My new cell is room 621 at the Hotel Firebird, a place too much like jail for me to believe I’m out. The hotel warden wears a T-shirt declaring his Vietnam-veteran status and conducts his business through a till inside a chain-link enclosure. Behind him, a massive ring of keys hangs from a nail above a stained baseball bat with “911” carved along its side. Above a small television, a sign reads: “No Visitors After 10 pm, No Loitering in Front, No Change for Vending Machines, Cash Only, No Exceptions.”
The residents are a mixture of men and women, recovering and relapsing addicts, and those squarely between either distinction. Some of the doors never open, others never close, the dealers and prostitutes working 24-7 for a piece of business or a piece of a mark, some runaway fresh from the bus station. The hallway lights have burned out; I navigate by the blue glow humming from beneath the doors.
My room has a sink in the corner, a bed, a night table and a small desk with a black-and-white television, a Bible, a deck of cards, a bar of soap, and the stench of every other resident who ignored the soap. Unlike jail, it has a window with a view of the street below. I open the window to let the fresh air in and the human stink out. Looking down to the sidewalk three stories beneath me, I hear an impulse whisper, “jump.” I stand still, let my arms go slack to hear the whisper again, then pull myself inside.
I sit on my bed with a game of solitaire spread in front of me. I know the rules but don’t remember learning them. The columns of faces and numbers make my head hurt and my bandages itch with static. My notebook awaits the next lucid replay of forgotten seconds, which have felt seconds away for the last hour. A slam of thunder sends the seven of clubs flying. My heart pounds heat to my bandages and blood flares into my new skin. With no forewarning footfalls, a polite knock is a pounding fist is a door crashing to the floor amid airborne hinges and frame splinters, storm troopers storming in from the dark, black armored bugmen aiming laser-guided stingers at my chest, awaiting the queen’s orders over the wires lodged in their ears.
This time, it’s only a knock. I’m face to face with a pair of Firebird residents who could just as easily need to borrow my soap as kill me.
“Do you have a tapeworm?” His words are soft, the beats measured like the pendulum swing of a pocket watch.
“No. Why would I?”
“Something you ate,” he says. His eyes meet the air to the left of mine as though he’s reading from cards over my shoulder. “Or the Man has you by the short hair of your balls. Or you’re on his payroll.”
He dips his chin toward his companion, a lanky stalk of a man over six feet with a tangle of greasy hair hanging below his shoulders. His face is the color of a nicotine stain and he has the blank, bloodless eyes of an old photograph, eyes held too still for too long and frozen onto a silver plate the instant after the flash pan sucked the soul from behind them.
“He can smell tapeworms. He thinks you might be a carrier. Happens sometimes with a new resident.”
His companion remains silent. He wears a knee-length black raincoat, oblivious to the evening heat. He could be stretched across a set of crossbeams in a cornfield as easily as he could be flesh and blood.
“Your friend is wrong.”
I start to close the door when he says, “My name’s Jack.” He extends his hand through the opening and his beefy grip swallows mine whole. His palm is slippery with the accumulated grime of a life spent neither working nor washing. When he lets go, his companion has stepped into my room and Jack follows.
His silent friend hisses through clenched teeth and slices a finger across his throat, Quiet. He turns my television on to a dead channel and a canopy of white static deafens any long-range listening. The hissing flickerstorm on-screen envelops me. My heart swells as though I’m listening to an orchestra.
“It’s like music,” says Jack. “The static is hundreds of millions of years old. It’s been flying through space since before time. Remnants of the big bang are strains from the symphony at the beginning of the universe.” He smiles and says, “I like to read,” then untucks his shirt. “I’m going to show you I’m clean. No tapeworm. No one is listening.”
“I don’t care. You need to get out.”
“If you don’t care, then you are most definitely wired.”
Jack hikes up his shirt and shows me his bare torso in a full turn. Something terrible was happening to the Virgin of Guadalupe. She’d been rendered in bruise-colored ink, wrapped around Jack’s ribs, but her face, body and aura were shredded by a buckshot blast of sores like cigarette burns, some healed to scabs like dots of rust, the rest abscessed and wet, ringed by swollen red stains of infected skin.
His friend does the same. He hangs his coat on my doorknob and lifts his shirt for a three-hundred-sixty-degree view of his chest and back, a scattering of identical sores across both. The television light behind him glows through his skin like sunlight through a paper window screen. Veins and arteries form a webwork beneath the silhouette of his ribs. The murky pulsing of his heart throbs between dull clouds of lung tissue. He drops his shirt and his shadow on the floor darkens back into place.
“What happened to you guys?”
“Bugs. They’re everywhere.”
Their rooms are infested. They’re being eaten alive but asking about tapeworms. Another memory struggles to take solid form but mudslides apart.
“Well?” Jack is waiting. I lift my shirt and turn a full circle.
“I still don’t know what you mean,” I tell him.
“People come here to go straight. They won’t let us. New residents are sometimes wired with a tapeworm. They move in, ask around for this or that, or maybe someone offers the wrong thing and the Man hears all of it. And somebody goes right back inside. But you’re clean.”
“I just got out of jail.”
“What happened to you?”
“Fire.”
“Keep clean and covered. Bugs will lay eggs if they get underneath. Give us a urine sample.”
On cue, his companion produces an empty coffee cup. I ask him if he’s trying to pass a test.
“No, but somebody, somewhere, is. I connect people with what they want. How about you?”
“I OD’d the same time I got burned.”
“Things haven’t been going well for you, then?”
“I’m saying I’m not clean. I piss in there and somebody gets violated back to jail, I promise you.”
“Then give us a cigarette.”
“I don’t smoke.”
“Five dollars.”
“What for?”
He surveys my room.
“Because you have it.”
The warden must have rented me one of the Firebird’s nicer rooms. It has pictures and a sink.
“And what do I get?”
“You understand, now,” Jack says. “Perhaps I can help. What are you looking for?”
“Everything I’ve done before I woke up in jail. I’ll piss into any cup, anytime, and pay you ten bucks for your trouble, if you can deliver. If you can’t, get out of here.”
“That’s hardly necessary,” he says as though talking in his sleep. “I come here to say