The Third Hotel

by Laura van Den Berg

In the morning, the train lurched from the La Coubre station with a shriek and a hot gust of smoke. When Richard saw her at the opposite end of the car, he fled down the aisle and through a rusted vestibule door. She followed him into the next car and the next. He was light on his feet, swift in the face of the doors. She kept grasping the worn seatbacks for support and heaving herself against the heavy doors, yanking them open in time to see his figure pause at the top of the car before disappearing.

  The train was crowded, the overhead racks bursting with luggage and plastic shopping bags, the bottoms stretched and bulging. She passed a family of three, the parents bouncing a little boy in red shorts on their knees, singing a song. A woman wrote furiously in a spiral notebook, her hair a lick of brown between her shoulder blades. A man in a Mets cap slept against a giant duffel bag, his wrists crossed over the top. Two teenage girls sat close together, sharing the black headphones attached to a Walkman.

  Finally Richard was out of cars, at the top of the train, cornered. There was no place left for him to go unless he planned to work his way back to the other end or fling himself onto the tracks. She did not want to encourage such rash behavior; she would have to be very careful. She imagined the zookeepers slowly circling the loose ostrich on a street in Havana, armed with a tranquilizer dart and a very large net.

  When he sat down, she slipped into a seat five rows back.

  She felt the train gain speed, though she could not be sure if that was happening only in her imagination.

  Clare understood the mystery at hand to be not a new mystery, but a continuation of the one that had presented itself in New Scotland. She was being granted a chance to follow that story through to its end, and she understood it was a very rare thing, to get that kind of chance. She believed that if she and Richard kept following their private plans together, in parallel, these separate plans might align, merge into one.

  She watched the sway of Richard’s honeyed head. The window was smudged by the ghost outlines of palms and her own reflection, caught in the glass. The train they were riding was called the French Train, and it had gotten its name, she had read, because the trains had been purchased secondhand from French railways.

  They passed green fields bordered by round hills, scattered with grazing goats. She watched a piebald goat stretch its neck, claim the green crown of a branch. Through her binoculars she could make out cement houses tucked into hillsides. A restaurant sign painted in blue on the round end of a gas tank. A swath of red earth slicing a path through the grass. She was surprised by the vastness of the countryside; without her binoculars those hillsides looked to be a lifetime away.

  She tore out a piece of paper from the back of her guidebook and found a pen in her backpack. STOP RUNNING AWAY FROM ME! WHERE ARE YOU EVEN GOING? She crept to the front of the car and dropped the note by Richard’s feet. He looked straight ahead, his hands folded in his lap. He did not acknowledge her. From her seat she watched him pick up the paper, and as they passed flat fields, restless with cows, he returned the paper to her in the exact same manner. She snatched up the note and was able to understand, through patterns of scrunched letters that transformed into words, into the communication of meaning, from the dead to the living, that he had written the name of a hotel, along with a room number and a time. She held the paper close to her face.

  The sloping, cursive script did not quite look like his former handwriting and somehow did not quite not look like it either.

  The hotel name was familiar, one she could place in the Escambray Mountains. At one of the festival receptions, she had overheard a couple talking about their recent stay in the hotel. Under Batista, the property had been used as a tuberculosis sanatorium, and now it was a hotel that catered to health tourists and ecotourists; for a fraction of a second she was overcome by the worry that she was following a common medical tourist into the mountains. The most enthusiastic ecotourist she’d ever known drank his coffee from Styrofoam cups. This hotel sat in the middle of a subtropical forest. The couple from the reception had extolled the virtues of the hydromassage and the birding. The way they had pronounced the name made it sound like “Cure Hotel.”

  Across the aisle a man pulled a cigarette from a wrinkled red-and-white package. He stared at the end of the cigarette before lighting it. Next to him sat a young woman in peculiar clothes: a straw hat, a checkered dress with a large bow at the waist, hiking boots with wool socks. How was she not on fire? She was reading War and Peace in Spanish, the spine bolstered by duct tape. Clare wondered if she had gotten to the part about the bear.

