The texture of the voice played on the skin of my inner ear like a fine-grit sandpaper coated in hot milk.
What kind of place you running here? it demanded.
I stammered. I don’t. I just. Work here.
She heard it immediately.
What are you, a kid? A wise ass? Jesus. Where’s the manager?
No. I’m sorry, ma’am. I’m just. I don’t. I just. Watching over it.
Watching over it.
My brain was hard wired to think three times about what it wanted to say, then to rethink it three more times as it was saying it while second guessing, sure it should be saying something else instead. I tried to get out of my own way. Can something be. Is something that matter. With the room?
The terrible moment of silence she returned was hardly perceptible, but I knew that in it she was considering how to deal with me.She said, One light bulb, okay, it happens. But when the second goes, I get the sneaking suspicion that something funny’s going on.
Which meant she was in the dark. I don’t know why my head stuck on that.
I’m sorry. I didn’t.
That it’s not coincidence, she said, And somebody is trying to pull something funny. An attractive woman. Again just the slightest hint of pause.
An attractive woman, in the dark, I thought.
Sitting in the dark in a strange room, she said, as if she were reading my mind. Is there something funny going on? Is this funny to you in some way? I can call the cops, you know. Or is the next trick to cut the phone line?
I said, Uh. Um.
Her next sentence was more indictment than question: Are you a creep.
No. It’s not. I’m sorry. I didn’t-
I’m not one to complain. And I don’t scare easily, believe me. Tell me I have no reason to be paranoid. That something creepy isn’t happening or about to happen to me.
I can, I will bring light bulbs. We have them. No problem. Room 57, right?
Hurry up.
The phone snapped and I hopped to. I had been coached on these matters many times and what I did next was only what I was instructed to do in such situations. What I was trained to do. I shut the TV, Three’s Company, picked two fresh light bulbs off the second to top shelf in the utility closet, and flipped the sign on the door so CLOSED faced outward. I hung a second sign on the same suction cupped window hook so it hung below the first declaring its addendum: Be Back Soon! I turned the flimsy hands on its printed clock face to read 8:30. Ten minutes from now.
How does one kid screw in two light bulbs in the dark with a strange woman breathing down his neck, I thought, placing myself squarely at the center of what was the beginning of a joke, probably a bad one. I locked the door of the lobby on the way out by instinct or habit, wondering if there was a difference between the two. I told myself what I’d heard a thousand times: bring the tenant what they need and come back to the lobby as soon as possible with as little interaction with said tenant as possible.
Outside, the air was the same blue and red pulsing neon haze that had declared its dominion over all my nights on earth, and as I traced the contours of the parking lot with my sneakers, I whistled. At some point when I was in the vicinity of thirteen I’d promised myself that I always would, that I’d always make up a new whistling song, however awful, whenever walking the grounds and hallways of the motel. Why? To keep my mind off the reasons why I promised myself to distract myself with made up songs, maybe. Ridiculously, I considered the reasons that made distraction necessary while I whistled: The premonitions. The sinking feeling that never abated. The disquiet of knowing or, worse, not knowing what may or may not be happening behind the lines of deadbolts and doorknobs at any given time. The endless flow of strangers washing up on the shores of the poison river turnpike. Your home away from home,goes the slogan, but you never feel at home in a motel, even when it is your home. Especially when it’s your home, and you interface with the vast, unknowable, capital P Public.
I was just about to knock three inches below the numbers 57 when I heard a disturbing moan coming from within the next room, 59. I froze my fist clenched half-slack mid-knock. It didn’t sound like the usual forced laughter equivalent of carnal pleasure that typically emanated from a Motel Americana room. It sounded different somehow. It sounded authentic, genuine. The groan of genuine sickness or authentic pain, I thought. I thought I heard someone say something unfathomable and I was about to lean toward the suspect door and press my ear to it in hopes of clarity, when 57 opened right in front of me.
The woman wasn’t there. Not because she was invisible or a ghost, or some other such entity I, as a child, always feared occupied the rooms, but because having opened the door, she was already walking back into the room, a receding figure.
It was dark inside, as advertised.
I forgot 59 immediately and leaned into the space of 57. I have the light, I called out.
I should hope so, she said, Come in already.
