Outside the motel, eight miles away from the bed in which Hope and Anthony caught their breath, the Vacca Vale River had overtaken most of Chastity Valley. The river was once the place where officials stored sewage and murderers stored bodies. Now, the river was every place. From above, the Valley was sapped of color and form, night sky pelting rain against the florae, autumnal trees submerged in shadow and water. A jungle gym built to resemble a miniature castle up to its neck in the flood. Animal burrows collapsed. Squirrels, deer, owls, foxes, and chipmunks fled to higher ground, hunted for thick vegetation to protect them from the wind. Unlike the terrestrial creatures, the fish went down: down to the bottom of the small lake at the western edge of the Valley, a lake that was joining everything around it. Soon, you couldn’t tell where it began or ended. A family of ducks huddled in a tight line, swimming across the forest in the dark. In the center of Vacca Vale, the swollen river kissed the bridge that stretched across it. South of downtown, the affordable neighborhoods stood defiantly in pooling water, disposable one-story houses holding their rooftops high. Water gathered in the basement and first floor of La Lapinière Affordable Housing Complex. Electricity and pumping throughout the poor neighborhoods malfunctioned. Stop signs, submerged. American flags, swimming. Basketball nets brushing the water. Hoods of cars peaking above. One truck floating down a residential street. The color of the water was the color of nothing, and it was as though the nothing that always haunted Vacca Vale had materialized into a physical substance, one capable of quantifiable damage. The river was everywhere, contaminating the city with itself, insisting that there was no real difference between it and them.
In Room 57 at the Wooden Lady, a woman named Hope allowed her husband to hold her close to his warm, real body. Deep in her own, a transformation was beginning. In four days, a fertilized egg would implant itself in the lining of her uterus. It would be a boy, and he would be born with large, dark, beautiful eyes. In the bed, Hope cried pleasurably, as she often did after good sex. Anthony kissed the tears off her face, traced patterns of light that fell on her skin, and told her that it was beautiful to feel so much. Pizza boxes were piled on the floor beside the television. In her husband’s perfect thumbnail, Hope glimpsed something essential, some secret from the gods to help her through: not a single factory, boarded-up window, overcast day, foreclosed honey-baked-ham shop, empty bank account, or medical emergency could permanently kill them. None of this nothing could trap them inside it. There was no such thing as freedom, Hope knew, but there was such a thing as feeling good, and it was important, and it was real, and sometimes you got it for free.
“I love you,” he said.
“I love you,” she said.
And they believed each other.
Olive Brine
Moses is staying at the Wooden Lady, a place that inspires hard crime as soon as you enter it. Moses chose this motel because it had the worst online reviews he could find—It’s like if manslaughter were a place, commented user BabyFace444—and he wanted to keep a low profile. A sign on the front desk reads: VACCAVALE’S FIRST MOTEL! A dubious distinction. It used to be called the Wooden Indian until three years ago, when a group of students campaigned for the owners to change it. Moses gathered this from the internet before he arrived.
Around ten on Wednesday morning, Moses approaches the front desk, following an accidental confession at St. Jadwiga’s. He notices a collage of local headlines mentioning the Wooden Lady framed on the wall.
MULBERRY KILLER’S ALIBI PROVES FALSE, WOODEN LADY STAFF TESTIFIES. GINALADOWSKI TAKES OVER AT THE WOODEN LADY, CRIME DOWN THIRTEEN PERCENT. WOODEN LADY POOL TO CLOSE PERMANENTLY AFTER TEN OPOSSUMS FOUND. “THE HOOKERS CHOSE US, WE DIDN’T CHOOSE THEM”: WOODEN LADY OWNER SPEAKS OUT ABOUT SEX WORKCHARGES.
“All press is good press, is it?” Moses asks in a French accent. He’s wearing a black turtleneck, despite the heat.
The teenage boy at the desk stares at him like an undertaker. Rabbit figurines crowd the surface of the filing cabinet behind him. A vase of snakes sits in the center of the lobby, resembling a memorial.
“Why the snakes?” asks Moses.
The concierge turns his attention to a game on his phone. “For the children,” he replies.
“My name is Pierre,” says Moses. “Pierre BuFont. B, U, F, O, N, T. I would like a single room.”
The boy turns to his outdated computer and types irritably. He pauses to take a luxurious gulp of milkshake, then mumbles something that sounds to Moses like, We are out of echoes.
Moses asks the boy to repeat himself.
