Travelers Rest (24 page)

T
hings were even worse than he would have guessed. If this guy Hugh, who turned out to be the very brother recently introduced in Stephanie's story, so that it was as if he had sprung to life suddenly from the pages of a fairy tale (he would be the troll or ogre), could be believed, and Robbie didn't know why he couldn't be, his one and only nephew, Dewey, had been mysteriously abandoned at the hotel, where he had spent several days sleeping in a cold room by himself and eating cheeseburgers, French fries, and chocolate pie in the diner across the street.

Officially, on behalf of his absent brother and semi-absent sister-in-law (in what way did this news explain or not explain their hazy nocturnal encounter?), he was angry beyond words at the poor judgment reportedly exercised by Hugh and one Lorraine, two adults of roughly the same age as Robbie himself who had done such a shockingly poor job of attending to the needs of a lost and frightened child that he felt somewhat justified in thinking that he might have done better himself. At the same time, he could very well have done a lot worse, and if he decided to let his frustrations boil over into a self-righteous diatribe directed at Hugh, he would no doubt open himself up to a lot of questions, such as where the fuck were you while all this was going on and why don't you take care of your goddamn nephew yourself. Besides, Hugh seemed like a nice guy, though surprisingly timid and nervous for a man of his size. Stephanie was clearly the dominant sibling.

They were sitting at the kitchen table. Stephanie was dressed now and ready to go. She seemed prepared to tackle large problems. Hugh looked more like Robbie himself did, probably—tired and overwhelmed.

“Well, where the hell is he now, Hugh?” Stephanie was asking. This seemed to be the most pertinent question of the session thus far.

Hugh took off his hat and revealed a sweaty, matted-down mess of stubbly, thinning hair. His mouth was open in the manner of confused people or large animals masticating something. “That's the thing,” he said. “We don't know. He's got me and Lorraine scared shitless. We told him to come stay with us and he went to get his things, and I saw him once through the window, and then he disappeared.”

Everything was quiet in the kitchen. Robbie leaned his chair back and forth on two legs and listened to it squeak. He was feeling shittier by the minute.

“So,” Stephanie said to Hugh, coaxing him along. “You
heard
something,
saw
something?”

Hugh stared down at his hands and one of them rose as if it had been summoned. He ran it over his mostly bald head and then wiped it on his pants leg. “Yeah,” he said, not looking up at Stephanie. His chin trembled. For the first time, Robbie felt that something really bad might have happened. His nephew, his only brother's son. Dewey. The Dooze Man, who loved card games and magic tricks.

Stephanie stood up and walked, shoulders slumped, to the sink. Definitely not nice to see her that way, definitely not a good sensation. Robbie really liked the vigorous, peppy Stephanie a lot all of a sudden.

“I told him what could happen,” Hugh said. “I told him about souvenirs.”

Stephanie stood there looking into the sink. “There probably wasn't anything you could do,” she said. She glanced over at Robbie. “Anything you
can
do,” she added in a softer, apologetic tone.

“We've got to try, though, Steph,” Hugh said. “We
have
to. If you—” He dug his top teeth into his bottom lip. “I mean if you could see this kid,” he said, and he rubbed his knees with his big hands.

All right, that was enough. Enough already. “Let's just back up a second here,” Robbie said. “Let's just back the fuck up.”

Hugh and Stephanie were quiet.

“First off,” he said, and he was breathing harder than he liked to, feeling that tightness in his chest that never augured good things, “what do you mean did he
hear
things, did he
see
things…
What
things?”

Stephanie pulled her arms tight across herself and looked up at the ceiling. “When someone”—she nodded, as if she was assuring herself that she was getting things right, saying the right thing—“disappears, there's a certain noise. It's kind of like your ears popping. And you sometimes see a flash. Sometimes it's big, like an explosion, sometimes not so much. It's like letting the pressure off.”

