This small Colorado town growls with fair-goers, rodeo air-pumpers, monster-truck connoisseurs and foot-long hot-dog wielders dripping mustard onto the hot street as they stream by. My motel is the faded supporting star of a hundred Hollywood movies. Bruce Willis sits and broods in one of the cells. The ghost of Janet Leigh haunts my shower. Men haunt the bodies of the children and hang over the railings, sprinkling ash and acid taunts onto the cleaners below. The concrete landing smells of ammonia and worse. Javier Bardem stalks the swelter from the air-conditioning outlets of the exhausted rooms and taps them in the head, one by one, ching, ching, ching.
Someone in a suit is looking for someone called Louise.
I retreat into the corpse of a hotel room slowly rotting into folk history. The roof is concrete. The sink is chipped. The plugs totter in ancient sockets at odd, tilted angles. The carpet is full of tiny histories. The branded Kleenex tissue holder by the big mirror is worn so smooth by use that it gleams. The late summer Colorado light, low in the thin air, is trying to sweep the thick columns of motes into competing whirlpools. The metal grilled window cannot stop the light, nor the grime of the glass. It lies across the bed, tired and resigned but still the loveliest creature in the room. Where it lies, it turns the quilt to stained glass.
*
The glass is in the panels which glow marsala, maroon and petrol blue with great bossy flowers in faded creams and ochres. There are orchids and crysanthemums, pods of seeds and long, thin green leaves. There is a flower I don't recognise, long and oval split raggedly down the centre. There are holes torn at intervals depicting a crucifixion. A blood sacrifice is revealed in one corner. The surface is scratched and torn and pulled in a hundred places. From a distance it is a window depicting the desert. A faux predator of some kind curls, perhaps a fox. There is a chase, perhaps, in a dry river-bed of ochre and blood red where some small creature of meagre means is persued. There are channels of blue in long lines here and there. The centre bar dividing the two panes of glass is barbed with shadow-thorns or the silhouettes of barbed wire. The flowers make no coherent pattern, as though they lie where they have fallen from a hundred dissappointments. Where the quilt lies naked it spills white and discoloured through the wounds.
There is a pristine bible in the bedside drawer, dated 1985.
*
It strikes me that this room is no faded Hollywood starlet. No, it's the starlet who never made it. Hollywood casts these rooms because Americans know them. They have lain down in these rooms and dreamed of escape, fulfillment, a life and in return had a reprise, a half granted and broken wish. These are the rooms where Death always finds you. His presence is in every stain, every picked at hole in the wallpaper, every chip in the sink, every stain in the bathtub, every cigarette scald in the ancient veneer of the fittings. He works these rooms with promises and grinds dreams like a sandstorm. No this stained glass window to culture depicts a crime scene. It's the aftermath of the bloody execution of a million American dreams.