I quickly closed the curtains and called Elise up on the phone. She answered on the fourth ring.
“What are you up to?” I said.
Cyndi Lauper was singing Us Girls Just Want to Have Fun over loudspeakers and I thought I could hear the vociferous ramblings of Ellie, her old USC roommate, screaming typical absurdities in the background. A dog howled. It must have been my hound dog. Aristotle. Several intoxicated sounding girls howled along to encourage him.
“Oh, nothing much.” She spoke the best she could over Cyndi Lauper and Aristotle’s philosophical howls, or perhaps she was angry at my absence again. There’d been an unhealthy build-up of anger as of late. From thousands of miles away, I felt so helpless. “How about you?”
I enlightened her on everything that had happened to me since leaving John Wayne Airport in Orange County earlier that morning, everything except for the homeless man keeping me company across the street and the woman on the other side of the wall speaking her prayers to God. She said she couldn’t hear me very well, but I suspect she simply wasn’t enthused to hear about the amazing deli sandwich I’d had for lunch or the Kung Pao Chicken for dinner, and said she needed to go with a hastened promise that she’d call me later.
She never did.
We barely spoke on the phone anymore. If not for the party, there were long sleepless hours studying for her doctorate in psychology. There was always something. Every measly hour of sleep or time together had to be fought for. Thousands of miles away from home, I thought about Elise kindly asking me to tend to the fashion of marriage flesh with the freedom of exploratory eyes as she cascaded down the hallway into our room, walking through the cool of the morning, wearing the clothing of my rib, embodying the ages. She’d stretch, yawn, and dig for garments, as if to beckon me (with a flash of her eyes), be not apprehensive of my limbs, nor of that which is found in-between.
Then take into account the Bible buried in my suitcase. I Am the Way. It had gone too long unread. Why did I still bother bringing the prophets and the apostles along? I could recall years earlier when the excitable state-to-state airport hoping in the wide world of wedding photography had fully hooked me in. John, Matthew, Luke and the lot used to be carry-on. Next it was purposed for the carousel, and finally, a sparing relief from guilt. I feared growing old and penciling in calendar dates for all the night’s prayers went unspoken.
I heard a faint whisper (or distant call). I knew the delivery. It came from an ancient muse, the voice from the burning bush, seeking to ferment the grapes in my shriveled soul. And yet, sitting in the darkness of that motel, another strong voice flexed its antiquated call. The remote was calling my name. No, not Danny, Jesse and Joey on the television. I was afraid of circling calendar dates through endless nights alone when the fleshy shackles of porn went unchecked. Adult Entertainment was a dime a dozen in cheap motels.
There was this one time, at a motel around Newport News, perhaps a year earlier, where I was drowning in the guilt-stricken addiction of electric sex, watching a ridiculous scenario of bad-actors plugging up the other, and my wife texted me on the cell simply to say how much she missed me. I love you, her text said, with a happy face to follow. In the side pocket of my suitcase a couple of condom packets were still unopened from our last trip together to the Hawaiian Isles. It had only been a couple of years since she’d pack various colored G-strings into my luggage whenever I wasn’t looking, as if to say, Hurry home, and think of me while you’re gone. Something about us had changed over the last year, and not because I felt any different about her. I loved that woman. If this was the Odyssey, then she was my Penelope.
I pulled a swig of wine that I’d purchased at the gas station just across the street, still in its paper bag, attempted a healthy mouthful of Kung Pao Chicken, and considered the magnitude of people across the world watching the same Full House episode unfold from their slightly more expensive Hyatt or Hilton hotel room. It was my way of not feeling alone. I could have spent the night at any one of those fine establishments, but it’s rather nice, I reminded myself, having a little extra money in the piggy bank. I wondered if that homeless man haunted those hotels or if it was just my cheap accommodations he was after.
