“Fuck this.”
I drop the bag on the carpet and it explodes like a grenade in front of 504. I confirm the cash register is locked, turn off all the lights, and exit the hotel. The humidity should not be so strong at this time of night. But hey, at this point, I’m used to Texas being an asshole. The anger fuels me across to the Other Goddamn Hotel directly in front of my own hotel.
George is sitting behind the front desk, watching Pulp Fiction on his laptop. The volume’s cranked to full blast and the sound of Ving Rhames being raped by skinhead perverts can be heard throughout the lobby.
“My God, man, have you no shame?”
George looks over his shoulder, surprised to see someone standing there. “What? This is a good movie.”
“I think you give less of a shit about your job than I do.”
“That’s highly possible.” George mutes his laptop. “Speaking of which, I see you’ve already given up.”
“This lady is going to kill me, man.” I tell George about the hot chocolate lady. He proceeds to laugh like I’ve just finished telling him the greatest joke in history.
“She handed you a bag of vomit?”
“Yeah.”
“How did you not strangle her?”
“My hands were too busy…you know, holding the bag.”
“Of vomit.”
“Yeah.”
George keeps laughing. I sigh. Enough already. “You gonna bust out the flask, or what?”
He tries to calm himself. “This friendship is a sham. You just want my booze.”
“Pretty much, yeah.” I grab the flask and pour a healthy dose in a plastic cup on the front desk. “After tonight I am going to need all the whiskey you got.”
“Well, drink up.” George gestures to the empty lobby. “It’s not like we have cameras or anything. Fucking idiots.”
I gulp the whiskey down and refill the cup. “Do you think we’re the only two hotels in existence without actual cameras?”
“Probably.”
“One day someone will walk up to the front desk, shoot me in the face, take all the cash from the register, and walk out. And no one will ever know who did it.”
George seems to contemplate the idea, then nods. “Yeah, I can see that.”
The whiskey flows down my throat, warm and cathartic. “It would be a fitting end to a perfectly shitty life.”
George raises his own cup and we bonk them together. “Amen.”
We drink and discuss owls.
“She definitely sounds crazy,” George says. “But is she good looking?”
“I don’t know, man. I guess.”
He laughs. “You’re still in love with that fuckin’ bulimic chick, aren’t you?”
Shoving the whiskey down my throat seems to work as a decent excuse for not responding.
George shakes his head. “Have you even talked to her yet?”
“I told her ‘good morning’ the other day.”
“And what did she say?”
“…Nothing.”
“She just went into the kitchen and stole food, right?”
“I guess.”
“Then she puked it out in the bathroom?”
“I don’t know.”
“Did you hear her throwing up, yes or no?”
“…Maybe.”
Before finishing off the flask, George says, “Just don’t forget to make me best man at your guys’ wedding.”
“Deal.” I pause, debating telling him about the way she’d assaulted me the other day, but decide to drop it. He’d already laughed enough tonight at my own expense.
Back at the Goddamn Hotel, breakfast has been served and I’m just counting down the clock. Mostly sober at this point, but still in desperate need for a bed to crash upon. A group of men loiter around the lobby, fiddling with their cell phones. They belong to this oil company that often stays at the hotel. They’re waiting for Kevin to arrive and drive them all to work in the hotel shuttle.
One of them, this big son of a bitch wielding a Lovecraftian mustache on his upper lip, turns to the smallest of the bunch and says, “So, you gonna be my dance partner today, baby?”
The skinny one lowers his cell phone and looks at the big ’un. “I don’t know. I’m kind of sore from working with Mike yesterday.”
The big one sighs. “Oh, come on, don’t be a wuss.”
The smaller one pauses, seeming to consider his options. “I don’t even have the right shoes.”
“You’ll do fine. Come on. I need you to dance with me. You’re small, you can fit right up in there.”
“All right! Fine. Jesus.”
The big one grins, although it is almost completely hidden by his mustache. He holds out his hand and high fives his new dance partner.
