We had been driving for more than ten hours when the dog vomited a thin stream of yellow gruel down my wife’s shoulder. Nancy made the sound a branch makes just before it breaks. The dog whined and strained toward me for comfort as I dove for my purse, searching for my stash of napkins. But no amount of napkins could help the stench of rancid meat and cat turds steaming up the interior of the car.
“Fuck this,” Nancy said and swung the car off onto the next crossroad. Its barely two lanes stretched into the empty sagebrush, the road blackly new in the endless nothing of arid plain. Even the dull orange of sunset couldn’t add color to this wasteland of dust and rock.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” I asked, and she shot me one of her Bad Looks, teeth set, nostrils flexed.
“I’m going to find a hotel.” Her voice hitched a little, and I felt a spear of guilt. Nancy hated hotels, really hated them, and the dog’s nausea was my fault for slipping her a treat two miles earlier, Nancy’s tiredness my fault, this whole trip my fault. If I had only learned to drive, or better yet, refused to visit my parents in their apocalyptic bunker, we’d be happily at home, cuddled on the couch in front of the Criterion collection. If only we’d gotten on the road half an hour earlier, before a freak landslide closed the interstate, dumping us onto a string of highways even Google had forgotten about.
“I don’t know if there are—”
Her hand sliced through the air, cutting me off. “Didn’t you see the sign?”
“I haven’t seen a hint of civilization since we got on this highway,” I began, but then we topped one of those barely perceptible desert rises, and I saw the little town ahead, or at least one of those clusters of commerce that sometimes spring up alongside highways. An array of thirty-foot-tall signs bristled along the edges of this one narrow road: Popeye’s, McDonald’s, LaQuinta Inn, Chik-fil-A. A Chevron boasted a Subway and a DQ under one roof. Everything looked freshly painted and clean, all the promise of America with none of the litter.
“They must be expanding the highway or something?” Nancy asked, irritation replaced with curiosity. She glanced over at me, grinning. “Just imagine being the first person to sleep on one of those Hilton hotel beds they’re always advertising.”
Our friends Erik and Rita had liked their bed at the Hilton so much they got the mattress information from the front desk and ordered a new one when they got home. Of course, they’d been visiting a luxury resort in Hawaii, not a travel hub at the ass-end of Washington. I wasn’t sure even truck drivers passed through this place. The pavement looked untouched, the Platonic Form of new development.
We didn’t pass another car as we rolled downhill into town. After fighting traffic for hours due to the interstate disaster, it should have felt good, but the wrongness seeped into the car like the dust. Two narrow strips of green grass bordered the road, as if someone hoped to add a dose of cheer to the desert landscape. I imagined that come Christmas time, the same misguided fool would hang lights and put up some inflatable Santas. The grass would probably be dead by that time.
The stop light came as a surprise, but we stopped and waited our turn for the road. To my left, a Starbucks was clearly still under construction. The dog whined again. She hated being stuck in the car. A tinkling of light piano came from somewhere around the Starbucks’ drive-thru lane.
“Did you turn on the radio?” Nancy asked.
“Of course not.” I lowered the window a crack, glad for the break in the puke-stink. The music grew louder, bottled jazz piano and acoustic guitar. “It’s definitely coming from outside.”
She rolled down her own window, risking the ire of her dust allergy. Her nose crinkled. “Is it ‘The Girl from Ipanema’?”
“I love that song. It sounds so happy, but the words are so sad.”
“You would.” She chuckled, and the light changed. The music continued, though, the girl swaying seductively from streetlight to streetlight as we rolled slowly forward. Or so I assumed—there was no change in the volume of the song and no Doppler effect.
We passed a darkened Best Western, the lines in its lot so freshly painted they glowed blue in the twilight shadows. I rubbed my arms, even though the windows were letting in ninety-degree heat. “When you caught the sign, was there a name for this place?”
“Nope, just the blue gas-food-lodging sign. I figured you’d know where we were.”
I hesitated, trying to remember some of the trips my father had made us take during his Sunday Drives phase. He’d hold his face in this rictus of fake happiness, more and more teeth showing the farther from home we got. My mother sat in the front seat, unspeaking, eyes fixed on the road as she steadily smoked a pack of cigarettes. My little brother would lay on the floor, trying to breathe from the narrow ribbon of clean air as I pressed my cheek to the window, crying to myself.
