You're Always Haunted (1/2)

• The Lifecycle of Suns Ch 2: Exodus
• The Lifecycle of Suns Ch 2: Only Lovers Left

In my mind, the video never stops playing, so I don't bother watching four minutes of her grainy last hours.

I met her in the lobby of the DeMille Hotel. She was too good for that dive. I was not. I'd been staying there the better part of the month. I had fantasies about being an actor, getting discovered in LA. I cashed out a savings bond and bought time at the only place I could afford. Three weeks in, I was no closer to achieving my dreams.

You've seen the video, but you have never seen that smile she flashed me, shy and open, her eyes averted, hiking a backpack over one shoulder. She grabbed the key from the front desk and jogged to the elevator.

I was headed to an audition for bottled water, but I was not confident I would get the part. I hadn't had a call back in two weeks. What would I be losing following this instinct toward a pretty girl?

I don't know what my life would have been if I hadn't followed her.

I know how that sounds, that I followed someone trying to get away, but I need this to be honest. So much about her ending isn't. What part I played was slight, but I was there on her last day, at least for her last morning.

She pressed the button for the fourth floor, but the door did not close. I stood across from her, as far as I could be without exiting the elevator.

"You're on four?" I asked.

She glanced down at the key in her hand uncertainly, in case it might say otherwise. "Yeah..."

"Me too. 431."

She nodded but did not tell me her number, and I did not ask. "I'm Esther."

"Pretty name."

She smirked, rolling her eyes at my cheesiness. "You mean 'pretty girl,' right?"

I laughed at her brash confidence. "You aren't wrong, but it is a pretty name."

We paused there, both of us considering our next words.

"I have roommates," she said. "I mean, I haven't met them, but I do. They're expecting me."

"I don't," I said. "Have roommates, I mean."

She smiled, different from the smile I got before, something more hidden in it, wily. She squeezed her arms together, hugging herself. "I guess that means we should go to your room."

I'm not bragging. I am certainly not trying to speak ill of the dead. Less happened there than you might be imagining. Most of it was talking, though I couldn't tell you know about what. Books, I suppose. She left after only a few hours, happy as far as I could tell, as far as I could make her.

I still didn't know her room number, but I didn't worry. The DeMille is a big hotel, but it's a small community for those who last longer than a few hours at a time. Everyone knew who the prostitutes were, the heroin addicts, the father and son sex offenders on the sixth floor. You left them alone, and they left you alone. "You don't shit where you eat," as I heard from them all, the unstated mantra of the DeMille.

It was a few days before I saw her again, lugging her bags down the hallway.

"Leaving?" I asked, feeling a small panic in my stomach.

"Switching rooms," she said. "I didn't like that one." She sniffed. "I didn't get along with my roommates."

The police report stated that these roommates - anonymous women, even among the long term residents of the DeMille, guilty women who didn't want to admit even their minor roles in what happened - had asked at the front desk that Esther be removed from the room. They cited "strange behavior." She always seemed more or less okay to me, but those are the ones we should worry about, those who never show us what is beneath their shrouded faces.

"Are you getting new roommates?" I asked.

"No," she said, "I'm through with other people."

I helped her with her bags, not asking if I could but presuming invitation into her new room.

She showed me her fashion blog. The quote in the header struck me: You're always haunted by the idea you're wasting your life.

"You like Palahniuk?" I asked.

"I like that quote," she replied. "Maybe I am wasting my life. Are you?"

I didn't know yet.

I asked about the orange bottles she unpacked into the nightstand, unself-conscious. She told me that she had been depressed for as long as she could remember being anything.

"Is that why you're here, at the DeMille?"

She looked confused at the question. "I'm here because I'm traveling," she said as though nothing could be more obvious. "I've already been to Eureka and San Francisco. I went to a great zoo in San Diego." She pulled out her phone and scrolled through the pictures. There was a series of attempted selfies she had taken with an elephant. Her smile is wide enough that you can see her back teeth. "I think I'll check out Tijuana next, continue south. I have a passport. I'm open."

"When are you going to Tijuana?"

She looked me in the eyes, intense and expectant. "That's open, too."

Was this another invitation I should have presumed? It had to be strange and lonely to travel so far and much on one's own. What was I doing in LA but pursuing a dream few ever achieve?

"So you might stick around LA longer?"

"I could," she said, her hand now resting on my knee. "I could do whatever I want. No one is expecting me."

"What about when classes start again?" What I did know about her already was that she was a college student, making her younger than me by a few years and on a path more likely to result in a good life.

Esther squeezed her fingers together in the pain of this. She admitted that she had not enrolled for the summer or fall semester, that she didn't think she had it in her to continue going to university. It was too much for her but leaving it had left her "so utterly directionless and lost," she said.

That had been the point of what she had labeled her "West Coast Tour," taking Amtrak or busses on her own, an act of courage I couldn't echo. I hardly felt I could walk five blocks in LA without checking for my wallet and cellphone.

