The Last Checkout

by Peter Besson

  She grabbed Ansel’s hand. “Thanks. For doing this with me.”

  “Oh. Anytime.” He thought for a moment. “Well, this one time.”

  That he was able to do: He could make her smile. They looked back up, shadows of clouds racing across their faces. They both felt it. The moment. This must be what it feels like to face eternity.

  “You scared?” Ansel said.

  “Not of dying.”

  “Dying’s the easy part. One second you’re here, the next… poof. Like a cloud. You’re how old? Twenty-one?”

  “Old enough. I promised my dad I’d wait. To think about it. I did. It’s all a big pile of shit.”

  “There’s parts that are less than ideal, sure.”

  “Not parts. Everything. Every day I wake up, it’s like I got lead weights on my shoulders. I struggle to put one foot in front of the other. Moment to moment. It goes on and on, without end, and there’s absolutely nothing that tells me it’ll get any better. It’s like I live in eternal darkness. As if I’m in a tunnel and instead of the light at the end of it, they closed it off, and buried me with it. You know how that feels?”

  “For the last twelve years I’ve thought every day about killing myself. My days are no picnic either.” Even though, when he glanced up again, this did feel like a picnic. Not the most comfortable of picnics, what with the metal track cutting into his neck and his legs, to say nothing of a train that could race around the corner at any minute. But right now, the sun shining, holding the hand of a pretty girl —granted, in the same position as he, but still—he’d had worse. Plenty worse.

  “I tried everything,” Nikki said. “I went through medications like a drunk sampling beer. I’ve had therapy, hypnosis, alternative healing, vision quests, took drugs from native tribes whose names I couldn’t pronounce—everything you can think of, up and down. The list is endless. They said depression this, syndrome that. Mother, father, environment, sunspots, menstrual cycles, demonic possession. You name it. It’s all a crock of shit. I did meditation, yoga, music, art. I tried to fall in love, I fucked boys I can’t remember the faces of, I wasted days and nights drugged and drunk, but I simply can’t get a hold of anything. Nothing. I’m in that goddamn tunnel, and I can’t claw my way out of it. And I’m tired. Whatever it is—our parents, our society, the crap we eat, drink, watch… there’s just nothing.” She waved her hand about, indicating everything and nothing at the same time. “Nothing fucking matters. So I don’t see the point.”

  Ansel was unable to tear his eyes from the radiant sky. The clouds drifted by without effort or attachment, unconcerned by the affairs of the ground below, trailing unhurried shadows. Perhaps nothing mattered but those gleaming white tufts of water vapor against the deep cold blue of the atmosphere, the thin skin between us and the endless darkness of the universe, and somehow, as Ansel felt the earth expand all around him in every direction, sensed beyond it the eternal expanse of everything there is, this incredible sense of magnitude seemed to make a case for relevance. It seemed impossible for this to be nothing but a glorious waste of meaning.

  “But you wanna hear something crazy?” Nikki said.

  At the back of his head, Ansel noticed a slight vibration, as if the metal rail he rested on were stretching itself, awakening after a long slumber, humming a small tune. He turned his head. Around the bend, he caught the glint of sunlight bouncing off the roof of a train.

  “Sure. But make it quick.”

  “Ever since I decided to kill myself, I’ve never been happier. Isn’t that just the weirdest thing?”

  Ansel’s head swiveled from Nikki to the approaching train and back again. It was true, she looked happier.

  He turned his head. The train didn’t look happy at all—quite the opposite.

  But Nikki was beaming. The first time he had seen her—the little he saw of her when he’d swung from the chandelier and the world was an unfocused blob—she’d appeared to be nothing more than a stooped form, unsure, seeming to fold into itself in an attempt to vanish. Then the small glimpse he’d caught of her at the end of the hallway, when she had turned her head and told him she wouldn’t be here long enough for her name to matter—back then, sad-eyed, hiding behind her hair, she had looked like she’d already checked out, as if it was a simple formality to see it through. Now, lying on the railway tracks, the sun blasting everything with boundless energy, there was a spark of wild life blazing in her eyes.

  “Goddammit!”

  He grabbed her by her hand and yanked her to her feet.

