The Exhibit

It was 10 o’clock and everyone was checked into their guest room for the night except for Vic. His fingernails were dirty, their waxing moons black with dirt, but he was in a western shirt with pearl buttons and it was ironed and tucked in with a belt. Glossy gel held his hair in place, and his beard was neatly trimmed. He carried a silver money clip sandwiching hundreds in twenty dollar bills in his pocket. 

He said, “You got a monthly rate?”

I said, “I’ll need to check with my manager.”

“Yeah, okay. I’m paying in cash.”

The plan for the exhibit came together weeks later, after Vic became our first long-term guest since Y2K. Management raised concerns about squatters' rights, but we were trying to attract the attention of a corporate investor and had yet to prove promise of profitability. We couldn’t sacrifice the revenue. Vic left at six forty-five each morning with two newspaper-filled grocery sacks shouting Thank You in red. After dark, when he returned, objects wrapped in the paper weighed the sacks down in his hands. Housekeeping said his dresser drawers were lined with these newspaper bundles. When he walked, his shoulders were about as far from his ears as they could get, like shame weighed them down. In the first few weeks he was there with us, he never once finished a sentence, but his words trailed off into silence and his eyes searched for an out in every conversation. We talked shit about him, said he was bizarre. 

“Why doesn’t he stay down the road at the roach motel?” I said once. I regret that.

 Our hotel wasn’t remarkable—but we began to feel it wasn’t as bad as we’d made it out to be. It was a 125-year-old resort and spa, built around the healing water of Missouri’s mineral springs, obsolete ever since that exposé dropped in the Dispatch refuting claims of their medicinal qualities. Some gangsters stayed there once, and a presidential candidate. An Elvis impersonator is rumored to have drunkenly fallen to his death from the mezzanine bar, but I don’t think that one’s true. The hotel’s history gave it a certain draw, but no one stayed overnight more than once. Lot’s of mildew, drafty windows—we shut down the western wing of each of the five floors when business was slow. There was a mosaic floor in the lobby made of Italian marble placed piece by piece that was difficult to keep clean. Each of the front desk clerks spent the last hour of our shift mopping it, which amounted to three or four times a day. The water was always dirty, and we joked about which ghost had tracked mud in when we left the lobby unattended to dump the mop bucket in the industrial sink of the laundry room. 

We all ignored the do-not-disturb placard Vic hung on his door. It was an obvious failure to respect guest privacy and explicitly against policy. You can imagine the justifications we provided ourselves and others when we made a copy of the master key. By then we understood where he was spending his days and how he made his cash. He was a picker, scavenging alternators and engine control modules in junkyards and flipping them for cash. An assistant manager went up there first, suggesting we could be unwittingly housing a criminal, but found no evidence he was mining for personal documents or conducting an elaborate identity theft operation from the desk of his fifteen-square-foot suite. A housekeeper brought up issues of cleanliness and the health department, but found not so much as a crumb on his bed sheets nor a cigarette butt in the bowl of his toilet. 

For my part, I think it could be blamed on my need for distraction from this thing that was happening with the news. I was experiencing a peculiar response to the reports about the recent tornado in Joplin—it was fifteen miles from where I lived. The TV on the wall above the bar played the coverage for days. When I counted the cash drawer at the end of my shift, I was watching the news. Diane Sawyer flew out on Monday. When I picked up the walkie talkie to call housekeeping, to let them know a guest had checked out and they could start stripping the beds, I was watching the news. When I pushed the mop back and forth across the marble floors, I was watching the news. This wasn’t the first time this happened. I was eleven years old when the planes hit the towers, and my dad turned on the TV in our front room and in our kitchen and only turned them off when we went to bed at night. There was also the stuff my youth pastor said about his page-a-day calendar predicting the attack and pinpointing our last day on earth. He said there were names written in an eternal book, some were chosen and known, and I felt certain my name wasn’t one of them. That my name was disappearing in some way. I started to think the way my age looked like the towers on the page meant something. I felt, for a time, I couldn’t find a solid surface for my feet to land on, but all of it disintegrated underneath me. I knew I, too, would start a free fall that could only end one way and no one would remember what my face looked like after I was gone. I began to memorize the names of those who died in the attack, as if some karmic response would return the favor. I felt this again after the tornado. At night, I was neither able to fall asleep nor control the continual replay of the names they read off on the news that day. When I stopped being able to move my body, I thought I would call a therapist in the morning. I never did. After a couple hours of sleep, I sat cross-legged in the bathtub with a tepid cup of coffee. I raised my voice to my boyfriend’s ears in his office one room over and said maybe we should practice moving our mattress into the bathroom of our third floor apartment. 

