The Third Hotel

by Laura van Den Berg

  As it turned out, the cave had been more like a tunnel. They crawled through a circular opening, the rough mouth ringed with light, and then up a slick stone footpath. Outside they found themselves standing on the bank of a swift emerald river. The air was even cooler and thinner, the vegetation denser, the treetops transformed into canopies of leaf and vine, the branches braided together by a light fog; they appeared to have reached a higher plane of elevation. She could see where the river charged downhill, the mane of white froth churning in the distance. A waterfall had been the source of the rushing.

  To celebrate the first year of their marriage, she and Richard spent a weekend in Las Vegas. They lost money at blackjack, woke in the morning with latticed memories: neon shards glimpsed through cab windows; her husband moving behind her in the hotel shower, his hands on her hips; sinking into the sticky softness of a booth in some nocturnal bar. Their hotel was north of the Strip and the room had been very cheap. The cops turned up the first night, the lights soaking the plastic blinds in red; there had been a fight in the parking lot. She found a pink wig sitting in the small microwave. They had needed this cheap room in order to have enough funds for the flight and the drinks and the rental car.

  Outside Las Vegas they passed a casino, she remembered, and a Baptist church and, to their great surprise, a white stucco opera house called the Amargosa. A little while later the Stovepipe Wells General Store appeared like a movie set, with a covered wagon and a hitching post, the last thing they would see for many miles.

  Richard would never have wanted to go to Las Vegas on his own. On their first night, he had remarked that this place was fun with the right company but could easily be made nightmarish by solitude. Clare, for her part, would have never wanted to go into Death Valley on her own. Florida had trained her to be skittish around the natural world; you never knew where or when a snake might turn up. For these reasons, she blamed their marriage, a force field with its own design, for what ended up happening.

  She remembered how they had rolled down the windows on their way into Death Valley. They stuck their hands into the air. They went fast along the straight highway. They felt like outlaws. They passed signs warning of EXTREME HEAT and Clare looked at Richard and winked and said, They must be talking about us.

  In the Badwater Basin, they pulled over to take photos of where the salt had made a honeycomb pattern in the sand. She thought the ridges looked like animal spines and kept this thought to herself without knowing why.

  They returned to the car and continued on, past the Funeral Mountains. They followed a sign for a lookout. They turned off the highway, drove up a short, steep road. Dust swarmed the rental car. Desert rock crunched under the tires. At one point, the car stuttered, but her husband gunned the engine and they leapt up to the top; it felt like they were driving right into the sun. From the lookout, the salt basin below appeared extraterrestrial, part of the barren, pocked landscapes rovers photographed on Mars. They took photos on the edge of the lookout, and in one, because his brother had not yet ended his life by jumping from a bridge, Richard feigned the posture of a person about to fall.

  When they got back into their car, it would not start. They popped the hood: the engine hissed, thin streams of smoke rose from deep inside the gears. Clare touched the dark curve of a tube and gasped when the heat stung her fingers. They had two liters of water, a bag of macadamia nuts, and three apples. No GPS, no cell service, no memory of the last mile marker. It was late afternoon and a hundred degrees. They decided to try to hitch a ride, so they skidded down the short hill to the road, the sun beating against their shoulders. They brought one liter of water, and it was gone before they reached the bottom, bodies radiating dust.

  A car piloted by teenagers, heavy metal escaping through cracked windows, roared past and then nothing for a long time, so they climbed back up to the lookout, which proved much harder than going down, and collapsed in the backseat of the rental car. They foolishly ate all the macadamia nuts. They gulped down the second liter of water and it wasn’t enough—she wanted more and more. They fell asleep. When she woke, the sun had been devoured. They left the car, shaking the stiffness from their bodies; never before had they seen such impenetrable night. From the lookout they watched the highway for passing headlights. An animal howled. They lay down on the steaming hot roof and looked up at a dense, inky sky. Where were the stars? She would think about that desert dark when she walked Havana at night, the streets half-lit or unlit once away from the tourist sites; never in a city had she looked up and seen so many stars.

  Splayed out on the car Clare had felt a growing fury. Why had they not brought maps and more water and food? Why had they driven up to the lookout in the first place—whose idea had that been? She imagined he was thinking a similar set of thoughts beside her, even if they too went unexpressed. Silence facilitated blame, she would decide later. In the absence of another person’s account, the story you invented for yourself went unchallenged.

  We just need to make it to morning, she said, her voice thin and unconvincing in the desert.

  If we do, we will have survived our first natural disaster.

  Man-made, if we want to get technical about it, she said.

  I’ll amend to our first disaster in nature.

  Amendment accepted.

  All night she had been telling jokes. Back then she loved jokes, the worse the better; she could remember only a few of her old favorites now.

  A man and a woman walk into the desert, she said, then stopped because she didn’t yet have a punch line.

