“Yep.”
“Well, I’m going to see about getting a drink,” he laughed, moving back toward the bar. “You need something?”
“No, I’m fine.”
Did she need something? Yes, always, but what? There was a general aimless movement around the room, a purposeless churn of professors and grad students soundtracked by the classic rock pumping from the jukebox. Angie, Ah-hayn-jeh, Jagger ludicrously crooned. She’d been introduced to dozens of people over the last day, but could not remember any of their names. They all ran together, earnest grad-student types who radiated admiration, envy, hostility. The girls tended to dress in flowing garb, the guys tended to dress like blue-collar laborers. One of them, a gaunt, bearded kid, noticed her standing by herself and came over. “Hey.”
“Hey.”
She looked at him, and he said, “Mitch.”
“Right, Mitch.” With his pale skin and hollow eyes and the whiff of whiskey on his breath, she’d picked him out earlier as a type. He reminded her of a couple of the more adventurous boys she’d gone to school with, a type discontented with merely reading about dissolution, compelled to experience it themselves—the real thing, or a convincing simulacrum of it anyway. “Hey, I have a question.”
“Shoot.”
“You know anywhere to get drugs around here?”
“Sure,” he said, “we can just duck out back for a smoke.”
“I was thinking about something harder than that.”
“Oh.” In that moment, she became aware she’d never actually been smirked at before. “Well, yeah, I know a guy. But we’d have to get out of here.”
“Happily.”
He shrugged. “Okay, I’ll pull my car up, wait here.”
He exited the front door and ran down the wooden steps, large feet slapping against the wet pavement, disappearing quickly into the rain. She stood by the door watching. Don approached from behind, fresh drink in hand, and said, “You leaving already?”
For a moment, she felt an immense sadness and guilt. Why wasn’t this enough? Why couldn’t she ever be happy where she was, satisfied in the moment, here at an outing thrown on her behalf, talking to a nice man who might have wanted to flirt with her a little?
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Be careful.” He looked at her for a long second, and in that moment she felt utterly transparent as the drug-addled fraud she was. She’d acquitted herself decently at the reading, the product of prefatory drinks at the hotel bar beforehand and two buoying Bennies, but she’d thought she caught Don looking sideways at her a few times. Now she was sure, when he seemed to say, “Twisted.”
“What?”
“Twisters. Tornadoes.” He gestured at the TV in the corner. “They’re saying on the weather report. Be careful out there.”
They drove south through town and across a bridge that looked out over a railroad hitching yard. Then through a suburban area, past a supermarket, and into the country. Mitch had popped a cassette into the tape deck and Highway 61 Revisited came on, a choice that, were this one of her creative writing workshops, the professor might have called a little on the nose.
He tapped his fingers on the wheel nervously—she’d flattered herself thinking his fidgety reticence was nerves caused by being with her, the big visiting author, but now she saw that he was scared. Distant lightning forked in the sky and the wind shook his little Datsun, in which they crawled down a country road everyone else was too smart to be out on. Cornstalks whipped in a mad dance, a dark, dense frenzy to her right, and it fully occurred to her what a terrible idea this was. Had she really wanted to get high this bad? She guessed she had.
“It’s here, I think,” said Mitch. “Right around here.”
A few moments later, Mitch stopped and reversed with his arm behind her headrest. He turned left down a long gravel drive. The white house at the end had a hunched, reticent look, almost seeming to back away at their approach. When they parked in front, the water ran down the windows in gelatinous sheets.
Mitch said, “His name’s Jimmy. I get stuff from him now and then.”
“Okay.”
“I don’t know if he’s here. Probably is, considering this weather. He might be a little weird about me bringing a new person, but it’ll be fine.” He talked as though she didn’t live in New York, didn’t do drugs, didn’t ever deal with the weirdnesses of drug dealers. Putting up with weirdness—and creepiness, boringness, stupidness, laziness, rudeness, etcetera—was like the tax you paid for the enormous privilege of buying illegal substances for a 500 percent markup.
