The Removed(9)

I stopped the tape and called a random number. A woman answered. “Hello?” she kept saying. I hung up on her. The next number I called was a business. The guy who answered said, “Maintenance.”

“I want to talk, if it’s all right with you,” I said.

“What?”

“Where do you work? I just want to talk.”

He hung up.

I called a number that registered a busy signal. I found it strange and rhythmic, an alert of sorts. The sound put me at ease, helped me feel better. I became aware of my surroundings, of the dim motel room with the green curtains and pale walls. Maybe there were no colors in the room. In my mind I see black and white, something out of a French film. I liked watching the room dim on its own, listening to the hum of the air conditioner blowing.

I called my friend Jessie, but he didn’t answer. Then I called Byrd, an old friend I hadn’t spoken to in several months. He’d crashed his Harley on a highway just outside Tulsa and managed to survive with a concussion and stitches in his tongue. “I grew my hair out,” he told me. “Now everyone thinks I’m Neil Young. The guy at the diner keeps asking me what happened to Crazy Horse. What happened to the Stray Gators, he says. Sing ‘Yonder Stands the Sinner.’ Sing ‘Cinnamon Girl.’ Where are you?”

“New Mexico.”

“Come back to Oklahoma. You need somewhere to stay? You can stay with us, kid. I got an extra mattress in the basement. I got Rubber Soul on vinyl. I got Exile on Main Street.”

“My man Keith Richards.”

“Hey, Lucille’s sister’s in town with her kids, so I gotta go. Try to lay off the shit, brother.”

“I miss you, Byrd.”

He had already hung up. I found myself waiting for someone to pick back up, but the line went dead. I turned on the lamp and called Sonja, who was half asleep when she answered.

“Is everything okay?” she said. “Where are you?”

“Albuquerque.”

“Is everything okay?”

“Rae left me, and I just wanted to talk,” I said.

“Well, I’m sorry, but don’t use it as an excuse to use meth. Are you coming home for the bonfire?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“Everyone wants to see you. I want to see you, and so do Mom and Papa. They keep asking me about it, and I tell them I don’t know.”

“I don’t know.”

“I hope you come home,” she said.

After I hung up, I didn’t feel like calling anyone else. I thought again of Rae, and how we could heal each other through language. We could say words and reach an understanding. We could touch each other’s face and say one organic word. Sometimes we never spoke. We once spent an entire afternoon embracing in the park.

Darkness spread around me. After a long while I got out of bed and took a beer with me into the bathroom, where I filled the tub with warm water. I removed all my clothes and stepped into the tub. I wanted time in isolation, quiet, but there was laughter coming from the next room, voices talking. My body felt warm and heavy in the water. The heaviness was an abstraction, I felt, a part of some equation convoluted by the presence of the room. Be aware of your surroundings, Rae used to say. Be aware, cautious, observant of time and place. I’d dealt with too many dealers who could hurt me. She didn’t want to see me beaten up over drugs. She was right.

I popped open a can of beer and reclined in the tub, thinking of the times she and I splashed around in the tub in a different motel bathroom, maybe at the Route 66 Motel or the Knights Inn, a mirror image of this room. A bathroom with the same tile full of squares, part of the equation to entrap me. Motel bathrooms all look the same, I told myself. I thought of Rae, of us splashing around one hot July afternoon during a dust storm that sanded over the windows. We listened to the Mexican radio station and drank Mexican beer. We paid the housekeeping to stay away, immersing ourselves in our own bodies, in each other, for six days.

In the tub I counted the tiles from ceiling to floor, around the room. It became a sort of game, counting vertically by row, then horizontally, eight, fifteen, then twenty, thirty-four. I kept losing track. The tiles over the sink were smaller and of a different color—pink rather than light blue. Pink, the color of skin and flesh, the color of body parts, tongue. By the time I finished my beer I had counted over a hundred square tiles, not counting the partial tiles that stopped at the edge of the tub. They were not half tiles, maybe a quarter of a tile. The numbers were confusing, and I couldn’t figure out the pattern, but I thought of it as a game. I had a strange and intense vision of being stuck in an elevator as a child, gripping my mother’s hand. A hard jolt from a cable or faulty electrical circuit. A woman crying out. A loud ringing alarm from somewhere. I felt the loss of air, no oxygen, the room shrinking. Closing my eyes, gripping my mother’s hand. My mother bringing me closer against her. The doors finally opening.

In the tub I let myself slide down into the water until my head was underwater and I was staring directly up at the trembling ceiling. I blinked underwater. I felt my eyes burning and saw only blurred whiteness above, everything shaking. I saw myself falling backward. I realized then I was drowning, being held under water by some force beneath me. The heaviness of my body made it difficult to sit up, but I managed to gain enough strength to lean forward and gasp as I came out of the water like some horrific beast, sputtering as I steadied myself in the tub. I leaned forward and pulled the plug to drain the water.