Someday Never Comes

Chapter Two

At Eureka, the next point of civilization, I made for the town's lone hotel like a Chinese street gang was on my ass.

A quick dance of ID and crumpled twenties with a mostly comatose clerk scored me a single queen on the second floor of the Lincoln Logs inspired structure.

What the room looked like, I wasn't sure. There could have been a family of coyotes playing Texas hold'em in the bathroom and a fire in the john, for all the notice I was taking. My sphere of interest had narrowed down to the existence of a waiting bed.

Glory fucking hallelujah.

The minute I'd ceased forward momentum, I was instantly exhausted.

I spent a hot second mulling over prospect of undressing, ruled the plan gauche and flopped down on the Mexican print spread, boots and all.

-----

A few hours later I came around to the sensation of my heart trying to make a break for it. Outside the hotel's windows, the skies were still night dark, but trapped in the moment I couldn't parse that. There were sirens in my ears. A staccato of lights was dancing across my field of vision and obscuring everything beyond it.

This was not my first rodeo. I some level, I knew my subconscious was having a go at me. The police light bars I was seeing were, in point of fact, a bedside clock that needed the time set, and the most sinister thing in the air was probably mildew. No melted rubber, no stink of burning motor oil.

Didn't matter.

The vindictive chunk of hindbrain that was calling the shots on my fight or flight mode was committed to the lie.

Knowing you're in the middle of irrationally dropping your basket is all well and good. Doing something about it while your own body is trying to smother you via a tex-mex bedspread is another matter.

After a retrospectively humiliating length of time, I managed to twist myself around enough that I wasn't inhaling poly-cotton blend and could start forcing myself to breathe through it.

Out. Hold. Inhale... Out. Hold. Inhale...

I'd had a new age-y academy instructor who'd insisted on teaching us calming breathing patterns for use in stressful situations. Then, like now, I'd doubted the merits of pausing to do a bit of circular breathing while a junkie was taking pop-shots at you. It did, however, work annoyingly well when one was having an early a.m. freak out.

It took me few tries to stick the rhythm, what with feeling like somebody'd dunked my lungs in cement, but once I did, my pulse started winding noticeably down.

-----

It was still dark out by the time I'd leveled off enough to get up and throw on the lights. A check of my watch told me that it was indecently early. I'd slept maybe four hours. Nowhere near a reasonable amount to be driving on. I'd been fighting the dreams and the resulting rounds of panic for a couple months though and I knew nothing short of elephant tranquilizer would knock me back out. I was always on edge after- over-energized and feeling like I could run a mile- which I had done, or nearly, on more than one occasion in response.

Something told me though that the residents of Eureka would not take to a man jogging in the wee hours of the morning as well those in Seattle had.

In a city, inexplicable behavior is the norm. In The Middle of Nowhere, Utah, it was liable to get me arrested on suspicion of using a controlled substance.

Short of heading back out, that left bad morning infomercials as a possible distraction technique. Or I could just grab some matches from the car and spend the next six hours burning off my leg hair one by one. Both sounded equally pleasant.