He had spent time studying these images, understanding what the web was saying about the people it watched. It showed you could live in a city, be one of its inhabitants, without comprehending or being part of its wider picture. Like mice living in a human house—it was their address, but that didn’t mean they had rights, that they had to be viewed with anything more than benign amusement, that they weren’t fair game for cats or traps. Similarly, you could sit in a restaurant all day without ever becoming more than just some guy temporarily taking up space that belonged to someone else, space you hired by handing over money for coffee and burgers. Even if you had your nice house in the suburbs you paid tithes in every direction: you chipped away at the loan you took to buy the property, you hacked at the vig for your son’s dentistry and the money pit of your daughter’s some-day wedding, you paid the insurance that might cover your parents’ tumor care but wouldn’t save their lives. You took your days and handed them over to other people, who did things with them, who made stuff with your days, who sold their products with your life. Your days, your time, were their secret ingredient, their twelfth herb or spice; your life was given away free in the bottom of their packets like invisible Cracker Jack treats. In return they helped you pay off some of your debts to the banks and the hospitals and fate—and so you went back and forth, every day, riding the rail between your house and your place of work, driving in a machine you were paying off in installments and which someone would tow off your driveway, no matter how manicured, within days of a payment not being made.
You kept doing this until you got old and your life started running in reverse, and you went from having a whole house to just a room in one of your children’s houses, assuming they’d take you, and finally to a room in a stranger’s building, some rest home, surrounded by old geezers you’d never met before and might not have liked even if you had: the young don’t understand that the physical similarities of old people do not mean they’re the same inside. They don’t all got rhythm either. Even more acutely than failing health, this progression makes it bluntly clear that life is going in very much the wrong direction. All that time spent owning a house, all those loans and aspirations, are erased, wiped off the disk of your life. It is lifted gently out of your hands like a kitchen knife taken from someone too young. The things you acquired and which have helped define you are given or sold or thrown away, and you are squeezed again into a little room, as if you were twelve once more—but this time, instead of feeling at one with the outside world, by now the whole thing has long ago stopped making sense. You sit in quiet places and look out of windows and try not to panic as you notice both how much you are forgetting these days, and how little of value there is to forget. The layers of self you spent decades accreting are dissolved, reducing you once again to dependence; and there’s no kidding yourself that this is a mere stage to be got through, that your time lies ahead. It doesn’t. You’ve had your time. Your time has been and gone. Now you are merely color in the background of someone else’s time, and even that probably won’t be for long.
Meanwhile other people now drive your freeway to and from work, and live in your old house, and repaint the walls and tear down your shelves, and the planet spins.
ONE DAY, AFTER A PARTICULARLY ARDUOUS TRIP TO and from the john, when she was settled back in her chair and looking exhausted and small and ashamed, his grandmother had looked at the boy and said:
“It’s a pity He puts the worst bit at the end.”
He hadn’t understood immediately, but did seven months later when he sat quietly behind one of the chairs in the living room, two hours after coming back from Grandma’s funeral. He had been sitting there awhile, thinking about the old lady, when his mother came into the room holding a record. She went over to the player, turned it on, and then sat in a chair and listened.
He was severely freaked. He didn’t know what to do. He knew this was a private moment of his mother’s and she would not take at all well to finding she was not alone. He knew this especially when he heard something that might have been his mother crying. He had never heard his mother cry before. He never heard it again.
So he just sat, and listened.
His mother sat through the recording once, from start to finish. Then she got up, wrenched the record off the player, and threw it viciously into a corner, where it smashed into many pieces.
She stormed out. The front door slammed.
When she was safely external he cautiously emerged from behind the chair. His body told him to get the hell gone from the room, go upstairs, go out, do something, but his mind said his mother was halfway to a bar already and it wanted to know what the music had been. The mind won.
He stepped over to the record player to look at the sleeve. It was Fauré’s Requiem, and he recognized it from Grandma’s room, one of the few possessions she’d brought to their house when she was deemed too old to live by herself anymore. The sleeve was old and faded and battered, and it looked like the record had been pulled out and replaced a great many times, back in her real life, when she got to choose what music was played within her hearing. Perhaps it was this that made him go over to the corner, pick up one of the biggest fragments of the shattered disk, and take it with him back up to his bedroom: a realization that there would come a time when he would be controlled by others once more, and that the time in between was all he had.
He was twelve years old. Four years later, Fauré’s Requiem was the first album he bought. By his late teens it was already something he played only privately. Fauré was one of those composers, he had learned, who was a little too well known. It was like putting on Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, or Beethoven’s Fifth or Bach’s Air on a G String. You wound up looking ignorant no matter how much you actually liked it, because you were surrounded by people who valued ideas—including the idea that they were clever and unusual and not just part of the common mass—rather than experience. People who thought it was better to admire something than to actually like it, who either lived a life of constant fragility or indulged themselves in private.
People who did not have the courage to realize that if they acted powerfully enough, they could tip the planet.
