Travelers Rest (11 page)

“The thing that makes me me is that I have a son and he's my son and not someone else's. I have a wife who's mine and not someone else's. I have a house and a car and a cat. What do you want me to talk about—bipedalism, opposable thumbs, descended larynx, Broca's area? The things that make people people?” He waved his hand vaguely toward the window. “The solar system, the galaxy, the universe—here I am, right here in this one spot in the center of it, myself, conscious of being myself, who I am.”

Tiffany picked up his pipe and puffed on it aggressively, smiling and nodding and shaking his index finger in Tonio's direction. “Very good, Mr. Addison, very good. Now we're getting to the bottom of it. You became who you are through an act of will. You're you because you made yourself you, correct? You made your own life.”

This subject was, of course, one that Tonio studied all the time, or at least had studied for years, before he lost interest and began studying as little as possible. Insofar as he thought of these kinds of things anymore, he did in fact agree with Tiffany's statement. To the question of whether the self was more biologically or more socially constructed, it had always been Tonio's answer that the self was more
self
-constructed, a position that, even at the point at which he had ceased to concern himself with whether it was true, still rewarded him with the material for several well-placed articles and a number of conference presentations. He had borrowed from economics the term “collective autonomy” to describe his position—collective autonomy, anthropologically speaking, described the process by which a number of individuals acting independently chose the same course of action in response to the same set of stimuli, thereby creating, albeit unintentionally, new biological or social conditions. For instance, the evolution of a species or the establishment of a country—each was actually created by the individual will operating parallel to other individual wills. This was not unlike evolutionary theory in general, except it attempted to suggest that the result was due to an exercise of will rather than a biological imperative. And even though the strange events of the past few days suggested that Tonio's theory (and many, many others) didn't hold water, he still wanted, somewhere in that part of him that seemed like himself, in which the individual will that he postulated had to be rooted, to believe in the accuracy of Tiffany's statement. And so he said to Tiffany, as carefully as possible, because he was again having that unnerving feeling of floating away with the snowdrifts, “Correct.”

“Mmm-hmm,” Tiffany said. “And if this you that you think of as being yourself were whisked up from one place and plopped down in another, let's say transported from New York to Istanbul, this you would still be the same person.”

“Correct,” Tonio said after a second's consideration.

“What if the medium were time instead of space?” Tiffany asked. “If you somehow found yourself existing in a different time, say a hundred years or more in the past, would you still be you in that different time?”

Tonio had risen from his seat almost without being aware of having done so. There was a coldness in his hands and his fingers trembled slightly, as if he'd suddenly shifted to a position outside the window, observing himself through the window and seeing his own reflection in it at the same time, as well as the reflection of Tiffany in the chair behind him. He could tell where Tiffany was going with this, of course, and he rejected the notion flatly because it was ridiculous, but it caused him to feel something very cold inside nonetheless. “Not possible,” he said, “and you know it. Time has no physical dimension. It's merely conceptual.”

“Istanbul is merely conceptual,” Tiffany said, his reflection casually examining something on his coat sleeve, “unless you happen to find yourself there.”

Tonio shook his head and battled a kind of dizziness that seemed to be welling up. Anger, nerves—was he ill? “That's just dumb,” he said. Tiffany grunted behind him. “I'm sorry, but it is. It's not the same thing at all.”

“But why should everything be the same?” Tiffany said. “You keep talking about things being the same.”

Across the street two figures emerged from the diner, huddled together, walking with their collars turned up along an icy trail where the sidewalk used to be. It reminded Tonio of something; he'd seen somebody else cross the street—the boy. There was this boy who kept coming back to him. “How else could they be?” he asked distractedly.

“Different,” Tiffany said. “What if things were different?”

Tonio turned to face him. “What do you mean, different?”

