[Listen to the Episode]

When it occurred to Lindsey that the motel standing before her represented her last resort, she found the pun already caught up in her web of thoughts. The phrase turned over in her mind compulsively, and ultimately produced the notion that, in some other life, if she owned a place like this, that’s what she’d name it, The Last Resort. And in a half-hearted attempt at smarm-adman inflection she said aloud to no one, An all-inclusive vacationland for addicts, low-lifes, and sex trade entrepreneurs.

Between trembling fingers she burned a new cigarette on an old one and considered popping another valium, her third, but checked herself. She needed to be as clear as possible for whatever this was, whatever was about to happen.

She stepped from of the car swinging a Dooney and Burke over her shoulder. She smoothed her skirt over her narrow thighs and walked with a wholly feigned sense of purpose to sixty three, where, as if to confirm her misgivings, the door opened before she knocked. A man stood holding it open. She didn’t budge.

You could’ve been looking out the window, she told him, not a whiff of an attempt to temper the piercing note of accusation with humor or irony.

The man looked at her.

It’s not that impressive, okay? she said. Spiro, right?

He nodded. Yes.

The trick, she spit out at him. I’m not a sucker. Am I supposed to be impressed?

It’s not a trick. I heard your car pull up. I opened the door. That’s all. This isn’t what you think it is. Lindsey.

Miss Gruber.

There’s no need to be on your guard. In fact, it will hurt the chances.

She pulled on the cigarette. Looked away from him. The highway stream of cars. People know where I am right now, she said. A lot of people.

Curiosity passed over the man’s face.

You still want to live.

Excuse me.

You’ll need that if there’s any chance to resolve your condition.

This isn’t my last resort, she told him.

Every waking moment is a last resort, he said.

He stepped backed into the room, long stringy strides that displaced no air, leaving the door open. Left her standing in her tan heels with tiny pellets of rain bouncing off the shoulder pads of her suit jacket. Letting her decide for herself.

She resented this, what she’d been reduced to. Contemplating whether or not to enter a motel room she’d ordinarily never even glance at, it felt unreal. Bed bugs. Stained sheets. She heard blue light laughter and false applause in rooms. What might pass as a party behind a door at the far end of the chain of them. People would be fornicating in ways she knew she couldn’t even imagine behind some of those doors. Getting high, as they say. God knows what else.

Did she trust this man? She’d arrived here by some complex and wholly dubious word-of-mouth gossip network. He was the best, her secretary had said. Whatever that was worth. The woman was an idiot. Lindsey replayed the brief interaction with the man but couldn’t find anything resembling a basis from which to form an opinion there, either. She checked off the tangible: He was skinny. Empty. Dark. Mediterranean. His voice was even. Calm. Maybe he was depressed. Did he seem familiar? What else? Even behind the lenses of his thick glasses she could see flaring red spots emblazoned in the whites surrounding each black-dotted eye. She tried to think of the term. The condition. She couldn’t. She was in worse condition than she thought.

She dithered more. She weaved together strings of disjointed, irrational logic that culminated inevitably in the deciding factor, which was fear. It was always fear. The fear had finally and irrevocably crowded out her anger at her state of being afraid. The balance had tipped out of her control. It’s not fair, she thought I’ve driven too far to turn back now. Two bridges and a sea of traffic from Long Island. You are a respected woman. You can’t go on like this anymore. As soon as you pulled into the lot, you felt it coming. Building, about to erupt, an episode.

Which is when she noticed it against every effort to not see it: The shadows moved at their edges, quivering, lifting up and away from their surfaces in a plot to form new shapes. The cracked folds in the stucco on the wall right in front of her quaked, the surface threatening to open in on itself in order to release upon her god-could-only-guess. A weight pressed on her chest. She grabbed the rail for support but it burned her hands and she released it. Something pushed outward from inside her skin. Bubbles like exaggerated hives raised on the backside of her hands and arms. She dropped the cigarette onto the concrete and hurried into the room rubbing at her skin, urging the inflammations to quell.

He sat hunched over the desk facing the wall. Cans of beer strewn in haphazard gestures framed this man, God help her, yes, her last resort.

You must trust me, he said. If this is going to work, if I’m going to be able to help you. You’ll have to trust me even if this may seem lunatic.

She stared at the long arcing bow of his back. She didn’t sit.

