cigarettes

There was more to that day. Unexpected and jarring things. Wandering upstairs from the exhibit I came cross a tableau that leadened my feet and sank my heart. Behind a plexiglass barrier was the opened hotel room—#306—that Dr. Martin Luther King stayed in on 4/4/68. The very room behind that infamous balcony everybody pointed from as a mortally wounded King lay sprawled at their feet. There was a neat bed, and an old TV Guide nearby with some strewn papers here and there. I remember seeing a set of cufflinks and a pack of marlboro online. A plate some food had been eaten from and a small container of milk or juice. And of course, that window looking outward, onto the balcony towards for him, that day…infinity. I found myself later in the motel’s parking lot downstairs where vintage cars from ‘68 sat parked in a time-locked open-air diorama of sorts. A local woman pointed for me—pointing is something one seems to do on impulse when at the Lorraine—to a short brick wall in the distance, a scattering of small trees and a boarded up building where Ray supposedly shot King from. Eyes darting from sniper’s nest to target area. Imagining the crack of the Remington 30.06 caliber rifle. The distance a short one, a couple of hundred feet perhaps. And blinking back the image of the fallen King and the pointing co-horts. That room, in those odd 60’s pastels—seafoam and beiges. The last place he willingly lay.