THE GHOST IN THE MACHINE, Part Two

Among the many contrasts between the two friends were their attitudes toward women. Whereas Michael was a romantic idealist, Omar saw women as means to an end. The philosopher regarded the painter’s views on the female sex as willful distortions arising from not living in close quarters with his specimens. Given his disdainful view of women on the whole, Omar was less exacting on both tangibles and intangibles in partners. What he wanted was very particular, and it required directness and little finesse in getting it. Michael, for his part, so over-thought every aspect of the female psyche he rarely acted on any impulse. Omar was by nature a ‘big picture’ person, and resultantly was both blinded to and often blindsided by details. But it was always water off the back of a duck for him, either way. The painter, to his regret, lacked that constitution. Michael could see, where his friend could not, the inevitable outcomes of personal entanglements: how prolonged intimacy would run afoul of diverging interests. Omar would argue (rightly so) all relationships might be destined to end as a result of over-familiarity, but life must be filled with something, even happiness derived from short-term self-deception. Michael could not dispute the point, but there was something in his character that ruined him for even his fair share of self-deception.

The lawyer’s penthouse apartment in the crumbling hotel was his home-away-from-home when he was in Chicago, although Michael, with his fear of heights, was always reluctant to visit him there. This time at least they would not only be on the same floor but also in neighboring rooms. Omar had his guest’s charges removed from the register before the two braved the elevator together. The hotel’s resident was a late sleeper, so on splitting up in the hallway he reiterated to his under-siege friend that he would be by Stonesthrow in a few days to clear up his troubles.

By the time the woozy guest put his key in the room door, he could scarcely string together the evening’s events that led him to it. He latched onto the doorknob with the thought of turning it, but on hearing a squeak glanced up to see the shapely form of a woman going into his friend’s apartment. He could only presume she was a room maid by the pushcart left in the hall.

With fading steps, Michael toddled over the dark threshold to knock a videocassette box off the top of a television. A throbbing blue light ebbing back and forth over the windowsill illuminated the film’s unpromising title in the floor: Invasion of the Bodily Snatch. He stepped over it and into the bathroom to flush out some of the libation he had cavalierly consumed over the course of the evening. After a few turnarounds between the towel bar and sink, his jacket and he parted company, whereupon his attention turned agreeably to the bed. It appeared solid enough, so he promptly fell on it to arrest things still spinning in the dark. The delayed effect of the alcohol was laying bare the true object of his unsettled state.

Perhaps he had only driven away to miss her—to feel her like nails in his chest.

A pair of beady eyes emerged out of the shadows to intrude on his self-pity. Grasping they were attached to an unlikely stuffed horse head mounted on the wall, a crinkle worked its way down his spine. Michael pried himself from the bed and stripped off the bedspread, draping it over the offending beast. Having rectified the problem, his body wasted little time in burrowing down into the lowest spot in the mattress. After a minute or two it would neither budge nor descend further.

It was not like sleep, however. It was eerily something else: something raw and closer to the surface of his anxiousness. He cracked an eye on hearing more muffled squeaking rising out of the hallway. It was probably the maid’s cart once more on the move, although it seemed to be echoing up out of the bowels of a catacomb. It grew gradually louder in his ear until, finally, it stopped short of the bed.

THUMP!

Michael propped open a leaden lid. The inconstant bar light across the street revealed that the heavy spread had brought the horse head down off the wall. It was now lying covered in a heap on the floor. The man wanted to leave it where it was, but the creature’s snout was sticking out in a threat. With grudging effort he got up to not only re-cover the odious monster but also to use the occasion to scoot as much of it under the high bed as he could. The light in the window surged with the last nudge, illuminating the bare wall where the head had hung. An impression was already full in his mind before the outline was half-seen. He turned to face the discolored wallpaper, noting with interest how the ghost image of the pulled-down mounting mirrored what he had found in the corridors of Nadir Hall.

Before venturing another pass at the mattress, a blanket was stripped away to blot out the annoying light in the window: Darkness, the tired man reasoned, would surely be conducive to sleep. A bleary peek out the room curtains revealed the light he had supposed to be from a bar was in fact coming from another hotel room window at the L-bend. A guest of the establishment was watching one of the films from the “gentlemen’s library” on a large flat-panel screen, and though nothing of it could be heard, the female lover on exhibit, with breathy exclamation in a tight headshot, was intensely concentrated on her partner. Michael was about to turn away when the woman appeared to address him in an abrupt, matter-of-fact manner, as though telling him something in an aside that was unconnected to her pressing business. Given the oblique alignment of the screen, it, like the incidence at the gas station, was a freakish chance occurrence, and the viewer was eager to relinquish her eye contact.