I heard the sharp click of cigarette lighter. The small splash of liquid into a glass. A throaty exhalation. I stepped further into the room past the bathroom-flanked corridor. Then further still into the main space where I stood struck dumb at the foot of the queen-size I knew was there but couldn’t for the life of me see for the darkness.
She was sitting in the chair in front of the window blotting a sharp inked form out of the indigo light-filled window behind her. The buzzing neon. I was aware then that she could probably form some opinion of meby the very light that masked her, the indigo that made a dim visage out of me against the void of the room. As the smoke sculpted expressions out of the air around her head, she re-crossed her legs. Jesus, she crossed her legs.
In 59 next door it sounded like somebody knocked something over and it reported to the adjoining wall, inches from my head, a rounded bass drum thud. I jolted. Maybe it wasn’t something being knocked over, I thought. Bone, I decided. A skull.
Someone mewled. I assumed it was that same someone that called something out, but the voice was as muffled as the skull and I couldn’t make out any words.
I bet you’re a betting man, she said. There are two lamps. Pick one and you’ll pick a winner, I guarantee it. Not bad odds, huh?
She drew on her cigarette and for a suspended instant her eyes formed a pair of fiery dawns in the emptiness of her face.
I make my living by sure things, she said into a plume of smoke.
I fumbled for the lamp I knew to be planted on the desk. It was, intentionally, the lamp closest to me that I went to first, the lamp access to which didn’t require me to pass too near the darkened woman.
What’s your name, young man?
Another someone laughed next door, but it didn’t sound like that someone was laughing at a joke of any kind I’d ever heard.
Oscar, I said.
Weiner? she blurted.
Ha ha, I thought. I had long ago decided to forever boycott Mr.Meyer’s gleeful meat products in protest of the unfortunate happenstance of my name because I’d heard that song a thousand times sung by a thousand post-toddlers before I even left kindergarten. I proffered no answer. I felt around for the base of the lamp instead. Get in, get out, I reminded myself.
So, so serious, she said. I didn’t mean anything by it,Oscar. If you don’t want to tell me your last name, you don’t have to. I have an idea. I’ll make one up. Let me see…
Garrett, I said.
And what is an evidently game, handsome, no bologna, Oscar Garrett doing working in a place like this on a Friday night? Aren’t there girls to chase in this town?
I wondered how she knew I was handsome. I wondered if I was.
The other someone in the other room sounded like he was on the verge of tears. Blubbering. Pleading. I tried to ignore it as I felt my way up the stem of the lamp to the blown bulb. I unscrewed it, then worked the new one into the socket. The light flared, then steadied. The world leapt.
She was wearing a skirt and it took a supreme act of will not to look at the black stockings drawing unthinkable contours her legs as she re-crossed them again, true, but she was far less terrifying than I’d imagined.Her face held fewer angles than her voice suggested. Her eyes were a near black brown that seemed to simultaneously reflect and absorb the lamp light. The black blazer made her more desired teacher than vixen and I assumed it was the booze, or maybe it was the slightly blurred mascara, that gave her the appearance of a teacher who’d had a long day with unruly high schoolers. She stared unflinchingly at me.
Well, well, she said.
I looked down at the two light bulbs, one dead, one awaiting life in my hands. My eyes caught a small electronic box, which I took for a slightly enlarged Sony Walkman, on the table beside Jim Beam and his glasses. A pair of headphones was plugged into the Walkman-esque device.
My family owns this place, I said, My dad. He usually goes shopping for supplies on Sundays, but he had to go tonight instead because. Well. A small emergency. Nothing to worry about. A zone valve for the hot water heater wasn’t working is all, and-
And your mother, she demanded.
I shook my head.
I crossed her on my way to the bedside lamp, risking entrapment.
I see, she said, So you weren’t born into this Motel Americana so much as abandoned into it.
I recited to her a collection of words that I had written inmy journal the week prior and had since memorized: Desk sitting at the Motel Americana, I said, is a blood duty I stopped resisting when the futility of resistance drowned out my sense of injured justice.
I thought it might make me sound smart.
Hmm, she said, Liberty demanded, you mean.
What?
The futility of resistance drowned out your demands for liberty, more like, she said. For justice, you’d need a point of reference. You’re just a kid.