Shooting the fifteen-foot curl between car and porch thoroughly soaked them, and they shivered like dogs on the porch after Mitch rang the doorbell. A light came on inside, and after what seemed like a very long time, the door cracked a little. “Yeah,” the voice said.
“It’s Mitch.”
“Who’s that?”
“A friend.”
“I meet her before?”
“No, she’s traveling through town. Come on, man.”
The door fully opened and they were admitted into a dimly lit hall. The man in the shadows to her left wore a baseball cap and dark glasses, as though he were in disguise. He led them into a living room that was pretty much as she’d expected: ratty couches that looked like they’d been rescued off a sidewalk, junk and boxes piled up against the wall, curtains drawn, guitar akimbo in the corner, pervasive smell of cat shit in the air. The guy, Jimmy, was older than she’d initially thought, maybe forties, with acne scars so deeply pitted you could have pressed Tic Tacs into the largest of them. “What’s your name?” he said.
“Alice.”
“Why are you here?” The conversation felt like a weird double of the one she’d had an hour ago at the party.
“Here at your house, or in town?”
“Town.”
“Just visiting.”
“Nice time to visit.” As if in response, a gust of rain hit the window, sounding like someone had tossed it from a bucket. Jimmy turned to Mitch and said, “So, what brings you out?”
“Thought you might be holding.”
“Got some Dilaudid yesterday, how’s that work?”
“Works for us, I think.”
“That works,” said Alice.
Jimmy went into an adjacent room even darker than the one they were in, and returned with a pill bottle. He shook a few out on an oblong metal plate on the coffee table, which was dusted with drug residue. “Ten per,” he said. “How many?”
“Ten,” said Alice, and he looked at her. She said, “I’m taking some with.”
He counted out ten and she counted out five twenties from her wallet, money she’d withdrawn from the bank in advance for just such a hopeful, happy occasion. She handed him the money, and with an extra bill and one of her credit cards, she crushed four of the little white pills on the plate, grinding them beneath the bill with the edge of the card. Once the lump of crushed drugs felt smooth, she lifted the bill, scraped off the lingering residue, and chopped the pile into two lines. While she was doing this, Jimmy got up and fooled with a record player in the corner. A country song she didn’t recognize came on, cued by the corny one-two of the fiddle’s scrape. She rolled the bill up, inserted it into her right nostril, and vacuumed up the pile, then handed the bill to Mitch, who did the same.
Reclining on the sofa, she realized she should have asked what the milligramage was, but it was too late. Jimmy was telling Mitch about a car he had an eye on, lovingly describing the old yellow Stingray with its eight-stroke engine, and the rain was falling outside, and the woman on the record was singing something about how her love was like a rose, and a black-and-white tuxedo cat wandered in, and Alice wondered if she’d ever been part of a more peaceable scene. If you forgot the narcotics on the table, there was something even wholesome about it, something homey and Midwestern. Mitch gave her a cigarette and lit it, and she gulped in the smoke, which filled her lungs like something solid and in turn made
her feel more corporeal.
Then she expelled the smoke, and likewise her attention diffused into the thick air and she was only intermittently aware of various things: Mitch talking about the book he was writing, the cat rubbing against her ankles, Jimmy getting up again and looking out the window. She became increasingly aware that there was another person in the room with them—she counted over and over: one, two, three, four. One, her. Two, Mitch. Three, Jimmy. Who was four?
She knew. It was the man from the Neversink—he’d entered the room unseen. He’d been visiting more and more lately. Her eyes were closed but she could tell it was him, could feel him bathing her in his glow as he sat beside her on the couch, looked at her with a kindly stare, and encircled her with his long, dark arms.
She jolted awake to Mitch shaking her. “Come on,” he said.
“What?” He was waking her, she felt certain, because of the gray man.
“You hear that?” said Jimmy.
It was a mournful sound, a keening that seemed to be coming from the record player. “What is it?”
“You really aren’t from here, are you?” said Jimmy. “Tornado sirens. Let’s go.”
