“I don’t know. The article didn’t specify.”
“That’d begin to smell pretty fast.”
“Well, given the choice of death or—”
“I’d probably take death.” She pauses. “Wait. What about homeless people? Did they nail the owl corpses to, uh, I don’t know, their assholes?”
“Quite possibly.”
“The Romans were fucking hardcore, dude.”
“Hell yeah.”
Kia stops laughing. “Hold up. Did you say an owl killed someone who used to work here?”
“Yeah, but she wasn’t killed at the hotel. The owl attacked her at home.”
“What happened?”
“It ate her face off.”
“You’re fucking with me.”
“Go Google it if you want.”
“Holy shit. Owls suck.”
“They’re the worst.”
She rubs her eyes, clearly exhausted. So am I. I debate asking if she wants to go nap with me in a vacant dirty room, but before I can find the courage to speak, she says, “So, how about those waffles?”
Part 13
I’m afraid to sleep because I don’t know who will be standing over me when I wake up, watching. A guest might hop over the front desk and touch himself and drool over my unconscious body—or worse, my manager might decide to come in early and bust me doing something I’m not supposed to be doing. Then I’m out of a job and I’m sleeping on the streets, which honestly doesn’t sound so bad most nights. But I can just imagine sleeping in an alley and waking up to some stranger pissing on me. At least at the hotel, the strangers are up front about pissing in your face. They do it while you’re awake.
So tired my motor functions are out of sync, like a universe that’s been split into a dozen tiny universes all attempting to work together, like different alternative realities just a second slower than the previous, like an online video game lagging due to shitty Internet service. I walk forward but end up leaning against a wall covered in dirty handprints and spattered condiments, resting my head against the cold surface, listening to the machines vibrate in my skull only I can hear. Somewhere Kia is asking me if she can eat something. I may have answered, but my voice is distant and muffled, like a drowning victim pleading for a fish’s help. There is never enough sleep. I could sleep for a thousand years and none of it would matter because right now I must be awake, right now I must function. I am a robot disobeying its programming. At this rate, my creator will disarm me any moment, and goddamn it can’t happen soon enough. And goddamn will it be great. And goddamn, I said, and goddamn. I try to drink cold coffee from two years ago and it spills down my chin because I forget the exact location of my mouth, and it’s all right, yeah it’s all right, because who needs coffee when you don’t have a mouth, and who needs a mouth when you don’t have a brain—at least, not a proper brain, more of a brain that someone accidentally installed while downloading pornography, like a virus that’s eating up all the good things in me and replacing it all with a self-destruct sequence that’ll be triggered in five, three, one.
Boom.
There’s this sensation that overwhelms me when I’m in that nodding-off stage. Like my skin is an inch from bone, caught in stagnation, floating as its own entity. I try to scratch my skull and my scalp peels off like the skin of a rotten orange. My flesh is artificial and my guts are gravy. Nobody remembers the last few seconds before sleep snuffs them. When you wake up, there is no memory of your surrender. It is like time travel. One moment you’re in bed, tossing and turning, and then five hours have passed within the blink of an eye. Or four hours. Or three. Or twenty minutes. How much sleep does a person even need?
The moment before you become unconscious, something terrible happens that none of us remembers. I never remember it, either. I am not special. But I’m sure it exists. Something painful, agonizing. A great pain overwhelms our senses, and it is only after this orgasmic, awful moment that human beings are allowed sleep.
I try telling this theory to Kia and she laughs, tells me I’m a psychiatrist’s wet dream, but don’t worry about it too much, because so is everybody. She’s following me around the meeting room as I clean up after an oil company that’d rented it out earlier today. Like true savages, they had left their mark behind with piles of trash and abandoned food. To Kia, this room is paradise. I wipe down tables sporting puddles of barbecue sauce and peel pickles off the wall while I tell Kia that sleep isn’t a reward, it’s a punishment.
“Time is all we get in this stupid life,” I say, tossing a handful of sliced onions in the trash. “And sleep goes out of its way to take that from us. Think about it, each day consists of twenty-four hours. But do we actually get to experience all twenty-four?”