  Later that night, they crawled into the backseat of the car that now felt like a coffin and fell asleep on top of each other. When they woke, the car was shaking. They couldn’t see out the windows; the world had erected a screen between them and the outdoors. Dust was blowing around inside, in her mouth and up her nose. Her face was pressed against his ribs. The wind shoved the car around on the lookout and then they were rocking backward and then they were sliding, trunk first, hood rearing. They screamed as the car sailed down the hill, banging over rocks and brush, and came to rest on the highway shoulder, two particles cast into outer space, two particles spinning apart, as a void opened beneath them and then, by some miracle, decided to close.

  At dawn, they were rescued by an old woman driving a jeep. They were sitting on the hood of the rental car, caked in sweat and dust, bruised and aching, when she materialized on the road. She wore her silver hair in a long braid and a red T-shirt that featured Hulk Hogan waving an American flag.

  The woman had no air-conditioning, broken seat belts, and one condition. She was on her way to the Baptist church, and if they wanted a ride to Vegas, they would have to wait until the service ended, and that was how Clare and Richard came to find themselves sitting in the back of the desert church, holding a linen prayer book they never opened. Her palms bled sweat into the blue binding. The scent of cigarette smoke rose from the carpeting. Whoever was in charge of keeping up this church had a habit.

  At the end of the service, the pastor told everyone to get on their knees and shut their eyes because it was time for those who wished to be saved to beg for forgiveness. Clare and Richard did not kneel or close their eyes, and after a long silence, just when she was thinking no one would come forward, a young man with a cowlick slipped from his pew and crawled to the front, followed by a woman in a denim dress, her legs pushing against the carpet, and then a man in a belt with a long knife attached, who crept like a dog. On all fours, head hung.

  All of a sudden she felt her husband gathering himself, preparing to make a move. He shot up from the pew and then he was on his knees, crawling fast toward the altar. She had never heard Richard express a religious sentiment—was that even her husband up there? The pastor walked the row of kneelers, touched the top of every head. He bent over and whispered into each person’s ear.

  After the service, they gulped apple juice in the church basement, making small talk with the other congregants, who were al
l polite enough to not comment on the fact that Clare and Richard looked like they had just climbed out of a ditch.

  Danger keeps a marriage alive, the old woman said in the church parking lot. My late husband and I used to take wrestling classes together. People thought we’d go easy on each other because we were husband and wife, but it was just the opposite. Once he fractured my ribs. Once I gave him two black eyes.

  Clare supposed this theory hinged on both people having the same idea about what constituted danger.

  The woman squared her shoulders and turned her hands to claws. She mimicked facing an opponent. She began to grapple with the air, or perhaps with her dead husband, pushing and grunting, her silver braid swinging, until she flipped the invisible opponent onto their back. She stomped the gravel, sending up a white cloud of dust.

  Tourists have died in Death Valley, Richard would say back in Las Vegas, when Clare wanted an explanation. They were huddled in the small shower, scrubbing each other’s bodies raw with bar soap and a washcloth. Usually such a disaster began with some minor mishap: they got a little lost, they miscalculated the weather, their car broke down, and then. But they made it out. They were alive. It was a miracle they’d not been badly injured. That was the best he could do to explain why he had gone to the altar.

  What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger, Clare said, with bitterness.

  What doesn’t kill you leaves you alive, Richard countered.

  She spat water onto the floor. What doesn’t kill you only leaves you feeling broken and insane.

  He placed his hands on her shoulders and pressed her gently to the wall. She felt the water slap the tops of her feet. The fat vein throbbed. He said going up to the altar had just been an impulse and that it did not mean anything.

  Clare did not tell him how left behind she had felt in the pew, a door slammed shut in her face and now she would have to figure out how to crack it back open—or not. He let go of her shoulders. She lathered the washcloth and rubbed white circles on his chest. The earliest betrayals stung the sharpest.

  She imagined fashioning his leaving into a joke, her own underhanded form of revenge: A man and a woman walk into a church in the desert. One of them walks out with a brand-new soul and the other gets left in the dust.

  Richard told her that at the altar he’d opened his eyes, even though the pastor had said not to, and he couldn’t stop looking at the pastor’s shoes: black and cheap, the heels worn down to rubber discs.

  They were the shoes of a low-level bureaucrat, he said. They were the shoes of unemployed professors at academic conferences. They were the shoes people get buried in.

  In the shower, they did not yet know that soon they would be deciding on burial shoes for his brother.

  By then her brother-in-law’s descent was well under way. They had become fluent in the awful numerical language of statistics; Clare felt these figures colluded in acts of dehumanization and this made the numbers feel evil to her. Seventeen percent of patients diagnosed with traumatic brain injury reported suicidal thoughts: this was the first evil-seeming statistic Clare and Richard had memorized together, after his brother fell while on a construction job in La Jolla. The fall was the disaster that gave way to all the other disasters: Tegretol, joblessness, homelessness. The majority of suicidal TBI patients were men between twenty-five and thirty-five. He was a year away from leaping from the bridge, and in that aftermath she would feel more generously toward her husband’s crawl to the altar. She would wonder if a part of Richard had felt the future ghost of his brother up there, calling him forward. She did not yet know that they would spend much of their marriage bracing for departures they could not see coming.

