Girl in Hotelroom Chapter

The trucks would be hissing by the Portland hotel room all night. The breaking of the dawn was so muffled by the weight of their beastly arrivals, mingling not for a second until they exited this frame again. She lay on the bed like a slice of cardboard, brand-new from its packing, while her ash drizzled over the candy colored bedspread, like grandmother’s. But someone else’s, since she never knew her grandmother, nor her house, no stolen pennies, nostalgic stones or sweets hidden in baggy pockets. Just a fading photo and no memory of what it meant. Her friends told her it was better that way - you never knew the kindness or warmth, but you missed out on the icy distance, the bitterness that grows from a widow’s windowless garden, the power struggle that exists between old daughters and older mothers until the grandmother relinquishes her throne. Still, she caressed the bedspread as if it told her everything would be ok and that she was a beautiful girl but had her father’s eyes.

The dim amber light was shy to cover the cramped room, anxious to keep its place and reveal only a few distinct and quarantined aspects – the clunky and remote control, the bible creeping out of an unopened brown drawer, the brazenly-coloured brochure about what few channels there were to watch, to remind you that you were still in America, no matter where you ran to.

The blue ashtray. A friend kept close, while she couldn’t sleep. James Dean was an insomniac (true beauty is sometimes only felt when its fighting the shadows amongst your eyes). It’s supposed to rain a lot in Portland, that rain would soften the trucks in her ears, like an angry ocean beating oars to the shore. They were solemn the trucks, approaching and yielding at the same time. She began to try and figure out the very instant that the approaching truck began to depart from her trembling eardrums. It was puzzling and fooling her, becoming a game as she ashed her failing cigarette at what she thought might be that very instant. But she couldn’t win, her fingers couldn’t keep up with her brain waves, which couldn’t chase after those trucks driven by phantoms, and they would never reach their destination, the ticking of the clock would prevent it.

This is the sort of hotel that murders happen to – all quiet behind rows of brown wooden doors (or painted-on wood). Giving into sleep would lead to blue and red lights flashing over the distressed amber, finding it out in its loneliness. Then it better rain, for men in garbage bags with flashlights would arrive in a more direct fashion that those who are dry with comfort.

She couldn’t bear to watch television, not when the forests were so nearby. The idea that they were something to visit outside of our lives began to sicken her. The dampness in the room began to seep into her bedspread (phantom grandma’s) and she preferred to lie over it, and pull the cheap blanket over her, still dressed and barely breathing.

When she was little, her thoughts would keep her from normal sleep sometimes – like there was so much around corners in her mind that her child’s head couldn’t possess it straight away. Her mother used to stay with her in her dark pink room, like a church it seemed now, she the silent gospel act under the canopy. Her mother’s core was distant yet the part of her that nurtured did it well, like one of a queen’s attendants, would take a poisoned cup for her, or at least it felt like she would. First, every time she would begin to fall asleep, a mathematician would grow to magician inside her head. That feeling when you start to drift to sleep, of losing control (sometimes you hit earth once and then ascend again) was when the numbers would come over her. Her mother on her rocking chair, waiting, probably thinking about her mother gone so long (phantom grandmother with no bedspreads to offer) while her daughter’s eyes, how still were they. She would be half sleeping, her mind began racing. Those creeping shadows would act like mischief once the parent has gone away, like a church without God – running from place to place. In her mind, it would manifest itself into numbers – not any particular theories or problems that she could remember, but perhaps because they were too great for her to remember. In the dream, sitting on a bench, no world around, no one sitting there – she still remembered that. The numbers would make no sound, just a hum growing in her thoughts, they would flash in front of her sleeping mind faster and faster, more problematic and so much so that one would be gone before the next progressive one appeared and so forth, ‘til her breathing increased, her body caught up and her tiny soul couldn’t bear its grand seal just yet. Seems as if it were the mathematical problems that equally served as the secrets of every universe. She would wake up in a start, perspiring, nervous, never crying. But her simple mother would be by her side, on the bed, warm washcloth taken in hand for her head after she felt its waning, typical softness mingling with her arm on the mattress next to her. She would get to sleep eventually, but, in these episodes, her mother knew something was occurring. She could never follow through to what exactly, but her daughter might remember someday – might speak of it or write it down, or dream of it again, or think on it, while smoke rose through the air from her silent mouth in a Portland hotel room, as she listened to the trucks, giving up on their moments of arrival and departure. They were much slower than the numbers of the universe, but she still couldn’t manage to crack their code.

She used to be exhilarated when she was a girl, a few years after the numbers episodes, when she couldn’t get to sleep again (mother still by her side, this time with a glass of ginger ale to calm her, castor oil not hidden inside like the duplicitous orange juice she consumed as a younger girl). She would have a kind of breathing fit, though nothing so dramatic, she would explain it to her mother in the only way she knew how – “I just feel like I can’t take a full, deep breath”. In trying to continuously, she’d not be able to breathe properly and that made sleep a hardship. To live, to take that one, deep, full breath became so much the focus of her, at least on the inside.

Her cigarette was gone. The people next door through flypaper walls that’ve gone dark, they put their TV on. She had to give in, she listened, her mind went blank and the valium tones of late night shows drowned out the trucks and clock ticking and the quiet of her sheets and memories of numbers and breathing in . . .

Her body slits its aural wrists and sank beneath the once-blue, stone coloured blanket, the amber light drowned her thoughts and she fell asleep. Even without the sharp breath of waking up, when she and many do, forget to breathe and the body shakes your lungs to momentary reason for a spell. She simply drifted through the forests but come out the other side, where there were no flashlights and their rainy policemen, no mothers waiting on rocking chairs, no games and numbers revealing to her prematurely the hidden gifts of the skies on fire and the stars in their prime, just the muffled, light-less sound of a false family’s voices next door. And the occasional rehearsed applause which wasn’t for her, since it had been only real once, but saved again and again until it was only a shell of someone’s smile that was experienced probably twenty years ago in a real place that, most likely, died by now. So the amber lamp constant, no tingle of stopped breath, no sounds from the forest, but she fell asleep at 2:20am to the sound of a dead man’s laugh.

Mimi L.