“You’re spending a good chunk of your twenty-four hours cleaning up someone else’s trash.” Kia hovers over a Styrofoam container of half-eaten pasta and feasts.
“Yeah, and you’re spending it eating someone else’s trash.”
She holds up her scarred finger and finishes chewing. “The difference here is, I’m content with my current actions. Can you say the same?”
“Contentment is a disease to which I am immune.”
Kia laughs so hard she practically chokes on her cup of water. “What-the-fuck-ever, dude.” She moves along the room, picking through the abandoned food and filling up the Styrofoam container with whatever she deems suitable for a bulimic’s diet.
Somewhere above the meeting room, a baby is crying. If I listen hard enough, there is always a baby crying at this hotel. The meeting room carpet needs to be vacuumed, but it’s not happening at this time of night. The sound wouldn’t drown out the baby’s crying but it would annoy the neighboring rooms. Last time I tried to vacuum on my shift, a lunatic in the room next door attempted to bludgeon me with his television remote. The memory of his extraordinarily long, veiny dong dangling from out of his boxers still haunts me to this day. I’d been less afraid of the remote than I had been of the prospect of his penis detaching itself from his groin and attacking me like a rabid ferret. Never again.
“I wish someone would shut that fucking kid up. It’s almost three in the morning.”
Kia stops eating. “What kid?”
“You fucking know.” The urge to slap the pasta from her hands is overwhelming. I bite my lip and resist tackling her and beating her face in, resist kneeling down and proposing marriage and devoting the rest of my life to her happiness.
“Man, how long have you been awake?”
“You can melt reality, you get tired enough. Deprive yourself of sleep for a few days and the universe starts to make sense.”
She shakes her head, laughing again, digging her fork back in the day-old pasta. “You’ve finally cracked, Isaac. Congratulations.”
“You don’t hear a baby crying?”
“Only you, darlin’. Only you.” Then she pauses, staring at the pasta, and drops the container to the floor. “I think I gotta go.”
“What?”
“I’m sorry. Uh, thanks for the grub.” She’s spinning and running out the door before I have a chance to give her shit for further staining the carpet, before I have a chance to beg her never to leave me again. Two hours pass before I realize she never stopped in the bathroom to purge.
* * *
Every time I try to get Kia to open up to me, she shuts down. I’ve read that a relationship will never blossom without both partners sharing personal details about themselves. Obviously she isn’t ready for this relationship to blossom. Obviously this is not a relationship. I am suffering from a delusion. She does not like me. She tolerates my presence in order to score free food. I’m nothing more than a waffle maker and a free toilet bowl to puke into. The only reason she comes here is because she’s too poor too afford her own food, her own toilet. I am as replaceable as porcelain.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” she says one night, inhaling a plate of waffles. I’m standing by the waffle iron, heating up a new b
atch. A few minutes ago, Hobbs had stumbled through the lobby after smoking a cigarette by the front trash cans. He had winked and grabbed his junk before heading into the elevator. I’m still on edge, waiting for him to come back down and give me shit. He’s been remarkably quiet these days, mostly keeping to himself, doing whatever the hell it is he does up in his room.
“Isaac, what the hell is wrong with you?”
“I’m not looking at you like anything.”
She stops eating and pushes the plate away. “I’m sorry, but do I disgust you?”
“What?” My voice squeaks.
“I said, do I disgust you? Do you find me fucking repulsive?”
“No. Why would…why would you think that?”
“Because you’re looking at me like I’m dog shit.”
“I’m not even looking at you. I’m just…tired. I haven’t been sleeping well.” I debate telling her about Hobbs and the stolen wallet fiasco, but she wouldn’t care, not really. She’d probably just laugh like George did. She only pretends to want to hear what I say because otherwise I might not give her waffles.
Kia shakes her head, sneering. “You have no idea what I’ve gone through. You have no fucking right to judge me.”