I shrugged, making a note to think about it more later.
And that’s it? she said, The Young Oscar Desk Clerk soon to be a Middle-Aged Oscar desk clerk untilthe day he’s a–
No! I found myself looking straight at her.
And then there was light, she said.
I’m not going to die in this place.
Oh, Oscar. Honey. I wasn’t going to go that far. Old desk clerks come before dead ones. She made the cigarette glow again. But since we’re on the subject, she said, What is it you want out of this life other than desk sitting on your injured justice. If anything, that is.
I didn’t answer, not because I didn’t have an answer so much as she had no business in the one I had. At least I had that.
The bulb in the second light didn’t need changing, after all.At my touch it flared briefly. I just had to tighten it and it stayed on. The room illumed, veritably bathed now in lamp light.
I’m sorry, I said, I have to go.
Someone was speaking loudly in the room next door, a commanding tone muffled by six inches of sheet rock and the wave pattern-grained yellow wallpaper.
You want to be rich, of course, she said. You want to get out of the life your life’s trapped you in. It’s only natural. You want to checkout of the Motel Americana and check into the American Dream. Who doesn’t. If you could be anything. Have anything. What, a movie star? Famous musician?
She stubbed the cigarette out.
Just out of curiosity.
No, I said.
No? she asked. What else is there but money and fame?
There was a sudden silence next door and it allowed the highway hum to seep back in through the cracks of the door and window like the noxious fumes it represented.
Ah, I think I see now, she said. She rose from the chair.She didn’t have very far to go to be inches away. She was exactly my height so she stared into my eyes with a directness that bordered on persecution. You’re not like everyone else, are you, Mr. Garret? She touched my cheek and my entire face burst into flames.
Have a drink.
This set the stammer into motion again. I don’t. I can’t. I have to.
Sit down, she said.
I dithered but eventually sat against every instinct, instruction,and inclination that had been bred and bludgeoned into me by my father. She turned off the lamp next to the bed so the other once again cast its hard shadows across the room. She flipped the round ruffled-edged paper covering off the second glass on the table and poured an inch or so into it. She waited for me to drink.I recoiled as the willies shot up my spine. She tried not to laugh. She did.
I have to go now, I said.
She ignored this, too. You’re wise beyond your years, she said, To hold so closely that which is… she trailed off. Most dreams wag from people’s tongues like the weather and celebrity gossip, she said, But there’s no need to be ashamed of what you want, Oscar. Who you want to be.
She emptied most of her glass then poured more into both of them without tilting up the bottle in the chasm between the rims. She pushed mine at me and watched until I drank again. The shudder was just as violent. Her legs swung close as she re-crossed them again. The high heels.
She said, reminds me of a story.
I clearly heard someone say, It’s not fair, next door.
I knew a girl once, the woman said. She loved a boy. Or thought she loved a boy. A boy she thought she was supposed to love, let’s say.Good looking. High scorer on the basketball team. Good grades. A bright future kind of kid who promised her the same bright future she thought she was supposed to have. He promised her the kind of future that’s really a past. The leafy backyard and shiny cars of her parent’s past future.
Well, one dark and stormy night, pretty boy got pretty girl pregnant as sometimes is wont to happen when pretty girls copulate with pretty boys. Normally, this sort of incident is attended with hysterics as only the suburbs can be thrown into hysterics, but the girl, incredibly wasn’t cast into crisis. Instead, she somehow thought the pregnancy was just a matter of course.The promised past future was just coming a little sooner than anticipated. It helped when pretty boy made his promises on pretty bended knee, of course. Her parents were generous sort.
The screaming next door began again redoubled.
Not much older than you, she said, Suddenly blooming with baby. There’s a moment, maybe you’re too young to know it still, a moment you get if you’re lucky, when you’re not a kid anymore and not yet an adult, when everything seems exactly as it’s meant to be. So much so you don’t question itone way or another or if you do and you protest this or that of the way the world is, the protestations themselves are a kind of admission of accord, that anything you can possibly think to do is the way it’s meant to be, including protesting the status quo. Anyway, that was the perfection of that moment. That baby. A small life in perfect, unconscious harmony with the pretty girl. Prophecy manifested.
The screaming voice was saying, Goddamn you. God damn you, in 59.
