Intrusive Thoughts and Lost Time

I roll over in the stiff bed as the alarm trills. I’m momentarily confused by the noise. It’s not my alarm. Then I remember, I’m in a hotel room. I seek out the thin red lights peeking through the darkness to turn off the harsh ringing. There. The clock was turned slightly away from the bed last night. I must have had trouble falling asleep last night, and moved in when I was in that gray area of sleep, when someone’s not really awake by any measure, but not yet actually asleep either.

Turning off the alarm, I notice the time. After seven. Not early. A normal time. I must have missed my first alarm. Which begs the question, why is it still dark. It shouldn’t be dark outside this late. Is there a storm happening? Hopefully not, I don’t want to have to deal with that. I’ve got six hours of driving ahead of me today. A storm heavy enough to block out the sun fully would be bad for that, probably add an extra hour or two. I head over to the window. As I move the curtain aside to look out the window, the light streams in brightly. That’s why. Of all the things this lovely, cheap motel skimped on, the blackout curtains were not one of them. I’m not sure exactly why, but that somehow makes me feel even more suspicious of this place. But I didn’t lose any time last night. None that I noticed anyways. So it must just be a normal suspiciousness of no-tells. I move across the room, to my bags. Checking the route’s traffic on my phone, I take a moment to do some mental math. I decide I have enough time to do the normal morning activities.

I start out by turning on the room’s small coffee maker. Having a cup of coffee as I head out is a nice way to formalize the beginning of the functional day. After putting in the cheap coffee and filling the water tank, I start it up. I don’t bother watching the drip machine do the dripping. I have other things to go through. I walk into the tiny bathroom. Basically just a toilet and a shower. I don’t need to use the former this morning. Not yet, anyways. But the latter... Well, I’ll just say the odor of sweat and grime wafting off of me may well be a key reason why I determined that I had enough time for my morning activities.

I turn the shower on, the water spilling out from the showerhead with even less pressure than I expect. Yet another thing this lovely place clearly skimped on in favor of the blackout curtains and the room-to-room noise insulation. A little bit of an odd choice for a place like this, but I supposed their usual clientele would only need this to rinse off, not scrub themselves clean. I pop my head out to check on my coffee. Halfway done. It’ll be done and slightly cooled off by the time I’m out of the shower. Stripping off the sweaty underwear I slept in, I climb into the shower.

I start to relax, almost meditate as the water falls onto me, powered more by gravity than water pressure. I don’t meditate much, outside of times like this, when it can’t do any harm. When I empty my mind and put aside my personal ego, I tend to have intrusive thoughts. Intrusive thoughts that don’t feel entirely my own. It’s also hard for me to maintain those meditative states, because as I empty my mind, I also tend to notice the little things. The things that go unnoticed. The longer I’m in such a state, the more those insignificant details I notice begin to connect in my gut. And that causes me to ask questions. Questions which break my focus on being unfocused. Today, it’s in that almost meditative state that I notice one such little thing. A small trail of ruddy brown on the shower, trailing down from a small bit of the lower far wall to the floor, then across the floor until it contacts the area where the water hits. Touch it, a voice-my voice?- enters my mind. It is curious. I press my fingertip against the trail. It depresses slightly, but doesn’t move. I pull back, and only on my wet fingertip does any come off, and even then, not much does. Fairly well dried, but not fully dry. Normally, that means in the last day and change, but this is in a shower, so it could well be any time in the last week or so, depending on how often the shower’s been used. I smell it. Blood. But I can feel the hairs on my shoulders stand up straight, like the air around me is abuzz with static electricity. So, not just blood. Dang it, why did I have to relax. Now I’m probably going to miss the movie. I know that feeling of electrostatic air. It almost always immediately precedes two things. First, comes another intrusive thought or two. There’s Hunger here, We can find it. There the thought is. Then, well, then I lose time.

I wait a moment. No odd blackout. Nothing suddenly moves slightly. No sign of the time jump. The hair starts standing up more than simply on my shoulders. I feel the weight of my existence lift off me slightly. But I know what that actually means. If this were the first time, I’d think my gut was wrong. It’s not. It just sometimes takes time. At least this time, this town isn’t a place I really ever plan on coming back to. That sometimes can get awkward. I can feel the flows, the currents in the still and somewhat stagnant air. If I understood better what was happening, I get the feeling I could learn a lot about the world from those currents. But with that, the voice doesn’t provide any helpful tips, like it does with the scent of blood. Then, my hair begins to settle everywhere but my shoulders. The static runs up my neck and my stubble from two days without shaving feels like it too is on end.

