Yet none of it struck him quite as much as the sensation that there was someone or something else in that grim room, both unseen and present, and coming for him as much as for anybody.
In mid-January, standing in a grim room, flanked by a pair of projector screens with his hoodie zipped nearly all the way up to his neck, the Facebook C.E.O.
When she opened a thin wooden door that was almost directly off the busy lobby, and I saw the dark grim room with a saggy double bed, I decided to look elsewhere.
In that grim concrete room it struck me that everything Masto did, she did with her whole self.
It felt so profound, so mordant, that I didn't want to step outside the small circle of light to walk back to my grim motel room.
With one fateful appointment in a grim, grey room, everything I'd ever hoped for and dreamed of felt like it was taken away from me.
It's better upstairs, away from the grim dining room, where the lounge décor makes it possible to think of the whole operation as a campy nineties theme bar.
The most striking thing about "Wanda" is its textures: the grain of cheap wood in a ramshackle house, the cold metal of a coffee shop and the marble of a bank, the dank warmth of a grim hotel room, and, of course, the skin of its people, with all its power to allure and to revolt, come through with a jolting physical power.
As I lay drowsing in bed at the Barbizon Hotel for Women, the maid began slamming her fist against my door like a D.E.A. agent, and I popped up, briefly disoriented, taking in the grim, narrow room, the orange and yellow bedspread, the clothes I'd laid out on the armchair the night before.
(Her "Three Women," 2013, which poses naked girls standing in Beyoncé-like formation, recalls Albert Arthur Allen's naked chorus lines of the nineteen-twenties; in "Ashanti," 2011, a nude on a sheetless mattress in a grim, bare room assumes the position of the figure in Ingres's "Grande Odalisque").
Greg turns to Kent for comfort; they work the night shift loading boxes at a factory, eating lunch at 3 a.m. in the grim break room.