Well, the woman said, The silly pretty girl didn’t even realize that she was, in reality, trapped in her life like everyone else until eight months or so later, when she found her brand new pretty boy husband fucking her once best friend in the electronics shop where he worked after quitting school for the blooming with baby girl. His uncle’s electronics shop.
The pretty girl walked in there and looked for him but he wasn’t on the show floor where he usually would have been– proving he had no aptitude for repair, he was training as a junior sales rep and was therefore always on the floor waiting to sell microwaves and cassette players to up and comers– so the pretty girl, who thought it a good idea that day to pay him a surprise visit, went into the back room and there she found him inside the heavenward pointing legs of her once best friend. He’d evidently cleared the work bench of soldering irons and precision screwdrivers for the express intent of doing so.When the once best friend saw the look of utter surprise on the silly pretty girl’s face, she laughed. Cackled really. The pretty boy of her once past future didn’t say a word, though. As far as the blooming with baby pretty girl knew, he didn’t even bother removing himself from her once best friend.
So the blooming with baby girl ran from the store and raced back to her parent’s car and she drove that car in whatever direction it happened to have been pointed, and she drove it far and she drove it long. She drove it forso many hours, in fact, she lost track of where she was or how far she’d gone and at some point in the dead of night, she found herself in a cheap roadside motel in the middle of nowhere USA. A motel not unlike this one USA, actually. These are perfect places to rupture, aren’t they?
I looked around the room. The wall that was still screaming.
Inside that room not very unlike this one, the pretty girl cried for hours on end. She cried so long that her tears eventually turned into prayers and she offered those prayers to whatever heaven she thought may or may not have existed above her. She prayed for even longer than she had cried. She prayed until at some point in the night the prayers turned into curses in their turn. She cursed for longer than she had cried or prayed. She cursed her life.She cursed her parents. The once best friend. Herself. She cursed the pretty boy. She cursed everyone and everything she could think of. Electronic work benches. Borrowed cars. The act of conception. The motel. God himself.
God himself, she repeated.
The voice in 59 pleaded in agony. The woman seemed oblivious to what was very obviously now an act of torture.
She said, At some point in her litany of cursing, she had awaking dream where she saw herself strapped on a runaway train that was barreling down a pin straight track that she could very clearly see ended at the edge of a precipice that had no rail bridge to connect it to the other side of the gulf. Just as the train drove off the rails, a knock on the door rattled her from this vision.
The man standing in the hallway was handsome, older than she was, of course, and had a powerful chest shaped like a barrel. He had a lovely smile. He said that he was in insurance, despite his suit being much too expensive for insurance.
Insurance against an unhappy life, the barrel-chested man said, winking and nodding without actually winking and nodding.
The blooming with baby pretty girl felt the barrel-chested man was mocking her and tried to close the door, but he barged in as if he had booked that room with tears instead of her.
The barrel-chested man cracked his bulging knuckles like playing a xylophone and said he mostly dealt in black market lottery tickets,that he knew someone on the inside, wink wink, and the tickets he had were a sure thing. He dealt in sure things. He opened his case on the table and extracted a single, flimsy lottery ticket, dated a week from that day, placed it on the table, and snapped the case to.
The woman, extracted a piece of paper from her purse and placed it on the table beside the glasses and the electronic device attached to the headphones. A sure thing, she said. I deal in sure things. A winning ticket, guaranteed.
But money, she said, Isn’t quite what you’re looking for, either, is it, Oscar Christopher Garrett?
I tried to remember if I had finished the joke I had written myself into. If I’d told her my middle name.
The woman continued, The blooming with baby pretty girl, she said, Not entirely bereft of the faculty of critical analysis, immediately asked the barrel-chested man, If those are real, then why don’t you use them yourself,to which the barrel-chested man replied, Hell, already have. I got everything money can buy, sugar. Whereupon he played happy little popping sounds on his metacarpals.
Sounds of terror came from the other room.
Before the blooming with baby pretty girl had a chance to ask the second question on her lips, which would surely have been, Then why are you going door to door selling stuff, the barrel-chested man touched her swollen belly and said, Sweetheart, even train tracks can lead to better places than they’re bound for if you know someone who can operate the rail switch, someone who can set you on a different course, away from that great and scary gulf.
