Travelers Rest (10 page)

U
ltimately, you lived and died entirely alone—that was at once the most satisfying and the most disturbing fact of life. He had his own body, his own mind, he moved through the world autonomously in both thought and action and experienced life on his own, in a way that no other creature on the earth presently or in what people called the past or the future experienced it exactly—that was what gave his life a kind of dignity. Despite all the people he knew, with whom he surrounded himself and occupied his time, life was ultimately finite and he would have to die alone, too—that was what made him sit up sometimes in the night, gasping, putting his hand to his chest to feel his heart beating there. There were two fears only—the fear of death, for which people had religion, and the fear of solitude, for which people had society. He wasn't religious and he didn't have much to do with society. But he also didn't have a misanthropic bone in his body, despite what Julia or Robbie might say; he knew that societies invented God to assuage the fear of death, but he also knew that people formed societies to increase the joy in life, that joy came from human companionship and human communication. He wasn't a robot. It was just that he had spent many years carefully, very carefully, learning how to bury his emotional life, covering it with the finest sediment, letting it sift under layer by layer, into a lower stratum, so that only the most practiced excavator would ever find anything there. Just the tiniest part of him poked through, like the eyes of a lizard that hides in desert sands. He had been happy that way.

Then his wife came along. And it wasn't that he was bowled over by her beauty (although she was very attractive, of course—any idiot could see that), or that he had experienced some version of love at first sight, or that he had gotten carried away in a romantic whirlwind. It was just that, within five minutes of meeting her, he had felt…comfortable. He had felt comfortable with her in a way that he rarely felt around people, even people he had known a long time—Robbie, for instance. Was that such a terrible thing? And yet if you listened to the popular ideas of what a marriage was supposed to be like, merely being comfortable wasn't enough. He had tried, at times, to do more—had tried buying flowers, tried going out to dinner, embarking on romantic getaways, had even made the occasional awkward confession of love. But with these things he was
not
comfortable, and, curiously, they had never seemed to be what his wife wanted from him anyway. And so while he had felt at ease in the relationship from the beginning, he had never been called completely out of his hole, and he had never tried to coax his wife out either. The effect was that he knew his wife now in the same way that he'd known her, say, after the first year they'd been married. There was a longer trail of shared experiences, but the track hadn't cut any deeper. He was still, to some degree, safe beneath the sand.

And then came Dewey. Game over. Defenses wiped out immediately, entirely, white flag waving in the breeze. Dewey was a different thing altogether, for which Tonio had no classification—his son was so much a part of his own internal world that it was hard to believe anything could happen to him that didn't also happen, simultaneously, to himself. It was almost incomprehensible that Dewey existed separately in the world, that he went to school and did who knew what all day long, talked to different people, had accidents on the playground, learned about geography. Tonio sometimes felt himself straining in the middle of one of his own lectures to imagine what Dewey might be doing that instant, how his hair was combed, the expression on his face. So much of his life was absorbed in Dewey that to be apart from his son was like having two separate experiences, one only half real and one entirely imagined. It was something that he could barely fathom, even though it was the state in which he now found himself. He was convinced, on some level, that this was all an elaborate trick, some cruel form of punishment for having, ten years ago, on the day he first held his son in his arms, allowed himself to love.

It was morning, and he sat in a chair staring hard out into a world of white and wrestling with what he thought he knew about his senses. “I was in this room yesterday,” he said.

“That's possible,” the owner, Tiffany, who was seated next to him, said.

“I looked out that same window,” he said, “but it wasn't like this.”

Tiffany rested his chin in the palm of his big hand. He was smoking a pipe, drawing in the tobacco with little sputtering sounds. It was cold in the room, room 306.

“It was nothing like this,” Tonio continued. “The hotel was new and clean and my wife was here with me.” He paused and turned his gaze from the window to the bed and he breathed in deep. “I can still smell my wife in this room,” he said. “And there's something else. Something that happened.”

