by Peter Besson
THE LAST CHECKOUT
by
PETER BESSON
Published by Peter Besson, Inc.
Visit Peter Besson’s official website at www.peterbesson.com for the latest news, book details, and other information.
Copyright © Peter Besson, 2017
Ebook Formatting by: Guido Henkel
“The Last Invocation” from “Leaves of Grass” © by Walt Whitman
All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.
This novel is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed herein are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to places or events is purely coincidental.
CHAPTER ONE
CHECKING OUT
A gun in the mouth was not a pleasant experience, Edward thought. Hard, cold, tasting of weapons grease and carbon fouling; somehow he’d pictured it differently, but the reality of harsh metal against soft tissue simply didn’t live up to the romantic image he had about that great, heroic act of self-annihilation he was all set to perform.
Suicide.
Grand. Big. Sweeping in its devastating implications.
Nothing was ever said about the awful taste of a used gun.
Edward had a hard time concentrating on what he was doing. On the tragedy of it all. On the—
Goddammit, that really tasted like crap.
Edward took the gun out of his mouth. Smacked his lips a couple of times. Jesus. Maybe he should have gone with hanging, or throwing himself off the roof, or a nice bath with a plugged-in toaster, or—
No. He’d decided on a truly violent end. Something with a… well, a bang. A statement. Edward Keyes’ life had been a grandiose failure, and it needed to end just like that: with a ba—good god, was that all he could come up with?
He was sitting on the ivory-leathered chesterfield in a grand suite at the Hotel Terminus, one of the few Last Resorts left like it—and it showed: the tasteful but neglected state of the establishment, trying to hold on to an earlier, more glorious era but losing the battle against time and decay as everything must. A plastic tarp spread out behind him covering the sofa, Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde blared on the house stereo, just reaching the critical part in the music, when Tristan tears off his bandage and blares “Hahei, mein Blut, lustig nun fliesse,” having given up on life as too torturous to bear, and Edward Keyes, having no bandages to tear nor talent to sing, nevertheless vehemently agreed with the Knight of the Round Table. Circumstances might have differed a bit between the two, sure, with Edward’s life missing the love potions, murders, betrayals, the kings and queens and most everything of the mythical tale, but still, life was torturous nonetheless… and now, sitting here, Edward just couldn’t get past the taste of that blasted gun. Perhaps he could ask the concierge for something to make gunmetal more palpable… some jam? Honey? A glaze of—
No, Edward, no. This was it. The moment.
He’d had it all planned out. This exact moment. “Vergeh’ die Welt meiner jauchzenden Eil!” the singer wailed. And damn if he wasn’t right, that Tristan. The world needed to end.
Now, Edward. Now.
Tears streamed down his face. Goodbye, cruel world. He closed his eyes. His finger tensed. The trigger moved back. Broke. Here—
CLICK.
…
Nothing.
He opened one eye. He was still there. Still the same flabby forty-something, petulant, overly-dramatic account executive who never got dealt a fair hand in life, not from his lovers (not that there had been that many), not from his family, and most certainly not from his job. Edward Keyes, who—since he could—had made several millions appear in his account with nothing more than a few clicks and a couple of winks, only to be found out later and who was now, as of last week, on the verge of having to face the consequences of (dear god) living the rest of his life without the extravagances he so richly deserved and therefore had decided to blow his lights out with—
Well, that was exactly it. That blasted pistol, the standard 9mm house gun, hadn’t done it.
He put the gun back in his mouth. Eyes twitching in anticipation, he squeezed the trigger again.
Click.
Again.
Edward opened both eyes. The taste of the gun was forgotten. He pulled the trigger repeatedly.
Click click click.
But no bang. No death. Only Edward getting angrier with each pull. He racked the slide.
Click.
He released the magazine and slammed it back in.
Click.
He cursed, fumbled, scratched, pulled, cranked.
Click click click.
“Goddammit!”
Edward jumped off the couch, plastic tarp crinkling, and charged for the front door. Someone had some explaining to do.