  Clare spotted a truck parked at the mouth of a dirt road, a sticker that translated into TRANSPORTATION OF THE FUTURE pasted across the tailgate. The fields were taking on a wild verdancy. The train passed horses chest-high in grass, the green tips bowed by wind. She felt a warm drip on her knee. She looked up. The roof of the French Train was leaking, even though it had not rained in several days.

  An hour later, the train stalled on the tracks. A little girl in a purple dress ran up and down the aisles, smacking the backs of seats. The sun burned through the windows. Clare tried to remain fixed on her husband’s figure five rows ahead, tried to be a good detective, but there was the stillness and the sun and the lack of sleep stalking her like a wolf, and soon she was slipping down into the warm stickiness of her seat.

  When she woke they were moving again. She looked out in time to catch the concrete slab of an uncovered platform and the hunched old man standing there, brandishing a black umbrella at the passing train.

  * * *

  The swell and burn of her bladder drove her from her seat, in search of a bathroom, found three cars down, tight as a coffin with a jagged hole in the floor; through it she could see bits of passing land: snatches of green, gray streaks of gravel, the thick iron veins of the tracks. No mirror. She was relieved to not confront her reflection. No sink, no lock on the door, no toilet paper. She went quickly, a hot stream in the bowl.

  On her way back to her seat, she noticed a man in a suit sitting alone, body coiled against the window. He did not notice her—he was engrossed in reading an orange guidebook titled The Pocket Atlas of Remote Islands—but she recognized him as the man from the café in Miramar. The man with the flaxseed mustache and her father’s forehead. On the French Train, he looked perturbed: frowning as he turned the pages, his dark, padded shoulders pressed to his ears, his brow scrunched. Clare hurried back to her seat, a funny feeling zapping around in her stomach.

  Horror films had taught her that a person could will a thing into existence, but once it was outside their consciousness, the consciousness that had been busily inventing simultaneous possibilities, it became a force unto itself, ferocious and uncontrollable. Maybe some invisible corner of her consciousness had willed her husband’s return, but surely that corner had not intended to also conjure a duffel bag filled with mangoes or a man who ran away from her or a rotary phone that wouldn’t stop ringing. The character then had to do battle with the part of themselves responsible for the conjuring, in addition to battling the consequences of the conjuring itself. For example, if she had conjured the victim of a crime, it stood to reason that she might also have conjured the killer—not the killer, perhaps, but a killer, a person they were now meant to flee.

  Clare sat inside a very long silence, though it was not really a silence at all: she could hear the train clacking over the tracks, pages turning, breaths, coughs, squeaking seats, an old man farting, children arguing in Spanish, matches struck, cigarettes lit, the near imperceptible gust of time passing, wind. She had crumpled up the note and left it on her seat, which now seemed very foolish, in the event that they were being followed.

  She stared at the back of Richard’s head so hard he blurred and multiplied, like he was being replicated right in front of her, and then she ate the paper.

  * * *

  The train stopped again. Through the window she saw a dark green lagoon, bordered by marshland, clouds reflected in the water. One ro
w ahead someone had placed a white paper cup upside down on the floor, so it looked like a little castle. On the French Train, you could buy coffee, but you were expected to provide your own cup. Her skin was pink and tender and warm. She felt raw with alertness and exhaustion. She imagined the paper dissolving in her stomach. The ink. She felt empty and full. She yawned against her will, her mouth prying itself open. Other passengers were falling asleep (heads tipped against windows, foreheads poised on the backs of seats), as though a spell of somnolence had been cast over the car. Even Richard was slumping over, five rows ahead. Clare drifted off once more, and when she woke, he had vanished from his seat and the train was pulling into Cienfuegos.