Tiffany shook out his pants leg and ran his thumb and index finger along his mustache, pausing slightly when his fingers came together in the middle, as if he'd found what he wanted to say in the hairs on his upper lip and was now holding it up for Tonio's inspection. “Think of how many things have to come together perfectly to make it possible for you to be yourself, not just in the past—I mean the sequence of events that concluded with your birth, the circumstances of your childhood, the eventual meeting with your wife, all that sort of thing—but also in the present, the advance of every single day, every single new day which has to start off with all the celestial bodies maintaining their usual cosmic positions, all obeying the same laws of matter and space and physics and”—Tiffany waved his hand in the air—“and, well, I don't know what all, Mr. Addison. You're the scientist here.” Tiffany chuckled.

Tonio wanted to say that he wasn't a scientist, that he was really more of a…but he couldn't recall what he was. He turned back to the window. There had been so much snow that he couldn't even see it anymore, as if there were nothing falling from the sky at all, and the world was just a silent, still tableau that included these suspended particles, tiny white absences of space, shimmering and light.

“I asked you this question before, but perhaps you'll understand better now.” Tiffany talked from somewhere far away, almost as if he were behind a curtain of snow himself. “Is it easier to imagine a world in which everything always happens in exactly the same way over and over according to the same set of scientific principles—all the way down to the uniform behavior of the tiniest, most minute particles, mind you—or is it easier to imagine a world in which there exist places—maybe just
one
place, even, only
one
”—he paused dramatically, the word hanging in the air—“where
one
small piece of cosmic machinery, one tiny piece of the world's vast mechanical puzzle, would operate differently?”

Tonio felt almost as if he were lifting out of his shoes and floating, sailing up, and he recognized the feeling and the way his vision tunneled, the same way he'd felt when he went out into the snow, when he disappeared, and as he rose out of himself and everything narrowed he still saw, momentarily, the glowing sign of the diner across the street, and it was dark outside, as if the day had passed, and he thought of how he needed to go out there, cross the street to the diner and perhaps find Dewey, who had sat there with him eating French fries. That had been just days ago. And he had seen a boy in the street.

Tiffany's disembodied voice kept going on and on. “Why are we willing,” it said, “to accept a wide range of divergence in human behavior, in the outcome of merely human events, while we admit no possibility of divergence whatsoever in the material operation of the rest of the universe? We don't even get upset about our lack of knowledge in this area. Two children are raised in the same environment in the same way by the same parents. One of them becomes an ax murderer while the other sells insurance in Cleveland. ‘Just goes to show you never can tell,' we say. ‘Anything can happen.' If anything can happen, why doesn't the principle extend beyond genetics into the other spheres?”

Tonio was drifting out there now, he was going away and away and away. He had been drifting for days, he knew, and he had been trying all that time—or during all the time that he could remember—to figure out what was wrong with him, to locate the problem
inside himself.
Was this what it felt like to become mentally ill? Was he experiencing an extreme version of one of Dewey's trances? How reassuring it would be to think, instead, that none of this had happened due to any fault of his own. “Or maybe I'm just dreaming,” he said aloud, and for once, for just a second, he expected Tiffany not to say anything. He almost expected Tiffany not to be there at all.

“What if you are?” the familiar voice said. “How would that change things? Aren't dreams a part of our lives as well? Don't dreams
happen
just the same as anything else? What are they but the loose strands of our everyday experiences?” He could hear Tiffany puffing on his pipe, the slow draw of the spittle in the stem. Tonio held his own finger out in front of him and examined it carefully and then placed it to the cold glass of the window and drew it down through the film on the pane. “Maybe you
are
in a dream place, Mr. Addison. Maybe you're in that singular place, that different place.”

He
was
in the different place, yes he was. The different place, the icy whiteness, the cold and the collapsing breath that fogged the windowpane, the vision of Dewey, the small, black outline of his beloved Dewey there in the street or in his mind's edge. He had either seen a boy who looked like Dewey or he had imagined seeing a boy who looked like Dewey, or, in some way, he had imagined another version of himself who saw a boy who looked like Dewey, or all this was an elaborate dream and Dewey was in fact right in front of him, right here if he just opened his eyes, which were closed now, but which still carried an impression, on the inside of the eyelid, of Dewey crossing the street as he had seen him do from this very window. He had rapped on the glass. The boy—Dewey or the one who looked like Dewey—had kept walking. There he walked right now, in the space behind Tonio's eyelids. If necessary, he could keep his eyes closed forever in order to keep seeing Dewey there.

