Travelers Rest (9 page)

It was funny that he'd dreamed about Julia, freezing to death here on the stairs. He supposed his subconscious was still caught up in the matter—how his brother had ever married her. As far as Robbie was concerned, every sexual relationship (and every friendship as far as that went) contained the possibility of a certain finite amount of pleasure, a prescription for which there was no refill, so that you had two choices, the same way you did with drugs—you could spread out the pleasure in very small doses over a long period of time, which as far as he could see was the only way it would ever be possible to make a marriage work, or you could go for it all in one big glorious bang. He and Tonio had an example of the first approach in their own parents, who had never used up any great portion of their allotted joy at any point in their forty-odd-year run.

It had always seemed to Robbie that Julia behaved as if she was in the second kind of relationship, while Tonio behaved as if he was in the first. That is, while what Julia seemed to feel for his brother might better be called warmth than passion, it definitely appeared to have an expiration date. Something about her suggested exhaustion, maybe as a result of neglect on Tonio's part, neglect of the myriad small attentions she paid him, the collection of the various articles of clothing Tonio carelessly laid around the house, the way she took his toast out of the toaster oven for him (because Tonio never remembered, the toast vanishing into thin air as far as he was concerned, resurrected only as a curious burned smell a few minutes later). Clearly there was something about Tonio that she admired, but her attentions toward him seemed like a means of getting to something else. And Robbie wasn't sure how he had intuited (although he often seemed to intuit this sort of thing, which sometimes made him suspect something that certainly no one else in his family had ever suspected, namely that, of the two brothers, he was actually the smarter one) that something deeper underlay Julia's attachments, that she saw her marriage and everything else in the world as the pieces of an intricately designed puzzle that she had only her allotted span of years to assemble. She was constantly alert, as if she sensed some disturbance within the visual or auditory or tactile dimension currently on display to everyone else, and never fully believed in what appeared on the surface, was always attuned to something else that might be occurring.

So this was another strange aspect of the partnership—why, if Julia was the kind of person who believed it was possible to solve life's deepest mysteries, had she tied herself to Tonio when the major thrust of Tonio's life, as far as Robbie could see, had been going about the intellectual and even physical business (the long bony hands busily fondling the bony skulls, the big hollow eyes examining the cast of a prehistoric femur) of demonstrating that people (at least people other than himself) had never solved
anything,
explaining to Robbie when he was age thirteen or so, as briefly as possible in response to Robbie's question on the subject, that cultural anthropology was the study of exactly where and when civilization had turned to shit?

A cat appeared. Right there. A
cat.
In the stairwell where he was sitting. It sashayed on up to him, a long-haired cat with multicolored markings, tan and black and white. It had a red collar with a silver tag that made a tinkling sound. This astonishing cat rubbed against Robbie's leg, but when his hand went out to it, it skittered away and approached a door—a
door,
not twenty feet away—and scratched to be let in. Amazingly, the door opened from the other side, soundlessly, and the cat disappeared.

It seemed like a good idea to try this door. His legs didn't want to work right away, but once he got his body tilted over to the side he was able to fold his legs up and get his feet under him a little bit and use the wall to help push up to a standing position. Then he staggered forward, arms outstretched, until he arrived at the door and commenced pounding.

Almost immediately the door swung open, and the closest thing Robbie had ever experienced to the feeling of the door opening was a dream he often had as a child of standing in some high place, in the sunshine, the background unfamiliar. Below him was a long valley, a river cutting across it, the valley green and meadow-like, fading away toward tall, purplish mountains in the distance—always some variation of this scene. He stepped forward and his stomach plunged when he found there was no ground under him. Then the deathward dropping, the momentary panic, and it always seemed to him an act of sheer will on his part to avoid his fate and begin flying, soaring along the cliff wall, peering down into the valley where his shadow raced beneath him. How many different ways he had found to live out this childhood dream—they were almost beyond number.