By June, they weren’t showing much Joplin coverage anymore. Sometimes they’d do a little segment. But they were always doing Joplin coverage in my brain. That was the summer Schwarzenneger’s kid got in that surfing accident. He was in bad shape, and I kept thinking he might die like those kids in Joplin, but everyone would remember him while those kids had already been forgotten and that felt cruel. So when Vic was standing there at the front desk, shuffling through all those bills to pay for a second room—the one adjoining his—when they announced Amy Winehouse’s death, I gasped and broke into terrible sobs. It was like when you’re just trying to move to a larger apartment, but your terrier thinks his entire world is crashing down around him and every box you move or sudden noise you make is one more reason that must be true, and he’s pissing everywhere all of the time. I was like that. Vic didn’t look away with embarrassment, but held eye contact with me as a silent acknowledgement of my tears. 

“I’ll be right back,” he said, signing his receipt.

I nodded, but said nothing in return.

I stood in front of the wooden backdrop of the front desk where each key card had its own labeled compartment. Debra, hair dyed red, was leaning on the hostess’ stand opposite me.

 “They’re talking about asking him to leave,” she said to the housekeeper after the elevator door closed behind him. “Hyatt is supposed to be on property next month, and they want to be able to control every moment of the visit.” 

Once, when we had another potential buyer in town, our night auditor was at the piano in the empty lobby when a bachelorette party returned to the hotel. 

“She climbed onto the piano and sat directly in front of my face, legs spread,” the auditor told me. “At that exact moment their acquisitions rep exited the elevator, he was looking for an ice machine.” 

Hotel management swore it wasn’t the moment they decided not to buy, but maybe it colored the rest of the visit. They couldn’t risk another incident given the state of our accounts.

“Thank you for calling the ⸺ Resort and Spa,” I said into the phone. “How can I help you?” 

Vic came back down the elevator and wandered over to the bar for a minute while I talked on the phone, but he never did that. He never loitered anywhere, just left the hotel at fifteen before seven every morning and went straight to his room when he returned after dark. He was trying to look at me without me noticing. I wanted him to look at me, and I felt when I tilted my head to listen to the caller on the other end of the phone, it was Vic who tilted it, who raised my hands and lowered them again onto the keyboard as if on a string. He wandered in my direction, and there was something small in his hand. He put it on the front desk in front of me.

“Have a great day,” I said into the phone before hanging up.

“Don’t worry,” he said. “I know how to sanitize it.”

It was a skull: yellowing white, but immaculate. There was a long snout and the front teeth hung over the bottom jaw, like fangs. I didn’t know what to say. 

He said, “Try getting a little closer to death, it’ll help.” 

I watched his long strides up the stairs until he disappeared into the next flight.

I made cheese and egg sandwiches that night after work. The yolk was soft, and I turned away from my boyfriend when it ran down my chin. It was after midnight and the second Matrix movie was playing on TV. I showed my boyfriend the gift, holding it out with reverence in cupped palms.

“Gross,” he said.  

“It was kind,” I started, but when he looked at me everything began to destabilize again. I left him at the countertop of our kitchenette, walked to the bathroom in the hall, and started a bath. 

“I’m tired of this,” he said, following me. “Don’t you think it's weird you can’t talk to me honestly without hiding in here?”

“Please,” I said. 

“What about this?” he turned around so he wasn’t facing me, but when I was silent long enough he left the room and closed the door between us. “Okay, go ahead.”

Without his eyes on me, I could tell him about Amy Winehouse and how the reporter’s words had crawled down my throat, snaking around my lungs, then cinched into an unbearable tourniquet around them. I told him what Vic said about death. In the TV room, Keanu Reeves had just done that thing with the forcefield, stopping all those bullets. The fight that followed was his favorite part. 