“I’m not judging. I’m not doing anything.”
“What do you know? You don’t know shit, man. You’ve never suffered. You’ve never had a truly bad day in your whole fuckin’ life.”
I turn off the waffle iron and sit down across from her. “You can make your own damn food if that’s how you want to speak to me.”
“Whatever.”
“I’ve been nothing but nice to you. I don’t know why suddenly you think I’m some kind of asshole.”
“I don’t know.” She leans her head back and sighs. “I’m sorry. I’ve been going through some shit. My brothers have been real dicks lately and they’re just…you know. Just really pissing me off.”
“I didn’t know you had brothers.”
She falls silent, then clears her throat. “Yeah, well, Isaac, there’s a lot you don’t know about me. So what?”
“So tell me.”
“I’m not a writer. I don’t tell stories.”
“Anybody can tell a story.”
“Not me.”
I reach out to grab her hands but she yanks them off the table. “Look,” I say, “I think at this point you have to understand that I’m not a stranger. We’ve become friends, haven’t we? At least tell me that’s true.”
She slowly nods. “I suppose.”
“Then what are you afraid of?”
She laughs, nervous. “I don’t like talking about my life. Why must you know everything? Some things are better left in the dark. Like cockroaches.”
“I understand what it’s like to have a shitty past. Believe me, I totally understand. But, like, I know absolutely zero things about you. Don’t you think that’s a little weird?”
“Why don’t you tell me about your shitty past then?”
“What? No. I asked you first.”
She smiles and takes a huge bite out of her waffle. “And I asked you second.”
“Uh.”
Kia leans forward, pointing an accusing finger. “That’s because you don’t know shit, just like I said. If you did know, you’d understand that it’s better to keep it to yourself. And if you were my friend, like you claim, then you would respect my privacy. I mean, come on, dude, for fuck’s sake.”
Her face is so close I could kiss her if I wanted to. And I want to. But does she? Doubtful. A gust of sewage dust expels from her mouth and hits my face and I pull my head away, grimacing at her murderous breath.
“When I was twelve years old, back when I was still in Indiana, we lived in various motels and hotels until I was almost sixteen.” I gasp and grind my fingers into my thighs. Oxygen escapes. I’ve never told anybody that before.
She shrugs. “So you lived in some hotels. Shit, kid, you work at a hotel. What’s the big deal?”
“Well, I didn’t go to school from ages twelve to fifteen. Completely skipped high school. Never got that experience everyone else gets. I have a difficult time relating to the films of John Hughes.”
“Man, not having to go to school.” She shakes her head with faux sadness in her eyes. “What a terrible childhood.”
“The state was under the impression that I was being home-schooled. But that was bullshit. No one taught me anything. I lost all my friends. All my belongings. One day everything just changed. We left our house, our town, and just…moved on. Isolated from the world like psychotic conspiracy theorists.”
“Watch out, Mel Gibson.”
“Seriously. I know it sounds like a fun way to grow up, traveling from motel to hotel to motel without having to worry about school…but you gotta realize how fucking disturbing and awkward it is to go through puberty while sleeping in the same room as your mom and dad. Every minute of every day. Zero privacy. Every friend you ever hung out with is gone. Every shop you have ever loitered at is miles and miles away. You are alone. All that’s left is you and your thoughts to drive you crazy.”
Kia stops smiling. She looks at me the same way I look at her when she’s eating. “Why was this happening?”
I shrug. “To this day, I still don’t know. One morning, our house lost electricity. This was common. We were always behind on bills. I went to school, then when I came home my mom had packed a bag of clothes and said we had to stay at a hotel for a few days. A few days stretched into a few years. I never saw the house again.”
“Jesus fuck. What does your mom say now when you ask her?”
“She just…screams. Like I’m being an asshole for bringing up the past. I don’t know. I’ll never know.”
“That’s fucked up, dude.”
“I know.”
“What did you do to pass the time? That’s like, what, three years? Shit.”
“I read a lot. Also, like I said. I was going through puberty.”
