The Third Hotel

by Laura van Den Berg

  He never got to be anything more than a young man, she continued, winding the thread around her finger. He died in Holguín, in 1973. He was killed.

  Killed, she repeated.

  She added that her parents could have helped her brother, but chose to do nothing, and now that they were dead, she frankly found the unending life of their consciousnesses irritating, she would much rather any trace of them be eradicated altogether, but she couldn’t ignore the scientific realities.

  My brother on the other hand.

  The professor ripped the thread clean from her skirt. A faint halo of red around her mouth, the stubborn remnants of lipstick.

  She said, It gives me pleasure to think about his simultaneous possibilities. So let us continue, then, with the simultaneous possibilities.

  Let’s say you know someone who has changed from one kind of possibility into another, Clare said, selecting her words carefully. Let’s just say that such a thing could happen. What do you do then? How do you reach them?

  Who says you should do anything at all? Professor Berezniak rubbed her upper lip, erasing the halo. Don’t you think it’s strange that people believe their current lives, in their current bodies, are the only thing that can contain their consciousness? In a world where we readily consider the possibility of extraterrestrials and déjà vu and reincarnation. In a world where people disappear and never come back.

  Clare repeated the word “disappear” and suddenly she was back in her childhood bedroom, curled on her side in the dead of night, her mother’s quaking spine pressed to her own. Being this small person and thinking the word “vanish.”

  Everyone wants to disappear, Professor Berezniak said next. The two impulses cannot be separated. The desire to have a life and the desire to disappear from it. The world is unlivable and yet we live in it every day. Or do we? We are all erasing ourselves a tiny bit at a time. Drinking, fantasies, secrets, denial, hysteria, double lives, suicide, ennui, schemes. Those are just a few of the ways we disappear.

  Clare leaned back in the chair. Sweat ran down her sides. At the Seahorse, her mother had always said that people went on vacations in order to not flee their lives—a temporary abandonment could prevent a permanent one.

  Let me raise a single possibility to you, the professor said. Get that little joke? You think you’re having some kind of minor existential crisis—I say minor because to have a true existential crisis is a rare thing indeed, and Americans do love to have their little crises in countries that are not their own. You’ve been spending lots of time drinking in the sun and now you’re starting to ask the Big Questions.

  My husband died, Clare said. And before that his brother died too.

  And my father is not far behind.

  And, and, and.

  He came from dust and to dust he shall return, the priest had said during the homily.

  The professor slipped a finger under her bra strap. The Big Questions ask us.

  My husband died, Clare said again, louder this time, wanting her voice to shake those books from their shelves. Death could make a person feel righteous in a way they had no right to be. Nothing in the world was less personal and nothing felt more like a poison arrow sent straight for your heart.

  Your husband’s body died. Professor Berezniak coughed, and her bare stomach quivered. She made a motion with her hand that resembled a spider scuttling across a floor.

  She said, His consciousness had to go somewhere.

  * * *

  When Clare left the university, it was once again two in the afternoon. At the Third Hotel, she stuffed her backpack until the canvas belly swelled. The last thing she zipped inside was the white box, nested in a coil of T-shirt sleeves, on top of a thin envelope of cash, having finally exchanged the last of her dollars. She left a note on the bedside table in the room because she had a feeling she might not return for some time, and if anyone came looking for evidence of her whereabouts, she did not want to give the impression that she was the kind of woman who went to another country only to go missing or wind up dead.

  That afternoon, she did not bother with the hospital. She went straight across the bridge to the aquamarine building with the bountiful yard corralled by green fencing. She passed the gilded mime performing on the Malecón; he stood on an overturned white bucket, transformed into a statue. A woman in a striped jumper took photos as her child stealthily poked the mime in the side with a miniature Cuban flag. The whole time Clare felt like she was levitating. She kept waiting for someone to point at her feet and say, Look! That woman’s levitating! From the sidewalk, it was clear the building was a hostel or a guest house; the familiar blue-and-white placard hung on the chain link. The unoccupied rocking chairs swayed, even though the wind was quiet. A red can of TuKola stood on the edge of the porch. The building was modern but surrounded by baroque mansions with vast lots, all in various stages of disrepair. The yellow facade of one house was coated in a gray film, as though someone had carefully painted the exterior with ash. Two were under renovation, caged in scaffolding. A school marked the end of the block, surrounded by a high concrete wall.

  She glanced down the sidewalk and caught the eye of a woman in a pink dress and flip-flops, her hair pulled back by a gold clip, a leash connected to a tiny caramel-coated dog looped around her wrist. The woman held Clare’s gaze, her mouth sagging into a frown. The dog raised its hind leg to a tree. Clare waved, baring her teeth in a way she hoped looked friendly and noncriminal. The woman turned around and led the dog down the street.

  The gate was open, the front door unlocked. Next to the doorbell someone had written out GYM on a strip of duct tape. She picked up the can of TuKola. Empty. The entrance hall was dark. The walls had a damp, sweet smell. Huge elephant-ear plants in chipped clay pots loomed like alien life forms, their green leaves, wide as faces, brushing the ceiling.

  On the ground floor, only one room faced the alleyway. The door was locked.