Keeping his cool here, not going ballistic. “And this ‘souvenir' thing?” Robbie asked. Neither of them looked at him. “What the fuck is this ‘souvenir' thing?”

“The ‘souvenir thing,'” Hugh said in a soft voice, “is us. We're the ‘souvenir thing.'”

In Stephanie's story, the little girl and the little boy had been left in the fucked-up little town. They had lived there forever after. Robbie was at a loss to put his feelings about this into words, the deeply backward way of this place, the level to which people had sunk here. It was as if he'd been admitted into a circle of the damned where the people were all like him.

Stephanie came over closer to Robbie but she didn't touch him or try to console him. “I've been trying to explain to you,” she said.

He looked at Hugh sitting there pathetically and then he looked out at the world of snow—the snowy sky, the snowy streets—with a feeling that it would never, ever end. “Fuck everybody in this place,” he said.

You would have thought that might get a rise out of Hugh, but it didn't. The guy just seemed too hurt and beat down.

Stephanie stood over him, though, and he could see her hands shaking. “You asshole,” she said. “Who the fuck are you? Souvenirs or no souvenirs, people who were born here or not—we're all the same, none of us have anything, really. We're all jealous of people like you. That's why all of those guys hate you. We've got no connection to the world. We're just some shitty little forgotten place off the interstate.”

Much of this speech was lost on Robbie. It had occurred to him that he didn't know where his brother was, that his brother was actually gone. More than anything that had happened, this seemed impossible. Where was Tonio to fix this mess? Did he,
Robbie,
really have to do this himself? Somehow rescue Julia and Dewey, do it in his brother's name? Had these local fuckers kidnapped his brother, killed his brother? The only thing he knew anymore was that he believed Stephanie, believed whatever she told him, or at least believed in his own interpretation of it. It was probably not a good thing, was it, how much he depended on other people—always some other person to keep things straight, tell him when to go to work, what was his court date.

He made Stephanie sit down in one of the kitchen chairs, drew her up next to him. “Tell me,” he said. “I'll listen.”

She looked like she wanted to slap him. It was a look he'd seen plenty of times before, and it was sometimes followed by an actual slap, sometimes not. He braced himself. But then the tightness around her eyes faded, and she stared down into her lap and frowned and picked at a stray thread on her sweater sleeve.

Then she looked back up at him. “Really?” she said. She glanced over at Hugh. “You really want to hear about this place? Because I've thought about how to describe it for a long time.”

“Yeah,” he said, and nodded. “Please.”

Hugh fidgeted in his seat. “Is this going to be the mirror thing?” he said.

Stephanie leaned forward and propped her elbows on her knees, then leaned back and put a strand of hair behind one ear, then leaned in again. Hugh scraped his chair across the floor and got up and went over to the refrigerator.

“Okay,” Stephanie said, “first of all, think of a place where everything is opposite. Everything that's alive is dead, and everything that's dead is alive. The past is the future, and the future is the past. Dreams are reality, and—”

“Okay,” Robbie said, “I get it.”

“All right,” Stephanie said, “now think of a place where everything is its opposite but also still itself at the same time. Both things at once.”

“Not getting that one,” Robbie said.

“The best way I can describe this place: if you took two mirrors and placed them, like, one centimeter apart, facing each other.” She held her hands out in front of her, fingertips vibrating, not quite touching. Hugh rummaged in the refrigerator door and pulled out a bag of shredded cheese. “The mirrors would be exactly the same. They would both be themselves, but the image in them would be the image of the opposite mirror. Which would also be each mirror's own image. If you could
see
into them, you wouldn't be able to tell the difference one from the other, right? They would show what was opposite but they would be the same thing—but you can't see into them because they're too close.”

“Okay,” Robbie said.

Stephanie leaned in further, still holding her hands close together but not touching. “Now think if the space between the mirrors, that one centimeter of light, was the line between the two opposite things that were also exactly the same—the present between the past and the future, or the moment just between waking and dreaming, or whatever. And if you shove them just a
little bit
closer, so that they touch, everything disappears. There's nothing at all.” She clapped her hands softly together in front of her, palm to palm, fingertips to fingertips.