  * * *

  The last time she and Richard visited her parents in Florida, a month before he was struck by the car and killed, she had imagined that her father might be feeling what she had felt in the desert car, in Death Valley, a long slide into the void. For him, though, there was no chance of the void ever closing; it would only get wider. They were sitting on a couch in the house that would soon be only her mother’s house. A sour smell was trapped in the wallpaper; the windows were fogged. She asked her father if he remembered her story about the car that broke down in the desert and he frowned and kept saying the word “car” like he had never heard of such a thing before. His twisted his hands together, his wrists dappled with small blue bruises, and began to shout, Car? Car? What car?

  What were you doing in Havana?

  On the riverbank, Richard’s voice sliced through the thunder of her own thoughts. The back of his shirt was printed with sweat marks in the shape of claws. They were sitting close to the rushing water. On the opposite side a slender trail curved around the river, the path bumpy with rocks. A sharp sunlight had burned away the mist.

  I wanted to see the movie, she said. I wanted to meet Yuniel Mata.

  She did not tell him that if she just kept circling place after place, if her migratory pattern could expand, then she might stand a chance of escaping this monstrous-feeling inner life, this tangle of woolly midnight thoughts. She could turn herself into a ghost, and ghosts weren’t expected to be anything but bystanders, their work of being alive already done.

  She did not know how to grieve her husband’s death or her father’s decline or the choice each day carried her closer to, the choice she was wholly unprepared to make—or would turn out to be more prepared than any person should be.

  She did not know how to grieve in the context of her life.

  Bullshit, Richard said. No one gets on a plane to see a movie.

  Everyone dies at the end, she said, except the hero’s daughter.

  In the end, Agata Alonso’s character had escaped the ravaged city by motorboat. She had lost the zombie tape in a failed attempt to save her father, but she had held on to her own life.

  Richard took off his shoes and peeled the socks from his long white feet. He cuffed his pants and waded into the river, just past his ankles, the water darkening the khaki hems.

  Never give away the ending, he said from the river. Never ever.

  She heard a rustling and, through the bushes on the opposite side of the water, she glimpsed an animal stamping down the path. She thought of the escaped ostrich and imagined the creature having found its way into the Escambray Mountains, where it could roam about in peace, free of pens and gawking tourists. The animal cleared the foliage and turned out to be not one but two: a pair of bleating brown goats.

  The mind contained a million half-open doors and they could become closed or swing open at any time, by virtue of remembering or forgetting or illness or petrified avoidance. On the riverbank, she felt one blow open.

  I want to talk about the notebook, Clare said.

  She felt the moist ground seeping through her shorts. The river was funneling a hooked branch toward the froth; for a moment it had looked like an arm.

  Richard waded farther out, the water swallowing his knees.

  The notebook, Clare said again.

  When she had opened the little red notebook in Richard’s office, she’d immediately recognized her father’s hand. The first entry was dated a week after his diagnosis. The last entry was dated in September and barely legible, the letters dropping down the lined pages like tears. She could picture a small parcel mixed in with the bills and the takeout flyers and the reminder postcards from the doctor and the dentist. From the postmark she had been able to track her whereabouts to Iowa City. All those months she had been ignorant of the record her father had been keeping, ignorant that he had entrusted it to her, ignorant of her husband’s interception. Ignorant of the investigation he had launched and then left unfinished.

  Clare stood and stepped carefully into the river, as though the stones might be concealing a trap. The cold bit at her ankles. Above she heard the distant scream of the zipline. A harnessed body whipped over a canopy, legs kicking.

  Why did you take it? She sloshed toward Richard, the coolness closing around her knees. Why didn
’t you tell me?

  Blood pounded through her body. Her armpits burned.

  Richard sank down into the river, like he was getting ready for a leisure swim.

  The water was at her waist, and she felt the pull of the current.

  Ever since she took a call from her father in a hotel room in Omaha, ever since that first envelope from him turned up in New Scotland and she opened it to find a business card with a name and a number—

  Ever since all of that she had felt like her body was being remade one cell at a time. Changing.

  The fog cleared and the sun dumped light through the tree branches. In the river her husband’s head was a brilliant flame, the burning end of a lit match. His distance, his silence, felt like a taunt. She raised her backpack over her head.

  She called out Richard and it was as though the sound of his own name drove him away, given the speed with which he dove underwater, swam fast toward the churning froth, and then slipped like quicksilver over the falls.

  Clare stumbled forward, and by then she was too far into the current to argue with its logic, that perfect, thoughtless force that did not care about human want. A band of pressure formed around her hips. Her knees bent, her toes lifted, her field of vision was overtaken by tree and sky. She raised her backpack higher. When it was over, she would have no memory of whether she had screamed and thrashed as the current dragged toward the froth or if she had just let it happen, if she had let the river breathe her in and then breathe her out, straight down the falls and into a turquoise pool, her heart escaping through her throat.

  For six months after her brother-in-law died, her husband had dreams where he thought his dead brother was calling in the middle of the night, and then once, around two in the morning, the phone started to ring for real. Richard answered, disoriented, freshly launched from sleep. He collapsed on the carpet, hello hello hello, while Clare kneeled beside him on the bed, clutching the covers.