|
(( I'm in the middle of reworking this interview, and I'm working backwards from this point. They've left Neil's living room at this point and have sat back down in the kitchen to speak. Sebastian has just begun delving into the topic of Neil's family, who were in Denver during the war's initiation. ))
Also, there happens to be one f-bomb in the following chunk, and I filled in an * for the vowel rather than have it be censored by the forum bot.
--------
He didn't answer, "They were lost. I think they still hoped they would be let back in, that the declaration of war was just a scare tactic.
"Jeanne called me from Denver International to tell me she had canceled her photo group and had booked a flight with Chelsea to get back home. I remember there was so much noise in the background, people hollering at one another. She told me she would call me when she landed in Minneapolis. I said I loved her, but the payphone hung us up before I could say good-bye to Chelsea. When she didn't call back that night, I knew something was wrong. I stayed awake until I ended up falling asleep by the phone. When I woke up the next morning, there weren't any messages. I tried calling the airport but the line had been disconnected. I don't know why I turned on the television. God, it was on every channel. Some person in a pressed suit guessing at the casualties, property damage. Sometime during the night before, they'd begun bombing."
His lips twisted into a barely contained snarl, "They attacked the airports. Burned up jets as they sat on the runway. They kept on replaying the footage. They couldn’t show what happened once. They had to keep on playing it over, sometimes in slow motion. Most of them had been empty, they said, but some of them weren't. I tell myself, 'They couldn't have known what was happening. Jeanne would have done something to keep Chelsea from being scared.' And at the same time I know that's not true. She wouldn't have been able to realize what was happening in time to touch Chelsea.
“I couldn’t say goodbye to my daughter because Jeanne didn’t have an extra quarter.”
Before I could stop, the words that had formed in my head came tumbling out of my mouth.
"Plenty of people made stupid decisions back then.”
My heart stopped, and yet I could hear it crashing against my ribs. I swear he could hear it, too. I wanted nothing more than to get back to the car and get away, but something kept me rooted to my chair. For a strange second I couldn't decide whether I was more terrified about losing my job or receiving a jaw-shattering blow from a man twice as large as me.
But instead of striking out, Casey's breathing slowed and his face lost its flush of scarlet. He pushed out of his chair and without taking his eyes off of the wall in front of him. Something in his voice had turned molten, deadly.
"Sebastian, I think it would be best if, right now, you pick up your [censored] and get the hell out of my house."
My hands were shaking as I snatched up my paper and pencil and shoved them into my coat pocket. I knocked over my tape recorder while I fought to keep from giving into panic. I had to slap my hand on top of it to keep it from sliding off the edge. Casey didn't as much as move when I hurried towards the door, stuffing my feet into my shoes without bothering to do the laces.
I didn't know I had left the kitchen door open until it slammed shut behind me like a gunshot. I threw a panicked look over my shoulder but saw no one pursuing. No disgraced soldier on my heels. Only a shell of a home bearing the cold in another forgotten corner of the world.
-------------
I pulled the Prius to a skidding halt in front of the overturned Canadian National and, once I was certain no one was in sight, I punched the steering wheel until I could no longer feel my knuckles.
Snow began to fall by the time I managed to calm down. I rubbed my sore fingers and glared silently at the wreckage as if it were somehow in part to blame. A part of me reminded me that, in fact, train wrecks don’t give journalists big mouths. Big mouths turn journalists into train wrecks. I told that part of me to keep its opinions to itself, and drove over the rails.
I squinted at the map on the dashboard and took a right at the next set of inoperable streetlights. The unplowed two-lane turned onto an unplowed four-lane that followed the tracks into what was unmistakably the center of town. It was unmistakable because of the decorative green sign on the curb which read Historical Downtown between a pair of white-silhouetted cattails.
Several single-story businesses squatted along each side of the road. Most of their display windows had been smashed down to jagged shards that clung to their frames like exposed teeth. Snow crawled inside just the same as it had everything else, powdering naked mannequins and empty tables. When I turned onto the city’s main street, many of the small businesses sprouted upper apartments. Several of their windows were missing as well, but every block would reveal a set that had survived. I could tell that a handful of these were being regularly maintained, while the majority of others had simply turned a shade of brown as dust and loneliness settled unabated on both sides.
I gingerly navigated the deepening snow and approached the blackened remains of a modest-sized building. Its brick façade had crumbled into itself, crushing the brittle remains of burned tables beneath it. The building’s marquee board had been felled like some steel tree sometime earlier, which might have caused the fire when it tore through its roof. Like everything else, it was blanketed in white powder, only telling of its fate by revealing the twisted shapes of things inside. The only piece of property that had gone unscathed was a small sign at the entrance to the parking lot, boasting a pair of golden arches and a too-happy clown that held up the word, “Enter,” in its hands.
I saw my destination two blocks past the charred restaurant. Standing sentinel in the now blowing snow was an unlit black and yellow signpost for the Super 8 Motel. Its marquee clung to an unintelligible smattering of letters, with the only real sign that any of it had any purpose was a red dollar sign near the center. The back of the car fishtailed when I hit the ramp into the parking lot a bit faster than I intended. I parked next to the only other vehicle in the lot: a dirty white minivan near the door wearing rusting snow chains around the front tires.
Using my forearm to shield my eyes and keeping my free hand in contact with the vehicle, I groped my way through the blustering snow and unlocked the boot. Somehow the wind had transformed the harmless flakes into tiny frozen razors. I was very manly about it, and only flinched or cursed each time I felt a pinch of pain. I shoved the hatch open and hefted my only piece of luggage – a green rolling carry-on that had more packed inside than the manufacturers likely intended – out and onto the ground. The monster refused to roll in the deep snow, and I found myself swinging it like a pendulum in front of me with each step as if it were an ill-shaped cane.