Maybe this vacation from her life could clear her head enough that she could go back to being Esther without the embarrassment. I didn't think it could be as easy as all that, but I didn't say that. It wasn't my place. I wanted it to be true for her, for someone so lively and sweet. In contrast to DeMille's drabness, Esther appeared to be even a brighter and better person. You couldn't look at her without knowing she didn't deserve to spend her life here.

I spent that night with her. She held me after a few hours of talking, and she cried. Not a few small, inexplicable tears that she thought she could hide on the pillow, but wracking sobs, snot leaking from her nose to soak my shirt. In a better hotel, security would have been there in minutes in response to her wails, but not the DeMille. I could have cut her to pieces, and no one else in the hotel would have said a word. None of us wanted to involve the police in anything we didn't have to, the hotel management most of all. Among the desperate, there is anonymity and privacy nothing else matches.

She wouldn't tell me why she broke down. I didn't press. These two nights together didn't give me any right to that. I didn't even know her last name - Fields - until after she was lost and found again.

Coming out of the elevator the next day, I saw her walk into the hotel with two men, one of whom gave her a small box, wooden and austere. I asked who they were, what was in that box, but she only hid it in her bag and walked away, assuring me that it was none of my business and she didn't care for my unearned jealousy. I could enjoy nights with her, but that didn't give me any right to pry into how she spent her days at the DeMille.

She came to my room that night handed me a copy of Palahniuk's Diary she had bought me, with the quote underlined. We made love, hardly speaking, falling into one another.

It was afternoon before she left, wearing my red, zippered hoodie. I never looked as good in it as she did because that is the way of women. Something commonplace to you, something everyday, transforms into haute couture when they zip it around them. Beneath this, she stole my gray t-shirt and shorts, though the sandals were hers.

She left her clothes behind, which I took to mean I would be seeing her again soon for their retrieval. I was headed to the laundromat anyway, so I washed these.

I did not see her that night or ever again. I thought I saw a man, no one I knew, taking her bags, but the elevator doors had closed before I could be sure. I pushed the call button, but I was a second too late. It went to the basement; nowhere the guests could access.

She is wearing my clothes in that video, where the elevator won't close. You can pause, and it is as though she is trapped forever, like she never died, but is amid a sort of hide and seek with you. Was she gesturing to someone from the hall? Some say that the spirit of the DeMille had her, as it had the Nightstalker. I don't believe this. There are not demons but the ones we conjure in our imagination.

She presses even more of the elevator buttons, like a kid trying to play a prank on whoever comes in next. She then covers her ears against a loud sound or words she does not want to hear. There is no sound on the recording. Given the pixelation of her mouth, the police didn't want anyone to decipher what Esther might be saying. She presses her back against the wall again, pushing herself into a corner before launching out again.

When she leaves the elevator, it goes from curious to eerie. She raises her arms in front of her in the hall as though miming a zombie, then twitches them, casting a spell with dual spider fingers. She rocks. The rest might be a game, but this is unsettling. This is where I could believe there I something sinister.

She enters the doors, still open, always open. She goes against the wall then leaves the elevator. In a second, it closes. That is it. That is the end of her.

The DeMille gave no explanation for the elevator's behavior. This is simply something it did. It was not malfunctioning before or after. This must have been something she did by going in and out or pushing so many buttons in sequence.

The toxicology says she wasn't on drugs, so that can't explain this. If she was trying to hide from someone, she was doing a poor job of it.

I didn't think of her as missing after that night because it did not make sense to. We had a few nights. I would be lying if I said I didn't want more, but she had no attachment. I would rather she had escaped the DeMille before it ate her up.

My parents transferred me enough money for another month, making clear there wouldn't be a third month here. If I were not self-sufficient, I would return with my tail between my legs.

The police came a week later. Esther's parents, I heard, had filed a missing person case and had flown down from Vancouver. The staff of the DeMille did all they could to appear accommodating while keeping the officers away from the more unsavory residents, but that wasn't necessary. The police avoided the DeMille unless forced, and they knew exactly how unsavory it could be. Rumor had it that Elizabeth Short, she of the Black Dahlia murder, had stayed here. Richard Ramirez, the Nightstalker, had rented a room while he was on his killing spree for the Devil. The same was true of Jack Unterweger, an Austrian serial killer. Suicides were so frequent that no one bothered counting them, the same with overdoses. The place was cursed, but that could be said of anywhere populated by those on the fringes.

The police brought in the dogs, who sniffed around. I heard them snuffling and beginning to growl outside my door, but the officer pulled them away. Even with her clothes laundered, I still caught her scent when I slept, when I showered. I felt her inside me.

If she were missing, how many people have seen us together? I would be an obvious person of interest.

The police never spoke with me or, from what they said, most of the people on the fourth floor. They talked to the book shop clerk, who said she seemed happy, that she talked about what gifts she would be getting for her family and friends. She didn't kill herself, is what I'm saying. It'll never believe otherwise, and the coroner's report agrees on that, though not much else of my conjecture.