Leaving the room, Edward didn’t notice as, behind him, outside the window, a body tumbled by with a scream.
Gun in hand, Edward stormed down the hotel hallway, fueled by the most righteous of angers. He blew by a half-open door with a housekeeping cart wedged into the opening. If he’d looked into the room, he would have seen a man swinging from the chandelier by a rope around his neck, blue-black in the face, as dead as Edward would have liked to be if it weren’t for that terrible-tasting pistol. The housekeeping crew had put up a stepladder and were about to cut the man down. But Edward had somewhere to be. He rushed down the hall, past another door, this one closed, the ‘Room Service Please’ sign dangling from the handle. There was a buzz of electricity, a flicker of the lights, the harsh smell of ozone. Something overloaded the circuits. The electrical system stumbled, hiccupped, then caught back on. Not that Edward cared. His singular interest lay in giving proper voice to his displeasure at not being dead yet.
He reached the elevators. Pushed the button. Again and again and again and again. Did nothing in this blasted Last Resort work? And once more, the last one a punch that made Edward yowl with pain and shake his bruised hand.
Goddammit! Who’s got time for all this?
He kicked open the staircase door next to the elevator and crashed down the steps, one, two, three four five at a time but tripped—stumbled—floundered—thudded onto the landing below on his belly, his head so close to the sharp edges of the radiator he could kiss it. If he hadn’t caught himself at the last second, jerking his head back, he’d have brained himself.
“Oh no. Oh no no no no. Not like this. Not like this!” he said, and picked himself up and clattered further down the stairs, madder than ever.
A mote of dust, the tiniest particle, settled on Huntley Gibson’s jacket. He raised an eyebrow. Intolerable. With precise movements, not wasting energy but still with an undeniable flourish, Huntley brushed the offending speck of dirt off his jacket. Perfection restored.
Huntley returned to his normal state of consummate equilibrium, manning the concierge desk in the lobby of the Hotel Terminus, stately erect in stature, chin held high as if by sheer force of will he could keep the building from disintegrating. Like the building itself, the lobby was glorious to behold, with grand chandeliers and swooping columns, if one didn’t look too closely. The tooth of time had left its mark everywhere—chipped paint, creaking furniture, and in the dark corners, the debris of carelessness slowly accumulated. Huntley, now in his forties, had been concierge here for the last sixteen years, and it was with sadness that he’d watched this once-grand dame stoop gradually with the advancing years, had to witness the development of wrinkles and age spots that even the heaviest of make-ups could no long
er conceal. An era was winding down, and with it, perhaps his calling as concierge. At least he knew how to put an end to things. He’d seen too many—
“Garbage.”
Edward had materialized in front of the concierge desk while Huntley’s mind had wandered. Huntley quickly drew the air of aristocracy, if not arrogance, tight around himself once more. With a pleasant smile re-established on his face, he turned to the unseemly interruption of a perfectly peaceful morning.
“Excuse me, sir?” he said.
“Garbage, that’s what I said.”
“Perhaps you would like to be a bit more specific, sir.” Huntley’s eyebrows never fell below the haughty mark.
“What kind of low-rent Last Resort are you guys running here?” Edward gesticulated with the pistol in his hand, pointing it haphazardly in any number of unsafe directions. Huntley never flinched. “I’m up there, ready to finally reboot, but noooooooo. You had to give me this garbage.”
He fiddled with the gun, clicking the safety on and off, racking the slide for good measure, but only managed to jam it even more. “See? Garbage. Garbage!”
Click. Click.
More fiddling with the gun.
“Garbage!”
“I see. The gun didn’t perform to your satisfaction.”
“No, it didn’t. Because it is garbage!”
“I think I get the picture. Now, sir, if you could please keep it down a bit, the other guests would like to enjoy themselves.” Huntley nodded toward the dining hall, straight across from the lobby.