“Where?” But she saw he was opening a door in the hall, pulling the chain on an overhead lightbulb.
“Come on,” said Mitch again. “Down to the basement for a little bit.”
“No,” she said.
“Those sirens mean there are tornados on the ground, let’s go.”
At some point while she’d been on the nod, the house had apparently begun vibrating a little—it notched up a bit more, and, like a group of animals on the savannah registering a sudden predator, they all seemed to notice it as one. Mitch had a pleading look, and she relented a little, allowing him to shepherd her toward the door. Jimmy stood at the top of the stairs, arms full of the squirming cat. Thunder cracked, and the thing jumped away, knocking his glasses off in the process. When he crouched to grab them, he momentarily squinted up at Mitch and Alice with the eyes of a blind creature, something used to being in the dark, and again there was the feeling of aluminum between her teeth.
“No,” she said.
“Come on,” Mitch said.
“No.”
Mitch pulled her arm, wrenching her toward the basement, and it provided extra momentum for her to slap his face. He stepped back, holding his beard, as if he feared she might have knocked it askew. “What the fuck?”
“I’m not going down there,” she said.
Without looking back, Mitch pushed past her, and the two men disappeared behind the closed door. With a shuddering whump, the lights went out, and the woman’s voice on the turntable slowed to an eerie moan, then nothing. The house’s vibration was beginning to buck the uneven floorboards. A welter of knickknacks and magazines fell from the top shelf of a cabinet in the corner, its doors flying open like arms trying to catch the falling junk. Alice found she was not afraid, simply curious about what would happen. She drew back the curtain.
Weirdly, the rain had almost stopped, revealing a sky underlit by greenish aquarium lights. In the cornfield across the road they’d driven in on, she saw it: a thicker blackness against the black horizon, a funnel moving slowly this way and that. There it was. At the same time she noticed it, it seemed to notice her. It came across the field and ripped up the road, bearing closer in a blurry havoc. She looked back at the basement door and relaxed a little, secure in the knowledge that whatever else might be true, she would not go down there.
She scooped the remaining pills into her wallet and returned to the sofa, waiting for whatever would happen to happen. The house was shaking and shaking, with a mounting violence similar to the earlier rain—every moment simultaneously as intense as it could get and less intense than the next moment, which was already happening. The beams of the house scraped out a rising, rosiny whine; the air inside seemed to condense as though the house itself were taking a breath; then it screamed, and all the windows exploded. She couldn’t breathe, couldn’t think, was lifted from the sofa, was going to die, then she was on the floor.
It had passed, she somehow knew.
She was sitting in the heart of the sudden stillness. The wetness on her hands was blood. She’d landed on glass. She was alive. Some amount of time later, the men emerged from the basement. Jesus Christ, they both were saying unimaginatively, at different tempos and with different inflections, Jesus-fucking-Christ.
“Jesus Christ,” said Mitch to Alice, “are you okay?”
“Yeah.”
“That was close,” said Jimmy. “That was really fucking close.”
Mitch said, “It sounded like the house was lifted on its foundation.”
Jimmy said, “It might have been for a second.”
“Jesus-fucking-Christ,” they both said.
Later, after the TV had given the all clear, Mitch drove Alice back to her hotel. She sat primly with her hands together on her lap, the wounded left one wrapped in an old T-shirt. It was still out, the cool stillness after a great storm has passed that is like nothing else in the world. The eerie quiet was ruined by other cars now passing on the street, people already getting back to their lives, distant sirens, a team of power company workers fixing a downed line.
He dropped her off in front of her hotel and drove away without saying a word. She walked through the lobby, ignoring the stares of the front-desk clerks, down the hall to her room. It was cool in there, sepulchral, and though she turned on all the lights it retained the memory of the darkness it had been in before she entered. In the bathroom she washed her hands again, then swallowed another of the little white pills. She turned on the TV to David Letterman, a segment with Super Dave shot from a cannon into a brick wall. Through the narcotic haze she felt—what? Well, mainly, disappointment. To be forever in that moment with the storm bearing down, with life narrowed down to the wind and the walls, that would be happiness; that would be just fine with her.
