The specks on the floor didn’t seem strange because waking up is usually strange, half suspended in dream contrails while the lights slowly fire back up, sometimes shorting out again for a few seconds—a few minutes, longer—on the way to a tipping point. Especially bewildering in hotel rooms or on friends’ couches with all their peculiar fabrics and pigments and scents you can’t quite put your finger on. Familiar but not nameable. Nearby but vaporous and out of place. Yet even then, you’re calm because there’s an expectation that everything will be cleared up since it’s always been before. Oh right, I was at a party. Or, oh right, I’m on vacation.
So, I just went with it as a red-speckled bathtub and tented shower curtain edged into focus. Water glided down the latter, throwing off enough steam to make everything else more of an impression than anything you could land on or dock with. And after a few seconds, I stopped trying, the formlessness weighing on me as I shut my eyes, overwhelmed by a throbbing, relentless fatigue that sealed off my inner monologue. And instead of struggling upstream, I let myself be whisked back to oblivion—or at least a sanded-corner half-state—where I wouldn’t have to think or feel or scrap anymore.
But each time it seemed like I’d drifted off completely, a tapping would reconjure the shower curtain through half-opened eyelids. It was gone. Then it was back again. Gone and then back again—the resolution gradually sharpening until instead of something ghost-like staring back from behind it, it was human. Though its limbs were so twisted that I couldn’t help but think they were fragments of yesterday’s Kiite bender, causing what Dr. Thompson had described as a “recurring mental kink.” And, of course, I hadn’t listened because that lift was the only thing left that made sense anymore. Mercurial. Lighter than air. It was the only thing left that didn’t make me feel like a total piece of dog shit.
So again, the sheet descended, this time pulling me all the way under for five, maybe ten minutes—it was hard to say—the mugginess invoking a world of summer trips to the Cascades. Fireflies. Rafts and glacial lakes––a sense of infinity playing inside some previous light-streaked existence where I was so close to being who I wanted to be. So close to being actually home, away from the gnawing, ever-present dread that my parents would create some sort of mushroom cloud, screamfest in front of my friends, and it would be obvious to everyone that I was damaged to the core.
When I awoke later, I could definitely see a person under the curtain: A nipple was flush against the nylon with another outlined farther back—odd because I hadn’t remembered going on a date. I hadn’t been on an actual, IRL date in months, having passed out on the sofa last night watching various bounty hunters and house flippers—total garbage that made me feel even worse about myself than I already did, if that was possible. Though as that reality phased to this one and disparate parts slowly started re-syncing, I realized that the shower had been on far too long. And given the layers of steam and how sweaty I was, the person under it had to be scalded.
The floor stuck to me when I pushed up, and seeing the unmistakable smeared red underneath made the dream dissolve entirely, my gaze flitting from my chest to the ripped shower curtain to the vast lake of blood beside it. There was another woman crumpled in a U shape under the sink and a naked man floating face down in the bathtub.
I lunged for the door but slipped in a smaller puddle and slammed back onto the tile—pain corkscrewing across my shoulder in a raw, bewildering fragmentation of the senses. My eyes were still open, but it was just stray blips—dark one second, overexposed the next—so fast that I missed the toilet bowl scrambling to my feet, and was able to catch just enough of the rim that I didn’t crash all the way back down. Yet the pain swallowed me, the bathroom steam like a straitjacket, thick and iron scented. I kept thinking that someone would appear out of it and fillet me like everyone else, but when one moment passed and then another, I wasn’t so sure—since except for the shower, the dripping tub, and some faint oriental music, everything was entirely still.
I was, too, looking through a full-length mirror at a bidet, towel closet, and ottoman barely visible along the opposite wall—before noticing a chopping knife a few inches from my fingers. Its blade was obscured, half-submerged in a puddle, though its handle was white-tipped and had little avian engravings etched into it, similar to a set my aunt had given my mom for Christmas. Similar to the artisan utensils she always gave out on holidays and birthdays. But before I could fully inspect it, a rapping sounded, and the word “housekeeping” sounded over the shower.
I prayed I’d heard it wrong—that it was just another dream artifact—but I knew they came in if you didn’t answer at these upscale places. That was the whole reason they knocked in the first place.
“Housekeeping,” the voice called again. “Housekeeping.”
More knocking.
Skirting the puddle, I flew toward the bathroom door, twisting it open with my good arm and nearly barreling over a coffee table in the suite beyond. I tried calling out, but the pain above my elbow was so sharp that I couldn’t draw in enough breath.
“Housekeeping.”
Hearing the lock click and the handle turn was enough to get me across the room in a few strides, jamming my shoulder hard into the main door. “No, no. Please, don’t! Everything’s fine. Really!”
And then, realizing how suspect that was—along with the door slam—I stammered, “If you could just, uh, come back later—I’m uh . . . I’m still getting dressed.”
Silence blared in the wake, then just hung there. One second. Two. Five—before I blurted again, “Really, everything’s okay. Just come back . . . come back in a bit. Please.”
“Of course, sir,” she said finally, coolly—and a few moments later, wheels squeaked against the carpet as the cart clattered away. I breathed in but then held it when it stopped only a door or two down. And then even longer when I noticed powder-filled baggies and hypodermic needles scattered on the teak desk a few meters away. Nothing was marked, but some of those could probably cause psychosis, and the orange stuff spilled on the floor looked like Penumbra, which definitely made you more paranoid and aggressive. “Every shadow’s a Lovecraft monster when you P-trip” as Case had put it after we’d started slinging together.
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