The Room

The Sunset Motor Lodge sits on Route 66 like a pulled tooth. Twenty-three rooms. Color TV from 1991. Ice machine that works every other day. The kind of place where people check in with MasterCard and check out through the bathroom window.

Room 7 has words instead of wallpaper.

Every surface. Floor, ceiling, inside the closet, behind the toilet. Black Bic pen. Red Sharpie. Brown something that flakes when touched. Something that might be blood but probably isn't. The handwriting starts neat in the northwest corner. Palmer Method, Catholic school precise. By the southeast wall, it's a seizure.

Jim manages the place. Sixty-three. Salem Lights. Metformin twice daily. He discovered the room on a Sunday morning, September 15th, 2019, after a Saturday night that the security footage mysteriously deleted. The previous guest: paid cash, signed "J. Smith," left nothing but burnt matches arranged in a perfect circle on the nightstand.

The writing won't come off. Jim tried everything. Goof Off. Kilz primer. His nephew brought a belt sander that broke on contact. The words just sat there underneath, bleeding through like a birthmark through foundation.

So he started charging admission.

Fifty dollars for two hours. Cash only. No photos.

Supply and demand.

They come.

MFA students from online programs. Instagram poets with 50K followers and Xanax prescriptions. The kind of writers who keep Moleskines but never fill them. They sit on the bed. Sealy Posturepedic, manufactured 1987, cigarette burn on the left corner. They read.

The novel has no title. No chapters. No paragraphs after the first thousand words. Just one continuous sentence that broke grammar's neck somewhere around the north wall and kept going.

There's a man in it. Or men. The pronouns shift.

There's a woman. Or women. She's blonde, then brunette, then bald.

There's a kitchen with yellow walls. There's a knife. There's an argument about coffee that becomes an argument about children that becomes an argument about God. Someone screams. Someone laughs. Someone's teeth hit linoleum.

Then: jungle. Monsoon season. Entrails wound around a fence post. The taste of copper and cordite.

Then: suburban basement. Fluorescent flicker. A child's bicycle, red, missing one training wheel.

Then: the inside of something's mouth.

The timeline doesn't track. Past tense becomes present becomes conditional becomes imperative: Run. You're running. You ran. You will have run. If you run. Run.

Around hour two, readers' noses bleed. Light hemorrhaging. Nothing serious. Jim keeps a box of Kleenex by the door. Also Visine. Also Excedrin Extra Strength.

This is what happens: You read until your eyes burn. You read until the words stop being words and become shapes, sounds, raw transmission. You read until you realize the story isn't changing.

The internet has theories.

A schizophrenic's manifesto. CIA mind control experiment. Alien communication. The real Book of Revelation. Someone on Reddit claims it's just Finnegans Wake transcribed by a speed freak.

The mythology coalesces: Read every word and you'll know who wrote it. Read every word and you'll understand why. Read every word and you can escape the Matrix. Your student loans. Your divorce. Your father who never said he loved you.

Nobody finishes.

A novelist from Iowa City lasted nineteen hours. They found her in the bathtub, fully clothed, reciting the multiplication tables in Latin. She teaches high school English now. Omaha.

A philosophy professor from Berkeley made it three days. Tenure track. Heidegger specialist. Campus security found him having covered his office walls with Post-it notes. Each one said: "Just one more page." He sells insurance now. Good commissions.

The room doesn't kill them. It dismisses them. Like a bored cat with a broken mouse.

The kid arrives Thursday, October 8th, 2020. 3:47 PM.

Honda Civic, 2003, silver, odometer frozen at 166,419 miles. Goodwill flannel, $3.99 tag still attached. Gas station coffee. He's maybe nineteen. Acne scars. Fingernails bitten to the quick. The kind of face you forget while you're still looking at it.

He counts out three weeks' rent in twenties. The bills are sequential.

"You know what's in there?"

The kid nods. There's a notebook in his back pocket. Composition. Black and white marble.

"You know what it does to people?"

The kid sets down the key deposit. "I know what people let it do to them."

Jim's heard this before. The confidence of the untested. He's seen what comes after: ambulances, psychiatric holds, Thorazine.

The kid takes the key. Room 7. Brass. Tarnished.

He goes in. The door closes.

Click.

The deadbolt.

Day one: Nothing.

Day three: Jim walks by, pretends to check the ice machine. Silence. But the Do Not Disturb sign has been flipped seventeen times. He counts the fingerprints on the plastic.

Day seven: The maid reports sounds. Not screaming. Whispering. Like someone reading out loud in a language that isn't quite language. Like someone learning to speak by reading.

Day ten: The whispers become dialogue. Two voices. Then three. Then one again, but different.

Day fourteen: Jim tries the door. Locked from inside. He knocks. No answer. But there's movement. Shadows under the door gap. Pacing. The shadows have too many angles.

Day seventeen: A smell. Sweet rot. Like fruit left in a hot car.

Day twenty: The whispers stop.

Day twenty-one: Silence.

