The original neon sign still stands out by the boulevard.
The neon filaments declare this to be The Comet Motel in a flashy, mid-century script. Just in case you forgot what a comet looks like, the sign provides one such specimen – swooping around the name with a fiery tail. The whole thing blazes at night in a counter-clockwise trail three times, and then all at once.
There’s ten rooms.
That’s pretty much it.
A couple from Erie, Pennsylvania checked in yesterday. The guy came right up to the front desk and knocked on the Plexiglass screen. Funny thing to do, considering I was looking right at him.
“The bathroom door handle in our room came off,” he said.
That was a simple fix. I explained how to put it back on.
“It keeps coming off. I think it needs to be replaced.”
I just stared at him at first.
Maybe he didn’t notice, but every inch of this place – including the old coot in front of him – needs to be replaced.
Don’t get me wrong. I do what I can. I scrub the scuff marks and oily hand prints off the walls, shovel in the winter, dust, stuff like that. Then there’s the cleaning service for the rooms, and I always make sure it’s done right. But that’s about all I can do.
The heavy oak boudoir in the lobby is our only attempt at classiness. Even it can’t muster up the energy to match its only neighbor, a lone security camera with a bundle of black electrical wires floating down and away from the wall. I don’t think it’s even plugged in.
But, yeah, sure. The bathroom doorknob.
Well, I did the best I could with some super glue. The poor sap was just sitting there on the end of the bed, his sandals dangling from his toes. I don’t know where the wife went. Maybe there never was one. I wished he’d turn the TV on or better yet get up and go to the casino.
“This happens all the time,” I said. I don’t know why.
You can tell some guests are used to a certain baseline in life. Which is fine, but you can’t expect that baseline to just follow you around. Not for free. Not because it loves you. If you make that mistake, a doorknob will come off in your hand one day and it will seem like a kind of tragedy or the omen of a tragedy instead of what it is. A doorknob.
I dropped off some fresh towels a little later, just to check in. I think he appreciated that.
–
For regular guests, a room is $50 a night. Ricky’s room is $35 a night.
Ricky is a guest but will do things no one (meaning me) wants to do. He cleans tile grout like no one’s business, for example. But the thing about Ricky is you have to keep him busy. Otherwise, he gets talking about hypothetically killing people.
“God forbid I ever have to use the bowie I got but I will if I have to,” he said to me this morning, toward the end of a longer soliloquy about being hypothetically robbed.
I would normally tune this out, but there was a nice, polite family in Maid of the Mist merchandise waiting behind him to check out. I had to get rid of Ricky, who was under the unfortunate misconception that he was a sort of security guard people felt safe around.
“Patio tables could use a scrub,” I said, as if I was remembering but not looking forward to doing it myself. That was all I needed to say.
Then Ricky was off, practically jogging through the lobby and out the front door. Mom handed over the keycards. I filed the keycards. Then they piled in their min-van and turned right – like they all do – out of the parking lot.
We don’t have patio tables. This is a fact that will never return to me or contradict me in any way due to the nature of Ricky’s attention span. In this way and sometimes others, we have whatever we say we have.
–
Lee, the night clerk, has not been himself lately. For example, I expected to get off at four today but he came in and took over at three – a whole hour earlier than he’s supposed to. He said the bus hasn’t been on time lately.
“Better to be early than late, right?” he said.
Funny thing to say, considering he’s never been late and it would not be a problem if he was because I live twelve feet away, in a room off the back of the office. I told him to just relax until his shift, but he ignored me and started unpacking a shipment of tissue boxes.
I don’t know what’s gotten into him.
While the boxes made dry ripping sounds, I clicked around on the computer. We have three occupancies I expect to continue for at least another two weeks. We have a three-night stay booked for next week. Pretty average for a place that’s been in the red since 2003.
“So it won’t be long now, huh?” Lee says.
“Until what?”
“You know. The landing.”
“We’ll see. I’ve been wrong before.”
“Where do you expect it to happen?”
I don’t expect anything, but I don’t belabor this point. “It’ll have to be somewhere discreet. Somewhere upstream from the falls, I guess.”
I told Lee about the Others because one day, while I was balancing the books no one ever looks at, he asked me what I do in my room without a TV. Come to think of it, he might’ve just asked me if I have a TV in my room.
Anyhow, I told him I listen to the radio.
“What do you listen to?” he had asked.
Then I had to explain that I’ve already listened to everything on planet Earth, so I started exploring.
I drifted further away from the stations, to the static in between the stations. I liked it to be static punctuated by a few intelligible words. It was just noise at first. And it was very boring, but no more boring than everything else.
“But then you…found something?” Lee said.
I think this is Lee’s second or third job. He normally comes in, sits down at the desk and falls asleep for eight solid hours. I used to shake the chair from behind to get him to leave. Lately, though, he’s gone by the time I come out of my room. The desk will be tidied, and all the trash cans empty.
“Yes.”
But I didn’t find anything. Not at all. This is what I don’t know how to explain. If I tuned in to the Others right now, all Lee would hear is meaningless static. There’s no secret station. There’s no code. There’s nothing to find. I just listened and then one day I understood.
–
I needed toothpaste and new batteries for my radio. I figured this was a good enough reason to take the motel’s truck to the gas station down the road, just past the old Cupid Motel and Bit-o-Paris.
Niagara Falls used to have a need for all of these motels. It used to be the Honeymoon Capital of the country, if you can believe that. Nowadays, it’s mostly families on cheap vacations to the falls or the outlet malls or both.
