Travelers Rest (6 page)

T
he Dooze Man was feeling a little low this particular morning, he had to admit. First, there was no one there to call him the Dooze Man, no one to pour him a bowl of cereal, show him what clothes to wear. As it turned out, parents came in handy in all sorts of ways—for instance if his mother were here he wouldn't be wiping his nose on his sleeve and he would know where the toothpaste was.

Last night it hadn't seemed so bad. The people at the diner, Hugh and Lorraine, had been really nice. When they found out he was here all by himself and he wasn't exactly sure when his parents were coming back for him, they gave him his dessert, a piece of chocolate pie, for free. Then when he was leaving, Lorraine helped him with his coat because the zipper was stuck. He played the gumball maze eight times, not so much because the game was all that fun—it was pretty fun—or because he wanted that much gum—he did want quite a bit of gum—but because the idea of going back across the street to the dark hotel—when he looked out the window of the diner, he couldn't see a light on anywhere—was kind of depressing and scary.

The interesting thing for the Dooze Man to consider, here in the cold hard light of morning, was that he hadn't really even thought too much last night about what it all
meant,
he just had this vague idea, like, get some food, come back and go to sleep. He had fallen asleep on the couch watching the weird patterns on the TV, and he had dreamed of his dad and his mom coming back during the night, waking him up there on the couch and telling him to be quiet and go to his own bed,
Shhh, don't wake Dewey,
which didn't make any sense, of course, because Dewey was himself.

But now it was the next day and they still weren't here, no Dad, no Mom, no Uncle Robbie, so this whole experience had now gone beyond being strange and was getting closer to the territory that his dad would refer to as “unique.” Not many things were unique—it was an even more restricted category than “special,” which was a word his dad also used a lot, and which was related to the scientific word “species,” but which in everyday usage meant something that gave something a specific or particular designation apart from other less distinct designations. Certainly this occasion was special, this being abandoned here in this town where he knew no one, where everyone was a stranger, where he had no way to communicate with anyone he knew, his teachers, his grandparents, his friends (and in fact it was difficult to find
anyone
to communicate with here—where
was
that guy who owned the hotel, for instance?), and where he had no place to stay other than this very cold and very lonely and pretty creepy hotel, and nobody to make him meals other than Hugh and Lorraine at the diner across the street, and not a whole lot of money, by Dewey's reckoning, with which to pay them to keep cooking for him. Whether the situation was
unique,
meaning whether it had never happened before in the history of the world and would likely never happen again, remained to be seen. It was definitely unique to the Dooze Man's experience, he could say that much for sure.

He sat at the foot of the bed wearing his coat and his warm hat and his boots, his hands folded in his lap, as if he were waiting patiently for someone or something. He had grown so used to the snow now, the sight of the flakes falling one by one, starting from the upper-left-hand corner of the window and twirling softly downward toward the right, or, if the wind was gusting, blowing almost straight across, or, at times, even upward in a gravity-defying dance, that it would only feel worth thinking anything about if he were to turn toward the window and
not
see snow, not in the air, not on the buildings, not in the street, not on the hills, not in the neon light of the diner sign. A snow town, a town of snow, of snow women and snow men.

Dewey had been told various things about what to do in emergency situations, and, since he was peculiarly smart and even moderately diligent, he had listened to and understood and now even remembered several of these things: Never go anywhere with strangers, even if they say your mother and father told you to. When lost, go to the last place you were before you got separated. Apply vinegar to jellyfish stings. Do not touch electrical wiring. Always wash your hands before you eat. Not many of these rules seemed to apply, except maybe the one about going to the last place before you were separated, but he was
doing
that, right
now,
and it wasn't
helping.
None of the usual things seemed to work in this place. For instance, his mother's cell phone. When he first found it, he had been relieved to see that it was still charged, and then when he had tried to use it, there was the weird rainbow pattern, and then nothing. Like, nothing. No voice mail, no texts, not even any kind of message telling him that he had no service here. By the time he had woken up this morning, the thing was completely, totally,
irrefutably
(another of his father's favorite words) dead. So he had literally been cut off from every single thing he'd ever been used to having pretty much every day of his entire life.