T
he Dooze Man was back in his favorite booth, the same one he'd been in every day, eating pretty much the same food—French fries, always, and a burger or a sandwich, this time a sandwich, a steak sandwich to be precise. He liked this booth because it was where he'd sat with his dad before he disappeared forever, as Dewey was starting to see it, because if his dad was ever going to show up again why hadn't he already shown up again. When people were gone, Dewey decided, they were usually gone for good, like children on the news, taken away by strangers in cars or locked away in basements or closets, their bones found years later in the woods. Or criminals who had done something terribly wrong—was his father one of these? Changing their identities and wearing fake beards, flying to remote places like Borneo, every once in a while caught at the airport on the way out of town. Mom, Dad, and Uncle Robbie dressed up like tourists, wearing flowered shirts and floppy hats and sunglasses with the price tags still on the frames, lying on a beach somewhere drinking bright red drinks in tall glasses, discussing how soon it might be safe to send Dewey a postcard.
Sorry we left,
he could read in his mother's jagged handwriting (she had shockingly bad penmanship),
but Dad stole an old pile of bones that was worth a bazillion bucks, and we're living in a hut in Peru
.

More likely they were all dead in a ditch. The crazy hotel owner, the skinny evil dude with the big nose, had wasted them all one by one, first Uncle Robbie, then his dad, and then his mom, taken them in the back room and tortured them and cooked them in the massive oven. But that wasn't true. That sounded like a fairy tale, the early part of one, before the hero or the handsome prince came, when everything was horrible and wrong. The truth was going to be even scarier and more real. There was the illusion of his mother walking around that hotel room and sitting on the bed. There was the trail of dead souls, as Dewey had come to think of them, passing in the greenish light of the TV.

Lorraine came over to the table. She was a large, friendly person—not fat, just large—and one day she wore T-shirts and jeans and boots as if she were a man and the next day she would show up in a nice dress and lots of makeup. She said things like what she said right now: “Did you get enough to eat, babycakes? Are you doing okay, angel, you poor thing?”

They had taught him what to say, Hugh and Lorraine, so that he didn't have to pay any money. “Yes, thanks. Can you put it on my tab?” And Lorraine laughed real loud—“cackled” might be the exact word—and Hugh chuckled over at the grill. This thing about the tab really seemed to make their day. Actually, he seemed to make their day in general, if you judged by how happy they always were just to see him come in, how they practically fell all over themselves making sure he had everything he could possibly want or need. It made him wonder why, given the fact that they seemed to understand his situation more or less, they hadn't invited him home. Did they live in a trailer? Like one of those little ones you could hitch on the back of a truck? That would be perfectly fine. He had almost blurted it out a couple of times—
Get me out of here!
—but if there was one thing his mother hated, it was people who invited themselves. And even though these weren't exactly normal circumstances, he couldn't quite bring himself to do it. Besides, while it seemed more and more unlikely, what if his mom and dad came back for him at the hotel and he wasn't there?

He turned his gaze across the street. Out the window was the same thing he saw every time, the snow. The snow, the snow, the snow, the snow, the snow, the snow, the snow. And the hotel room on the third floor where every once in a while his mother's shadow passed behind the curtain, a thrilling, sad mirage. “Do you see her?” he'd asked Lorraine once.

“Who?” she said, looking up while she held his plate in her hand.

“The woman in the window,” he said. “My mother.”

Lorraine set the plate down, craning her neck. “There's nobody in the window, babycakes,” she said. She shook her head and pursed her lips and glanced at Hugh, who stayed bent over the grill.

Sometimes Dewey could hear them talking about him in the kitchen, back through the rectangular window. It was like the dialogue in a movie.

It was like a
bad
movie where nothing ever happened.

He rose wearily from the booth and shuffled past the counter and Hugh gave him a quarter for a gumball, like he always did. What was the point of that? Dewey's whole family was missing. How was a gumball supposed to help? He went ahead anyway and put the quarter in, and yes, he noticed for the one millionth time now that the maze contained a reproduction of the stairway in the hotel, was in fact probably an exact replica of the whole layout of the town. But so what? What did that prove? And what did it matter if out the window now, past all the falling snow, he could see a man who resembled his father, only with a mustache, standing in the window of that very same room in which Dewey had encountered his mother? He'd seen the same thing before.

“How you doing, big guy?” Hugh said from behind the register.