In the dark cab of the truck, I was patting myself down for my wallet when I noticed the naked woman in the window of Room 4. She was digging around in a suitcase half-heartedly, like she was searching for an item and the reason she needed the item.
Then the man from Erie, Pennsylvania was next to her. He didn’t close the curtains. They just started talking, as if this was the most natural thing in the world. As if no one else could possibly see the exact shape and size of her tiny, upturned nipples.
I should’ve started my car, but I didn’t.
The door was probably unlocked. I could’ve waltzed right in and acted like it was an honest mistake. I could’ve popped their little bubble any time I wanted. What do I think I’m doing? Well, I’m just doing my job is all! I was just stopping by to check on that pesky doorknob!
“Dolts,” I said.
The man from Erie, Pennsylvania whipped around like he heard a twig snap underfoot. Then the curtains came together so fast I couldn’t tell if he spotted me or something else. I waited a few minutes, put my car in reverse, and took the long way there.
–
When I came back from the gas station, Lee was still awake and playing some sort of card game on the computer. That is extremely unusual. By that time in the evening, he would normally be asleep.
“Everything good?”
He gave me a thumbs up. So no complaints of Peeping Toms. A good sign.
As I packed the new batteries into my radio, I thought about the thumbs up. Why didn’t he say anything? Had Lee ever given me a thumbs up before? I didn’t think so. That just didn’t seem like him.
But that’s just what happens. You go to sleep one night and you wake up different. Then it happens again a few nights later. You may think to yourself, “That’s odd – I forgot about the thing I think about every day.”
At first, it’s a relief. You may think you’re improving. But you’re not. Not if nothing comes to take its place.
You find yourself stammering in situations you’d normally pull off. You are absolutely convinced of an outcome and then, when a different outcome occurs, you are completely apathetic. You consult your childhood and find that it happened to someone else entirely.
All the while, your Other is gaining what you are losing.
For example, I recently forgot the kind of soups I like. I stood there, in the soup aisle, unable to connect my desire with its object. Another preference transmitted to the Other. The one I ultimately chose paled in comparison to the favorite I could no longer recall.
What exactly the Others are doing up there, siphoning our lives away on the pot-marked face of the Moon, is hard to understand. They are probably controlling us, in a mild and indirect kind of way. Like an expectation that fails you. There is a force in the absence.
–
That night, I dreamt that the Others landed.
Lee went looking for them, and the Others agreed to let the Lees switch places. As soon as the door of the spacecraft shut behind the real Lee, I knew with complete certainty that he was a goner.
Well. Imagine my surprise when Lee burst into my room that night, yelling at me and then leaving without closing the door. I lingered, considering the way my esteemed colleague’s incursion cut a stark tractor beam into my room.
Was it finally time?
I already had a suitcase packed in preparation for the landing. I picked it up but then put it back down. I hadn’t thought it through, the way a single suitcase implies a return and predictable needs. Very silly, in hindsight. I brought it out with me anyway.
Outside, red and blue lights strobed silently across the long line of dark windows. The man from Erie, Pennsylvania was sitting on the curb, propping his right hand up on his knee. A blade protruded from the back of the hand. The hilt, no doubt, was buried in the other side.
My mind tried to get around what I was seeing. What, I wondered, was the trick here? Ricky – having no sense at all – was not only still on the scene but was also ranting and raving to the police.
“Well you cannot go around accusing decent people of crimes and not expect a response. You cannot do it. I’m sorry it had to come to this, but it had to be done.”
At the same time, the man from Erie, Pennsylvania was giving his version of events to a different pair of police. Ricky had been skulking around for days and peeping on his wife in the windows, he said. All he did was tell the creep to beat it, and then Ricky stabbed him. Unprovoked!
“Well what do you expect when you try to unarm a man?” Ricky replied, overhearing. Always the picture of reason, repose, and common sense. “And what do you expect when your curtains are wide open for that matter?”
The man from Erie, Pennsylvania tried to protest but he was losing steam, consciousness, and the will to keep his wound in that crucial upright position – with his hand to God. Tip forward or backward, the knife would go where he goes.
Lee was on the phone out by the boulevard, ready to flag down the fire trucks or ambulance or whoever came next. When he didn’t show up for his next shift or any shifts after that, the owner of the motel blamed drugs. Even if that was true, I still blamed the Others.
I think him standing out there, under the neon comet, is what completed his transfer. He walked under it believing in the sign’s signalling power. He believed he was making rescue faster and easier.
As if it were only a matter of being found.
–
I can remember what it was like before.
I pushed my two kids on a tandem swingset in the backyard. I cared about the grades they got on their tests. When I heard footsteps on the staircase, I listened. The qualities of the tread had something important to tell me.
The footsteps were the first to go. They didn’t just stop speaking to me. The sound completely abandoned me. If I turned a corner, I was liable to run right into one of my kids. I had no idea where my wife was unless she was standing right in front of me. Sometimes not even then.
I bet you can guess how that went.
Without anyone else in the house, there was nothing to stop the transfer to my Other. I got progressively lost in my house and in my life. With no real plans, destinations, or designs for my future, I focused on easy household chores.
Landscaping, for example. I would drag the hose out every so often to water the bushes, even though every step was tiresome and I could barely remember what I was doing. By the time I got out there, I would be so exhausted that I would water the shrubbery sitting down.
Sometimes I would just lay down in the middle of my lawn in broad daylight. I expected the police to come and drag me inside by my lapels, but they never did. Maybe my neighbors never called. Maybe they were under the impression they were preserving dignity.
“Here lies Greg,” they might’ve eulogized as they did the evening’s dishes. “Gone but not forgotten.”