Other Voices, Other Tombs

by Joe Sullivan

  He had a bit of a beatific smile on his face. More like he was somewhere else. He didn’t say anything, just moved his head in some vague way.

  “Let’s go in and figure out dinner then,” she said, more to bridge this fragmented moment between them. It was an earth-to-Den moment and she didn’t like it. It didn’t suit him. He was a practical man, a man who still shook out the newspaper at the breakfast table.

  “Sure, hon. I’ll just smoke, and I’ll be right in.” He reached into his sport coat.

  “Smoke?” A catch in her voice. “Smoke, after the dentist? With a tooth infection? Den, no.”

  “I’ll be right behind you, hon.”

  For a wavery moment, like the heat above the VW’s hood, she thought she was going to burst into tears. It was so wet and hot, and she felt like a plastic bag was around her head. She turned and went back into the room.

  #

  Den had slept for a couple of hours while she picked at a paperback, trying not to look over at him every few seconds. His untouched take-out carton stood under the harsh lamplight on the night table, the stink of greasy noodles breathing out of it. He’d been in the bathroom for forty minutes now, and she’d had to pee for most of them. She just wanted to brush her teeth and go to bed and snip the past three days out of the calendar.

  They needed to leave this motel. Be in motion. Den had gotten his toothache after dark Saturday and turned off the highway. Now here was Tuesday night, beach hours ticking away like a death-clock, and they were still plopped in the middle of Nowhere, Georgia. They had to be home Sunday evening. “The sky is a little bit wrong,” she muttered, and the sound of her voice startled her. The curtains weren’t even open.

  “Den?” She slid off the bed and went over to the bathroom door. She heard nothing at first, and even that worried her—she’d listened to his bathroom noise, less pleasant the older he got, for going on thirty years. Then there came a small sound, like a grunt mixed with a gurgle. “Den, I have to pee. Are you okay in there?” She rapped once. Nothing. “Den?”

  “A second!” She heard him spit and turn on the faucet. The water ran. It seemed to go on and on, softening to a whisper, until it became part of the room. At last, as her legs squirmed and scissored together, he opened the door with a clatter—that, at least, was more like him—and came out. His vacant grin hesitated as he looked at her, then his face went dark. His hand lifted to his jaw.

  “Does it hurt, hon?” She touched the hand he held against his face. “Just get a good night’s sleep, okay? I can drive us in the morning and you can heal up in the good Florida climate. Or we can go home. I could bring you soup in our own bed.” She hoped her face didn’t look too irritated.

  “You don’t drive,” he said. “I don’t want you having any of your attacks.” With this he winked at her. The almost childish mirth she caught in it—a tightening of his eyes—made the skin of her arms go cold again.

  “If you’re not feeling well, I can try. It’s been a good few years. I’m not helpless, you know.” She noticed a thread of blood over his lower lip. His tongue moved inside his cheek, restless. Like a worm. Not a worm, a tongue, she thought, of course his tongue’s doing that. She reached out—not up, exactly, he was only an inch taller—and wiped it off. “Is your tooth bleeding? Open up and let me look.”

  “No, no.” He stared over her shoulder. “Just the toothbrush.” She felt real unease—she hadn’t heard any brushing and he shouldn’t be doing it anyway—and turned to look behind her, but there were only the closed curtains. His face was pale—blanched, really—and his forehead splotched with red, but the corners of his mouth looked as though they wanted to curve back into that grin. And the tongue twitching inside. “I feel great,” he said. “This place is great.” His face slackened suddenly, and his eyes dulled back to inexpression.

  “Well, that’s… You okay, Den? Really?”

  “Fine, fine. I’m fine. Teeth are made of dentin, hon. Denser and harder than bone. Dentin, denser. Dennis! Get it? Let’s go to sleep, huh?”

  “Den, what?” She searched for traction. “Please, you need to get your rest. We’ll make up for lost time tomorrow.” The smile she tried on felt grim, but it held.

  #

  She woke with another headache like powdered glass. It was just past eight, the morning already warming to a kiln or a sauna or both. No surprise that she hadn’t slept well on the hard, narrow bed. Den’s was empty and barely wrinkled. She stared at it for too long, memorizing the angle of the still-plumped pillow. From where she lay, propped on elbows, it looked like the sheet and comforter were still tucked into the mattress. But Den was no bed-maker.

