by Ellen Datlow
One day, on impulse, I took a marble out of the big glass vase full of them that decorated the breakfast island and set it down near the far wall, then watched it roll in a slow, meandering zigzag across the apparently level linoleum to gently pock against the inside of the front door. Can you say non-Euclidean, boys and girls?
And there was a tone in there too. It crept up on you, underneath everything. Sometimes it seemed to be coming out of the fixtures, shivering inside the lamps like an ill-set fuse, a light bulb’s tungsten filament burning itself out from white heat into stillness like some glowing metal pistil. Sometimes I felt it coming through the floor, vibrating in my soles, making my toenails clutch and the bottoms of my feet crawl. It set my teeth on edge.
The longer I was in that place, the more I wanted—with increasing desperation—to be anywhere but.
Not that I cared enough to ask, but by the end I was convinced the only reason Greg had bought this unit, in this building, in the first place—the only way he could have—was that he’d never actually been here himself; that the entire exercise, from review to mortgage to signing, had been conducted online through virtual tours, remote bank branches and faxed paperwork.
That was the twenty-first century for you, though, bounded in the proverbial bad-dream nutshell. So supposedly interconnected on a global level that you could buy a place to live in a completely different country, without ever having to see for yourself—in person—just exactly what made it so . . . utterly unlivable.
• • •
When people ask me what I do for fun, for a hobby, here’s what I often want to say: That there’s a tone that moves around the world, and I follow it. That it’s always been there, buried under everything else, all that static and noise and mess we call ordinary life—blowing high and dim, a wind no one else around me ever seems to hear.
Except, of course, that every once in a while, somebody does.
So I do my research, find the clues, the names and dates and places; I seek those people out, ask my questions and listen carefully, note it all down. Just the facts, if “fact” is ever the right word for something like this—rumour become anecdata, an utterly subjective record of experience, impossible to doubt or verify. Then I input what I learn, reformat it slightly and post it on my webpage, throwing comments open underneath. Leave each story hanging there, an open question, after which I retreat and watch to see who might turn up, who responds with reactions that read like answers.
Every story starts and ends the same way, no matter who tells it. Remember that strange thing that happened, that one time? How it went on, till it stopped? How we never knew why?
I cycle through these instances, rubbing each one in turn, telling them like the beads of a black bone rosary. They’re tiny doors I leave open, so others who’ve heard the same bleak call can peep through. And it’s like I’m mapping the edges of something invisible, something which exists on a completely different wavelength, an inhuman frequency; I’d never catch a glimpse of it otherwise, except through compilation, running the numbers. Just trying to figure out what it’s not by grasping at whatever I can, however briefly—a blind woman theorizing, modelling the world’s most nebulous elephant, and not even by touch. More by rumour.
It lives in the dark, alongside us, not with us. Impinges on us occasionally—or is it the other way around, maybe? We want to believe we’re the point of any exercise, after all, but maybe we’re not. Maybe we never are.
Collateral damage, spindrift, spume: We’re what’s left behind, the wake made flesh. Its tendrils blunder by us and scrape us raw, like shark’s skin. And I’m just trying to build a community, I guess, to pare the loneliness down before it cores us clear through—cores me. Not as though anything actually gets solved in the process, but at least by the time it’s over, we no longer assume we’re all crazy.
“I just didn’t know who else to talk to,” they (almost) always say, and I nod, understandingly.
“Me either,” I reply.
• • •
Back in April, when my original plans for moving out of Dad’s place for the summer had fallen through (rooming with school chums, who suddenly decided to tour the world over the summer instead), Gavin had impulsively offered to let me share his apartment until fall; wouldn’t even have to chip in on the rent so long as I got a job and paid for my food, he said. In hindsight, this was one of Gavin’s bad habits—he was a chronic over-promiser, always on one manic deadline or another—but I was too overjoyed to put two and two together, though we’d never even talked about sharing a place before then. That this pissed Dad off even more than the previous plan just struck me as an extra bonus, at the time.