He returned to bed and closed his eyes with greater resolve, but the noisy cart was soon on the move again. Its last few inches to the bedside were excruciating to endure. He clinched his eyes tighter, refusing to relinquish, if only in theory, he was asleep. The squeaking abruptly stopped, although the silence that followed was even pricklier than the noise. Michael was regardless dead to the world, or as dead as he could make himself…

He was back in the restroom at the filling station, fussing with the busted tap where he could get no water to wash his hands. Giving up on it, he stepped away to the noisy hand blower and was again staring at its half-painted-over graffiti:

333-6152

The blower started clanging loudly, and the noise ricocheted off the tile-covered walls to deafening effect. Michael banged the loose cover, whereupon a key was coughed out of the whirling blades to land at his feet. The blower stopped, and the visitor reached down to snatch the key. Instinctively, he began scraping the top of the cover with it; characters inched their way up through shaved slivers of enamel:

333-6152 -M-KCU-OT---Y-TN-W-I

Michael yanked on the cover. When it gave from the wall, he held it up to the sink mirror:

I-W-NT-Y---TO--UCK-M- 251-6333

“I’m asleep,” he told himself.

Returning to the front of the station, the dreamer gazed warily at the TV screen behind the counter; it was black like a curtain—one drawn down over something. At the double doors, he was met by a smudge on the glass measuring the rough dimensions of a forehead; it marked the spot where someone had leaned in for a view.

Was it his forehead? Was he sleepwalking? Sleep driving? But no, the imprint was too low on the glass to be his forehead.

Beyond it, the bright interstate beckoned on the left; however, it was the darker way that pulled him right. He drove only a quarter of a mile before his headlights picked up pale buttocks along the dark shoulder opposite his lane. The nude woman’s pace was slow and steady, and she showed no reaction to being caught in the glare. He eased off the gas and rolled down his window, but little of her face could be seen.

“Do you need a ride somewhere?” he asked.

She did not look over.

“It’s not safe out here,” he continued, “to be seen like this…”

Still, no reaction.

Unsure what to do, Michael pulled on ahead. He drove slowly to maintain visual contact with the woman in the side view mirror, although she was quickly shrinking on her steps. Her mouth began to move, as though speaking to him, but her blank, unreadable expression was drawing away like blood in a syringe. On reaching a mailbox reflector, he swung the car around to face her.

She was gone.

Rolling his window back up, the frightened man crossed over his tracks on the woman’s side of the highway. He kept glimpsing in the mirror thinking she might be hunkered down in the weeds. An unearthly hush pushed under the car; he reached for his radio. Instantly, a dark Cadillac ambulance overtook him in the opposite lane with flashing lights. The driver watched in horror as the mute emergency vehicle tore away in a long, dripping line; the carcass of a headless horse was being dragged behind it. The shadowy form scuffed and tumbled indignantly over hard pavement. Chunks of cartilage and bone flew off to roll under his tires; they rapped like knuckles on the floorboard wanting to be let in.

Thump. Thump… Thump. Thump…

With sudden elucidation, Michael realized the disturbance was rising up from underneath the bed. He bolted off the mattress and staggered over to slap at the knob on the room door; the suffocating Victorian wallpaper in the hallway all but wrapped around him. An exit ripped through it with a way out. He barreled down the first half-flight of stairs to smack into a window at the turn. Two slithering nipples peeked in through frosted glass—a watercolor overrunning the margins of its paper with animal bluntness. They could hardly catch up with him as he flew down the second, darker half-flight. Another turn and another window—blacker nipples watched him trip and bang down the next flight of cement steps. His limbs, yanked from their sockets by centrifugal force, were little more than flightless wings. The vertigo and stinging blows persisted long after he came to rest on his back. He gazed up at the dark stairs above him, assuming it was his falling body, like a pair of scissors, that made the tears of light separating one flight from another.

A voice echoed down the stairwell. “If you would like to make a call, please hang up and try again.”

There was a pause, as if waiting for a response. Michael’s eyes navigated the twist of handrails to spy a woman’s bleary face peering down from the top of the stairs. Her expression seemed unnaturally wide.

“If you would like to make a call, please hang up and try again,” she repeated.

The address was clearly directed at him, but the words were creeping down the steps with spidery mischief…

It was the voice of a man mockingly imitating a woman.

The injured man focused his sights on several strange lines running parallel with the woman’s mouth. They were fingers—fingers of another person making her lower jaw open and shut. She appeared to have no body.

Michael managed to sit up. But it must have been minutes later. A fierce headache followed him to his feet. He trudged back up the steps to retrace his out-of-time fall and found the maid’s cart still in the hallway; Omar’s door was ajar. His friend, lost in his dark library-of-a-room, was sitting in a chair drinking coffee and reading Parmenides by a small, insufficient lamp. He looked up only half-surprised to see his friend swaying in the doorway.

“What happened?” he asked.

“I fell.”

A woman emerged halfway out of a dark passageway. She hugged the shadow on the wall, but even still Michael could tell she was wearing a skimpy maid’s uniform.

“My friend said you scared her half to death.” Omar gestured for the woman to come over, but she preferred to remain where she was. He was straight. “I told you I would send something by your room to help you sleep.”

The blushing hotel guest averted his gaze to the unraveling edge of a Persian carpet at his bare feet.

The friend sighed, “Don’t you remember her coming by?”

Michael’s hurt feelings were slow to emerge. “You shouldn’t have, Ommie.”

“You need help with your little problem.”

Michael shrank into the hallway. “Not that kind of help.”

Omar yelled out to his friend before he disappeared from view. “Lock the door, so you don’t go wandering off to tumble down stairs!”

Chapter Fourteen, Section Two/ Back/ Contents Page

Copyright © 2007 Michael Teague. All rights reserved.