The Pink Hotel

by Anna Stothard

  The pills made me very aware of how my brain worked, especially as I found myself in a rooftop beer garden downtown, lying flat out on the grass with the same superb thump of emptiness in my stomach. There were other people around, people I’d met while dancing, and we were all drinking beer in a sort of circle. Around me were knobbly grey trees the same colour as the winking chrome-and-glass building behind. There was a small guy called Justin with a big nose and chipmunk cheeks. He looked mean and confused and very high. Another boy was tall and had this vast, bobbing Adam’s apple. Everyone in the group was talking intently about “vanishing points”, the space where perspective lines converge, and everyone was tracing the vanishing points around themselves – where paths disappeared beyond foliage, where walls ended and sky began. They were all student filmmakers. I thought to myself: this is a vanishing point, this moment in time, but I didn’t say anything. My mouth wouldn’t have worked anyway. The boy with chipmunk cheeks asked me how I felt, and I had difficulty verbalizing the sensation of emptiness in my gut. More than that, it actually took me a moment to physically feel my body, at which point I worked down from my head to my toes without speaking. My jaw was uncomfortably tight, but the beer went down pleasantly, softening my tongue and the rigid muscles. My shoulders were solid and locked, my stomach was empty, my womb was empty, my legs ached. The boy with the chipmunk cheeks put his hand on mine and I took it away as if stung.

  “Hey, hey, chill,” he said.

  “Sorry,” I said, and the morning yawned forwards. Everyone around me seemed strangely elegant for this time in the morning and this state of Ecstasy and alcohol. At least it seemed that way. People smiled slowly, discussing the nuances of the morning’s light as it knotted against the reflective windows of the building opposite, or dissipated from a shiny metal Buddha in the corner of the garden. They must have all been camera guys, because all they talked about was different kinds of luminosity.

  40

  Later that day I took a Greyhound Bus out to the desert, to near Laguna Highway. I wanted to see where Lily died. In the phosphorescent East Los Angeles terminal there were army boys with buzz cuts and high foreheads, an old man with a white beard and a sullen, tidy girl staring over from a computer game she was playing in the cafeteria. Behind me, an obese Japanese woman in a velour tracksuit was talking to an elderly Southern lady. The Japanese lady’s name was Saigo, which she told her friend meant “end” in Japanese. She explained that she got her name because she was the last of twelve children, after which the woman’s mother moved into the guest bedroom and refused to get undressed in front of her husband ever again.

  “Now boarding for Indian Wells, Bermuda Dunes, Palm Desert, Rancho Mirage and Cathedral City and Indio,” the automated voice said. I climbed on behind the group of army boys. They sat in front of me and played a card game called Go Fish while talking about their kids. They’d all been to Iraq, and just got back on leave. One of the youngest soldiers, with a high forehead and stocky shoulders, had a daughter living in Fresno. A boy with acne had a pregnant girlfriend living in Van Nuys, and another had a four-year-old son with a woman who was now married to another man. As we fled through the desert, I imagined that the bus was driving across David’s suntanned skin. There was a broken pane of glass winking on the sand, smashed into twenty or so slices of reflected sunshine. It reminded me of the scars on David’s shoulder. I tried to remember the other scars, the one across his hand that he said was from a bar fight, the one on his lower back from falling off a wall. “Matrix,” I thought, imagining the mass of fine-grained strings of skin that made up a scar. The word came from the Latin for “womb”, which seemed fitting: an environment in which something develops, a mould in which something is cast or shaped, an organizational structure.

  I touched my tummy and looked out of the window. Laguna Highway was near Palm Springs, a few hours out of Los Angeles. The Greyhound Bus eventually stopped bang in the middle of nowhere, where khaki desert crevices met a single hot-tarmac road, and the driver told me that this was where I wanted to change buses. There was a forest of windmills against the craggy mountains. The bus stop was powdery pink concrete with a goods train passing behind it in a parade of graffiti-caked wrought-iron freights in faded red, blue and green. Someone had tagged the word “ECHO” onto several of the crates, and the repetition had a calming effect as every third or so façade “echoed” and kicked up dust with the methodical clack – clack – clack of metal on hot metal. A young man with dusty ankles and chapped lips was asleep in the shade of concrete, surrounded by a fortress he’d built from army-regulation camouflage bags. There was also a man riding a children’s bicycle, his big body unstable as he stumbled into view over the horizon. Everything was a little wobbly. On the other side of the pink concrete structure appeared a uniformed man. He stubbed out a hand-rolled cigarette as he shielded his bloodshot eyes from the sun to glance up at me and grin broadly.

  “Where you going to?” he said. I guess maybe he was stoned.

  “Laguna Highway,” I said.

  “Don’t know it,” he replied, and turned abruptly away from me to pick up a sci-fi magazine.

  “It’s the road that runs through Laguna Town, north of here. Can I look at a bus schedule or something?” I asked. He stared at me as if I was insane. Behind me the man on the bicycle had stopped, and his face was exactly the same colour as the sand, like a beach sculpture. He was panting from the ride, and his breath smelt vaguely of salt, too, probably the remnants of a tequila shot or salt-rimmed margarita on the rocks. I thought about the smell of alcohol on David’s skin the other day.

