has pretty much been haunting my dreams lately. A lot to catch up on in regard to him.

First of all, I came in a few weeks ago during the week to get a little practice/suck up to the owner, and I found the BOV looking less like a decrepit vulture who likes Pearl Jam and more like a fancy penguin. He had on some decent pants and a shirt that might have been washed and what hair he has was slicked back. It was odd. Also, I heard him speak for the first time. And surprisingly, when he gets going, he kinda gets going. He gets a little animated. I think it's because he has this deep, sad knowledge that no one can really understand him. Partially, it's his basic English and unwieldy Polish accent, to a small degree it's the onset of dementia, and in part it's his absolutely adorable, wispy, reedy, old-man voice. Although I've never been able to look at him to determine his dental health, he sounds just like you'd expect an old person with no teeth to sound--reedy, wispy, undone by sibilant consonants.

But the joke, as it always will be with Death...er, the BOV, is on me. Every night, just when the hour seems longest, when even those most willful and revelrous have departed, I can hear the elevator shudder to life and I know without a doubt that he is coming. I hear the elevator's chime, it's pitch so gay and mocking in a world, a hotel lobby, where he and I must exist together. And now those doors, those panels--if only they were doors that one could lock!--are sliding back with a jolt, and now they have closed with equal clamor, but where is he? He has not appeared. From my guarded perch, I can observe all but a sliver of the gray marble lying before the elevator. Could he really be there? Must he be?

And then, after the seconds and the minutes have oozed agonizingly by, until one is sure that no living thing could wait so long or come so slowly, always, the BOV emerges. In my short time behind this desk, I have developed an uneasy toleration of his presence. I have learned to keep my head down, figuratively, as he literally keeps his head hunched over and shuffles ever forward toward the completion of his singular task.

But two weeks ago, as he padded across the hallway, the Vulture and I locked eyes. He stared deeply into me as he made his way across the lobby, refusing to release me from his gaze in the ninety seconds it took him to walk the length of the desk (that's about fifteen feet). There was death in the look that the BOV was giving me. I don't just mean that it was a look of malice, or that the BOV's wish was for me to drop dead, although there is a Baba Yaga / that old woman who got possessed by a snake in the last Harry Potter facet to him.. I mean that the transmission between us contained all the final and unyielding contradictions and paradoxes that end in death's terrible mystery.

Plus, then, that night, after I had engaged in some late night real politik in fact, I stepped onto the elevator on the 12h floor, an elevator that is mirrored on the ceiling and all four walls., and who should be there, for no apparent reason other than to stalk me until he has harvested my uncorrupted soul. He surrounds me, and I cannot escape.

And if I cannot escape him, must I become him?