Inside the hall, a thick haze of cigarette smoke hung in the air. Long drapes filtered out the last bit of the morning light that struggled to shine through the rarely-cleaned windows. Other hotel guests were scattered about the room as if having breakfast at a leper colony: one person per table. They were islands adrift in a sea of decay, picking morosely at their food, watched over by half-asleep waiters. Time had slowed to a crawl in here, made viscous by the accumulation of broken lives and shattered hopes.
The only person even halfway paying attention to the commotion, possibly because he was seated closest to the double doors leading into the lobby, stubbed out his cigarette, breakfast mostly untouched before him. Ansel Grayson was somewhere in his thirties, though it was difficult to tell with the hard lines of old grief carved into his face. He watched with dark amusement as Edward performed his St. Vitus dance before Huntley.
Ansel noticed Huntley’s questioning look, the concern for the comfort of the guests. Ansel waved him off. It’s all good.
“What do I care,“ Edward said back in the lobby. “Fuck them. Look at this right here.” He pulled with all his might on the slide of the gun. It was hopelessly stuck. Nothing moved. “It’s—”
“Garbage. Yes. Thank you for pinpointing the problem. Now, if you wouldn’t mind?” Huntley held out his hand.
Fuming, Edward slapped the gun into it.
“Thank you, sir.” With the speed and accuracy of a Marine, Huntley disassembled the pistol, then reassembled it with barely a second glance. Click, clack, ka-chunk. Done. He held out the gun for Edward, grip first. “If you would try it now?”
Edward snatched the gun from Huntley. “You know I had everything covered with a tarp upstairs? Just so nothing gets messed up.”
“How considerate of—”
“Wouldn’t want to make a nuisance of myself. No, not me. Oh, I was very careful.”
In the dining hall, Ansel got up and headed for the double doors leading to the lobby. As he passed a table, a half-full whiskey glass slipped from the fingers of a passed-out drunk: Henry Barnett. Henry could count the sober days of his adult life on one hand, and today he certainly wasn’t going to add a second hand to it. His blood alcohol rarely fell below pickling levels, so his first drunk nap was scheduled just past breakfast, a lit cigarette in his mouth.
Ansel caught the dropped glass in mid-air without spilling a drop, put it back on the table, and plucked the burning cigarette from Henry’s mouth. On the way out he stopped to light another unfiltered with Henry’s stub, casually listening to Edward’s rant about garbage guns, the apparent inability of the Last Resort staff to appreciate tarp-covered furniture, and his forceful need to not be an annoyance.
“I finally got my courage up to do this,” Edward said. “Everything exactly like I want it, all down to the last detail: Tristan und Isolde at precisely the right spot, myself emotionally perfectly aligned, I pull the trigger to take the last step, and then this. This piece of garbage doesn’t work. Do you have any idea what that does to a person? Do you?”
“Sir—”
“I don’t think you do. So guess what? Screw this. Screw me trying to be considerate. Screw you. All of you. I’ll show you. Watch this.” And without hesitation, Edward jammed the gun into his mouth and squeezed the trigger.
BLAM! The back of his head exploded. Edward tumbled to the ground, dead. At last. But the bullet that took Edward’s life wasn’t done yet. Pulling blood and bone and brain with it, it searched for more things to destroy and, finding none, slammed into the opposite wall, not two inches from Ansel’s face, who was still trying to get his cigarette lit.
Ansel didn’t even flinch.
The cigarette finally catching fire, he inhaled until his lungs stung with the rush of nicotine. He puffed out some blue death and walked away.
There was Edward, dead, stretched out as if making a snow angel on the carpet, the inside of his head outside of him, like a volcano erupting from his cranium, while all around him, Hotel Terminus went about its business.
Heads turned back. Forks poked food around the plates. Waiters fell back into their trances.
Huntley sighed. He picked up the phone. “Housekeeping. In the lobby.” He hung up.
Trailing smoke, Ansel pushed the elevator button. The doors slid open. He stepped inside and turned around. His eyes met Huntley’s.
Weary eyes.
Another death. Another day.
Huntley nodded.
The elevator doors closed.