I said, “I wish you had stayed in here with me.”

He said, “You made me leave.”

“I wanted you to tell me no.” 

I didn’t tell him how I wondered what it might be like if he held my face in his hands so I had to look him in the eyes. Would he always respond with apathy when I said I’d rather he fuck me in the dark? I could die having evaded intimacy my entire life. He fell asleep on the couch half an hour into the third Matrix movie, and I went to bed alone. Knocks on the apartment door woke us in the morning. The renters above us had been evicted, and left the bath to run continuously onto the floor of their bathroom. Water had soaked our ceiling while we slept and the carpet was wet under our feet. My boyfriend moved back in with his parents, but my mom was two hours away and my dad was two months into a manic episode with no plans to restart his medication. I moved into an empty room on the fourth floor of the hotel until they finished cutting out the drywall. They would hang clean sheets, tape and mud them. Then they would sand it all smooth and dust would fill the apartment.

“We’re not breaking up,” he said from the hallway while I packed up my toiletries in the bathroom. “But maybe this is a good thing. It’ll give us some time to think.”

The next day I began, with a level of denial and embarrassment, looking to run into Vic in the hotel. I was supposed to keep my distance from the guests when I wasn’t on the clock, but noticed how the staff and management talked or stood in my presence. They turned their heads away from my apparent fragility. No one acknowledged me if I was somewhere I wasn’t meant to be. I ate in the kitchen most mornings, standing in the corner where I could watch prep, discreetly, and then exited through the dining room instead of the back hall. This took me through the length of the lobby and, if I timed it correctly, I passed Vic leaving for the day. I never said hello to him, and I avoided looking at him. I only wanted him to perceive me. In the evenings, when I worked behind the front desk, I said hello as I always did, as was my job, and then watched him cross the lobby and enter the elevator. When I laid in bed at night I heard him working above me. I thought we might remain in the pattern indefinitely, and I felt he was held in it as well. After a week of this, I broke the pattern. In the morning, after we silently crossed paths, I turned to look over my shoulder just before I started up the stairs. He was watching me, too. 

“Hello,” he said that night when he entered the hotel.

I asked him about the noises I heard at night. He asked me if it was keeping me awake. 

“Sometimes,” I said. “Most of the time I can’t sleep anyway.”

He nodded. He didn’t apologize for the noise, but told me he was working on preservation of the items especially prone to rust, mold, or corrosion.

 “Come on up and see after your shift.”

I was small in front of the door to his hotel room; the knob too large in my hand. I turned to walk down the hall again, away from Vic, but it seemed to expand in front of me, lengthening with each step I took, so when he opened the door I stood there still in front of him as if I had never tried to walk away. 

On the mini fridge next to the ice bucket, there was the entirety of a wren warbler skeleton, as noted on a small tag that hung from its leg, held up in a position of flight by translucent floss. Striated with the variation of a hundred abandoned heads of hair, a thin braid hung from a thumb tack on the wall. Kitten heels and pumps, all size eight but none belonging to a matching pair, were arranged as the first eight counts of the Bus Stop on the rug. He had glued the ten acrylic fingernails on the cardboard cutout of a hand as if they belonged together—he assured me they didn’t—and painted each one cherry red.

“They remind me of my mother,” he said. “You look a bit like her. She peeled them off while she was driving. That’s how I knew to look at the floorboard of the driver’s seats.”

He must have dedicated significant time to integrating together the words he found, creating a small collage of receipts, parking tickets, loyalty punch cards. There were books, too, and he said those were a challenge because they were trashed when he found them. Wet, covered in mud. He disassembled them, keeping the cleanest pages, and reassembled them as one volume sewn together with the same floss holding up the birds’ wings. Somehow, one page read seamlessly into the next.

The drawer of the nightstand was labeled as “pleasure.” 

He cleared his throat and said, “You don’t have to look at those.” 

But I did. He told me this was a small fraction of the dildos and vibrators he found. Many were discreet enough to have been housed in a purse, then left behind in a car after a wreck. Others were unbelievably large, they were pink and purple. Flesh colored too. 

“I wondered why those ended up there.” He laughed and suggested an upgrade or repentance as reasonable explanations. 