  “When’s the next bus east?” the sand man asked the uniformed man.

  “Should be here in an hour,” he said.

  “Mother-fucker,” said the sand man, and kicked the kerb with broken trainers.

  I had to stay the night in Palm Springs, which is the nearest town to the little pink bus stop, and also the nearest town to the mysterious Laguna Highway. The town was full of elderly people with sun-scorched skin. I found an information booth with an elderly woman inside, wearing big sunglasses I could see my reflection in.

  “What you looking for, love?” she said.

  “I want a bus that goes down Laguna Highway?”

  She ran through the schedule. There were funny little water-spritzer machines attached to the roofs of most buildings in Palm Springs, which sprinkled onto your skin and occasionally left little watermarks on people’s sunglasses. The air smelt of fried meat from a burger restaurant nearby. The information lady eventually decided that there was a bus that went up and down Laguna Highway from a town called Burrow, not far from Palm Springs, towards a town called La Toro.

  “Where you wanna get to, then?” the woman said.

  “I don’t really want to stop anywhere,” I said, and the woman frowned, losing interest in me.

  The La Toro bus didn’t leave till 2:00 p.m. the next day, from a different stop than the pink one near the train tracks.

  The inside of the bus smelt of burnt plastic, and there was no one on it except for a bedraggled woman wearing a headscarf, clutching bags of shopping and staring straight ahead of her. I’d bought a sunflower from a flower shop in Palm Springs, and it sat limply in my lap. After ten minutes, the bus turned from the small road out of Palm Springs straight onto a big highway marked with a sign saying “Five miles to Laguna”, so I guessed this was Laguna Highway. I held my breath, expecting to feel something at the sight of the road Lily died on. It was just tarmac and sand, though, and it looked nothing like my nightmare or my imagination. There would be no way to know exactly where the accident happened, of course, so I’d just have to get off at some point. The road disappeared occasionally around craggy corners, jumping out of sight. There were squat little shrubs poking out of scorched and bearded rocks.

  I wouldn’t have known we were entering the town except for a lopsided sign that said “Welcome to Laguna Town”, and a minute or so later we came to a huge plast
ic Mexican cowboy, taller than the bus, only the cowboy didn’t have a head on his shoulders. He wore an off-white shirt with denim pockets and a denim collar, but his head lay in the muddy sand next to his boots and had flies buzzing around it. Then the bus trundled past a solitary grocery store offering 99-cent tacos: outside there was a crowd of men drinking coffee from blue plastic camping mugs. All of their heads turned to watch the bus pass the shop, and nobody smiled.

  I looked straight ahead, and decided not to get out of the bus just yet. At worst I’d take the bus all the way to the end of the road and then come straight back. Each flattened shop or bungalow was miles from the last, and there was some sort of factory in the distance, kicking up curls of grey smoke into the perpetually corrugated white sky. Some of the buildings had little wire fences around them, and bony dogs yelped at the bus from their cages. We passed a burnt-out caravan on the right-hand side of the road, and I was so focused on this strange skeleton of black metal that I almost didn’t see a dusty blue warehouse-type building with a sign saying “Eagle Motorcycles” lying on the floor in the sand. The windows of the building were boarded and bedraggled, but I immediately recognized the shop sign from the picture in Lily’s suitcase, although in the picture the sign had been elevated above the door and the paint hadn’t been peeling. I got up off my seat and took a step towards the front of the bus.

  “Could you stop?” I said, and stumbled to the front of the bus, where the driver glanced at me in the wing mirror. His eyeballs were off-white, the colour of a fried egg. He looked around at me.

  “Here?” he said, not stopping.

  “Yeah, sorry, I want to go to that Eagle Motorcycle place we just passed,” I mumbled, staring back at him in the grubby mirror. As the driver begrudgingly put his foot on the break and curled to the side of the road, I scanned the surrounding area for David’s SUV. “Do you know if anyone lives there?” I said. The bus shuddered to a stop.

  “Don’t know. Think it’s been closed for years. You getting out or not?” he replied gruffly, opening the folding bus door. For a town with such a pretty name the air there smelt like singed skin, sand and petrol.

  “When do you come back?” I said to the driver.

  “Not till this time tomorrow,” he said. I hesitated on the steps of the bus, Lily’s suede shoulder bag on my arm. We were two hundred metres away from the shop.

  “Really? Someone said you came back this way today. At the information booth they said this was your route.”

  “The information booth was wrong,” he said laconically. “I don’t have all day,” he said.

  I glanced out into the desert and hesitated. Then I swallowed and figured – fuck it, there’s not much to loose really – so I stepped off the bus, but I was scared as the bus doors closed behind me, and all I had was a suede shoulder bag and a sweating sunflower that had lost half its petals in the vicious desert heat. Almost before my shoes hit the tarmac the bus started up again in a beige bubble of sand.