I don’t know, he told her, It may not seem so lunatic if what you say about your condition is true, perhaps, but in any case, now I will tell you what this is and who I am, and how I can help you. That is, not the way in which you’ll be helped, but how it can be done. This is important, the knowing. Otherwise, your mind will be overwhelmed, condition or no, and that can have irreparable effects for us both.

Subconjunctival hemorrhages, she said.

He didn’t turn to answer.

Burst blood vessels under your conjunctiva, she said. Your eyes. It’s caused by physical trauma or psychological stress. It’s just trapped blood. Not attractive, but not very dangerous. I worked in an optometry office part-time during undergrad.

The man ignored her. I am better now, he said. He rubbed at the apex of his nose, unseating the glasses momentarily in the process. The syncing helps. I am no longer funneling myself into an opiate vortex, not squeezing myself into the pin pricks I open up in my arm in order to deal with the side effects of shifting.

A junky, she whispered, almost soundlessly so he wouldn’t hear. She said, Shifting?

Again, his was not a direct response. You think you know agony, I know. But you don’t. The blood in my eyes is the least of my worries. I don’t even need eyes to see what it is you are asking me to see and resolve for you. I have been plagued by migraines and nausea. Swollen limbs and joints. Loose teeth. Burns I’ve felt in places I couldn’t place. Real pain, physical pain so unrelenting I have prayed for death. Begged God to let me die just to make it stop. These are not… fear illusions.

He glanced up at her in the mirror. I don’t mean to diminish your condition.

Stop calling it that, a condition. You don’t know what it’s like.

He turned to her and stood. He lifted his shirt and in the sick motel lamp light revealed to her a confusion of angry scars, scorched entanglements of Navajo red and bitter orange. They were furious impasto in texture, chaos-ordered streaks running up his torso from beltline to neck, markings, Lindsey thought, as if in evidence of countless attempts by some Sisyphean monger who’s eternal charge was to flay this man’s body with belts of flame.

Lindsey’s lips parted in a near-gasp at the sight of the destruction woven into his flesh. Her delicate eyebrows lowered in horrified incredulity. She sat in the chair beside the small table. She looked away.

Spiro said, The ones that can’t be seen, they’re worse. The scars in places I used to sleep. I was a young man when all this began. Just starting college. My whole life before me. Here.

Though she was no longer looking at him, he pointed to a small slice of white-pink on the lower right rib cage, a tiny sand bar in an ocean of fire. The first one, he said. It has sentimental significance you might say.

Spiro retook his position at the desk and turned away. Glanced at her in the mirror. It is ok, better now, he said as if to assuage her. I am nearly fully synchronized and this makes the palliative of oblivion no longer a dire necessity. Even if I’m not completely there yet, here yet, the very act of restraining from the needle helps. I can take solace in the sobriety that comes from the act itself, the effort to resist.

He drained the last of one beer, caved it in on itself with a hollow tin-man gasp, and snapped another open with a sharp crack-hiss. He sneered.

Yes, the alcohol. I spend most of my time with Jim Beam, in fact, but when I work, it’s Senor Modelo. My Mexican uncle. It’s not heroin. Rest assured, I am conscious of this, here. He gestured to the room. I am aware, of you, of this time and this place. The simple, agreed upon laws of cause and effect, gravity, the forward thrust of time, happening here in this room.

I’m not sure I understand, she said.

And the beer, I am human. At least I still reserve the right to believe so. Because the syncing hurts too, in a different way, even if it is a lesser terror than the shifts that were randomly forced upon me, because it cancels out… possibility. Maybe you understand this in some small way?

What syncing?

It is what you have come to me for. Before, I resisted it. Forced through the fields. The burns. Now, my life now, what I’m doing, it means…

He cast adrift. From some distant shore he said, The concession of free will, the abandonment of the naïve illusion I’ve harbored ever since I’ve had the faculty of thought in which to harbor other thoughts, the illusion that I could choose my own path. My grandfather, god rest him, came here to… and I have been robbed of this most fundamental of American promises. Nay, the American delusion.

Lindsey felt nauseous. There was no hope, no way this sad man suffering some psychological sickness could help her.

I’ve come to terms with the man that I’ve become. I’ve relinquished my right to the man I may have been. The man I may have wanted to be. I am many men. One and not one.

Even as her uncertainty took hold, Lindsey felt the room pressing in. The wood of the chair beneath her twisted of its own volition. The air around her made sounds like pressure releasing. Or building. She clung to composure the way a drunk keeps a foot on the floor after falling on a bed.