  Every September of Clare’s childhood, her mother packed a bag and drove away for the month. She never said where she was going and the details of her trips were never discussed when she returned. Once she drove all the way out to California. Once she drove to Mexico City. She called every Sunday, around dinnertime. She sent exactly one postcard. From Point Reyes. The Grand Canyon. Acapulco. Once, while her mother was gone, her father accidentally locked himself out of the business office and then showed his daughter how to get inside.

  Clare unzipped her backpack and dug out her wallet, for her credit cards were suddenly not so useless after all. She slid a card into the crack between the door and the jamb. She bent the card toward the knob and away; the lock popped open.

  His room had the texture of a crime scene. Everywhere she saw slight disorder. The bed was unmade. Pants had been tossed on the floor, the cloth legs splayed. The lamp shade was crooked, the inside spotted with amber burns. The single chair was pulled away from the table, as though the occupant had gotten up abruptly. The window blinds were half-raised and hanging in a tilt. A rotary phone sat on the bedside table, the cord a tangle. The wallpaper had bubbled from the humidity.

  She investigated the bathroom and found an empty medicine cabinet with rusted hinges. A pair of damp red socks had been slung over the shower rod, left to dry. She rushed back into the bedroom when she heard the sound of a cat crying. She stopped in front of the ceramic black-and-white cat and felt a surge of relief when she realized it was animated, programmed to blink and flick its tail and release a robotic meow. She picked up the cat and shook it. Meow, meow, the animal wailed. She felt like she was levitating again. She put the cat down. All the surfaces wobbled.

  A wall closet with wicker slats faced the bed. She opened the doors, pushed aside three pairs of identical slacks, found nothing else. The closet wasn’t quite tall enough for her to stand inside, so she sat on the floor, hugged her knees to her chest. Through the slats she watched daylight sculpt shadows on the wood floor.

  She pressed a hand against the wall. He
r skin was slick, and she imagined Richard finding sweat marks in the shape of palms, the work of an overheated ghost.

  A hard ball of pressure collected in her stomach. She heard a door slam. Clacking footsteps in the room above, as though someone were stomping around in wood clogs. Water rushing through the pipes hidden behind the walls. Every sound made her heart jackknife in her chest.

  One September, when Clare was twelve, a Cat 3 hurricane barreled into Jacksonville Beach. Her mother was in Maine for the month. The guests at the Seahorse were evacuated, but Clare and her father stayed. She remembered watching families pack their cars, windswept, eyes flitting up toward the cloud-clotted sky. She remembered wondering if she and her father would have to hide in a closet or under a bed. On the way to the community center to collect sand bags, he told her they would not be alone that night; as it happened, one guest had stayed behind and they would be taking her in.

  When they returned, a woman was standing by the attached apartment. She was thin and fair, dressed in jeans and a black leotard top. She was barefoot, a detail that had startled Clare with its casualness, even though people went barefoot in Florida all the time. Her chestnut hair was in a ponytail, tied with a red kerchief, showing off a smooth forehead and shell-shaped cheekbones. Her name was Ellis Martin.

  In the apartment, her father went to work boarding up windows. Clare sensed it was her job to entertain this stranger now standing in their living room.

  My car broke down, Ellis Martin said, retying her kerchief. Her top had a scooped back, a black satin bra strap pressed tight against her spine, the hooks pulling. Her shoulders were freckled. When she moved, Clare could make out the knots of vertebrae sliding around under her skin.

  My mother’s car broke down once, Clare said. In Saratoga Springs. She called Triple A and they took care of everything.

  Well, Ellis Martin said, I don’t have Triple A.

  How are you enjoying Florida? Clare was repeating a line she’d overheard her mother say to guests. In their presence, she would turn outward, like a flower finally afforded the right degree of sun.

  The weather could be better, Ellis Martin said, curling her toes. She pulled out a pack of cigarettes and lit one right in the living room. She blew smoke toward the ceiling and told Clare not to worry. She was a doctor and she knew the risks.

  Clare offered Ellis Martin, who had tiny feet, the spare pair of jelly sandals by the door. Maybe this woman really was in some kind of desperate situation, to have shown up at the apartment without any shoes. Ellis Martin gave the jellies a long, disdainful look and told Clare that the sandal was a grotesque invention. They flayed and pinched and squeezed—few things were less flattering. She preferred her feet to be completely covered or bare.

  Clare wondered if Ellis Martin was aware that she was in Florida, where no one spoke ill of the sandal, though much later she would learn this woman lived several hundred miles south, in Port St. Lucie. Perhaps, at the time of this first meeting, her address had been elsewhere. When Clare thought back on that night, she could remember the sound of her father hammering, the attached apartment growing darker one window at a time, casting shadows across the face of Ellis Martin as she exhaled—and, she could only assume, her own. It had felt like sitting inside a mouth that was slowly closing.

  It was evening when Richard returned to the room, carrying a brown paper sack. She pressed her fingers between the slats, her eyes into the narrow opening. She was hunched between two pant legs, a swath of fabric hanging on either side of her face like blinders. He did not seem hesitant or suspicious; she had concealed her presence well.