It was not long before he left those people, all people, far behind, when he found the smoking road. Listening to his mother, and hearing those strange, ugly/beautiful sounds coming from inside her, that had been real. That had been something that was happening, a real-time incident, a change in the world’s color as his grandmother’s death scraped its indelible mark on reality. It had been like a glimpse of a distant lake or sleeping girl or grubby street corner, frank and vulnerable in its simple, uninflected truth.
Death is real. Death changes things. Everything else is filler, merely a message from our sponsor.
The old woman’s death said something, especially as he knew that the fall that had finally killed the old lady had not been purely accidental. She was being helped down the stairs, after all, and he had heard her say “No” urgently, once, just before she fell.
But then everything was quiet for her, and she no longer cried out in the night or soiled herself, and her ragged breathing was no more. She was put in the ground and slept easily, and she must surely have known, in some way or another, that her daughter had cried for her after she was gone.
The worst bit didn’t have to be at the end, that much was clear. It didn’t have to be quiet and pointless. So long as there was someone there who cared, the end didn’t have to be so bad at all.
So why wait?
WHEN HE GOT TO THE CITY HE PARKED. HE walked some distance to his destination. He kept on the move, because movement was best. Even now, this part of the process was strange and ungovernable, and a lesser man might have entertained the idea this was because the impulse was coming from somewhere other than his conscious mind. Not him. He knew it all made sense, that sometimes this was what we are for.
He walked. He waited for the night. He waited so that someone else special would no long
er have to wait. He was actually doing it for his own reasons, of course, and for wider-reaching benefits, but that didn’t stop it being the right thing for her too. Everything would be fresh, and all would be quiet.
It was truly a no-lose situation.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
THE ELEVATOR OPENED. BURT WAS STANDING INSIDE. He grinned and stood back to let Katelyn in, then realized he had to get out with his big cart and that this had to happen first regardless of the dictates of his personal code of chivalry. He hesitated, went back and forward an inch or two, then rolled his eyes and shrugged. This, or something like it, happened pretty much every night.
He apologetically clanked his way out and then turned back to hold the doors open. “Fetching the menus, ma’am?”
“That’s right, Burt. How’s your night?”
“Getting it done.”
Burt was the Seattle Fairview’s only black employee apart from the much-celebrated Big Ron, the daytime concierge. Katelyn liked Burt. He was twice as old as anyone else on the payroll and worked twice as hard, even at three in the morning. If you saw Burt, he’d be doing something. The idea of him at rest was absurd.
Reassured that she was safely in the elevator, he winked and trundled off, on his way to fix something or reattach something or scrape something off. Katelyn watched him as the doors closed. He was a night toiler too, and something told her he felt the same as she did, the same sense of being in a special position. She’d never asked because, well, you just didn’t. Or was that too simple? Did she believe such an observation lay outside the terms of their working relationship, and if so, why? Did it say something bad about her? Was hierarchy more important to her than she’d thought? Or was she patronizing him without realizing it, not taking him seriously because he was old or . . .
Christ, it was too late now.
THIS WAS NOT A JOB FOR THE NIGHT MANAGER, SHE knew that. Some hotels left it to the bellboy, a final errand before he knocked off for the night; or, if there was 24/7 room service, sometimes the overnight cook would put the machine on in the dead zone around four A.M. and fetch them himself, most likely wandering the corridors with his pants down, judging by the night cooks she’d met. One place had asked for the menus to be hung on the door by six, rather than two, and there it had been the first job of the day for the service staff who’d later be running those same breakfasts upstairs. That seemed wrong to her. You might think breakfast was the first event of the new day, but it wasn’t. Not for the guests. It was the last thing. They returned from an evening in an unfamiliar city, midevening and surly or late and politely shit-faced—guessing which was half of the fun. Katelyn liked to imagine them kicking off their shoes and sitting soberly at the little desk in each room, or else sprawled hiccupping across the bed, gripping a complementary ballpoint pen, brow furrowed with lonely concentration, ticking and annotating. When you were on vacation, or away on business, the arrival of breakfast was of existential significance. It reminded you who you were—or who you’d thought you were, at least, at midnight and full up to the ears with wine.
So Katelyn believed. She’d tried explaining this to one of the guys on reception and he’d looked at her as if she were speaking Mandarin. A few of them treated her like that whatever she said. Night managers were rarely women. Something to do with their responsibilities, maybe, the fact that they had to deal with strange doings in the night—explaining to nonguests that you didn’t run a cab service to the suburbs; dissuading goggle-eyed businessmen from bringing back women who were too obviously whores; finding someone to clean up the vomit in the middle elevator (people always threw up in the middle one; nobody knew why, not even Burt). Most night managers weren’t on an upward track. They were like lifer waiters, out of step with this world. They came on at nine, or whenever the particular hotel deemed the real action to have died down, installed themselves in the back office, and drank coffee. If they were lucky, they’d continue doing that until the sun came up, taking a minute every now and then to check that the downtime maintenance and cleaning and restocking was getting done by people paid half as much as they were. If fire fighting was required they’d boss people around until the problem had gone away, been forgotten or superseded, then go back to flipping through magazines. At dawn they faded like the dew, back to their apartment or little house, to sleep out the day like chubby vampires.