“I'm not denying the possibility,” Tiffany said.

Every time he talked to Tiffany he felt like killing him. He had never before felt the urge to strangle a man with his bare hands, but Tiffany brought forth this urge on every single occasion that the two of them were together in a room, forcibly and invariably. But Tiffany was all he had. There was no way to strangle him, at least not yet. It wouldn't be a good way to play the percentages.

“I was in this room,” he said, staring out again at the snow, which continued to fall, floating silently into the heaps already on the ground, drifting into dunes that formed along the sidewalks. “But I don't think I was exactly myself.”

At that he stopped talking for a long time and simply stared out the window until he felt that he had come unhooked from everything, as if his life were suspended in a world of quiet snow, not proceeding anywhere. This was a strange feeling he had come to have over and over since he'd been here, and when it settled on him he sometimes disappeared to himself, for how long or how short a time he couldn't say.

Tiffany's voice called him back on this occasion. “When you say that, what does it mean to you?”

Tonio ran his fingers slowly along the worn thread of the armchair. “When I say what?” he asked.

“When you say that you weren't…
exactly yourself.
”

He sat heavily in the chair with his eyes dully open, his fingers on the cool silk of the armrest, the light shifting subtly from gray to darker gray and back again, his mind foggily turning and drifting in contemplation of itself. He had come to this place, he knew, seeking shelter during a journey. He had arrived in the snow, in the evening, with his wife, Julia, and his son, Dewey, and his brother, Robbie, none of whom were with him any longer and all of whom seemed more difficult to conjure, to bring from nothingness into memory, as time passed. In the moments when he did feel exactly like himself, rooted in this present time and place as he had always been rooted before, it meant that he felt like the father of his son, the person in orbit around Dewey, that bright star burning on his life's horizon. He had been trying to find Dewey and he had been doing a very poor job of it, and the reason that he had done a very poor job had to do with exactly this—that as soon as he began to search for Dewey, he lost himself. The pattern was getting to be familiar—a period of growing frustration and then outright anger followed by yet another trek out into the snow followed by a sluggish feeling, a period of haziness, and then a complete loss of his senses followed by, yet again, his reappearance in a room with Tiffany.

He had by now spent so much time with Tiffany in rooms like this one, in fact, that he had learned a great many things he didn't really care to know about the hellhole he was stuck in: that the hotel had been built in response to the influx of mine workers and store proprietors and saloon denizens and travelers that descended on the town of Good Night as a result of the silver ore being dug from La Mine de Rêve (“The Dream Mine”); that the original claim had been filed in 1878 by a Frenchman, known to history only as Gardiener; that Gardiener's brush with history was brief, as he simply disappeared from all records of the Idaho Territory after 1880; that, according to local legend, the town got its name from the fact that it was the primary stopover after crossing the high pass of the Bitterroot Range to the east, tired travelers being greeted with a hot meal and sent to bed with a hearty “Good night”; that in its heyday the town boasted ten brothels frequented by the nearly one thousand miners who made up half the local citizenry; that prostitution remained legal in Good Night until well into the twentieth century; that, while they might be enduring quite a storm currently, it did not measure up—at least not yet—to the town's largest snowfall (seven feet, four inches exactly, according to Tiffany), which, oddly enough, occurred during the week of the hotel's opening, in 1886.

Tonio knew all these things, and even though some of the facts sounded familiar, as if he had encountered them in the article he'd read somewhere before, none of them were at all important to him. But he did know a few things that
were
important, for instance that time was passing and that it was imperative to find his family, right
now,
goddamn it, and yet as he rose from his chair and prepared once again to yell at Tiffany, to demand some explanations, a look of pity on Tiffany's face brought him to a stop. Tiffany, the despised Tiffany, felt sorry for
him.

