Board Thread:Writer's Workshop/@comment-25383866-20141021090212

He was driving right into the storm. He’d been watching it build through the windshield for the past four hours, a bruise forming against the horizon, purple and black. Like a sucker punch from God. The air was starting to grow damp; he could smell the moisture in the air through the open windows.

He stuck his hand out the driver’s side window to catch the first few drops of rain that would soon turn the surrounding scrub and desert into a wet dust like hot chocolate in cold water. The wind rushed between his fingers, slid coquettishly up his jacket sleeve, made it billow out like the sail of some small ship. He turned his hand this way and that, enjoying the feel of the expectant air across his skin.

The rain would be warm, he knew, flowing like martyr’s blood from holy stigmata to the heathen earth below. It would be heavy, too, fat drops falling and bursting on the ground, in his open palm, on the windshield. The first few drops would be solitary, almost hesitant, until all at once they would come pouring down, determined to drown the world. He drove on, one hand on the wheel, one out the window, waiting for the rain.

David Alistair had begun the day early, coming awake abruptly sometime before dawn. He was naturally an early riser, but he had not slept well; the bed seemed to be stuffed with some kind of migratory filler that changed position whenever he did, following his body’s contours and then completely ignoring them once settled. He wondered briefly how many others had rolled helplessly from side to side over the anomalous surface of the mattress, spending the night trying to sleep until they gave up, red-eyed and apathetic.

He sat up on the bed, and opened his eyes as wide as he could, rolling them around in their sockets and blinking until all the sleep was gone from them. He looked around the room in the lightening dark. There was a lone window at the far end of the room that was covered by a drawn curtain; the faint light of a nascent sun crept in around the edges, lending the interior a grey chiaroscuro.

He reflected as he sat there that the room belonged in darkness. It was ugly in a way that couldn’t be helped, like a tragic birth-defect born of some flaw in its architectural genes. The whole thing seemed to lean inward as if exhausted by the task of holding itself up, the molding in the corners visibly warped and sagging, baseboards bulging out from the walls. The wallpaper was wrinkled and droopy, and seemed to be sloughing off like dead skin in places. It had the aura of something ready to die, but unable.

He kicked the thin blankets off, and swung his legs out over the edge of the bed. He sat for a moment, then stretched and stood up, the bed creaking gratefully as his weight left it. He made his way to the tiny bathroom and turned the light on. He showered, dressed, and gathered his things. He wanted to be on his way quickly.

He left the room, closing the door quietly behind him, and walked to the office, his duffel slung over his shoulder. He rapped on the window until a light flicked on behind the glass and the manager appeared.

He was a gaunt, older man who had marks on his nose from the spectacles tucked into his breast pocket and was bald except for a lovingly cultivated ring of hair that started at his temples and wrapped around the back of his head, giving him a distinctly priest-like appearance. He narrowed his eyes and put the glasses on, looking out through the window. He recognized his customer and waved him in.

David opened the door and walked up to the desk, behind which the manager had retreated. “Early bird, huh?” the man said with a smile, his lips pulling back to reveal a mouth full of crooked but otherwise healthy teeth. “No worms around here, bud.”

David smiled back. “I’m ready to check out is all.” The manager nodded.

“Sure,” he said, “Just one minute...” He began to rummage around beneath the desk.

As he did so, David looked around the office. There was a small TV up on a high shelf, and next to it was what appeared to be a trophy fashioned to look like a sailboat. Plastic painted gold, infused with the tart nectar of sentiment. The manager came back up with a receipt and a Bic pen.

As David signed the slip, he asked, “What’s that trophy for?” He passed it back across the desk.

The manager pocketed it and smiled once more. “I raced sailboats in my younger days. Pretty well, it seems. I didn’t always run a motel in the middle of the desert, you know.” He laughed.

David nodded. “Right,” he said. “Just curious.”

“Everybody is. Not a problem. Well then, Mr. Roberts,” the manager said, extending a hand, “Thanks for staying with us. I hope we’ll see you again soon. Tell a friend about the Miracle Inn.”

David didn’t think he’d ever come this way again, but he shook the man’s hand and said “Thanks, I’ll be sure to do that,” before turning and walking out the door.

The manager watched him go, his smile fading. He could hear the water lapping on the shore somewhere behind him, tasting the earth with its liquid tongue. It was such a soft sound, so gentle. He closed his eyes, letting the sound become his world, filling him up with whispered crescendos. He felt the creak and sway of a boat under his feet, and let his sea legs hold him steady.

Then the door thudded closed and his eyes opened into the silence. He went and turned the neon “No Vacancy” sign off, the light fading slowly from its reflection in the window until it was completely grey, drained.

Outside, the light of dawn was beginning to tinge the desert around the motel with a vibrant palette of purple, orange, red, and gold. In the pale distance David could see low hills already blazing with the morning’s glory, looking like faraway funeral pyres.

