I drove to Moorhead, Minnesota where my grandchildren live. It’s a six hour drive and, so, I booked a room for overnight.
The motel where I stayed was a Microtel by Wyndham. The place is new, set back from a grim frontage road running parallel to Interstate 90. Three-stories high, the motel manages to look squat and flimsy at the same time, the sort of structure that a blizzard wind might level or that the summer sun could melt like a tallow candle. The attendant at the front desk seems distracted. Some kind of sinister melody is playing in her ear and she doesn’t exactly register that I am standing in front of her computer station. Perhaps, she thinks that I’m virtual, a hologram, or some sort of automaton of the sort to which, perhaps, she aspires to become. We are all inhuman here.
The ground floor room assigned to me is at the end of a short hallway. A glass door opens into an exercise room jam-packed with brutish-looking treadmills and weight machines, instruments of torture, it seems. No one has ever entered this place. Perhaps, the glass door is inoperable. The motel room is dark. There’s a narrow ledge under the TV that serves as a sort of desk or table. But, when you press the light switch, only a faint, useless glow drizzles down from the wooden rim of the upper shelf. The thermostat seems disconnected. The room is clammy like a basement or a storage room in pole barn.
About an hour before sunset, my son and my grandchildren are waiting for me in the parking lot. We go out to eat at a Chinese buffet. The food is awful. Overcooked chips of chicken in sugar sauce, dumplings submerged in a lukewarm, murky fluid, soggy egg rolls, ropy lo-mein that glints with grease. The sushi tastes vaguely like caviar, a bad sign since, so far as I can detect, the dirty, sticky rice doesn’t have any fish embedded in its seaweed wrap. The soda pop is diluted and, even, the ice-cream offered in little cartons in a cooler for dessert have no flavor. An angel is dining in the buffet with us. The angel has a swollen, bruised-looking face that is curiously hairless – I can’t tell if this seraphim is supposed to be male or female; perhaps, there is no gender in paradise. Walking on tiny, pointed feet, the angel carries a plate of food to its table. Over the angel’s shoulder blades, embossed on the back of the creature’s black blouse are two tiny white wings. The angel has BDSM trousers, all spiky with zippers and silver bolts marking the garment’s seams, buckle rigging for chain tethers. The other people at the table have bloated faces like drowned corpses fished out of the river.
Back at the hotel, the room remains cold. I put a bottle of cranberry juice in the small refrigerator under the window. (Outside the window: an empty parking lot, widely spaced vehicles, a muddy vacant lot scarred by tire tracks.) I can’t sleep and feel feverish. Maybe, it is the effect of the Chinese buffet. When I remove the bottle of cranberry juice from the refrigerator, it’s frozen solid.
There are no towels, no wash rags anywhere in the room. The toilet stool is mounted six inches too close to the floor. When you sit on the thing, you’re trapped; it’s all but impossible to struggle up to your feet. I go down to the lobby where a couple of men who look like oil-patch roustabouts are eating the house breakfast. A big TV warns of approaching thunderstorms. A basin is full of fluffy scrambled eggs but there’s no salsa or ketchup or anything to impart the slightest flavor to the eggs. The other half of the basin is full of leathery cinnamon toast, possibly intended to be dowsed in syrup and eaten as an approximation of french toast. The cinnamon toast is not easy to slice. When I try to cut the toast with my plastic fork and knife, the knife breaks in two and the fork leaves tines embedded in the shoe-sole sized piece of bread. The orange juice in its dispenser is diluted so that the drink is merely a watery and tasteless infusion of yellowish fluid – the apple juice looks like urine.
At the front desk, a woman is playing with her phone. Her face is haphazardly painted on the front of her bald skull. She ignores me. At last, I clear my throat and she sullenly glares at me from behind her computer. I tell her that there is no towel, no wash rag, nothing of that sort in the room. Reluctantly, she leaves her post, vanishes into some back rooms that seem to be clogged with soiled laundry, and comes back to the lobby with a couple towels and wash rags draped over her arm – she looks like a waiter about to serve champagne or wine. (In the room, a placard says that because of staff shortages, rooms will only be cleaned once every three days.)
The shower drizzles metallic-smelling water into a bathtub that is slick as ice and a death trap. The curve of the tub tries to catch your ankle and pitch you down onto the slippery surface. There’s no purchase underfoot and the grab-rails are poorly placed – you would have to be a contortionist to use these wet metal rails. Under the stream of bad-smelling water, I teeter as if stranded on a pinnacle at a great height above the earth.
Outside, in the parking lot, I look across to some warehouses with blunt, featureless walls, a collision center that is shaped like a squat pagoda, and a used car lot. In the foreground, there’s a big earthmover, a front end loader with its hydraulic arm and dull, heavy bucket stretched out in front of its little cab with blue-tinted windows and a superstructure of feathery antennae and pipe-shaped roll bars. The loader is limp and inert, somehow abject/ It’s labeled Landwehr and Komatsu. The heavy treads under the cab and engine look like a crouching animal, half-mired in mud. The presence of the thing is inexplicable, as if it has fallen from the sky – I don’t see any trench or excavations or anything worth digging out of the muck and there are no tread tracks leading to where it has been abandoned.
Driving away from the place, the roads are broad and empty under cold skies. But, whenever you have to switch lanes, a big pick-up or SUV roars up through your blind spot. The road is dangerous with traffic that materializes out of nowhere. Everything is flat, featureless, a landscape preparing for an enormous and lethal flood. Already half the buildings are abandoned – several shuttered and morose restaurants with weeds growing in their parking lots, an extinct day care, an intersection with a febrile blinking light.
This is by no means a cheap motel. With tax, the charge for the room is $185 a night.
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