In practice, Gavin’s no-bedroom unit turned out to be way too small for two people, especially when the host was a neat freak and the guest tended to overreact to anything that felt like nagging. Didn’t help I already felt indebted, resentful about it, and guilty about that resentment, all of which only played into Gavin’s increasingly passive-aggressive attitude. Distracting ourselves in bed worked for a while, but not long. Greg’s job seemed like a lifeline, as much for the excuse just to get out of the apartment as for the money, and I can’t really make myself believe Gavin didn’t sense that.
The general routine went like this: Greg booked residents online, then e-mailed me with the details of when they were supposed to arrive, at which point I went over and cleaned the selected apartment as sparingly as possible, trying to make it look “welcoming” for his guests. This involved garbage and recycling removal, cleaning all sinks and surfaces, running the dishwasher and washer-dryer, putting fresh sheets on every bed, opening windows and spraying spring fresh scent everywhere, plus light dusting. I charged fifty dollars an hour for housekeeping, clocked it, then sent Greg the receipts for any household supplies along with the rest of my weekly invoice.
Eighty dollars to check people in, eighty to check them out; I handed the guests a set of keys the first time round, took it back the next. Sometimes they were late, but I didn’t get paid for waiting around, so I’d ring that up as part of the housekeeping. Sometimes I was late, and they just left the keys on a table by the door, closing the apartment door behind them—I worried about it initially, but it was never a genuine problem. People don’t really tend to try other people’s door handles, not even when they’re neighbours.
The money was welcome and arrived fairly regularly, but the job itself ate up far more of my time than I’d thought it would, especially when you factored in what Greg liked to call “floating duties.” As the only person the guests ever dealt with face to face, I was essentially playing concierge at a nonexistent hotel, often getting texts in the middle of the night from people who thought that paying to squat semi-illegally in someone else’s apartment entitled them to treat me like their maid. One woman demanded I come over and re-clean the Flowered Sheets bathroom at 2:00 a.m., because it was so “unforgivably filthy” it was keeping her awake; another demanded I babysit her children for free, because I’d “misrepresented” how kid-friendly the area really was. I remember a father and two brothers who booked the Motel over a long weekend, at the beginning of July, apparently for the express purpose of getting solidly drunk together for three days straight; when I came in on Monday, I found they’d already been gone for hours, leaving behind three teetering pyramids made from beer bottles and a stench that didn’t disperse until I propped the front door open and set fans in front of all the windows.
Like any public washroom, people do things in hotels they’d never do at home. They specifically come there to do them, because they expect someone else to clean up after them.
Naturally enough, this soon led to a constant series of Variations on a Collapsing Relationship, repeated riffs on You’re never around anymore, Loren and I’m working, Gavin—because what else could I do except trust him to understand? After all, we were rowing the exact same leaky financial boat, essentially: him with his unpaid internship, his under-the-counter graphic des
ign contracts, versus me with my two equally illegal jobs, killing time, and racking up the dough till I could go back to Brock University and live on campus. The both of us robbed and left twisting like the rest of our generation, unable to rely on anything but the post Too Big To Fail world’s inherent unreliability. With nobody else to take out our stress on, our arguments grew bitterer and bitterer, repetitious, discordant as bad jazz:
If the job’s giving you that much grief, why don’t you just quit?
You know I can’t.
I know you won’t.
You were the one who said I had to pay for my own food.
Fine, but can you at least stop talking about it all the time?
What the fuck does that mean?
It means that if you won’t do anything to fix a problem, then there’s not much point in complaining about it, Loren. So I’m sorry, but shit or get off the pot. Please.
Didn’t help that Gavin was a skeptic by nature—I’d tell him about all the weirdness at the Motel, only to listen to him break it all down, carefully, till it barely convinced me anymore. It’s badly laid floor tile, poor design choices, horrible ventilation, he told me. Sick-building syndrome, that’s all. And hotel guests behave badly everywhere, nothing needs to be “wrong” for that. All of it only more infuriating for not being anything I could really argue with.
