I've been sitting here trying to figure out why the television in my hotel room says "Aerodynamic" on top. Such a quality is not typically a selling point for a TV set, unless, I suppose, you needed to throw it, as I've been wanting to do since the pounding on my hotel walls began sometime earlier this evening.
The noise spills in from everywhere. From nowhere. Is there an attic? Because if so, it is definitely coming from the attic. If there is an attic, maybe there is someone trapped in the attic. Maybe the pounding is a plea to be rescued. Or perhaps some sort of code. Maybe he's not trapped at all - just hungry for a Baby Ruth, like Sloth, or some toast with mora. Mmmmm...mora...I wish I'd learned morse code...
Or Spanish? I thought I knew Spanish. I watched telenovelas, listened to audio tapes, filled out little workbooks, painted by number. I repeated lines like "Donde es tu casa gato" endlessly like a rosemary. No one seems to respond when I ask aloud to the banging walls - "donde es tu casa gato?" No one notices me at all.
Except the elevator man, who notices me with an intensity I find discomforting. He never lets me take the stairs even though that's all I really want to do. The stairs are pretty and the elevator is tight and stuffy, like a coffin being raised and lowered in and out of the cold hard earth. I feel awkward inside it, trapped with the elevator man. "Hola Miiiiiike," he says in his dazed, and distant voice. He draws out the syllables in my name suggestively, like he knows What I Did Last Summer. He won't look right at me when he talks; instead he gazes just past my left ear. "Como te fue Miiiiiiiike?" Whenever I turn around, he is there, gazing...I think he has taken a liking to me. And not in the good sort of way.
I'd been looking for a place called El Pueblito, a lost city somewhere in the rainforest of Parque de Tayrona. It was supposed to be the city that was lost, not me. I vomited on the bus. Several times actually. I'd fill the bag and dump it out then fill it back again. "Blat!" then bag it. "Blat!" then bag it - the sound like the noise of mash potatoes hitting a cafeteria lunch tray. I'm feeling quite nauseous again, and my leg is turning yellow, and my only source of solace is the sleepiness that has just crept upon me. The bus last night was full of bugs. I wonder if they were on vacation too. I didn't sleep at all last night, I don't think. I can't think....
Someone must have been thinking when they set up our hotel minibar. They thought of everything. Since I don't feel like leaving my hotel room ever again, it's nice to know I have a decent supply of rations. There's all the basic stuff, of course: booze, soda, chips, candybars. In Thailand they always have tea and slippers, in Europe there is barely enough room for your own backpack, let alone a mini bar. Here, I have the following unique additions: nuts wine aguardiente rum toothpaste alkaseltzer mini-toothbrush abrelatas razor shampoo beers gum and, most curiously, condensed milk and canned sausages. Is it normal to wake up in the middle of the night with a hankering for canned sausages? And were they supposed to be enjoyed along with the condensed milk, or was that a separate meal altogether? Were these items supposed to be cooked, or heated, and if so where was the stove? Do they make aerodynamic stoves? If so, I wish someone would throw me one. I should feel hungry, I haven't eaten in quite some time, and right now I feel dizzy and I'm certain I'm out of Dramamine but I go to the bathroom anyway to check.
I can't find the Dramamine. I can't even find the light switch. Somehow there is light in the bathroom, an eerie blue light that seems to stem from a small open vent in the wall near the ceiling. I stand on the toilet and lean against the opposite wall to look through the open space but all I can see is a fluorescent light and a small passage. Maybe the passage leads to the attic, if there is one of course. If there is an attic and a man trapped in the attic and this passage leads to the attic then maybe I should feed the man trapped in the attic some canned sausages. He's gotta be hungry. I decide to run to the fridge. I run back and grab a can of sausages, the can opener, and the toothpaste too. I peel back the lid of the sausages and throw a few through the open vent and think of that phrase about throwing a hot dog down a hallway. I think one of the sausages makes a splash. I wish I had one of those mirrors that dentists use to get a look at the back of your tonsils so I could see if maybe there was someone down there. There must be, because the light is on. Then I throw the toothpaste. It does not splash.
