Title: Drain
Summary: Margaret spends her first night back from Korea alone in a hotel room.
Author's Note: This idea struck me when I was in the shower last night.
Margaret arrives in Oakland International Airport and it's four o'clock in the afternoon. She had left Korea at eight P.M and she can't figure out which day it is. She's flying out at six-thirty the next morning to go to Fort Hood where she'll receive her next orders. She checks into the hotel a half a mile from the airport.
Sunny California is pale in comparison to the merciless beating Korea would take on a cloudless day. The sun glints off the windows on the building like it had off the parched and arid dirt and yellow blades of grass. It's windy.
Her dad might meet her in Texas, if he can get free. She's made plans to see her mother later in the week. Margaret doesn't know where she'll live. On the Base, probably. She sold her apartment before being dispatched to Korea and she can't choose one parent over the other.
She's dressed in her uniform, something neatly pressed, beige, all starched, and insignia on the shoulder. The girl at the desk hands her the key with a blinding smile and a hope you enjoy your stay, ma'am. A bellboy helps her up to her room with her trunk and Margaret has forgotten the going rate for tips, because, after all, in Korea you could get by with a couple of dollars. She presses a ten into the waiting paw of the bellboy, hat tipped jauntily over one of his eyes, and hopes it'll be enough, or not too much; she doesn't know. He looks so young.
The door clicks shut and Margaret immediately realizes how loud it is in her room. She can hear planes roaring into the airport and hear through the window as trucks rattle passed on the highway. She can hear the drip of the faucet in the bathroom and the trembling of the air-conditioner through the grate.
Behind the noise she can hear the silence, that aching, pounding silence that hides the fact that there is no constant buzzing of crickets in the grass behind her tent and no crackling of the intercom, no voice telling the medical personnel to assemble for the influx of wounded, no bubbling of the still inside Hawkeye and B.J.s tent, no shuffling footsteps on the dry, dirt ground, and no crumbling sound of the wind rushing through the rafters of tents.
Margaret throws her bag on the bed, on top of the quilt that's painted in gaudy colors that hurt her eyes. The bright lighting hurts her eyes. She flips up the lid and looks at her clothes. Clothes that are familiar, wrinkled, dirty, filthy, disgusting, that smell musty and sour, like that regulation army soap – She snaps the lid shut again.
She…doesn't know what to do with herself. Her thoughts jump unsteadily from one thing to another, to the way the ground had looked, rushing up to great her as her plane flew in toward the landing strip. How the streets had materialized out of veins in the midst of greens, blues, browns, and grays that had been America, an indistinct blob of color, hidden beneath clouds. To B.J., who had no doubt arrived already, too, who had fallen into Peg's arms, who had lifted Erin and felt her soft and smooth cheek against his. To the look in Hawkeye's eyes. To the smell of smoke on the air. Her hand sweating in a Latex glove. To Colonel Potter's rough voice being carried away on the stiff Korean breeze.
Suddenly her hotel room feels very small.
She runs her fingers through her hair. Her fingers are shaking, she realizes. She – she – doesn't know what to do. There were millions of things she should do, unpack, call her mother to let her know she's arrived safely, go downstairs to get a drink, call in for room service, go for a walk, remember what it was to be in the hustle and bustle, sights and sounds, feel what it was to walk in the middle of an American city.
Margaret runs her fingers down the front of her shirt, smoothing the creases, straightening the buttons, feeling the stitching against her skin. She can feel the grime and oil of war on her uniform, feel the gritty remains of dust and dirt in its fibers. Before she know what she is doing she tears it off, leaving it in a crumpled heap on the floor by the foot of her bed.
She shuts the bathroom door behind her with a snap and walks brusquely to the shower. It takes her a moment to figure out how to get the water running. The light is even worse here. She avoids looking at herself in the mirror because the brightness of the naked lightbulb in the ceiling casts odd, flickering shadows across her face, makes her look wane and haggard, cuts deep crevasses across her cheeks and forehead. She doesn't want to believe she looks that old.
She climbs into the tub and feels the slick surface of the mat beneath her toes. For a moment she allows the water to pour over her in a glorious cleansing, trickling between her fingers, sticking her hair to the sides of her face, imagining her outer skin slipping away with the running water. It's the hotel's soap and the hotel's shampoo, the hotel's conditioner and will be the hotel's lotion that she puts on when she gets out of the shower. The soap leaves her skin feeling sticky. The shampoo smells pungent and fruity. It fills her nostrils and makes her want to gag. She realizes that this is the first shower she has had in over three years that didn't involve wooden stalls or limited hot water.
There's black mold in the corners.
Her hand jerks compulsively and unconsciously across the faucet, slipping the dial all the way to hot, until it won't turn anymore. The water hisses and roils and she almost pulls away, feeling her face contort with the searing pain. Her skin is screaming and burning red. Steam billows across the bathroom and erupts inside the stall, fogging her eyesight until she can't make out the tiles that pepper the opposite wall.
The shampoo bottle slides out of her fingers from the soap on her fingers, and clatters to the bathmat with a thump that echoes against the tiny bathroom's walls.
Margaret feels her heart stumble, remembering with sudden, stark clarity the patter of gunfire, the vibrations of bombing, and the roar of artillery. Her heart refuses to stop racing, even when she tells herself reassuringly and hopelessly repetitively things that start with irrational, ludicrous, get a hold on herself….
Her knee brushes the soggy bathmat as she drops to retrieve the bottle of shampoo and she abruptly realizes that it isn't the fog that's making her vision so blurry. And then she's collapsed, crumpled over so that her stomach is pressing and trembling against her thighs. Her sudsy hands are covering her face and tears are rushing down the drain along with soap and hot water.