David’s car was the only one in the lot, but it would have stood out even if the place had been full. She was a hard old bitch, all dents and glossed-over war wounds; a steel scar on wheels. Her body had been red once, faded now to a bruised-peach orange. It was only by an act of god that the beast was still moving, or so he had been told, and more than once. Well, the lord worked in mysterious ways. The bitch was not without her graces, of course; he never needed to lock her. It was a poor thief who stole damaged goods, he thought, and the bitch was all damage and no goods. She was the type of car an old man might keep in his garage long after he has any business driving it, a trophy of youth, now a tragedy in rust.

He pulled open the passenger’s side door and threw his duffel into the back seat. He cast one last glance back toward the office. The manager was no longer in sight. He wondered how the man sustained a business in a place like this. When David had first asked for a room, he’d been informed of his good luck, as there was one room left unbooked. The manager had made a show of turning on the “No Vacancy” sign before handing him his room key and pointing him back out the door.

That had struck him as strange as he walked from the office to his room; there was obviously no one else here. People were not subtle. There were always hints to their presence, be it an echo of laughter down a long hallway, or the hushed steps of bare feet padding across carpet in an adjacent room. Here, though, there was nothing. He didn’t have to open each door to know that the rooms beyond were empty as unsold coffins.

His family had owned a big plot in a local cemetery when he was little. There was a stone mausoleum built onto the front of the crematory where they displayed ashes and flowers side by side. When the furnace was going, it looked like a great marble beast squatting at the top of the hill, belching smoke amongst the headstones. He remembered his father’s memorial, viewing his ashes inside that stone monster. After the rest of his family had filed out the door, he stood in the preternatural quiet that seemed to be generated by some silent engine hidden in the walls. For a second he felt terribly alone, the empty weight of isolation pressing in on him, and he found he couldn’t get out fast enough.

That was what total absence of life was like; and that was what he had felt as he entered his room. He was glad to be on his way. He went back around to the driver’s side door and climbed in. He placed the key in the ignition, and started the car up. There was a tearing sound as the engine turned over, and then a roar and a rumble as the car shuddered to life. He pulled back out of the parking lot and up to the highway, where he paused to look both ways before pulling out onto the road. Behind, in the lobby of the motel, the “No Vacancy” sign flickered off, and then back on again, red light refracting in the warped glass.

He’d been on road trips before. There was a kind of peace that came over him after a while, this mechanized Zen that settled into his marrow as he drove. A blacktop hypnosis that lulled him into a trance of movement. The way the car hummed, the engine’s roar muted to a whisper and a growl by that strange thin atmosphere that lay between him, inside, and the world, with its noise and fury, outside. A human nucleus in a metal blastocyst, seconds from splitting apart.

This time it was different. Peace eluded him; his mind wouldn’t rest. All he could think of was how this was going to end, the blood that would be spilled. Whose blood would be spilled.

The sun was fully in the sky now, its golden orb bathing the landscape in a hot, monochromatic light, the pastel colors of the early morning gone, replaced now by this harsher, brassy tone. The desert baked and boiled, cracking and chapping like parched lips in the already blistering heat.

The sun seemed a harsh master in the places empty of man. Its light washed the world clean of color, leaving it to dry in yellowed sepia tones. The story of the world was written there on the dried parchment of the earth. It was funny, David reflected, the way all deserts looked like that: like a still from a silent movie, sterile and anachronistic. A freeze-frame from the dawn of time.

Looking out the window at the illuminated earth, David recalled a coyote story he’d been told as a boy; “Coyote and the Eyes of God,” something like that. Coyote was a trickster, a thief, and a charlatan. But he wasn’t evil. In a way Coyote was the original Robin Hood; a character that existed solely to humble the high and mighty, to turn the tables just enough so that all had a place to sit. But then sometimes, he was just a tricky bastard.

David tried to recall the details of the story, his mind snagged on the memory, caught like a coat-sleeve on a door handle.

In that warm, post-natal time in the life of the earth, God watched it constantly, worrying over it as any new father does. His eyes burned with light, one fiery red, the other a soft white. Coyote walked the earth as a man, his padded feet attached to two legs, and the light of the creator’s eyes shined on him as well.

Coyote schemed to steal God’s eyes that he would control the light, and that time finally came one day when God was at rest in his bed. Coyote stole up to the creator’s bedside, and plucked his eyes from their sockets while he slept. Coyote ran, and God, blinded as he was, could not follow. Coyote threw God’s eyes into the sky, where they remain to this day. And that’s why we have the night and the day. God in his wrath cursed the trickster to go forever on his belly as a beast and eat vermin. And that’s why Coyote goes about on all fours.

David contemplated the story, wondering what had inspired the memory. The sere landscape flew by outside in a brown blur, punctuated here and there with spots of green where hard little shrubs had grown up in the dry soil. He looked ahead, trying to see to the end of the highway. It stretched on forever into the horizontal abyss of the desert, a black snake swallowing its own tail. When he was little, he used to think that there was a line where the sky met the earth, and you could lift up the soft curtain of blue to peek at whatever mystery lay beyond it.

He wondered now if that was where the highway led, off the edge of the world into the cosmos. Maybe. He would see soon enough. 