Cecil

Can a building really eat a person? Can a hotel transfigure a soul? She came by bus, she wrote better when she was in the moment. Flashes of the coast and the rough smell of worker sweat and commuter breath. She worked better when she was inside herself, her writings proved it, tender and gentle. The perfect meal for hungry concrete.

I think she might have been tracing the path of the moon.

I wonder what she thought of the hotel, the rows painted gray against the smog like teeth, walls eaten away by time and water, stained billboards, the general air of rot, neglect and decay. A building is like a person, she should have known that, standing there, navel-gazing into its maw. The furnace its heart, the water its blood, the power lines its nerves, the doorway… its mouth. The rooms its many hungry bellies. Buildings are like people, they have personalities… and this hotel, it was one mean m**********r. It had hunched in Skid Row like a potter, it had sewn its fields, it had learned anger and pain and sadness and the eternal haunt of desperation.

They said she went crazy, but slowly, chewing on the plaster in her own unique way. She wrote better when she was in the moment, but maybe that hotel got in her a little, then got in her a lot. She had to have felt its breath around her, the sigh of its years, maybe caught a hint as it moaned about its old bones or the off-beat of its ticker. She had to have smelled the sweat, fifty years or more of sex, hurried or slow, sensual or paid, heard the staccato echo of the old bed hitting the wall, leaving little scratches and dings. Hotels are like that, they hold onto things better left let go. Hotels make their own ghosts.

They moved her around, into a room of her own, so she wouldn't eat the guests. She still wrote but… crazy. She must have heard the rumors of Richie, how he would come up the back stairs in the dead of night, in his underwear gone ivory, slick with blood from his stalk. Dragging the heavy, patched duffel bag along the floor with a hiss and click, the muffled thumps, flicking the filthy black strands away from his angled face. His black eyes that refused to return the hallway light’s reflection. Gaunt, pale, scarred, tattooed, the hotel, god, she must have known what it did to his insides. He came in crazy… he went out a lunatic, every night. He punched holes in the plaster. The hotel hit back, in its own way, after a long drive from Tucson.

But can a building really eat someone? We watched as she conversed with shadows, fear like a shawl, the run of her hands across the buttons, her fingers angled… just… so… stabbing away insane at the air. And then she was gone, just gone, like the ghosts she argued with, like the breath of Richie, like the stale water that ran through the veins of the building, feeding it, giving it what it wanted, delivering her remains into the mostly empty bellies of its girth. Swallowed by a steel tank, into the belly of the monolith. The weight of the sins of L.A., the return of the weight of the sins of the world, reflected in a beautiful dead girl. Swallowed by a steel tank, into the belly of the monolith.

What was she when she went into the water but chasing moonlight? What was she when the cold suck gripped her pores and pulled them open? Moonlight. What she gulped through her scratched throat? Not water or air, but moonlight. When the tank closed in above her, and the hotel swallowed her, she became the end of moonlight.

But everyone asks, why the tank? Why the water?

She wrote best in the moment. She was naked. She must have wanted to write about the rain.

When they found her, her eyes were open, and her skin had gone pure white, like a lost angel.