The searing-hot water pounds angrily against her bare back, staining it red. All she can think is that blood is red, too. Their blood was red. Everyone's blood is red. She used to think it was a pretty color.
Her shoulders rack with the force of her sobs tearing up her throat, scraping it raw, and she feels like she's convulsing, completely incapable of restoring order to her body. She sobs until the water fades to icy-cold, gurgling down the drain like the stifled moaning sound is coming up her throat, clogging her ears until her unsteady breathing is all she can hear.
The air around her is heavy and smells hot and wet. It smells unfamiliar. So much around her is unfamiliar. And she achingly remembers that it didn't always used to be that way. She's shivering now, and the bathtub feels slimy and cold beneath her touch. Tears are still running down her face but she can hardly distinguish them from the water pouring out of the shower and dripping over her bowed head.
She doesn't know why she's crying.
She's so…cold. And empty. There's a gaping, tearing hole in the middle of her stomach and she can't remember what used to fit there. It's hungry, whatever it is, grabbing for other things to consume, and might eat her away from the inside out.
She's so tired. Her eyes are itchy and she doesn't know how long she's been sitting here. Surely it hasn't been very long. It feels like it's been a matter of minutes, but from the frigid water still trickling over her back, she knows she might have been there for close to an hour.
Suddenly she's standing outside, in her fogged up bathroom, precipitation dripping down the tile walls, and she can't remember making the decision to stand, turning off the water, pulling back the curtain, stepping out of the tub. The bathroom floor is soaked with water.
She stands there, dripping, naked, and shivering and doesn't know where the towels are.
She fumbles for the doorknob and looks in the closet that's outside the bathroom door. There's a mirror on the door and she can't help but noticing she's pale. And thin. And she doesn't feel remotely hungry even though she hasn't eaten anything in who-knows-how-long. The last thing she can remember ingesting was a cup of coffee, but that had been in the mess tent….
She's bathed in the light that's spilling from the open bathroom door. The rest of the room is fading quickly to shadows. The one light she had flicked on doesn't do much to fight back the night that is seeping through the curtains.
When she had gone into the shower it had still been light out. She wonders if she's going insane, if these large pockets of missing time mean she's going insane. If how she can't remember how long she was inside the shower, how long it's taken her to find the towels, what she's done with her makeup bag, maybe it all means she's going insane.
Maybe she isn't really back in America. Maybe she's still in Korea, maybe she's had a nervous breakdown like Hawkeye and is locked up in a metal cell. Maybe this is all a perfectly horrid, vivid nightmare. Maybe all of Korea was a dream. Maybe her whole life has been a farce, has been a fabrication of her fevered mind, distorted since childhood, since birth –
Margaret chokes back the sob that again rises in her throat. Her eyes are red, she notices in the mirror. There are dark shadows dripping from her eyes. She's still trembling.
She remembers she was looking for towels and finds them folded on the top shelf of the closet. She rubs herself vigorously, trying to work warmth back into her limbs. She rubs herself until she hurts, until her skin stretches and scratches, raw –
She realizes she hasn't anything to wear. She can't bear to put her uniform back on, to throw on one of her frilly nightgowns from back…there. She can't – she doesn't know what to do and crawls into bed with nothing on, feeling the sheets scratch against her skin, feeling the rough fabric of the pillow against her face, feeling her still-wet hair soak into the pillow and lay damp against her cheek.
She wouldn't mind it if there was someone else there. Someone to hold her.
She realizes she's left all the lights on, besides, it's too early to go to bed, but she stays there, listening to herself breathe, to the air rushing through the vents, to the cars outside her window and the airplanes overhead, and watches as the darkness creeps across the ceiling except for the circles of light that form around the single lamp on her bedside table and the light that spreads from her open bathroom door. She listens to the shower drip into silence and the gurgling of the drain.
She hears a dog bark and remembers how her parents had never allowed her a puppy because there were never means to take care of a pet on whichever base they happened to be on; not to mention they had almost constantly been on the move. There had never been time to take care of a dog. Margaret, even as a girl, had understood her parents' reasoning , but that hadn't stopped her from wishing for a dog, even at times hoping.
She doesn't think she sleeps that night, and gets out of bed when the clock glows red, the numbers spelling out four-thirty. Her eyes feel dry and scratchy. Her hair has dried stiff and sticks up at awkward angles, compressed on one side from leaning against her pillow. The bulb in the lamp next to her bed has gone out sometime in the middle of the night.
Dawn begins to seep through her window. She pushes back the sheets on her bed in the half-formed light and prepares to leave. She runs a brush through her hair without looking in the mirror and smears makeup beneath her eyes, hoping it might cover up the dark smudges. She pulls on her uniform, still crumpled at the base of her bed, and smooths out the wrinkles with the palms of her hands, pulling the buttons tightly so that the metal leaves little imprints on the beds of her fingers. As she pulls up her skirt she feels the stubble on her legs and realizes she had forgotten to shave the night before.
She pulls the quilt back over her bed, fluffs the pillow, leaves her used towel in a neat pile by the toilet, shuts off the bathroom light, laces up her shoes and clicks shut her suitcase. She rings the lobby for a bellboy to help with her trunk. She decides she might pick up a mug of coffee at the airport and leaves her room with a shake of her head and not a look over her shoulder.
The rest of the city is beginning to wake up as she steps out of the hotel's revolving door and trips down the stairs to the sidewalk, hearing her heels click on the pavement. There are places to go and things to do, millions upon millions of things because she's missed out on three years' worth of sound, sturdy, hardy American life. Three years too many. Because war is long and Margaret is old and there's no telling how much time she has left.
She has a plane to catch in an hour and a half.
Please tell me what you think. Also, if you find any discrepancies among the present tense POV, let me know, as I usually don't write like that and might have accidently slipped into past tense once or twice. Thanks!