But overall the Dooze Man thought he was doing pretty well, and that when this whole thing had been cleared up somehow, he was going to be getting some pretty serious rewards not only of the guilt-trip variety but also due to his extreme levels of maturity and responsibility. There had been only a few moments, a few fleeting moments at intervals through the night, when he had really been scared…moments when he thought his parents might have abandoned him, but then he would remember all the truly nice things his mother did for him—basically fix him snacks whenever he wanted, unless it was right before dinner, and also how she would practically stop whatever she was doing almost anytime to give him a ride to one of his friends' houses, or if there was a certain movie he wanted to see she would take him to it, whereas his dad would say, “Dooze, can't you wait until that comes out on Netflix?” And then there was his dad, of course, and, well, he couldn't get his dad to abandon him for five seconds if he paid him to. So it couldn't be that.

And he didn't think they'd wandered off into the woods and frozen to death. And he didn't think they'd been in a car wreck. And he didn't think they'd been kidnapped. And he didn't think they'd been arrested.

He still thought it had something to do with Uncle Robbie, and it was unfortunate, Dewey thought, that at ten years old you didn't have enough experience of the world to determine how a person like Uncle Robbie, a degenerate if you agreed with the use of the term that you most certainly
did
understand and which you'd heard tossed around, could cause the disappearance of two adult human beings who were specifically enlisted in the ongoing effort to offer him assistance. Could Uncle Robbie have gotten himself arrested—Dewey knew he'd done that a couple of times before—in such a way that his parents had been detained as witnesses? And not allowed to contact their one and only son?

His father had this saying he used on certain occasions, like when the chair of the anthropology department did something he didn't like, or when the guy at the car repair place explained something to him as if he were a child, or almost anytime he had to talk on the phone: “Human beings are easier to like in theory than in fact.” It was just the opposite with Uncle Robbie as far as Dewey was concerned—he was much easier to like in fact than in theory. When he was sitting with you in the backseat showing you card tricks, or making you laugh in a restaurant until you shot Coke out of your nose, he was a pretty great guy. But when you had to sit around and think about how much trouble he was always causing for pretty much everyone in the entire universe who ever talked to him or had anything to do with him, then not so much.

If there was one thing Dewey knew, or at least suspected strongly, it was that he wasn't going to learn his parents' whereabouts by staying in this hotel room. And he did like the diner across the street, and he did
especially
like the hash browns and the biscuits and gravy, which he could order at the same time if his parents weren't there. Which was what you called a small consolation.

So to the diner he would go, and he would keep acting like everything was normal. At least it was really quiet here, which when you thought about it actually
was
kind of more normal than the way things were at home. He closed his eyes and pictured his mother frantically running around from this place to that place, this project to that one, one errand to another, so that she was always flying in and out of the bathroom, flashing through the kitchen or the living room with a jangle of keys, zipping up and down the driveway, Dewey never knowing from one minute to the next whether he would be whisked along or no, and his father sometimes there in the house giving him a hug or a pat on the back and asking him all these goofy questions, and then the next thing you knew you'd turn around to answer him and Mom would say, “He's off to Arizona,” or “He flew out this morning to Saskatchewan.”

At the diner he asked Hugh and Lorraine where to find the police station and they told him there wasn't one and then they glanced at each other. They didn't seem too surprised to find him alone again. In the Dooze Man's experience, adults were generally more helpful, or at least they thought they were, or at least they tried to make it appear that way. Hugh and Lorraine just looked at each other and Lorraine frowned and narrowed her eyes and shook her head a little. But they did give him quarters for the gumball maze. Dewey put the quarters in and stared out the window, wondering how many more hours of daylight before it started to get dark again.

