This pattern repeated itself for a few more days until one morning Todd got out of bed, took all the empty bottles to a dumpster, showered, sat down at the desk and began to work.

Seven

SEVEN

It was a sunny morning in a crappy part of town as Sara walked up to the Sunset Motel’s reception desk. There was a grimy bell on the counter. She pressed it and it rang faintly.

“Help you?” said the clerk, appearing from the office.

“I’m looking for Todd Milstead,” said Sara.

“Room five,” said the clerk, and headed back into the office.

“Room five it is then,” said Sara to herself.

Sara walked around the side of the motel. The door to Room 5 was closed and she could hear the sound of the TV blaring out from behind it. She knocked hard and, a few seconds later, harder.

“Go away!” she heard Todd shout.

“It’s Sara.”

The TV sound cut out and the door opened.

“Sara?” said Todd.

Sara stepped back in surprise. Todd was unshaven. His hair was uncombed and he was wearing nothing but his underpants.

“You’d better come in,” he said.

Todd closed the door behind Sara and instantly she wished he hadn’t. It wasn’t that she didn’t feel safe—Todd looked so ill and thin that she doubted he could have harmed himself, let alone her—but that the room was awful. There was a fug of unwashed everything—unwashed clothes, unwashed dishes, unwashed Todd—and while someone had hoovered the greasy carpet, they hadn’t opened any windows or removed any pizza boxes.

But that wasn’t the worst thing. True, Sara would have been hard-pressed to pick the worst thing—it could have been that Todd seemed neither pleased nor annoyed to see her, just kind of accepting, like she was now part of the furniture, or it could have been the whole muggy gray-green atmosphere of drawn curtains and lamps with towels over them, giving the whole place an underwater look.

The worst thing was the writing.

It was everywhere. Pieces of paper, torn and crumpled and balled-up, on the floor and on the desk and on the bed. Paper, scrawled on and scribbled on, in the armchair and the closet and even the bath. Writing everywhere, on pads, on leaflets, even on the walls.

Todd looked at Sara.

“They come like that,” he said. “The words. They just come like that, in no particular order. And I can’t put them together again.”

Sara backed away a little.

“What do you mean, ‘put them together again’?”

“Like Humpty Dumpty,” said Todd. “The words. Jumbled up and messy. No use to me. I mean, look at them.”