“We only made it out here once,” I admitted. “It’s so far out of the way, going around the nuclear reservation like this. My dad used to say it was like the US military stuck a pry bar in reality and tore a hole for all their secrets.”
“Not creepy at all,” Nancy said as we turned into the driveway of a Comfort Travels Inn. The light in the lobby came on as we pulled into the loading zone. I shot Nancy a look, but she was scraping vomit off her shoulder. The dog sat up and gave a single, hollow bark.
“I’ll take Molly for a pee if you’ll check us in,” I suggested.
“Sure, sure.” She waved me out of the car and dug under the seat for her phone-wallet.
I opened the back door. “Come on, girl.”
Our shepherd mix blinked her one blue, one brown eye at me, and then wobbled a little as she climbed down from the backseat. When she shook herself, tufts of brown and white fur flew everywhere, and her ears bounced like they had springs inside. I had to give her a treat for being so cute.
“Come on, girl,” I repeated, urging her toward the green ribbon at the side of the road. We both stopped for stretch breaks, the long drive sliding away as we unwound our way across the cooling black parking lot. The smell of warm plastic wafted off the green. “Fake. Nice.”
The dog took a step onto the pseudo-turf and froze. I gave her leash a tiny tug, and she lowered her head and tail, sidling toward the car.
“What’s wrong, Molly?”
The dog set more of her thirty-five pounds against the leash.
“Well, if you don’t have to pee, you don’t have to pee.” I let her steer me off the grass. Glancing up, I noticed there were no other cars in the parking lot, and the top half of the four-story hotel was entirely dark. “Nice of them to conserve energy, I guess.”
I tried to give Molly a little jog around the lot, but she kept darting toward the car, pawing at the door. It took an entire handful of treats to get her inside the hotel.
The lobby smelled of fresh paint and industrial glue. Efforts had been made to create a welcoming interior, but the rigid gray couches squaring off around a glass coffee table managed only “discount corporate.” A set of shelves boasting travel supplies stood empty save for a bottle of Advil and a tube of toothpaste—not in the box.
I went to the counter, where a lone employee buried their face in the computer monitor. I stood there a long moment while they ignored me. Keystrokes echoed in the empty room, as did the soft sound of my throat clearing.
“Hello?”
The person at the computer tilted their head an infinitesimal degree toward me, but said nothing.
“Did a woman just check in? My height? Short red hair?”
“Mmm-hmmn.” The keyboard emitted another burst of clacking.
I took a deep breath. “Do you know where she went?”
The hotel employee sighed and extended an arm toward the far side of the lobby. “Room 113.”
I noticed now a hallway opening beside the elevator bank, its gray carpet made gloomier by a half-dead fluorescent light. “Thanks.”
They said nothing. I glanced back at them from the entrance of the hallway, ready to make some kind of irritated and perhaps snarky comment, and felt the words dry on my tongue. Beneath a squared bob with fluffy black bangs, the person behind the counter had my face. My wire-rimmed glasses. My slightly connected eyebrows. My wide mouth and square chin. Even a scar on the upper lip, a white accent mark springing off the top of the cupid’s bow.
They turned around and vanished into what must have been an office. Molly whimpered.
The fluorescent light above me crackled, the gloom flickering from full dark to absurdly bright and then back again. I made my way to Room 113, whose door stood open. Nancy had gotten us one with two queens, both made up with comforters the color of unsorted laundry. The entertainment center, typically occupied by a television, stretched out barren and empty, with only a reproduction of Monet’s Water Lilies propped against the wall to distract the eye from the décor. Everything felt as gray as the sagebrush outside the window.
“There you are,” Nancy said, standing at the sink in only her bra. She scrubbed the tiny bar of soap over the shirt soaking in the basin. “I was thinking we could grab a bite before we bring our suitcases in from the car.”
“Yeah, sure.” I pulled my phone from my purse and sat down on the bed. “Let me just call my folks first.” But my phone warned me we were too far from any kind of service area to make a call.
“There’s no Wi-Fi, either,” Nancy complained. “Can I borrow your cardigan?”
I shrugged off the sweater and watched her button it, the reverse of a strip tease, but still pleasing. “Maybe the McDonald’s will have one. I saw one across the street that looked open.”
We settled Molly onto the second bed and headed back outside. No one attended the front desk.
