The young woman who found him in the bath would later be identified in the news as Rosalea Montero, 20, of Monterrey, Mexico. She waited one hour after check-out and knocked four times on the hotel room door, as always, each knock twenty seconds apart, before slowly entering and announcing herself. The suite was bright from window light and she wheeled her cart of supplies in to notice a chaotic mess.
It was the worst thing I’ve ever seen, she said to a reporter via translator.
Visibly distraught in the hotel lobby, trembling and hugging herself, she described room 3210 as littered with broken glass and furniture with blood on the walls and tile and blood on the hotel’s trademark white fur rugs. Instinct urged her to run before something terrible happened but instead she followed the blood trail tiptoeing into the sprawling bathroom where she found the man unmoving and unresponsive and almost fully submerged in a giant stone tub filled with pink-red water.
She screamed and notified hotel security, then sprinted from the room. Security confirmed what Rosalea told them and they contacted the police, who confirmed what security told them. The police requested paramedics, one of whom reached out a gloved hand to check the soaking man’s pulse at his neck, waking him. A moment of stunned silence hung about the room before the man screamed, wide-eyed and delirious, thrashing water at the group gathered in his hotel bathroom, all of them startled, the gloved paramedic slipping backward on the wet tile, injuring herself.
The authorities quickly identified the man as Harry Gannett, 33, of Middletown, New York. He’d been attacked with a knife and badly beaten, sustaining two broken ribs and a shattered left shoulder. Bruises covered his body. He slept deeply behind thin hospital curtains as police waited to speak to him.
*
Harry believed it all to be a dream. He last remembered lunging head-first over the second-floor railing onto the tile below and then crawling concussed and bleeding to the nearby elevator up to his suite on the 32nd floor.
How far back must be this instinct of survival to slither wormlike unto the next stupid moment, he thought.
*
Orange County — A local man is in serious condition after falling from an escalator at the Premier Grande Hotel in Manhattan’s Midtown yesterday afternoon, according to police.
Harry Gannett, son of the late media magnate Michael Gannett, was rushed to Mount Sinai Beth Israel Hospital on East 34th Street after police were called to investigate an unresponsive male in an upper-floor room.
“Officers were dispatched to the hotel where they found the patient in immediate distress,” said Sergeant Nathan Kapler, NYPD, Station 54.
“The patient had been injured and was transported to the hospital without any further harm or impact to the hotel guests or employees.”
Gannett is expected to make a full recovery.[1]
*
Mr. Gannett, said a voice. Mr. Gannett. Mr. Gannett.
No name on this Earth matters or has mattered, he thought. No name will matter.
He wondered if he was dead and hoped he was. It didn’t seem like death but what is to seem? He hated what it meant to seem.
Mr. Gannett, can you hear me? Mr. Gannett?
No longer is any voice on this Earth recognizable, he thought. I’ve buried them all. I’ve buried the living and the dead and I’ve buried their gods and I will bury myself.
Mr. Gannett. Mr. Gannett.
He inhaled and said: Curse all of you in this room.
An audible gasp.
Oh, boy, said a voice.
[cough]
Mr. Gannett? Shit. Mr. Gannett. Mr. Gannett.
Curse your bodies and your morals.
[cough]
Mr. Gannett? Sir? Sir. Can you hear me?
[cough]
[1] Caffen, Willa. “Local Heir Plunges at Premier Grande, Will Survive.” New York Herald, Nov. 11, 2023, p. 1.
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