John Doe No. 2 and the Dreamland Motel

1 The Dreamland Motel

1The Dreamland Motel Thwack! Timothy McVeigh is throwing firecrackers at you from across the room. You are sitting on top of a bedspread in what you would generously describe as a “seedy” motel. The kind of motel that rents rooms by the hour and whose deserted, rectangular swimming pool has a milky sheen to its perpetually unrippled surface. The kind of motel that has a miniature refrigerator next to a narrow, unforgiving bed into which you can feed quarters to experience a halfhearted electrical massage. You know intuitively that the refrigerator has never seen anything north of a six-pack of beer on the food pyramid, and you are well aware that the bedspread that you are sitting on is exactly the kind of bedspread that your mother has been warning you about all these years. Patterned in a faded, greenish print of garish flowers and ornamental swirls, it is oddly slick and filmy to the touch. You are repulsed by its grotesquerie. Your mother told you that motels never wash these things, that it’s too much trouble, that it’s too expensive to buy all that detergent, and, besides, no one stays in these rooms for long, anyway. That’s 4 J o h n D o e N o . 2 a n d t h e D r e a m l a n d M o t e l why the TV doesn’t get H.B.O., the picture isn’t all that good, and the yellowed copy of TV Guide on the nightstand is more than two years old. Your mother warned you that whatever you do, you must never—never—allow your pristine, naked skin to touch the bedspread directly or you will very likely break out in a rash the next morning. A painful, potentially scarring red rash that lasts for days and days and days on end. But that’s not what’s bothering you right now. What’s bothering you right now is that your room is located directly next door to the motel’s reception office. You could tell from the awkward glances of the burly, droopy-eyed manager with the wide forehead that she was suspicious of you and your roommate from the get-go, that you must be up to no good—that you would have to be, given that you don’t look anything like the truckers and the hookers who normally pull off I-70 into her gravelly parking lot. You know that she is putting you and your companion into Room 25 so that she can keep tabs on you—like this morning when she ran into you next to the ice machine, which is even more dangerous , with its microbes and its mold, than the bedspread could ever hope to be, and asked what you were doing up so early, this being a weekend and all. You know that you have already told Timothy McVeigh—you were as explicit and uncompromising as you can ever possibly get— that you don’t like the way the manager is acting, that you should keep a low profile, that you should check into the Super 8 just off the interstate. You know that the last thing—the very last thing—she needs to hear from the manager’s desk right next door, through the thinnest of cheap motel walls, is a bunch of firecrackers popping off. But Timothy McVeigh doesn’t listen to you. He never listens to you. Just like he’s not listening to you right now when you warn him—in the most direct, most unambiguous tones that you can reasonably muster—that he would be very mistaken to throw another firecracker in your direction. The Dreamland Motel 5 Sporting a blank look on his thin, emotionless face, he sits Indianstyleonthetwinbedoppositeyourownwithhisbackrestingagainst the far wall of your dilapidated motel room. You can tell that he is preparing to launch his next fusillade, gingerly removing yet another firecracker from the plastic sandwich baggie that rests in his lap and fidgeting with the Bic lighter in his free hand. Your mother was very clear when she told you, all those years ago, that you must never play with firecrackers, that they are not a toy, and—here’s the really important thing—that they should never discharge anywhere near the vicinity of the head region or serious injury could result. Namely, you could damage...