The Last Checkout

by Peter Besson

  “And that’s where you come in,” Romer had said. “Tell them. The whole suicidal bunch of them.” He had taken a last drag of his cigarette. “Tell them the lunatics can run the asylum.”

  ***

  Henry managed to swallow the last drop of his leftover breakfast whiskey before the comforting warm embrace of another blackout grasped him. His head lolled and the glass slipped from his fingers, but Ansel caught it deftly before it clattered to the ground. He slammed the glass back down on the table, waking Henry.

  “Whatissssitttha…”

  “Good mor—” Ansel checked his watch. “Good afternoon everybody,” he said, addressing the whole room. They all lifted their heads. It was a somewhat busy day; a few people Ansel had only seen in passing, a small number of new, frightened-looking faces, and some who seemed to already have checked out, at least in their minds. All the perms were here. Henry, lolling drunk; Leah, bitter and suspicious; Olga—or most of her. Ansel glanced over to where Romer would have sat. Now, a saturnine man in his early fifties, a spoonful of by now surely cold eggs suspended before his open mouth, gawked in bewilderment at Ansel, who held up a stack of papers.

  “This is the agenda for today’s shareholder meeting. Sorry for the late notice, but circumstances call for an extraordinary general meeting.” He put a handful of papers in front of Henry. “You probably don’t know this, but you all own this place.”

  “Fantastic.” Henry burped. “Then somebody get me a drink.”

  ***

  Douglas Forlan checked his watch against the clock in the kitchen. Both agreed: it was getting late in the day. He had tried to give his daughter time and space, to not smother or spook her with sudden, unexpected attention. He’d felt magnanimous, displaying that kind of restraint when all he’d wanted to do this morning after he woke up was storm into her room and harangue her for trying to throw her life away, for putting him and his wife (where the hell had she gotten to, anyway? Some martini breakfast with her girlfriends? An early shopping spree in the city? He could never keep track of his wife’s whereabouts. Only one thing was certain: She would not see noon sober) through hell. So he’d paced the length of the kitchen, drinking one cup of coffee after another, answering his phone when business required it, but mostly just drinking coffee and walking, ambulating like a monk in his cell, his sense of benevolence slowly evaporating with the minutes ticking down and his daughter refusing to get up.

  She slept late. Douglas knew that. She always had. Oh, how he’d railed against her indolence, how he’d tried everything to get his daughter out of bed early to go, do something, anything, with her life. He’d promised rewards, threatened all manner of punishment and deprivation, harangued and harassed, cajoled and enticed, begged and browbeat, all with the same result. She got up when she got up. He could stare at the clock in the kitchen all he wanted; she would not magically appear, hug him tight, and thank him for saving her life. That wouldn’t be his daughter. It would be nice, sure, but if he wanted to make peace in his own heart, he would have to accept her for who she was.

  He stopped, stunned by this simple realization, and for the second time this morning, he felt the unfamiliar glow of compassion warm his heart. It had taken him long enough, sure, but maybe this was his chance to reboot his relationship with his daughter. He grabbed a cup from the counter and poured coffee for her, and as he did, all he felt was gratitude that she was here, and that he’d come to this understanding just in time.

  Douglas was in such high spirits—brimming with goodwill, on the verge of giving in to an unusual urge to hum—that at first he only felt a pang of annoyance when he saw Tom the bodyguard with his chin on his chest, sleeping, making bubbling noises. He thought, irritated, that his daughter’s love of sleep must be contagious—then he noticed the water glass tipped over on the floor by Tom’s feet.

  Douglas Forlan III didn’t feel all that much warm gratitude anymore.

  ***

  “How could this happen?” Morton stared out the window of his office. The city, that dreadful behemoth, spread out like a cancer in every direction, belching poisonous pollution, drowning everything in noise. He turned around, expecting an answer, but he should have known better. Huntley was standing at the desk with a face as inscrutable as Cretan hieroglyphs.

  “Didn’t Mr. Romer handle the bureaucratic details for you, Mr. Morton?”

  “Yes. Thank you for pointing out the obvious, Huntley. Perhaps I should have been more specific: How do we stop this?”

  “I have no idea, sir.”

  Morton glared at his computer monitor. He re-read, for the thirtieth time this morning, what had greeted him when he’d checked on the balance in his personal account: ‘Your transaction cannot be completed at this time. Please contact customer service.’ Rage boiled deep inside him. His money. His dream. Morton envisioned Romer, lying cold in the morgue downstairs, smiling up.

  With a blind roar, Morton swiped the monitor off his desk, where it clattered to the ground, cracking in a thousand places.

  ***

  Leah didn’t know why she had come. She knew why she came earlier—because she’d been riding one of the new arrivals until he begged for mercy and checked out five minutes later with her still on top (that had made her come hard)—but she had no idea why she was sitting in the dining room with all the other guests of the hotel, listening to Ansel tell her she had a choice. She knew she had a choice; that’s why she’d come to Hotel Terminus in the first place. Perhaps she was here because she’d known Ansel for over ten years now, which made him sort of like family, and so she’d felt an obligation to indulge him. But like every family gathering she’d ever attended, this one was turning out to be a painful affair.