“Did you notice the way the check-in person looked just like me?”
Nancy paused in front of the counter, pocketing a peppermint from the cup beside the register. “I guess they had your same glasses.”
“And my chin.”
She shook her head, walking faster toward the exit. “You’re much cuter.”
For a moment I thought the lobby doors would stand impenetrable against our exit, but Nancy’s room key let us outside. Night had collapsed across the desert, and now only the white glare of the halogen street lights illuminated the world. “The Girl from Ipanema” continued to play.
“I’m surprised more of these businesses aren’t open,” Nancy said as we crossed the street. “I guess they’re just waiting until the highway construction is complete?”
“I guess.” A breeze had come up in the night, and I regretted giving Nancy my sweater. The nubs of goose flesh made my skin too tight, and the cooling plastic grass needled the bottoms of my thin canvas sneakers.
A constellation of fast food options ran along this side of the road, the promise of sameness written in their bland, boxy shapes and their trademarked lights, the commonplace of American travel. I had seen mile after mile of such offerings on our drive today. Wherever asphalt had been spread, the traveler could root themselves, at home even when separated from their physical abode. My body, held tight and still within the confines of my seatbelt and bucket seat, could probably be convinced via taste and smell that I had never left Portland.
Except there were no smells here besides the electric scent of sagebrush, underpinned with the faint iron scent of granulated basalt. The exterior lights still glowed, but every lobby stood empty and dark. Only the McDonald’s sent out a glow of welcome.
The jazz piano grew louder as we crossed the empty drive-thru lane and made for the door. Beneath the restaurant’s awning, the song’s volume rose to brain-piercing levels, the singer’s voice burning through my ear canals and buzzing my mastoid bones.
One person stood behind the counter, their hair a squared yet puffy bob with straight bangs and wire-rimmed glasses. I grabbed Nancy’s arm and raised my eyebrows. She made an amazed face and then turned back to the counter.
“Hello again.” Nancy smiled and glanced up at the menu. I hadn’t eaten at a McDonald’s in probably ten years, but the selection looked approximately the same.
The person at the counter said nothing. They had taken off their red blazer and now wore a black polo shirt with the McDonald’s logo on the clavicle. The collar of their white button-down shirt looked awkwardly crammed into the neckline of the polo. I noticed a pimple at the corner of their left eyebrow that mirrored the one at the corner of my right.
I tried to smile and act as friendly as I would in any other restaurant situation. “Can I get a quarter pounder and a green salad with ranch dressing?”
“And can I get a Big Mac with a medium Diet Coke, a large order of fries, and a cherry pie?”
“That will be $9.50.” The person at the register hadn’t pushed any of its buttons.
“Great!” Nancy pulled a twenty out of her back pocket. The worker gave her the change and turned toward the kitchen. “Hey—can I get my drink?”
The person vanished into the back of the house. There were no lights on back there, and no warm, golden smells of frying food.
I grabbed Nancy’s arm again and pulled her into my side. “This is really weird. And I can’t believe you don’t think that person looks like me. Like, we could be twins.”
Nancy snorted. “Jill, I’m not even sure that person is a woman. You’re being paranoid because you’re sure your parents will be pissed at you for not getting to their house tonight. But I will be amazed if this weird worker gives us anything like what we ordered.”
The counter worker reappeared with a plastic bag, which they dropped on the end of the counter. They hesitated a moment, and pulled a stack of napkins out of their back pocket, which they piled beside the food. “We’re closing now.”
“Okay, I guess we’ll take this to go—”
“We’re closing,” they repeated, and vanished into the back. The lights went out.
“Jesus Christ,” Nancy grumbled. The glow from the neighboring Taco Bell was just bright enough for us to find our way to the doors. She swore a few more times as we crossed the street and retrieved our luggage from the trunk of our car.
The tires on Nancy’s carry-on squeaked as she dragged it behind her. The plastic bag swung beside my leg, something solid hitting my thigh every alternate step. Nancy paused at the door, reaching for the key card in her back pocket.
“Did I ever tell you why I hate hotels so much?”
I shook my head, but she was busy with the door. The squeaky wheel echoed inside the lobby. The lights had lowered while we were out, and now the gray couches and empty shelves sat in shadows, their edges undefined. It looked better this way, less new, less haphazard. We could have been in any highway-facing hotel in any stretch of flyover country. The fluorescent light at the mouth of our hallway sent out a surge of white light.