“I want you to find your wife and your son and go on home,” the unfailing voice of Tiffany said. “I sincerely do, Mr. Addison.” And Tonio felt himself tip forward and fall, end over end, like the lightest flake of snow. “But I don't know anyone who ever has.”

I
t was morning again, judging by the dull gray light slowly overtaking the room. Robbie sat up gingerly in bed—his feet hurt, his fingertips hurt, his eyes hurt, his skin hurt, his teeth hurt—and pulled back the window blind just slightly to glimpse,
again,
falling snow. He was in an upstairs room, and past the snow-laden bough of a big fir tree he could see a street, or what used to be a street, and on the other side of the street a boxy white house of the sort, he guessed, that he himself was in. A good three feet of snow covered the roof of the house and there were berms of snow where even more had slid from the roof or been shoveled off. A wall of snow rose on each side of the walkway leading to the front door. The walk had been shoveled very recently, as only a light coating with a fresh set of footprints kept it from being clean. Smoke rose in steady white puffs from the chimney. Clearly the place was inhabited, but the curtains were drawn, and up and down the street, at the other similar houses, there were signs of life but no actual people. And the street itself was impassable. No plow had touched it since the storm began, and now Robbie wondered if you could even get through it with a plow. Or a monster truck. Or a tank. The only moving thing in view, other than the chimney smoke, was the snow, of which the gray sky seemed to hold an endless supply. The heartbeat of the world seemed almost to have stopped, the earth itself lulled into a state of hibernation by the silent, hypnotic whiteness all around, this invasion of the whole of visible space.

Grunting, he lay back down in the bed, and Stephanie, without appearing to wake up, curled herself against him. She reminded him of a large cat.

He'd been with her in this house for what…two days now? There had been another morning, yesterday, presumably, when he had woken up feeling like a half-thawed loaf of bread, his nerves and skin tingling and his insides frozen solid. He'd told Stephanie to take him to the hospital, and she'd laughed her soft laugh, like a cat's purr, and told him not to be ridiculous, there wasn't anything seriously wrong with him and there wasn't a hospital they could get to anyway. He fell back asleep and, sure enough, when he woke up again he felt much better, warm and buttery and soft all the way through. Stephanie made him eat some hot oatmeal and orange slices, and then they'd had a few shots of Jack Daniel's apiece and played several games of gin rummy sitting in bed. Stephanie gave him a guided tour of the house, sort of, without making him get up, explaining to him where the kitchen was downstairs and the TV and the shower and the closet with the towels in it and, here in the bedroom a drawer with clothes for him if he needed any. Then she was gone all day, most likely at work, and he slept for long stretches, getting up only to use the bathroom and find the bottle of Jack Daniel's, which, it turned out, was in plain view right next to the kitchen sink—she hadn't even tried to hide it, which he took to be a good sign. He carried the bottle back upstairs and finished off a fair portion of it before Stephanie returned from work, poured herself a glass, crawled in next to him, and sat reading by the light of a bedside lamp. He was mostly asleep, but he occasionally opened his eyes drowsily to see her there, her dark blonde hair tucked behind her ear, her black reading glasses perched on the end of her nose, her round arms and breasts, which she didn't bother to hide, above the covers.