  She glanced over the piece of paper Ansel had given her earlier, full of words like ‘shareholder,’ ‘contract,’ ‘responsibility,’ and ‘vote’. She thought she’d left all this behind her a long time ago, and good riddance to it. She knew she’d never go back out into the world again, and she certainly didn’t appreciate the world intruding here.

  “What do you want with this, Ansel?” she said.

  Ansel stood by the buffet, the natural focus point of the room. Behind him, the kitchen staff was busy filling the trays with steaming food. Suicidal or not, most people in this room worried more about lunch than life choices.

  A fidgety-looking man a table over from Leah piped up. “Can we move this forward?” He seemed ready to jump out of his skin. “I’m checking out today, and I haven’t eaten yet.”

  “There’s plenty of time for that.” Ansel didn’t feel like pointing out the incongruence in ensuring a full stomach before committing suicide—logic wasn’t the strong suit of residents in a Last Resort. He addressed the whole room. “All we need is a simple majority. And then we can change things. The way we want them.”

  “Why would we want to?” Leah asked.

  “Because right now, we can’t do anything. Except die.”

  “That’s why we came here.” An agreeable mumbling ran through the rest of the group.

  “Could somebody get me another drink,” Henry slurred. “If I own the damn place—”

  “Henry!” Ansel took a deep breath. This wasn’t going to be easy. “Yes, we’re all here because we’ve had enough at one point or another. But don’t you want more of a choice?”

  “Sounds to me like you’re chickening out,” Leah said. “You’re a couple of days short of kissing it all goodbye, and you don’t like what’s on the horizon. But guess what? I haven’t changed my mind.”

  “Hell no.” The fidgety-looking man got even more fidgety.

  “You let people run around like this is some kind of hotel,” Leah went on, “where you can come and go as you please, and not a Last Resort, you’re gonna end up with confused people. Suicide tourists. Taking away the spot from someone else who’s committed but just hadn’t found the right time, the right method, the right state of mind… doesn’t matter. But y
ou’ve got to do it. And that’s the whole point, isn’t it? If you don’t have the courage, at least you’ve got Huntley then. And for some of us, that’s for the better.”

  She could see half the room nodding, either in agreement with her or in their sleep.

  “If you ask me, this is a gargantuan waste of time.” Leah pushed her chair back. “We all know how much of it we got left. And believe me, it’s not enough for this.”

  “Maybe it’s a waste of time, but is there anything pressing that has to be done right now?”

  “I could check out.” The fidgety man again.

  “Would you shut up for one minute? Let me finish, and then if you’re still ready to do it, I’ll help you myself.”

  Fidgety man held up his hands: Calm down, friend.

  “I’m asking all of you. Do you have anything to lose by giving yourself a choice?” Ansel made sure he looked each person in the eyes. “You can still jump in bed with anybody you like, Leah. Olga? Nobody’s taking knives away from you. Cut to your heart’s content. Henry, the drink’s coming. I can see them pouring one right now.” He hadn’t planned on saying what he was about to say. Then again, a couple of days ago, he hadn’t been planning to check out anytime soon. Besides, he wasn’t going to win them over by appealing to reason—people about to kill themselves were distinctly lacking in that department. “Maybe you thought at one time or another that change is impossible, but if there’s one thing my time here has taught me, it’s that things do change. Probably not as fast as we want, or as much, but they do. Like it or not. And they change when you don’t expect them to.” Here it was. The slow unfurling of pain that tugged deep at the base of his being. Even if he wanted to, he couldn’t stop it anymore. The past came back, vicious, angry for having been denied. “I lost my wife. Twelve years ago. I was young and stupid. You don’t make the best decisions when you’re young. I didn’t. I thought I had it all figured out.”

  Oh, he’d known it all. He was invincible. He’d been a young investment banker with a peculiar knack for the short sell game, making more than he had any right to do at his young age. He couldn’t help it; it was as if money sought him out and stuck to him like glue. He knew he was getting rich off of other people’s misery, but he didn’t care. He had it made; there was more in his bank account than he could ever hope to spend. He was the guy with the tailored suits, the four-hundred-dollar haircuts, the personal chef, an army of assistants. He was the person others always looked at and wondered what he did for a living. He had a penthouse apartment overlooking downtown, high above the concrete sea that turned at night into a glittering stretch of lights as if the stars had fallen and dusted the whole city. There was always a reason to celebrate. His nights were an endless parade of parties with rich—and if not rich, then at least beautiful—people crowding his wide-open rooms, his endless terrace, all to the sound of soft tinkling music, the popping of champagne corks, the exuberant laughter of the immortal.

  Amidst all the sparkle of light and beauty, there moved a singular bright star, drawing everything around her into her orbit. Looks, smiles, admiration, and envy all followed her, and quickly, she drifted on, never lingering too long.

  Tamara.

  His wife.

  She swam through the crowd of people, flashing a smile, squeezing an elbow.

  The perfect hostess. The perfect wife.

  “I had no idea what I had.”