Then, as soon as it came, it is gone. Except I know better. The brown washed off entirely. The soap has moved. The toilet seat is down. I check my body. No sign of anything. In fact, I seem clean. I turn off the water. Climbing out of the shower, I dry off as I check on my coffee. It’s done. I open up a pair of cups and pour them in. It’s colder than it should be. Another sign. I put tops on the cups and place the pair in the microwave. Setting it for twenty seconds, I put on my clothes for the day. The microwave beeps. I take out one cup. I drink from it as I check the time. Nine. Shit. An hour and a half this time. I can have done a lot more than simply clean a shower in an hour and a half. I gather up all my stuff for the night into my duffel. The mask is on top. At least I remembered that. I slide it down under my old clothes, out of paranoia. I put the room key in my pocket, as well as my keys and wallet in other pockets. Putting the duffel on my back, I pull out the other cup of coffee from the microwave. I walk to the room door and, temporarily placing a cup on the floor to free up a hand, I open the door and pass through.

Sipping my already partially drunk coffee, I head towards the front desk. I don’t notice anything out here different than last night, besides it being brighter. As I approach the desk, the lovely middle aged woman behind the counter asks, “Are you checking out now?” The emphasis is put on ‘now’. Like there was a time we already chatted but I didn’t check out. I must have passed here before this morning. I can’t give any indication of my ignorance.

“Yeah,” I say. Fortunately, or unfortunately, this isn’t the first time I’ve had this sort of interaction. I place one of my coffee cups on the counter to free up my hand this time. I pull out the room key. “Sorry about any hassle.”

She shakes her head. “It’s no problem,” she says. It’s not a friendly or true statement. In all honesty, it almost feels purely exasperated but polite. So it wasn’t a chat earlier. Probably just a curt denial, likely accompanied by an equally curt and a tad disingenuous apology, when asked about checking out. I nod.

“Do you need me to do anything else?” I ask. She doesn’t, but it’s the polite thing to ask. And, more importantly, the longer this lasts, the more likely she is to connect me to this time rather than the morning.

“No, we’re good,” she’s really not helping out in that regard.

I nod. “Well, thanks,” I say offhandedly, “Have a good one.”

“You too,” she instinctively replies.

I nod once more as I pick up my coffee and head out to the parking lot. Hopefully that will be enough. Not that it matters much, I doubt she’ll remember me much at all after any of the more interesting stories in the motel begin checking in and out this shift. So as long as whatever ramification of my blacked out actions doesn’t start until the afternoon, I’ll be fine. I walk to my car and, putting the pair of cups on the roof, walk around to the trunk. I open it up by the handle, swing the duffel inside so it fits snuggly up against my suitcase, and slam the trunk down once more. I open the driver’s door and bring my coffees inside, placing them in the pair of cupholders in the central console. As always, when I start my car, the rumbling of the engine causes a thought to pop into my head. The same intrusive thought, every time. A fine steed for our journey. I begin to drive out from the parking lot, into the streets of the city outskirts. Following my phone’s directions. As I pull past, I notice it. Peeking out from the dumpster in the alley behind the fast food block. A hand. It looks mangled, but I’m guessing it’s not. At least, not in the way the police will think once they find the twisted body. They’ll assume it’s some weird ritualistic behavior or shit like that. I don’t know exactly how they’ll phrase it, I only know police stuff from TV and I know that’s all wrong. But they’ll think the killer did it. But that’s not really what happened. Assuming that hand is what I think, it’s in a state I’ve encountered before. I’ve seen a body become like that, after my fourth blackout of this unexplainable sort.

It was several years ago. I had been camping, after my recovery. “Alone” in a forest. Of course, being a relatively common campground, I was only alone in the sense that I was at the camp without any guests. There were about six groups in the campsite. It was the first time I’d blacked out away from civilization. I’ve figured out it’s rare, though I’m still not sure why. But when I came to, I was in the further of the two nearby rivers. And on the shoreline there sat a large cat. Like a puma, but the size of a bear. And it looked pretty dead. Then, it began twisting back into itself. It became something that could almost be human, though mutilated by its own existence. I vomited in my mouth and dragged the body into the water. I wasn’t about to go to jail for whatever that thing was. As it washed down the stream into the wild, I realized for the first time how weird my life had become.

And now, the weird has become commonplace. And I drive away from whatever monster I don’t remember killing calmly, my only concern being how poorly I hid this body. I mean, if any of the restaurants clean in the morning, I’m fucked. Although, as I think about the specifics, I become a bit less worried. Given the state of the fast food places last night, I doubt cleaning is something they do any more often than required. Which means it might not be discovered until closing. Or more realistically, some unfortunate soul’s lunch break. And another thing people do during lunch breaks is have torrid affairs in motels. I should be fine, I think, breathing out deeply. Of course We are. The thought enters my mind, and I immediately turn on the radio to drown it out the best I can.