When I pushed through the motel door I was instantly wrapped up by a wave of heat that made the skin on my cheeks tingle. It was the sort of overbearing warmth that felt pleasant for the first few minutes before becoming suffocatingly uncomfortable in the next.
Bits of snow shook loose from my shoes and suitcase and soaked into the lobby’s gaudy red floral carpet. A fake maple sapling stood in a massive ceramic pot at the center of the space, buried in dusty wood chips and wearing a few spider webs between the leaves. Two tables flanked the entrance to a long hall. They were infested with overpriced maps and old travel brochures that had nothing to say about the city they were in. Three electric lamps hung from the ceiling by brass chains, though none were lit. The only light source in the lobby came from a glaring florescent tube that had been screwed into the wall above the black granite receptionist desk to the right. A single wire ran from the side of the light’s mounting and disappeared into a crudely-drilled hole in the wall next to it. I set my suitcase near the fake tree and approached the desk that could comfortably seat three more receptionists, including the teenaged girl already sleeping behind it. Her chair bent back precariously close to the point where physics would begin carrying her the rest of the way to the ground, but she had managed to keep herself anchored in place by digging the soles of her trainers into the top of the desk. I rapped a knuckle on the desk just loudly enough to catch her attention.
“Oh,” she said with a jolt, pulling her feet off the desk. She rubbed the sand from her eyes and glanced around the lobby to check for anyone else. Seeing no one else, she stifled a yawn and turned her attention to me, “Um, name?”
I pretended I hadn’t noticed anything and casually tugged my wallet from inside my coat. I tossed a glance back out to the empty parking lot, and wondered why anyone had bothered to call ahead and book reservations. I told her my name and her bleary eyes were off me.
She blinked at a pad of yellow legal paper that sat next to a well-worn issue of Entertainment Weekly, and had to work to focus her eyes on the handful of names scrawled across it. Each one had been crossed out with thick black marker except the one at the bottom, which had been written next to several scribbled-out doodles of what looked suspiciously like British flags. I had to force myself to quietly thank my editors for finding me a place at all.
“Here you are,” she said to the legal pad. She swiveled in her chair to face an old pegboard on the wall behind her. She leaned towards the glittering keys that hung in neat order, pushing strands of blonde hair away from her face while trying to find the correct one, “You’ll be staying in room one…” her finger traced a line down the second row of keys, “…nineteen.”
I smiled politely when she spun back around and handed me the key. She placed the legal pad and a pen in front of me, tapping the line beneath my name, “You can sign here.”
While I signed, she quickly added, “It’s two-hundred a night. We only accept cash, up front.”
I stopped writing, “For one night?”
“Yes, sir,” she said, her hazel eyes matching mine.
“Two hundred,” I said, my voice turning sour, “For one bed.”
She folded her hands apologetically, “That’s our standard rate. I’m not allowed to charge any less.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, closing my wallet and digging my feet in, “This place isn’t worth that bloody much.”
We stared at one another in silence. The fluorescent light ticked overhead while the heat of the building crawled up my jacket. I had a feeling I would be looking for a new place to sleep in another moment, but after nearly a minute she dropped all pretenses of a pleasant motel receptionist and leaned back in her chair with a scowl.
“One-fifty,” she said.
“Halve that,” I said.
“F*ck you, Mister. I have to eat too,” she said, “A hundred.”
I cursed under my breath and slapped five twenties next to the key on the desk. The girl promptly stuffed two in her pocket and threw the rest in a cheap metal till set into the desk’s front drawer.
She took the pad with my incomplete signature and pointed to the hallway near the travel maps, “Down the hall. The plumbing doesn't work, so if you need the toilet there's a Port-a-Potty out through the fire exit.”
I didn’t ask.
I gathered the key and my luggage and dragged it down the worn hallway floor past several identical beige doors before finding the one with my number on it. The wood around the silver knob was stained dark yellow. I turned the knob with as few fingers as I could manage, not wanting to know what was likely crawling around on it.
I dragged my suitcase into the small room and shut the door behind me. The carpet was the same faded floral pattern as the rest of the motel, and only stopped its progression at the edge of an old layer of linoleum tile in the tiny restroom. I set my suitcase near the door and, according to an unwritten motel tradition, inspected the bathroom. The toilet, true to the girl’s word, was bone dry. A ring of mineral stains ran around the sink and the toilet, and the shower stank of mildew. I stepped out and shut the door to the bathroom.
A large dresser sat across the room from where the queen-sized bed lay. A box-shaped absence of dust on top of the dresser suggested a television had once been there. One of the drawers sat open and empty, pointing towards the bed and its hideous brick-red bedspread.
It would have looked better nice had the bed been made.
I walked over to the window on the far side of the room and pressed my forehead against its cool surface. One failed interview, one hundred dollars wasted, and one week yet to go.
I stared down at the snow that had been blown into the outside corner of the window, watching as each stray flake would get caught in the little pile and be buried under another before it could escape. I left my forehead there until the cold began to gently press nails behind my eyes. I massaged them with my thumb and forefinger as I stood straight, and looked out across the main road. A large brown brick building stood at the end of an expansive parking lot, with a handful of cars dotting the stalls furthest from me. Stretching across the building’s roof was a massive multicolor sign whose thick white letters proclaimed: Rainbow Foods.
I looked down at my watch. It was almost four o’clock. The last thing I had eaten was dinner on the flight in, and that had been more than ten hours ago. Now that my stomach had been reminded of the time, it rolled furiously in my gut. I was hungry.
I was careful not to come in contact with the bed as I slid around it towards the door. I didn’t want to think about who had been in it last, or what had taken place there. I had an appetite to protect.
|
Login
FAQ
Search