At this the air went out of the room and the barrel-chested man continued, What if I were to ask you what you think freedom’s worth to a girl in your predicament? I’m talking blue sky, free and clear, good old fashioned, safe as hell, liberty bell freedom.
The blooming with baby pretty girl thought on it a minute, then told him that without safety and freedom, life isn’t worth living.
The barrel-chested man nodded. Thought you might say that, he said, So it follows that freedom could very well be considered to be worth-
He didn’t have to finish the sentence because the blooming with baby pretty girl did it for him. Life itself, she said.
Life itself for safety and freedom, he said, Sounds like a fair trade to me.
He removed his hands from the blooming with baby girl’s belly, and offered it to her. Deal? he said.
She took the hand.
My you’re a pretty young thing, he said, collecting up his case. On the way out he said, You’ll sleep now.
She didn’t remember moving to the bed to lie down, but that night the girl slept better than she had in more months than she could remember.The sleep of the dead, as the saying goes. She slept so soundly, in fact, not because she was tired exactly, but because the baby’s movements did not wake her as it usually did.
Sheer terror sounded next door.
If you had asked her at the time, she wouldn’t have said so,and she wouldn’t have even have admitted it aloud to herself, but she knew as soon as her eyes opened that the life that had been inside of her was gone.
The once pretty girl did not leave the motel. Night turned to day and back again to night three times, and for three days and three nights she harbored the corpse of her dead child in her womb as if it were a murderous lover on the run. She wrote checks in the lobby signing her mother’s name. She subsisted on a diet of potato chips and chocolate bars from the vending machine. She slept on that overused motel mattress, denying that anything was wrong with anything other than the strangeness of the place and the circumstances that had driven her there. She even half-convinced herself that she had dreamt the entire incident with the barrel-chested salesman as a kind of abstract extension of the runaway train dream.
But on the third day, the once pretty girl felt the inexorable decay inside her declare itself. At first, it was the growing sensation of a dead weight hung low at the center of her gravity. Then a certain stiffening of ligature became a dull aching mass that quickly became a hot jabbing fusion. Before noon, the pain seared through her insides, unbearable and piercing, engulfing her alternately in waves of cold sweat and conflagrations of fever.
A rotten smell emanated from within her, the woman said, A stench of infection wafting up from her entrails. She wailed and howled condemnations at spirits unseen.
In the mirror, the glow that everyone told her she had possessed only a week before had vanished entirely. Her eyes glared hollow, yellow, and bloodshot set deep inside gray purple rings. Her skin dried and cracked. She stared back at herself, a corpse.
When the waves of pain no longer abated and she cried out its continuous diatribes of agony, she staggered into the parking lot naked and bulging, a fetid red river flowing from her onto the concrete, where she collapsed into the infected pool of her own making.
She had hallucinatory visions of EMTs in masks, the scream of an ambulance tearing through the sun, of being wheeled into the hospital under revolving banks of fluorescents. Pushing a small rotten death out into God’s once perfect world.
When the once pretty girl woke just before dawn, all she remembered clearly was that nurses had taken the small body without letting her look at it. To be fair, they may have asked if she’d wanted to see it. She may have declined.
The once pretty girl assumed that the hospital staff had found her information through the motel and had subsequently notified her parents of her condition and that it was only a matter of time until they arrived. So she rose from the bed, detached herself from the IV feeds, and found her way out of the hospital.
The barrel-chested insurance salesman was there waiting on the walk outside holding open the car door for her. A gleaming white Caddy with gold trim and white wall tires.
He said, You look like you saw a ghost, Sugar.
I didn’t want this the pretty girl said.
Well now, train passengers, even pretty ones like you, don’t rightly know which track the train should be going down. Shouldn’t have to neither. Important decisions like that are best left up to the switchman. That’s me. A switchman. Otherwise, train’s likely to drive off into a canyon. Don’t worry, sugar. I’ll know what’s best for you. Need a ride?
The once pretty girl got into the car.
The woman wiped a mascara-darkened stream from her face. Aping what I’d seen in movies in moments like these, I poured booze into her glass.