Hugh dug his fingers into the bag and put a few shreds of cheese in his mouth and put the bag back in the refrigerator door. “You should sell tickets,” he said.

“Shut up,” Stephanie said. “Now imagine that you're in between the mirrors when the space starts to close.” Her hair had fallen into her eyes and she shook her head trying to get it back in place, still not moving her fingers. “Everything is its opposite but everything is the same, no matter which way you turn, all around you.” Her voice lowered to an emphatic whisper. “Then the mirrors press together—it feels like there's no air—there's a sound of pressure building and releasing—and
poof!
You're gone.”

The people who were drawn here, Stephanie went on, were people who lived in the space between the mirrors—not alive or dead, not awake and not dreaming, not in the past or in the future, but in this little sliver of light between all these things.

“News flash,” Hugh said, sitting back down in his chair. “It's called the present. The space between the future and the past.”

“I
know
that.” Stephanie stared at Hugh reproachfully. “But with the people I'm talking about the present is razor thin. That's exactly my
point.
”

She thought it was something deep inside a person's consciousness, she said, something that could only be reached by going into the past, or even someone else's past. Maybe some of the people drawn here were the descendants of other people who came here or they were the same people thrown back in time or they were people who somehow lived the same lives over and over again, drifting in and out of memories. But they came here because there was something they had to see, something they had to do, and this was the only place it could happen. She felt it herself, this deep pull, because she'd gone into the hotel so often that she'd begun to collect her mother's dreams and memories. And in turn, she might pass it along to a daughter, a son, she might unintentionally be planting the seeds, which was why she had never wanted to have children, which was why almost none of the souvenirs did. Because where did people go when the space between the mirrors closed?

On the table in front of Robbie lay the picture Stephanie had found in his sock drawer at the hotel, the little girl and the little boy seated on the sofa, smiling hopefully into their mother's camera. Their mother had disappeared that very day. Now the boy and girl sat across from him, and the girl was trying to tell him that his own family, as much as they could be called his family, as much as anyone could be called his family, had disappeared the same way. All this talk about noises and vanishings and mirrors and souvenirs—the people here were like a strange cult, a stunted, cut-off remnant of some primitive tribe existing in this lost pocket in the mountains. But this was where he was—these were the people he had to deal with. And, taking Stephanie's hand in his, looking down at her chipped fingernail polish, he could say in all honesty that she was one of the few people he'd had actual feelings for in years.

“All right,” he said to her. “So what do I do?”

Stephanie and Hugh looked at each other but didn't say anything.

“Call the police, right?” Robbie suggested rather helpfully, he thought. “Hand me the phone,” he said to Stephanie. “I'll call the police.”

Stephanie and Hugh still didn't say anything.

“You're kidding, right? You're fucking with me.”

Hugh cleared his throat. “Have you seen a phone since you've been here? You heard a phone ring?”

“Wow,” Robbie said. He went over to the kitchen window. The weather report today seemed to call for snow. Snow in drifts, snow in blankets, snow in swirling clouds. An infinite supply of snow falling from the sky, snow, snow, and snow. A beautiful, mesmerizing, numbing white trap, a straitjacket fitted on him from the sky. And now Stephanie was saying it was all just a dream? Was he going to have to convince himself that he never actually saw Julia in the hotel? Could you seriously think about it—Julia was dead somehow, and he had been visited by her ghost? Where was all this leading? Tonio had never left the hotel? Or he had left the hotel, but nobody knew where he was? How was that possible when Tonio hovered over Dewey so incessantly? And now, after having been there all alone, Dewey was gone, too? That was the one that hurt the most—that Dewey would have relied on two strangers because he thought his worthless uncle Robbie skipped town. That was a tough one. The Doozer. If there was one thing he
had
to do here, it was find the Dooze Man.