Rick Moody - Hotels of North America

Home, the place your enemies would wish to avoid. Home, the place your former lovers are troubled by. Home, where you can sit at the quiet table in the morning. Home, the place you sometimes hate that you also love the second you leave it. Home, any address that causes you to tear up. Home, near the metal box that has your surname on it. Home, where almost all the postcards you have ever received have been delivered. Home, where the government of your nation believes you live. Home, where your mother or your father brought you the second you no longer lived in a hospital. Home, where you first sang whatever it is you first sang. What welcome means, this you first learned at home, along with the word home . Home is where your bedroom was in the past and is now, and home is where you sleep more days than you sleep anywhere else, because if it were otherwise, you would renegotiate the application of the word home . Home is where there is almost always a beverage that you like. Home is where, if you wait long enough, it is likely that you will be fed a dessert even if it is not the best thing for you to eat. Home is where you are able to watch your favorite programs. Home is where people will try to find you when they need to find you. Home is the address you will sneak out of to kiss the first person you ever kiss who is not a member of your family, and it is the place to which you will return afterward, knowing about that kiss. Home is where you will first learn about disappointment, and it is where you will learn that it is okay to feel disappointed. Home is the place that is almost always indicated with a final major chord. Home, when you are older, is where you will watch your children grow, and, in fact, no other way of describing home is as valuable and meaningful as this, and when you are near death, the impossible sweetness of life will adhere first and foremost to the home where you watched your child or your children grow, or where you watched other neighborhood children grow, watched them rise up from the carpet and stab at something with their little paws before attempting to stick it into their mouths. This will be your home. Home may also be the place where they have called you an asshole more than any other place. Home is where you will paint your masterpiece. Home is what you will describe in your masterpiece; either home or the leaving of home. If you say you have no home on earth, then what you mean is that there was trouble at your home. Home is where you go right before dark. Home is where you go when you are recovered. When work becomes impossible, you will long for home. It is possible that in your life you have had multiple homes, a sequence of homes, and that each of these has required a transition. For example, when you were in a car that carried you from a house where both of your parents had lived together to a house where only one of your parents lived, even during that car ride, there was still an idea of home.

That catch in your throat that is the feeling that you will never be known, never be esteemed? That feeling evaporates in the presence of home fires, and while no substitute is adequate, there is the sense in the finest hotels that you are not far from home. When you embark on your journey, you set aside this notion of home, as if launching onto a whitecapped sea, certain that you are sturdy enough to let go of home, to relinquish the familiar, but it is only because you know that you can return home again, and it is the job of the hotel, the inn, the motel, the furnished room, to suggest the possibility of home or serve as a way station for home, preparing you for that return, lightening the load as long as you must be away. This is the great romance of life, the losing of home temporarily as when, upon that same storm-tossed sea, you lost the horizon line. The hotel helps you to see the horizon, even if there is no land to be witnessed there.

Or so it has been in the recent, modern centuries of human history, and so it would continue to be if it were not for one tiny nettlesome bit of insect life that has emerged from up out of the eons of the past like a scourge to torpedo the serenity of our home lives, and that nettlesome life-form, as you must recognize by now, is the bedbug. Where did the bedbug come from? It came from somewhere in the evolutionary past, the dark ages, and it came to disturb your sleep, so that you would never sleep again, and while resting comfortably, you would wake to a stabbing pain on the surface of some extremity; somewhere the blood is pooling in such a way that the bedbug can come at you for warmth, creature comfort, and a full belly. It was gone, this species, but now it has returned, and it has descended on the cities, almost all places where there are hotels in abundance, and everyone you know, whether virtuous or sinful and carefree, is a potential vector of the dreaded bedbug.

Do you know any musicians? Do you know musicians from Francophone Canada who live in a sort of a commune and practice community ownership of their possessions and who do not wash their hair as often as they might? These musicians are almost certain to be harboring bedbugs, especially after a year of touring and sleeping on various people’s floors. Do not let them into your house. There are bedbugs in their guitar cases or their duffel bags. Every cinema that you visit carries with it the possibility of bedbugs, especially if it is not newly renovated, as in the old chain theaters that attract a downmarket clientele. You are better off not bringing any personal possessions, such as knapsacks or briefcases, into this movie theater. And then there are the hotels. It is widely known that even some of the best hotels in the nation have had outbreaks of these critters, and probably they bomb entire floors or strip them down to the studs before re-releasing the rooms onto the market. How do you know if they have eliminated the problem or not? I have stayed in some fine hotels in my day, but I was in no way certain in any of them that I would be unmolested by the bedbug.

At one time, the bedbug was a class marker. It separated the wannabes from the dynasts. Power is not afraid of powerful insecticides. But these things no longer separate us, for we are all fallen into the abyss of bedbug-related chaos. Some guy from Mali gets a visa because he is being tortured for his religious beliefs, and brings the hemorrhagic virus with him on the flight from London. Another guy comes from Pattaya with the antibiotic-resistant strain of gonorrhea. It’s all one world now, the bedbugs cry out, and they gather up resolve in the neighborhoods of addicts, where people have stopped washing or cleaning, and these addicts take them to the motels where they are putting up for a day or two to get their heads together before going home to tell their husbands or wives that they have spent it all.

The bedbugs await these administrations of sorrow, and then they move on to the truckers, the truckers slumbering off a seventy-two-hour shift, so wasted and dead inside that they wouldn’t know if the bedbugs took off a six-inch patch of them, and the truckers in turn take them from one state to the next, or else the truckers pass them on to the hookers, because what trucker does not, at some point in his dismal haul, squint out into the parking lot and see in dim light the woman who does not look all that bad. The trucker comes from where we are most impoverished, and he brings the bedbugs, and when the bedbugs arrive in the city, they find an unimaginably colorful banquet laid out before them, a feast of human tissue, because where one human is neat and clean and somewhat cautious about such things, only fifty feet away lives a deranged and toothless hoarder of decayed snacks and tchotchkes whose apartment features a bounty of rats and cockroaches and unread copies of USA Today. So many places for the bedbugs to get comfortable, and when they are comfortable and have a base of operations, they move out to colonize.