H
e sat thoughtfully stirring a cup of tea, the same thing he'd been doing off and on for several minutes without actually drinking any. Tea held little interest for him. Head lowered, he took a guarded look at “Tiffany, A., Tiffany, initial A,” as the hotel owner, who sat in an armchair to his left, wanted to be called. He could have passed for a character from a Zola novel, or one of Cézanne's card-playing peasants, a human being presented in that post-Darwinian wave when the emphasis was all on the animalistic properties, the dangling arms, the large hands and feet, the scraping knuckles, the cranial asymmetry. Tonio shared a few of those characteristics himself—“You're so
gangly,
” his mother always told him, disapprovingly, that furrow in her brow—but the effect with him was smoothed by a rather babyish face, soft round cheeks, a mildly pug nose.

“Amenities can make all the difference,” this Tiffany, the hotel owner, said. “For instance, the lighted fire. Our guests expect luxury, and rightfully so, but they're always surprised when they see that our lobby, while built on a grand scale, is at the same time quite cheerful.” His large hands were as rough as bark, the fingers thick and long like cigars, with a heavy silver ring on his left index finger, and yet he held his teacup delicately, the pinkie extended. He was long and gaunt and a little stooped in the shoulders, concave in the chest, and today he wore a dark blazer over a colorful wool sweater of the sort favored by Tonio's hipster students and somewhat threadbare corduroy pants. His hair was a shaggy brown mass tinged with gray around the ears, and his face, or what could be seen of it through his bushy mustache, was absolutely bland and nondescript except for a large, crooked nose that made him resemble both a boxer and a Frenchman. His voice had a strangely nasal twang that seemed at once overarticulated and mumbled. He was, Tonio decided, unlikely, in all respects.

“The fire is nice,” Tonio said. “Thank you for the tea.”

He had been sitting on this sofa in the lobby for ten minutes, he estimated, and he was busily keeping it a secret from the hotel owner that he had no clear idea how he'd gotten here or what he'd been doing prior to sitting on the sofa. He was certain now that this was the place he'd read about, an article attempting to verify a string of disappearances, a mystery at the root of some Old West town's foundations, so unscientific that he had been offended by its mere presence in the journal, one to which he himself had submitted articles unsuccessfully on several occasions. But it was more than that, more than the journal article, and more than what he'd learned from Mr. A. Tiffany in the few minutes he'd been sitting here, trying to manipulate the teacup with his shaking hand: that construction on the hotel had been completed in 1886 under the supervision of another A. Tiffany, Alfred Tiffany, whom this newer Tiffany mentioned with a boastful air; that it had burned nearly to the ground soon afterward and had then been restored; that it had originally contained 105 rooms, a four-star restaurant (according to a reviewer from a paper in San Francisco), a saloon, a Turkish bath, and a barbershop; that it was the first hotel in the territory to feature gas lighting in all the rooms; that at the time the town of Good Night had a much larger population, more than two thousand inhabitants; and that this hotel, as Tiffany pointed out with pride, in fact formed the centerpiece of a mining town that was once the largest in the western states. It was more than any of that—it was a growing awareness that he knew these things already, that he knew this place himself, maybe through some dim memory of early childhood. And it was that time somehow seemed to have disappeared, that the hours had begun to slip away without his noticing. He was terrified.

Mr. A. Tiffany smiled crookedly and placed his big, gnarled hands on his knees. “Mr. Addison,” he said, “I'm very glad you'll stay another night. Honestly, it can get rather lonely.”

Tonio didn't say anything. He was wondering why it was nearly dark outside and he was trying to recall having spoken to the owner earlier about the possibility of extending their stay, and he seemed to remember being outside in the snow, even though he was perfectly dry and warm now, lingering over a cup of tea. He had been outside in the snow on a narrow street and there was a woman, wasn't there, a woman he'd known before, and there was a door she'd come out of and he'd tried to enter, and most of all now he wanted to know why Dewey wasn't in the lobby and how long ago he'd left Dewey here and whether Dewey was upstairs safe in the room with Julia, and he also wanted to know what was wrong with him and why he didn't know all these things.