“You're beginning to understand that won't work, aren't you?” Tiffany said. Tonio said nothing. Tiffany reached over and placed his hand on the back of the armchair. “Relax and talk to me. That might help. It pains me to see you flailing around out there in the snow.”

Tonio slumped in his seat and wondered what it would be like if the sun came out, just for a moment, whether that might make everything, all of it, clear. As it was, he couldn't really even be sure if it was day or night—it was a kind of perpetual half-light that couldn't be trusted to indicate morning or evening.

Tiffany leaned forward, his chair creaking under him. “I asked what it means to you when you say that you feel
exactly yourself.
”

“Right,” Tonio said. “Well, for the past ten years what it's meant to be exactly myself is to be my son Dewey's father.”

“Hmm,” Tiffany said. He settled his weight back, crossed his legs, and began waggling his foot. “Hmm. And have you
seen
your son in the past few days?”

Really, if he could crush this guy's skull in the palms of his hands. “What the fuck do you
mean
have I seen him? I've been looking for him the whole time I've
been
here. What do you think I've been asking you about?”

Tiffany's foot stopped and his head started to nod, as if the movement had passed all the way through his body by a series of shafts and gears and come out the other end. “I simply asked you,” he said gently, “whether you had seen your son.”

And something did come to mind. It was like a backward memory, the mental picture forming before the event that made the picture. There was a blond-haired boy out in the street—wasn't there?—fighting his way through the snow, his breath clouding above his head. It had hurt him in some way. But it was during the time when he wasn't exactly himself. He didn't know if he recognized himself or the boy in that moment, which had seemed like two imaginary people coming together in the confluence of different streams. He didn't tell Tiffany anything.

“It's all right,” Tiffany said. “Go on.”

“What I need is a policeman,” Tonio said, more or less to himself. A raw energy crawled up his spine, as if he were a lizard awakening in the sun. He walked over and threw open the window so hard that the wood cracked. “I need a cop!” he shouted into the cold air. “Police!”

But outside there was no help and no police and in fact no one at all, not on the sidewalk, not in the windows across the street, not anywhere. He shoved the window back down into place and returned to his seat across from Tiffany. Tiffany tapped out his pipe into the cuff of his pants. He took out a tobacco pouch and pinched some leaves and stuffed them into the pipe and lit it with a match from a box of kitchen matches he pulled from his coat. He did not look at Tonio during the course of this procedure.

Tonio almost said “I'm sorry” but he didn't. “I don't know if you can help me or not,” he said to Tiffany instead, “but I still hold you responsible.” Tiffany sucked on the pipe, puffed smoke into the air. He opened a drawer on the end table next to his chair and dropped the spent match into it and closed the drawer. “I just want you to know that. I just want you to know,
mon ami,
old buddy old pal, that the shit will still hit the fan. Shit hits fan, fan is pointed at—Tiffany, are you listening to me?”

Tiffany held the pipe stem in one hand and placed the other on his belly. He blew smoke from his nostrils and rested the hand with the pipe on the chair arm. Then he opened his mouth a couple of times as if he were doing stretching exercises with his jaw and his eyes went toward the ceiling momentarily. “Not with any real degree of interest,” he said.

Then they sat there that way without saying anything. Tiffany hummed a light tune to himself. Out the window, the snow fell so softly that it didn't appear to be falling at all.

“I feel exactly myself,” Tonio said after a while, “when I'm talking to my son about things or I'm taking him places. Or sometimes when I'm just watching him. Or even just thinking about him—what I have to do, things I have to prepare for.” He nodded for emphasis. “Being vigilant,” he said.

“What else?”

“I don't know. I don't pay as much attention to things as I used to.”

Tiffany made that sucking sound on his pipe. “But come now, Mr. Addison.” He placed his pipe on the end table and held his hands together, the thumbs touching above his interlaced fingers. “What is it…and I mean really, here, the
essence
of it,” he said, leaning forward and placing his elbows on his knees, “the thing that makes you
you?
”