  She swung her legs onto the floor and stood up. She fought off a wave of dizziness before she noticed a twinge of dark and looked at her feet. All of her toenails were purple-blackened, with thin curling bruises like ink clouding in water. She lowered herself back onto the bed and lifted a foot. The pads of her toes were weltered as though she’d dozed in bathwater. Her finger crept down and touched the big toe. She squeezed it but there was no pain. Tears stung her eyes anyway. By her other foot was a dead cockroach she had somehow not seen. It lay on its back, more than two inches long, legs folded in supplication.

  Back home roaches were awful enough at more respectable sizes. With a shudder she went to the window. Den’s wagon was glaring the sun right at her when she pulled the curtain aside. She imagined the desiccated roach, jagged praying feet, climbing onto the heel of her foot—she gave a little scream and stumbled across to the bed and snatched up her phone.

  She went into her call list and stubbed her finger into the screen. Den’s phone—that shrill old rotary-phone ring he annoyed anyone around him with—burred from across the room. She walked, reminding herself that she wasn’t running, she was calm, over to the bathroom and saw it in the soap dish above the sink. Three drops of water bloated on the screen like contact lenses. The drain-hole stared up at her, the porcelain rust-stained around it.

  He was only checking out, she thought, surely. He was down at the motel office. But now she did cry. She let it come, for a little while.

  #

  The sun was angled lower in the sky than she thought it should be. Then again, she’d never been a Boy Scout, she told herself. It was past ten as she walked down to the corner of the building, scanning the front lot once more before she turned and hoped that Den wasn’t back there behind the motel, where she’d seen his car drive around from yesterday. A circuit through the lot and around to the other end, passing by the empty motel office, had shown her nothing, just a maintenance closet and too much lot, like in some golden time a swimming pool had been daydreamed before the owner wised up. She didn’t know where else she would rather Den be. Where did a traveler go in a husk of a town? Arby’s? Dollar Tree? But somehow anyplace else felt better than where she was going.

  The side of the place was maybe forty feet long, flat walls barren but for clinging mud daubers’ nests like adobe organ pipes, and she came around the back corner to something of a scab on the earth. A place that had healed over. A tongue of parking lot curved around back here, with slanted stripes painted so long ago she could barely see them. The asphalt was broken in dozens of places with bleached weeds. There wasn’t enough trash to make it a dumping spot, but on some of the wrappers and flattened cups, she saw product logos that didn’t even look like that anymore.

  If she’d thought the motel itself was a relic, its rear had gone beyond mere neglect and was edging into rot. It had an air of ruin. A bank to her right sloped up after about three feet of deadened pinkish grass and a light coating of straw. Stunted pine trees jutted from the bank at absurd angles like spears thrown into the red Georgia clay. At the top, no more than fifteen feet up, a sparse row of less unhealthy pines stood in an unimpressive vigil.

  She would have considered it abandoned, except it was not. She smelled something pungent in her nose, a deep animal scent like musk, or perhaps unwashed men. It was strong enough to im
agine a herd of oxen corralled behind the doors here along the rear of the motel. There were six doors, each blue with wide patches of red where the thick glossy paint had been torn off. None had numbers, and the row ended at the thin arm of the bank that hooked around and gathered the asphalt within a crooked elbow. Standing here in the moist swarm of heat, the heady musk, her thoughts swam in a kind of soup. Her mind slowed and thickened.

  The curtains were shut in every window, and she saw each as some eye, asleep, its lids closed on a vertical aperture. Her own eyes, reflected in the smeared glass, looked back at her from beneath her black curls.

  Something else was now watching her, something not sleeping, and she didn’t question the knowledge. She looked up at the second level, which stretched behind its rail to the right until the rail ran out and the building continued, blank as a cataract, beyond her sight. Rooms had never been added up there, or the doors in the front of the building opened onto larger suites on the second floor. The eye of her watcher was below, down here with her, between one pair of the curtains.