“I'm sorry,” he said to Tiffany, and he held his hand open with the tip of his thumb placed lightly against his forehead and he shook his head slowly from side to side.

The hotel owner chuckled, low and throaty. He sounded foreign somehow, as if he belonged somewhere else. “You've had a bit of a scare, haven't you?” he said. “That's okay. You're okay.”

Tonio tapped his thumb against his forehead. “Am I?” he said. “Because, well…”

Tiffany's smiling face hovered there, the strangely crooked nose pointing toward a horseshoe that decorated the fireplace mantel. It occurred to Tonio that he'd somehow been gone long enough for the workers to complete the renovations in the lobby, the ladders and buckets and sawhorses all gone, electrical work all done, paint all dry, furnishings all arranged, fire in the fireplace. He'd thought the job would take weeks.

The owner leaned in to Tonio and whispered confidentially. “Naturally, you'll want to go see for yourself how things are upstairs.” He settled back and then abruptly leaned in again. “Let me ask you, though, before you begin…”

But Tonio was already halfway up the first flight of stairs. He had been walking or running endlessly all day, it seemed, and his breathing was shallow and his head felt light, and when he reached the second-floor landing, he was suddenly so tired that only the most outsize act of will kept him from curling up in the corner right there and going to sleep. He went on to the room instead, and he stumbled in, and found nothing. A light slanted into the room from the big bay windows but he couldn't tell if it was day or night, and there was nothing but stillness, although a certain animal feeling lingered in the air. The suitcases were gone. He remembered the spot where the big one had lain on the bed that morning, with all of Dewey's socks tumbling out. The closet was empty, but so narrowly altered by time that he could almost see Julia's things, her blouses and skirts and cold-weather sweaters, the way they had hung there this morning. He thought of going into the closet and reaching at the empty air where his wife's clothes had been, as if he were a grieving husband in a movie. But he didn't. It wasn't logical that anything bad had happened. Maybe they had moved into a different suite. It was odd, though—everything in the room looked perfectly new, and in fact so undisturbed that you would have guessed no one had stayed here in a long time. He experienced a brief moment of duality, as if he were standing, at the same time, in both this bare room and the same room as it had been this morning, before he'd gone out into the snow. He closed his eyes and saw Julia seated on the bed, Dewey looking out the window, and he opened his eyes to the empty room again. He scanned it one last time, with his glasses on, but nothing seemed any clearer, so he put the glasses away and went wearily back down the stairs.

Tiffany sat there in his chair, waiting for Tonio contentedly, as if he had never left. Tonio lowered himself onto the sofa and said, as carefully as he could, “Do you know where my wife and my son are?”

“Well,” Tiffany said, adjusting his pants leg. “Well, no. Not exactly. I haven't seen your wife and son since yesterday evening. And you have not seen them. And you've looked in the room and you've found they aren't there. But I'm going to suggest to you that no one has vacated the room. If anything, the room has vacated them. The room has
moved,
Mr. Addison. In your perception. For you.”

Not once in his entire life had Tonio wondered, while he was awake, if he were in fact dreaming. Until this point he would have doubted that any waking person, ever, had
actually
confused the two states—he understood claims to the contrary to be simply a manner of speaking. But the past day had all the qualities of a dream—first of all the presence of Robbie and the trouble he always represented, then the driving, then the blinding snowstorm, then how the blinding snowstorm wouldn't
stop,
how it
had no end,
how even now, there it was,
snow,
still falling out the window, and the strange hotel that had seemed to transform itself, the disappearance of the paint cans and the drop cloths and the sawhorses and the planks and the appearance of the overstuffed chairs and the sofas and the fireplace, and before that the walk in the snow down the long, lonely alley and the vision of the strange and yet familiar woman, the sense of something forgotten, missing, displaced, and then his own displacement, and the disappearance of Dewey, the disappearance of Julia, and now this odd conversation while he looked out the window at the falling snow, that
snow…
it couldn't be real. But it was. You could mistake a dream for reality, but not the other way around.