  There was nothing around for miles except smoke trawling up from cumbersome horizon-level buildings. I didn’t feel sad or moved or curious or lonely. Nothing came into my mind, so I turned away from the road that she died on and walked the two hundred metres or so up to the closed doors of the Eagle Motorcycle building. I stood exactly where she’d stood in the photo. The sign was at my feet, while it had been over Lily’s head, and there was empty space to my left where her motorcycle had been. The air was so hot it was difficult to swallow, even though day was turning into afternoon as I stood up on tiptoe to look through the windows of the building.

  “Hello?” I said. There was something lodged on the inside of the front doors, a bit of metal that may have fallen down from the roof or wall and made it impossible to open.

  “Hello?” I said, louder. “Is anyone there?”

  It didn’t look like there was anyone in there, and I felt nervous about how on earth I’d get back to Los Angeles. Perhaps I could walk to the 99-cent-taco place and call a cab. Eventually the door of the Eagle Motorcycle shop squeaked open a bit and I could slide through. Something clattered outside the mechanics shop, and I jumped. A ragged little kitten chased a Coca Cola can over the stubble. The kitten followed the can out of sight again, and I held my breath.

  The front door had been held shut by a fallen bit of machinery – a ramp. There was half a motorcycle suspended from the ceiling, and another motorcycle was gutted in the corner. The bikes looked similar to the one in Lily’s photograph, but both of these bikes were covered in dust and rust like they hadn’t been touched in a long time. They were nothing like the muscular pieces of metal that I saw at the mechanics shops. These ones had smooth lines and simple shapes. The back wheels were smaller than the front wheels, so the bikes looked like yawning animals, both arching their backs. I thought of the coyote David and I watched outside his flat. “In order of preference, orgasm, ice cream or yawns? What do you think?” he’d asked me, and I never answered.

  Around the bikes there was a mortuary of parts. There were thick black tires, handlebars, sprockets, greasy chains and wing mirrors all glinting as the sun struggled through dusty windows. The seats and mudguards looked like they were made of onyx. I jumped at the sight of an eagle on a bookshelf, but it was stuffed. It was a taxidermy eagle, like the taxidermy cat above the door of August’s bar. The bird’s spine was arched just like the bikes. His head was high, beak polished to a knife point. There were bottles with viscous and chemical-sounding names like Autoglym and Mamatec. I wondered who invented those names, some aspiring poet stuck in the branding of cleaning chemicals? Two massive industrial fans sat in two corners of the room. A pile of dust covered each blade. Across one cork-lined wall hung a few wrenches, pliers and screwdrivers. Along another wall were planks of wood, untidily littered with a few dusty books. They weren’t all vertical like the little army of alphabetical books in David’s flat, but spewed out in horizontal and diagonal piles, front covers akimbo, wrinkled pages folded out all over the place and interjected occasionally by the odd ornament – a metal lion head, a small wooden totem pole, a souvenir Venus de Milo. I noticed that some of the books had front covers like the Enkidu novel I’d taken from next to Lily’s bed at the wake and lost when my bag was stolen. There was a whole bunch of these books, and I fingered their dry pages: one was called Prometheus Bound, with a drawing of a naked man in handcuffs; another was called Leda, with a picture of a half-man, half-swan creature. I flicked through books on astronomy and books on art history. Stuff had fallen off the shelves to the floor. There was a complimentary mug from a gas station broken on the floor, and a pink conch shell. I touched the smooth seat of one of the bikes. Maybe one of these bikes was the one she died on.

  “Excuse me, is anyone there?” I said to the nothing, and wondered where and if I’d sleep that night. I would stay in the workshop I suppose, but I’d be cold. I looked around for blankets, and saw some plastic sheeting with frayed edges. I shivered and fondled a chunk of smooth, half-welded metal from one of the work desks. There were streaks of colour in it, and it was a perfect weight.

  Apart from the two windows at the front of the workshop, there was one little window at the opposite end. Through it I was surprised to see a bungalow tucked right behind the workshop, out of sight from the road. There was garden furniture outside it, including a rusty barbeque and some discarded barbeque utensils. Behind the barbeque there was something that looked like a dry pond, except it was made out of a plastic rowboat, sunken into the sand. Colour was just beginning to drain from the desert as midday turned to late afternoon. The massive expanse of sand around the building did look a bit like a lagoon, and the boat could have been a ship in low tide. There were no vehicles around, so I guessed it would be as empty as the workshop.

  I walked up to a wire-mesh gate that framed a garden of cactus plants and shrubs around the bungalow, a bit like the garden in my gecko dream. Inside the wire mesh, the bungalow windows were dark, and I knocked hesitantly before trying th
e door handle. “Anomaly,” I thought. “Mendicant,” “grandiloquence,” and raised myself onto tiptoe to stare through a broken window, which was open a crack. I couldn’t see anything through the glass, because it was darker in there than it was outside, and the sunlight made rainbows on the surface. What is glass made of? Is it just sand? It was only a small window, about the size of an A3 piece of paper, reflecting light particles back into my face.