One evening in mid-July, I finally came home with what I thought might be direct evidence, shoving my phone at him the minute I got through the door. “I’ve got something you need to hear,” I told him, “but first, I have to tell you what happened with these last two guests.”
“The women you checked in on Monday?” Gavin asked. I had to give him this—even if he never took anything I said seriously, he did at least listen, and remember. “From Barrie, kept calling it their ‘Big-City-cation’—you said you thought they might be a couple.”
“Yeah, exactly. Well, I go by today to do checkout and the shorter one’s sitting in the kitchen with her head down, looks like she’s been crying. Tells me she and her friend had this horrible fight, but she can’t remember about what; anyhow, she stormed out, then came back to find her friend was gone. Hasn’t been able to reach her since.”
Gavin scoffed. “They wouldn’t be the first people to fight on vacation, Loren. Probably just turned her cell phone off and went back by herself.”
“Yeah, that’s what I told her.” I sat down on the couch. “But after she left, when I was cleaning, I found an empty vodka bottle in the trash, and the place was also a lot cleaner than usual, like somebody’d gone over it already. Plus there was a smear of something that looked like blood, on the edge of the bedroom door.”
Gavin put his hand over his face. “Jesus, Loren. I mean, how are you even sure it was blood, exactly? You packing luminol in that kit of yours?”
“Oh, please, fuck the fuck off with that CSI bullshit, okay? ’Cause while I may not have airquote-worthy ‘formal forensic training,’ I have had a period every month of my life since I was eleven . . . so yeah, Gav, I do think I know a bloodstain when I see it, thank you very much.”
Hadn’t meant my voice to be quite so acid, but I was pissed, and it showed; Gavin flushed, like he’d been slapped. “Fine, then—say it was blood. So what? Could just have been from one of ’em whacking her head on the door by accident, especially if she was drunk. ’Cause if you’ve got any sort of firm evidence it was anything else, you should be telling the cops, not me.”
I wanted to punch him, but settled for gritting my teeth. “Just listen to the damn file, all right? Tell me if that room tone sounds normal to you.”
It had taken nearly an hour of creeping around the Motel, holding my phone at wrist-straining angles with its volume jacked to absolute max, but finally I’d found a place where the noise that constantly harassed me seemed both louder and steadier, as if it might be the actual spot it was emanating from directly (today, anyhow). The result was twenty-three solid seconds of ululation, near-inaudible without earbuds, which I offered.
Gavin sighed, screwed them in, activated the mp3; I held my breath, watching as he listened, but his expression didn’t change, except for the faintest frown. Till he closed his eyes, at last, took the buds out, shook his head. Telling me, as he did: “Loren, that’s nothing, literally. It doesn’t sound like anything.”
I tried not to blink as the wave crashed up over me, sheer disappointment turning my voice harsh again. “So . . . I’m just crazy, I guess.”
“Did I say that?”
“You didn’t have to.”
We stared at each other for a moment before Gavin finally turned away. “I’m going to make some dinner,” he said. “You sound like you need a break.” He went into the kitchen.
The moment he was gone I grabbed the phone back, shoved the buds in my own ears and hit play. And there it was—that same note, wavering just underneath the hiss of empty air, making my jaw thrum, my fists clench, scowl sliding to wince. How could he not hear it? Were his ears just that bad, or . . . ?
(Or. Or, or, or.)
That night I dreamed I was pulling hair out of the drain in the Motel’s all-black bathtub, whole sodden clumps of it melted together by decay, reduced to their ropy, keratinous components. It wasn’t mine, and it smelled bad, worse than bad—terrible, terrifying, sharp enough to make the back of my throat burn. Like glue on fire. Like mustard gas.
With that tone there too, obviously, behind everything—behind, beneath, whatever. That same unseen filament twisting, sizzling, burning itself out; a call from far off, filtering down through great darkness. That shadow, mounting, yet barely visible: five fingers separating on the Motel’s master bedroom wall, angled outwards, sketched charcoal grey on grey.