And now here he was this morning feeling sore everywhere, and there Stephanie was still asleep beside him. She'd seemed like an angel, he could dimly recollect, when she'd opened the door for him and led him into the back room of the bar, half dead, dirty, piss-stained, to a table where he slept hunched over, shivering, until closing time. Then there had been a walk through the snowy streets, and again, here he was. He had no plans beyond the next thirty seconds (which he intended to spend studying Stephanie's closed eyes and the smooth skin of her cheeks and the downy blonde hair by her right ear, all of which made him feel calm for the moment and not so badly injured), but he knew what was
not
in the plan, and that was to set foot on any stairway or in any secret passage in this town ever again as long as he lived, or to go anywhere
near
that goddamn hotel.

So where did all this leave him? Here with Stephanie. This Stephanie, who was, insofar as it was possible these days, at this point in his life, a woman after his own heart. What wasn't to like? She had a pretty face and an even temperament. She kept a bottle of Jack Daniel's within reach, and she knew where to get pot and probably more if he pressed the issue. This house seemed to be hers alone, no roommates or, worse, a boyfriend. She appeared to be within a decade or so of his own age, in one direction or the other, and, as far as he could tell, she didn't behave as childishly as he did. He had no idea how much of Tonio's money he had left—come to think of it, he had no idea where his wallet was or when was the last time he'd seen it. Same with his cell phone. So the question was, how long would it be possible to string the current situation along before it became so ugly and painful that the long-term regret outweighed the short-term pleasures?

He'd gotten good at all the factoring. There had been a lot of Stephanies. In this case, the Stephanie in question appeared to be particularly durable and even unusually enjoyable in certain ways. As best he could tell, she was prepared—he had no idea why—to stick with him, defend him, come hell or high water, against anybody and everybody, for as long as he cared to hang around. All offers of the sort became invalid after a certain point, but this one appeared to be good for quite a while.

What was there, then, to look forward to? A long stretch of drinking and hibernation in this snowbound ghost town? He could do worse. It didn't appear that he'd have to worry about Tonio either. Although he'd lost track, what with all the drinking and the near-death experiences, it must have been three or four days since they'd arrived in town, and there was no way Tonio would stick around that long, blizzard or no blizzard. He would have paid somebody to put on snow tires and chains, and off he would have gone. True, when Robbie was lost in the hotel (or wherever he was), he'd heard Julia calling his name—that was puzzling. But he was inclined now to consider it just another strange moment in the whole strange experience, probably just his imagination, whatever
that
meant anymore, and even if it had been Julia, it was two days ago. And if Tonio had gone hunting for him while he was holed up here in bed, how hard could it have been to find him? A couple questions here, a call to the police there…Was there any way you could escape notice for four days in a place as small as this? He felt pretty sure he could have tracked himself down in half an hour, and he'd been drunk or high most of the time.

So he was going to get to know this Stephanie better. Might as well get started. He moved in closer and she curled in tighter without opening her eyes, and soon, despite the prickling sensation he felt at her initial touch, they were working together under the heavy down comforter as smoothly and pleasantly as you could hope for. She made hardly any noise but she held on to him tight, as if she were falling from someplace, and he came hard, his mouth against a wisp of hair that had strayed across her cheek, and then they loosened and he stroked her leg lightly with his fingers and she finally opened her eyes and stared at him calmly while she ran her hand across the hair on his chest, as if she were inspecting him for ticks or fleas.

“What?” she said when he laughed at her.

“Nothing,” he said. “Thank you.”

“For what?” she said, and laughed herself. “Having sex with you?” She reached over his head with her breast up against his neck and plucked a hair band from the nightstand and sat up and wound her hair into a ponytail. She did it very prettily, and in fact the more you looked at her, the way she did things, easily and unself-consciously, the prettier she got in general. She had good, healthy, sturdy country girl looks and habits, a tribute to her solid Northwest roots. Robbie imagined that she voted for Tea Party candidates and spoke fondly of Randy Weaver and Ted Kaczynski. This didn't bother him a bit. “I didn't think you were desperate enough to have to thank people for it,” she said. “And anyway, I had fun, too.”

“I just mean thank you for taking such good care of me all around,” he said. “I wasn't in very good shape when you found me.”

She shrugged and pulled her legs up to her chest so that her breasts were covered. There was something a little troubled in her expression.