I smiled at this, but my face was hot. I moved on to a timeline of music. Shards of vinyl records, arranged as pieces of the same jigsaw puzzle, were mounted on the wall. He had found and repaired a Philips cassette player, and I slipped the headphones onto my ears before pressing play. It was a boy’s voice, in the awkward in-between of adolescence, reciting the names of the presidents alongside the years they served and one or two of their most notable achievements. 

“Thirty-one,” he said. “Herbert Hoover, uh, 1929 to 1933. He sucked, probably caused the Great Depression. Thirty-two. Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1933 to 1945. In office a long time. World War II and stuff like that. Paralyzed.”

Vic looked at me with amusement and we both laughed. CDs, caseless, were arranged as a rolodex, chronologically held up by felt-covered clasps attached to a cylinder that rotated slowly. I saw Jagged Little Pill, the Titanic soundtrack, and Get Rich or Die Tryin’. And then Vic pulled from his pocket a small remote and triggered a carousel slide projector—I drew my breath in—one click at a time, it cast onto the wall above the untouched bed a mother and child, a crying bride, hands—tucked under, as if holding up—cradling the round belly of pregnancy. There was a toddler with curls standing in a plastic pool, water at his ankles, his teeth clenched into a smile so energetic, his eyes closed as half moons. 

These were different people, from different decades, some with darker shades of skin, square faces, or prominent teeth, but as each image flashed in front of me, they were one life unfolding. A life Vic had strung together from the negatives he had found in glove boxes among owner’s manuals and insurance documents.

“I want to help you,” I said.

“Alright,” he said. “I have an idea.”

I made a master key, and he asked me to show him the empty rooms of the west fifth floor. He chose one that would get sun in the second half of the day with access to the back stairwell. The next night, after the restaurant closed and management went home for the night, I let him in through the employee entrance, and he carried lumber—three and four planks at a time—up the stairs. We disassembled the bed, moving it into the adjoining room.

He constructed a wall installation for the curation of music and audio players. There was a small shelf, stained dark brown, for the growing library of found words. He placed the blackout curtains on a timer, so they swung shut every forty-five minutes and the room grew dark. Through the first fifteen minutes of the new hour, the carousel circulated through the images he had amassed. When this happened, he stopped working and turned toward the wall and he watched intently, a sad smile on his face. His eyes would become wet, but he never looked away. 

“Do you know these people?” I asked.

“I don’t,” he said. “They feel familiar, don’t they?” 

He built small cases with dimmable lighting for the animal skeletons. He held them out for me to see before locking them away; to me they became immortal in his possession. After I saw them, small and delicate in his hands, I felt there was nothing I wanted more than to be possessed in this same way. It was as if I had discovered, in the hidden corner of a hotel fading into obsolescence, an alternative to the habit we’ve made of erasing each other from history over time. I knew there were adjustments we would need to make to my exhibit. Originally, we had planned for it to be quite large—made of fragrant cedar and four panes of glass. However, given the recent changes in my size—I stood then as an equal with the warbler—we were working on a much smaller curio using a fraction of the lumber and a single one foot square of glass. There was a small stand with golden arms that wrapped around my waist. It would hold me upright.

Vic used a t-shirt to rub beeswax onto the wood after the stain dried. A small key dangled from a piece of twine in his hand. The glass front door of the exhibit unlocked with a quiet click, and I climbed onto a felted platform in the center before he closed it again. I felt it could hold me. My name was printed on a gold placard below my feet. There was a church on the corner, one block east of the hotel, with a bell that chimed ten times to signal the end of the hour. The curtains closed. I anticipated Vic’s turn toward the wall, where the carousel began again with the small girl with her hand in her mother’s who grew into a teenager in a strapless dress with a corsage on her wrist. He didn’t turn, but kept his eyes on the glass between us, where I became in the reflection the crying bride, immortal daughter, her face expectant of the life ahead of her.

Mary Sauer

Mary Sauer is a writer living in Kansas City, Missouri. She is a candidate for an MFA in Creative Writing at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She has published or upcoming work in Cleaver, SWWIM, Glassworks Magazine, MER Literary, The Washington Post, and Popula.