  ***

  Running across the train tracks was rough work. The railroad ties seemed purposefully designed to trip them up: warped, splintered, or plain missing in places. It was as if Ansel and Nikki were contestants in an obstacle-course game show and the prize in the end was certain death in the form of the train hurtling at them, gaining fast. As if they weren’t aware of the stakes, the engineer blasted the horn.

  “Faster!” Ansel yelled.

  “What do you think I’m doing?” Nikki had no time to think. Getting run over by a train had been her idea, true, but now that the train was threatening to do the running-over part, she couldn’t remember if it had been a good idea or a bad one. Judging by how fast her legs were moving, it was the latter.

  Another horn blast from the train. Ansel’s feet didn’t seem to touch the ground anymore. He pulled Nikki hard. She stumbled into him and together they fell on the station platform, just as—whoosh!—the train rattled by, brakes smoking, just barely missing them.

  Ansel and Nikki rolled onto their backs, laughing. They were still alive. At the moment, that felt terribly good. Good enough for Ansel to take Nikki’s face in both hands and kiss her.

  Good enough didn’t even come close for Nikki. ‘Great,’ no, ‘fantastic’ was more like it. Blood pumping, adrenaline burning, eyes wide, she kissed Ansel back. She didn’t know what any of it meant, where it might lead, but at this moment, lying on the dirty train platform, next to dog shit, cigarette butts, and chewing gum, being stared at by strangers, life was incredible.

  People shook their heads at the two idiots rolling on the ground. Someone must have forgotten to lock the door when they closed the asylum for the day.

  “You!” The conductor, stepping off the still-moving train in a smooth movement born of daily habit, pointed an angry finger at them.

  Ansel and Nikki froze in mid-kiss. They’d completely forgotten there were other people on the earth. One of them was extremely agitated, red-faced, and, judging by the way he pushed through the crush of people getting on and off the train, he meant them harm. “What the hell do you think you’re doing!” That wasn’t a question. That was an ‘I’m going to beat you so hard your grandkids are going to feel it’ statement.

  Ansel saw a mischievous glint in Nikki’s eyes. If he’d had a mirror and the time to look into it, he’d have found the exact same sparkle in his own: The sense of two against the world, their banner of unconventionality—decrying the square, dull, boring old world—flying high and bold and for everyone to see. They were not like them. They were here, now, and would never be here or now again. This was a moment as unique as a snowflake. They both knew it. They smiled at one another and then they took off running, the yells of the conductor fading as they flew down the stairs of the elevated station, two, three steps at a time until they spilled into the street below, a wild fire in their eyes.

  Nikki pulled Ansel to a stop and drew him into another kiss, exuberant at first but melting into a soft caress, something that to Ansel felt almost like a tender goodbye. Never breaking eye contact, Nikki, smiling, arms held out, stepped back, into the flow of traffic rushing by right behind her.

  Ansel’s heart stopped. He expected Nikki to be clipped by a car and bounce between vehicles like a pinball, but incredibly the cars swerved, evading her, horns blaring, brakes squealing, smoke rising from rubber locked on asphalt. She waded backwards as if through a school of deadly meta
l fish blinking in the sunlight, streaming all around her.

  She threw her head back and laughed aloud.

  “You’re nuts.” She couldn’t possibly have heard him, but still, she beamed at him, then turned and ran across the street, disappearing into the gawking crowd.

  Ansel watched her slide between people. He smiled, but the smile tugged at something deep inside, something larger than he was willing to pull to the surface. A dark fearsome mass. He realized he probably didn’t have a choice anymore. It would emerge.

  He braced himself and hurried after Nikki, stepping through the tangle of cars hopelessly deadlocked, angry drivers honking and yelling at each other.

  ***

  It was humiliating, that’s what it was. Douglas Forlan III wasn’t used to being treated like everyone else. Mostly because he wasn’t like everyone else. He was richer than most, had more influence than anyone he knew, and he’d never come across a problem he hadn’t been deft enough to solve.