“You're saying something is wrong with me,” Tonio said quietly. “Something wrong with me physically, or in my mind, my perception of things. You're right. I can feel it. I feel strange.” He turned to Tiffany, who now leaned so far back in his chair that he seemed to have tipped already, his chin pointing at Tonio where his nose should have been. “You're saying that because of whatever's wrong with me I couldn't find my way to the right room.”

“No, I'm saying the room is no longer where you left it. Or vice versa, really.”

Tonio put his hands in his pockets and squeezed his fists tight, tried to make sure his blood was pumping, that he was awake and hearing this. “That's…” he said. “That's…” He discovered he was almost crying.

Tiffany rubbed his mustache. He shook his head rather sadly. “Mr. Addison,” he said. “Is it harder to imagine that certain places in the world”—he looked down at his hands—“are different from other places, or that all places are the same?”

“I'll ask you again,” Tonio said. His breath came up short in his throat, he could feel his heart beating there. “Do you know where my wife and my son are?”

Tiffany sipped his tea. He put a finger in the air, then withdrew it, and rested his hand on his knee. “Not exactly.”

“That's what I thought,” Tonio said, and he walked to the door and opened it and went back out into the snow.

He started off walking in the opposite direction from the hotel this time, because he had a vague notion that the car was parked that way. It was essential to find the car, make sure it was still there and still running properly, capable of getting them the hell out of here at the first available opportunity. He was sure he had started off in the opposite direction, but when he turned the corner everything began to feel familiar—the same alleyway with the same snow flying down, the same brick walls of the same two-story buildings, the same tunneled effect to the walls and to his vision.

Soon it was just the same as it had been before, staggering along in the cold, the snow, half petrified, nobody in sight, not anywhere. There was a frozen moment, a kind of existential breakdown, an acquiescence to biological commands—seek warmth, go to sleep. He had hoped to avoid this sort of thinking in this sort of situation, when the time came, because dying was always, he imagined, under any circumstances, like this, in one form or another. Here he was out in the snow, slipping along in his jogging shoes, his arms spread to keep from falling, and he desperately regretted leaving the lobby and his cup of tea. “Dewey! Dewey! Dewey!” he yelled. He cupped his icy hands to his mouth—“Help!”—and then he fell. He lay on his back watching the snow come down, feeling it land on his cheeks, his eyelashes, and it came to him suddenly—the
woman,
the
door
—and he leaned up on one elbow and peered through the snow, and sure enough there the door was, no woman, but the door. There was the door, but he knew what had happened the last time he tried to go in there, that was when he'd lost track, somehow lost track of something—the time, the place, himself—and hadn't been able to get it back again.

But what else was there to do now? He rolled over onto his hands and his knees, then stood rather gingerly and straightened himself, and he went to the door. This time he was aware enough of what had happened before that he managed, as the door yielded to his weight, to keep a little better hold of himself inside his own head, where things were becoming soft and sleepy again, and white, maybe not white like snow so much as absent, blank, void, but also peaceful, and there was just the bare edge of panic that held him to his usual world, asking him where was Dewey, what was happening here, and then without any particular sensation of walking, in fact he was fairly certain that he was not in any way using his feet for the purpose of transportation, he found himself moving through a tight space, a vein, something that worked with a kind of capillary action, and time flowed the way it did in dreams, he saw Julia and Dewey each in the hotel, in their room, but not together, and there were people who seemed to have been here long ago, and there was a place with trees and water and something was burning—he was often in this place in his dreams—and his body felt as if he'd slept on it, like an arm that has lost circulation, and then his eyes opened, and there he was again in the hotel lobby in front of the fireplace. Next to him sat a woman he recognized, although he couldn't recall her name, and looking down he saw that she wore a delicate silver shoe.