Andrew Sullivan - Waste

The television was filled with static. Two queen beds stood beside each other against the far wall. Each one was neatly made and covered in a homemade quilt. Bright reds and greens made it look like Christmas. The furnishings didn’t belong to the motel. Matching green lamps and bright white dressers sat in front of the locked balcony doors. A workbench and two toolboxes leaned against the television stand. There were no family pictures.

It was too clean. Jamie had expected cigarette burns and pools of Jack with dead houseflies on the floor. He wanted to find them passed out drunk in front of pay-per-view with their hands in each other’s pants. He wanted to press the gun into the fat rolls on the backs of their necks and wake them up slowly from a naked slumber with their guts hanging over the side of the bed. There weren’t any stains on the ceiling, no condom wrappers on the floor. Jamie tossed the gun onto a bed to thumb through a stack of medical files on the bedside table. Women’s faces gazed back at him from hospital gowns and leather restraints. Prescriptions, toxicology reports, and therapists’ notes were mixed into a pile on one of the beds. None of the pictures were labeled.

Jamie dragged the body over to the far bed and unwrapped the tarp. The face looked up at him from sagging sockets. Bits of pig fat clung to its lips. Jamie held his breath as he scooped the body up and laid it on the bed. The skinny legs were rigid and bent at odd angles. He had to press on them with all his weight to crack the knees into place. On the right leg, he heard the knee pop and a gout of purple fluid hit the ceiling fan, sputtering around the room. Jamie didn’t pause. The arms were easier to adjust. He got the body into a sitting position and piled up knitted pillows to support the slippery back. He spent another five minutes trying to turn the head toward the door, pretending it wasn’t a person. It was too purple and mottled to be a person. Jamie yanked at his dead model’s neck to face the entrance, but it wouldn’t budge. He wanted the brothers to look their prize in what was left of its eyes when they came home with drills in hand.

Jamie’s reflection in the screen was covered in wet splotches and his arms looked black in the static. He tried the bathroom door, but it was locked too. Jamie sighed and tried a fist against the wood. It did not move. He used the same foot as before and felt the bones give again. This wasn’t a regular Dynasty door. The lock was heavier and the wood was too solid. The pain forced him to curl up on the floor for a few minutes, breathing through his nose till the urge to puke passed. He could smell the purple stains on the wall creeping toward him. It was just like cleaning out the bone cans in the summer. That was what he told himself as he wound up again. Just cleaning out another bone can. There was always more waste to come. The door gave away and so did Jamie’s ankle.

The woman in the bathtub wasn’t wearing much. Her long legs stretched over the edge of the tub, covered in blue and yellow bruises. Her lipstick was messy and stretched up to her nose. She pulled her teal housecoat tight across her chest. Long blond hair filled the tub around her. The water was running and she kept one hand under the warm flow. For a few seconds, Jamie thought she was a man. Then he noticed the long, tapered fingers and the swell of her hips crammed into the back of the bath. Her legs were shaved and she had a ring on her left hand. The diamond was missing. Jamie didn’t move from the doorway.

Elvira Moon waved hello and climbed out of the tub.

The woman from the tub walked up to Jamie and reached out to touch his face. Her back was wet from the bath and she had fine wrinkles stretching out from the corners of her eyes. Her large hand wrapped around his cheek. The light made her skin look yellow.

“Who — did they bring you here?” Jamie said.

“I don’t know you,” she said. “You weren’t supposed to come in here.”

The tall woman sat down on the toilet with her knees pressed together. She began to hum a prayer to herself. When she got to the end of a verse, she began again. Jamie couldn’t make out the words. He tried to get her to speak again.

“Are you…can you at least give me a name?” he asked. “I need to know what they did. Was it the brothers? Those guys? They did it to you?”

Jamie grabbed a quilt from the other room. When he returned, she was washing the lipstick off of her face. She pretended not to see him in the mirror. The woman didn’t belong in this place. The lock on the bathroom door was too stiff. Someone had spent money on the new door. Her underwear was gone.

“Do you know where they are? Do you know if — are you going to talk to me?”

She ignored him and continued to wash her face.

“Elvira.”

“What?”

“I’m Elvira. You wanted my name, you got it, okay?” the woman said. “You don’t need to ask so much. So many questions, and if you are looking for him — I know I was looking for him until I fell in here. I know where he goes when he doesn’t want to see me anymore. I know where he goes. He goes away, but not as far as he thinks. Downtown is not so far away.”

There were two of them, but they looked so alike with their beards. She was just confused, Jamie knew that. She could have thought she was seeing double in that state, whatever state she was in. Especially if they had their sunglasses on the whole time, but he didn’t want to think about the whole time. He didn’t want to think about any of it. Jamie thrust the quilt in her direction. The woman ignored him and splashed more water on her face. Jamie pushed the quilt at her again. It was covered in turkeys and pumpkins, but the pumpkins were green and the turkeys looked skinned. Christmas colors for the wrong holiday.

“Just put this on,” he said. “Where did they find you? How did they find you?”

She couldn’t see the body on the bed from inside the bathroom. Jamie knew the twins could return at any time. He opened the door a crack and looked down the hallway. It was still empty, but there were newspapers sitting in front of the doors. Photos from the rally in the park took up the front page. Jamie could not stay here any longer.

“I know he can’t hide. He left and he tried to hide. And hide me too.”

Elvira wrapped herself up in the quilt and pulled it over her head like a hood. Her bare feet were almost bigger than Jamie’s. She turned off the taps and closed the bathroom door.

“You know where they are?” Jamie asked.

Elvira nodded from inside her new wrap and scratched her leg with one long foot. Jamie grabbed the rifle off the bed. Elvira didn’t notice or didn’t care.

“Can you — um, can you show me? I need to find them. Him. Can you do that?”

“I can show anyone, but no one will let me. I know the place. You want me to go with you?” Elvira asked. “I don’t want to stay.”

“I’m your friend, okay? I am. I am. You just need to…you need to come with me.”

They stepped out into the hallway. There was nothing Jamie could do about the busted doorknob. They would know someone was here either way. He had traded in his corpse for a six-foot woman without any underwear who couldn’t look him in the eye. As they made their way down the stairs, Elvira kept talking and smiling. The words bounced off the walls. Jamie knew she wasn’t talking to him; she wasn’t talking to anyone but herself. It was the same thing Alisha’s mom did during visiting hours at the hospice.

“It’s the tall place downtown with all the bad chandeliers, but you have to take me with you. You don’t get to leave me here,” Elvira explained. “They don’t even let dogs in there. They think they’re so fancy, but even fancy people got dogs. I don’t want to be left places, okay?”