  The rotary phone sounded. He placed the sack on the unmade bed and answered, the receiver pressed tight to his ear. He tapped his index finger on the bedside table. He was silent and yet a conversation, an exchange of some kind, was ongoing; she could tell by the density of the air. She considered the possibility that through some freak mishap in the laws of physics, he had been vaulted into a future, a future where he lived and boarded the flight to Havana, but at the same time it was not quite his future; he was someone else here. Could this have been what Professor Berezniak had been suggesting? She felt like she needed to spend a year reading about physics and philosophy and then visit the professor again.

  The moment he hung up, he kneeled and pulled a black duffel bag out from under the bed. Clare recoiled into the shadows, certain that he was going for the closet, that any minute he would hurl open the door and there would be nothing left for her to do but scream and leap out, like the killer she had decided to be. Instead he emptied the paper sack into the duffel. A dozen mangoes spilled out, all gleaming green. He added the red socks hanging in the bathroom, a bar of soap. He appeared to be packing for a trip.

  * * *

  When he left again, his luggage still on the bed, lavender clouds had thickened the sky and the room was shadowed. She slipped out of the closet and switched on the lamp, lighting up the crooked shade. The room felt smaller than it had before. A train ticket now sat on the bedside table, pinned under the base of the lamp. In her guidebook, she wrote down the departure time and the destination: tomorrow morning, Cienfuegos. She consulted the map in her guidebook; the city was about a hundred and fifty miles from Havana, on the southern coast. The rotary phone started up again, the ringing so forceful the table shuddered on its stubby legs.

  She heard a noise outside and looked out just in time to see a man in a dark suit skirting the side of the building. She rushed to the window and shoved away the blinds. The alley was unlit, the shadows too dense to see clearly, but she could have sworn she glimpsed this man scurrying up a tree. The rotary phone was still ringing and the noise was having a physical effect on Clare; it was as though she had swallowed the bell and now it was sounding inside her body, shaking her organs from their cavities.

  She picked up. The line was riddled with static.

  Hello, she said in Spanish, holding the phone away from her ear.

  She could make out a voice, but the crackle made it hard to discern much more. She hunched over, hollowing out her stomach. She imagined vanishing into the line and bursting into whatever space the voice was originating from.

  She said hello once more. For a moment, the line cleared. A voice said hello back.

  She dropped the phone. The handset bounced in the receiver and then went still.

  The entrance door slammed open and shut. The bubbled walls trembled. She turned the lamp off and rushed back into the closet. Once in the room, Richard went straight into the bathroom. He left the door cracked open, the light bleaching a patch of floor. She listened to the toilet flush, the faucet run, the water shooting around behind the walls. All those worlds within worlds making themselves known.

  In the bedroom, he pushed aside the black duffel bag and lay flat on the mattress, eyes closed, palms folded on his stomach. He had left the bathroom light on, so the room was half-lit. All through the night she watched him lying there. His mouth was soft, his eyelids still, his breathing even. He really did seem to be asleep.

  Scopophilia, or the morbid urge to gaze.

  The word had appeared numerous times in one of Richard’s papers; at their kitchen table, she had found it difficult to pronounce. Horror films were designed to assault the eye, he’d written. They satisfied the audience’s secret desire: to stare into the abyss and confront whatever existed there and then be ushered safely back to the familiar, the very process that Arlo found so objectionable. She had not thought about that word for a long time, but in the closet it returned to her. Through the years she had learned a lot from her husband.

  At dawn, the phone rang and he jerked awake. He rolled away and squeezed a pillow over his head. Clare sat coiled behind the pant legs. Her spine was a hot curve of pain, her mouth as dry as a stone.

  The caller had been a woman, and Clare had to admit, if only to herself, that the voice had sounded very much like her own.

  During her final trips to Nebraska, Clare skipped business d
inners and spent the evenings driving silent country roads, earning reprimands from her boss. She did not want to go back to her room and listen to the rattle of the ice machine. She wanted to keep going—but not to a place she had been before. She turned off the headlights. The darkness sudden and complete. The pressure of her shoe on the gas. The weight of her hands on the wheel. She felt immortal. She turned the headlights back on and drove for a little while and then switched them off again. Five seconds. Ten. In New Scotland, she would not tell Richard, would shield him from the inner ugliness only she could see: the part of her willing to drive in blindness even if it introduced the possibility of running over a dog or a human being. Consider how the initial confession of the dark headlights would lead to more questions and where those questions would lead—Why did you miss these dinners? Did you not care about being fired? Why were you acting reckless and insane?

  Maybe the person who struck and killed her husband had been driving with their headlights off too; maybe they had not been drunk or homicidal; maybe they had just been trying to shock themselves out of their own skin. Maybe her own negligence and her husband’s death were connected in this way. After he was killed, she turned on her headlights at the earliest threat of rain or evening, but it was too late.

  It could have been me.

  At first, she tried to keep this thought hidden, but in time she began to welcome the thought, because if she was somehow culpable, if she was party to the crime, then there existed a direct and useful set of actions for her to undertake. She could admit, she could atone, she could solve. She could claim her unforgivable act and assure herself that she would never again commit another.