‘Josie’s Bed & Breakfast,’ is way out of my set budget for places to stay, especially considering I spend about 80% of my nights in the truck itself which costs me nothing at all. Every once in a while, Shitholes throws me a bone and reviews a place with a mattress, excuse enough to live a little kinglier for an evening and, in this case, the morning after.
‘The wait time for breakfast at Josie’s could be just as easily attributed to a lack of foresight as to a stroke of genius. Past a certain stretch of waiting, any food in any condition will seem better, if only for its close proximity. Let this assurance guide you, then, as the wait grows to the unimaginable, as it seems to end only to begin once more. Assure yourself that the food is made better for your invested time. Is it worth the exchange, though? Could it ever be?’
The author doesn’t speak at all about the room which means he (or I) probably only reviewed the place for the breakfast and that I could probably get away with doing the same, no extra money spent, but I could use a night of solid rest and god I hate waiting. My lifestyle has become one that revolves around cheap food and quick service and, though other aspects of myself suffer for it, the quick turnaround of a burger has only served to validate it.
If there can be a life without waiting, I’ll gladly live it.
The entry room, Josie’s lobby, is extravagant. I say as much to the young woman at the counter, someone I assume is not Josie herself.
“It’s not extravagant,” she says, swiping my debit card, “It’s just old.”
I look around again and see that she’s right. Everything in the room is old and heavy-looking. The wooden furniture is bruised and dark with years of re-staining, the curtains dusty with time. Josie’s lobby straddles the line between sitting room and antique store, at times a sincere representation of old-world posturing and at others, unironically gaudy. It’s easy for my generation to confuse nostalgia with class. We seem, at times, to wishfully look back on the greatest hits of past decades, comfortably ignoring history’s B-sides. Maybe every generation does that. Maybe it’s just me.
“How long have you worked here?” I ask.
“A while,” she says, pushing my receipt over the counter, “I’m saving for college.”
“Getting close?”
She looks at me, darkly, and says nothing.
The room is much like the lobby, an already small place made closer by the furniture arranged inside. The pack I slump off my shoulders, the jacket I hang on the bed post- both look cheap and dirty and somehow unwelcome. I do too, when I find my reflection in the vanity’s mirror, I look distinctly out of place.
Normally I have a hotel room routine- a contemplative lie-down on the bed, a long sit in the restroom, a shower, a nap, a belated order-in dinner, and finally sleep. Today I settle for a shower and manage to eat a granola bar before passing out under the bed’s oppressive quilt. It has been a long time since I have dreamed.
I open my eyes and it is still very dark. In keeping with the atmosphere, Josie has provided no electric clock, no indication at all that this is not the 19th century. I tap my phone on the bedside table but it refuses to respond, the battery dead. I grope around blindly for a while before I find the light switch near the door.
The first fright I get is my own naked body, hunched and pale in the reflection across the room. The second is my jacket, the floating guise of a man to my still-waking brain. Travel has made me paranoid; as my eyes adjust I come to the conclusion that there’s nothing to be afraid of in the room at all.
I plug in my phone and see that it’s only just past midnight. I piss and settle in for the rest of the night.
It is still dark when I wake again and I lie, unmoving, in case it was a sound that disturbed me. Pressed into the bed by the quilt, I remember the thing in the walls and the hefty reassurance of Phil’s hammer. There is no noise, though, and no smell; no one sense that suggests anything dangerous has happened, is happening, or will happen soon. I look at my phone and see that, despite feeling wide awake, I have only slept fifteen minutes.
I cough a couple times in order to break the silence and then once more out of necessity before turning over and closing my eyes. Quasi-sleep follows.
The next time I check my phone it is a quarter to one and a dull headache has begun to grow behind my eyes. I recognize this from college, from when I pretended to go to college. Back then I would sleep in until early afternoon and nurse this same headache the rest of the day. I would use it as an excuse to skip class and to go to bed late.
I sit up and use the restroom again, drink some water. My stomach growls and I wonder if it isn’t hunger that’s keeping me awake. I eat a few more granola bars and a tough strip of jerky. When I’m finished my phone reads 12:55am.
Five minutes has passed, is what it’s saying. It has been the middle of the night for ages.
Fully-conscious, I take stock of the things that don’t add up. The hunger, the headache, the constant trips to the restroom, the fact that my aging phone seems to have charged itself entirely in less than an hour- nothing is suspicious on its own, none of that really proves anything except that my perception of time, and potentially my body, are distinctly out-of-whack.
I finish piecing all this together in less than 60 seconds, according to my phone. As soon as I tap the screen it ticks off a minute, as though feeling guilty all of the sudden. As though feeling self-conscious. I stare for a long, long time before anything happens.
And then another minute passes.
I dress myself and peer out the windows, wondering if my phone’s clock isn’t malfunctioning. It looks, by all accounts, like one in the morning. I open my door a crack and stare down the hall. In a hotel I wouldn’t think twice about leaving my room but a bed and breakfast is so much like a stranger’s house that I don’t know how to act in a way that doesn’t seem like trespassing.
I take the creaking stairs in socks and find the lobby dimly lit. The woman from before is there, still. She’s staring at her phone.
“Hi,” I say.
She looks up, not particularly surprised or interested.
“I… was wondering when breakfast is,” I say.
“It starts at half past seven and runs until ten.”
“And, uh, what time is it right now?”
“Nearly one in the morning.”
“Right,” I say, “Okay. Just having some trouble sleeping.”
She maintains the bare minimum eye-contact necessary for this exchange.
