Chapter 5
Before he was aware of his surroundings, he was aware of his nauseating migraine. It felt like a steel rod had been pushed
through his head. His hands were balled into fists, and when he tried to open his fingers, he found he couldn’t.
He opened his eyes on a hotel room, dimly lit by the sunlight glimmering around cheap nylon shades. One corner of his queen
bed was lower than the others, which made Van feel seasick. Cheap-shit clock-radio by the bed and a phone the color of Dijon
mustard. He couldn’t remember how he had wound up here, but he had an idea it was a shitty Days Inn, located midway along
the road between nowhere and nothing.
He looked down and got his first surprise. He was wearing a mitten. It was a black leather mitten, so small he had to keep
his hand in a fist. A wide, flat steel ring had been cinched around the wrist and was held shut with a padlock. He had a matching
mitten on the other hand. What fucking fetish bullshit is this? He wore a T-shirt and loose white jockeys and was alone in his tangle of sheets: no dead girl next to him, no live boy.
He wanted something to drink, badly, and made his way into the little motel bathroom.
He expected to find drugs, but the speckled Formica was as clean as if housekeeping had only just spritzed some Windex around and left.
He knew there had been heavy drugs in his recent past from the quality of his migraine.
His head was thumping as if it contained a second heart.
He wished for a line of cocaine, had a day of crippling decompression sickness ahead of him if he was going to have to face it without chemical assistance.
He shoved at the faucet, got a blast of warm water going, and drank.
He hoped the girl who had buckled him into these leather mittens would come back before he needed to pee—it was going to be hard to aim his prick with his hands in bondage gloves—but for the moment he felt no desire to urinate at all.
It came to him that he was a married man who loved his wife, and if he was in a motel playing bondage games with some girl,
then he had made some poor life choices in the last forty-eight hours. He wished he could look himself in the mirror and say
it was the first time. Whoever he was here with had to come back soon. He would get the gloves off, give her a kiss and a
friendly swat on the bum, send her on her way, and then call Allie and make up a lie. What lie, he didn’t know yet. Not that
it mattered. Allie didn’t want to know if he was cheating. Maybe she was even glad if he cheated. She liked to be held and
liked to hold even more, but when he screwed her, she shut her eyes and smiled a tiny, enigmatic smile, and hurried him to
the end with the brisk cheer of a nurse changing a patient’s catheter. And after, she would do some of his coke, her cookie
for being a good girl. He wished she’d cheat on him too, but she had put that behind her, was fiercely loyal, would rather
put a cigarette out on herself than screw someone else. By the clear light of day, he could admit to himself that Allie had
always wanted to punish herself for being a sick, terrible person . . . and the punishment she had chosen for herself was
life with him. But generally he didn’t allow himself to stay sober long enough to think about it.
But the real question was not if he was at a motel with a girl (what motel? what girl?) but when she was getting back. He
assumed she had gone for coffees and thought it would be quirky and fun to leave him in his bondage gloves. He was going to
be in a hell of a fix if she had been hit by a car (or, he thought, if a gas main exploded, an oddly specific notion that gave him a tickle of unease. His next thought—didn’t Allie go for V8?—was so terrible, he shoved it away).
He went to the picture window next to the hotel room door. He twitched the edge of the curtain aside for a peek into the parking
lot—and was overcome by a shock so intense it almost put him on his ass.
There was no parking lot out there. There was, instead, a wide, brilliantly lit white corridor.
White lino floor, white drop ceiling, an open door on the far side of the hall.
Van didn’t have a good angle to see into the room opposite, but he thought he could see part of a conference room, a whiteboard on one wall.
A woman walked by, Black, older, handsomely dressed in tweeds.
She was typing on a BlackBerry with one hand.
The other tugged at a pair of librarian glasses, hanging around her neck by a silver chain.
“What the fuck is this shit?” Van cried and pounded on the window with one mittened hand, but she had already moved on.
He shoved the curtain all the way back. It shrieked on the rod. It was like peering into the hallway of a research-and-development
lab for 3M. He looked at the door again and saw there was no chain on the inside to lock it, no bolt.
Van fumbled at the knob, but it only turned uselessly, wouldn’t open. A big guy, built like a weightlifter, in a tight pink
polo shirt, walked by pushing what looked like a library cart. Van hit the glass again with one fist. The guy glanced at him
without much interest and went on.
He staggered on weak legs to the bed and sat down. He fumbled with the receiver, got it between shoulder and ear—then realized
there was no dial, no number pad.
“Guest services,” said a voice on the other end of the line, female and friendly. “How can I help you?”
“What the fuck is this?” Van asked. “Can you help? I’m in a room in a, I don’t know, a hospital? And I can’t open my door.”
“Yes, Mr. McBride. Someone will be along with your breakfast and your pills very soon. Do you need help in the bathroom?”
“Do I—what? No. Who are you?”
“This is guest services.”
“I can’t use my hands.”
“Well, how did you pick up the phone then?” She sounded very amused.
“I mean, I’ve got these, I don’t know, leather bags on my hands. I can’t get them off. They’re fastened with padlocks.”
“Yes, Mr. McBride. That’s a safety measure.”
“What are you keeping me safe from? Jerking off?”
“It’s not to keep you safe, Mr. McBride. Mr. Valentine will explain everything. He’s in a meeting now, but I’m sure he’ll be glad to hear you’re
awake and suffering no ill effects.”
“Suffering no ill effects from what?” he asked.
Only it was coming back to him now. His heart had been beating exactly this way when the shockwave blew in his favorite window,
the one that always made him think of a sand dollar, and he thought Allie had been killed by an explosion. A gas main, that
was his first thought. Only it wasn’t a gas main and Allie wasn’t dead. Because she had called him. She had called him and
told him to run and he would’ve if only he could’ve found his shoes.
“You can’t just hold me here.”
“Try to remain calm, Mr. McBride. Mr. Valentine will be along after you have breakfast, and he can explain everything.” There
was a click as she disconnected.
He slammed the receiver down so hard, it bounced out of the cradle. People were walking by in the hall and he didn’t want
them to see him. He ran across the room, snared the curtain between his leather mittens, and yanked with so much force, he
accidentally pulled the rod down. He sobbed with unhappiness and tried to put the rod back in its brackets, but it couldn’t
be done, not with his hands in the bondage mittens. Now everyone who went by could see his pimply legs and scrawny ass in
his white jockeys. It wasn’t to be borne. He staggered back to the bed, scooped up the bedspread, and wrapped it around him
like a kind of robe. He sat, suddenly exhausted. He could not remember the last time he had needed a drink or a line so badly.
He stared at his reflection in the surface of the Zenith television. A television. If he could find a local news station,
maybe he could figure out where he was, what time of day it was. Van got back up and fumbled with the on/off until the screen
lit from the center, the brightness spreading out to the edges of the glass. There was no sound.
Donna was on the screen, in a T-shirt and a pair of white panties, her hands in bondage gloves and her hair mussed up.
She was on her side, curled into a fetal position on top of her sheets, her eyes closed.
Her bedroom was identical to his, down to the cheap watercolor of a seaside boardwalk in a sweeping blue rain.
The sight of her took the last scrap of life and hope out of him. It was like being unplugged.
There was a dial to change the channels. He fumbled through the glove and turned it with a clunk. The picture shifted to a
different angle on the same room. He clicked listlessly, numbly, through five views of Donna’s room before coming back to
the first . . . which was when he realized there were cameras in his room too, sealed in sleek glass balls on the ceiling.
No doubt she would find him on her own television if she turned it on.
Five channels of Donna McBride, all day long: well, that had always been her daydream.