I wish the police had investigated me. Then I could be acquitted in some sense. Instead, I am guilty of some part of her death because I was not there to stop it. I don't know what that would have taken-watching her take her meds, keeping her from monsters. Prying. Being there when she was taken or had taken herself. Maybe as simple as taking her out to lunch that day instead of going to another fruitless audition.

She was bipolar. I'll believe that. I looked up the symptoms of that, the mood changes like monsoon season, the impulsivity that would convince her to go to the seedy hotel room of an attractive stranger a moment after meeting, how inwardly she could focus, so it was like you were no longer in the same world as her. She told me once that, whatever else happened in her life, she never thought about ending it. Of all the things I knew about her, I believe this one the most.

I went to a few more auditions - minor things, barely more than an extra - but my heart wasn't in it. All I could think of was Esther whenever I returned to my room. She haunted me, her smell, her taste. Even as that initial smile faded into the haze of my mind, I felt her ghost at my back.

It was a solid day after the police released the video that I saw it. One of my friends from home linked me to it because he knew that this was where I was staying, not because of Esther. She was still my curious secret. I hadn't wanted her to be more.

I had weeks more until my eviction. I wanted them spent with her, whatever that meant. I knew Esther never left the DeMille. She was here, somewhere.

An addict told me that the top two floors had flooded, and no one seemed to know why. I tried to investigate on my own, anything to get out of my head, but the elevator would not take me there. When I tried the stairs, those doors were locked.

The watered turned brown and sickly sweet. The water pressure decreased, but that didn't seem usual for a hotel of this age and pedigree. Something always seemed broken, and you dealt with it. If you wanted better accommodations, you paid for them. You always got less than you expected from The DeMille.

The DeMille said that it was safe to shower in - something to do with the flooding - but that we shouldn't drink too much of it. Given the smell, I got a membership to the YMCA and showered there.

It was late February, five days after the video's release, when the water situation became dire enough that the hotel sent a worker up.

There in the tank floated Esther, weeks dead, her clothes (my clothes) beside her. The coroners would later say there was no trauma. This was an accident.

How could it be an accident? How could she have gotten onto the roof, past doors that needed keys, those that needed codes? How could she have gotten in the tank, have lifted the lid? The confluence of events to make this an accident was astronomically unlikely.

Alongside my mental replays of the video, amplifying them, I play through what drowning must have been like. Inside a dark tank with nowhere her fingers could have found a grip. Trying to tread water to keep her head above. Screaming herself hoarse for help that would not come. How long could this have gone on before her life was over?

Esther would have still been alive in a better hotel, but not the DeMille. The DeMille let people complete their mistakes. The DeMille encouraged "accidents" to happen as part of the hotel's life cycle.

The coroner's report says nothing about Esther's fingers. If she had been trying to get out, they would have been ragged, wouldn't they? But there was no mention of the state of her fingernails.

Her hands were beautiful. Now, people talk about them as unsettling, as they twitch in that video like dying insects, but I saw them up close. She had the deft fingers of a pianist. She had hands that could hold tight what she wanted.

I've done my research. There was no "insect activity" in the tank. Even in February, LA has no lack of them, but none were present in the tank, meaning the lid was closed shortly after Esther went in. How could she have put herself in there and managed to close it? It would be an impossibility, but that is the story. Esther opened the door, hopped into the tank, and closed it behind her from the outside.

Afterward, when the internet started scrutinizing her accounts, I came to see the woman she was, the one who I saw only in flashes when we were together. She was vulnerable but utterly open about it. That was what hurt the most, that she was so ready to confess herself to the internet, and now armchair forensic psychologists were picking over her bones for clues to back up their insane or prurient theories. These jackals let me know her better. That was a sort of blessing, but I didn't want it from men for whom she was only the creepy video du jour, no more real than that clip that looked like pants wandering through a field or that one of the CGI alien autopsy.

Looking at her accounts, I tried to tell myself that Esther and I would have had some relationship outside DeMille, but it is a lie. I would've been a part of her journey, a companion story to the gamboling of the red pandas at the zoo. The time she hooked up with an aspiring actor in LA. For a few nights, we would have belonged in the other's story. Now I had ceased to be in hers because it had stopped forever. I was the storyteller who had to get her right because no one else cared to.

When her parents returned a second and third time, a woman in a tailored pantsuit, reeking of the aura of a lawyer, escorted them. They would be sure to sue the hotel for all the good it could do them. It would not bring Esther back.

I felt for them, but I didn't feel the need to confess myself to them.

Surely someone had seen us together. Surely that same camera that caught Esther in her final hours had clocked the two of us together at some point. The hotel seemed to have kept this private. This was no courtesy to me, either being that they didn't have the footage or they didn't care. I was not murdering her, so what business was it of theirs?

The police didn't search most of the hotel until it was far too late. They had no reason then to suspect that a crime had taken place. Girls go missing all the time, especially on Skid Row. By the time they knew better, everyone trying to make a spectacle of her death had contaminated the scene. The man at the front desk, whom I knew only in the tangential way you know someone you do not consider human, told me that the owners were considering jacking up the nightly rent to profit off the vultures, but that I would be grandfathered in. They knew I wasn't up to anything like that.