“When I was a little girl, my parents took me on a trip to visit my aunt and uncle. They lived in Sacramento, so it was a long drive. We had to stay in a motel someplace along the way. Medford, maybe? Redding?” She shook her head. “It doesn’t matter.”
The wheels of her carry-on caught on the seam between the lobby’s fake hardwood and the carpeted hallway. I nudged it forward with my toe.
“As a treat, they sent me to the drink machine to get us each a can of pop. I felt so grown-up, carrying those three one-dollar bills in my hand, trying not to crumple them. But when I stepped into the hallway, I wasn’t sure which direction to go—left or right, they both looked the same. And when I started walking, the hallway started to stretch.” She stopped and gave me one of her Very Serious Looks. “I don’t mean like it seemed to grow. It really did stretch, Jill. It got longer and longer, and the faster I walked, the faster it grew. I started running, but it didn’t matter. Door after door after door. I ran so long. I thought I’d never see my parents again.”
“That must have been terrifying.”
She started walking again: squeak, squeak, squeak. Thud against my leg. We passed room 104.
“My parents found me sitting in the hallway two doors from our room, crying. I still had the dollars.” She stopped to look over her shoulder. Cleared her throat. “Whenever I’m inside a hotel, I can feel it.” We stopped in front of our own room, and she dug in her jeans for the keycard. The look on her face, deeply focused and yet somehow absent made me think of my mother on those long Sunday drives.
“Feel what?”
Nancy kicked open the door and we had to spend a minute soothing Molly. She did her usual anxiety dancing, throwing her furry body against our waists, licking our hands and elbows, desperate for reconnection. I gave her an extra hug, burying my face in her shaggy head fur, which had its own unique perfume of spice and Fritos. A good stink.
I didn’t even want Nancy to answer my question now, but as she dumped the plastic bag of food out on the bed she said, very quietly: “There’s a part of me that really believes every hotel is that hotel, no matter what it says on the sign.”
I put my hand on her shoulder. She didn’t put her hand on top of mine like she normally would have.
“Hey, there are Oreos!” Nancy grinned like this was all a fun adventure, so Molly and I sat down on the bed to better see what we’d gotten: three ham sandwiches wrapped in plastic, two bottles of water, and an entire package of Oreo cookies.
We let Molly have one of the sandwiches because it had been one of those days, and besides, she wasn’t allowed Oreos.
I woke in the night to sound of Molly’s collar jingling, her feet scuffing on the carpet as she made frantic circles at the door. My neck ached from the too-thin pillow, and my mouth tasted like Oreos and ashes, despite brushing and flossing. I really needed to start bringing my electric toothbrush with me when I traveled, but I hated the idea of anything happening to such an expensive tool.
“Molly?” Nancy mumbled, rolling onto her side.
“I got it.” I jammed my feet into my shoes and found my cardigan where Nancy had draped it over the Monet. Now that I was up, Molly had stopped circling. She made a little snuffle as I dug in Nancy’s jeans pocket to find the keycard. Nancy’s story was starting to surface inside my sleepy brain, the weirdness of it and the entire day making me hesitate, one hand on the door chain. When I opened the door, I half expected the hallway to stretch into infinity. It looked normal enough, although the light at the end of the hallway had given up, leaving me to walk in gloom all the way to the lobby. Molly walked so close to me her fur sparked static on my pajama bottoms.
“It’s okay, girl,” I whispered, fumbling the key across the reader and opening the door.
It was brighter outside, the streetlights and safety lamps in the parking lot burning so brightly it made my eyes sting. Molly loped across the pavement, headed for the grass strip beside the road. I had to run to catch up and then grab for her collar The dog-heated nylon pressed into my fingers, a contrast to the cold night air. I turned my face up to the sky, but the brilliance of the artificial lighting had bleached the darkness out of it. There was no moon, no stars, only that sick halogen white.
A breeze blew the smell of bacon toward us. I shut my eyes and drew it in, mouth watering. If only I’d grabbed my purse, I could have picked us up some fourth meal—
My eyes shot open as I felt Molly’s collar slip out of my grip. “Molly, come back!”
