six DAYS ago

hotel BROWNWOOD

Nighttime again. It seemed I was nocturnal because of my aching appendix along with the clanking noise outside. I sat on the edge of my bed, my t-shirt overlapping under my mass. I tried to ignore the clanking, but there was no point. I might as well investigate it when filling up my sippy cup at the tap.

I opened the door and gradually recognised the sound. It was the vending machine acting up. I went over to the tap and leaned over to begin the fillup. The man at the vending machine turned around. It was the man from room 29. He looked frightened and frightening at the same time, as if I was looking at him through a crack in his conscience. Then he reverted into a somber face upon realising who I was.

I said, "You need to give it a kick." He took my advice and gave it a kick. The vending machine almost always didn't work unless you gave it a kick. An item fell down from its holding place in the vending machine. He opened the dispenser and took out a can of Hi-C Ecto Cooler. He popped the cap open with a lingering fizz and drank it as he stared at me. My sippy cup overflowed with water because I hadn't been concentrating and I expected it to take longer like other days and nights, but maybe having a social interaction had disrupted my perception of the rate of water that this tap was capable of running.

I skimmed some water off the top of the sippy cup so it wouldn't leak water when I screwed the lid back on. The man was now standing two feet away from me. He grabbed my shoulder, with the intention of being gentle, but it was a hard grip for a man of his smaller size.

"Do I know you," he asked, "you look familiar." I couldn't possibly tell him if I looked familiar. I might be familiar because I'm the winner of a large MMA tournament. I might be familiar because we lived at the same motel. I could be familiar to him because I passed him on the street at one point. Aren't we familiar with most people but choose to forget because we need to make up space in our memory for important storage? What he was saying could be a lie to instigate small talk between me to keep both of us from getting lonely behind closed doors that we both acknowledged I was bursting to revert to.

"Yeah, your girlfriend died on my ex," I said. He took his hand off my shoulder.

"Oh I already know that. I'm saying you look like someone famous." He spoke with a frankly slight German accent. I looked away from his eyes because they freaked me out. I couldn't see that crack in his conscience anymore because he had covered it up so well with the crazy-eyed look of a fanboy. "I got it! You're Conall Warner. Lostar!" I chuckled nervously. I didn't like being pointed out that I was famous because it would bring unwanted attention to the motel. "Hey man, it's all cool. I used to come vatch your fights. You were a legend in the game. Vhat happened?"

"I really couldn't tell you," I said. He laughed brittlely as if he was copying my chuckle.

"Anyways, what drew you to this motel?"

"Oh, I don't know - maybe the rats did."

"You've seen them too?" he asked rhetorically. "They're the size of my shit. They remind me of these rats that climbed along the drainpipe around my family home. Did you know that they succumb to peer-pressure just like ourselves? They will choose to mirror their peers; what they eat, how they move. They'll even eat what they don't prefer just like how we'll drink at a party even though we don't want to get drunk. So these rats would follow each other and they would lickety-split when trouble arose. I wanted to test out this theory of rodent peer pressure so I got myself a ladder and climbed onto the roof. I had a pair of scissors in my pocket. I ran around the roof and caught two of them, but the rest roamed free. Two was all I needed. The exterminator could gas the rest. I cut the tail off one of them and forced the other to watch it. You should've seen the look on that rat's face. It was like: DO I or DO I NOT. And then it made its mind up and nibbled its own tail off because it wanted to look as cool as its little friend. Can you believe that?" I guess he wasn't looking for small talk. I nodded calmly so he could calm down. He grabbed something from his pocket. For a moment I thought it would be a tailless rat, the tail of a rat or - much worse - a pair of scissors, but it was a clean apple. He offered it to me awkwardly.

He said, "This is for helping me vit the vending machine." I accepted it, but he turned his hand into a hand requiring a handshake, so I had to put the apple in my other hand and then shake his hand which required concentration for a man that had awoken from an uncomfortable slumber. "The name's Yaegar Wood. Ve should talk more. Everyvon else here is boring. Like drying paint." He turned away and walked up the stairs.

"Wait!" I called out. He looked back at me. "Let's talk then."