I try to return to Animal Money but am once again interrupted when a man dressed in a business suit strolls inside. Despite being dried and sober, there is no mistaking him as the nearly naked man who had previously punted a beer can outside the hotel at the beginning of my shift. He nods and says, “Hi, how’s it going, sir?”
I stare at him, amazed with the universe. “Did…did you find Denny’s?”
He smiles and rubs his stomach. “Boy, I really love their omelets.”
Just as he disappears, the woman from 504 takes his place.
“Hey, you can cancel my wake-up calls,” she says, seemingly materializing from nothing. At least her terrifying breasts are thoroughly concealed. “I need to extend my stay another two nights.”
I nearly start crying. “Sure thing, ma’am. You got it.”
Before she leaves, she says, “Make sure to have your little illegals replace my dirty towels with new ones. I’d like some actual goddamn service for once.”
And the tears finally arrive.
Part 5
The alarm clock screams. Somewhere inside this contraption resides a tiny man being tortured to death, and I am stuck listening to his suffering. My body remains still, lifeless as a corpse. If I don’t move, maybe the laws of time will dissolve into the unknown. But the shitty song playing on the radio won’t end until I get up and turn it off. I piss and get dressed in jean shorts and a Bad Religion T-shirt, then head out the door.
On the way to the hotel I stop at a gas station and buy a Red Bull. The drink’s empty by the time I make it back to my car. I swerve into the hotel parking lot as sloppy as a drunk driver, punk music blaring through my speakers, guests outside for a smoke glaring at me like I’m the Anti-Christ arriving to claim all the hotel sinners. My windows are down, which makes Jello Biafra’s lovely vocals all the clearer. The AC has never worked on this car, and it’s typically never much of a problem considering I do the majority of my driving late at night or early in the morning. But in the afternoon, with this Texas heat? I might as well be swimming in a pool of lava, in the thick spunk of Satan himself.
Karen’s at the front desk stapling paperwork. She tells me good afternoon and I grunt without further response. Simply put, Karen is an asshole. The kind of person who wastes your time ten, twenty minutes after your shift ends by complaining about every wrong thing that’s ever happened in her life. “My little Rufus woke me up an hour before my alarm went off because he just loves me so much,” she’s told me on many occasions, “but you know how my legs are, they need their rest, if I don’t let them sit long enough I’ll get them stress hives again and my doctor specifically told me them stress hives are bad news, so I told Rufus he had to wait a little bit longer, and he ended up peeing on my carpet, can you believe it, Isaac, can you believe what I am telling you, can you, can you believe I am a waste of cells, can you please please bash my face in and end this faulty design as quickly as possible, thank you, Isaac, you are a hero, Isaac, Isaac, I said you’re a hero, kill me, ruin me, end me, please, Isaac, Isaac,” and so on. Like anybody gives a shit about her dumb dogs. But of course I can’t say that, because my boss inexplicably loves her. I doubt it’s her looks, and it sure as fuck ain’t her personality.
There’s a taco bar set up in the dining area. Most of my coworkers have already begun eating. I pour a cup of coffee and sit down, leaning my head back, closing my eyes. Next to me, Yas says, “What’s the matter, Isaac? Aren’t you going to eat?”
I don’t respond. I’m too tired to open my mouth. She asks the same question every meeting. And I always tell her the same answer—that, for me, it’s really midnight right now. It’s the middle of my sleep schedule. How would you like it if you had to wake up in the middle of the night, drive to work, and eat a full meal while your boss said a bunch of pointless shit everybody already knew?
She usually gets quiet around this point.