His dad was the only adult he'd ever really understood how to talk to. Well, his mother, but he didn't even think of her as belonging to the world of adults, to a separate world from himself. And Dewey was the only kid his dad knew how to talk to. When his friends came to the house, for instance, his dad would make jokes and stray remarks that only Dewey could understand, so his friends thought his father was insane. And vice versa. Clearly, the Dooze Man wasn't what you'd think of as a normal ten-year-old, but his father thought so, so he made the mistake of thinking it was the
other
kids, Dewey's friends, who were freaks instead of Dewey. Example: Once, his dad walked into the living room and Dewey was in one of his moods, staring out the window for hours, and his dad said, “What are you thinking about, Doozer?”

And Dewey said, “Oh, I'm just sitting here thinking about how the universe is always expanding, and what it'll be like when everything stretches out too far and all the stars explode, and there won't be any more light or any life anywhere and everything will be just like a huge black hole.”

And his dad kind of laughed to himself and came up behind Dewey and messed with his hair. “Kids,” he said.

So obviously it was also true that his father wasn't normal in the things he thought and said, and Dewey would be making a mistake if he took his dad as any sort of indicator of how adults were supposed to interact with ten-year-olds. He doubted that Hugh, with his greasy apron and wool cap and guitar pick between his teeth, carried on a conversation in the same way his father did, and so he was a little unclear about how to proceed. But the time for proceeding had come. Things had gone on too long and become too weird.

“I don't think I'm doing very well,” Dewey said, glancing sidelong at Hugh, who removed the pick from between his teeth and scratched it thoughtfully back and forth across the stubble on his chin.

“Unh,” Hugh said. He squinted into the falling snow as if searching for something that could be obscured by it…an aardvark, a zeppelin. He took a peek toward the back of the dining area, where Lorraine was talking to the only other customer, some grizzled old guy who looked like he might have arrived on a burro. Then he walked over to where Dewey stood near the door. “It's hard, right?” he said, and he swallowed and glanced down at Dewey for a second. “I mean, right. You're in a tough spot for a kid.”

“I think I'm in a tough spot for, like, anyone,” Dewey said. “Like for any actual person. Irrespective of age.”

“What'd you say?” Hugh said.

“I said, ‘Irrespective of age.'”

Hugh didn't say anything. Across the street the woman, his mother, passed by the window. Just a shadow.

“You didn't see that,” Dewey said, and gave Hugh a hard stare.

“I didn't see what,” Hugh said.

Dewey sighed. “I mean I think I want to know what's going on around here if somebody can please tell me.”

“Lorraine!” Hugh called out.

“Because I don't think this is normal,” Dewey said. “What's wrong with this place? My dad's an anthropologist and so I know about the rules, okay? Like how things can happen. And this isn't how things can happen.”

“Lorraine!” Hugh called again. “Like what?” he added.

“Like my uncle disappeared and my dad disappeared and my mom disappeared but then there's a lady who looks like my mom in that window over there only nobody else can see her and there's a weird guy who looks like my father in a disguise only he pretends he doesn't know me but he watches me from the window. One time he was out on the street, and I yelled at him, ‘Dad!,' but all he did was run and disappear through a door.” He was getting choked up now even though he had told himself not to. The old grizzled guy eyed him suspiciously in between drags on a cigarette, but Dewey didn't care. He started talking even louder. “And there's scary stuff on my TV,” he said, “like dead people coming out of a hole and things like that. That's not supposed to happen, and I want someone to tell me.”

The snow kept coming down, soft and quiet with no wind at all. He and Hugh stood there and watched it. In this town, you spent a lot of time looking at snow.

“Lorraine!” Hugh shouted.

“What?”
she answered. “I'm talking to Jerome.”

“You better come here,” Hugh said to her. He guided Dewey over to the booth and made him sit down again. “Bring some Kleenex,” he added, because the Dooze Man was crying now, yes, he most certainly was, the snow outside blurring till everything became a screen of gray. And he felt good about the crying, because the crying seemed normal, like something someone his age should do in a situation like this one, and he wondered why he hadn't let himself do it before. He started crying even harder and it felt even better. “And a piece of pie, maybe, while you're at it,” Hugh said.