The once pretty girl’s been happy ever since, the woman said. In any case, she’s been free. The barrel-chested man has been true to his word. She’s been free of the life that was written for her on the day she was born and she has seen every corner of this earth, from the most serene peaks of the highest mountains, to the most luxurious rooms in the greatest metropolises man has created. She has dined with kings and queens and danced with movie stars and rubbed elbows with powerful politicians’ wives. She moves about the earth untethered, unbound by the chains that shackle common people and she has known intimately every iteration of carnal ecstasy.
The woman turned her face to me and said, She has also murdered with the cold calculation of curiosity afforded to only those who have been granted unconditional impunity. Her safety from the damage the world can do to her is secure.
The woman stared back into the space of the room saying, Her husband– yes, she’s married to the barrel-chested salesman now– her husband showers her with gifts at every chance he gets. Odd and lovely things plucked from this world like lilies of the field.
She fell silent and for a long time and we listened together to the brutality unrelentingly underway next door.
Finally the woman said, But I digress. The point here, Mr.Garrett, is that people can change.It is possible. If you get the right help checking you out of one place, into another. This, she waved a slender hand at the room, Isn’t a death sentence.
Look at me now, she said.
And I turned to her, against my will, it felt like. The glistened eyes framed in watery black.
So long as you understand the cost of it, she said, whatever it is you want.
I breathed. A voice inside me said, To know things.
To know things.
I want to understand how. I want to know everything there is to know about people, how they live and why they live, what makes them do what they do to one another in the open, in rooms like these. The loving, the killing.
Why would you want to know something like that?
To tell their stories.
I see, she said, You want to play God. And what is such omnipotent knowledge worth.
Knowledge is power.
Power is safety, freedom.
Freedom is.
Life itself.
The woman held out her hand. I took it.
She broke suddenly and swept up the lottery ticket and snapped it back into her purse.
Well, unfortunately, you’re not quite old enough to enter a proper agreement yet.
I stared at her, stunned.
She said, So we’ll have to call this a retainer.
A what?
You’re what, sixteen?
I nodded.
A two year trial run because, well, rules are rules.
She nudged the electronic box toward my half of the table. She handed me the headphones.
And the first taste is always free.
What is this?
Why, head phones, silly. You put them over your ears. She mimed the act as if instructing a child.
I placed the headphones over my ears and suddenly the torture underway in 59 leapt through my bloodstream like strychnine.
I looked at the woman for an answer and she smiled as if she had just been proven right. Then she reached her hand out across the table and held her fingers outstretched for a brief instant before placing her pointer and middle fingers over my left and right eyes respectively. I allowed her to lowe rthe lids.
I saw then the full extent of the suffering one human being is capable of causing another. The room was familiar, of course. 59 is simply the mirror image of 57 and I saw the screaming man in the tub in the bathroom with his torso opened. Some of the organs had been removed and placed neatly on the floor. Some of his entrails were pinned back so as to allow access to the area where a pair of aqua colored latex-encased hands were working at the flesh-matter with a common utility knife such as is used when installing drywall. The man being cut into was drugged or bound or otherwise rendered immobile, though he was still conscious and crying in agony.
With sudden g-force intensity that I felt as butterflies in my stomach, I was catapulted into the skull of the tortured man and saw in a calliope blur what I later realized was the imagery of the life he had spent. A childhood. A family. A political rally. But I couldn’t piece anything together.The images overwhelmed me and I overloaded like a fuse on a wet circuit.
I woke somewhat later staring up at the ceiling. The woman was looking down at me. You’ll get used to that, she said.
The door opened in the distance and a man with an enormous chest wearing aqua latex gloves on hands twisted into arthritic claws joined her side. He was holding something swaddled in towels I knew to be property of the motel.
Got something for you, he said. And he pulled from the bundle a small winged creature the size of a sparrow with the fur and face of a rodent. It was covered in a slick, watery-red slime, as if just born. It was endearing the way ugly puppies are endearing.
The woman took it in her hands with an expression like joy.
She said, such and odd and lovely little thing, aren’t you?
She and the barrel-chested man walked away and I lost consciousness again.
When I woke the room was empty save the Walkman like device and the headphones. Beside these was now a tiny black box. The bug.
I took the apparatus back to the lobby, where, out of curiosity, I tested the light bulbs. Both of them lit.