“We’re out of nonsmoking rooms.”
“This is good for me,” replies Moses as Pierre. “I am smoker.”
“Sixty-two dollars and fifty-three cents.”
Moses pays in cash.
Once the plot is set in motion, he makes the most of it. He deposits his bags in Room 57—a shadow box where, unbeknownst to him, a baby was conceived ten months prior. The room is surprisingly cozy, despite its green wallpaper, odor of smoke, and general atmosphere of death. It reminds Moses of the catacombs in Paris. After he sets down his things, he leaves the motel and walks across a four-lane intersection to the liquor store, which plays new age music on the speakers and footage of gorillas on the televisions. In a shimmer of flutes and synths, he purchases vermouth, gin, olives, and a pack of cigarettes, maintaining the accent throughout. If the cashier is interested in his French performance, or his conspicuous consumption—he chose the most expensive brands—she keeps her interest to herself.
When he returns to his room, he finds a pink hood in the dresser. Just a hood, torn from its body. There is no soap in the bathrooms, no breakfast in the morning. One damp towel. Moses loves it—all of it. His interaction with Father Tim left him feeling hungover, itchy, breathless, pursued. He takes a few pulls of gin, removes his clothes, then settles into the bed. Immediately, he falls into a thin and sweaty nap.
He wakes to evidence of a wet dream, but he can’t recall the details. As he waddles to the bathroom and takes a shower, splinters return to him. An art class was painting him as he modeled nude. All eyes on him. He dries his body with a towel he brought from home, rubbing his skin aggressively, then dresses in a fresh outfit identical to the one he was wearing this morning. Now, to kill time—a phrase he’s always liked—he fixes himself an extra-dirty martini. He makes it quickly, slopping vermouth on the paranormal television, which keeps turning on and off without his intervention. Thankfully, it’s muted.
It’s after five in the evening. On his bedside table sits a pack of cigarettes. He lights one and smokes cinematically, actively appreciating the lack of art. On the quilt, a wolf howls at a yellow moon, ensconced in pine trees. In this motel, Moses feels French, despite the comforter—feels nihilism and passion sparring like bucks for the territory of his brain.
He stretches on the bed, sipping his drink, which is mostly olive brine. The air conditioner in his room is more of a gesture than a reality—it pours forth room-temperature air, although it’s fixed on the coldest setting. He’s sweating but feels chilled. He drinks until the martini takes hold of him, warming him up, erasing the morning, cleansing pollutants from his body. In elementary school, Moses loved erasing—it was, in his estimation, the closest thing to time travel. At recess, he would crouch on the Astroturf with a notebook, write horrible things about people he knew—including himself—then erase his markings until the paper became thin and hot. Rubber shreds would cling to his uniform polo, leaving evidence. He never minded the evidence.
Moses opens his laptop, relishing its blast of screen light, and logs into the email associated with his mental health blog. The blog is devoted to a subset of people who suffers from the same itchy, invasive, multicolored fibers that he does. The subset he leads, however, does not identify with the Morgellons community. Truth be told, Moses finds the Morgellons folks completely unrelatable, but he maintains a respectful attitude toward them in his writing. While the Morgellons community spends much of its energy attempting to medically validate their condition, Moses’s people understand that they are more advanced than the dermis-typical human population, and thus cannot expect the medical community, which is dominated by the unevolved, to detect such a condition. It’s like expecting a pedestrian to recognize the Son of God—most wouldn’t! Most didn’t! Neither do Moses’s people attempt to treat their condition, as they believe that it is their duty to suffer it. Coconut oil, cinnamon, black soap—these remedies are acceptable so long as they are used to soothe but not eradicate the symptoms. If the symptoms “heal,” the sufferer must cease use of the product at once and do everything in his power to resurrect the itch.
Moses’s subset refers to its condition as the Toll, so-named because the symptoms reveal genetic material unique to the hypersensitive—to geniuses, artists, and prophets. People who suffer from the Toll accept the fibers as a consequence of their superiority. The Toll is taxing, indeed, but as Moses writes in the “About Us” portion of his blog:
It is our duty to endure alienating discomfort, and, toward the end of our preordained missions, singular pain. Our lives will not be breezy. Our condition will isolate us from family and friends. It will render contemporary structures of happiness ridiculous, unattainable, or both. This is our Toll, and it is one we embrace because we know that our condition also unlocks the affected consciousness to nirvana. As my grandmother used to say: your gift is your cross.