Tugging another swig from my discount bottle of wine, I cupped myself in a somewhat comfortable fetal position and flipped the bedside light-switch off as one episode of Full House ended, a second was soon to follow, and the cockroach had miraculously repositioned itself on the shag again. But far more importantly than Danny Tanner or the zombie cockroach or the homeless man across the street or the fact that another wave of religious groans had ignited from my friendly female motel neighbor, I thought about my brief conversation with Elise, wondering what Oh, nothing much actually implied.
2
Sexual bed buzzing in the next room was part of the uniform practically whenever I stayed in cheap motels. Adultery was rampant, especially during the lunchtime hour when co-workers could fly under the financial radar and split a room with lunch money cash. I’d never cheated on my wife before, and I wanted nothing more than to be pure, but in my weakest moments I fantasized about it. That’s the difference between the real world and internal fantasy. In lustful reverie, the sin is never destructive. A lie is rarely powerful in what it says so much as how it’s said.
She was a prostitute. I figured that much, especially considering the sleazy men who came and went, sometimes staying no longer than twenty minutes and other times in groups for an hour. Even stranger were the instances when I’d make it home in time for Catholic Mass on Sunday morning after spending my night next door to a motel brothel, like this one. First vulgarity and then worshiping the resurrected savior with fellow believers, back-to-back; life for me was always at a contrast. It was the kind of reality that religious people back home rarely felt comfortable hearing about.
As I lay in bed there were too many images spinning through my head. I retrieved my poetry notebook from the suitcase to write it all down. I liked the mystery. What was so great about living in a universe that I could fully wrap my head around? Apparently I wasn’t the only person in the world who couldn’t sleep. Someone was standing alongside the second story banister smoking a cigarette. I peeked through the curtains. It was a young woman in a blue hoodie and gray sweatpants with those Eskimo boots that were especially fashionable that year, topped off with coarse skin and sandy hair tied sloppily back in a ponytail. She was probably about my age, twenty-seven, but could have passed for forty. I’d seen her earlier. I thought she might be the prostitute in the next room over. Further down in the night, at the far end of the parking lot, the homeless man was underneath a streetlight curled up with a blanket, and comfortably sleeping. He certainly wasn’t trying hard to hide from me, if that was indeed the attempt. I wondered if she saw him as well and if she was as captivated with mystery as I was. I had to know. I opened the door a crack and slid my body through. She pretended not to notice.
“Hi,” I told her, rather awkwardly, after a silence.
“Hi,” she said, shifting an uncomfortable set of eyeballs in my direction while keeping her chin pointed straight ahead into the darkness. She reeked of smoke and I noticed a thick red scar on her left nostril.
“You want to know something crazy?”
She didn’t say anything.
“There’s this dead cockroach in my room, sprawled out on its back. And every time I look for it, it’s somehow managed to move.”
“The world’s going to hell in a bread basket,” she said it like she didn’t mean a word of it. As she sucked on the nicotine, the tip of her cigarette glowed with red embers, illuminating her eyes and nose.
“I don’t want to intrude or anything. I was just wondering if….”
The prostitute let out a heavy sigh. She probably thought I was a sexual fly in need of a good swatting. I didn’t finish my sentence.
“If you want a fifteen minute quickie, fifty roses. A total hour of my time will cost you a hundred and twenty. Don
’t think that because you’ve held a glass to the wall all night you deserve any sort of peeping privileges.”
“No, that’s not what I’m after.” I held up my wedding ring. “I’m happily married.”
She rolled her eyes. “Mm-hmm. Isn’t everyone?”
“I was actually just curious if you’ve seen anybody suspicious looking down there in the parking lot… or anyone at all, for that matter.”
“What are you, like a cop or something?” Her face tightened. “You have to tell me if you’re a cop, you know. The law requires it.”
“No. I’m just a businessman,” I said. She turned her head slightly sidewise and frowned. I took it as a sign of disbelief or sarcasm. “Really, I’m here on travel.”
“Mm-hmm. You and everybody else.” Her jaw was somewhat relaxed again, sucking on her cigarette and letting its smoke curl lazily from her mouth. A cold sore clung to her upper lip.
“I’m a wedding photographer.”