  Ansel felt light, suspended between what had been and what was, his head swimming from holding two simultaneous realities in his mind. He saw the guests of the hotel in the dining room, looking up at him, but he also saw himself back then, at that last party, where he’d drunk too much, done too many fancy drugs he couldn’t pronounce the names of; where he grabbed his wife, his beautiful wife Tamara around the waist and pulled her close to him; where, at the pinnacle of his existence, eternity had opened up for him, and he’d sensed the endless churning of millennia in the touch between two young, indestructible bodies.

  “It was all there.”

  They lay in bed, Ansel and Tamara, in their vast white bedroom, and she turned, naked, luminous, the morning light flowing over her, spilling across the landscape of her body. With perfect ease, she tucked a strand of her unruly hair behind her ear, smiling at Ansel, and he felt his heart split with unbearable joy.

  “It was where I never bothered to look. And then, in an instant…”

  He couldn’t remember where they’d been that particular night. A fundraiser, a boisterous party, a champagne-soaked visit to the most exclusive night club, or only a dinner with too many bottles of wine—God knew where it was they’d spent the previous hours, and it would never matter again. None of it. Everything Ansel had valued up until that point in time, driving home in his overpriced European sports sedan, a sleek missile he’d loved to race through dense traffic because he could, because being young and rich and deathless gave him all the rights denied the less fortunate—everything vanished the instant he decided to punch the accelerator even though the light ahead was about to turn red. Tamara, in the passenger seat, had closed her eyes, trusting, as she always had, in her husband, in her own indestructibility, believing their existence to be outside of convention, untouchable by what governed the normal, lesser world.

  “It was all gone.”

  Ansel remembered a burst of broken glass and streaks of light twisting, turning, tumbling. At that instant, Tamara had ceased to exist. She’d fled the world of chaos and pain in an onslaught of sharp metal. Ansel had no idea where the other car had come from. It had jackknifed their car so violently it felt as if a giant had mistaken it for a spinning top and given it a good nudge with an iron fist. Ansel caught a glimpse of Tamara, who seemed astonished at the rudeness of bad luck to crash into their lives like that. Years later, after he’d replayed that scene in his mind infinite times, he realized it might not have been puzzlement he’d seen on her face but dismay, the shock of realization that the real world had caught up with them, and the dream had ended in the most destructive way.

  The last thing he saw clearly was Tamara’s hair flying, defying gravity, and then he closed his eyes against a fierce storm of glass and metal and blood churning inside the car’s cabin that never seemed to end. But it did.

  All gone.

  Ansel stood in the dining room, next to the buffet, food slowly cooling, his eyes clamped shut as if he were still inside that car, trapped in the maelstrom of swirling debris. “I thought I lost it all. I did.”

  He hadn’t thought life could get any worse than losing the one you love. After he left the hospital, he’d wandered through his empty penthouse, bandaged, limping, his head throbbing dully as if stuffed with cotton, his eyes a feverish red. He couldn’t stop the tears, they formed and fell like summer rain, as though someone had turned on the faucet and forgot to turn it back off.

  After a long time, he had started packing up Tamara’s belongings—first things he didn’t even remember being hers, then others, stirring small pangs of manageable hurt until he had worked his way toward her clothes, the scent of her having long faded. As he was bagging up the intimate contents of her dresser, a little package fell to the ground. It was a small present, tied with a blood-red bow, as small as could be. Ansel had stared at it for an eternity, playing through his mind all the possible explanations for such a delicate gift box—one he certainly hadn’t given her. When he opened it, his hands trembled, afraid of what he might find, but somehow almost wishing his wife had been having an affair so he would feel justifiable anger and disgust, anything to lessen that unbearable pain.

  He’d imagined the worst, but he got so much more: Inside the little box was a filigreed necklace, light as air, with the letter ‘V’ attached to it. A small note was folded underneath. ‘Can’t wait to meet you, Daddy—Vivien.’

  Losing the one you love wasn’t the worst. What Ansel had learned that day was that losing the one you hadn’t had the chance to love yet tears a heart cl
ear in two, and that terrible pain of loss and guilt would never, ever go away, but only curl up deep inside and slumber, to awake and tear and hurt and rend the insides until there was nothing left but a red raw wound.

  “She was pregnant,” Ansel said to the quiet dining room. “She must have just found out because… she hadn’t told me. Guess she wanted to surprise me.” He gave a grim smile. “That she did.” He looked over his audience, spellbound by his tragedy. “That was twelve years ago. And every single day of those twelve years was hell. I didn’t think it would ever get better. And perhaps it doesn’t. You all have your own stories. I don’t claim to know what you’ve been through. I can only speak about myself, and what makes me stand before you now. Because as bad as everything was for me, I never could take that final step. Something always kept me back. Now I know why. Turns out everything I thought was lost, isn’t. Everything I thought buried, wasn’t. There’s more. More life. Despite everything. If you only have the patience to wait. I didn’t think I had any choice in my life, but that’s because I wasn’t looking. What we can do right now is give ourselves the chance to decide. To take some control back over our lives. What little we have left. We ourselves can determine what to do with this place. How to do it. And we can give ourselves the chance to leave. If we choose.”

  There was a long pause. The silent digestion of thought.