Rick Moody: Hotels of North America

To summarize, these are the three main problems of bed-and-breakfast establishments: throw pillows, potpourri, and breakfast conversation, and the fourth problem is gazebos. And the fifth problem is water features. And the sixth problem is themed rooms, and the seventh problem is provenance (who owned the inn before and who owned the inn before that, and who owned it before that, and what year the bed-and-breakfast was built, and how old the timber is in the main hall), and the eighth problem is pride of ownership, because why can’t it just be a place you stay, why does it always have to be an ideological crusade? And the ninth problem is excessive amounts of regional advice. And the tenth problem is the absence of telephones. Even if you aren’t going to use the telephone, you want to know that the telephone is there. And the eleventh problem is price. There is no bed-and-breakfast that you can see from the interstate that says $39.95 in a neon sign above it, and although you can really sleep peacefully in the bed-and-breakfast if you are the sort of person who can be comfortable in the presence of a superabundance of pillows, that rush of uncertainty and danger that you get from the motel by the interstate is absent.

Well, given the feelings described above, you are probably wondering why I would go to a bed-and-breakfast after all this. And to speak to this question I have to speak of the way in which I met K. In the more than two years that I have been working as an online reviewer of hotels, I have never told you this very pertinent detail about my personal life, and that is the way in which I met K., the love of my life (even though it appears, at the time of this writing, that I am still in a hotel by myself, trying to avoid using the bathroom down the hall, which is exactly how I described it in my review of yesterday). It happens that about the time my ex-wife and I signed the relevant documents related to our parting, I went to a local ashram, which I had learned about from a flyer on the bulletin board at a local health-food provider, whose aisles I was wandering aimlessly because I had nowhere else to go. There in the foyer, among the advertisements for home-birth classes and guitar lessons and clutter clearing, I saw a flyer for open classes in meditation and thought-cleansing. I noticed immediately that whoever had written the copy for this advertisement of meditation and thought-cleansing did not have a real grasp on the kinds of marketing language that would drive a person into a class on meditation and thought-cleansing, and so I resolved that I would offer my services at the ashram in the hopes that I might serve in some kind of official function.

I marked down the address, and then on the day of the meditation and thought-cleansing session, I took a bus over to the neighborhood in question. (I’m leaving out the precise address of the ashram, because I would prefer that the kindness of the ashram remain a kindness unknown to the likes of TigerBooty! or KoWojahk283 or WakeAndBake.) I had no intention of meditating and did not believe my thoughts were in any need of cleansing. My idea was to petition the monk or monks about the advertisement, but I turned up at the ashram a little bit late, and because I was late, I had no choice but to sit in on the class. There was a flurry of activity around me, as some people with shaved heads indicated where the seating pads were and helped me to find a place. The sensei, or howsoever he was called, was giving his little talk, and it was about the course of thought, which, in the view of the sensei, was about flailing in the dark, lost, and the goal was not to think at all but to create some free-floating stasis in which one’s thoughts were like billboards and you just drove on past them and didn’t order the product. This seemed like a good plan, and quaint, as I’d heard many people saying things like this thirty years ago, but the plan was also difficult for me because of the pitch I was going to make about how the advertisements they were using for the ashram could be improved.

I had so many good marketing ideas, but then in the middle of the sensei’s lecture I must have begun listening to him. We were supposed to have our eyes closed, but I couldn’t help but notice that there was a woman next to me, with dark hair and modern racial chemistry, who was wearing some rather fetching yoga pants and a black T-shirt and who seemed to be in deepest concentration. Apparently, cleansing my thoughts was making me forget my mercantile purpose, and instead I was thinking about the woman, but even in this area I was prey to the oceanic intonements of the sensei, his half-Japanese muttering, because somewhere in the middle of the hour, which seemed more like seven or eight hours, I began either to drift off or to feel some sense of well-being, which I guess implies an absence of worry about money, and perhaps there were fifteen minutes or so of thinking about only the woman, and then maybe there was a period, an elevated echelon, where I felt the stirrings of something that, to my horror, corresponded with what was being described by the sensei, that is, the beginnings of contentment.

It would be reasonable to ask whether these were actually cleansing thoughts or something closer to mind control, but given that there was time left on the clock for that day’s class, I could not but give in, and off I went, and I would say, as readers of the Rate Your Lodging site might be aware, that I have trouble getting my thoughts to decelerate. Does anyone else have trouble with that kind of thing? It was sort of a miracle for me to find that the sensei and his voice had now receded beyond the waves of meditative space, and I was finding that actually the quiet was agreeable, and even the slight knee pain was no real nuisance, and that it was as though I were the skiff, and the cares of my life had been left behind in a cooler on a dock, and now I was dropping the lines and setting out onto the pond. The pond’s shores withdrew as I rowed, and now I was in and of the current, and the current was strong, I no longer needed to row at all, and the pond had become a lake, and above the lake, dusk fell into its painterly tonalities.

And this was how I learned that I was of the ocean. I was the clock coming to a stop, I was the strings that don’t get played but just vibrate sympathetically, I was the nest awaiting its fledglings, I was the coming of night, I was the bicycle cresting the hill, I was the music box, I was the windmill turning with no one around to watch, I was the tree in the forest, I was the choir whose individual voices could no longer be distinguished, I was the clouds after the storm, I was the table awaiting its cornucopia, I was the bed awaiting its sleeper, I was the book passed from hand to hand, I was the reverberations of the muezzin having called the city to prayer, I was the hand waiting to be held, I was the ropes for the climb, I was the hammock out back, I was the song of the songbird, I was the old sand washed to the top of the new in the sequence of waves, I was the teardrop in the moment of being wiped away, I was the aerodynamics of the bumblebee, I was the stairs up to the proscenium, I was the cage door swinging open, I was part of the other people in the ashram, I was starting to feel that I was the other people in the room, though I was the unlikeliest person in the room to have had this beginner’s luck in the meditation and cleansing thoughts, and I didn’t have time to think about that, I could see the woman in black and feel something coming from her toward me, as if we were one together, though at the moment, I also felt this way about any number of other people in the room, like the guy with the gray comb-over and the lavender headband. I felt one with him and his callused feet, and with the anorexic woman in the corner wearing sunglasses, with her gallon-size jug of water; I was one with all of them.