“A wedding photographer? You come out from Orlando or something?”
“No. Long Beach.”
“Long Beach?”
“It’s in Los Angeles, the other Disneyland.”
“Jeez. You came all the way out from Los Angeles to photograph a wedding?”
I told her I did. “I’ve even got another wedding on Sunday in New Orleans. Sometimes I’m lucky enough to book them back-to-back like that.”
“Jeez. You’re driving all the way to New Orleans…for a wedding?”
I told her I was. “They’re putting me up in a nice hotel. It will be my first time actually staying in the French Quarter. It’s called the Saint Eleanor Hotel. Ever hear of it?”
“And you’re sleeping here in this dump?”
“The bride and groom don’t always pay for my hotel accommodations. No per diem. I like to save money.”
“Yeah, well, apparently so do I.”
She tried not to laugh about it. I followed her lead.
“I guess we have something in common, then. They don’t call it Budget Motel for nothing.” I extended my hand. “I’m Joshua.”
She hesitated to take it. “Sindra.” She extended limp fingers and took my hand but kept her lips tightly wound.
“So Sindra, I was wondering….” I started to say. Sindra’s eyes narrowed into the shape of diamonds, as if she were expecting the question to spring into action. I gathered men rarely remained gentlemen in her presence for long. “If you do see anyone, like perhaps a homeless guy sleeping below in the parking lot”
She coolly shelved the cigarette to her lips, inhaled, released another steady stream of smoke, and then grappled it between her fingers. “Yeah, um, since I’m still standing out here without my can of mace, I’m putting all my chips on the hope that you aren’t crazy or anything.”
“No. Just tired, that’s all. I guess it’s been a long day and the Jetlags settling in. But really, do you see anyone, like perhaps right over there?” I directed her attention towards the streetlamp, where the homeless man was presently sleeping.
She squinted her eyes, sucked on her cigarette, and looked in the general vicinity. “Sorry to disappoint.” She finally smiled. “I don’t get to say that too often.”
“Then maybe I am crazy.”
“I read somewhere that you can’t be crazy if you think it’s a possibility, or something like that. And besides, I’ve met plenty of crazy people.” She pointed her cigarette at my nose. “You don’t have the look of it.”
I tried not to shift my eyes over the balcony towards the sleeping homeless person.
“He’s down there, isn’t he?” She seemed amused.
“I’d be lying if I said no.” I had her full attention now.
“Does he like…. talk to you and tell you to do stuff? Is he talking to you right now?”
“I can’t say that he does. I know this sounds weird, but I see him sporadically all over the country. I haven’t told anybody about this yet, not even my wife.”
Sindra unlocked her lips and grinned. “Sounds like some lazy ass-dementia to me, if you ask me. I mean, it’s a waste of schizophrenia if he won’t even bother talking to you. Besides, they’ve got pills for that, you know.”
I wasn’t crazy.
“Thanks,” I smiled. “I’ll look into it.”
Actually, I probably wouldn’t be looking into it.
“The name’s not Sindra.” She extended her hand again. “Well, it is, but my real name’s Josie. That’s what my friends call me.”
“Pleased to meet you, Josie.” I advanced my fingers to meet her.
This time she really shook it.
3
I’d never seen anything like it before.
The little man in the gray suit had directed my attention to the dark spot on the surface of the water, not far from where we stood on the shore, and the strange spiral pattern that soon enveloped it. I thought it might have been a whirlpool, if such things of ancient legend even existed, until the unmistakable funnel spun down from its gray cumulus mass and twisted horizontally into a violent blue column, finally touching down into the Gulf of Mexico below, where it sprayed rings of ocean water thirty or forty feet into the air. I was pretty sure I was looking at a tornado.
“I suppose this is how all of your weddings begin,” Chester coolly said after he finished speaking to his fiancée on the phone, imploring that she come with haste for photos, and apparently unmoved by the seriousness of our situation. I snapped several pictures of him, back turned to the lens and funnel in two-thirds view, as he budgeted his attention between the otherworldly phenomena and his cell phone. “She’s not going to make it in time.”
