Ride to Louisiana. Air coming off the ocean tastes of salt, something chemical. I walk round a gas station, unable to understand the products, the writing makes no sense to me. Leaning against the glass door of a fridge, humming to match the pitch of electricity. When I leave, someone has left a flier beneath a windscreen wiper of my Hyundai Sonata. It’s a drawing in blue biro of a monster eating someone. I look around, screw it up into a ball and throw it. There’s a burned out car by the corner, windowless, like the skull of a Jurassic fish. It watches me as I pull away, joining the road again, feeling itchy beneath my skin.
Night time in Baton Rouge. I could have kept going to New Orleans, but stay at a Holiday Inn. There was an old man sat on a lawn chair outside a motel room. The door was open and a great, fleshy back of a person was curled up, lying on the floor, facing away from me.
“Hot night.” Says the old man. I nod.
“You got a cigarette?”
“Nope.” He says. I sit in my motel room and turn on the tv. Law & Order, CSI, ads for cell phones showing that they get coverage almost anywhere. I snort. The US was meant to be a superpower and still didn’t have phones that worked everywhere. They were forty years behind the rest of the world. I flip to the news and see myself. I lean forward.
There is footage from a doorbell. It’s a cop, wearing a mask of my face. For a moment I didn’t make the connection, the extensive plastic surgery I’d had back in New York seeming to be a lifetime ago. I watch the news report. Somebody was posing as a cop, or was a cop, and gaining entry into suburban homes. Once inside he would gather the family into the living room, place handcuffs on them, then make them watch some sort of film. It wasn’t clear what the film was about from the news reports, but they interviewed a witness who didn’t blink and their hair had turned grey and they seemed to speak as if they were very small. Police sketches of the mask. It looked like me. My reflection was on the tv and aligned perfectly with the mask. I turn the tv off, go to the window, look out, draw the curtains. What was happening?
I thought back to the last couple of weeks in Florida. I had dressed as a cop myself just the other day. I wondered for a moment if this man had been me, but dismissed it. The report was from further north, though it had been the sixth time it had happened in the last few weeks. Minnesota, Iowa, Nebraska. They were heading south. I looked in the bathroom mirror, squeezing my cheeks, pulling the skin down so my eyelids revealed the pink, wet flesh beneath eyeballs marbled with veins. I was myself. Knock at the door. I look through the key hole and it’s the old man.
“I got you a cigarette.” He says. I open the door, keeping the brass chain on the latch.
“Pass it here.” I say, searching in the dark. He passes me a Marlboro, we wink at each other and I close the door. I pace round the motel room, trying to make the cigarette last as long as I can, smoking it down so the writing burns away and the filter fizzes and burns yellow.
Why was the person posing as a cop have a mask of my face? And what was on the video he made these families watch? I kept walking, trying to work it out, trying to imagine what it could all mean, yet my thoughts were like a kite on a still day, never taking off, just dragging across the ground. I sat and drummed my fingers on the bedside table. What if people mistook me for this fake cop? I wasn’t totally innocent. The real cops could already be on there way. They might be in the parking lot right now, a SWAT team creeping by the motel rooms neighbouring mine, ready to bust through the door at any moment. I needed another cigarette. It didn’t matter. I still had a job to do. I was in Baton Rouge in July 2025 and I was safe. It would all be fine. I lie back on the bed and study a stain on the ceiling. Tomorrow I would get to New Orleans, drive across the Mississippi, maybe try some soul food, maybe go to a jazz club. Just as I was drifting off the sleep, there was a knock at the door. I sit up slowly.
“Old man? You got another cigarette for me?” I say. My voice cracks, going high for a moment, betraying the dread I felt, utterly alone in a motel room in a strange country. There was no reply, but there was another knock. Shave and a haircut, two bits. I go over to the door and open it, looking out into the night between the gap in the door and with just a slender chain protecting me from the outside world. There is nobody there. I’m about to close the door when I look down. Someone had taped a piece of paper to the floor. There’s a QR code on it. I take a picture with my phone, close the door as it loads. It’s a link to a file on wetransfer. I download it. It’s a video outside the motel room. It was earlier, the old man coming to give me a cigarette. I watch myself close the door, then the camera starts to zoom in, closer and closer. I glance up at the window. Are they still out there? I look back to the phone, my heart beating twice as fast. What the fuck was going on? The camera holds, digital noise making the motel door seem to dance and shift like kaleidoscopic snow. Then it went black. I sit on the bed, feeling frozen in place, as a wild animal encountering car headlights for the first and final time.
That night I don’t sleep.
