The air condemned me to the fate of drowning dry.
The motel's thin plaster walls, warped wooden frame, and rattling ventilation system sheltered us from neither the heat nor the humidity.
It was a comfortable space all the same.
The room in which we stayed could be crossed in ten paces. The glow of the setting sun filtered in through the window, framed by bright orange curtains. The curtains, in turn, were framed by beads. So too were the doors. Red, orange, yellow, white. The bed was soft to the touch, and invoked as much a sense of safety as any place called home ever had.
If only for one week, this space claimed that title.
Several of us shared it. We took part in the room as we took part in each other.
One could imagine that it was part and parcel of a beach trip. Dilapidated, but within walking distance of the shore. When a cool breeze blew by, and the birds cried out, the effect was heightened. But the breeze never carried the tang of salt, and the birds that crooned were too large to be gulls. Instead of sand, only the cracked asphalt of unattended motor lots baked in the sun.
Traveling to and from the room presented us with difficulty.
To the people who staffed the front desk, only one person occupied the room.
That person was not me.
I carried myself with tension in the hallway, not daring to eye the cameras for fear that they would notice the oddity.
But this, too, was like home.
The largest member of the team unpacked the van in slow, inconspicuous trips. The rest of us helped by fortifying the room, and preparing for the assignment ahead. Each bag he brought was used to barricade the door, mimicking the feeling of safety, until the van was empty and sweat ran across his skin.
Those of us who were present that night lay across the bed, bare of clothing and subject to the heat from the window. But we could not stay in this spot forever.
The work required our movement. Our involvement.
To look a dog in the teeth is to kill it.
When one of us left to survey the area, the barricade was disassembled. When they returned, it was rebuilt. Each cycle grew more frenetic, more gripped by paranoia, until we had honed the process down to a matter of seconds.
Our belongings, scattered and intermingled, existed in piecemeal collections throughout the barricade. My single rolling case, stout and upright, was kept apart. It stood between the bed and the window, close to the nightstand, its zipper left undone. Its interior contained clothes that best suited the weather. The sickening sweetness of ripe flowers wafted from within.
I left its lid wide, like a door that had been propped open on a summer day.
Curled inside, with arms and legs tucked close to a broken chest, was a woman.
She was bound in a fetal position, nestled in the case and clothes as if it were a grave.
Only her head was not tucked close. That was left upright, vigilant, peering out at the world through the corner of sunken eyes. Her muscles had rotten away, leaving behind clumps of sinew, patches of mummified skin, and bones that were sticky with congealed blood.
Long black hair trickled down and across her exposed collarbones. It was woven into her rib cage. Only the tacky blood kept the roots fastened to her skull.
To the interior of the case's lid, small plastic cylinders had been secured with hot glue. Each one contained an organ.
There was nothing remarkable to any of it.
Like everything else that had been supplied for this job, she was an old object. A previous vessel. I had once worn her. Through the rite of vivisection, slow and excoriating, I had extracted myself.
I may have found her as she was now. I had never seen her otherwise. The pieces of her body had been used to construct a façade that was now long pulled apart and exhausted.
When I joined the group that left for the day, I pulled out my clothes from around her, hardly noticing, so familiar the presence of the body was.
The motel parking lot kissed the highway.
A small green pickup truck, next to our van and devoid of wheels, supplied our lead of the day with his tools.
The dead abided it. They watched with blank eyes from the window, and the thin strips of median grass along the lot dividers. Swaying, unsteady, smelling of flowers. I was thankful for the strength of that smell. It masked the baking flesh that would inflict us all with a hunger that we could not afford.
He collected the metal box by its handle, and pushed his way through a gap in the chain link fence leading south. Our destination for today was the lot two hundred paces west.
A rectangular box, the size of an industrial shipping container, had been built out of plywood there.
A long run, made to contain beasts, extended from its furthest small side.
Using a pry bar, I forced the lock on the thin slabs that served as its doors.
Within the shade of the container, he placed his toolkit on the floor. I removed my notepad, and took my measurements.
The box served as a coffin.
A tomb.
A means of viewing the past.
I counted its width and length in paces, and he counted its height with his hands. The air shimmered and bent in the heat haze, warping around him as he stepped out into the beast run itself. At the furthest end, with her hands clasped behind her back, stood a woman. She was frail, and bore a head like the twin of the woman in my suitcase.
They were not related.
Could not be related.
But these circumstances provided the means of synchronicity.
He approached her, counting the spaces, so as not to become lost.
She placed one hand against the wire mesh, intertwining her fingers in the loops. He looked covetously, but did not do the same.
I joined him. I watched the others in our company, encircling the lot, far out of earshot. They held their own notes, and drew what they saw, as I did.
The dead woman's mouth parted. From her lips poured lines of sweat, the same consistency of that which left trails down his back.
Her voice carried the inflection of a tape played in reverse.
"Do you remember me?"
He performed the script.
"I will never know your face."
I thought of his note cards, tucked into his back pocket. He read through them in diners, alone in the corner, ever preparing himself while the rest of us struggled to relax and forget.
She continued, on cue.
"While you know mine, I will never know yours."
I knew that he could not see her as I did.
He saw someone else.
"Through our lives intermingled, your tongue has always had the taste of poison."
"You have only seen me through the guise of dead skin and bone," she replied.
Her tone was easy. Flat. Without judgment.
So was his.
Each verse carried a touch of yearning, but they were two halves of conversations from different times. Never truly in parallel.
Every word was another act of excoriation.
Penance.
Starvation.
I knew that what he spoke was not what I heard, just the same as what I saw was a vision unto myself. I hoped that his perspective was more gentle than mine.
Very little was left of her upon completion of the rite. Her body had caved inwards, not unlike a squash left out to the elements. She was mottled, bruised, and pulsing with scavenging flies that caressed and probed her soft interior.
Under the sun, she did not smell of flowers.