The Rusted Rite

Nithid

Chase Chasteen

Dreary gray, mid-mourning light diffused onto the dying phoenix, feathers flustered, falling up from the eight-hundred thread count ashy percale. California promised to bestow sunlight but instead eclipsed it behind plumes of smoke, hiding from its disdain for the life it immolated below. Tiny orange pills visited with more frequency now, punching, with cumulatively less effect, the turbulent hands - wildfires themselves enraged with conviction lost - unable to punch back. Eager ears would first see the brightness abound as the benzos rattled, like the last few Tic-Tacs, a fervent desire to escape their plastic prison.

The once sprawling resort, my charge to manage, succumbed to her viral fate and devolved into a sad, lonely kingdom and I into her proud, narcissistic prince. With then unspoken vows of vanity and greed, I consumed whatever light still radiated from her desert.

“Everyone wants this.” I gestured outwardly, gaze fixed with bloodshot eyes at the river-stone fireplace illuminating the corner of the five-star, twelve-hundred square foot hotel suite I alone would occupy for another eight months.

Rivers rushed tumultuously through the ten floodgates adding depth to the oversized, fiberglass jacuzzi tub, my chasm of comfort, where I would hourly spend before marking the next X on the calendar. Credits rolled and, with an indifferent shrug at the shriveled ending to yet another pay-per-view film, I drained the warmth.

With just enough strength to twist off the ridged cap to my eye drops, my shaky hands reached for the brand new iPhone Pro, battery fully charged to my retired mother’s credit card. Its digital shutter sounded the three times necessary to capture the perfect bathroom lighting my cheekbones and Instagram followers deserved. Half-naked, I bared all yet borne naught - loaning out my dignity for the fleeting euphoria rendered by each tiny red heart pumping through the pixels and into my veins the fix necessary to continue this relentless routine.

Having no patrons scheduled to visit for the near future, I shed my woolen livery and traded it for a uniform of black synthetic sweats and a baseball hat. Commuting through the empty parking lot toward the temperamental espresso machine in the kitchen, I spotted Wilson, the long-revered, iconic soul of the property, steady hand extended as I approached.

“Hey, buddy!” I shouted from across the cracked asphalt. “What’s new?”

After a purposeful slap onto his copper-forged palm, I fakesmiled and continued on, wiping off onto my athleisure suit

his proud footnotes of personal struggle that he was willing to part with, inked in the same hue as my envy toward what he represented.

Banshees wailed as I frothed away - barista, too, adorned my business card in the wake of furloughing everyone on my team, sans Wilson. The disappearing co-workers who once lined the doorway to my office now queued in my mind the loud memory of their silencing. Forever joining me for a midday latte, their faces begged that I vent the empathy trapped in its chemical confines.

“How did I get here?” I cried, balancing myself on the heavy chains securing the doors from more formidable intruders. Vivid images of previous guests resurfaced into the mind that had long fought them off with swords brandished by an ever protective ego:

“I’m disconnecting the call now, sir,” Kim said with tasteful disgust before fulfilling her promise. “That asshole was masturbating to my directions from the airport!” The impervious perv climaxed, breathing labored, to the sound of my first mentor’s cracked voice. His moment of sick anonymity briefly foreshadowed Kim’s long-awaited exit from hospitality, her compulsory stand to renounce the worst of humanity before inevitably merging with it. The abandoned fetus circling the shower’s drain, the teenage boy with nowhere else to go looking from exalted windows and, with tempered pain, asking downwardly, “What if?” The sex worker, left-leg lifted onto the public restroom vanity, preparing herself with our pomegranate-scented salt scrub for the evening ahead, the meth aficionado impersonating a SCOTUS justice, the paranoid defenestrating refugee running from me: a renowned CIA operative, the entitled platinumelite member throwing presidential invitations at my very pregnant front desk colleague with the hope of soliciting sex, Amenhotep protecting the elevators garbed in the hotel’s finest single-ply: all paying ghosts, summoned as projections of the worst in me, spirits I invited in, with whom I hid from community behind my own paper-thin veil.

As I made my way upstairs to the room after another lonely days’ work, overhead lights ascended my way home, shining in unison only confusion for the man under their raise; three shadows theirs, none of them mine. When the bottom hit my soul, I forgot how to climb up on my own; but, with a defiant grasp onto the unevenly textured handrail - worn by the neglect of the disbanded fraternity who had long maintained its strength - I remembered again.

Chase Chasteen is a hotel manager in Napa, CA. He relocated from his previous post in Texas at the onset of the pandemic only to face the most challenging time in his career due to the effects of COVID-19 in the hospitality industry. He has since gone through a rough patch and writes to tell his story of overcoming adversities.