The neon sign had been buzzing the word VACANCY since the Eisenhower administration and I had no reason to believe it would stop on my account. I checked in under a name I borrowed from a paperback, paid in cash that smelled faintly of someone else's perfume, and was handed a brass key warm from the clerk's pocket. The carpet in the hallway had opinions about my shoes. The wallpaper had opinions about everything.
There was a small fire in the wastebasket of Room 207 when I arrived, which the previous occupant had apparently started on purpose and then forgotten about, the way other men forget umbrellas. I poured the ice bucket on it and sat down to write. Outside, a highway the color of cold coffee carried strangers toward more interesting trouble than mine, and the desk lamp made a noise like a wasp learning a second language.
I have been a correspondent for nineteen years and I can tell you with the certainty of a man who has slept in his suit that the country is not, as the magazines insist, divided. The country is simply tired, and pretending to be furious because fury is the only emotion still on sale at full price. Everything else has been marked down to move.
The woman in the room next to mine was crying in a language I did not recognize. It sounded like an argument with God, and God was losing. At three in the morning she knocked on my door and asked if I had any whiskey. I had whiskey. She sat on the edge of the bed with her shoes still on and told me her husband had died in a factory accident in Gary and she was driving his ashes to California because he had always wanted to see the ocean, which she described as "the largest possible disappointment."
We drank the whiskey. She showed me the urn, which was wrapped in a motel towel from somewhere in Utah. "He hated Utah," she said, as if this explained everything. I asked her what she would do in California. She said she had no plans. The absence of plans, she said, was the only inheritance he had left her.
By four the bottle was empty and she had returned to her room, taking the ashes with her. I sat at the desk and tried to write something true about the encounter, but the only true thing I could say was that I had met a widow in a burning motel and neither of us had mentioned the fire. That seemed, somehow, to be the whole story.
In the morning the clerk told me there had been no one in the room next to mine. The room had been empty for three weeks. I did not argue with him. I paid for the ice bucket, which was now technically a fire safety device, and drove west on the highway the color of cold coffee, carrying my own absence of plans like an inheritance I did not deserve.
I will file this dispatch from the next motel, and the next. There is always a next motel. There is always a small fire someone has started and forgotten. There is always a woman crying in a language you do not recognize, and she will always ask you for whiskey, and you will always have whiskey, and you will never know if she was real or if you simply needed her to be. That is the job. That is the column.
— H.R.F.