  When Clare arrived at the Albany precinct, her husband had been dead for forty-eight hours. At night, she would imagine the person who killed him driving on; she would will their car to spontaneously combust. She had been sleeping with the sealed white box on the bedside table, and she could not help but think that it was the ideal size for a human ear.

  The police station had been cold. Inside she had wanted to keep her coat and gloves and hat on, but it felt strange to do so once seated across from the detectives, both in short sleeves, adapted to the temperature. She did not want to appear in a hurry; it was hard to imagine what she would be hurrying for now. She took off her hat. She kept her gloves and coat on, the zipper pulled to her chin.

  At the precinct, she learned there were no traffic cameras on that stretch of road. It had been dark out, and they had not succeeded in securing an eyewitness. They were still awaiting the forensics—tire marks, debris—and the autopsy report. In the meantime, the only other available evidence was the Good Samaritan’s account of the scene and her own account, of her husband.

  They asked if she was ready to begin.

  They wanted to know where she was at the time of the hit-and-run. She had been on a conference call; she provided the relevant names and information.

  Just so we can get that out of the way, Detective Winter said.

  They asked if he had been acting like himself, if she had noticed anything unusual.

  Silently she began a list. He was newly skittish around dogs and he had stopped eating bananas and he walked like he was in a dream and he had a notebook filled with ideas about zombies, presumably in preparation to see Yuniel Mata’s film. From this notebook, she’d learned that William Seabrook had boasted about being the first to colonize zombi into “zombie” after a trip to Haiti—made possible by the American occupation, which spanned from 1915 to 1934, nearly twenty years. Apparently William Seabrook had also been a renowned sexual sadist. She read a quote attributed to Zora Neale Hurston: “He can never speak again, unless he is given salt.” She learned that in 1887 Lafcadio Hearn was hired to write about the French West Indies. In Martinique, after hearing the word zombi for the first time, he went looking for a definition. He was told that if he is walking the road late at night and sees a great fire and the closer he gets to the fire the more it moves away—that is the work of the zombi. He was told that a zombi is a horse with three legs and a nightmare in which a familiar person transforms into unspeakable evil.

  A white box, the edges taped shut, and she had no idea what was inside.

  She did not know what any of this added up to.

  What qualifies as unusual? she said.

  Anything that comes to mind, Detective Winter said. Anything at all.

  He seemed preoccupied, she began.

  For how long? the detectives wanted to know.

  A while. She paused. Close to a year.

  That’s a long time to be preoccupied, Detective Hall said.

  More questions followed. Did he have trouble at work, did he have enemies, a history of mental illness, debt, bad habits, had he deviated from his usual routines. She felt like she was standing in another room, listening to the conversation through a wall.

  She removed her right glove.

  He took walks every evening, she said. That was a normal part of his routine.

  The side of Route 443 doesn’t seem like a very restful place for leisure walking.

  Detective Winter was right. All this time she had imagined her husband walking the quiet streets in their neighborhood, or over to Elm Avenue Park. She tried to picture that stretch of Delaware Avenue—what was there? A bagel place with suicide lighting, a car wash, a knitting shop. She imagined her husband sitting alone in a booth and eating a bagel, his tongue thick with cream cheese. She imagined cars whipping past him on the road, the fright of one coming too close.

  He was writing a book, she said.

  And was that unusual?

  No. He had published widely in his field.

  This was both true and not: he had published a great many papers, but he had never before finished a book. She understood the manuscript to be half-completed at the time of his death, and right then a few lines from it appeared in the air—Both city and zombie have a talent for transformation. The surface of a city transmutes as a person moves across it and then covers their tracks—and because we loathe the eradication of our presence, we make new movements. To live in a city is to be engaged in an endless cycle of self-erasure and self-assertion, ignorant of the zombie worlds, with their own restless cycles of transformation, plotting to proclaim their own existence.

  Her hands looked so strange now, one gloved and one not.

  And what was the title of this book? asked Detective Winter.

  It was called The Nightmare Is Near.