  She turned and looked along the lip of the bank above, to the haze-yellowish sky between the pines. There was no breeze and no click or reed of insects. No birdsong. She faced the doors again. Den, where was Den?

  The shadows shrank, bled into the ground. She stood, unable to push herself forward to the doors. The shadows crept out in the other direction, lengthened down into the lot from the arthritic fingers of the leaning trees.

  #

  The motel’s office was situated beneath a red awning so faded it was more a sickly pink. She held the questions she needed to ask in her mind. She lifted her toes against her sneakers, wanted the bruised flesh under the nails to hurt because it would make sense. Her blood felt thin and there was a cramped weakness in her limbs. She went into the office, where a woman was watching a soap opera on a TV smaller and older than the one in her room.

  “Help you?” The woman dragged her head around from her perch behind a rummage sale desk. Her sallow face already seemed unpleasantly pleased, as though she’d heaved herself out of bed only to keep information to herself.

  “My name’s Karen,” she told the clerk. She squeezed her eyes shut, realizing she didn’t want to hear what the woman might say, and tried to go on. “My name is Karen and my husband and I are staying here.”

  “Okay. Help you?” The woman’s eyes gave her nothing. Her accent turned the words into Hep yew?

  “Yes, I was hoping you could.” She felt stifled. There was a little fan on the desk shaking its head back and forth as though it knew it could never freshen all the air in here. “My husband is Dennis Tumey, and I’m Karen. I’m his wife. We’re in room 116.”

  “Right. Okay. 116.” The woman stared as though neither of them had said anything at all.

  “My husband, Den, he’s not feeling well. And a little bit ago—” She looked at her wrist but her watch wasn’t there. “—when I woke up, he wasn’t here. His car’s here. Our car’s here. But—” She stopped and became aware she had nothing to say that was urgent enough. Her tongue sat in her mouth. “He—Den, I mean…what time is it?”

  “Two or thereabouts, quarter after.” The woman shifted in her chair, and the desk shifted with her. “You saying your husband’s gone?” Grimacing, Karen told herself she really wasn’t hearing Yew sane yore huzzban’s gawn? The woman’s accent wasn’t quite that bad. “Cause I got his card number, don’t worry.”

  She clinched her jaw. “No, I thought maybe he went for a walk. I was wondering if there’s someplace people walk to around here.” This was not exactly what she’d meant to say. Fresh sweat crawled out onto her face.

  “Well,” the woman said, and blew her lips out in a chuckle. “There ain’t much. People tend to pass through. Those that don’t like to stick close. They like the comfort here, and the old ways.”

  “The old ways?” She cast around the room for an anchor. “I’m sorry. What time is it?” Her voice was thinning to a gasp. She couldn’t get her mind past the thought that she’d been in back of the motel for going on four hours.

  “Two. Two…twenty-one.” The woman pointed at a small white clock on the wall that claimed it was not quite noon.

  “I’m sorry. I’m going to go and get a glass of water.” She went outside and took deep breaths, trying to quiet the alarm bells ringing her husband’s name. Globs of cumulus clouds hung in the sky. None looked like anything she recognized.

  She forced herself to walk up to the road and over to a crosswalk, stood wringing her hands at the traffic light as she swiveled her gaze from side to side, looking for her husband, debating a direction. A video store decayed in the strip mall across from her. A hawk—or a vulture—marked the sky in the distance. The slow rush of cars drifted through the inter-section.

  The traffic light changed to red several times and still she did not move. The familiar strains of an attack, like distant mad flutes, began to rise in her chest. The periphery of her vision crowded with bright shadows. She took tiny sips of air, wanting nothing more than to see Dennis. He was her grit and her glue. She wanted her husband, and something was not right here.

  It had been years—good years—since her last anxiety attack, years since her last seizure, and like a child lost in a department store, she abandoned whatever grace she had and ran back to the room.

  Den had always handled her seizures with a calm and steady hand. He always knew what to do and did it like he was folding laundry, but he wasn’t here. He was gone and she lay there on the motel bed and went into her old shaking dark.

