The Removed(8)

The only way I could get rid of the fowl was to ignore it. Eventually it went away, but never for good. Sometimes it returned, and whenever I saw it, I felt a pull at my heart to want to pick it up and hold it. I could never fully rid myself of the fowl, and there was something I loved about it, no matter how disgusting or how elated it made me feel.

WHEN I GOT HOME, Rae was still gone. I called her cell but got her voice mail. “It’s me,” I said. “Where are you?” I hung up. I couldn’t figure out if I was mad or sad. I didn’t know whether to be angry at myself or at Rae for ignoring my call. In the kitchen I drank the last of the wine. I looked through drawers for a pack of cigarettes but couldn’t find anything. Then I went into our bedroom, packed a duffel bag, and left.

I drove my shitty low-slung Oldsmobile to the El Cortez Motel. It was the motel where Rae and I used to stay sometimes, pretending we were somewhere far away. I wanted to call her on the motel phone and try to get her to come stay with me. The motel’s VACANCY sign flashed pink out front. Inside, I was certain the motel clerk recognized me. He chewed on a toothpick and wore a patch over one eye. His hands looked like my dad’s, dry and cracked with stubby fingers. Behind the front desk, the sign on the door read: MAN GER. All the motel doors opened to the empty parking lot. Nearby, a desolate highway stretched west through the plains.

“The door says manger,” I said. “Away in a manger.”

The clerk handed me the key to room 121 but never looked at me.

I walked down the row of doors until I got to my room, opened, and went inside. It smelled of old cigarette smoke and cleaner. I immediately went to the phone, which was the old rotary kind. I called Rae’s cell, and she answered.

“I’m at the El Cortez Motel,” I said.

“Why? Go back home.”

“Drive over here,” I said. “I’m sorry I smoked. It was because my mom called you. Drive over here.”

She was silent a moment. “No, you need to go home. You lied again. I told you I was leaving if you kept smoking that shit.”

“Please come to the motel.”

“My God, Edgar, I can’t even talk to you right now. I’m staying at Jessica’s tonight.”

She hung up, and I immediately called back. It went to her voice mail. I called again, and the same thing. I was a little high. I’d brought along a small duffel bag containing a bottle of a few oxycodone pills, aspirin, a tape recorder, a few cans of beer, and Rae’s broken sunglasses I had doctored with black tape. These were all the things I needed for the night. I took the sunglasses out and squeezed the tape on the handle to make sure it hadn’t loosened. I put them on a moment, then took them off and set them on the desk beside the bed.

I wanted to talk to someone. A roadside motel like the El Cortez was not a good place to feel lonely. The room was a mirror image of all the other rooms, the center of nothingness, dim and warm despite the air conditioner blowing. It felt like an isolated presence, welcoming me. But I liked the room dark—no light entered from the drawn curtains, which were green. The lamp threw a jagged and intimidating shadow across the pale wall, and the carpet, partially stained, was avocado.

In the room I sat on the edge of the bed, looking up at the ceiling. Something in my head was expanding, I felt, trying to force its way out. My skull felt heavy when I kept my head tilted back, looking up. This was how things went—first the head, then the stomach. When I saw my reflection in the mirror across the room, I wondered whether people saw me differently. I’d lost some weight.

In the bathroom I took an oxycodone and drank a cup of water. The only thing I had in my pocket other than my wallet was my turquoise snakeskin lighter, which was a gift from Rae. I imagined her here with me. I thought of her watching me play chess in the park against one of the druggies, daring me to lose. She kept me on edge, a dominant and unpredictable force. I started to feel sick to my stomach.

I turned on the TV. A movie was on, showing a man walking through the desert. I stared into the TV. The man was walking and walking, going nowhere. Where was he going? I wondered. A drifter, a wanderer, in search of something important. This must be real life, I thought. Searching for something, trying to move forward. Looking for meaning or happiness. The commercials were all in Spanish.

When a commercial came on, I peeked out the peephole and saw the parking lot outside. I could see desert dust blowing around in the wind. I looked back up at the ceiling and felt a sense of transparency and isolation, a sense of longing, a dampening of the soul. The room smelled like all the other motel rooms. Above the bed hung a framed watercolor of a farmhouse painted in browns and reds. A field surrounding the farmhouse was dull green, with nothing else around, only empty pasture. The farmhouse looked vacant, too, with a broken-down pickup truck beside it. No sign of life anywhere. I wondered who lived there and then who painted it, and for what purpose. On a different wall, the only other picture in the room, was another watercolor, a painting of an old wooden fence with barbed wire. A dreary sky in the background. A barbed-wire fence. I wondered why a fence, such a lifeless and dull thing, seemingly in the middle of nowhere. A fence, used to enclose territory. It was as if the motel was emphasizing its loneliness.

The room darkened as I sat in silence. This was how I liked to spend late afternoons, it occurred to me, sitting in a room as it darkened. Letting the darkness spill over me and the room. I opened a beer from my duffel bag and played the tape on my recorder, hearing my own voice. I heard myself say, “I looked for the Great Spirit today.” I heard myself laugh through my teeth, but I wanted to hear someone else’s voice, by circumstance, unfiltered and cautious.