I’m working on this too, Spiro went on, That one day I might find fortification in the concession, the sacrifice I made to become what I am to help people like you. But this is not easy. I can find solace in my sobriety. A source of pride. You can justify something you can congratulate yourself for. But finding fortification in the act of sacrifice, for that you have to first let go of the resentment. And that is more than can be expected of any man.

Her breath grew short. Why… are you telling me this?

You can trick yourself into believing that sacrificing your free will was made in an act of enlightenment instead of one of animal survival. But this, as the other– believing you actually possess a will of your own– is at best just a vanity, a flower to put in your hair that begins wilting the instant you pluck it from the ground. In the end, it’s just another delusion and ultimately I’ve reduced myself to a pure neutrality, which is what I have always been destined for, and which is the quality that makes me most useful to you.

He sat in silence for a moment. I’m losing you, he said. I’m losing myself.

He turned to her and saw with surprise that it was happening to her right then and there and for a brief instant it brought him a perverse sense of joy, that twin misery sensation.

Lindsey torment was upon her. She recoiled now from darting flashes of light, quicksilver streaks cut into the space around her, aeriform organisms taking shapes like batwings right in front of her.

An intensity flushed hot in Spiro’s face. There are no ghosts, he said forcefully. Look at me, Lynn. Look here.

She tried to find him through the slashes of light but the devilled wings had gathered and now fused into a shimmering essence of human form. A nebulous construct of body. A dark gaping mouth in a light-blurred face.

Tears came to Lindsey’s eyes and Spiro felt her panic viscerally. It is strong here, in this place especially, isn’t it?

She stood quickly and motioned toward the door. Spiro took her by the arm. Half-stopping her, half holding her up from falling. She looked into his face through a swirling aurora, tried to hear him through thunderous concussions of atmosphere.

Spiro yelled as if she were at a great distance from him. There are no ghosts! There is me and there is you. An echo chamber of ourselves, a choir of phantoms, reverberating through the infinite tunnel.

Indeed it seemed a tunnel had formed around Spiro. A hollowed darkness beyond his head engulfed the room.

I’m sorry, she said, pantomiming the aspect of a woman in control of her faculties, I’ve wasted your time. I have to go.

She wrenched herself away from him, nearly toppling in the process. She raced to the door and somehow managed to open it.

Beyond the room the world had simply vanished. What confronted Lindsey was a black absolute. She halted instinctively at the threshold of the void but was sucked through it as if under force of vacuum. She was dimly aware of the door slamming behind her and disappearing entirely as she was thrust forward at a speed she could not begin to quantify because of the absence of any visual points of reference, but she felt the motion in the pit of her stomach with a g-force intensity stronger than anything she’d felt in all her days on earth.

She screamed but no sound escaped, no breath came from lungs.

Her body elongated under the unseen force as she throttled through space. He skin stretched. Her muscles strained against indomitable pull.

The contents of her stomach were drawn out and whisked away into nothing, blackness.

And when her body split in two it was with the unthinkable terror pain of being wrenched apart. Her mind reeled back for an instant to an illustration she’d once seen in an elementary history school book—a man tied to four horses faced in opposing directions, about to be quartered.

Her spine snapped. Her torso ripped open and her intestines flailed chaotically about her for a brief moment before they took on a life of their own. The capillaries of each of the severed entrails grew tiny, slick hands and they clung to her, kept her two parts together. The hands snaked up around her arm pits, wrapped around her neck, forced their way into her throat.

The intestines filled her esophagus and lungs until the lungs burst outward and she at last lost consciousness.

She awoke on the motel room on the bed. Spiro was over her, dabbing her forehead with a wet towel emblazoned with the Motel Americana insignia.

My Lynn, he said. Lynn, my poor girl.

She was too disoriented, too spent to raise any defense. His glasses were gone. She looked into his blood-marred eyes as he caressed her hair.

We have done this so many times, he said, In so many ways.

He moved to the mirror across the room and stood before it. He looked at her in the reflection for a moment, then placed his hand on the glass.

The man glowed then, self-illuminated. A hot yellow aura suffused him, then emblazed and took on the aspect fire. He shook convulsively inside the corona and became the cynosure of the room. All air and light bent toward him. His eyes bulged and nearly burst before he clenched them shut and forced his body and the surrounding room to resolve itself.

