A Stranger Like You by Elizabeth Brundage Read Free Book Online

vacant stores. The store fronts reminded him of the animal displays at the natural history museum, depicting the habitat of a particular species. The manikins stared out at the darkness with passive confusion. The pursuit of fashion had taken precedence over the hunt for food. Food had become the predator, the evil sad thing in a box.
    It was after midnight. A few stragglers drifted on the sidewalks. Consciously or unconsciously he was looking for the girl from his motel room. He entertained the possibility that she was still in the room where he’d left her, waiting for him, but of course that was unrealistic—he knew she’d left the room hours ago. Her name was Daisy, he remembered. She may have gone to that awful hostel, he thought, and considered going there to check. It wasn’t right that a girl like her, a girl of her age, was wandering around the streets at night. Just thinking about it made his chest burn.
    He parked in the motel parking lot and went into the motel office with its green fluorescent light and tapped the bell and the manager came out of a darkened room. It was a place to stay, Hugh told himself. It was the only place he knew.
    The manager looked pleased to see him. “You came back,” he said.
    “Yes.”
    “No luggage?”
    “Not tonight.”
    The manager was an obsequious Pakistani who should have been working in a better hotel, not a place like this, where the guests were slippery incarnations of some alien presence, and when he walked down the corridor past the battered anonymous doors, he sensed that something was going on, something amorphous and strange— out there —that no one could ever fully appreciate, and he could almost feel the earth shifting under his feet, his sense of balance compromised by the tilting planet, the topple of a wayward globe.
    This room was a little better than the first, he thought, one flight up, and it smelled a little better. Instead of looking out on the parking lot, the room looked out on a side street crammed with stucco houses, the surfaces of which resembled thickly spread cake frosting. Small yards were enclosed by chain-link fences. One house in particular caught his interest. It had a large picture window, lit up by a crystal chandelier. A little white dog was barking out one of the windows. It was rude to let a dog go on barking like that; it wasn’t nice. Hugh didn’t like little dogs like that.
    For a moment, he sat on the bed and did nothing. The room seemed dim and depressing and he suddenly longed for his wife. Not her exactly, but the idea of her. He felt a little afraid. He knew he should call her, but instead he turned his cell phone over in his hands like some found artifact, as if he were oblivious to its purpose. His life back in Montclair was like an old episode of some TV melodrama. He supposed he had switched the channel long ago, at least in his own mind. He lay down for a few minutes and watched the shadows on the ceiling, the gliding light of passing cars. A helicopter crossed the sky, its spotlight grazing his windows, and he felt as if he were in a foreign place, where dangers beyond his comprehension were routine. When he woke hours later, still in his clothes, the room was light. His body felt weak, hungry. He stood at the open window looking out. The sun was bright, he could feel it on his hands. He went into the bathroom and pulled open the shower curtain just as a cockroach scurried down the drain. His body shuddered as he turned on the water and took off his clothes and stepped under the stream of tepid water.
    Hugh dressed and went down to the café and sat at the counter and ordered eggs and flapjacks and white toast. The waitress behind the counter wore a uniform, the fabric of which was the color of cantaloupe. Around her waist was a frilly apron. It occurred to him that everyone in Hollywood looked like an extra in some movie. There was something about the place—different from back home—maybe it was the sunlight that