Jim stands outside with his master key. His hand shakes. Salem between his lips, unlit. He's about to unlock it. Call the cops. Call the coroner. Call whoever you call when someone becomes literature.

Click.

The deadbolt. From inside.

The kid looks excavated.

Three weeks of beard, patchy, desperate. Fingernails chewed past the quick to meat. Weight loss: fifteen pounds, maybe twenty. His eyes won't focus on anything closer than the horizon.

But standing. Walking. Breathing.

Jim drops his cigarette. "You finished it?"

"No."

"Then what—"

"I added to it."

The parking lot goes cold. Desert cold. The kind that comes from space between stars.

"You what?"

The kid's looking at his hands. There's writing on them. Fresh. Still wet. The ink is wrong. Too red. Too thick. "I tried to find the end. But it doesn't end. It just keeps going. So I thought—" He stops. Swallows. Something clicks in his throat. "I thought if I added my own ending—"

"Jesus Christ."

"—but it changed what I wrote. Changed me back."

Jim's mouth tastes like copper. "What do you mean, changed you back?"

The kid's already walking to his Honda. His gait is wrong. Like someone pretending to remember how walking works. "Go look."

"Wait—"

The engine turns over. First try. The car reverses, smooth, normal, except the kid isn't looking where he's going. He's looking at Jim. His eyes are black. All pupil.

Then gone. Taillights. Then nothing.

Jim pushes open the door to Room 7.

The walls are breathing.

The words pulse. Systolic, diastolic. They're rearranging themselves, sentences fucking sentences, birthing paragraphs. The novel is writing itself, eating itself, becoming itself. Ouroboros in Bic pen.

The new writing is different. Desperate. Frantic:

HELP ME. I CAN'T GET OUT. HE WON'T LET ME LEAVE.

Below that, in the original script, calm as a diagnosis:

Yes. I will.

Below that, the kid again, letters degrading:

PLEASE. SOMEONE. ANYONE. READ THIS.

The original:

No one can hear you here.

Then:

MY NAME IS—

But the name is scratched out. Written over. Rewritten. Scratched out again. The wall is scarred there, drywall showing through like bone.

More fragments:

I HAD A MOTHER.

You have me now.

I WAS REAL.

You're more real here.

LET ME GO.

You wanted an ending. This is it.

THIS ISN'T—

This is.

Jim backs out. His legs give. He catches the door frame. Something warm runs between his fingers. Thick. Viscous.

He looks. His palm is red. Maybe blood, probably ink. But warm like blood. Body temperature. The door frame is sweating it. Beading up through the paint like the room has a fever.

He wipes his hand on his jeans. The ink spreads. Won't absorb. Just sits there on the denim, pooling. Moving against gravity. Forming letters.

The novel is spreading.

Jim does three things:

First: Hangs the sign. CLOSED FOR MAINTENANCE.

Second: Parks his truck across the door. F-150, 1997, two hundred thousand miles, still runs.

Third: Stops answering the phone.

But late at night, when the desert goes quiet and the interstate sleeps, he hears it. The scratch of pen on paper. Writing, writing, writing. Getting louder. Getting closer.

The novel is growing.

He checks the other rooms. Clean. Still clean.

Except.

Room 6: A word in the corner. Small. Written in pencil. Once.

Room 8: Under the bed. Ballpoint. Upon.

Room 9: Inside the medicine cabinet. Lipstick. A.

Room 10: On the ceiling. What might be blood. Time.

Jim stops checking.

October becomes November. November becomes December. The phone rings. Reservations. Cancellations. Questions about Room 7. He doesn't answer.

December 24th. Christmas Eve. Jim sits in his office. Bottle of Jim Beam, half empty. Prescription bottle of Xanax, completely full. The transistor radio plays "Silent Night" on repeat. Outside, the desert is cold and bright with stars.

He hears footsteps. They stop outside his office.

Knock. Knock. Knock.

"Jim?"

It's the kid's voice. But older. Or younger. Or both.

"Jim, I figured it out."

Jim doesn't move. Doesn't breathe.

"The ending. I figured out the ending."

Silence.

"Want to hear it?"

Jim's hand moves to the doorknob. Stops.

"Jim?"

The voice is closer now. Like it's pressed against the door. Like it's coming through the door.

"It doesn't end, Jim. That's the ending. It just keeps going. And going. And growing. Until everything is the story. Until everyone is in it. Until there's nothing outside it."

Footsteps again. Receding.

"Room's ready for the next guest, Jim. All clean. All prepared."

"Merry Christmas."

Silence.

Jim waits until dawn. Then checks Room 7.

The door is open.

The walls are white. Pristine. Like they've been painted. Like they've never been written on.

Except for one sentence. Dead center. Eye level. Black ink:

This is how it begins.

Jim reads it.

Then reads it again.

He can't stop reading it.

His lips move. Whispering. The words taste familiar. Like something he's always known. Like something he wrote himself.

This is how it begins.