Late last year, I made an aesthetic decision. I decided to stay, during a two-day business trip to Washington, D.C., not at my regular generic Hilton property, but at a charmingly creaky, historic, and low-lit inn a short distance southeast from Dupont Circle. The price was right, and I had grown tired of fluorescent lights and floors without rugs. I would sleep, I determined, in homey comfort, and I might even dash off a new idea at the provided writing desk in my room.
I did this, and more. I enjoyed the paintings on the walls, far cries from the sterile art hung at corporate properties. I enjoyed the brown weight of the extra blanket. I even enjoyed, in a character-building way, the shower water that I could not figure out how to turn hot. And so for two nights I slept soundly, feeling like the guest of some warm grandmother.
This feeling lasted until the next morning, when I noticed Nelson in the bathtub.
Had he been there all night? I wondered. It was possible: I hadn’t checked all corners of the shower, and my heart broke to imagine him sopping with icy water before crawling, shivering, to the edge of the drain where he now lay, curled up. Suddenly my presence in the bathroom seemed almost obscene; this poor fellow was trying to sleep, and I was making all of my clumsy human getting-ready noises.
The proper course of action when you find a stranger sleeping in your bathroom was not taught to me in my years of Catholic school. So, I took a picture of Nelson and proceeded to send it to various group chats of friends and family, some of whom urged me to leave immediately and some of whom remarked how cute Nelson was.
My mother bade me inform the innkeeper. Twenty minutes later I was leaning on the concierge’s counter downstairs. I gestured for him to come closer. “How can I help you?” he asked pleasantly. “Well,” I said—whispering, because there was a couple behind me about to check in—“there’s a mouse in my shower.”
The concierge paled and leaned even closer. My God—I am so sorry! “Thanks,” I said. Before I could ask, he had refunded my entire stay. It occurred to me only later that I had no confirmation that Nelson was alive; surely a mouse with a beating heart would have felt my footfalls and darted away. And even later, as I walked the streets of our nation’s capital, I felt an even greater obscenity: I hadn’t intruded on this poor fellow’s sleep, but upon his deathbed.
The macabre saga weighed on me the next week as I made my way to Reagan National Airport en route to Chicago from my second two-day business trip of December. Southwest Airlines is relegated to the old, unfashionable terminal, and as I collapsed in a chair and squinted through the grainy gray light and almost tangible human desperation, I saw them: two drab-colored mice, darting across the drab-colored carpet.
Perhaps it was my surroundings that made the difference. When I had come across Nelson in all of his vanitas-like glory, he was soft, curled, in the way a dormouse is when he sleeps in a tulip. It had been bitterly cold outside: Perhaps Nelson had crawled up the hotel drain, desperately seeking warmth and, too drained by his efforts, died honorably. Perhaps he, too, had harbored the same ambitions of comfort and rugs that I had—albeit more mousily—and perhaps he had died happy in the arms of a warm (mousey) grandmother as I had slept happily in her phantom embrace. Perhaps he, too, had said (mousey) prayers as he headed toward oblivion.
But these drab cousins! Darting to and fro, chasing after potato chip dust, perhaps even chewing on an unsuspecting traveler’s Cotopaxi. When I sent a video to my parents, one remarked, “They’re following you.” Were they descendants of Nelson, his burnout relations? I don’t know. In any case, if Nelson traveled, I imagine he would have shelled out for Delta.
