Sacrificial Alter
When I stepped out of the gas station, I called Daniel, who I’d contacted through couchsurfing.com and had offered to host me. He didn’t answer, so I left him another voicemail, this time telling him I was in town and at the gas station he’d described. I packed the spoke in the BOB and hopped back on my bike to go get a snack and drink while I waited.
I’d finished my snack when I realized I’d been sitting on the curb of this gas station for about a half hour with no return call from Daniel. As time passed, something inside me grew less confident with my choice to stay with this particular stranger. I wasn’t sure what that was exactly because I’d been staying with strangers almost every night since heading west from my stay with the Mitchells in Maine. Inside me, I started to parse a difference between strangers that were contacted by my mom, and often had a connection to Meals on Wheels, and a stranger willing to let any stranger stay at his house whenever they wanted, via a sketchy website.
Just as I’d decided I was done waiting, a mid-’90s red Honda Civic pulled up to one of the gas pumps. The driver got out and I noticed he was wearing JNCO jeans, the kind that were popular among the skater crowd in the year his car was made. As I continued to look up, I saw that he had on a black silk button-up shirt with a fantasy scene being played out across the front. Spike earrings, dark sunglasses, and straight, jet-black shoulder-length hair rounded out this guy’s look. My immediate thought was, Holy shit this guy must stand out in a crowd around here. But then I noticed that he was looking back at me, as if he knew me. “Are you Landall?” he asked across the parking lot.
Oh fuck, I thought to myself. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuuccckkkk…
I could say no, but come on, how many other dudes traveling by bike were going to be stopped at this gas station? If I was going to bail, I’d missed my window. I wasn’t going to run away, so I was committed, even if everything in my being told me not to go to this guy’s house. “Yeah,” I said. “You must be Daniel.”
When we got to his house, he explained that he was actually on his lunch break from work and had to go back. He wouldn’t be home again until after midnight, but he’d try to be as quiet as possible when he came in so as not to wake me up.
“This will be your room. I have to blow up the air mattress,” he said as he opened a door and stepped inside.
You know how in movies when a character figures out how they’re going to die and the camera will pan to that one thing, giving the viewer the impression that they can’t focus on anything else? Yeah, that’s exactly what happened when I stepped inside the door and saw the four-foot-high wood platform that was built in the center of the room where Daniel was now unrolling an air mattress to inflate.
Everything about this platform indicated I was going to die on it. At about four feet high, it was much taller than a bed. It was enclosed on all sides with plywood. There was a one-inch lip framing the tabletop that I’d be lying on, deep enough I assumed to catch my blood from whatever terrible thing was sure to happen to me in the night. This thing wasn’t a platform bed, it was a sacrificial altar.
As he blew up the air mattress, he commented, “I built this myself,” with a sense of pride.
With the air mattress inflated, Daniel said he needed to get back to work. He gave me the CliffsNotes version of the rules again, including, “Oh yeah, don’t let the cat out,” he said as he closed the door behind him.
There’s a cat? I thought. Just then I felt something rub against my leg. I looked down and saw a cat looking back at me. Its eyes were telling me my fate was already sealed.
I spent the next ten minutes standing in the same place, with one hand on the doorknob contemplating getting out of there as quickly as I could. As if to make things even more creepy, a thunderstorm rolled in.
Eventually, with no signs of the storm relenting, I decided I was going to stay, but not without taking a couple precautions. I dug in my bag to find my Leatherman multi-tool. I’d had so little use for it that it’d been buried in the bottom of the bag. I was grateful I’d kept it because it had a completely useless, dull blade that I thought was better than nothing. I also fished around for a couple other metal items that I could stack against the door. If the door was pushed open from the outside, I wanted this to fall and wake me up. Relatively satisfied with my makeshift security system, I climbed into my sleeping bag—on the air mattress, on the altar—and stared at the ceiling for a long time. My mind was on high alert, as every sound sent me into a panic of readying for defense. Eventually, I went to sleep. I guess fatigue finally won out over vigilance.
When I woke up in the normal, groggy fashion, I suddenly realized that if I was waking up, it meant I’d been asleep and all the fear shot back through my system. I looked at my watch to see what time it was, assuming I’d only been out for a few minutes, a little annoyed at myself for letting my guard down. Five a.m. stared back at me and I was shocked that not only had I slept through the night, but that I’d slept deep enough to not wake up with sounds coming from a house I wasn’t familiar with. Not to mention the whole fear of being murdered. A rational person would’ve realized that Daniel was clearly not going to sacrifice me on this altar, but I’m not always rational.
I quietly rolled out of the sleeping bag, tiptoed down the stairs, and packed everything into the BOB with the methodical concentration of someone playing Operation. I felt bad leaving unannounced but also didn’t want to wake him up, so I wrote a thank-you note and centered it on the fridge with a dragon magnet. As I was slipping out of the front door, I saw the cat sitting on the back of the sofa, giving me a look that said, We’ll get you next time. “Fuck off,” I said, under my breath, and silently closed the door behind me. I was so focused on my escape, I hadn’t noticed that it was still raining until I was on my bike and pedaling up the street.