“It’s not a problem with the room, I mean…”
She doesn’t seem to care. I force out a fake yawn and walk back upstairs, back to my room, and close the door behind me.
My phone reads 12:59am and it is quiet. I pace the room, stare at myself in the mirror, and then I try to sleep again. I close my eyes and I count seconds until I drift off.
The headache, having gathered itself like a storm, greets me as I wake. I open my eyes slowly, hoping to see light between the shades but the room is still dark. I check my phone- 1:10am.
I leap out of bed and then stand, quietly and without purpose. Even if I were able to prove to myself that time has slowed down, what would I do to change it? I sit down again, still in the dark, and tap my foot. I drink a glass of water and eat the rest of the dried goods I’ve stored away. I wander the room, memorizing it in the dark. I make faces nobody can see. I open a book, a western thing I picked off a rack in a gas station, and I finish it by half past one.
I’m starving.
The woman at the front desk doesn’t seem surprised to see me leaving, but I hesitate at the door anyway.
“Just going to grab a few things,” I tell her and she nods.
The roads are quiet, but not suspiciously so. A seemingly normal number of cars pass me on my way to a convenience store I remember seeing as I drove in. I look at the clock inside- 1:17am, and I clear the place of its jerky stock.
“Long night?” the man asks.
“Sure.”
The truck’s time has just ticked off 1:21 when I park back at Josie’s. I walk into the lobby, a bag heavy with meat at my side, and ask the woman there a very pointed question:
“Did that seem fast to you?”
“What?” she asks, looking up from her phone. Her screen is visible from this angle- she’s been staring at the clock.
“Do you know how to beat this thing?” I ask, “Is that something you can tell me?”
“Just got to wait it out, man,” she shrugs.
Back in the room I set up a small nest- my bottle of water, a pile of jerky, and the quilt, wrapped heavily around my shoulders. With my phone plugged into the wall I sit and stare, counting the seconds to verify that they match the passage of time. And, for the most part, they do. As soon as I quit counting, though, or look away for long, the clock slows itself.
Or, I think it does.
There’s not much I can do to verify.
Eventually I fall asleep and I wake, slumped forward in a pile of jerky-smelling plastic. I take the phone with me into the bathroom and I drink a bottle of water while the morning slips tediously past two. The headache has grown beyond ignoring so I pop a couple ibuprofen and think about the flask. I’m not sure I want to risk falling asleep again.
The most circuitous path through the room goes over the bed but I start going around after a few dozen laps because I’m just that out of shape. I pace in circles, counting off the minutes till 3:00am. The numbers warp and furniture moves strangely in my peripheries. I find myself too warm and too cold in turns. My eyes dry and the headache thuds quietly under the restraint of the painkillers.
There is a knock on my door just past four as I stand, swaying slightly on my feet, in what passes for a break. I step quietly over and find the woman from downstairs in my doorway, holding her phone as I hold mine.
“I could hear you walking around up here,” she says.
“Sorry,” I tell her, “I can be more quiet.”
“It’s fine,” she says, looking down at her screen, prompting me to look at mine as well. I haven’t turned the lights on in my room and it is dark in the hall. Our faces hover in the shadows, illuminated by the two phones. “Do you want company?” she asks, without looking up.
“Sure,” I tell her.
She steps inside, slips off her shoes, and sits on the bed without ever looking up from the device in her hand. I’ve lost track of mine already, just trying to keep up with the strange presence.
“There’s not anything more to this than waiting,” she says, sensing my eyes on her, “And if you don’t watch, you’ll fall back. Can I have some jerky?”
I join her on the bed, eyes refocused on the screen, “Sure.”
“How many times have you fallen asleep?”
“A few,” I tell her, trying to remember, “Several.”
“I thought so,” she smiles, a smile that remains on her face as she tears a piece of the jerky from the mass, “Only twice for me.”
“This happens every night?”
She nods and yawns. When she covers her mouth I notice her nails have been chewed down to the skin.
“Why do you work here?”
“I got caught shoplifting just out of high school,” she says, “Had to go to court and everything.”
“So this is like your personal hell or something? Some kind of punishment?”
“Uh, no,” she says, “It just makes finding a retail job impossible.”
“Right.”
It gets quiet in the room for a few minutes, quiet enough that I hear when her breathing takes on the rhythm of sleep. I tap her leg with my foot and she starts.
“You were sleeping.”
“Thanks,” she says, and she yawns again. “Why are you here?” she asks, after a moment, “Not a lot of middle-aged guys stopping through on their own.”
“I…”
I explain everything. We’ve got all fucking night and what do I care if she believes me or not? I even tell her about the dead guy, I even try to replicate the breathing sounds he made. It all comes out of me and before I know it we’ve passed an hour and a half. Above my screen I can make out a look on her face, not quite impressed, I guess, but certainly not uninterested. She seems to let the story digest before settling on an answer.
“That’s…” she begins, “That’s pretty crazy.”
My heart drops a little in my chest. That’s exactly the answer I give to the loonies I meet on the road, to every old woman that’s seen a UFO and every hunter that’s seen a bigfoot. It’s not agreement or disagreement and it’s an unwillingness to engage with the story, lest there be more.
“Well,” she says, standing to stretch, “Hang in there for another half an hour. Things go back to normal at six every day and I have to start food prep. Thanks for passing the time.”
“No problem,” I say, and as she’s slipping back into her shoes I ask: “How’s the breakfast here?”
“Extravagant,” she says.
I return to the road, reader, feeling as though I never rested.
-traveler