“Is it okay for me to be staying here?” he asked. He tried to make it sound like he was merely being polite, but what he really wanted to know was whether the look on her face had anything to do with a husband (unlikely) or a boyfriend (not unlikely at all) who might come barging in the door at any minute.

“Yes,” she said with what seemed like real conviction. “Why shouldn't you? I want you to stay as long as you want to stay.”

He smiled and turned back to the white square of windowpane. “Careful what you ask for,” he said.

“Why?” she said. “I'm guessing you're not that dangerous.”

That was slightly insulting, since Robbie had made a pretty long career of being a danger to himself and others, but he supposed that, in this town, only physical danger mattered, and he wasn't much for ass whippings or assault and battery, he would have to admit. The danger he represented was restricted to the realms of the emotional, psychological, petty criminal, and fiscal. “And when I get ready to leave, I just pack up and go on my merry way?” he asked her.

She squinted at him. “You didn't think we were going to get
married
or anything.”

“Good,” he said. “That's good to know. I'll just stay here awhile and hang out with you and all our buddies.”

Again that look on her face, the drawing in around the corners of the eyes.

“You don't think that's a good idea?” he said.

She sat up and moved her feet over the side of the bed and reached down for a T-shirt she'd tossed on the floor. She glanced at him over her shoulder and pulled the shirt over one arm. “I just don't think I would call those guys my buddies if I were you,” she said.

“You don't think their intentions are good?”

She was standing up now, pulling the T-shirt down over her hips. “I'm not trying to be funny,” she said, tilting her head back as if she could inspect him better from a higher angle. “I am
telling
you that those people are not your friends. You have a grand total of one friend in this town. That's me.”

Her tone depressed him and made him feel tired again, even though he'd slept most of the past two days. The tone suggested problems and arguments and deceptions practiced upon him rather than by him. It also suggested that his more or less friendless condition was something you could predict based solely on his appearance, and he didn't like to look like someone who had no friends. Robbie thought of the world as his friend and was genuinely surprised sometimes when the world didn't return the feeling. Although it was true that at other times it did not surprise him one bit.

She was in the bathroom now washing her face, the door partially closed. “This place really isn't all that bad,” she called out. “But I can promise you it's different from anything you're imagining.”

“I don't know,” he said. “I've been to lots of places. I can imagine lots of things.”

“Yeah,” she said, “well,” and left it at that.

He heard water splashing in the sink and then the door closed the rest of the way and he heard the curtain rod and then the shower started up. He lay there and closed his eyes for a few minutes, remembering all the stairs that had seemingly run everywhere, forever, and how he'd felt so desperate to get out, and then he fell asleep and he was having a dream in which he sat in a completely white space with stairways ascending all around him and a crowd of people talking to him in voices that sounded like Julia's, and all the people were confused about something that seemed obvious but that he couldn't find the words to explain. It made him feel uncomfortable and frustrated to understand something that no one else did.

Then Stephanie was standing over him, putting her hair back into a ponytail. She wore a sweatshirt, jeans, and heavy boots. Dressed that way, she seemed determined to get something done. “I'm walking to the grocery store,” she said. “We need food.” She leaned over the bed and kissed him on the forehead the way he guessed somebody's mother would. “Maybe you should get up and around before I get back,” she said. “You'll probably feel better if you do.”

She opened a closet door and took out a coat that appeared to be made at least partially from the skin of some animal. He lay there gazing at her, this big but still quite attractive girl who looked like she was dressed to go mountain climbing. He liked her, he really did. He closed his eyes and then he heard her boots on the stairs and he heard the door open and the whoosh of cold air come in. He figured he would wait awhile before he took her advice. Right now he felt better than he had in quite some time.

Eventually he got up and took a shower and then checked out the drawer Stephanie had pointed him toward. In it were his clothes—
his
clothes, his
own
clothes, the ones he'd left behind that night when he snuck out of the hotel.