It’s another night in a hotel room that is dingy and minimal in its features, except for its furniture, which is either too large or too small but never in between. With work, I find myself drifting from hotel room to hotel room. Their ethereal constants blend and fade between one and the other. I round a corner and think I’m heading to the bathroom, only for the closet rod and mandatory hotel-issued safe to remind me that I’m thinking of the last room I stayed in, at that other building across the street and two floors down. I work, I sleep, I rinse, I repeat. Eight hours on, one hour for lunch, six hours on, a half hour to grab dinner, a half hour to walk “home,” eight hours to reset before I embrace Steely Dan and do it again.
I fall asleep instantly, or at least my brain shuts off. I find time to shower, to respond to four text messages about work, to climb into that uncomfortable bed with its flat and thin pillows. Two pillows for my head (since I sleep on my side), one for between my legs, and another to wrap my arms around. The quills of the down prick me when I adjust, tiny hypodermic needles with the audacity to claim they provide comfort. I need white noise to sleep, a fan specifically, but the portable one I bring with me isn’t loud enough to drown out the moans of the fornicators and degenerates stalking the halls.
I’m in a private room, publicly.
I turn on some ambient storm noise, for as much as I long for sleep, my desert soul craves the rain. I set the thermostat to a temperature only penguins find comfortable, and I fall asleep before I’ve counted a third sheep.
I wake up after two hours, something I’ll do three more times this night as no sleeping pill is strong enough to thwart the over-activity in my skull, and I stare at the prism of light underneath the door. I’m dazed and confused, my eyes are clouded, and I perceive the doorway to be the exact doorway I stared at in my childhood bedroom. I’m young, small, and miserable. I’m a child again and nothing could be more humiliating. My heart beats violently, as if it were trying to break free of its bony cage. I must have slept through the brass section of the garage door and the bellicose chords of his motorcycle. My father is home from work, and he left the light in the laundry room on again, its hellish yellow tint creeping into my corneas. The warden is home, and he doesn’t care about the comforts of his prisoners. I’m too afraid to walk out and turn off the light. I’m stunned into stillness, but I can’t sleep with its piercing gaze. The rain has stopped, my breath feels violent. I am a statue of fear before his Medusa. I can count my pulse with my tongue. A Harlan Ellison story sits in the back of my throat: “I have no mouth and I must scream.”
He only hit me once or twice growing up. He preferred to work out his aggression by yelling at and physically intimidating me instead. He’d tell me of his martial arts classes, of his time in the marines, how he can hit someone without leaving a bruise. He’d hear a good quote from Sons of Anarchy and suddenly his catchphrase to me would be, “Eat shit and die.” It didn’t matter that he was a dork who watched kung-fu movies and played with his num-chuks in the desert. He sold me a story of fear, and I bought it. I was afraid of everything. I was afraid of the bullies at school, afraid of the bully at home, and afraid of the voice in my head.
As my eyes blur and adjust, I feel as though I’m looking at an old tube TV. Its channel is set to snow, the green volume bar slowly adding more and more ticks to the screen, the static growing louder and louder and louder as I wait for it to explode.
“Wait,” I think, my adult faculties tiptoeing into my soul. “I can leave. I can flee! I’ve got two legs, and I know damn well that I can use them. I don’t have to suffer through this any longer.”
I have no plan, but the garage door is still open, and he’s probably in the kitchen. I shoot out of bed, coming back to my senses somewhere between my third and fourth steps. I hear the rain again, and I feel my adult body. I lean my skull against the door to my hotel room, the groaning gamblers and copious copulators sing like music to my ears. I slump to the floor, lightheaded and weary from my travels. I laugh to myself—as I do whenever I witness something horrifying—and grab a quill-filled pillow from the guest bed so I can smother the glow beneath the door. I press firmly, flexing my muscles, muffling my internal screams until my hands drip and ooze from the sharp down.
The light is gone now. It has become so dark that I can see again. Shapes and auras fade in and out of my periphery. The outlines of my life project outwards from my cave’s walls. I see the scared child, the hurt teenager, and the accomplished adult. I focus on the adult in the room, for that is me and those others merely were me.
And for one brief and fleeting moment, I allow myself to feel safe.
“You go back, Jack, do it again, wheel turnin’ ‘round and ‘round. You go back, Jack, do it again.”
Adam Daley is an aspiring writer and perspiring carpenter from Phoenix, Arizona. He works in show-business as a project manager and he thinks that Nick Offerman stole his woodworking schtick. He even goes to therapy every week. His personal musings can be found on his substack under Bi Wife Energy.
Featured image by Top Sphere Media on Unsplash.
