Through the screen door and the opened windows of the old motel room, he looked out at the dappled shade of the afternoon on the circular gravel drive around which the dozen paint-flecked cottages sat in mute dishevelment. Trashy hackberry and chinaberry trees shielded the entire compound in a murky gloom that contrasted sharply with the bright sunwashed street a short distance away at the motel's entrance. In the center of the circular drive was a weedy miniature playground, a weather-splintered seesaw, a swing set with two broken swings, a rusted merry-go-round. No child had touched them in decades, and they were haunted by silence and by the absence of little bottoms and little hands.
From the sagging bed where he sat, he could see the bungalow directly across from him. An older couple was sitting in front of it in clunky rusted lawn chairs, smoking. They wore outsized shorts over their inflated stomachs and pale, spindly legs. From behind their sunglasses they stared straight ahead without animation, like the listening blind.
The Bungalows Motel was built in 1942, and it had not changed except for the necessary piecemeal repairs that the decades regularly forced upon it. It used to be out on the edge of town, but the years and the city had swallowed it. Now it occupied a section of South Congress Avenue that was invisible, except to people who were also invisible and who no longer had anything to do with the world in which they lived.
Shirtless and perspiring, he wiped his damp hands on his trousers. He was conscious of the odors of dank and aging surroundings, of puggy linens and mildewed upholstery and wood furnishing soured by decades of cursory cleaning with cheap, sweet cleansers. All this forced a weight of melancholy on him that was unexpected and uncomfortable.
He didn't like this motel, and even though he had been here only a few hours, there was something about the place that gnawed at him in a way he couldn't explain. It was the dank odor of mildew. He had figured it out, finally, but that didn't make it stop. There was no mildew where he'd come from. The odors of cheap hotels and apartments were quite different there. They didn't give him this oppressive feeling that chewed at his thoughts.
He didn't usually give a damn where he was. He was summoned. He went. He did his work. He waited. If no one called, he just stayed where he was, living however life was lived there. The world was interesting. Or it wasn't. It was different everywhere. Or it was the same everywhere. Sometimes it was both in the same day. It depended on what it was. There was an infinite variety of things to be different or to be the same. In the end, though, it didn't matter to him one way or the other. He just observed that it was… or that it wasn't.
He had never smelled anything like this before in his life, and it was driving him crazy. It didn't make any sense at all. Why would this smell get on his nerves so much? The humidity. The slimy feel of the sweat under his arms. He imagined the hair under his arms mildewing and turning rancid. Rotting. Tufts of it falling out and sticking to the sweat against his body. Itching.
Sometimes he went to cities he'd been to before. It happened often. But it seldom seemed as though he'd been there before. It was just new all over again. As alien as the inside of a casket.
The old couple across the way were beginning to get on his nerves, too. They sat there like two corpses, their bodies distended by the heat. He imagined he could smell them, as well. He imagined that when their bodies began to crack open and ooze, they would begin to tilt over a little. As they tilted, their sunglasses would kick up on one side, maybe slip a bit down their noses. The ooze would begin to cake on them, and their limbs would swell and discolor and stiffen with gases, making them tilt even more.
No need to think like that. He'd change the subject. He'd already forgotten the name he was supposed to be. It didn't matter. He had his ID. He'd check it if he needed to know.
Sometimes it was a good thing not to remember who you were.