To be honest, though, there’s a more complex reason for my refusal to eat. It isn’t like my stomach isn’t growling right now. The smell of those tacos are like heroin. At home, the contents of my fridge consists of expired milk and tuna. But if I don’t eat at this meeting, then management gets pissed off, and that, to me, is worth starvation. They go out of their way to buy a shit-ton of food every monthly meeting as a “thank you” to the employees for showing up, and I never touch a bite. They can’t grasp how selfish these mandatory meetings are for some reason, no matter how many times I explain it to them. Anything that’s said this afternoon can easily be texted or emailed. They could pass on the information the next morning. They could just leave a note. But no. Instead they force my ass out of bed with only an hour or so of sleep and put my own life and everybody else’s in danger as I drive across town to the hotel. Then when I get home, my body refuses to go back to sleep, and I’m awake until the next day.
One of these days, my eyes will burst from their sockets. Sleep deprivation will consume me. It will become me.
One of these days, the world will be on fire, and I’ll be holding the empty gas tank.
My boss asks me if I’m going to eat and I start laughing.
“Just thought I’d ask,” he says.
I sip my coffee, close my eyes again. Fuck this place. It means nothing. It means everything. In the day, it’s foreign territory. Come night, it’ll transform back into familiar land, and I can loathe it properly.
I don’t belong here, out in the sun, like some kind of scumbag.
Fifteen minutes pass. Nobody says anything. They all just eat. I drift off for a few, wake back up and my boss is in the middle of a speech, saying something about a funeral being scheduled next Friday afternoon.
Sweaty and delirious from my brief nap, I bolt up and shout, “What funeral?”
Everybody in the dining area looks at me, shocked. Some of them have been crying.
“I’m sorry.” I sink back into my seat, wishing I was invisible.
Javier stares at me for a moment longer, then returns to his speech, ignoring my question. “As I was saying, for those who wish to pay their respects to Mandy, the funeral will be held tomorrow at the Fisher-Diaz Funeral Home in Universal City.”
“Wait, Mandy’s dead?” I stand up, frantic. “Which one?” I quickly scan the crowd of employees and spot Mandy 1. The sequel’s missing. “Holy shit! I just saw her. We…shared a moment. Wait—she’s dead? What the fuck?”
Javier groans and motions for me to take a seat. I refuse. “Isaac, please try to control yourself.”
“How did she die?”
“Now, we aren’t quite sure yet, but…”
“It’s all over the news,” Kevin says. “Stop trying to act like you don’t know, man.”
I turn to Kevin, shaking. “What happened to her?”
Kevin laughs, and I want to beat his face in until his smile erases. “Fuckin’ owl killed her. Ate her face off.”
A guest passing through the lobby laughs.
“Kevin, that’s enough,” Javier says.
“Wh…what?” I’m choking on vomit. “An…an owl? What? I…how, what. An owl?”
He nods. “Yeah, man. An owl.”
My legs betray me and I collapse back in my seat. One of the housekeepers sitting next to me gasps and motions to her nose, then points at me.
“Te sangra la nariz,” she says.
And I don’t need to understand Spanish to know my nose is bleeding.
* * *
There is nothing to eat in my apartment and I regret my stubbornness against participating in the free lunch back at the meeting. I find some crackers on the floor and drown them in ketchup and eat and stare at the wall thinking about Mandy 2, thinking about owls, thinking about the cosmic horror of the universe swooping down on us all with its hideous goddamn talons and tearing us apart. Clawing at us until we’re nothing, until we’re everything, which means the same thing so who really cares, who can really care, hoo, hoo. Our previous scheduled continuation of sleep has hereby been cancelled. The day’s activities will now be replaced with the following: terror, insanity, nail-biting, and more terror. If time permits, perhaps we can fit in another delightful round of insanity.
There’s only about fifty dollars in my checking account, which I was saving for filling up my tank throughout the rest of the month, but gas only remains important when you aren’t worrying about inserting food into your stomach. I order a pizza and pace around my studio apartment as I wait for it to arrive.
I have no food in my stomach, and I must vomit.
I am a Troma adaptation of a Harlan Ellison story.
The urge to eat and be sick overwhelm each other, and I can’t help but wonder if this is how the bulimic girl feels. Does her stomach also send her mixed signals? I curl into a ball on the floor and rock myself like an infant. Blood drips down my nose and soaks into the carpet. I lost any chance of regaining my apartment deposit a long time ago, so a little blood won’t hurt anything.