He returned once again to a human state and at that instant, the mirror reflection began to shift. It revealed random tableaus in succession, the forms of objects and people it revealed warped into one another like the amalgamation of mercury and gold:

At one moment the mirror revealed a tiny well-kempt man fixing his tie, humming a popular tune.

At another moment, a woman spoke conspiratorially into the motel room phone while chewing her thumbnail.

Another showed simply an empty room, clean and waiting.

A naked man lying flat on his back on the floor with the phone to his ear as he stared up into the ceiling.

Again it shifted and an obese man slept in the chair beside the lamp, fast food detritus strewn about everywhere.

A pair of teenagers sitting beside each other chewing candy on a bed.

As the scene continued to shift beneath Spiro’s hand, he said, Once you walked into a small room by accident and found inside it a distraught young man. You were in college.

The room in the mirror appeared to be destroyed by fire.

It was a janitor’s room, Spiro said, The young man you found there trembled in the dark on the floor beside a work bench among mop buckets and detergents. Brooms and wet floor signs. The young man was bleeding through his shirt. He had an open utility knife in his hand. Do you have any recollection of this?

Lindsey did remember. She’d been in a building relatively unfamiliar to her, there to meet with her health administration professor and discuss her final paper, a possible position at the hospital he’d been associated with. She had been looking for a restroom to freshen up before going into his office and instead found the room Spiro was describing. The young man on the floor had recoiled against the light when she opened the door. He was clearly distraught, she remembered, though she chose not to acknowledge it, though she chose not to see it. She’d asked him if he was okay. She chose to accept his answer that he was.

In the changing tableau in the mirror beneath Spiro’s hand, glimpses of scenes occupied by themselves, Spiro and Lindsey, but somehow not them, were revealed. 

Sometimes they were alone. Sometimes together.

Sometimes, Spiro said, you ask the young man if he is okay. Sometimes you prop the door open, forcing the light to come in hoping this will prod him to emerge on his own.

Sometimes you pretend you don’t see him and simply close the door and the young man opens his veins again and again until he disappears into his blood letting.

 Sometimes you call campus security or the police. Sometimes you alert a professor.

Once, he said, once you talked the young man. You skipped your meeting with that professor and instead walked out of the building with the young man and out onto the university lawn and into the warm spring sun.

Spiro’s breath caught. He gasped.

The mirror stopped revolving and steadied on a Lindsey sitting on the other side of the mirror. A Spiro was there too, standing behind her, his hand reassuringly placed on her shoulder. He looked healthy here. Whole. His eyes clear. The reflected Lindsey also looked different somehow. Her hair hung long. Her clothes were less severe, casual. Flowing even. Jewelry she’d never consider wearing adorned this woman that was somehow not her. A simple crystal hung from a thin leather string necklace, delicately perched at her breast.

Spiro said, We walked for hours and talked that afternoon. I explained to you what had been happening to me and you listened. You believed me. You believed that I was shifting through a tunnel. We sat in a park and listened to sparrow songs coming from trees. You bought a cup of ice cream and we shared it using a wooden spoon. We watched mothers and fathers play with their children and you said one day you’d like that, to have a family.

Lindsey had risen and approached the mirror. She stood next to Spiro and looked at the woman on the other side of the surface and the woman looked at her. Some understanding passed between them unlike any understanding that Lindsey had ever known.

The woman had a stack of photographs that she held up to the mirror, held out for Lindsey to see. Tears were streaming down both their faces as the woman in the mirror revealed one after another. Pictures of a family, the woman’s family.

You healed me, Lynn, Spiro said. You made me whole. We married. We have two beautiful children. Growing faster than we could ever have thought possible.

Lindsey touched the surface of the mirror, aching to touch the woman she saw there, aching to touch the children in the photographs. Lindsey said to to the woman, I am so alone.

But at night, Spiro said, I know you have regrets. You wonder. You think about what might have been. Wonder who you might have been if you’d closed that door that day. If you might have become a successful woman. If you might have done an internship for an optometrist. If one day you might become a CEO of a hospital with a secretary. Respected.

Lindsey folded into Spiro. 

He took his hand from the surface of the mirror and it returned to reflect only them, what they were there and then, subject to the common agreed upon laws of time and space.

Spiro put his arms around his Lynn and she sobbed softly into his chest.

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