My head aches and my muscles ache and my joints ache and I've decided to sit on the bed and I've also decided to try the sausages to satisfy my own curiosity - marveling at the foresight of the hotel staff to provide a can opener. Abrelatas. I try the word out like they do, with a little flair. Abrelatas. Abrrrrrrelatassssss. Very debonair. I open the can with the can opener and cut my hand on the lid and it bleeds a lot so I lick it and let it bleed just a little. The little canned sausages are cute but not tasty, especially smeared in blood, and so I decide to make little sausage men. Surely the mini bar man remembered the toothpicks? I rifle through all the items again, no toothpicks, not even Q tips. In Thailand there would have been Q tips. Wine bottles, chocolate, cigarettes. I don't smoke, and right now I can't think of a better use for a pack of Marlboro lights than to be the arms and legs of my little Latin sausage army. When I run out of sausages I use the chocolate bars and I stand them up but after awhile they bend so I chew the gum and use it to make them stand better. Now I'm wishing I had mixed and matched the chocolate bars and the canned sausages. It would have looked better. Their leader, I've decided, will have a toothbrush head.
Is it hot in here? The weatherman said it'd be fifty degrees outside but I'm burning up. I am bleeding my blood on the sausage army and they look like they've been injured in the line of duty . I put the sausage army on shore leave and lie down and everything's quiet, except for the alarm of course which I think I already mentioned, for about twenty seven seconds before I hear the banging again, and the sound of a clubbed seal. Silence. Banging. Now I hear footsteps. Are they coming from my bathroom? I get up and peer through the door into the bathroom and there is no one but there still sounds like there is and I realize it is coming through the vent and so I stand on my toilet and peer through the vent but that's before I realize there's no light coming through the vent now. I glance over my shoulder and notice there is another vent coming from the other side of the bathroom too. Two vents too weird. I turn around on the toilet and look through this vent, out in to pitch blackness. My head does a somersault like I never could and I'm dizzy and scared. What if they are watching me. What if they followed me to the Pueblito and they think I know something that I don't really know like in the DaVinci code, or Pi. "I don't know anything!" I yell. Everything is quiet. Even the alarm is quiet. All of the sudden there is a loud voice that sounds like it exploded from a megaphone and a horrendous pounding on the door which frightens me and a step off the edge of the toilet seat and slip and fall and pound my head on the hard porcelain bath tub and the bang my head makes is louder than the banging on the door and now I've got more blood to worry about then what's on my little finger. There's blood everywhere and I'm lying in it and it's actually kind of nice and royal red really, like the sheets I used to have on my bed when I was younger.
From inside the bathroom I can see the door to my hotel room burst open. Although my vision is blurry and there's blood in my eyes from the cut on my head from the tub I can kind of see the outline of a man and he's letting himself in and closing the door even though I know I had locked the door. And the windows. He comes cautiously closer and I think that man is the elevator man and now I know it is. The elevator man has come for my cornhole, and after he gets what he wants, he'll put me in the attic with the other guy. I told you he likes me. And not in the good sort of way.
* * *
Juan David Morales had seen some strange things in his thirteen years as porter of the Hotel Escorial. Sex toys, dirty needles, even once a room whose walls were covered in human feces. But nothing like this. The guest of room 303, an American who had seemed nice and normal enough upon arrival, now lay in a contorted heap in the bathroom in a puddle of blood. The toilet seat had been ripped from its hinges. On the bed there was more blood, as well as several small figurines which had been constructed from chewing gum, cigarettes, canned sausages, and chocolate bars.
From his hip, Juan's radio blurted out loudly. "Que pasa Juan?"
"Senor, I think we have a small problem," Juan said, radioing in to the concierge.
"Did you find the man who was throwing the sausages?"
"Si. Room 303. But senor, I think we need to call the medics."
"Just a concussion," the doctor said when he arrived. He had spent the first few minutes just making sure the guest was still breathing, and that his neck had not been broken in the fall. Meanwhile, Juan David was doing what he could to mop up the spilled blood.
"Interesting..." the doctor mused.
"What is it?" asked Juan David. The doctor pulled up the hotel guest's shorts to his crotch and revealed a ring of yellow, blotchy skin surrounding around a small black spot. "That, hermano, is Lyme Disease. This man has been bitten by a tick.
"A tick?"
"This yellow ring here is caused by spirocheta, a type of bacteria which is transmitted by deer ticks to humans when they bite the skin. Untreated, this bacteria travels through the bloodstream and affects the body in various ways."
"Such as...?"
"Fatigue, aches, fever, numbness, all sorts of nasty things. If it gets bad enough, which, judging from the look of this bite here, it has, it will affect the Central Nervous System. No wonder this poor guevon has been acting so strangely. He must have been out of his mind before he fell."