How can Mandy 2 be dead? We had just spoken. What the fuck kind of crazy shit was she into? Had she actually tried to pet an owl? Had my mice idea worked? This could be my fault. She could be dead because of what I’d said. But still, sure, owls are cranky bastards, but I don’t remember ever hearing anything about them fucking murdering human beings. How did this happen? Maybe everybody at the meeting had just been screwing with me. They noticed I was taking a nap and decided to pull a practical joke.
Ha, ha, ha.
I search “girl killed by owl” online and the article about Mandy 2 is the first result. Well, the first result after the surprisingly massive amount of owl-related porn.
The headline: “Woman attacked and killed by feral owl”.
I already know what the words say before I read them.
Her window was open. It flew in. She was in bed. Maybe she was awake and aware. Maybe she even smiled as the owl landed on her chest. What transpired between the time the owl flew into the room and flew out will never be exactly known. Nothing about that night will be one hundred percent concrete. But somewhere in that time period, the owl scratched and pecked Mandy 2’s face off. The article perhaps goes into too much detail. The journalist will probably be demoted, or depending on the page views, maybe a bonus will be given out instead. According to the article, Mandy 2’s head was mostly hair and skull when she was discovered in the morning. The owl was nowhere to be found. Police say if you see an owl in the sky, you should find cover immediately. Close your windows. Lock your doors. Do not walk outside at night without some form of protective headwear. Do not trust the owls. The owls are not your friends.
Do.
Not.
Trust.
The.
Owls.
The comment section is mostly full of people making fun of Mandy. People calling her a dumb bitch, saying something like this would have never happened to a man. Other people arguing with those people about being sexist. Someone else selling discounted sunglasses. Another person claiming to have committed the murder. “I am the owl,” the comment reads. “Hoot, hoot, hoot.”
Another comment includes a link promising to be a photo of the crime scene.
Against my instincts, I click it.
What I see will haunt me both in
sleep and consciousness, which are really the same thing, when I think about it.
Mandy’s on the bed, on her back.
No more smile. No more braces.
Like she was chewing gum and tried to make a bubble only to have it explode across her face. Except in this photo, there’s no gum.
What happened to you, Mandy? What did you do?
What kind of owl were you fucking with?
The doorbell rings and I scream.
My pizza has arrived.
* * *
There are one hundred eighteen rooms in this hotel. One hundred eighteen corpses available for one hundred eighteen lost souls to step into and try on every night. Thirty-four standard kings. Thirty-nine standard double queens. Twenty-four king suites. Thirty-two double queen suites. Five floors. One hundred eighteen potential rooms to fuck a stranger or blow your brains out in.
“Do you think blood has spilled in every hotel room throughout the world?” I ask George, who’s at my hotel for a change. Since hearing the news about Mandy 2, I haven’t found the courage to abandon the premises at night. Maybe depression is to blame. Maybe I’m simply afraid of the same shit happening to me. Lots of owls outside this place. Who’s the next victim? The next meal?
George nods. “That seems like a pretty safe bet. If I was a smarter man, I could probably come up with some kinda fancy graph charting the statistics of menstruating women who stay at hotels. But, alas.”
I grab the flask from his mouth and shake my head like a disappointed parent. “Nah, man. I mean, like, blood spilling from a violent means. Like stabbings or gunshots or whatever.”
“I don’t know, blood pouring from a vagina seems pretty hardcore to me. Imagine if you one day started bleeding from your dick. Not only that, but it bled every month. Like, holy shit, man.”
“You’re terrifying when you’re drunk.”
“And you’re ten times sexier when I’m drunk.”
I hand him back the flask. Somewhere down the hall, a guest is screaming about something too difficult to decipher. Fuck him. “I’m serious,” I tell George, “I bet you, throughout history, blood has fallen in at least eighty percent of hotel rooms.”
The Nightly Disease (Serial Novel) Page 4