  #

  The phenobarbital released Karen in degrees from its fog. Something seemed to be leaning over her in the dark, a blacker silhouette over the bed tugging at her eyelids. The presence withdrew from her as she lifted her hands and scrubbed her face. At the edge of her vision, a figure lay on the other bed, facing the ceiling. She tangled in the sheets in a panic and fell to the carpet. Her eyes cleared. The bed resolved into emptiness, missing Den again. His pillow had dropped to the floor beside her. She raked her nails up and down her arms, felt the fingertips against her skin. They were deeply wrinkled and dry. She imagined vampires sucking on them as she slept.

  It suddenly struck her that she hadn’t searched for the car keys. Den might have left them in the room. But she was too heavy to get up. She thought of calling her parents, both nine years dead. She thought to call the police, the motel manager, but she just sat there on the floor between the beds. The seizure had left her weaker and more confused than she already had been.

  She didn’t move when she saw the front door wasn’t closed all the way—a skinny yellow rail of parking lot light edged into the room. Full dark had come. She didn’t move when most of the line was blotted out, and the door pushed open an eighth of an inch, and something watched her through the crack. She felt too heavy for anything.

  #

  She was still there, on the carpet between the beds, when Den came into the room. She didn’t know what time it was, but the sun had been beating at the gap in the door for more than an hour.

  “Where have you been?” She spoke as though he’d been out late at a bar, her voice too even and distant. There were other words, other things: that she’d needed him, he’d abandoned her, she’d had a seizure. But she closed her mouth and took him in. He had withered, somehow, and she could smell his rankness from where she sat. The sunlight enclosed him, nearly haloed him, and she had to wait until he moved deeper into the room to see that his navy shirt was smeared with red and half out of his grimed khakis. One foot had lost its loafer. His eyes roamed around the room.

  And something was wrong with his mouth, on the right side. It tucked down like he’d had a stroke. His chin had a swipe of blood, up along his jawline.

  Then she was on her feet and she slapped him. The silence rang out—her hand rang with shock at herself —but he wasn’t looking at her. She realized she’d impacted something hard, something unnatural, in his cheek.

&n
bsp; For a moment the room swam into darkness. “What’s in your face?” she said. “Oh Jesus, Den, what is that in your face?” He moved toward the bathroom, a few short strides, and she grabbed his arm and tried to pull his attention toward her.

  “You don’t have to stay, hon.” Calm, slurred. He grinned at her and the right half of his mouth was a gaping hole, a row of gums with ragged pockets, spit and blood drooling a rope that dangled below his face. And his cheekbones. Each one had a knob of skin bulging out, incised at the top, and on the right she saw something white like bone poking out of a cut.

  “You don’t have to stay here, hon,” he said. “I like it here. I’ve gotten a second room, in fact.” He went into the bathroom and shut the door. She heard him push in the lock. Quiet drew out and the only sounds were her weeping and the clicking of buttons, then something hammered against the sink and broke into a pattered rain of pieces. The pounding went on a long time, shifting to a lower pitch, like a bass drum, over near the door. He’s destroying the place, she thought. She tried to turn and run but couldn’t. She remembered standing at this door just two nights ago needing to pee.

  The door shuddered open at last and he shoved past her. His left fist was clenched, and bits of plastic and glass sprinkled to the floor like a trail of crumbs. “Don’t leave me here!” She shrieked and felt her voice crack. He stopped for a moment, turned and smiled again, opening his mouth wide for her. She gasped at the teeth that were there, glazed with blood, and the teeth that weren’t. He had implanted some of those missing in his cheeks, and she saw what could have been two more inserted near the failing hairline near his temples.

  “You don’t have to stay.” He left again.

  #

  Shards of his phone lay in the sink. He’d kicked the wall in beside the toilet, just above the floor, and cold, somehow black air leaked from the hole. She looked in the mirror, riveted by herself. Her eyelashes—both sets, top and bottom—had been cut off. She pictured Den folded over her in the night, blood dripping from his mouth onto hers, snicking with scissors. Then plucking them from her face pinch by pinch. It was powerful and strange, how alien her own reflection appeared without them. The rest of her face was drawn and sunken, too much like Den’s. The ringlets of her hair were limp and matted, creeping down her neck with new gray. Frightened eyes that were missing something of her essential self. The pull of some undeniable tide.