But she was running, running like I’d never seen her run before. I tried to run after her, but the grass ripped beneath my feet, dropping me into the mud. Car horns shrieked. Brakes squealed. Someone shouted. I got to my feet, but there were too many cars, too many lights, I couldn’t see her anywhere.
“Molly!” I screamed. A part of me knew the impossible had happened, that I ought to be standing next to an empty road in an empty corner of the Washington desert, not chasing my dog through a crowded street that could have been Seattle or Portland or fucking Beijing.
“Molly,” I breathed, and now the world spun in a slow circle around me, the logos of a dozen franchises blurring, voices shouting, some of them angry, some trying to help, some simply hungry, so very hungry. And then, just as I was stumbling onto the road, trying to follow Molly wherever she had gone, I heard it, the one, the voice that had been running beneath them all, the quietly buoyant voice of the girl from Ipanema.
It came from behind me, so loud it made my head hurt. I whipped around to face the hotel. The world went silent. The hotel hunched in its asphalt skirts, the lamp posts in the parking lot humming their barely perceptible electrical hum. There sat our car, and there stretched the desert. The wind picked up again, cold and mineral and smelling only of sagebrush. When I glanced over my shoulder, I was alone, the grass strip fake again, the world gone empty in every direction. Wherever Molly had gone, it wasn’t there any longer.
I found the keycard in my cardigan pocket and went back inside the lobby. I stood alone. I didn’t know how to tell Nancy what had happened to our dog.
The light at the end of the hallway buzzed angrily, sparking white. Then it snapped off, the light beyond it going with it. Darkness filled this end of the hallway, save for a milky square on the carpet where the door to Room 104 stood open.
I didn’t want to walk past it, but there was no alternative. When they crossed the line from darkness to white, my toes shrank inside my sneakers. Inside the room, a child sniffled.
“Hello?” It came out a whisper. It took all my will power turn my neck and shoulders to face the white void of the doorway.
Beyond the opening stretched nothing. Not darkness, not outer space: nothing. Only the pale, lifeless glow of some vast halogen bulb, its light pushing into our world like a pry bar wriggling into a crack. It breathed out an emptiness that drained the life from my legs. My butt bounced as I hit the ground. A faint scent of menthol cigarettes rose from the carpet, like a memory washed and re-washed until the context came unwoven. The light breathed on. A little girl cried, lost and lonely, but it was so far off in the distance I wasn’t really sure I heard it. Maybe it was the sound of nothing. The sound of broken light fixtures. The true language of hotels and roadside places.
The light burned hotter and whiter behind my eyes. The pores of my skin tore open, hungrily sucking me into my own self. The hollow spaces in my bones expanded, cracking and bursting into pain, into burning nothing. Screaming, I spun in the empty places of my body, the empty places in my life. My mother stubbed a cigarette back into fire. Nancy walked backward out of a restaurant, her introductory email unsending. A man in green fatigues jammed a post-hole digger into the Earth and pierced its core. A bell rang on a counter beside a dish of peppermints.
The door swung closed. I found myself on my side, tears turning to crust on the side of my face. The carpet’s cheap polyester threads cut into the bare skin of my ankles and cheek.
I made myself get up and walk to our room on aching, jellied legs. For a second the keycard refused to work, but then I turned it another way, and the reader flashed its green light and let me push down the handle.
“Nancy?”
But of course she said nothing. The gray beds lay untouched, their corners square. A painting of a lighthouse hung above a flatscreen TV. Beside it, a bottle of Advil and a tube of toothpaste, half-flattened, sat beside a stack of clothing: clean underthings, white sports socks, a pair of khakis, a button-down shirt, a red blazer. I reached for the Advil and took four. When I pressed my hand to my face, my fingers smelled like a dog, although I couldn’t remember why.
I thought about taking another Advil. The alarm went off on the clock beside the bed.
I got dressed, although I hesitated a second before I put on the red blazer. My hands shook as I did up the buttons. When the alarm squawked again, I realized there was no time to brush my teeth if I didn’t want to be late for my shift.
As I walked to the front desk, I could already see guests waiting for me to check them in, the lobby music tinkling quietly beneath their murmurs. It was “The Girl from Ipanema,” of course. It was always “The Girl from Ipanema.”
I welcomed each and every person to the Comfort Travels Inn, my smile burning like halogen.
Originally published in Vastarien (June 2022)