  He paced up and down his study, which was larger than a lot of people’s houses and paneled with enough exotic wood to constitute some sort of crime against the planet. He had sequestered himself in the room since he’d been sent packing, tail between his legs, by that scrawny little man who’d abused his bodyguard like a plaything he could toy with at will. And then that other, insufferable man, one of Nikki’s ‘friends.’ Ansel something or other. What business was it of his? Nikki had been at the Last Resort for less than twenty-four hours. Douglas had looked away for one day, one lousy day, and his daughter had done what she’d threatened to do for as long as he could remember. Where had he gone wrong?

  Nikki had been different. All her life. He had known it; he’d just hoped she would grow out of it, given enough time. If there was one thing Douglas Forlan III believed in, it was overcoming difficulties.

  He had to.

  He’d been the managing director of a company producing incinerators for crematoriums—a niche market at best, something never talked about at worst—most of his professional life. He’d seen his chance when the world had started to tilt, and he’d anticipated the growing demand for easy disposal of a never-ending flood of dead bodies. He’d knocked on door after door, trying to secure funding for an expanded operation that would depend on an increase in the death rate unthinkable at the time, and he’d been told ‘no’ so many times the word had lost its meaning, but he had persevered through sheer power of will. Soon enough, when the bodies started piling up, his was the only company to emerge with a ready solution. He built a network of interconnected crematoriums, tied in with local railway operations, and shortly the trains began to haul off an unprecedented number of corpses to be incinerated at the far stretches of the horizon, out of everyone’s sight. A collective sigh of relief was heard among the politicians: Everything happened outside county limits, the trains rumbled through the city at night, and nobody questioned where the bodies went. They were gone, that’s all that mattered. He, Douglas Forlan III, had made it happen when no one else had been able to, or had the mental fortitude to stomach it.

  And now his lawyers informed him it was perfectly permissible for those scoundrels at Hotel Terminus to give him a boot to the backside and tell him his daughter had to stay? He had to swallow that? “Legally, it’s the Wild West in a Last Resort,” they told him. ‘Uncertain judicial boundaries’ and ‘entrenched clauses’ and other legal claptrap nobody understood. The bottom line was the same: There was nothing he could do. He should be glad Hotel Terminus didn’t sue him, what with their ‘special status’ and the ‘non-interference by-laws’ and…

  Douglas’ head hurt. There had to be a way. There always was. And the simplest was always the best. So after he’d paced in his study for hours, stewing over the insult that nagged and nagged at his ego, he brushed himself off, downed a couple of glasses of single-malt scotch (a barrel of which he had flown in monthly from a remote distillery in Scotland), then called Tom the imbecile, his still-bodyguard, and told him to get the car.

  There was one thing that solved all the problems in the world.

  ***

  Maybe she would come today. He hoped she would come today. She had to come today.

  He glanced at his wristband. 00:00 in big red blinking numbers.

  Time was up.

  Mr. Aubrey slid his jacket sleeve back down, hiding those traitorous numbers. Perhaps no one would notice. They might have even forgotten about him. He took another bite of his lunch. That’s the one thing that hadn’t changed: The food was still insufferable at Hotel Terminus. For all the improvements they said they’d made, they’d neglected to take the cook outside and shoot him.

  Mr. Aubrey, an avian-looking man well into his fifties, with yellow skin, blood-shot eyes and a tremble as his constant companion, was sitting at his table in the dining room. There was something pronounced edible by the hotel staff before him, but all he could do was poke the food around, sliding it here and there on the plate. The other residents in the dining room ate with equal listlessness, more a function to be performed than enjoyed. Only Henry, by the door, devoured everything with a smile, but he was roaring drunk and would have eaten his left shoe with gusto.

  For Mr. Aubrey, losing his job wasn’t the worst. And it wasn’t the years of drinking, of waking up in gutters and whorehouses and parks. Or beating his wife. That was almost easy. Too easy. It seemed to always end that way. A petty argument about… he couldn’t even remember. The dishes. The toothpaste tube. The toilet seat. Tracking dirt into the house. God… none of it ever mattered, how could it? But then it began to matter, oh did it ever, when egos and hurt feelings and perceived slights and demands for respect entered the fray, voices got louder, gestures became more animated, acquiring shades of threats, the pointed fingers, the hand wringing, and then all that was left to do was release the pressure. So he’d hit her. Drank more. And the cycle started again.

