There was something both shocking and nasty about this idea; it came with a vivid image of blind white bugs oozing out of the pale and formerly protected wallpaper like living pus.
Mike raised the minicorder, pushed RECORD, and said: “Olin has certainly started a train of thought in my head. Or a chain of thought, which is it? He set out to give me the heebie-jeebies, and he certainly succeeded. I don’t mean . . .” Didn’t mean what? To be racist? Was
“heebie-jeebies” short for Hebrew jeebies? But that was ridiculous. That would be “Hebrew-jeebrews,” a phrase which was meaningless. It—
On the tape at this point, flat and perfectly articulated, Mike Enslin says: “I’ve got to get hold of myself. Right now.” This is followed by another click as he shuts the tape off again.
He closed his eyes and took four long, measured breaths, holding each one in to a five-count before letting it out again. Nothing like 389
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this had ever happened to him—not in the supposedly haunted houses, the supposedly haunted graveyards, or the supposedly haunted castles. This wasn’t like being haunted, or what he imagined being haunted would be like; this was like being stoned on bad, cheap dope.
Olin did this. Olin hypnotized you, but you’re going to break out of it. You’re going to spend the goddamned night in this room, and not just because it’s the best location you’ve ever been in—leave out Olin and you’ve got damned near enough for the ghost-story of the decade already—but because Olin doesn’t get to win. Him and his bullshit story about how thirty people have died in here, they don’t get to win. I’m the one in charge of bullshit around here, so just breathe in . . . and out. Breathe in . . . and out. In . . . and out . . .
He went on like that for nearly ninety seconds, and when he opened his eyes again, he felt normal. The pictures on the wall? Still straight. Fruit in the bowl? Still yellow-orange and uglier than ever.
Desert fruit for sure. Eat one piece of that and you’d shit until it hurt.
He pushed RECORD. The red eye went on. “I had a little vertigo for a minute or two,” he said, crossing the room to the writing desk and the window with its protective mesh outside. “It might have been a hangover from Olin’s yarning, but I could believe I feel a genuine presence here.” He felt no such thing, of course, but once that was on tape he could write almost anything he pleased. “The air is stale. Not musty or foul-smelling, Olin said the place gets aired every time it gets turned, but the turns are quick and . . . yeah . . . it’s stale. Hey, look at this.”
There was an ashtray on the writing desk, one of those little ones made of thick glass that you used to see in hotels everywhere, and in it was a book of matches. On the front was the Hotel Dolphin. In front of the hotel stood a smiling doorman in a very old-fashioned uniform, the kind with shoulder-boards, gold frogging, and a cap that looked as if it belonged in a gay bar, perched on the head of a motorcycle ramrod wearing nothing else but a few silver body-rings. Going back and forth on Fifth Avenue in front of the hotel were cars from another era—Packards and Hudsons, Studebakers and finny Chrysler New Yorkers.
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“The matchbook in the ashtray looks like it comes from about 1955,” Mike said, and slipped it into the pocket of his lucky Hawaiian shirt. “I’m keeping it as a souvenir. Now it’s time for a little fresh air.”
There is a clunk as he sets the minicorder down, presumably on the writing desk. There is a pause followed by vague sounds and a couple of effortful grunts. After these come a second pause and then a squeaking sound. “Success!” he says. This is a little off-mike, but the follow-up is closer.
“Success!” Mike repeated, picking the minicorder up off the desk.
“The bottom half wouldn’t budge . . . it’s like it’s nailed shut . . . but the top half came down all right. I can hear the traffic on Fifth Avenue, and all the beeping horns have a comforting quality. Someone is playing a saxophone, perhaps in front of the Plaza, which is across the street and two blocks down. It reminds me of my brother.”
Mike stopped abruptly, looking at the little red eye. It seemed to accuse him. Brother? His brother was dead, another fallen soldier in the tobacco wars. Then he relaxed. What of it? These were the spook wars, where Michael Enslin had always come off the winner. As for Donald Enslin . . .
“My brother was actually eaten by wolves one winter on the Connecticut Turnpike,” he said, then laughed and pushed STOP. There is more on the tape—a little more—but that is the final statement of any coherence . . . the final statement, that is, to which a clear meaning can be ascribed.
Mike turned on his heels and looked at the pictures. Still hanging perfectly straight, good little pictures that they were. That still life, though—what an ugly fucking thing that was!
He pushed RECORD and spoke two words— fuming oranges—into the minicorder. Then he turned it off again and walked across the room to the door leading into the bedroom. He paused by the evening-dressed lady and reached into the darkness, feeling for the light switch. He had just one moment to register
( it feels like skin like old dead skin)
something wrong with the wallpaper under his sliding palm, and 391
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then his fingers found the switch. The bedroom was flooded with yellow light from another of those ceiling fixtures buried in hanging glass baubles. The bed was a double hiding under a yellow-orange coverlet.
“Why say hiding?” Mike asked the minicorder, then pushed the STOP button again. He stepped in, fascinated by the fuming desert of the coverlet, by the tumorous bulges of the pillows beneath it. Sleep there? Not at all, sir! It would be like sleeping inside that goddam still life, sleeping in that horrible hot Paul Bowles room you couldn’t quite see, a room for lunatic expatriate Englishmen who were blind from syphilis caught while fucking their mothers, the film version starring either Laurence Harvey or Jeremy Irons, one of those actors you just naturally associated with unnatural acts—
Mike pushed RECORD, the little red eye came on, he said
“Orpheus on the Orpheum Circuit!” into the mike, then pushed STOP again. He approached the bed. The coverlet gleamed yellow-orange. The wallpaper, perhaps cream-colored by daylight, had picked up the yellow-orange glow of the coverlet. There was a little night-table to either side of the bed. On one was a telephone—
black and large and equipped with a dial. The finger-holes in the dial looked like surprised white eyes. On the other table was a dish with a plum on it. Mike pushed RECORD and said: “That isn’t a real plum. That’s a plastic plum.” He pushed STOP again.
On the bed itself was a doorknob menu. Mike sidled up one side of the bed, being quite careful to touch neither the bed nor the wall, and picked the menu up. He tried not to touch the coverlet, either, but the tips of his fingers brushed it and he moaned. It was soft in some terrible wrong way. Nevertheless, he picked the menu up. It was in French, and although it had been years since he had taken the language, one of the breakfast items appeared to be birds roasted in shit.
That at least sounds like something the French might eat, he thought, and uttered a wild, distracted laugh.
He closed his eyes and opened them.
The menu was in Russian.
He closed his eyes and opened them.
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The menu was in Italian.
Closed his eyes, opened them.
There was no menu. There was a picture of a screaming little woodcut boy looking back over his shoulder at the woodcut wolf which had swallowed his left leg up to the knee. The wolf’s ears were laid back and he looked like a terrier with its favorite toy.
I don’t see that, Mike thought, and of course he didn’t. Without closing his eyes he saw neat lines of English, each line listing a different breakfast temptation. Eggs, waffles, fresh berries; no birds roasted in shit. Still—
He turned around and very slowly edged himself out of the little space between the wall and the bed, a space that now felt as narrow as a grave. His heart was beating so hard that he could feel it in his neck and wrists as well as in his chest. His eyes were throbbing in their sockets. 1408 was wrong, yes indeed, 1408 was very wrong.