That open, beckoning hand.
• • •
The next morning I kissed Gavin good-bye as he set off for work, putting a little more energy into it than usual, hoping that would revitalize things, agreeing to vague evening plans for dinner and a movie. Then I came back after cleaning the House of Flowered Sheets and checking somebody in only to find my packed suitcases outside “our” apartment door, a note taped to the handle of my laptop case: SORRY, THIS ISN’T WORKING. TRIED TO TELL YOU BUT COULDN’T. LOCKSMITH CAME WHILE YOU WERE OUT, PLEASE THROW KEYS AWAY. I’M GONE FOR TWO WEEKS, NO POINT CALLING. DON’T HATE ME.
“Fuck you,” I told the wall, hoping he was actually lurking behind it, his coward’s ear pressed up close to hear my reaction. And left.
Gaslighting, my friends would have called it—he was making me question my own reactions, my own perceptions. But I was doing that anyways; the fucking Puppet Motel was gaslighting me, not Gavin. Gavin didn’t matter enough to gaslight me, and maybe he knew it. Maybe that’s why he dumped me. Maybe I would’ve dumped me too, if I’d been him.
(But I wouldn’t have, I know that already. Not when I already knew where I’d inevitably have to end up, after.)
“What are you going to do?” my mother asked me, when we met in our local Starbucks.
“Your place is out of the question, I guess.”
To her credit, she looked genuinely unhappy. “You know I would, sweetheart, but there just isn’t enough room.” She knit her hands around her cup, as if for warmth, despite how muggy it was. “And I won’t even ask about moving back in with your father, given he’s just as stubborn as you are.”
“Thanks for that.”
“Honesty costs nothing. Seriously, though—you don’t have any other friends to stay with?”
“They’re his friends, mostly,” I admitted, “so not crazy about asking. Not that I know who’d have the space, anyway. . . .” I trailed off, realizing the obvious answer.
After Mom left me, I pulled out my phone and checked the time-conversion app I’d downloaded a month and a half before, back when I first took this stupid job; it was just coming up on seven a.m. tomorrow morning in Seoul—Greg might still be at home, hopefully already awake. A quick text later, I had my answer: George St
reet unit’s free for 2 wks—yrs if u need it
I slumped, so relieved that I didn’t even realize until later that it was as much for which unit he’d offered as that he’d offered one at all.
• • •
I was so out of practice at dealing with real people, the friendliness of my new neighbours at George Street caught me by surprise. One middle-aged housewife a floor up from me made a point of dropping by to “welcome me to the building,” acting so amiable I found myself talking to her when I didn’t have to. And, ultimately, telling her a little about my situation—before learning she was actually head of the condo committee.
The very next day, that security guard I usually nodded to handed me a thick manila envelope, telling me the building’s by-laws explicitly forbade sub-letting without the proper paperwork—none of which, of course, Greg had ever bothered to fill out. The envelope contained a cease-and-desist letter I was instructed to forward on to Greg as soon as possible, and I was told to be out by eight a.m. next morning, or they’d call the cops. Panicked, I used Greg’s own landline to call his Seoul office directly.
“Oh, that,” he said, maddeningly unimpressed. “Yeah, go ahead and send the paperwork, but don’t worry; the corporation never bothers following up, it’s not worth the legal expense. Just lay low whenever you come in to clean and don’t talk to anyone, it’ll blow over in a week.”
“Does that mean I can stay?”
“Uh . . .” The cheerfulness faded. “No, better not push it that much. King unit’s empty tonight, though; I’ve got a booking in there day after next, but I can switch them over to George, so you’ll be good for a week.”
“Dude, are you even hearing me? They know what you’re doing now, they’re just going to throw out these next guests too—”
“No they’re not. Look, Loren, I hate to say this, but this only happened because you gave yourself away to that nosey-parker upstairs; management doesn’t really care about this stuff unless somebody on the committee forces them to. You’ll still get your money.” Then he softened. “Don’t worry, Loren. We’ll figure it out.”
