Watcher

I always click the button that locks the door until my Subaru beeps. It beeps twice, and sometimes, if the mood is just right, I keep hitting the button as I sing “Tainted Love”, the timing and rhythm perfect, as if we are singing together. And that’s what I’m doing as I cross the desolate wet parking lot toward the shabby four-story hotel.

This rust belt town is grim, on its knees, leather work gloves resting on a scratched yellow hardhat, exhausted and panting, trying to get to its feet. The hotel–part of a low budget chain–has seen better days. There are desperately-needed renovations going on inside, and a dumpster the size of a big-rig trailer and several construction vehicles are parked at the darkened end of the lot. Not all the lamps work, and why bother? The interstate with its high halogens sits right there on the other side of a steel and concrete barricade. That’s enough.

My clients asked where I was staying. When I told them, they shuddered. “That’s kind of a halfway house,” they said. “The addicts and homeless often end up there.” I did not offer that once, in another life, I had helped run a little house church, and the men from the halfway house next door had been regular attendees. The men laughingly called me pastor, and I laughed along, because I might be the worst candidate to shepherd any flock anywhere. Ever. People with problems are not the problem; systems that exacerbate problems are.

The car beeps along merrily when I notice him–the shadow of a hooded figure, a man in a rain poncho of some kind–looking down at me, hands pressed against the glass of a third floor guest room window. No discernible features. only darkness where his expressions should live.

The song dies on my lips. In my hesitation, the imagination my steelworker father so often condemned as overactive revs into high gear. Scream. Psycho. The Shining.

I take three more steps and pause between two puddles, my eyes never leaving that darkness where his face must be.

He doesn’t move.

I began calculations, eyeing the structure. Distance to the lobby. Distance to my room adjacent to the second floor stairs. Time it takes to climb those stairs with my briefcase, wearing my slick-soled dress shoes. Distance from his room to the same stairs. Probability that he would correctly guess I had parked closer to the side where my room was located so that I could see it from my window.

I keep watching, my neck craning until I enter the building, until he disappears from sight. The lobby is tiny, brightly lit, and the young woman at the counter has headphones on. She nods as I pass. Once I round the corner, I scurry down the hall to the stairwell closest to my room. On the second floor landing, I hear the fire door open on three. I slip into the hall, run my card key through the slider on my door, and breathe a sigh of relief when it is closed, bolted, and chained. Just my imagination. Yeah.

A shower and a change of clothes later, I settle at the desk to complete the day’s paperwork. That’s when I hear the fire door, followed by a whistle. It’s the tune I had been singing not an hour earlier. The whistler stands just outside my door. I see the shadow of their feet through the crack. There is no peephole. I switch off the light. The whistler leaves the way he came.

I spend the next several hours watching my car through a little opening in the drapes. My room is dark. No one can see me. Just me in the chair and the car and the mostly empty, half-darkened, puddle-ravaged lot. My accursed overactive imagination and the lamps of the interstate. The scattered showers that come and go. An occasional car or truck headed up the mountain, away from the town. A figure–a man in a ball cap and hoodie–walked by my Subaru earlier, during one of the lulls in the rain. Paused in front of it but didn’t touch it. Was he the same person I saw in that window? I don’t know–probably not–but the longer I sit, the more uneasy I get, the more I wonder if I’m somehow part of the problem. No. It’s just my imagination. It must be.