  The detectives appeared interested and confused. She tried her best to explain about the Terrible Place, how it was meant to embody the worst capacities of the human soul, how it could sometimes be a small space, like a tunnel or a basement, or it could be an entire city like Washington, D.C., or Barcelona or Paris or Havana.

  And was this a new … interest? Detective Winter asked.

  She waved her gloved hand. Horror films were his area of study, she said. His specialty. I’m sorry. I should have mentioned that before.

  Detective Hall wanted to know what she did for a living. Clare relayed the particulars of her job.

  You must hear a lot of jokes, Detective Winter said. About elevators.

  Not really, said Clare.

  Elevator jokes are a genre, Detective Winter said. Like, two people are on an elevator. One asks the other how their day’s going and that person says, Oh, you know, filled with ups and downs.

  Clare stared at the detectives.

  So you spend a lot of time on the road? said Detective Hall.

  Yes. Clare removed her left glove. Yes, I do.

  Recently, on a flight to Columbus, she had sat next to a passenger who wrote for a newspaper. He had started in the obituaries and worked his way up, though he noted that any reporter in the building could write an obituary if called upon, just as any good solider could be a foot solider if there was a need.

  Richard’s obituary had appeared in the Albany Times Union. His brother’s had appeared in The San Diego Union-Tribune. Her father’s would appear in The Florida Times-Union.

  The man went on to say that the paper was in a small town, and the thing that had surprised him the most was the volume of obituaries: around five a day, forty a week. He had not realized that, in this little town, so many people were dying. On the rare occasion that there were no deaths to report, the newspaper had to run a statement to that effect. Otherwise people would call, demanding to know what had happened to the obituaries.

  All that time away must make it hard to know what’s really going on at home, Detective Hall said. She wore a wedding ring with a cloudy stone, and Clare detected an edge of accusation in her voice.

  Did you have a nice wedding? Detective Winter asked.

  The question struck Clare as peculiar and unnecessary, but she did not want to appear uncooperative.

  Our wedding was a long time ago, Clare said, though as it happened their wedding had been nice, a courthouse ceremony in San Diego followed by a small gathering of family
and friends at Sunset Cliffs Park, picnic baskets packed with strawberries and tea sandwiches. Cheap, sweet champagne. The lightness of the lark, the high-hearted plunge into the unknowable.

  You’re right, Detective Hall said. Your wedding was a long time ago. Ten years by our count. Yet in my own experience I have found it useful to look back on the point of origin, especially when I’m in need of a reminder as to why I wanted to get married at all.

  I know why I wanted to get married, Clare said. I don’t need a reminder.

  She had never been drawn to ritual. She had only attended religious services for weddings and funerals. She had skipped her own graduations. Yet she’d permitted herself to imagine that the particular leap of marriage might bring about a sense of completeness, would perhaps even provide an answer to an invisible question, one that she could sense, could almost taste in the back of her mouth, but could not articulate.

  Of course, marriage had not led her to a sense of completeness. Rather, it introduced different sets of questions, one after another, and ultimately led her to the drastic incompleteness of being married to a man whose death, the exact circumstances, was uncertain. If a death was uncertain, a life in turn was made uncertain—or the uncertainty that had always been there was exposed. In hindsight, it seemed like a near-radical act on their part to not have children, to refuse that natural narrative impulse for closure. Closure in the sense that the purpose of your marriage was inarguable—to produce this child—and that a person’s essence still claimed a place in the world; in this way the dead could continue to move forward in time.

  No one would think her father’s death was uncertain, Clare thought in the interrogation room. Everyone would assume they knew the cause.

  She unzipped her coat. She focused on the sound of the teeth separating. She had not done a very good job of explaining their life.

  Clare, Detective Winter said, is there something you want to tell us?

  She closed her eyes. She wanted to tell these detectives the single truest thing she knew. If she could only sink below the current surface of her thoughts. She felt a few degrees away from that place, and yet at the moment the distance was unbridgeable.