11. Len
1988
The noise coming through the wall had, in approximately ten minutes, graduated from a low rumble of voices, to loud talking, to louder squabbling, to singing and chanting, to what was now intolerably loud chaos. For the third day in a row, the Polish Policemen’s League was making a racket. Len pushed back from his desk, the desk on which his head had been resting for the last twenty minutes, as the sound culminated. Standing, he briefly considered the utility shed down the lawn and the .22 locked inside it. He could take the gun, go in there firing at the ceiling, and go out in a blaze of—if not glory, something. A blaze, at least. And it might satisfy some obscure codicil or subaddendum of the hotel’s insurance if his face was shot away by a drunken Polack.
He’d idly thumbed through the insurance policy in bed the night before, momentarily seized with the appeal of burning the place to the ground. But it wasn’t clear what constituted arson in their opinion, or acts of God—force majeure, in the strangely poetic insurance argot. Another wave of yelling from the next room propelled Len up from his desk and out into the hall, a resigned smile gathering on his face. He wasn’t going to commit arson or, for that matter, any other act of felonious pluck. It was all a distraction and a fantasy—of being able to wrest some control away from fate, being able to dictate the terms of the hotel’s demise as it went through its inevitable and seemingly endless death throes.
He pushed open the heavy latticed oak doors of the banquet hall, a space that in several senses exemplified the current terminal state of the hotel. First, and most obviously, it was completely run-down. The yellow wallpaper seemed to be actively detaching itself from the wall; it puffed in brown sections like the flesh of a rotten banana. In the corner, water collected in a small discolored pool under the mirror image of a discolored spot on the ceiling. It smelled bad everywhere, a pungent blend of mildew, dry rot, and insufficiently applied bleach.
Second, the clientele—i.e., the fifty or so men in this room—blearing at him. Len had no issue with authority, was a law-abiding citi
zen in every important respect, even had the little policeman’s friend sticker on his car. But this bunch was the worst, the goddamned worst. They’d been coming since the late seventies, since the period following little Alice’s assault and the discovery of the boy’s body, unfortunate events that had made the hotel’s declining fortunes official. With the Neversink’s old clientele quickly disappearing and anonymous hotel chains springing up everywhere, Len had been forced to try various tactics to drum up new business. One idea, a stroke of seeming genius at the time, had been to offer special rates to police unions. It was an untapped reservoir of bookings that would provide a reassuring presence to other guests: two birds, one stone. He’d made some calls to connections they had in the city, and in, like a herd of drunken bulls, had stampeded the Polish Policemen’s League.
With their shorn heads, muscular necks, and broad torsos covered by carapaces of beer fat, they looked like bulls, too. Snorting and bucking, pawing at the keg by the untouched buffet table, outrageously drunk at eleven in the morning. They’d be pissing in the halls by three. A week they came, every April, as though to formally usher in another miserable year. Their spokesman and de facto chief, Sergeant Mikulsky, called red-faced from a nearby table: “Len!”
“Sergeant.”
“What brings you?”
“I was wondering if you might keep it down a little?”
“Down?” Mikulsky surveyed the room with an incredulous face, mirth clouding his already clouded little black eyes.
“Well, it’s sort of loud. There are other guests, you know?”
“Are there,” he said. The two men beside Mikulsky leered at him expectantly as he stood and addressed the room. “Boys,” he called. “Boys! Mr. Sikorsky here has informed me that we’re being a little loud.” Several officers booed and Mikulsky waved them down. “None of that. We’re here as guests, civilized guests, so let’s behave like that. From now on,” his voice dropped into a dramatic stage whisper, “from now on, I want you talk like this. Real quiet. Real, real quiet. Shhh!” They all laughed as he tiptoed around the room, shushing them individually, fat red index finger pressed to fat red lips in a prissy pantomime.
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