  So it went on, for however long it did, until one day—and Mr. Aubrey had never thought that day would come—one day she closed the door behind her and never came back. Took his daughter, his life, with her and left him with nothing. It had all come to light—what he’d thought should be the dark secrets between a man and wife, the things he’d done—and they all turned their backs: her family. His. His daughter. And, at last, his own body. Liver cancer. He was abandoned, all alone with a body that wanted nothing more than to get rid of him as well. The cancer was inoperable. That was the end; he’d run out of options. Still, nobody came. Nobody cared. So one night, the last night he’d had a drink, he checked in here. He’d thought it would bring them here—if not everyone, then at least her; his daughter. If she heard he was about to check out, take his life, she’d have to come running and throw her arms around him and give him back part of his life.

  But no one showed up. Days turned into weeks. The money he’d stolen from his wife’s inheritance ran out. Today was the last day.

  Mr. Aubrey glanced up, and his heart skipped a beat: Morton was heading his way, Huntley in tow. Mr. Aubrey quickly looked away. Maybe they were here for someone else. They might have just come for lunch. Everybody’s got to eat sometime. If he only kept his head low, this would pass.

  Morton glided through the dining room with his chin held high as if striving to avoid the stench below, the smell of death and defeat that hung palpably in the air. He saw Mr. Aubrey shrinking into himself, trying to present as small a target as possible, but who was he fooling? They had been kind enough to give him this one last meal. Morton would have taken him from the room right when his time had expired, but he had listened to Huntley about allowing this one final kindness for a man who hadn’t seen much kindness in his life. If Morton didn’t know better, he’d worry about Huntley’s display of… human emotions. Ever since that girl in 516, he’d changed. Imperceptible to most, but Morton detected the minute softening of Huntley’s eyes, the flicker of compassion that hadn’t been there before.

  They reached Mr. Aubrey’s
table. Mr. Aubrey had his eyes glued to his plate, poking his lunch about, perhaps hoping they would go away.

  “Mr. Aubrey,” Morton said. “With your permission.” He pulled back Mr. Aubrey’s shirt sleeve, revealing the 00:00 for everyone to clearly see.

  Mr. Aubrey faked surprise. “Oh… oh no, there must be a… That can’t be. It’s a mistake. I’ve got…” He looked up, eyes filling with tears, pleading, but he stopped when he saw the coldness of finality in Morton’s eyes. He swallowed dryly. “Please…”

  “If you don’t mind, Mr. Aubrey.” Morton stepped back, inviting Mr. Aubrey, with a sweep of his hand, to get up and follow.

  “But… my daughter. She’s going to visit. She said she’d—”

  “Your daughter has never visited, and she won’t today. Now, please. Do not make a scene.”

  The tears fell from Mr. Aubrey’s eyes, streaking down his cheeks. “But she must come. She must…” His voice faded to a whisper. He didn’t have the strength to resist anymore.

  Huntley took Mr. Aubrey gently by the elbow and helped him stand. “It’ll be over in a jiffy, Mr. Aubrey,” he said. “This way, please.” He led Mr. Aubrey out of the dining room, steering him lightly but with a grip unmistakably firm enough to brook no argument.

  Morton stayed behind. He let his gaze wander across the sad assembly of broken lives. That refuse of humanity. Oh, how he loathed them all. If he could only have them all taken outside by Huntley! But there were rules to follow, rules to be enforced with the utmost severity from now on—he would make sure of that. It had been a mistake to grant Mr. Aubrey those few miserable hours. It set a bad precedent, it might have showed weakness on his part, but as he looked harshly across the room, nobody dared looking up. All had their heads down, pretending to eat even if nothing was on their plate anymore—they were like school children scared to be called upon by the strict teacher.

  Good.

  He turned on his heels and walked off, chin up. God forbid he catch misery or despair. As he passed the table at the end, Henry, seated at his usual spot and unconscious by now, sagged to his side, drooling. The whiskey glass slipped through his fingers and clattered to the carpet, spilling a small amount of drink on Morton’s Bontoni oxford in chocolate leather.