Katelyn was different. As the elevator rose in the night, the reflection in its wraparound mirrors reassured her she was young, female, and attractive. Okay, not young. Scrub that. She had good skin, though, and hair that needed little pampering. Her nose was strong. She looked businesslike in her charcoal suit. She didn’t have to be here. Shouldn’t be, perhaps. You could enter hotel management without any experience whatsoever, but she had worked for enough flip-chart generals to know that bullet points were no match for time spent on the ground. During the day a hotel seemed like a huge engine, driven by its own internal principle. Sure, as soon as you got to the other side of the reception desk, once you’d stepped behind a few of those doors marked Private, you realized that wasn’t quite the case. You understood that a hotel was the head-on collision of a thousand different “to do” lists getting done at variable rates; that it was a flesh and stone computer running seventeen competing pieces of software (some new and can-do, some old and bug-ridden), and that a full-scale crash was always just around the corner. There was a momentum, nonetheless, the sense of an ecosystem rubbing along together, a relay team running an endless race.
At night it was different. The software went to standby and you became more aware of the hard fixtures: the desks, the chairs, the glowing wall lamps providing rest and shedding light for no one but themselves. The elevators, which might take it upon themselves to travel up and down, for no obvious reason, clanking and hissing in the small hours. Most of all, of the building itself, its long corridors and massive haunches, suffused with the white noise of downtime. Hotels see a lot of life. Hotels get kicked around. The action the average city hotel sees would give a normal house a nervous breakdown in a day. In the small hours the building has some time to itself, to think its big, slow thoughts. To wander the halls then was to sit down with some big brick animal in darkness and listen to it breathing at rest.
And maybe that’s why most night managers weren’t women. Katelyn knew she should have been at home, asleep, or listening to another human’s breath. A cat didn’t count, no matter how much she loved him. It had to be a child’s breathing, or at least a man’s. You could listen all you liked in her apartment, but you wouldn’t hear either. She should stop kidding herself.
That was why she was here.
THE DOORS OPENED ON THE SIXTH FLOOR AND SHE strode out like a night manager should. Six wasn’t so many floors, but it was all the Fairview had. Katelyn had been through this recently with a disgruntled guest, who’d been expecting the kind of vista he’d had at one of the sister hotels in the same small chain up in Vancouver. The Bayside there had twenty-two floors and admittedly superb views across Burrard Bay to the mountains—Katelyn knew this, having been there for an orientation course. There were hotels in Seattle with more extravagant views, she’d admitted, but none with the same boutique attention to quality of service. The man glared at her, knowing he’d been volleyed with brochure-speak, but seemed happy enough when he left. Bit of a nut in any case: had the fruit plate with sausage patties on the side, both mornings, which spoke of conflicted desires somewhere along the line.
The air was still and warm. She walked the silent, carpet-padded corridors, following three sides of a small square. Up, across, down. There weren’t many menus. Weekends at this time of year were quiet. There was a tourist couple down on five—having seen them stagger home after midnight, Katelyn was interested to see what they’d ordered—but mostly it was business folk. These would be up early and sucking down the free Starbucks and croissants provided in the lobby between seven and half past eight. The whole floor yielded only twelve orders, mainly for t
he hotel’s idiosyncratic version of a two-egg breakfast. Nothing much of interest, though there was a request for the steel-cut oats, which made her smile. The guest in question was a big guy. Oats wasn’t what he wanted. He was being good. His wife would have been proud—assuming she believed him, assuming it ever even came up, which it wouldn’t except in the context of a conversation he was destined to lose. He should just have had the big breakfast, like he wanted. Still, good for him.
At the end of the floor she glanced back to check that she hadn’t missed anything, and then opened the door to the stairs. The rich carpet stopped just the other side of this door, a cost-cutting maneuver she approved of. Guests did use the stairs sometimes—usually only if they were phobic of elevators, because there were a lot—and this was their glimpse of the insides. No pictures on the walls, no red carpet with little gold squares, none of the opulence the rest of the hotel affected. It was a . . .
Katelyn shook her head. Jesus, woman, shut up. There was no mystique there. It was just a staircase. It had gray linoleum and echoed. It wasn’t interesting. She didn’t have to try to make it so. No one was listening. Tromping down here was her job. That was all.
She listened to the clack of her shoes on the stairs, concentrating on the world outside her head. Talking to yourself was talking to yourself, even if you did it silently. Which she did, endlessly, she knew, did it like the chorus to a Shania Twain song: on and on and on, poppy and bright, sounded good in the background but empty as a Ping-Pong ball if you actually listened to what it said.
The Upright Man Page 20