Kia laughs. “You were jerkin’ it like crazy.”
“Pretty much.”
“In front of your parents?”
“Uh…no. There was a bathroom.”
“You little perv.” She chomps down on the rest of her waffle. Between mouthfuls, she says, “So I’ve always been curious. What’s the difference between a motel and a hotel?”
“The first letters.”
“Ass.”
“This is my take on it. Hotels are the kind of places you don’t mind bringing your family to—you can expect good service, a nice breakfast. Motels, on the other hand, are where people take cheap dates for quick fucks. The walls are stained with nicotine and moans, the sheets are photographs of past orgasms and homicides and the floors are infested with bugs you never even knew existed.”
“Hmm. And where are we now?” She motions around the dining area.
“Purgatory.”
She nods approvingly. “And are you the nihilistic psychopomp guiding all these poor souls from check-in to check-out?”
Instead of answering, I get up and plop a new waffle on her plate. “Okay, I told you. Now you tell me something.”
“Ugh. Okay, what do you want to know?”
“Are you homeless?”
“Next question.”
“How long have you been bulimic?”
“I’ve been purging since the womb, son.”
“Do you have any family?”
“I already told you I got some brothers.”
“Parents?”
“Never knew ’em.”
“Did your brothers raise you?”
She laughs, but it comes off as more depressed than amused. “If you could call it that.”
“Did they abuse you?”
She’s quiet for a moment.
I prod on. I don’t know why. “How—”
She raises her hand, palm out. “I think that’s enough questions.”
“But—”
She shakes her head. “Nah, I actually think I gotta
go. Thanks for the waffles.” She rises and heads toward the hotel entrance.
I attempt to follow. “What about the bathroom?”
“Fuck it,” she says, not turning back.
Then she’s gone.
Part 14
In the beginning we stayed in dozens of different motels. At first we mostly lived in the hotel by the casino, since we had a lot of comped rooms due to my mother’s uncontrollable gambling habits. But eventually those went away and we had to settle for anything with four walls and a door. We stayed in a lot of shit, but we stayed in some pretty nice places as well. After about a year and a half, we settled down in a Pretty Shitty Motel, as it had the cheapest rates with the least amount of cockroaches.
It certainly wasn’t the worst motel. It had two beds, a TV with a hundred channels, a desk, a window, a closet, a bathroom. It even had a refrigerator, which comes to a surprise to me now, since the hotel I am presently working at is ranked like sixty-five out of the six hundred-something Goddamn Hotels in the world, and our standards don’t even have fridges.
But it was a Pretty Shitty Motel, and the rates were extremely cheap, especially after we’d stayed there so long and worked up a discounted weekly price, so obviously the scumbags were expected to loiter about.
If you didn’t lock your car before going inside, you could pretty much be guaranteed to lose some shit when you came back out. Across the street, at the Dirtiest Motel in the USA, you saw hookers and business men coming in and out hourly. The guests at the Pretty Shitty Motel weren’t as bad, but we did encounter our fair share of crazies.
I rarely slept at night while living in the motel. I’d stay up until the sun came up and then just pass out. Funnily enough, I do the same thing now, only I get paid to stay up. It’s pennies, but at least it’s something. What I’m getting at is: I was awake when most were asleep, more alert when everyone else was out of it. So, when the night came that the Meth Freaks of Room 123 stayed at the Pretty Shitty Motel, I was the first one to hear anything out of the ordinary.
It was winter in Indiana, which is dramatically different than winter in Texas. Hence why it was so odd for the window below us to be wide open. Of course, our window was open a tad, but that was only because I was insane and needed to be frozen in order to be comfortable. It was obvious theirs was open since I could hear everything going on below us. Taking a break from the book I was reading, I approached the window and looked down, doing what every American does best: eavesdropping. It was two of them down there, talking real fast, “fuck” this and “fuck” that, “police” here and “pigs” there. Who knows what they were actually talking about. I doubted it even made much sense in their drug-addled minds, much less anyone else’s.
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