“More or less.” I stopped snapping digital pictures long enough to answer his supposition. “Though sometime my weddings end this way too, with the bride and the groom getting sucked up into it along with Miss Gulch on a bicycle and every member of the wedding party. It makes for great photography. Of course, once in a while it only takes away the mother-in-law.”
I guess I wasn’t taking the threat too seriously either. The world almost always looked different from behind the compartment of a camera.
“That’s my kind of service.” Chester stared up at it dreamily, seemingly without worry, and then returned to his cell phone. “I really do hope Ava makes it in time for some photos. These things rarely last twenty minutes. You know, the Florida Keys report roughly four hundred waterspouts per year. Owning a vacation house on Key West, I’ve seen my fair share of them, just never this close.”
“Good. Then as the resident expert, you’ll tell me when we should get out of here. It would dampen the wedding if we both got sucked right up into it. I’d very much like to visit Oz, just not today.”
He didn’t immediately address my concerns, but the way the funnel just sat there rather lazily like a spiraling fantasy, I wondered if nature was answering my inquiry for me. A curious fishing boat drifted dangerously close to its base. I hoped the funnel wouldn’t form a newfound sense of entitlement and worse, a God given consciousness, and envelop the vessel into its terrible snout.
“You don’t seem worried at all,” I said.
“No, and I wouldn’t be. Waterspouts aren’t typically tornadoes, and nowhere nearly as dangerous, generally exhibiting winds of less than sixty miles per hour. A lot of people don’t realize that. This one’s clearly not. Have you noticed how it hasn’t even moved since it first touched down? It’s not actually sucking up the ocean water below. It’s rain accumulated from condensation, since the cumulus cloud that it’s attached to is horizontally static.”
From somewhere down the beach a woman screamed for her husband to hurry outside and catch a glimpse of what was coming their way. Her husband’s shrieks of awe-inspired terror soon followed, with a glass-shattering pitch that surpassed even his wife.
“It’s beautiful,” I finally said.
“You probably see lots of beautiful stuff like this traveling across the country photographing weddings like you
do. Me, I’ve never been north of Tallahassee. As far as I’m concerned, Spaceship: Earth is one of the Seven Wonders of the World.”
“They don’t make them like this at Disney World.”
“No. They don’t.”
“But really, how much one travels has very little to do with it. Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.”
“Sounds like poetry or something,” Chester sighed. He studied his cell phone again. “You’re trying to trick me into abstract thinking, aren’t you? You’re what those shrinks call a thinker. I hate you guys.”
“Confucius.” I took several more photos of nature’s phenomena, mesmerized.
“Huh?” He didn’t turn around to look at me.
“The quote. Everything has beauty but not everyone sees it. I was quoting Confucius”
“So you’re telling me I not only hired a photographer, but a philosopher. How much am I paying you again?”
I told him.
Chester whistled at the absurdity of my price.
“I wouldn’t worry. The Chinese philosophy is an added bonus. I can even throw in a little Classical Greek or post-Enlightenment, maybe even something Biblical, or my personal favorite, Incessant Smart Ass, if you’re into that sort of thing.”
“Good. Because for a second there, just considering what today’s expenses are doing to my bank account, I was kind of hoping this was a tornado. End the misery, you know?” Chester gazed up at the waterspout and then down at his phone again. I clicked several more pictures. “I’m not actually miserable. I don’t want you to leave today thinking that. It’s just, we’ve never had sex, you know.”
His candied comment took me by surprise, but by no means bothered me. “Should I have worked that into the wedding contract?”
“Ava and I, she said she wanted to wait until the wedding night. She said she wanted it to be a gift for the man she married. I’ve never stuck around for a girl who didn’t hand out a hot dog or two from her cart once in a while. But Ava, she’s different. She’s one of those Presbyterians. I guess its part of their theology or something.”
Wrong Flight Home (Wrong Flight Home, #1) Page 2