The motel has eighteen reception desks and only one room. I walk from counter to counter carrying a leopard’s head on a branch. I killed it so I could sleep, but now every clerk wants to see its teeth before giving me the key. A pencil holds the mouth open. On the pencil: APPROVED.

The first clerk asks what time I want to be woken. The second asks whether I want the first to wake me. The third has already prepared an appeal against the second. I answer them all correctly. Eleven years have passed and I still haven’t taken off my coat.

Behind the glass a man is repairing a machine. I cannot see his face, only his dirty hands and a pot boiling on the engine. He says he needs to send something home. I ask his name. He writes it on his side of the glass, so from this side it looks like a license plate. In the register it says UNKNOWN, in handwriting identical to mine.

The leopard’s head rings. The clerk assures me it isn’t a living animal: I can go on carrying it without fear. Each ring opens another reception desk. The new ones are tiny, nested inside the old ones, and all need my signature. The branch grows through my wrist. In the end I am a tree with a hat.

A woman comes through a door nobody has registered. She has an empty bowl and asks me nothing. She moves the pot from the engine to the counter, takes two onions from her coat and begins to chop them. The clerks offer her eighteen menus. She uses the back of one to collect the skins.

I want to tell her my work is important. She takes the pencil from the leopard’s mouth. The jaws close with the sound of a suitcase snapping shut. Inside is the stream. Water runs between the teeth and soaks every request without erasing a single one.

“You don’t have to finish them,” she says. “You have to hold the pot steady.”

I hold the pot. It is harder than signing: the counter moves, the tree pulls, I am hungry. The man behind the glass stops repairing the machine and sets his bowl beside ours. His name fogs over.

When I look up the reception desks are still there, but the clerks are sleeping. Nobody has authorized sleep. The leopard, at last, has closed its mouth.