***
Ansel had been a resident of the Hotel Terminus for quite some time now. A time measured in years, if not decades. If pressed, Ansel would have said twelve years, give or take. Give or take what, he didn’t know. How much longer he’d be here, he wasn’t sure, but he was certain he was on the home stretch. The day he’d checked in, his life had started running out like a clock the watchmaker had forgotten to wind up. He had been asking himself for months now what kept him here. What prevented him from going into his room, tying a rope around the chandelier, slipping the noose around his neck, and stepping off the chair?
He didn’t have an answer.
He stood on the balcony of his room on the top level of the hotel, finishing up another cigarette. It felt like he was waiting for something. But hadn’t he been waiting for twelve years? He pushed a button on the side of the wall and a trapdoor clanked open, revealing a hole in the center of the balcony, large enough for a man to step through. He flicked the smoking cigarette stub down the hole and stepped closer to watch as the glowing butt tumbled through the air. Soon it disappeared on its twenty stories of free-fall until it would, Ansel imagined, hit the concrete pad on the ground floor in a shower of sparks. Like most Last Resorts, the Terminus featured a border of smooth concrete angled toward a drain for easy cleanup of spattered human parts, a ‘Force Impact Endpoint’ for the bureaucrats who had a need for complicated words, a splat-pad for Ansel and everybody else.
Was today the day? Why not? Every day, the same question, and every day, it stayed unanswered.
He imagined what it would be like, taking that step, standing on the trapdoor, pushing the button, the moment when the gears crunched, the safety latch disengaged, and the bottom fell out. His pelvic muscles tightened at the thought of the floor being suddenly gone and nothing holding him anymore. Would he hang in mid-air for an instant, like Wile E. Coyote in the cartoons, when he ran too
far off the cliff and found himself suspended over the gaping maw of the Grand Canyon? Would he have a flash of regret right before gravity grabbed him tight and pulled him toward his forceful rendezvous with cement, a feeling he’d made a mistake that couldn’t be undone? Then again, what choice did he have? The only way he would leave Hotel Terminus was feet first, no matter what, so why not get it all over with?
Ansel inched closer. His toes wriggled over the open trapdoor. He closed his eyes. Maybe a gust of wind, a lurch in the earth’s rotation would make the decision for him. It would be so easy… so why was it so hard? All he had to do was think about that day all those years ago, the day his life had ended. Every moment since then had merely been the afterbirth of death. His biological body hung on, wanting nothing more than just one more breath, one more beat of the heart, but he knew that everything his life was, what remained of it, would always be overshadowed by that one day. By her. By the beginning of hope they’d had. If only—
He stepped back. The abyss receded. This wasn’t the day.
Ansel lit another cigarette. Inhaled deeply. Well, something might kill him if he was too chicken-hearted to do it himself.
CHAPTER TWO
THE LAST RESORTS
At some point, the world had turned to shit.
When exactly that had happened, no one knew. It might have been after the realization that global warming couldn’t be reversed and our planet was cooking on an ever-higher flame, or maybe it was after yet another of the ‘regional’ wars that never appeared to go out of style, be it over some nutty idea about which ethnicity had the right to cleanse the globe of another, obviously less-deserving category of humans, or which religion should tell all the others what to do or, better yet, to simply make all the heretics of the world disappear through bombs or cutting off of heads or preferably both. Maybe it was after the reasons for war—always righteous and good ones, to be sure—shifted from blustering patriotism and grand ambitions to all-out landgrabs for money and power… or maybe it was when, finally, the global weather system got ever more volatile and unpredictable, and large parts of the planet permanently changed their climate patterns on a vast scale, leaving some areas barren and triggering migrations of entire populations, and wars began to be fought over resources, be they land, oil, or, in the end, mostly, water. The inhabitable regions of Mother Earth shrank and consolidated themselves until, suddenly, there wasn’t enough room anymore. With unchecked population growth, cities grew to previously unthinkable proportions, while parts of the globe turned into immense flooded expanses or windblown dust bowls. The world drew tight around itself and got harsher and meaner, and slowly, hope blinked out.